I am celebrating my last chance to read fiction and tracing a decade of development by rereading The Alexandria Quartet. It appears that all that registered on my twenty year old mind were instances of aberrant sexual behaviour- child brothels, 'inversion', Pursewarden's incestuous passion for his sister and a multitude of convoluted and diverse extramarital relations. Questions of politics and ethics passed me by, (or at least made a very shallow impression) although on this current read they seem to be the most salient things- Mountolive's conflict between duty and personal affection, Pursewarden's suicide to escape same (or was it), the venal and eminently bribeable figure of Memlik Pasha, the prospect of Egyptian independence and the complicated relations between the Egyptians, French and English associated with it. I'm fascinated, looking at the pre-Israel middle East: a world which vanished at the end of the second world war, a commercial and social disposition of forces which has gone forever.

The romance element, on the other hand, strikes me as tedious and embarrassing this time around.Perhaps my interests are maturing- am I past the stage of looking up cunt in the dictionary and giggling? Or is it a corollary of marriage that I have stopped scanning the written page for references to Love, in the same way I have stopped (more or less) scanning the material world for prospective lovers?

During an alcoholic fancy dress party at my friend Annabell's house, Marcin (dressed as Borat) confessed to me (dressed as Bindi Irwin) that he knows of the existence of this blog. Until now he hasn't dared to read it because he isn't sure of the ethical ramifications of doing so. Is it like reading somebody's paper diary which they have accidentally left open on the table? (In this case you deserve, apparently, what you get.) Or is it more complicated, since I have an audience anyway and what difference does one more make? But on the other hand, since I didn't inform him of the presence of said blog, does it mean that in some sense I am refusing him access? He also commented that since he is present, presumably, in its pages, he feels like he has taken unwitting part in a game of Big Brother which he doesn't especially like.

So: who owns the rights to the world we share? This is my blog, but can I say anything I like about anybody in its pages? The fact is that I don't, and that I probably expected him to read it sooner or later and have been fairly careful not to include (many) details of an intimate nature. It seems that all the usual constraints on honesty, usually generated by desire to be liked and not offend anybody, apply here as much as anywhere.

Back to school this week. Am I enjoying it? I'm not sure if the vocabulary of pleasure is relevant to this kind of enterprise - I have various sensations but wouldn't call any of them enjoyment. Self doubt, excitement and a kind of relief, as if I am getting something out of the way which has been hanging over me for a long time. I like the sensation of being forced to think and suspect I need the discipline of being told how to go about it. But there's also a sense of vertigo when I think of the proliferation of knowledge and literature that exists in the world, growing every minute - do I have anything to contribute? Is it possible to know anything about anything? Which may be precisely why it's necessary to compartmentalise and classify information- to prevent it from becoming an amorphous mess that covers the planet like a great junket and obscures all joy and sense of progress.

At the same time I am having a last brief Indian summer of fiction reading- Disgrace, The Alexandria Quartet, Graham Swift's Ever After and The Conversations at Curlow Creek. I read several things simultaneously and gluttonously, hiving stories against the long dry winter ahead like a junkie intent on the last hit before quitting. David Malouf especially, because he writes about Australia and all the things I like to think about: the way this country which is so familiar to us must have looked to people raised on the damp green hills of the English countryside or the pullulating alleyways of English cities; the irony of feeling claustrophobia in the middle of so much space; the sense of owning-by the sheer fact of having a white skin- country about which you know nothing and which stubbornly refuses to succumb to your advances.