That morning the rain had come down suddenly when I was cycling through Farringdon. I don’t have a mudguard on my back wheel, and it spun a steady jet of water just over my belt and down into the seat of my jeans. I spent every spare break leaning against a radiator in the staff room, trying to dry myself out, but I was still clammy, and I felt myself turning into a desperate character, becoming angrier, Gordon Comstock, the impoverished bookseller from Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying. I remember arguing about this novel once with a woman at a party who hated it. Why didn’t he lighten up? Money, presumably, was a matter of maintaining a positive attitude. There may be some truth to this, a minuscule amount of truth. I had maintained a positive attitude for the last ten years and it had kept me afloat. But no longer. I could feel myself shifting to a new way of seeing things.

*

A few mornings earlier there had come a knock on the back door of the flat – a rare occurrence. It was eight o’clock and I was still in bed, and I could hear the shower going in the bathroom. I pulled on some jeans and a T-shirt, and there at the door was our landlord.

‘Hello, Paul,’ he said. ‘It’s been a while.’

It’s OK, I thought. We could handle a small increase in rent.

In the end I offered to pay triple, but it still wasn’t enough. They could make more selling the whole property than keeping the shop open. It had all been decided. We had three months’ notice.

I saw him to the door and let him out. I walked into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Always I had been waiting for this to happen, but I had grown used to the fear and called it something else. Now I would have to change my life.

*

But change to what? I have always worried that I am destined to become my father. I am like him a white male from the north of England, small town, moribund, working class-cum-middle class, with books on the shelves, schooled in low aspiration in lessons and high aspiration at home, a reader, an autodidact, a would-be escapee.