Some book news. I have written the foreword for the new graphic novel version of Orlando by Virginia Woolf, adapted by Jules Scheele. The book is colourful and sexy and is out now, published by Avery Hill of London, UK.
I like the way Mr Scheele has rendered my name on the back cover, in wavy letters to match his and Woolf’s names on the cover.
I think of the opening titles of Life of Brian, where the words ‘Monty Python’s’ are a wavy neon sign on a cloud.
Opening titles of the 1979 film Life of Brian.
Some show news. I am appearing at a Saturday afternoon event about diaries in London.
I will be discussing how to write a diary, how to read a diary, and why diaries are good for you. Travis Elborough will be interviewing me, and I will sign books. There will also be DJs and guest readers, who will read diary entries by the likes of Samuel Pepys, Derek Jarman, and Virginia Woolf. The venue is the Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3BL, Saturday 22nd August, 2.30pm-6pm. Free entry, but tickets must be reserved on Eventbrite. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/dickon-edwards-on-diaries-tickets-1992055199727
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New Diary Entry:
Sunday 21st June 2026. To Hastings Museum for the Sanctuary Festival, a free event to raise awareness of refugees. It is a hot, sunny day and the museum grounds are packed with stalls, stages and people, spilling out onto the grounds of the Summerfields Leisure Centre next door. As I pass I see a small stage at one end, with a choir singing Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ in multi-part harmonies.
When I first moved to Hastings after so long in London, I was warned: ‘you’ll get bored!’ But there really does seem to be a different festival in Hastings every week. And the festivals are usually so popular that, as Wilde pointed out about galleries, even if the entertainment is not interesting, one can enjoy looking at the other people there.
I used to feel awkward attending festivals at which I had not been invited to appear, as I became too envious of those who had. Particularly if I thought that some of those who had been invited to appear were manifestly less interesting than me.
I have since resolved this dilemma by (a) getting paid to do a PhD, which rewired my brain into a more graceful machine; (b) having a book out; people always need to have something to buy, to reify their interest, to shore up their encounter with your art; and (c) regarding myself as a one-man festival wherever I go.
This is a dandy version of positive thinking, though the principles can be used by anyone. Cultivate an appearance that is very ‘you’, celebrate all the things that you like, and direct others to these things as well. Be your own festival, at all times. Bring the festival.
Indeed, one can use an internet diary as a form of festival. An online space is known as a ‘platform’, after all. All the internet’s a stage.
In this spirit, at the Sanctuary Festival I enjoy Remi Graves’s poetry salon, organised in collaboration with the Hastings Queer History Collective. Superb readings by Graves along with Abu Leila and Basil Alsheikh, on queerness, race, migration, and growing up in warzones. The setting is the museum’s Durbar Hall, a spectacularly ornate room made from dark wood carved in an Indian palace style. It was originally made in 1886 by two Punjabi craftsmen, Mohammed Baksh and Mohammed Juma, for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London. Having this product of the British Empire serve as a backdrop to poems on 21st century migration gives this event something of a site-specific frisson.
The Durbar Hall, Hastings Museum. Photo by John Fox. From the museum website.
Abu Leila reads from a smartphone, a typical practice at poetry readings now. In between each poem they pause for some time. I think at first that this is an artistic touch, to allow the poem to properly take its hold on the audience. But I then realise that they are just scrolling to find the next poem, in the same way that one might flick through a notebook. For all my love of analogue media, I have to praise phones for the way they can hide the nuts and bolts of life. Phones may turn some people into mindless zombies, but they can also turn them into mindful monks.
I am particularly taken by one of Graves’s poems, ‘Held’, which makes me think of ‘We Two Boys Together Clinging’, the Walt Whitman poem that inspired the David Hockney painting of the same name. After the poetry event I walk into the room next door to look at the museum’s temporary exhibition on local queer history, Lemons, Laws and Secret Doors. ‘Lemons’ being local slang for lesbians in the twentieth century. One of the displays features that same Hockney painting, used here in the story of a local gay couple, Charles and Jeremy. They met in the early 1980s and are still together today. In 1981, Charles sent Jeremy a postcard of the painting as a Valentine’s Day card. Years later they had the ‘We Two Boys’ phrase made into a neon sign for their kitchen in Hastings. The sign is in the exhibition. It further turns out that Hockney lived in Hastings himself in 1958, specifically at Cliff Cottage, West Hill, St Leonards.
The Lemons exhibition is full of rich detail illustrated by ingenious ideas. A canvas installation is painted to resemble the outside of a rocky cliff. This is to commemorate the gay discos held in the 1980s in St Clements Caves, a venue carved into the solid rock under the West Hill. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to put their heads through a flap in the canvas, where they see a video of 80s people dancing to Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’ and Hazell Dean’s ‘Searchin’’. I nearly titled this diary entry ‘The Caves of Hazell Dean’.
