Shanghai fling

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).