[Part three in my view-from-the-inside-of-a-book-tour series! (Parts one and two being Milwaukee and Ann Arbor). In the interests of keeping it real, this episode comes to you in writing. What with me being a writer and all. Thrill at my shamanic transformations and prodigious caffeine intake...]

In the lobby of the Alexis Hotel in Seattle there’s a coffee station of unusual ambition and grandeur. It sports a choice of brews and cup sizes, and the table is festooned with all imaginable accoutrements required for beverage customization. Patrons may elect to whiten with milk, or soy, or cream, or half-and-half, and to sweeten with sugar, brown sugar, golden Demerara sugar, Splendour, natural gas or a depleted uranium round. What’s more, the coffee is free. Indeed, it’s obligatory. “Grab a coffee on your way out!” the receptionist called to me. It wasn’t a suggestion. It was a direct order.

Being a man’s man, I opted for a straightforward black coffee. Brew in hand, I emerged blinking into the sunlight. Having come directly from the wintry gloom of Milwaukee and Ann Arbor, daylight was a novelty. As my eyes adjusted to the glare, Seattle came into focus. Specifically what came into focus was a bunch of hip young people with facial piercings, hanging out in a coffee joint advertising MEGA 20-oz COFFEE FREE REFILL. These kids were bright. They were shiny. They were amazing. I surreptitiously pressed my nose against the window to ogle them. So many grandma’s woolly hats. So much facial hair. And it wasn’t just the guys. It was a strong look Seattle’s kids were rocking.

I think we’re all aware that great travel writing eschews cliché and shuns local stereotypes, but happily I’m not a great travel writer and thus we may speak freely about the grunge look -- the only instance since feudal times when fashion has endorsed the clothes I wear. But while the rest of the world has capitulated to the demands of the couture houses, in Seattle, apparently, its still okay to wear green shoes and a dirty pink T shirt. I realized I’d found my spiritual home, and I celebrated by draining my puny hotel coffee and ordering one of the MEGA 20-oz CUPS. Emboldened by my flush of empathy with the city, I decided to push the boat out by making it a latté.

I strolled to the Pike Place market, where fish mongers hopped up on cappuccinos with an extra shot of cod liver oil were throwing huge Pacific salmon to each other, with a jaunty cry that I was unable to decipher. It sounded like FISH! HUP! YEP! BOOGIE! Curious, I asked the nearest market stall holder -- a coffee vendor -- for a translation. “What are those fish guys shouting?” I asked. “Oh,” she grinned. “They’re just happy. Wanna coffee?” Sure, I thought, why not? I ordered a latté and then, because no one from my home town was there to witness it, I went for a hazelnut shot. “What is there to do around the market?” I asked the coffee woman. She smiled -- a charmingly audible operation involving the clinking realignment of multiple lip rings. “Oh, you know,” she said. “You can exchange money for all kinds of crap. Knock yourself out!” And I nearly did, on a heavy bladed Native American war canoe paddle hanging from a nearby beam and priced at $199.

Rubbing my bruised forehead I wandered around the market, which offers all kinds of opportunities to buy genuine rainbow-painted orcas carved from authentic whalebone by certified Duwamish elders. It was while standing in contemplation of a beautiful yet strikingly intense ritual mask that I remembered I was due at my book reading. The mask had the kind of face you could imagine asking “Why does a man like you choose to write from the point of view of a female?” Propelled at insane speed by caffeine, I sprinted back to my hotel, showered, and changed into my Author Costume. This triggers my own shamanic transformation from tourist in green shoes to Important Literary Figure. I ran out of the hotel, pausing only to obey the receptionist’s instruction to grab a coffee on my way out.

Having squandered the day, I was embarrassed to realise I was late to meet my media escort. “I’m so sorry,” I blurted. “I was writing an important article for a newspaper and I was up against a very tight deadline.” Susan nodded, with the knowing smile of a woman who has seen everything and the horse it rode in on. “How do you like Seattle?” she asked. “Want to grab a coffee for the route?” “G… g… g… god no!” I pleaded through chattering teeth. Susan sized me up and proceeded to talk me down from my caffeine high with soothing anecdotes about her family, finally delivering me in a calm state for my reading.

I should explain that media escorts are among the most highly skilled professionals on the circuit. Combining the skills of driver, publicist, counsellor, pharmacist, local fixer and motivational coach, they have saved my English hide in cities from Scotland to Singapore. Susan was a particularly likeable example; charming, unflappable and -- crucially -- caffeine free. She was adhering to the number one rule of the drug dealer and literary handler: never get high on your own supply.

