It’s that ‘Once In A Lifetime’ feeling. You know it well, a moment of psychic double-take when you hear David Byrne’s voice piping in your inner ear: “And I ask myself: how did I get here?”

Your correspondent had one of those the other week, sequestered in a studio on the South East Radio premises, partaking in a link-up with BBC Radio 5 Live’s Simon Mayo Show, chaired on the day by Colin Murray. The nice publicity lady from Faber had managed to secure me a slot on the show’s book section. The format, she explained, involves two authors reviewing each other’s novels in the company of a panel of three or four critics, with the odd phone-in for good measure. “Who’s the other author?” I asked. Jeffrey Archer, she replied.
I’d love to say I responded with an open mind, but I grimaced, even though I’d never read a word by the man. All I knew was the thumbnail version: Archer the Thatcherite bestselling author who’d perjured himself and did a couple of years at her majesty’s pleasure. Truth be told, I felt a little outclassed by old Jeff on all fronts. Here was lorded gentry who’d mixed with Tory illuminati and guests of the nation. And he sells more books before breakfast than I’m likely to shift in a lifetime. When his new book Paths Of Glory – a fictionalised account of the life of mountain climber George Mallory, who died in his attempt to scale Everest in 1924 – arrived in the post, I approached it with caution.
I devoured the thing in two days. Don’t get me wrong; it’s no Heart Of Darkness. There’s some terribly hackneyed prose, and the dialogue often reads like it was lifted from a 1940s film where old boys congregate in the library to brandish brandy glasses and refer to the fillies on the croquet courts as ‘gamey old gals’. But I have to hand it to him: Archer can spin a boys’ own adventure story. It reminded me of the Alistair Maclean books I ate up as a youth. By the time I reached the final will-he/won’t-he chapters describing Mallory’s last hours, my heart was thudding.
And on the day, Jeffrey was the perfect gent about my own humble tale, bandying about phrases like “tremendous achievement” and asking if I was a seanchai (I’ve been called worse). The reviewing panel praised the book, even as they admitted they were sometimes puzzled by its phantasmagorical bent. It was, all told, a most agreeable interlude.
But tell me again: how did I get here?