Fourth. First since the telly version.

Fourth. My list says 1998, 2006, 2011 and now, so this is my first since the television version, which turns out to matter more than I expected it to.

The copy is a Corgi paperback that has been through a washing machine. Pages 200 to about 240 are wavy and the ink has gone grey on them. I could replace it for four pounds and I won't.

Here's what I had wrong. For twenty-odd years I have been telling people that the M25 explanation is the funniest thing in it, and I have been remembering it as a long set piece with several stages. It is a footnote and a couple of paragraphs. The reason I remember it as enormous is that I have retold it at parties until it grew. Same with the paintball. I had it filed as a chapter. It's four pages.

This is the useful part of keeping a count, I think. Not the counting. The catching yourself. I had built a version of this novel out of the bits I quote, and the actual object is differently proportioned. There is far more Newt in it than I would have said. There is much less Aziraphale and Crowley than the internet has convinced everybody there is. They are wonderful and they are maybe a quarter of the pages.

Newt is the thing I can't get past now. He was fine in 1998. He was fine in 2011, apparently, since there is nothing in the margin. This time every scene with him read as a delay. He exists to be a pleasant, useless man that things happen near, and Anathema deserves an actual counterpart. The passage where the book stops to explain that they slept together and it was fine is the flattest thing in it. I skimmed him. First time I have ever skimmed anything here.

The Them have gone up. I had filed them as the Just William homage and left them there. This time the argument about whether Adam should fix the whole world landed properly, because Pepper is the only character in the entire novel who says the obvious thing out loud: that a boy deciding what everyone gets is still a boy deciding. She's eleven, she is the moral centre, and I had missed that twice.

Now, the note. There's a biro line in the margin at the arrival of the Four Horsemen, dated 6/11, in my handwriting: "this is what satire IS." Underlined twice. I have no defence. I remember precisely the sort of year I was having and I had apparently decided that a joke about a motorcycle gang meant I understood something. Reading them now, the Horsemen are the weakest sustained sequence in the book. Famine's diet-food business is a decent gag stretched across three separate visits, and the payoff at the airbase is rushed.

What has held: the tone of the first fifty pages. The Garden, the flaming sword, the wall. Those are perfect and they set a temperature nothing afterwards quite returns to. Also Shadwell, whom I have never seen anybody praise and who has the best comic rhythm in it. Also that neither of them ever writes a sentence that is proud of itself.

You can see the seams now, which I couldn't before. Not who wrote what. Everybody plays that game and it doesn't work. I mean where the plotting was done by two people in a hurry. Threads get introduced and resolved inside the same chapter. The Chattering Order does an enormous amount of setup for very little return. Anathema's book of prophecies is a brilliant device that the plot only actually needs about six times.

Eight. It was a nine in 2011 and I know exactly where the missing point went: Newt, plus the Horsemen sag, plus my having now watched actors do these voices and I can't unhear them. Michael Sheen is sitting where my own reading used to be. Not the book's fault. The score is still the score.

Admin, for anyone who does this: date your margin marks. Past me only did it sometimes and the undated ones are useless. If you're going to embarrass yourself in a book, at least record when, so next time round you know how much rope to give yourself.