Jan Morris passed an evening at the FCC recently, and nobody there knew who she was. She sat alone at the bar, unregarded, no comment sought, no opinion challenged. Odd, you may think, given that Morris is the author of perhaps the book on Hong Kong: the valediction to empire which begat effervescent plaudits on, and between, its covers. Then again, like Hong Kong, most of her books do.
The explanation for her invisibility may have been that she is an illusionist; trying to separate Morris and myth can be confusing.
'I hope you don't do any direct quotes, because they're always wrong - it's almost impossible to get the cadence, the tone of voice right,' she warned, happily sitting down to be cross-examined in the Peninsula lobby as the tape recorder ran.
'One of my key things in life is not having the chocolate on the top of a cappuccino,' she continued, smiling, as the waiter departed. 'I hate the chocolate bit.' Morris isn't a 'difficult' person - she's just difficult to pin down. Probably the planet's most famous septuagenarian writer on places far-flung, she adores her home in North Wales and longs to publish a book of her photographs of it. Not that it's anything grand: 'It's only got two long rooms and two bedrooms, and that's it. I drag people in off the lane, total strangers, I'm so proud of it; I just want to show them.
It takes them two minutes to look round it. Most of them are English, and they think the Welsh are primitive,' said Morris, Anglo-Welsh by birth, Welsh by loyalty (according to her potted, Penguin Books biography) ... and, I was told beforehand, a jealous defender, in conversation, of her private life.
That life exists in recorded form in her autobiography Conundrum; an affecting, courageous memoir, it probably contains all the clues to all the dichotomies and dualities which seem to inform the Morris character. And that, she would no doubt say in her modest, affable fashion, is far too flattering a reading.
Jan Morris used to be James Morris: respected journalist, author and, thanks to The Times, which required dispatches from the expedition, member of the first team to climb Everest, in 1953. Transsexualism and years of torment for the woman incarcerated in the man's body culminated in a sex change in a Casablanca clinic. Afterwards, the books continued, the plaudits kept arriving, but other things had changed too: positively.