Another exhibit is a 1980s-style community notice board, made up of typewritten advertisements on pinned postcards. The twist is that the adverts are for local queer organisations operating in 2026, like the publisher Cipher Press, the club night Laundry Day, and the ‘wrestling cabaret’ Hagstone Stunners. To see an Instagram ‘@’ address typed onto a postcard by a 1980s manual typewriter gives me a feeling of uncanny giddiness. It surely risks summoning some kind of time demon, like an episode of Sapphire and Steel.
There are further games with anachronisms. The visitor can listen to a cassette recording of readings from newsletters produced by Hastings gay societies of the 1970s and 80s, blended with new music by the DJ Elena Columbi. The cassette and its cover are rendered in a very contemporary design in clear orange plastic, so the object manages to look new and old at the same time. I buy a copy in the museum shop. It must be the first cassette I have bought in thirty years.
Cassette byElena Colombi with the Hastings Queer History Collective: ‘Sarah’s, Satins and Blades (The Way We Found Each Other)’. Available from Osàre! Editions on Bandcamp.
Mr Firbank’s Vainglory is the most perfect flower of a fatigued society which, having produced this masterpiece, can now pass on, confident of a ‘niche’, to use one of the author’s own words. The Dial, 1925.
You’re neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you’re as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you’re unexplained as yet – you’ve not got your niche in creation. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, 1928.
I do have a fondness for the word ‘niche’, and not only because it rhymes with ‘quiche’.
In terms of making art, ‘niche’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘cult’. But there is an important distinction.
‘Cult’ suggests a small following, but it is one where the fans can go a bit too far. There may be strong drugs, secret ceremonies, conspiracy theories, not washing, that kind of thing. Some examples of cult novelists, if rather different ones, are William Burroughs, Baron Corvo, and Ayn Rand.
‘Niche’, on the other hand, is much more civilised. Niche suggests a small following, but it is one where the fans are graceful in their ardour. Niche creators are people like Ronald Firbank, Brigid Brophy, the musician Momus, whose memoir is simply titled Niche, and, I like to think, myself.
Cult authors often reject the world at large. They go off-grid and into jungles. They seek astral planes, menhirs, suspicious herbs and even more suspicious beards. Niche writers shave and take a folding chair.
A niche writer may be as strange and as difficult as a cult writer, but they still tend to enjoy the comforts of civilisation, with its libraries and its dry cleaners and its peacock-shaped coat hooks in the toilets (I am specifically thinking of the upstairs toilets at Café 1066 in the Priory Meadow Shopping Centre, Hastings).
Niche writers still want a place in the world, even if it’s just a rented room. Hence the wider meaning of niche: a little slot to fit into.
**
In this spirit, last week I hand-delivered copies of my nichebook to be sold at The Waves Bookshop, at 10 Claremont, Hastings. The Waves only opened three weeks ago, and I am overjoyed that it exists. It has an emphasis on new literary writing, classic gay books, arty magazines, Virginia Woolf books (obviously, given the shop title), and it also doubles as an art gallery. The owner is Jamie Atherton.
From the Waves Bookshop’s Instagram
If you are going to open a groovy new shop in Hastings, it helps to be called Amy or, if male, Jamie. There is the art, embroidery and stationery shop Bus Stop Studios, at 53 London Road, run by Amy Burt, where I get my cartridges of purple ink for my Kaweco fountain pen. Then there is the pleasant Folks coffee shop, a few doors closer to the sea at 45B London Road, which is run by Amy Dutton.
The argument for ‘Jamie’ as a male counterpart for ‘Amy’ recalls the London gender-flipped production of the Sondheim musical Company, which I saw in 2018. The character of Amy, the neurotic bride-to-be who sings the fast, hilarious showstopper ‘Getting Married Today’, was turned into a gay groom-to-be, Jamie. In that version he was played by Jonathan Bailey, who has since gone on to be the love interest in Bridgerton and the Wicked films.
Hastings HMV sells a Jonathan Bailey calendar, alongside ones for Taylor Swift and Harry Styles. I couldn’t see a Dickon Edwards calendar there, but there’s still time.
Company is also the musical that includes the song ‘Being Alive’, an earlier incarnation of which had the rather good title of ‘Multitudes of Amys’ . Now, when I think about the shops of Hastings, I think about multitudes of Amys.
Tough Love Records, which has just moved from Bohemia Road to 8 London Road, even closer to the sea, is run by an Anja. So that’s the end of that theory.
