I was up into the opening hours of Christmas Day after everyone else, involuntarily glancing every few minutes at the fireplace below the hanging stockings. It isn’t even a real fireplace and there is no chimney, so I’m not sure what my eyes were hoping to catch.

My belief in the existence of Father Christmas was rudely shattered one year when my mother burst into my bedroom at one am, throwing my presents onto the foot of my bed and saying ‘There’s no point in pretending anymore, is there?’ Both my siblings are older than me and I suppose my mum and dad had just become tired of the whole ordeal. Although, to be fair, I was thirteen.

Last night I was holding a microphone plugged into my laptop and attempting to record an audiobook version of my late novel with the intention of selling it on iTunes, with or without Harper Collins’ backing...

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Firing Sid is largely a symbolic gesture. With agents, as with girlfriends, it’s probably better to find a new one before getting rid of the old, but (as with girlfriends) this is easier said than done. But as we approach the beginning of a new year, I’m all about clean breaks and fresh possibilities. It is the only way I have managed to keep remotely upbeat in the last week.

The simple truth is that Sid is no longer effective in any business capacity, and he will probably interpret the termination of our professional relationship as the firing of him as a friend. Which is, of course, part of the problem. This is the first time I’ve had to sack anyone since I got rid of the Colombian drummer of my old rock band. He was the most popular member but he couldn’t play in time. But as Cheryl says, Sid’s in a ‘gots-to-go situation’...

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After waking up from a sweaty mid-afternoon dream involving Pauline, Mavis and napalm, I leave the flat while still half-asleep and take the tube to Hammersmith where I sit across the street from Harper Collins, getting up from the concrete wall every ten minutes or so to walk off some of the cold.

Mavis leaves the building around four o’clock, throwing a large scarf around herself like a cape, but I ignore her.

At five, a man who I think is Jason - one of the executives or at least someone high up – emerges and I run across the street and accost him before he can get to the staff car park...

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I have organised a book signing two months after my novel’s release primarily for my own amusement. On a whim I called my home town Dartford’s only local bookshop and the owner, Graham, said Yes immediately. I could almost hear him shrugging over the phone.

“I’m not expecting a great deal of people,” I warned him.

“I shouldn’t hire extra security then?” he said. I like him...

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Harper Collins has sent me a package with all the press clippings surrounding the release of my novel, Clear History. I was expecting a motorcycle courier, but the folder arrived instead with the rest of the Royal Mail correspondence in a single A4-sized envelope.

I pick it up between thumb and forefinger and flap it, as though it might trigger some expansion mechanism. It doesn’t. It remains depressingly thin and light.

I spread out the contents on the bedroom floor and pick through the skeletal remains of my writing career. “How could people have bought the thing if no one knew it existed?” I ask Cheryl...

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I’m walking along Berwick Street again, ostensibly in search of good bargain records and pretending to myself that I’m not looking for James Hardy. Since tricking one of the Harper publicity crones into giving me his number, I have left a humiliatingly large number of messages on his mobile’s answer phone, but he hasn’t returned my calls.

I have kept alive the slim possibility that my messages have cut out each time at the exact moment that I am reciting my own phone number, leaving him unable to contact me, frustrated and desperate to go out again and perhaps let me ride on his coattails of success for a time.

My phone vibrates in my pocket. It is Linda, the ex-girlfriend who I met for lunch a few weeks ago, calling me for the twentieth time. I reject it, as I have done each time. Despite this, she refuses to take the hint and keeps calling. It is embarrassing for us both...

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Sid, my agent, calls me from his office at seven am. “Christopher!” he announces cheerfully.

“This better be good,” I mumble, my brain sending out surveillance probes to assess the extent of my hangover.

“Oh, is it early again?” he says. “Sorry mate, don’t mean to keep waking you up.”

“Why are you always at work so early anyway?”

“Well, I share hot water with the other flats in my building and a couple of times it’s run out in the middle of my shower so I’ve started getting up before anyone else to beat them to it. Unfortunately a few of them are road sweepers. So I’m up at four every day now.”

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I’m hung-over because last night I was up into the mid-morning hours struggling with the follow up to 'Clear History.' I pace the living room ranting at Cheryl because she is locked into her laptop and is therefore here but not here.

“They’ve got me over a barrel. They’re playing me like a puppet. I really want to just say ‘screw them’ and write what I want but they’re dangling this second book contract over my head and I’m jumping for it like a fat kid for cake and it’s embarrassing. It’s just such a horrible torturous process fighting to put a few hundred words a day down because my heart’s not in it and I haven’t got any ideas and everything’s horrible. But it’s the only chance I have of getting a new contract so I have to show them something definitive soon and it has to be good and…”

“Christopher,” Cheryl says, surprising me by looking up from the computer. She summons a sheepish, compassionate look. “I don’t think they’re going to offer you a second contract...”

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James Hardy is strolling along Berwick Street browsing the record shops. A bitter, jealous loathing erupts with an intensity that both shames and scares me. But the loathing is stronger than the shame.

He looks so casual that for a moment I wonder if I have the right man. Then he stops for two pretty girls half my age who are holding towards him pens and copies of his lavishly bound novel with a submissive eagerness that momentarily pleases my misogynistic tendencies. With a winning smile he scrawls his signature and, no doubt, a charming personal message on the title page of each.

He excuses himself and the girls watch him leave with the books clutched to their chests and their hearts swelling. He doesn’t look back and the girls turn away, giggling and opening their phones to tell their friends...

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Mavis at Harper Collins has marked out on my itinerary for which appearances I should be drunk. Generally, as part of her continuing ‘Drunken Public Appearances’ plan, anything to be broadcast after nine pm has a D next to it. Some events with a liberal attitude have a DD meaning that I should be totally beyond my own control and will still probably avoid arrest. Mavis doesn’t seem to understand that once I start, the consumption of alcohol is already beyond my control, rendering the concept of regulating my level of intoxication laughable.

Last night's radio interview was a DD and yet, as I remember it, the DJ was delighted with my condition and, after baiting me into spouting ludicrous slurs against people of various races and religions, joined me with his own bottle of…Absinthe perhaps.

The session concluded at two am with the presenter actually snorting lines from the mixing desk and babbling like a madman about being the new king of Shock Jocks.

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