It was a great crowd and a good reading at University Book Store. I drank more coffee at the lectern. This finally tipped me over the edge: I co-opted three audience members and forced them to participate in a role-play exercise involving an English woman, a Nigerian refugee and former Vice President Dick Cheney. The audience were good sports and seemed to forgive my eccentricity. If I’d tried that stunt back home I think I’d have got my arse kicked (to use a technical literary term). There followed a great Q&A session. I should explain that a Q&A session is where a beautiful and strikingly intense woman asks “Why does a man like you choose to write from the point of view of a female?”, and I blush and point out that I would never drink my coffee with any kind of whitener or novelty shot.

The atmosphere at the reading was great and I was reminded once again how much fun it is talking about books in America. Susan ran me back to the hotel and drove off serenely into the night. Like a junkie I waited in the lobby till she disappeared from sight, then I slipped back out and found a late night Starbuck’s. I ordered a tall skinny chai berry latté with whipped cream and a light cinnamon dusting. Then I went back to my hotel room and drank it in the shower, just because I could.

I slept for about three minutes. “How did you sleep?” said the waiter at the hotel’s breakfast bar. “Terrific!” I said.

I went for a haircut at a place on 1st Avenue, a joint so achingly groovy that I believe they were quite distressed to see me walk in there. I think they bumped me up the queue so they could get me off the premises quicker. The music was so loud -- and I had already drunk so many coffees -- that I began to feel quite disorientated. I sat in the chair while the hairdresser made a complete circle around me, squinting incredulously at my hair and feeling it with his hands, apparently amazed to discover a head that was naturally unkempt rather than artfully dishevelled. “Who usually does your hair?” he asked. One should never keep a secret from one’s doctor or one’s hairdresser, so I owed the guy the truth: that I usually cut my hair myself when it gets embarrassingly wild, while my two-year-old finishes off the job by smearing spaghetti sauce and chocolate paste into it. “Oh, I have a stylist in London,” I said breezily. Then I asked: “Please could you give it a light trim, and keep it looking kind of unfussy?” Apparently what he heard was: “Please could you cut off nearly all my hair and sculpt what remains into a formal dome, so that I end up resembling nothing more than a Lego spaceman?”

It was -- and is -- unequivocally the worst hair cut I have ever had. Thank goodness it didn’t come at a period in my life when I need to appear nightly in front of audiences, and daily for TV interviews and newspaper photo shoots -- while doing a book tour across America, for example. I wanted to wee in the latté that my hairdresser sipped as he snipped. I wanted to seize his scissors and cut off his ears and send them and their tribal lobe-stretching insets crashing to the floor. I seethed furiously, in the particularly English way that so eerily resembles delight. The hairdresser finished and held up his little mirror around the back of my head. “How’s that?” he asked. “Terrific!” I beamed. “Thank you!”

As he massacred my hair, we’d been talking about my book tour and the kinds of stories I write. Effectively I’d been telling him about my career even as he ruined it snip by snip. As I left the barbershop, he put his hand on my arm. “So,” he said. “I have to ask you. Why does a man like you choose to write from the point of view of a female?” I told him I had lived the first sixteen years of my life as a woman.

By the time Susan picked me up for the night’s reading, I was a caffeine-addled wreck again. The city had somehow managed to get so many cups into me that the only sounds coming from my mouth were those hissy bubbling sounds that the percolator makes when it’s done. Nor had I been able to find any kind of authorial-looking hat that I could plausibly wear indoors. I was going to have to face the world with my Java brain and my Lego hair. I was secretly hoping that Susan would have a bottle of Diazepam tucked away in her handbag, but fortunately she managed to calm me down the old-fashioned way -- by quietly and charmingly hinting that I should get a bloody grip. She delivered me safely to the excellent Third Place Books, where a lovely audience had turned out to hear me talk. I wonder if they noticed that my legs were hammering up and down like a sewing machine. I talked about my life and the crowd laughed at me. Then I read from ‘Little Bee’ and they laughed with me. I hope. At least they laughed in all the right places, and it’s a night I’ll remember with great affection. And then, of course, it was time for the Q&A session. Finally, gloriously, someone asked the big question. I gathered every last ounce of mental strength I had, and forced my brain to give her an honest answer.

“It’s all the c… c… coffee….” I said. “It makes me r… r… rite like a g… g… gurl….”

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