Sometimes we walk through the world so full of our own troubles that we don’t even see the world around us. Not even when it includes mangroves and snapping shrimps.

FOR TWO YEARS or more, during the late 1970s, I went to Reuben’s on London’s Baker Street nearly every working day to buy lunch for my boss. Reuben’s was a strictly kosher establishment with a plaque in the window to say that the Beth Din of the Association of Synagogues regularly inspected the restaurant and its kitchens.

DECEMBER. I CAME into Newark from Europe in the early evening, Manhattan’s lights glinting blue and orange as we circled; all America illuminated for my first time.

When Miles Davis went into the studio to record ‘Kind of Blue’ on 2 March 1959 he had only a theory from which the five pieces developed. Why not approach a short story in a similar way, I wondered. Instead of starting with a preordained line of action, I tried to get most of it down during one sitting. In the end, it took longer to write than it did to listen to or even to record ‘Kind of Blue’.

The sand dunes at Hokianga were among my first and strongest impressions of New Zealand. They have made a couple of cameo appearances in my stories, but this is the first time they have taken a starring role.

‘THE HIDDEN VALLEY’, said the sign, ‘5km’. An enormous arrow pointed the way. Anna found that amusing. I stopped the car to take a photograph of her — inscrutably womanly in crop top and striped track pants — pulling herself up on taut fingers from its framework. We were half an hour north of Taupo on the shores of Lake
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IN THE PENTHOUSE suite of the lavish hotel, the guest lit another luxury-length with his expensively butch silver lighter. It was already his third cigarette and the interview had not even begun yet. He shuffled in his beautifully unadorned but hideously expensive Italian suit on the overstuffed hotel room chair, which was crowned with a prim antimacassar.

The stretch limo with tinted windows screamed to a dust-peppered halt at the edge of the desert highway. Except, suddenly, you weren’t in a desert any more; you were at the periphery of a wheat field, flourishing in hazy sunlight. The door opened somehow and the guy sitting next to you — the one wearing the operating-theatre mask beneath frowning, hopeless eyes — shoved you, straight-arm, into the roadside. You fell on your side, jarring your shoulder and grating your elbow; coughing up the red dust as the limo roared off.

A TINY DISTORTED face bearing an expression of incredulity is staring up at me from my coffee table between fragments of ruptured metal, carbon fibre, fiddly screws and mangled plastic. The pieces between the pieces of a thing, once broken, cannot be put back together.

ON THE DAY California tumbled into the sea, Hoops McCann slept fitfully. In his dream, brightly coloured molecules quivered in a semi-rigid matrix like glossy candies in a jar. What remained of humankind, like a hoard of unruly schoolchildren, had seemed hell-bent on tearing this toothpick-and-candy construction apart.