This splendid emporium stocks a decent range of new CDs as well as new vinyl, and I still buy CDs, still loving their compact smallness, not to say their cheapness compared to new vinyl. Tough Love also has an attractive mini-café by the window, with sofas, where I can vent my overcaffeinated opinions about music.
From Tough Records’s Instagram
Anja Petitto is a fan of heavy rock, but she also loves Sparks, Abba and Beyoncé. While I was there last week, sipping my oat Americano, she played me the new Blood Incantation album, All Gates Open, which was singled out for praise in the latest issue of The Wire magazine.
One might think, given their name and their usual genre of death metal, the Blood Incantation album would have noisy rock songs about nasty things happening with corpses. In fact, the album is ambient and quiet and dreamy in the Brian Eno style. This is a healthy reminder that genre can be a departure point as much as a destination, and that a cult band can make a niche record.
**
Fans of niche writers do not hold conventions, they hold symposia.
On Friday 22nd May 2026, I was invited to London to speak at a symposium for Ronald Firbank, held on the occasion of the centenary of his death.
The venue was the Warburg Institute in Bloomsbury, a building affiliated with the University of London. When I joined the Institute to use its library a few years ago, the staffer on the desk recognised me from the 90s band Orlando. ‘I was a fan, back in the day’. She was perfectly matter-of-fact in saying this. Proof, perhaps, of my own niche status.
The main speaker was the novelist Alan Hollinghurst, whose talk on Firbank (‘The Firbank Century’) was a properly crafted literary piece, like a Henry James short story. One hopes he will publish it soon, so it can reach the wider audience it deserves.
My own talk was on the history of the word ‘Firbankian’, and how it was used in magazines like Vogue in the 1930s as a synonym for high camp. What’s particularly interesting is that the phrase ‘high camp’ itself didn’t exist in print until the 1950s, when Christopher Isherwood coined it for his novel The World in the Evening. In the 1930s and 40s, magazine writers who wanted to imply that sort of thing reached for ‘Firbankian’, and their readers understood.
A few days after this talk I received a kind email from the author Richard Davenport-Hines, who was in the audience. He said I had ‘just the right combination of frivolity and scholarly thought’.
The symposium featured several other speakers, a short film, and a rehearsed reading of Firbank’s play The Princess Zoubaroff, the cast of which included Miranda Richardson.
Everyone involved in the Firbank symposium was thoroughly fragrant. I chatted to Susannah Clapp, who went on to write up the symposium for The Observer. The fact that the Observer was interested shows that writing about a niche writer never feels like a personal indulgence. Writing about a cult writer, on the other hand, carries that risk.
**
Among the symposium’s external events was a walking tour of Firbank’s London hosted by Richard Canning. I love that Professor Canning not only edited the 2012 Penguin Classics edition of Firbank’s Vainglory but that he also performed in a student comedy troupe with Stewart Lee and Richard Herring in the 1980s; they were called the Seven Raymonds. These worlds are not so different. Firbank’s work is a form of strange and intelligent comedy in prose; Stewart Lee’s stand-up comedy features jokes about how he’s too strange and intelligent for most of his audience.
This is the ideal: to remain true to yourself, yet still appeal to the common niche-ness in enough people to make a living. Everyone feels niche at some point; it’s just another word for lonely.
There is a new film on this subject that I’m keen to see. An enigmatic comedy performer from the 1980s has just had a documentary made about him: the Iceman, aka Anthony Irvine. His comedy act was to melt a block of ice onstage in various strange ways, and that was it. Anyone who saw him never forgot him.
The film features Stewart Lee and Jo Brand, among others, and is called Melt It! The Film of the Iceman. It is about to be screened at various UK venues over the summer, and I strongly recommend it. It makes perfect sense that one of the producers, Robert Wringham, is also the publisher of my diary book. He clearly believes in flying the flag for niche.
Melt It! will be screened at selected cinemas across the summer, including St Leonards-on-Sea (Kino-Teatr) on 19th July, and London (The Bill Murray) on 23rd August. For further info and other screenings, go to: wringham.co.uk/film
This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
This piece is fairly long and is made up of several sections. It includes an account of my talk on Aubrey Beardsley at Brighton, along with tips on public speaking.
The trouble with dandyism is that it makes it hard to do anything that feels like Joining In. When I started the web diary in 1997, before the word ‘blog’ was invented, it was considered a strange thing to put one’s life on the internet full stop. Today, this practice is commonplace, if not the default. Almost everyone now thinks they are worthy of attention from strangers, whether it’s posting on social media or posting on Substack or posting on OnlyFans. And that all rather makes it harder for me to stand out.
