I should have known it would be a funny year when the Chancellor of the Exchequer's daughter showed me her walnut oil. "There's a marvellous wine warehouse that stocks it just around the corner," she said. It was a large tin, big enough for several months of salad dressing. "They're very helpful. Just ring them and they'll deliver your order right through the picket line."
I like Nigella. She has big dark eyes and always looks as though she needs someone tall and strong to protect her; and it seems unjust somehow to blame her for monetarism. I took down the warehouse's phone number, Nigella went off to work on the literary pages, and I settled down in front of Rupert Murdoch's new computers in the Sunday Times foreign department. This was Wapping in February. Outside, the cries of the pickets rose and fell: "Scab, scab." "Judas."
We had entered what Andrew Neil, the editor, used to refer to as the "Armageddon scenario", dug in for the duration behind looped barbed wire and pools of mud. But we were winning. The Sun got out and the walnut oil got in, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer's daughter went on correcting the galley proofs of book reviews submitted by critics, some of whom were "on the Left" and perhaps even members of the party whose membership had been instructed to have no dealings with Wapping.
It's unfair to pick out Nigella. There were hundreds of us. But I can't forget the walnut oil. For me it was the first clue in a trail of evidence that sealed the case against many writers of English fiction who try to describe the condition of England by heightening its reality. They are wasting valuable imaginations. The reality of England is already high enough; just getting it right in simple documentary terms should earn any writer the Prix Goncourt. Isn't Jeffrey Archer, after all, more interesting than any character he has managed to create?
Winter
Things fall apart. I argue for going to Wapping, vote (meaninglessly) against going to Wapping, go to Wapping, leave Wapping. Others of my colleagues argue against going to Wapping, vote against going to Wapping, go to Wapping, stay in Wapping. This is a mote-and-beam situation; most journalists on the Sunday Times, I guess, are on the proprietor's rather than the printers' side, but few of us want to be seen as greedy and opportunistic. A few people never go to Wapping and get the sack; others go determined to make it work. These occupy the moral high ground; the rest of us below are mired in contradictions.
The Parliamentary Labour Party decides it won't speak to Murdoch journalists, while the NGA, the more militant of the two unions in the dispute, permits its members to set the Sunday Times Magazine and the Times supplements. Sogat members call me a scab when I leave or enter but cannot persuade their members in the provinces to stop distributing scab products. John Mortimer, sometimes mistaken for the unhumbugged voice of liberal England, is in a dither. He doesn't want to cancel his contract with the paper, but at the same time would prefer if his stuff didn't appear in it. He tells Andrew Neil he would like to "wait and see", which Neil describes as "a very English decision" and I can see what he means. Armageddon is a cosier place if you're knitting socks at home in Blighty.
Enter Samantha's bazookas. Two old friends, David Blundy and Jon Swain, are making their way out towards the pickets one day when they see a reminder of their days in Belfast or Beirut growling up and down inside the barbed-wire entanglements. It is an armoured personnel carrier with some Royal Marines perched on top. Surely we're not now protected by the British Army as well as the police? "No," says a security guard, "it's just brought in Samantha Fox."
It has too. The next day the Sun carries a page one story - Samantha joins the War of Wapping - which describes her "pointing her bazookas at the enemy lines" and inspecting "her privates" who are loyally at work in the Sun's new offices. What it omits to mention is that this spectacularly endowed daughter of the Finsbury Park working class sat on top of her armoured car as it drove through the picket lines twice on the way in; the second time to recreate the fun, as it were, of the first passage, when her old fans, the sacked members of the Sun machine-room, jeered and whistled. David Hare and Howard Brenton, the authors of Pravda, could sit together for weeks over black coffee and still fail to produce such a stunning piece of theatre, or such a ghastly metaphor for the state we're in. I'm surprised it hasn't transferred to the South Bank.
Spring
The best lack all conviction. In my resignation letter to the editor I compare him to Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. In his hurt reply he says he has "never interfered with anything you wanted to write, or when you wanted to write it". This is true. Remorse sets in and I apologise, but I still leave because the rights and wrongs of Wapping, going round in my head like a cat with a tin can tied to its tail, are beginning to drive me barmy.
The next week, in Los Angeles for Vanity Fair, I meet the man who took his name from Captain Queeg's ship. Michael Caine (ne Micklewhite) bangs on about the state of the old country for a while and concludes with a line from Pravda (the play) which tickled him; when Anthony Hopkins (as the Murdoch-Maxwell-Rowland proprietor) tells his eager but confused editor: "The trouble with you people is that you don't know what you believe." And that, says Caine, is precisely the trouble with the British.
