I’m in the Mr Morris wine bar in Brockley with Ben from Number Eight.

Nige isn’t here but he also comes in quite a lot, mainly because it’s downhill, literally, to our street. Which means he can have a bucket or two of larger, just point himself in the right direction then stumble on down without too much thought.

One night, there was a knock on my door. It was Nige who’d yet again lost his keys and needed the spare set he leaves with me.

Despite this, he looked very pleased with himself, swaying gently in the midnight breeze.

“Tel: guess where I’ve walked back from, full of ale, with no problems at all, no bleedin’ satnav necessary, thank you very much?”

“An interview to join the Ku Klux Klan?”

He frowned. “I may be a conspiracist, Tel, but I ain’t no Nazi sheet-lifter.”

I went to fetch his keys and a mirror. “Take a look,” I said.

“Jesus.”

Nige was covered in white powder: jeans, jacket, hair and face. Turns out, his stumble downhill wasn’t as smooth as his lager-swamped brain had believed.

“I must have bounced off every soddin’ white-washed garden wall in town . . . ”

Ben runs an independent bookshop near Brockley, which has managed to survive mainly because he and his wife, Sue, know their customers and their books, and which go best with which. But it’s increasingly difficult for them to hold out against cheap books in the major chains and from Amazon and the like.

We’ve come to Mr Morris to moan about the state of publishing and eat some good home cooked food. Unfortunately, the menu’s changed since we were last here.

“All they’re doing is bread, cheese and olives,” says Ben reading the tiny menu card and sounding as disappointed as if his daughter had announced she’s marrying a Waterstone. “I was looking forward to a nice juicy steak and big fat home-made chips.”

“I’ll ask Robert,” I say, heading for the bar.

Mr Morris is all dark wood and I fleetingly wonder why it is that such lighting in a working class pub would make me suspect they were hiding dirt. Whereas here, well, it all adds to the ambience. Which always sounds to me like an emergency vehicle for bees; then again–

“What can I get you, Terry?” says Robert, who manages somehow to look as if he’s occupying the entire other side of the counter. Maybe this is because he actually owns the place, isn’t just managing it. I’ve seen him before now run outside to berate and even bash yobs mucking about in the bus shelter nearby, because I guess they’re inside Robert’s ambient reach. I wonder if I should risk a joke about atmosphere and buzzing insects. Probably not.

“Well, I would have said steak and chips, except you aren’t doing it any more?”

At the last moment, I turn ‘more’ into a question, thus avoiding what might have been taken as a challenge.

Robert’s bald head wrinkles slightly with his thoughts. “Caroline and I decided . . . ” he begins, and I lean on the counter, settling into that strange condition I seem to spend too much time in, which is doing a lot of listening, even when I’m the customer. Who’s supposed to be always right. Or at least served.

Ten minutes later, I put down the wine bottle and two glasses on our table.

“I’m still hungry,” says Ben.

“It’s quite interesting, actually,” I say, pouring the wine. “What Caroline and Robert have decided to do with the food here is similar to what I’ve been trying to tell my writing group.”

“Is there anything that isn’t?”

“Before, they had to hire two chefs and a washer-upper, and were constantly run off their feet getting in supplies, and so on, which also meant the drinks side began to suffer.”

“I remember the supplies,” he says. “Yum, yum.”

“Anyway, when the chefs quit, they decided not to replace them. Instead, they thought ‘less is more’ and cut the menu down. It’s now pretty basic but they only use good ingredients that they prepare themselves. Which means they can bring the same level of care to everything, drinks too. It’s like with writing–”

He groans and rather over-does his point, I think, by banging his head softly on the table.

“–if you stick to the stuff you’re really good at, the magic will take care of itself.”

He frowns, takes a long swallow of wine. “You’re forgetting something. Caroline and Robert aren’t providing what their customers really want. They’re just dishing up cheese and bread instead of pies and roasts and custard, you know, the magic stuff.”

Hmmm. Looks as if this lesson might need some tweaking.

But before I can, Ben is hammering home his point. “If me and Sue,” he says, “decided to stock only a few classics–couple of Shakespeares, one or two Dickens and a Jane Austen for light relief, say, and don’t worry because we’d print them off ourselves, using only the best paper available, stuck together with glue made from organic free-range horse hooves–do you think our customers would be happy?”

“Well, I–”

“The great thing about places that provide hot food is that bloody Amazon can’t get into the market. Not yet, anyway. I suppose it won’t be long before you can sit at your kitchen table, dial into Amazon and in seconds there’ll be a plate of steaming hot spag bog in front of you and a Virtual Reality butler to tickle your balls while he pours you a nice cold glass of Pinot Grigio.”

“Clearly, hunger’s affecting your normally optimistic nature.”

He swallows the rest of his glass, fills it again. “You want to know how this is like writing, Terry?”

“Do I need my notebook for this?”

“I’ve spent most of my life selling books because I love them. I used to love them, I should say. But for years now publishers have been putting out mostly crap. Stripping everything down to bread and cheese genre basics. And because they control the distribution, authors have had to follow suit. Oh, they promise steak and chips and spag bog–they sure can write tasty blurbs. But what they’ve actually done is the same as what’s happened here: Caroline and Robert turning out what suits them, not their customers.”

“But they still have an extensive wine list.”

“Yeah, but I came here for steak tonight. You want to know why I’m finally thinking of closing the shop? Because I see more hope for books in self-publishing. Yes, most of it is utter shite at the moment. But the important thing is, it’s not restricting the artist in any way. It hasn’t sacked them because it’s more costly to produce steak than bloody olives and a dip. God, I am hungry . . . ”

In the event, we decide that wine is more essential than food, and by the end of the evening Ben is congratulating Robert on doing things his way and to hell with bloody Cafe Rouge, All Bar One and all those other faux family wine bars.

We do a bit of a Nige on the way back down to our street, and I remind myself to brush down my clothes before bumbling through the door. As I watch Ben swaying up to his front door, fumbling in his pocket for keys, his shoulders seem a little more bent than normal but maybe that’s just the wine and lack of food affecting my perceptions.