Duncan Fallowell is an English novelist, travel writer and critic. He has also worked with the German group Can, especially Irmin Schmidt, and written the biography of the trans-sexual April Ashley. He lives in a book-lined flat in London though he escapes regularly to Herefordshire and beyond. He has just finished a novel about the rise of irrationality in the West. How To Disappear: A Memoir For Misfits was published in September 2011 and was awarded the PEN/Ackerley Prize for memoir in July 2012. Fallowell was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2015.

1. Are you happy?

I was, until yesterday afternoon when I went up to Kenwood. This is the great Adam house in Hampstead, run by English Heritage, and which has just reopened after a long refurb. They’ve wrecked the Library! All the gilding has been whitewashed over and when I asked the attendants why, they looked embarrassed and muttered about putting it back to how it used to be. This is nonsense – if it was ever like that, that was an error which had long been corrected. What was famed as one of the most magnificent rooms in England is now incoherent and unreadable. A few bits of gilt have been left here and there, disconnected to the overall scheme. Adam’s original scheme was pale green, pink, white and gold. Lord Mansfield changed the green to pale blue – a mistake but made workable by the gilding of all the elements to articulate the space. What we have now is a double mistake: insipid pale blue, pale pink and whitewash. What English Heritage should have done is switch the blue to Adam’s preferred green and retained the gilding – green goes better with gold than blue does because gold has a green tinge. Green would also marry the room to the landscape outside. Robert Adam knew what he was doing! The English Heritage whitewash is an epicene castration of aesthetics. A kind of prudishness like fig leaves over classical statues or the cleansing of painted churches by Puritans. Ooo – we mustn’t have gold – it must be whitewashed away. Who were the eyeless idiots who ordered this very expensive outrage? It will have to be put right one day.

2. What are you reading at the moment?

Stendhal’s Selected Journalism; The Rape of Europa by Charles FitzRoy; Prince Eugen of Savoy by Nicholas Henderson; The Guiltless by Hermann Broch.

3. What was your worst job?

I’ve never had a job in the sense that I’ve never had a boss. I’ve always worked freelance. But the worst commission I was ever involved with was writing a film script for a German producer. It came back covered in blue pencil erasures and I was told to try again. When I examined the erasures there was no rationale behind them – all the guy wanted to do was show off at my expense. He hadn’t a clue what he was doing. We parted. But he did pay me.

4. How many hours do you work each day? 

One of the problems of being self-employed and working from home is that one’s never off the job. But I’m lucky in that there is no dividing line between my work and my life. As a writer every experience has its relevance.

5. Does love bring happiness or misery?

Neither. But people who can’t love will always be wretched, and people who can love will have many opportunities for happiness.

6. Town mouse or country mouse?

Both – very much both. The sense of relief as one motors towards the border of Wales is like being reborn. The slow adrenalin rush as one drives back in to London is bracing and wonderfully futuristic.

7. Mp3 or vinyl, real or e book?

It’s all part of the territory.

8. What are your three greatest pleasures?

High culture and all the arts. Snogging after orgasm. Escaping from oneself into society.

9. Do you believe in the nap?

If you mean do I sleep during the day – no. I can’t do that. I quite often can’t sleep at night either

10. What advice do you have for young people?

No piercings, no shaved pubes, no tattoos. Nobody was ever lovelier for these things. Beards are always disgusting but on young men doubly so (youth is not the time to go into hiding). If the world survives I expect it will be thanks to young women. Testosterone is a menace in most parts of the world.

Duncan’s most recent book the award-winning How to Disappear: A Memoir For Misfits is available to buy from the Idler Bookshop by following the link to the right.   (Photo of Duncan above by Neil Gavin.)

Below is a video where Duncan explains some of his ideas behind How to Disappear: A Memoir For Misfits.