• Bristol (Henleaze Library) – Wednesday 26th May, 6.30 pm – details here.
• Dorchester (Dorchester Library) – Thursday 27th May, 7.30 pm – details here.

LEEDS: Wed 12th May, Leeds Library, 12.30pm, tickets free. Details here.

NEWCASTLE: Wed 12th May, Newcastle Library, 6pm, tickets free. Details here.

BERWICK: Thurs 13th May, Berwick Library, 7.30pm, tickets £4. Details here.

All welcome. Please come if you’re in the area. I try to make the events interesting and fun.

Usually I’ll talk a bit about my work and the work of some of the contemporary writers I like, tell some of the real-life stories behind the novels, do a reading, and then throw the discussion open before signing books. The open discussion is always the best bit from my point of view, so please do come along and join in. Looking forward to meeting you if you can make it.

Events this week:

• Birmingham Central Library – Wednesday 28th April at 6.30pm
• West Bromwich Central Library – Thursday 29th April at 2.00pm
• Cambridge Central Library – Thursday 29th April at 7.30pm

Details coming soon:

Leeds, York, Newcastle, Berwick – May 12th & 13th

Bristol, Winchester, Dorchester – May 26th & 27th

Nottingham, Sheffield, Manchester, Preston – June 16th & 17th

Please do come along to one of these events if you’re in the area – I promise they will be fun. This tour has been fantastic and the atmosphere at the events has been extraordinary. I am very grateful to American readers for the wonderful welcome they have given me.

Tuesday March 23
HOUSTON, TX

Wednesday March 24
AUSTIN, TX

Thursday March 25
DALLAS, TX – Event sold out.

Friday March 26
DALLAS, TX – Live event with Special Guest, Nigerian Griot BABATUNDE SOLARIN!

Saturday March 27
DALLAS, TX – Creative writing workshop

DALLAS, TX – signing event

Tour photos from Wajiha Said and St Louis Public Library

Our amazing eldest child is six years old. When this column started, he sincerely believed he was Batman. Now he has reached the age of reason and his brilliant insights are becoming revelatory of him as an individual, rather than of the condition of infancy in its universality. This is a magical and a fragile time; it belongs to him alone and isn’t mine to redistill and reinterpret.

Likewise for our three-year-old, who hadn’t grown all his milk teeth when I started, but who is now a lovely handsome charmer, made entirely of imagination and dynamite, who has audaciously reinvented the office of middle child as a leadership role.

And likewise for our beautiful, smiling baby daughter, who wasn’t even under construction when this column began but who, as I write, is crawling across the kitchen floor, busy on youth’s eternal quest to find biscuits to ingest and electrical sockets to stick youth’s fingers into.

My wife and I are incredibly lucky to have such kids. While writing this column I have received hundreds of kind and funny messages from parents and grandparents who feel similarly about the children in their lives. Contrary to the negativity on display in some of the media, we are a society that loves its children and does not consider them doomed, feral or fallen. If your letters and emails are anything to go by then children unite us in hope, and the way we bring up our kids says more about us than the jobs we do, the beliefs we hold, or the way we vote.

Please let me thank a few people. My wife, as 88 episodes of this column have proved, is wiser, calmer and wildly more physically attractive than me. While I’ve been showboating about parenting, she has been quietly and brilliantly doing it, and working at the same time. She has been wonderfully assisted by our nanny, Danielle, who is the kindest, gentlest, most dedicated person anyone could hope to meet. I also want to thank my brother, Alex, for being a rock. It has been famous chuckling over the stories in these columns with him – and a lot of the best jokes were his. Thanks also to my mum and dad, who still show me and my brother, at 30-something years, the same unselfish kindness they showed us when we 30-something months. It is a measure of how great they are that as a parent I hope to be just like them.

Thank you to my editors at The Guardian, a superb and important newspaper that I’ve been very proud to write for. I admire their free spirit in affording a novelist this space on their pages. And I want to thank you, the regular readers of this column. I have loved all your warm and funny messages. Let me leave you with a parenting tip from top childcare expert Cormac McCarthy, in ‘The Road’: “He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

Finally I want to thank my children. Kids: they give me 650 words in this column, which is either a billion words too few or 647 words too many to say I love you. Maybe one day you will find these columns curled in the bottom of some drawer. If that happens, I hope they will make you laugh. I love it so much when you laugh.

