Anyone out there?

Mark, the BA cabin crew member in our reading group, has the distinction of once having been taken for a literary device: his job and his babies made it so difficult to turn up to meetings that writer Nick Royle, reading the reports of our discussions on my website, thought that he was my joke and didn't really exist. Well, he does exist, but he's now going to have a new incarnation: back in Manc at the weekend and at a barbecue I discovered that he's giving it all up to set out on a course to become an English teacher. Great! But damn it! He's a literary type after all!

Let me explain. It's always been a source of great comfort to me as a writer that most of the people in our reading group aren't what you might call 'literary types'. There's a furniture maker, a doctor, two scientists, a criminologist, a psychologist, a social work administrator, a textiles conservator and an accountant, and only three of us writers. What it seems to mean is that there are endless readers out there from all walks of life, and that when you write a book (as long as it's published!) you will reach EVERYONE...

But who am I kidding? It's not as if ours isn't a rarified group (all educated, all 'middle class' ), and anyone who reads books is by definition a 'literary type' after all (so Mark's move is hardly surprising). And when I conducted a straw poll of people in pubs and cafes for metropolitan (Issue 6), to try to assess the reading habits of the general public, the results were pretty depressing if hilarious. No one reads nowadays, was the message: 'Books is books, innit?' said one baggy-trousered lad contemptuously, switching his Walkman back on. And when I think of the educated, middle-class neighbours who declined to join the reading group 'because they didn't read'...

Whatever you do, though, don't let this get you down....