LAST GASPS Thoughts about Alan while waiting for Harold, by Simon Gray The author of the celebrated and widely-acclaimed The Smoking Diaries returns to print with a tender, affecting, and of course funny account of his friendship with Alan Bates, written as he waits in Barbados for Harold Pinter to turn up. PLUS: Said Sayrafiezadeh on the perils of having a socialist for a father Simon Garfield on his obsession with faulty postage stamps Wayne McLennan on the Australian outback's last boxing nomads. And Margaret Atwood, James Hamilton-Paterson, James Lasdun, Orhan Pamuk, Maarten 't Hart and Tim Winton on our changing weather. With new fiction by Frederic Tuten and Gllad Evron.