Paddy’s.
Projects current: at the end of the year
THE PRAGUE METRO a novel
MAY a short novel
(THE GUEST) a play
? a play
poems
essays
short stories
And that is the last line of young-Toby’s 1990 writer’s diary.
Here is his plan for the future. From January 1 in the 1991 diary:
I am staying in London with Paddy before going back to Czechoslovakia, probably for another four months. I then plan to live in France, working as an English teacher, for another year. After that I will probably take up some sort of academic career, starting with an M.A. or a PhD.
Thank you for following young-Toby’s year of becoming-a-writer. Thank you.
I am very grateful to you for sticking around. For your support and attentiveness.
This year’s diary wasn’t the most obvious use of Substack — it’s not pushing itself, or upselling anything.
But what’s interested me in daily posts, from the start, has been the possibility of something like a real-time experience.
And so, 1990 was able to happen all over again.
I’m not one for reunions. I’ve never been to a school or university get together, but I would go along to a Praha anniversary. This year would have been the 35th, so that’s been missed. Perhaps the 40th will do.
I would like to know what my friends from that time are up to. We were ‘the Left Bank of the 90s’. We haven’t done so badly since.
Among other young people there in 1990 were the novelist Tom McCarthy and the journalist Carole Cadwalladr.
Others are in the anthology The Return of Král Majales, published 2010.
I did go back to Praha a few years after I left, I’d just got a publishing contract; I may have spent some of my book advance on the flight.
Praha was changed. It was more familiar. It still had claws.
But this has been about 1990 and here I am back then —
There isn’t any video of me in 1990. But I found myself bottom left, blue shirt, in this video of a Karel Kryl concert at Lucerna from the following year.
(Still probably the best concert I’ve ever seen.)
Next year, tomorrow, I’m starting something different.