If I were happier with my body I would show it off on OnlyFans. Instead, I am a writer, or rather a ‘content creator’, on Substack, which is the OnlyFans of the mind.
Still, on Sunday 7th June 2026 at around 10.45 a.m., I received fresh evidence that, if nothing else, my external appearance still stands out in the crowd, for better or for worse.
I was walking along the seafront here at St Leonards to meet some friends at the Goat Ledge beach cafe. There are benches along the promenade, set in sheltered alcoves. These alcoves are popular, needless to say, with certain social groups who like to Hang Out. The expected roll call of junkies, meth addicts, stoners and alcoholics, as well as bored teenage lads in the regulation black tracksuits and hooded tops.
As I approached one of the alcoves in my linen suit and tie, I saw a group of grizzled-looking older men in there. They were already staring at me. So I braced myself for the possibility of an unkind catcall.
One of the men shouted at me as I passed:
‘You look magnificent, sir!’
Then his friend next to him added:
‘You always do!’
I hope this means I am still capable of providing interesting content, if only as punctuation in the infinite scroll.
**
In the same way that I take too long to get dressed, I take too long to write. I envy people who can really churn out ‘content’. It may be true that fools rush in where angels fear to tread, but everyone prefers a fast fool to a slow angel, every time. Fast fools meet deadlines.
Today, a professional writer not only has to compete with other writers who are much faster, but with AI too. AI really should stand for Arrogance and Instantaneity. It makes mistakes, but it does so with speed and extreme confidence, which is really just a fig leaf for arrogance.
AI may be new, but the world has always respected speed and arrogance. Successful politicians get away with lies, and successful podcasters get away with rambling audio content that could really do with editing down. But both sets of people deliver these things regularly, and they deliver with confidence. And that’s why they do so well. Never mind the quality, feel the bandwidth.
All of which is a way of saying that I need to just get on with it and try and put the haste back into Hastings.
**
Recently, Tribune magazine published a flattering article about my book Diary at the Centre of the Earth Vol 1, now available in a new printing for 2026. The article, ‘Samuel Pepys Who?’ by Claire Biddles, quotes several lines from the diary book, including this one:
“It’s always important to go where you’re invited. That way it’s someone else’s fault.”
This was the case on Saturday 28th March of this year when I was invited to give a talk about Aubrey Beardsley at Brighton Sixth Form College. Beardsley was a former pupil there, from the time when it was Brighton Grammar School. I was contacted out of the blue by one of the current staff there, Alison Cousens, whom I once knew from my indie band past. She was in the 1990s Sarah Records band Brighter.
It turned out that Alison was looking for someone to give a talk on Beardsley at the college’s community history festival. On the internet she stumbled upon my essay, ‘“Donald! Susan! Ronald! Brigid!”: The Camp Afterlives of Aubrey Beardsley’ on the website of the Aubrey Beardsley Society.
She told me later in a phone call: ‘I thought, “I wonder if that’s the same Dickon Edwards?”’
There are in fact at least two other Dickon Edwardses, a barrister and a deputy headteacher. But no, this Aubrey Beardsley one was indeed the indie band one that she remembered. So she got in touch.
On the phone I was happy to tell Alison C that in recent years I had reviewed a book about her old band and Sarah Records for The Wire magazine. I added that the magazine had printed a picture of her and her Brighter bandmates to go with the piece. It was a very cute photo of the three of them in their early 1990s youth, jumping about in a field, very much embodying the Sarah Records aesthetic of aloof, child-like adults.
‘Oh, I hate that photo’, she said.
**
The talk was unpaid, though it did cover travel expenses. Given my slow work rate, and my current low income, which is low enough to necessitate checking in with Hastings Job Centre every fortnight, I should probably hesitate before accepting unpaid work. But I said yes. It was for a free community festival, after all. And I like Alison C. And it’s nice to feel important, particularly in Brighton, one of my favourite places.
And although accepting the job meant spending many unpaid hours doing research and lurking in libraries and archives, because I like to do a good job with my talks, that’s my idea of a good time anyway.
I made a special trip to the Sussex Keep archive in Falmer, in order to look through copies of Beardsley’s old school magazine Past & Present, which published his early work, and which carried reminiscences of him in later issues. When Beardsley was ‘cancelled’ around the time of Oscar Wilde’s arrest, in the sense of losing much of his income through being fired from The Yellow Book and having his reputation tarnished by association with Wilde, the school magazine still carried articles in praise of their former pupil. That said, they only referred to the Salome book without mentioning Wilde’s name, which was a common thing to do in the years after Wilde’s imprisonment.
