05.18.04
Mrs Sinclair
Authors answer questions from their readers at their peril. This one manages a piece of extraordinary rudeness to noted ranting perambulator Iain Sinclair by the simple expedient of quoting the insults from another (suspiciously anonymous) correspondent:
As for Mrs. Sinclair, she’s fast becoming one of my favourite characters in literature - on a par, in terms of long-sufferance, with Tristram Shandy’s mother.
Imagine her life - dragged off every week or so to some slaughterhouse in the East End to watch some twat disembowel a London A-Z while shrieking about wounded ethnicity. Having to endure her husband’s circular, self-cherishing musings all the way home. And having to explain to callers, debtors and creditors alike that Iain isn’t in, because he’s “off on one of his walks again.”
Whenever Sinclair mentions her in one of his books it’s normally on the lines of: ‘My wife was very bored, and/or uneasy, while I was as gripped by excitement as Godard must have been making Sympathy for the Devil in the shadows of the great Hawksmoor church at Tower Bridge. I thought of William Blake …’
Bad reader. Naughty reader. Sinclair, to his credit, responded without rising to the bait.