During my mandated morning meanderings my mind returns to one of my favourite books, Arthur Machen’s 1924 non-novel, The London Adventure. Alternatively titled The Art of Wandering, the absurd work is 96 years old but has never felt more contemporary. The haughty writer-narrator, newly bound by the responsibility of fatherhood, must now write for money rather than art, “a prostitution of the soul compared with which the prostitution of the body is a little thing”.

Once again Machen mentors me down the tin-can telephone of time. The gaily lit theatres where I plied my trade are darkened. Like the author of The London Adventure, accepting a contracted word count from an unspecified “young man in spectacles” in a Fleet Street tavern on a January afternoon in 1921, with no idea how to fill it, I am now driven to flood this newspaper sewer for money. Though it is “a degradation somewhat below those experienced by the procurers of Soho”, nonetheless, like Machen, I walk my daily allowance, waiting to glimpse the great god Nodens in his great green masquerade.

I spent the first month of lockdown refusing to participate in the daily outdoor exercise hour, as a protest against the Brexiters and their incompetence. Has Matt Handcock looked behind the bins for the Turkish PPE? Or maybe it has been left with a neighbour, or just on the doorstep, by a fleeing Amazon delivery person wrapped up in bin bags. Perhaps Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “while you were out” note blew away.

(Note to self. Conspiracy theorists think China invented the virus to secure economic dominance. By this logic Amazon’s Jeff Bezos must have grown it, like an evil dill, in the soft ring of moist skin surrounding his tax-avoiding anus, and then smeared it on every parcel his slaves service, full spectrum delivery dominance within his grasp, the Fu Manchu of superfluous packaging materials.)

But now I am doing my daily 10,000 steps. My exercise strike was as ineffective a gesture against Handcock as the dirty protest that has annoyed my nauseated family so thoroughly, though the cats enjoy stalking the attendant flies, and the manure is good for growing indoor edibles, like dill for example. Thankfully, the world of my walks is one of wonder. I nibble my dill, and Danny Dyer’s face scowls out from a plastic box of ponies and fairies. But wait, old friend. I am getting ahead of myself.

Every morning, not five minutes from the place I have called home for a quarter of a century, I find myself Bermuda-triangulated into square miles of unknown side-streets. On page 11 of The London Adventure Machen, still unsure what to write, wanders unvisited London byways “that might have been behind the scenes of the universe … shapeless, unmeaning, dreary, dismal beyond words; as if one were journeying past the back wall of an everlasting backyard”. Then, suddenly, an urban fig tree appears, “as blessed as any well in an African desert … This was to be the kind of adventure out of which I had agreed to make this book”.

At around 11am I took a random right turn at the shut-up chip shop, noting how the timeless patterns of nature were disrupted. Squawking seagull hordes, which have flown in from the Thames to scavenge at school break times on the doorstep of Pizza-Fish 2000 for centuries, realise there’s no fast food to be found. Instead, the street is silent, and they stay at home, relearning their traditional trade from grey-winged gulls old enough to remember the ancestral fish-catching ways.

I found myself walking empty pavements past rows of mid-sized semis, and placed out front of one is a green plastic box of books, presumably free to take, arranged spines upwards. Chiefly they are children’s stories, the My Magical Pony novels of Jenny Oldfield, Renee Russell’s Dork Diaries, and Meg Cabot’s Allie Finkel series. But staring up between these jolly volumes is the angry face of Danny Dyer, whose The World According to Danny Dyer: Life Lessons from the East End is their inexplicable and unexpected bedfellow, my Machen’s fig-tree moment.

Had a little girl, who normally read about ponies and dorks, somehow misused her birthday book voucher to buy The World According to Danny Dyer: Life Lessons from the East End? Had she been horrified by the questions Dyer answers, such as “Where have all the old school boozers gone?”, “Are there such things as ghosts?” and “Am I middle class?”? Did the book include the suggestion, given in Dyer’s 2010 Zoo magazine agony column, that you should cut your ex’s face, “so that no one will want her”?

Had the shock of a child’s encounter with Dyer, and the young reader’s realisation that, yes, she probably was middle class, resulted in the sudden rejection of not only The World According to Danny Dyer: Life Lessons from the East End, but of all books? Or did some belatedly resentful father, far from his own cockney roots, displaced to the environs of the liberal elite, inflict Dyer’s thoughts, on ghosts and on pub, on his innocent daughter, to burst her out of “The Bubble”?

I dropped my dill laughing. I could feel an interminable 20 minute standup bit, hell maybe even a whole two-hour show, forming, and took a photo of the box as notes towards my post-Covid comeback. And then I realised. Random perambulations had given me the gift of this private epiphany, a secret tryst between the Dork Diaries, Danny Dyer and me. I would never mention it for money, like the whorish writers Machen despised.

But what to write about instead? On page 137 of The London Adventure, five pages from the end, Machen begins to “reflect very seriously” that he still does not have any idea what to write about. Then someone sent me a link to the video for the new single from Oozing Wound, Surrounded By Fucking Idiots, and I thought maybe I should write about that instead. But it was too late.