The odds against the existence of our three children were literally astronomical. The sun had to condense out of gas and spawn a string of planets, and ours had to cool to this ideal temperature where the water doesn’t boil unless you make a deliberate effort and add a spoonful of Kenco. Single cell organisms had to evolve into bicellular organisms and eventually into creatures with the impressive number of cells we humans have – I’m no biologist, but I believe it may be as many as a dozen.

And finally – and most improbably of all – each successive generation of humans had to dodge life’s ubiquitous malaises, wars and high-cholesterol foodstuffs for long enough to reproduce. Which means that somewhere along the line, Victorians had to have sex with one another.

Looking back at the ancient photos of the family on my parent’s side, as we did with the kids just recently, this seems the most unlikely conjunction of all. Not only were our children’s great-great-great-grandparents crusted in a thick layer of starch and moustache wax, dressed in rigid clothing that could never be removed, and supplied without genitals by the same northern factory that forged all Victorians from an immutable alloy of iron and spine, but our particular Victorian forbears were startlingly, mirror-splinteringly ugly.

There is no nice way to put this, so I’m going to put it the way our three-year-old did when we showed him the old sepia-toned marriage photo of two of his ancestors, their mouths frozen in that downturned line favoured by humans in those times, and by halibut in ours. “Don’t they look nice?” we said. “Oh no,” said our three-year-old matter-of-factly, “their faces is like doing a sick in my nose.”

The idea of those ancestors reproducing is as touching as they were, frankly, untouchable. For our kids’ sake, I’m so grateful that they did. They really took one for the team. My own parents are good-looking people – the hereditary hideousness has passed over them, although the grim Victorian lines of it still find some echoes in my own radio-friendly countenance.

The miracle, happily, is that my own kids are the most beautiful children in the world. Of course every parent believes this about their own kids, but I happen to be the one who is correct. The reason my kids’ faces are not like doing a sick in your nose is very simple, and I’m married to it. My wife is pretty, and looking back through the family photos on her side explains why.

The big clue about her ancestors’ photos is that they are not photos at all. They are painted portraits – not all of them commissioned. My wife’s ancestors were the sort of people painters volunteered to look at. There were serious discussions recently concerning whether a striking portrait of her twice-great grandmother should be removed from my wife’s mother’s wall and hung in the Musée D’Orsay.

On our last visit our six-year-old was captivated by that painting. He stood looking at it for ages – or for as long as a small boy is capable of standing still, which is four seconds. We asked him what he liked. He said: “How did they know what my sister will look like when she’s older?” – a question so profound that to preserve the balance of nature he had to cancel out the effect immediately by running into the kitchen and making farting noises. We stayed and looked up at the painting, and sure enough that 19th Century phantom was looking back at us with our own daughter’s eyes.

Author’s note: The photo that accompanies this article is of my paternal great grandfather’s great Aunt, real name Mary Perrings but known as Auntie Poll. She was the daughter of Jonathan Perrings of London, a stone carver, who assisted in carving the lions on Menai Bridge. The lions are 25 feet long and weigh 80 tons each.

Only his little brother was allowed in to see what was happening. Low and serious whispers emanated from the room. At intervals the three-year-old would emerge, under orders to fetch some delicacy necessary to sustain the worker. At such times, scuttling to fetch a biscuit or a glass of Ribena, the little one wore the secret and beatific smile of one who has been chosen to serve a higher calling. When asked what his big brother was up to he gave a pitying look, as if we could never understand.

This went on for an hour, by which time my wife and I were consumed with curiosity. Finally our six-year-old emerged in triumph, holding a single sheet of paper covered in his brilliantly wonky writing. His little brother squealed with excitement and followed him downstairs as, in scenes reminiscent of Luther nailing his Theses to the church door, our son pinned his text to our kitchen message board. We felt certain we were about to see something mysterious; something profound. When the boy stepped back with an air of pious satisfaction, we were at last able to see what he had written:

1 – sit on your cher nislee
2 – eetign nislee
3 – ask if yoy can get out ov the taibl
4 – sai pleez and tank you
5 – Lai the taibl
6 – cleen away the tayb
7 – chry evreefing on your food plat

Having expected at the very least an addendum to the Ten Commandments, I’ll admit to momentary disappointment at seeing a list of table manners that didn’t even include instructions on the proper placement of the desert cutlery, or an opinion concerning the propriety or otherwise of a woman reapplying her lipstick at the table.