I also consulted several books on Beardsley, particularly the sumptuous two-volume Aubrey Beardsley: A Catalogue Raisonné by Linda Gertner Zatlin. Zatlin’s book has a wonderful early sketch by the young Beardsley of the railway viaduct near Brighton London Road station, which I travelled over in my approach to the city. The viaduct is built on a long and graceful curve, not unlike the one in Beardsley’s Peacock Skirt.
I was curious to know which single artwork is Beardsley’s most reproduced; his Mona Lisa. Zatlin suggests several contenders, all from the illustrations to Oscar Wilde’s 1893 play Salome. One is the The Dancer’s Reward, which is the one where Salome holds John the Baptist’s severed head on the plate, another is The Climax, whereSalome floats in the air for no good reason, and kisses the same head, whose blood drips down to form a white lily.
The Dancer’s Reward
The Climax
There’s also The Peacock Skirt, which is Beardsley at his prettiest and least grotesque, as used as part of a trendy London flat’s decor in the film Carry On Loving.
The Peacock Skirt
EH Gombrich’s The Story of Art favours The Toilette of Salome, in which Salome is waited on by a Pierrot clown figure, which is not in the play at all. He just really liked drawing Pierrot clowns.
The Toilette of Salome
I managed to mislabel one of my slides, due to using Google Images, a mistake I owned up to when giving the talk. John and Salome is mislabelled on several parts of the internet as ‘Salome with her mother Herodias ’. There are two lessons right there. One, that Beardsley’s figures are still deemed confusingly androgynous even today, and two, that Google is not to be trusted. Stick to authoritative books.
John and Salome
I was keen to make some pop cultural references, so I brought in the Beatles’ Revolver and Sgt Pepper sleeves. I also referred to Harry Styles’s hosting of the 2019 New York Museum of Metropolitan Art’s Met Gala, the theme of which was Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Notes on Camp’. Beardsley was featured in the accompanying exhibition that year, as he is one of Sontag’s examples. I decided not to show one of the drawings that the Met had on display, as it’s one of the naughtier ones, from Lysistrata. The talk was at a family-friendly event at a school, after all.
Harry Styles also featured in my talk for his wearing of a Beardsley-influenced fashion suit onstage, as well as a costume based on Pierrot the Clown, another of Beardsley’s favourite themes. Soft masculinity; masculine otherness; camp masculinity, that sort of thing.
Harry Styles on stage
Beardsley, Front end-paper design for Pierrot’s Library, 1895
The argument of my talk was that Beardsley was the most important man in Brighton, in the sense of his spirit being there, and by his representation by a plaque on his birthplace and by a group of exhibits in Brighton Museum, which are currently part of their ‘Queer the Pier’ display. Beardsley was not only born and schooled in Brighton, but because of the influence of the Royal Pavilion on his art, and for his embracing of sexual otherness, camp exoticism, and alternative arts and alternative lifestyles, he was, and is, Brighton personified.
While writing the talk, I used a productivity tool which I find useful: Zoom Pomodoro writing. You meet other struggling self-employed writers or academics on Zoom (or Teams) and have 25 minute sessions of silent work together, while visible (but muted) on webcam. Then you take a 5 minute break, in which you declare what progress you made, and what your ‘nano goal’ for the next 25 mins will be. And so on. It’s cheaper than a writing retreat, and easier to fit into your day.
On one of these sessions, I told one of the other academic Zoom people what I was writing. I should mention that this person was a thirty-ish woman from Syria, whose field was architecture.
‘I’m working on a talk about Aubrey Beardsley’, I said to her.
‘Who’s that?’
‘He was a British Victorian illustrator. Very popular in his time, very influential since. He’s often spoken about in connection with Oscar Wilde.’
‘Who’s Oscar Wilde?’
‘Ah. Right. Well, Oscar Wilde was an Anglo-Irish Playwright from the Victorian age, very popular in his time. Still is now. Perhaps not with everyone. Well, I’m also going to talk about how Aubrey Beardsley connects with… Harry Styles!’
‘Who’s Harry Styles?’
‘Ah. Well, Harry Styles is a British pop singer of the current moment. Um… (sheepishly) Very popular in his time. Which is now. So… perhaps not so popular in Syria. Well, anyway, I’m mostly going to talk about Aubrey Beardsley’s connection with Brighton.’
‘Oh Brighton! I’ve heard of Brighton! I had sunstroke there!’
I learned a valuable lesson from this. Celebrity is overrated. Places are the true common ground.
**
I practiced the talk a few days in advance, with my kind friend Victoria R giving me feedback. Victoria also accompanied me to Brighton and helped me run a stall at the college’s community festival, at which I sold my book.
Here are some tips on speaking in public. Some of the following are from Victoria, some is feedback I have had from others, some is from my own experience.
