I was out very late one night a couple of months ago – went to a couple of clubs, a party at someone’s house, a couple more houses of people I didn’t know, in parts of town I no longer recall – and when I woke up, very late, the next morning, I rolled over in bed and bumped into a book I had never seen before.

If I lived a rather different sort of life from the one I do, then the thing I bumped into would have been a woman I had never seen before. But it was a book. And I was quite surprised. And quite relieved. It is so much easier to creep downstairs and make a cup of tea without waking a strange book, I find, than a strange person. Also, you are much less likely to squelch your bare foot on a cold condom.

I sat at the kitchen table, drank a mouthful of tea, and looked at the book.

I was glad it was just a book I had brought home. I didn’t know where it had come from, or why I had brought it home with me, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t feeling used.

It was a not-for-publication proof of a book called Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile, and boasted of being an exposé by an anonymous insider of what goes on behind the scenes in finance. Not my sort of book at all. I have never been remotely interested in the City, or money, or banks or any of that. Or in anonymous exposés of anything. Especially by people who are not writers. But I guess the whole “type” thing goes out of the window when you’re drunk. I was mildly tickled to discover that, with my beer goggles on, I go for tales of sex and drugs and insider trading. And I was also mildly revolted.

I began to feel a twinge of self-loathing. I began to feel sorry for the honest, loyal and still very beautiful literary fiction that I loved, and which had always been so loyal to me, and which I had betrayed now, on one mad, mad night of too much champagne. I went for a long shower, as one tends to in these situations.

Later that afternoon, I got an e-mail from someone called Gez, saying: “When are we going for that lunch then?”

Turned out he was the chap who’d given me the book. He’s also written it. I’d met him at one of the clubs or houses and he’d pressed it on me and I’d promised to take the guy out for lunch and use the review to give his book a plug (the promises you make in bars at three in the morning…).

The plan we had hatched, apparently, was to go somewhere in the City, write about some of its more exotic haunts (expensive, bad, long champagne lists, full of prostitutes and with nice, clean, flat surfaces in the loos) and slide gently into the book that way.

But he chose Eyre Brothers, which he said City types go to a lot, and I’d heard was an excellent neo-Iberian joint and a big deal generally, but had never gone to because it was in the City, and the City is just such a depressing place to go if you don’t absolutely have to. And you only absolutely have to go into the City if you’re a greedy twit with a 2:2 in engineering and no soul.

Which is why Gez left it, I suppose.

For the past couple of years he had been writing an anonymous column called “Cityboy” in one of the London free papers, I forget which one, in which he dissed his enemies, mocked his bosses, dropped his pals in the stink, and generally became a bit of a cult figure – was featured in the Alex strip cartoon and everything.

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