In June this year, I flew to London to buy Neil Gaiman’s new book ‘The Ocean at the End of the Lane‘ the day it comes out, stand in a queue like the good fanboy I am (he’s my favorite author, after all) to get it signed AND attend a Q&A session with him to leap up some writing wisdom and maybe shake his hand. The handshake did not happen.

The evening plane touches down and I am in London again, after over a year, the capital of the old empire where the Queen’s corgis still piss on manicured lawns. From the air, it looked like a giant illuminated cancer, ever-growing outwards, light-polluting the dark land around it.

My B&B is in an old Victorian villa off Holland Park Avenue in Notting Hill and looks nice from the outside. Inside, it is filled with black-and-white pictures of the Serbian royal family, bleached-out chintz and other knick-knackery, dead flowers in enormous vases and old sabers collecting dust on the walls. My room is the former ante-room of the apartment that used to be on the second floor, and the door leading to the next room has been over-papered with the same sicklish-orange wallpaper that decorates the rest of my room. The place is run by the ‘Association of Serbian Chetniks in the UK’, and I’m not sure if I like this, but it’s cheap and the location is not bad.

While I had lusted after a full English breakfast the days before, the breakfast is a dismal proto-socialist affair: four slices of toast, sweaty spam and cheese, the cheapest yoghurt they could find in the supermarket and, at least, a banana, served by two elderly ladies in plastic aprons and with slimy coughs with Serbian TV running in the background.

I walk from Notting Hill Gate along Bayswater Road to Marble Arch. Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens are filled with groups of Italians standing in the way and hip British teenagers throwing frisbees and clusters of jogging mums all in the same grey jumper, and I walk past the memorial of John Hanning Speke, a Victorian explorer who discovered Lake Victoria and who did not die of an exotic disease or assegais in Africa, but instead blew the top of his head off when he was cleaning a rifle in his London living room.

The next day, I join the queue at Forbidden Planet at ten in the morning, and wait for four hours with all the other guys who want to get their copy of the book signed, and a girl dressed as Death of the Endless shares chocolates with everyone, and the two women behind me keep talking about music, periodical pains and a common friend who looks like Jesus for four hours straight, but then I am ushered inside and grab a book and Neil Gaiman signs it and I walk to the checkout.

In the evening I dress in a white shirt and black jacket, as you do when you go to a theatre in the West End, and drink a glass of red wine at the theatre bar, before I take a seat in a large room that is too hot. But it’s sold out, to Gaiman-fans mostly, and there are sombre literary types in black polo-neck jumpers and rimmed glasses, and women in top hats and with parasols and with colorful butterflies tattooed on their back. Neil talks about music, his whistle-worthy wife and cats and the origins of stories, and I want to kidnap him and keep him in the closet under the stairs so I can always push my half-filled notebooks in his face and tap on an empty page. He looks tired and his hair is a mess, but he leaves to standing ovations, and afterwards I drink ale in the pub around the corner from my B&B and read his book in two hours. It makes me cry, twice, but no one sees it.

That night, before flying home, I dream that an ugly brown spider as big as my hand is chasing me through my apartment, but I am saved by two grey cats that suddenly appear out of nowhere and crunchingly devour the spider.