Well, yes and no. The beliefs of the machine-room minders on the picket line at Wapping are absolutely unequivocal; they believe they have the right to go on earning the same large wages in the same old way. Even more unrealistically, they believe they can achieve this by massing in the cold and shouting at newspaper lorries. Belief isn't the problem here, but thought is. I go down to the picket line to discover what it's like. White middle-aged men with semi-detacheds in Essex mill about on the pavement, muttering about their new-found disenchantment with the police (inside, the workers who have dispossessed them are young, often female and sometimes black, and too young ever to have been enchanted with the police). I meet a compositor who used to work on the Sunday Times literary pages. I say he must be pleased that two of the journalists he worked with, Claire Tomalin and Sean French, refused to cross a picket line. He is, he says, and then adds wistfully of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's daughter: "That Nigella, she's a bold one. She comes through those picket lines as calm as you like." He thinks for a moment: 'It must be in the breeding."
Summer
We're house-hunting. We get to know estate agents, sometimes more quickly and intimately than we'd reckoned on:
"Hi Ian, it's Mick here from the Stoke Newington office."
Mick is one of the new breed. Last month he was selling insurance, this month he's selling houses. He doesn't hold with all this crap about estate agents being a profession like doctors and the law and, in a way, I like his attitude. Estate agents are middlemen in the purest sense; why pretend there is more to it? One day Mick arrives in his yellow jeep with the slogan The Trendiest Estate Agent in the World on its side.
"Hi, Ian." "Hi, Mick."
He's come to give our house the once-over and trots up and down with a light-meter gadget which measures room sizes. Then he speaks into a tape-recorder; he has more electronic equipment as a house agent than I do as a reporter.
We have a cup of tea. Who, I wonder, is buying all these £80,000 flats in Stoke Newington? "Yuppies." Well, of course. I've seen the word; Mick's definition cuts out the frills. "They're in their early twenties, they're earning maybe 20 to 25 thousand a year, they've no trouble getting a 100 per cent mortgage equal to three times their salary, they work in video, advertising, or in the City and the media." He likes them; they've never bought property before and they are malleable. "Usually you only show them two properties. Let them see the worst one first and they'll usually take the second."
Later in the summer, politely tapping the walls of other people's houses, I begin to recognise the type. They have very pretty homes in pastel shades, where dado rails have been painstakingly restored and fireplaces put back. Often a stereo is their most striking piece of furniture; very rarely are there books.
Autumn
The richer the society, the fewer people smoke. In California smoking is now regarded as weirdly old-fashioned, on a par with medieval flagellation or trams. Things are not much better (or worse) in New York. Pathetically, I still smoke, and when Tina Brown, the editor of Vanity Fair, invites me to lunch at the Four Seasons restaurant I am filled with foreboding. The Four Seasons is a grand place, in fact it features as the cover story in that week's New York Magazine as the true home of the power-lunch. Not only are there no smoking lunchers at the Four Seasons, there seem to be very few drinking lunchers either. The atmosphere is Alpine in its clarity, the ashtrays merely decorative objects. Occasionally ice tinkles in a water glass. After the fresh raspberries I allow myself one Silk Cut, feeling rather like H M Bateman's man who dared to throw a snowball at St Moritz.
Winter
Bradford is not rich, though it once was. Here the Perrier and Filofax culture has not caught on, despite the chastisements of Edwina Currie. When she arrives to address a meeting at Hebden Bridge she is greeted by members of the local Labour Party dressed up in shawls and flat caps who hand her a pound of tripe. I wonder if Mrs Currie is so wrong. My nights out in Bradford are great fun but punishing: 20 cigarettes, six pints of Guinness, a prawn biryani, five poppadums, a packet of dry-roasted peanuts. A year of this and I'd be dead.
The Oldham Two are celebrating. Actually they used to be the Oldham Nine, nine people who had been arrested while trying to disrupt a National Front meeting, but then it was Two and that morning the court had dismissed the last charges. Now they are the Oldham Zero. We go to a pub, then have a curry, then on to a club where they play soul music and I can't hear what the anti-fascist from the private detective agency is trying to tell me. "There'll be civil war with the whites," says an Asian boy. "I don't care if I die."
One of the Oldham Zeroes kindly offers me a lift back to the hotel. He engages first gear and drives straight into a lamp-post. I walk down the hill alone, past the sites of textile factories and the Asian corner stores. Eventually, close to the hotel, I reach estate-agent territory. Their windows are still lit. I look inside and make calculations. In January this year our little house in London was worth the equivalent of 7.5 similar houses in Bradford. This month, December, it could buy ten. Perhaps, in that statistic, there lies the real story of the year; and perhaps, soon, English fictionalists will take lessons from old realists such as Bennett and Galsworthy and restore property to the centre of the English novel. Together with Samantha's bazookas and even walnut oil, it is, after all, so very close to all our hearts.
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