September has been a month of nail-biting anxiety for me. I feel as though October is a cliff edge I’m tootling towards in a gaily painted buggy. When I reach the brink, the buggy is supposed to sprout Chitty Chitty Bang Bang wings and launch me aloft. I keep imagining what seems a far more likely scenario – wobble, plunge and splat.

The buggy is my next book, Listen (On Music, Sound and Us). I’ve published books before, but a quarter of a century has passed since my debut and everything is different now, including me. Don’t get me wrong: I feel blessed that Under The Skin and The Crimson Petal and the White came out when they did and I’ll always be grateful for how they were received. But Listen is my first non-fiction book and my publishers have warned me that I’ve got just this one chance to establish myself as a non-fiction author. The legal edit has left me paranoid that I’ll be sued. Newspapers are an endangered species and review space has shrivelled. Bookshops ruthlessly cleanse their shelves of stuff that’s slow to sell, literary festivals are struggling in the wake of covid, there’s a cost-of-living crisis, I’m 63 and limping about with plantar fasciitis.

The biggest stress, absurdly, is the state of the railways. Chaos is now the norm. What if strikes or cancellations stop me from getting to that nice faraway bookshop in Bath or Bristol where a few loyal readers might brave foul weather to welcome me?

I’m very fond of several former addicts and wouldn’t want them to be forever hounded by the shit they did when they were in a bad place

Putting things in Perspective
At the very beginning of September, I have afternoon tea with Andrei the exiled Russian journalist. He’s a bracing corrective to the judgements that lefties like me feel provoked to make about Tory Britain, as I wring my hands about the creeping rise of fascism, the proliferation of untruth, the crushing of dissent and so on. Over tea and a dessert called zapyekanka, Andrei tells me about Valery Garbuzov, a foreign policy institute director who, just the day before we meet, dared to write an article in a major Russian newspaper decrying Putin’s authoritarian regime. Andrei is surprised and apprehensive.

A few days later, I enquire about the fallout, half expecting to get encouraging news about the upsurge of resistance. Andrei tells me that Garbuzov was immediately fired, and an indignant letter of support written by other members of the institute meant they were all fired too and replaced by Putin loyalists. The wrongthinkers will be lucky if they’re not murdered. Maybe they should flee to the West. The British government may be mendacious and incompetent, but we’re not under a jackboot yet.

The pale penis theory of genius
Listen is critical of the entrenched sexism and racism of “classic” music journalism, and of the macho arrogance of self-perpetuating canons in general. If I hadn’t sent the book off to press already, I would’ve been delighted to include the car-crash interview given in mid-September by Rolling Stone supremo Jann Wenner. “Maybe I’m old-fashioned and I don’t give a fuck or whatever,” he chuckled, when asked to explain his opinion that only white male musicians were “articulate” enough to “measure up” to the high standards set by Bob Dylan, Bono, Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen and the other chaps in his 368-page tome The Masters.

I think of the hotel rooms, backstage dens and penthouses where Wenner smoked and snorted with his idols. In those spaces, there might or might not be a decorative handmaiden sitting quietly in the corner. She would not be asked to speak and in the unlikely event that she did, it would kill the vibe of the guys talking about guy things. What would the chick equivalent of The Masters be? The Mistresses?

Trigger warnings
Later in the month, those chicks cause trouble again, as Russell Brand is accused by multiple women of rape and grooming – claims that he righteously denies, hinting at dark conspiracies to suppress his anti-establishment polemics.

I’m into redemption and forgiveness, so this case is a challenging one for me. I’m very fond of several former addicts and wouldn’t want them to be forever hounded by the shit they did when they were in a bad place.

But there are so many discomfiting things about Brand’s self-reinvention as a quasi-therapist, guru and sage. A person who preaches humility, stillness, solitude and rejection of materialism, yet who is obviously still so ravenous for attention and so very loud and so very, very rich is a tricky proposition. For all the (doubtless very helpful) books Brand has written about addiction and how to recover from it, I surmise that whatever void he was trying to fill with the adoration of celebrity-struck young girls he is still filling with the adoration of his philosophical acolytes.

Then again, I have a more visceral, irrational reason for my allergy to this man I’ve never met. Koumpounophobia. Sartorially, Russell is very keen on the bare-chest-with-glinty-buttony-shirt-only-fastened-at-one-or-two-buttons look. Am I doomed to be triggered all month?

Michel Faber is a writer and photographer. He has no website or social media presence, but the Instagram of The Intrepid Blonde might provide clues