Write your talk as a script, but don’t read from it verbatim. Put it on a stand and use your hands to illustrate the talk. Use it as a safety net to keep you on track and when your mind goes blank. Print it out in large font and treat it as a serving suggestion.
Write 100-125 words for every minute of the talk. If using slides, use one slide for every 2 minutes of the talk. This works out at 200-250 words per slide.
Forget nerves, plural. Rediscover your nerve, singular.
Slow your speech down. Writing should be fast, speaking should be slow.
Speak in haikus, not in sagas.
Pause more. Breathe more. Breathe at every comma and full stop. Give the words more weight. Give people the chance to digest your words.
Pick a well-known speaker that you admire and play them, like an actor. This is just to get started: your own self will soon come through.
If you need glasses or contact lenses, take them out for the talk. This turns the audience into a blurry single entity. You can now look at them, without looking them in the eye. This helps with nerves. Dusty Springfield used to do this.
I have read elsewhere that one tip is to imagine the audience as a person that you want to have sex with, and so must seduce. Although I can see the reasoning, it’s probably best not to do this when giving a talk at a school.
Regarding a follow-up Q&A, the ideal format is to do what Quentin Crisp used to do: supply blank postcards and small pencils under the audience’s seats. They’re sometimes called ‘golf pencils’ or ‘baby shower pencils’. At the start of the talk, ask the audience to write down their questions on the cards. Then get the cards passed to you at the end of the talk, and answer accordingly. This helps people who don’t like speaking up, or those who have several questions. It also makes for a more polished event, as you just dismiss any question you can’t or won’t answer.
If you can’t do that, and have to do a Q&A with audience members speaking, I have one tip that was passed on to me by a lecturer at Birkbeck. By a male lecturer, in fact, which is relevant:
Always try to take your first question from a woman. Men in an audience are, generally speaking, more likely to use a Q&A to voice an overlong personal opinion rather than ask an actual question. The only other people to ask questions after that, if there’s any time left, tend to be other men with their overlong podcast-like opinions, who now feel emboldened. So always start with taking a question from a woman. And then have a man after that. They’ll be fine, the men.
**
I did the talk.
Photo by Victoria Redfern
I think it went okay. I sold all the books I had brought with me, so that must mean something. The diary book is not even about Aubrey Beardsley. It does, however, have a cover that’s very much a pastiche of Beardsley’s designs for The Yellow Book.
Before leaving, I received a gift from Alexia Lazou, who curated the Beardsley display at Brighton Museum. She was wearing a wonderful black and white dress based on Beardsley’s art. Her gift was a bar of soap in the shape of a lemon, made by the Menton Côté Citron firm, from Menton in France, close to the Italian border. Menton is where Beardsley died from tuberculosis. The plaque on his birthplace at 31 Buckingham Road, near Brighton station, uses the Italian spelling ‘Mentone’, as confirmed when Victoria R and I visited the plaque after the event.
Photo by Victoria Redfern
The plaque dates from 1927, when Brighton council put up its first series of plaques, all designed by Eric Gill, commemorating people with a Brighton connection. They also chose Charles Dickens, George Canning and William Gladstone, and Beardsley’s own headmaster, EJ Marshall, who encouraged the young Beardsley in his art. The Beardsley plaque mentions his time at the Grammar School and calls him the Master of Line. It also reminds the viewer of his shockingly short life: born August 1872, died March 1898. He was just 25. Thirty years later, when the plaque was put up, his mother was still alive; she unveiled it at a ceremony.
While writing this account, I was listening to the new Harry Styles album, Kiss All the Time; Disco, Occasionally. On songs like ‘Aperture’, ‘American Girls’, and ‘Paint By Numbers’ there’s a bittersweet sense of soft masculinity and vulnerability, and of enjoying life while you can. Liam Payne, who was one of Styles’s bandmates in the boyband One Direction, suddenly died in 2024 at the age of 31. One song on the album, ‘Paint By Numbers’, seems to be about him.
“Oh what a gift it is to be noticed”, sings Styles, with clear mixed feelings about fame. And, as I found out, there are plenty of people who go about their lives completely unaware of the names Aubrey Beardsley and Harry Styles, so fame is all relative anyway.
Best just live, put out work while you can, and let others decide if it’s worthy of notice.
**
This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
NOTES
Diary at the Centre of the Earth Vol 1 is available to buy from poniesandhorsesbooks.com. The line about going where one is invited is in the entry dated Friday 9th January 2004.
I took the connection between Beardsley’s Pierrots and Harry Styles’s Pierrot stage costume from a talk by Samuel Love at the event AB 150: The Artist Resurgent, St Bride Foundation, London, 21st August 2022.
