I coped pretty well with the fuel shortage while it lasted, pivoting to bus, train and bicycle with no trouble at all. And I have found ways to cope with the anxieties raised by failures in the supply chain for turkeys, pigs in blankets, Christmas trees, chefs, waiters, kitchen porters, HGV drivers and butchers. But recent news from the literary world that we are facing a dearth of young male novelists has utterly felled me.
What has happened? Where the hell are they? Are they all backed up in shipping containers on the outskirts of university towns, in their elbow-patched tweed jackets and cords, unable to burst onto the London book scene because of haulage issues? Is it, like everything else, the fault of Brexit? Have our brilliant young authors been left to rot in the fields, like courgettes, because we had no itinerant Romanian peasants to bring them in before the first frost? What on earth are we going to do without the Christmas glut of tortured memoirs by young boys from the boondocks who scraped a place on the creative writing course at UEA and now have 100,000 words of closely typed fretting to sell us about their first experiences of shagging?
