Since I've been hired to contribute to the storyline of 'Doom 4' I can say what was always true anyway. I'm working. You see, for a writer, lots of stuff that doesn't look like working is actually working. Looking out of the window, for example. Balancing a pencil on the edge of the desk in order to find its exact fulcrum. Playing 'Doom.

Some people feed you with love.

It's just that to a lot of British people George Bush represents the worst of all things American. He's the right-wing Christian crusader, the toxic Texan who refused Kyoto, the poll-cheat eel who undermined democracy on the back of something called 'chads,' a notion we've never entirely grasped.

If I couldn't get published tomorrow I'd still be writing. It's something to do with feeling so overwhelmed by this experience of life that you have to tell someone about it, and in a way that reorders the experience to make it manageable.

Every day the eye is subject to a thousand tiny shocks as a thousand industries compete for the eye-kick, the visual hook that will lock the consumer into product for that crucial second where the tiny - or not so tiny - leap of the imagination is made.

It is, of course, the first recourse of every elitist to see social barbarism in others.

Perhaps writers should never be allowed to get together in a workplace context. It's not like studying computer science, after all. The emotions are at large, and are shared and are questioned. There is a vulnerability.