Tony Parsons could be any other Londoner standing outside Hampstead tube station, chatting with the newspaper seller about Arsenal's defeat in the Champions League the previous night. In his green flat cap, brown leather Belstaff Trailmaster jacket and satchel thrown over the shoulder, he epitomises the indigenous casual middle-aged parent that roams this plush suburb on the capital's Northern Line. It's only later over a breakfast omelette when the 55-year-old casually drops a line into the conversation that you remember his path to globally recognised author is strewn with bodies from rock'n'roll anarchy's Hall of Fame.
He explains how, more than 20 years ago while in Hong Kong researching a travel article, he met a friend of a friend who recognised him as a former writer with the music paper New Musical Express. According to Parsons, the young lawyer was something of a fan.
'When I was a 22-year-old music writer taking drugs with the Clash, the Sex Pistols and Iggy Pop, he was a wee lad in Aberdeen who was into punk rock reading about it in NME,' he says, recalling his part in the anti-establishment music of the late 1970s.
These days Parsons seems to have embraced much of what his peers railed against. Royalties from his best-selling novel Man and Boy, plus money from film rights and other books, means the man who grew up on an Essex council estate now lives comfortably with his Japanese wife and five-year-old daughter in Hampstead. A regular visitor to Hong Kong and the region over the years, his backpacking days are long over. He preferred first the Hong Kong Hilton (before it was pulled down), then the Ritz-Carlton (he's says he's on the look-out for a new favourite hotel since that is being pulled down too).
Yet despite clearly enjoying the trappings of wealth, some of his early socialist values remain intact. He says we should be more tolerant of today's open China than the closed country of old. But he's quick to point out the cheap goods we all enjoy are built from the sweat of the exploited worker.
Some of his experiences from his trips to Asia - love found and love lost in the more remote corners of China, or the busy capitals of Manila, Thailand and Singapore, have begun to make it into print. One for My Baby charts the struggle of a young English-language teacher as he tries to come to terms with the death of his wife. Having met in Hong Kong he loses her during a diving trip in the Philippines. Complete with Parsons staples such as arrogant lawyers, misogynistic protagonists and an exploration of the father-son relationship, he returns to England where he struggles to make meaning of his life. In a clear reflection of art mirroring real life, the father is a journalist turned successful writer.
Parsons' latest offering, My Favourite Wife, is a contemporary love story set in frenetic Shanghai. Bill Holden is an ambitious young lawyer who, along with his wife and four-year-old daughter, relocates to China hoping the move will fast-track him to partner. The book portrays a ruthlessness of doing business in the world's fastest-growing economy that involves land grabs, bribery, corruption and worker exploitation, all illuminated with the free and easy attitude of a modern Chinese city.