To occupy an afternoon - and he would be lying if he doesn't admit to the hope that he will be spoken to by someone - he decides to go to a choral music concert. It is in a great hall in a hundred year old university building.

He sits between two older Chinese couples, who perhaps are there to cheer their sons or daughters, whom might be in the chorus that will sing this afternoon. The murmur of talk. Occluded light through the stained glass windows. He is pleased to see that the room is surprisingly full. He tries to read the inscription that scrolls around the room at the lintel level. The part closest to him reads:

"...should be disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, evin to a rarity and admiration, things not before discourst or written of..."

He murmurs amen, even if universities now manufacture specialists rather than give wholeness and shape to raw human beings. The choraliers file in; men first followed by women. And then pianist who will accompany human voice, and the young soprano who will sing the solo sections; she dressed in red. It just so happens that he was reading about the color red in a novel. The novelist, Orhan Pamuk, says this about red:

"If we touched it with the tip of a finger, it would feel like something between iron and copper. If we took it into our palm, it would burn. If we tasted it, it would be full bodied, like salted meat. If we took it between our lips, it would fill our mouths. If we smelled it, it'd have the smell of a horse. If it were a flower, it would smell like a daisy, not a red rose."

The music begins - it is all French composers, two - Durufle and Poulenc - whose music he had never seen performed before. The piano leads, and the voices follow. Applause. One of the mysteries of music is that if one has it, one is not alone anymore. The soprano stands up, and hurls out notes of a Fuare's chanson from somewhere in her body, perhaps her feet. The room hushes. Hair crackles. This piece is titled "Apres Un Reve" - he knows enough French to recognize reve means dream. The rest is, well, French. Nevertheless, he is moved. His legs twitch and palms sweat.

But after heartbreak, the music moves to praise, with a hymn. He mouths to himself the refrain - "you must praise the mutilated world" - of one of his favorite poems as Faure's Cantique de Jean Racine plays. And after a break, in which he tries to fit back into his changed self, Poulenc's "Gloria" is performed; of which he can't help humming the tune of "Laudamus Te" ("we praise thee"), long after the concert in over, as he walks back to his room via The Philosopher's Walk.

to be a novelist? Si? Ja? Oui?

Ha of course you want be! Then go right away get a facial or plastic surgery or something that will make you look hot, for as Kate Kellaway writes in the Guardian Review:

"Certainly, the idea of a novel quietly selling itself now, with no sense of the writer behind it, is far-fetched. Kate Saunders, one of the judges of this year's Orange Prize for fiction (the longlist, just announced, has half-a-dozen first novels on it), says: 'It is harder for first novelists to get noticed now. They will find, increasingly, that they are judged alongside their work - and are less likely to be taken on if they are not photogenic or newsworthy.'

Amid the pile of first novels in front of me, a handful of author photos proves her point: Ivo Stourton looks as if he has stepped out of Brideshead Revisited, snapped outside a sunny villa. His publisher makes much of his youth and Cambridge education. And an A4-sized photograph of a smiling Priya Basil slips invitingly out of the review copy of her novel as if to win favour.