Michel Faber

Me and Dave and Mount Olympus (2006)

I lived through the 1980s, but was not touched by them. They might as well have been the 1880s, for all the notice I took of the defining characteristics of the decade. I didn’t own a wide-shouldered jacket with rolled-up sleeves, a double-breasted suit, or indeed any item of clothing that cost more than a pot plant. I dressed myself from charity shops, right down to the socks and underpants. I didn’t own a watch or a television, got around by bicycle, cut my own hair, and was not acquainted with any person who owned albums by Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Sade or Spandau Ballet. (Maybe it was because the few friends I had were lesbians.) The prospect of buying that newfangled invention, a CD) player, was as remote as investing in a Picasso. A high-flying career in the corporate sphere, or a steady job of any kind, held no attraction for me. Who needs money when so much of the food in supermarkets is exactly the right shape to fit down the front of one’s trousers, hidden by a loose jumper? Who needs status when one is an Artist, already living on Mount Olympus?
At the dawn of the 1980s, my first wife and I were in fact living in Fitzroy, a shabby inner suburb of Melbourne, Australia. Both of us were writers, misfits, snobs. In the grand intellectual tradition of Wyndham Lewis, Sylvia Plath, TS Eliot et al, we detested the common horde - lowbrow Philistines, the lot of them! We lurked in our tiny student flat, reading Four Quartets and In Memoriam, admiring shoplifted art books, discussing each other’s poems, and avoiding contact with the polluted sea of humanity around us.
Eventually, my wife found herself hankering for Winchester, her childhood home, and we decided to emigrate. England, after all, was the epicentre of high culture. It was where Tennyson and Virginia Woolf were from. Sylvia Plath would