Bowie's death is a very emotional thing. My generation of working-class Britain, it feels like we lost our spiritual leader, our guru. I always thought that if I was to be a hundred, somehow Bowie would be a hundred and fifteen. He'd be there to still steer me and guide me.

People even split up by text message, they dump each other by text. Everything seems so disposable, so throwaway, but you have to engage with that if you're writing about the modern world. You've also got all these pop references that you feel obligated to make. They're just part of the bricolage of the whole thing, whether or not these are actually significant elements themselves.

Just lock myself in a room, stop answering emails, stop answering the phone and I come out with something.

Even as I'm shoveling up my hooter, I realize the sad truth. Coke bores me, It bores us all. We're jaded cunts, in a scene we hate, a city we hate, pretending that we're at the center of the universe, trashing ourselves with crap drugs to stave off the feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, aware that all we're doing is feeding that paranoia and disenchantment, yet somehow we're too apathetic to stop. Cause, sadly, there's nothing else of interest to stop for.

Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as I struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life

I think of the women I know, and very few of them are obsessed with shopping, or with getting a guy - they want their own thing, they have their own network going on.

You've got first-generation Americans here who are going to be poorer than their parents. That's never happened in the States before, and it's going to have massive social repercussions here.