J.G. Ballard

From the Dec. 9 edition of the Times Literary Supplement:

Not long before he died, J.G. Ballard had a visitor:

He lives in the outer suburbs in what I think can kindly be called "squalor"---no central heating, kitchen linoleum from the 1930s, light fixtures of the same era, curtains held up in a limbo between open and closed states by a giant dehydrated plant that has collapsed on to his writing table, blocking all but the most determined approach. I dropped a pencil on the floor. "You'll never find it now," he said. I asked to use the loo. "At the top of the stairs---I hope it's still there." But a genial old type, who could have come from the country club in one of the colonies. There was a bottle of white wine on the table and he kept interrupting our talk to insist I drink up. "More! More!" As I sipped: "We don't want you getting killed on the road home." Conversational Crash, except that it wasn't.