Luckily my wife instantly saw the Big Picture, namely that our children at last seemed to be developing a primitive form of civilisation. Mealtimes with our three infants have always been a scene of appalling carnage, and my wife was quick to realise that we must nurture this unexpected interest in table protocol. So this is how we have spent the last few days, eetign nislee. I must say I prefer the weeks where we all get to dress up as superheroes and whack each other with rubber swords, but it’s true that mealtimes are more intriguing now.

For 24 hours, the rules were faithfully observed, and then a beautifully sinister transformation occurred. The rules which had so united the two boys somehow became a tool to divide them. The kids began to watch each other closely, and now whenever one makes the tiniest slip from decorum, the other will pounce: “You broke Rule Two! I’m TELLING!”

It’s fun to see how quickly the kids have progressed from anarchy, via the benevolent rule of law, to a police state in which citizen spies on citizen. Because the rules were quite hard to read, I took the liberty of typing them up. This has left my wife and I free to indulge in that other great pastime of centralised sates, the Orwellian evolution of laws.

At first the boys couldn’t recall the rule that said they had to give half of their oven chips to their parents but when we called their attention to “8 – share your food”, written in black and white, they agreed that they must have been mistaken and gravely ponied up their McCain’s. Our plan now is to add one new rule per day, making them gradually more outlandish until the kids learn that the law, for the governed, is a double-edged sword. Hopefully then they will tear the list up and we can wait for the day when, without the need of written instructions, a child of ours will finally sit on their cher nislee.

I feel the same about the girl in Duran Duran’s “Rio”, who still – insofar as we know – dances on the sand. While this must have been very nice for her at first, with a beneficial exfoliating effect on the feet, surely I’m not the only one who frets that her legs must be worn down to the hips by now.

I worry too about the kids with whom I shared my primary school. Since I’ve received no news to the contrary I assume that most of them are still there, sitting on tiny plastic chairs, bothering crepe paper with glue and spatulas. This is lucky for them, because a terrible thing happened to those of us who left that place. We became old, and afflicted by an occasional unbearable yearning to tie up all those loose ends of childhood.

You could call it nostalgia but that suggests something warm and fuzzy, not the jagged and unsettling feeling that came over me this week when we went to see our six-year-old’s assembly. His class put on a show about Victorian childhood, and as we stood at the back of a hall of two hundred kids in blue v-neck jumpers, surrounded by wall bars and gym mats, I found that I could see, with absolute clarity, my own school’s near-identical uniforms in a near-identical hall thirty years ago. I could bring to mind my classmates’ names and faces with a precision I don’t possess when recalling people I met last week.

What the shrinks say might even be true: that our childhood exists in the memory intact, although we lose the facility of recalling it at will. There in the school hall I could see myself at seven years of age, standing next to my friend B – whom I have not seen in nearly three decades – as we both queued to collect a boxed commemorative jam spoon on the occasion of Lady Diana Spencer’s marriage to Charles.

B came round to my house afterwards for tea. My mum had hung red, white and blue bunting and our neighbours had painted a Union Flag on their garage door. B and I solemnly decided that the awful, tacky, shoddily-made jam spoons were far too beautiful and precious to ever be used on anything so prosaic as actual jam, and we vowed never to do so. Recalling these things at my son’s class assembly I had to wipe away a tear, which was easy to blame on the occasion in hand.

Sometimes as a parent it is quietly terrifying to be responsible for a human child. You realise that out of all this precious and prosaic mayhem that is family life, not one moment goes unrecorded. Our children are too busy trashing the house to analyse life now but in thirty years’ time, equipped with perspective and understanding, scenes from today will flash before them. I hope my bald patch doesn’t show.

I’m not one of those people who suffer excessively from nostalgia. I don’t want to go to a school disco-themed night. I don’t want to search Friends Reunited. I don’t want to bother people who, lord knows, will have lost touch with me for a very good reason. But a small part of me does just want to know if B ever used his Diana spoon on jam. Because – with my hand on my heart – I can say that I still never have.