This Saturday 28th March at 1pm I will be at Brighton 6th Form College’s Community History Festival, to give an excellent talk about the Victorian artist Aubrey Beardsley.
Beardsley was a pupil of the college from its time as Brighton Grammar School. I will be explaining how his work relates to Oscar Wilde, the Beatles, Harry Styles and Heartstopper, and will show how this is all the fault of Brighton.
I will also have a stall at the festival to sell copies of my diary book, which has a cover influenced by Beardsley.
The festival is open to the general public and is free. It takes place from 11am to 2pm at the BHASVIC main site, 205 Dyke Road, BN3 6EG. More info at www.bhasvicfestival.co.uk
DE, Hastings, 28 December 2025. Photo by Victoria Redfern.
For some years now I have marked the Christmas period with a new photo of myself next to a Christmas tree. This year the choice was obvious.
In early December 2025, in Hastings, UK, where I currently live, a new aluminium tree-shaped structure appeared in the town centre. Decked with wind chimes and changing electronic lights, the Alu-Tree became something of a local conversation piece.
This object, it transpires, was a collaboration between the civic organisation Love Hastings, which provides improvements for businesses in the town centre, and the Hastings firm Metalworx, who normally make stages for rock festivals. Love Hastings wanted a solution to the problem of traditional trees being damaged every year by the strong coastal winds. They approached Metalworx, who unbeknownst to them had just made their first metal Christmas tree, an indoor one for Selfridges. So it was a fortuitous convergence of local needs, local expertise, and available funding.
Lovers of traditional leafy trees were still catered for: there was one in the nearby Priory Meadow shopping centre, which is much less exposed to the weather. Nevertheless, when the aluminium tree was installed it was met with adverse criticism on social media. On Facebook the tree was deemed ‘soulless’, ‘sterile’, and an ‘eyesore’.
I have to admit the tree’s daylight incarnation is inferior to how it looks at night, as shown in this video by Victoria Redfern:
But I do like the tree’s daylight look too. It reminds me that I grew up with a silver artificial tree in my parents’ home, one made of branches of tinsel glued to steel poles, somewhat resembling glittery feathers. Each branch had to be carefully unsheathed from a cylinder of stiff brown paper, then slotted into the holes of a central pole, starting from the base up.
This assembly process was carried out every year by myself and my brother, and was hugely enjoyable. It had all the pleasure of a kit of Lego or Airfix, but with none of the butchness. The tree was sustainable in the current sense, too, lasting our entire childhoods. Here’s me and my brother with the tree in Suffolk, during the mid-1980s:
Yesterday I was speaking to my mother on the phone about writing this piece, and she revealed that my childhood tree had been her childhood tree too. It was made in the 1950s for a Selfridges display. After Christmas, Selfridges sold off the trees to staff and account holders. Mum’s mother was an account holder, and she bought one. The tree was used, we think, for about fifty Christmases.
Here’s the same tree in the early 1960s at my mother’s childhood home in Gravesend, Kent. In front of the tree are my grandfather John and my cousin Milton:
In this year’s tree photograph I am wearing my own practical solution to coastal winds: a lovely new Parka-style weatherproof coat – my mother’s Christmas present – as made by the Red company. The colour is Rich Burgundy: I no longer drink alcohol but I can still enjoy the aesthetic.
The coat is big enough for me to wear a suit and tie underneath, and indeed to show off my lapel brooch, which happens to be in the shape of another Christmas tree. I like the visual pun of a tiny tree in front of a huge one. Both fake trees celebrate artificial colours and strong looks, and both are liable to invite comment. I can relate.
One local newspaper called the aluminium tree ‘modernist’. I would call it camp modernist, the concept I researched as part of my PhD. Paul Baker’s book Camp! argues that as a season Christmas is (even) camper than Hallowe’en: his prime example is the tradition of the Rockettes Christmas dance show in New York.
Christmas is also the birthday of the camp dandy icon Quentin Crisp, who delivered Channel 4’s inaugural Alternative Christmas Message in 1993. This Christmas I was given two Quentin Crisp tree decorations by two separate friends:
I’ve been called a Quentin Crisp imitator on occasion, who in turn was called an Oscar Wilde imitator, who in turn was called a J-K Huysmans imitator. All is creative imitation of a kind, like the tree. Dandyism is cosplay as oneself, but with a sprinkling of role models in the mix.
As camp modernist structures go, one might compare the Alu-Tree to Marine Court, the 1930s apartment block on the nearby seafront, built to imitate the Queen Mary ocean liner:
A block of flats impersonating a boat; an aluminium frame impersonating a tree. Hastings does seem to attract dressing up. There’s Pirate Day, Jack in the Green, the Frost Parade, and in summer 2025, a massed gathering of Kate Bush impersonators on the beach. What’s the collective noun, I wonder: a Dreaming of katebushai?
