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There are, always, unexpected pleasures in travelling. I have been in Scotland now for two months, and before that I was in the US for close to a month. Yesterday I went into Helensburgh, the nearest town to where I am staying in Cove Park, and browsed at the newsagents. On the covers of the magazines were all these faces that I didn't recognise: "My God", I thought to myself, "Who the Hell are all these people?"

I had a very similar experience ducking into a convenience store in Washington DC, scanning the shelves and being taken aback by these unfamiliar made-up, retouched, plucked, botoxed faces staring out at me. It turns out, of course, they are reality TV stars, sportspeople from codes I've never followed, wannabe Rihanna nymphettes (even Rihanna is a wannabe Rihanna), talk show hosts from programs I have never heard of.  It was a satisfying feeling, knowing that celebrity has finite geographical limits, even in this age of globalised media. These faces sell magazines, for a short time, tweak public interest, for a moment, and then they disappear back into the hyper-media primordial sludge from which they first emerged. I sound crueller than I mean to be. I just think it is a good thing to be reminded that aura and mystique of celebrity is transient.

I have been thinking of media a lot because I have just finished reading Gordon Burn's terrific novel, Fullalove. It is set in the post-Thatcherite newspaper world, about a hack tabloid journalist, Norman Miller. The novel is about how the pursuit of the depraved and of the sensational taints us all, how the gutter-ethics of the contemporary media are now the morality of the modern world. I had previously read Burn's Happy Like Murderers, a book about the serial killers Fredrick and Rosemary West. It was grimy, bleak, hard but just like Fullalove, it sticks to you, you can't shake it off. He's a great writer; he forces you to look in the mirror. As the name of the main character suggests, there is the influence of Mailer and that generation of US writers on Burn's work, a pungency and vigour that I am happy to be discovering in the contemporary English novel. The last year I have been vociferously reading David Peace, another English writer whose work is hard and complex, bleak and tough. And like Burns, Peace is a virtuoso with language. I think this is the joy in reading both these writers, that you read them and it seems that they are renewing the language as they write. They make you excited about the possibilities of words. It is in this tension between the bleakness of the worlds they describe, and the pleasure and energy of their language, that some of the best writing in English is being produced.

Gordon Burns passed away last year. I'm going to read his last novel, Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel next. And when I get home to Australia next month I've got Peace's new novel waiting for me.

I won't be surprised when I walk into my first newsagent back home, I'll look over at the magazine shelves and think, "Who the Hell are all these people?"

Four months is an eternity in the media age.