This still from a social media video of the event manages to include Marine Court (left, background), looking on approvingly. ‘You be Kate Bush, I’ll be the Queen Mary’.
The katebushai all wore floaty red dresses and recreated the dance from ‘Wuthering Heights’ in sync with the music. The official event was actually meant to take place high up on the West Hill, which makes sense, but poor weather the previous day had made the ground so muddy it had to be cancelled by the hosts at the last minute. Nevertheless, some of the dancers quickly organised an unofficial, guerilla version of the event, on the beach by the Goat Ledge café. This, I feel, is the true spirit of Hastings: creative imitation as an unstoppable instinct.
Given the rise of what people are calling ‘AI Slop’, where fake images and videos can be made online too easily, too anonymously, and too superficially, the meaning of physical experiences has now taken on a new level of intensity and value.
On a trip to London recently, I saw an advert on the tube encouraging people to retrain as plumbers. The tag line went something like: ‘Because AI can’t unblock a sink’. That’s hard to argue with.
AI ‘deep fake’ videos are certainly getting more and more uncanny, with all that word’s connotations of unease and fear. I used to think that my own physical speaking voice, which has a lateral lisp, was beyond AI imitation. But in 2025 I saw a whole YouTube channel of fake Slavoj Žižek lectures that convincingly imitated the philosopher’s own lisping voice:
Deep Fake AI Žižek:
The real Žižek, to compare:
In the deep fake video, the words spoken are not written by Žižek. They appear to be an original text by the anonymous person behind the YouTube channel, who probably used AI for that too.
The real Žižek has pointed out on his Substack (which for a while people thought was fake!) that, although the AI’s lisping voice is convincing, the videos fail to mimic his manic hand gestures, his sniffing, his stammering and other uniquely human tics. But perhaps it’s only a matter of time before AI can imitate those as well.
The question that bothers me is: why would someone go to the trouble of making a fake Žižek channel in the first place? I suppose it’s like the answer to why climb Everest: because you can. Because it’s there. In fact, AI creation offers a far quicker fix of pleasure than mountaineering. I assume the YouTube person went to the trouble of making the AI videos because it’s no trouble at all. Which, of course, is extremely troubling.
The irony is that deep fakes are a shallow thrill. There is deeper and more lasting pleasure found in offline fakery, with ‘real’ fake Christmas trees, ‘real’ fake ocean liner architecture, and ‘real’ fake Kate Bushes.
For my part, 2025 was the year I became a fake version of my own younger self. Young Dickon Edwards Cosplay. I authored a physical book, being an edited collection of my diary entries from the 1990s and 2000s: Diary at the Centre of the Earth, Volume One (P&H Books).
In fact, I had two books out in 2025 if you count the collection of academic essays Angela Carter’s Pasts: Allegories and Intertextualities (Bloomsbury Academic). My contribution for that book was an investigation into the making of Carter’s 1984 radio play about Ronald Firbank, A Self-Made Man. I was required by the book’s editors to conform to the Bloomsbury Academic house style. This meant using an author-date system for references and writing in a way that made use of my PhD training. More imitation, one could argue. Linguistic cosplay.
Meanwhile, my diary book’s bright yellow cover, by Lawrence Gullo, was commissioned by the publisher Rob Wringham as another example of creative imitation. It was a pastiche of Aubrey Beardsley’s 1890s covers for The Yellow Book, channelled through Mr Gullo’s own 21st century manga-esque drawing style. The social media platform Bluesky automatically censored pictures of the book cover as obscene. It isn’t, but Beardsley would have approved.
The yellow spine means the diary book tends to stand out on any shelf, as I tend to do in public, for better or worse. Whatever you think of the book or me, at least we’re easy to spot. But all the credit for the book’s physical appearance is really due to Mr Gullo and Mr Wringham. Publishers make books, authors just provide the raw material inside.
My own author epiphany was that all properly published books are the results of arguments. The author has argued with the publisher or editor about everything from the cover to possessive apostrophes, with many messages going back and forth, until both are satisfied. I can only apologise to Mr Wringham for being so fussy, and indeed, so slow and so late.
My first two author events for the diary book, in London in October, had to take place without any actual books. This was due to aberrant behaviour by the courier company, though I’m hardly in any place to judge others for human eccentricity.
We had the parties in London anyway. I was given gifts and drinks and food and flowers, making the events less like book launches and more like Book Showers. And the author turned up in person, which was the main thing. I am, after all, a limited edition object of one. Books are just an author’s stunt doubles.
Thankfully I had some Emergency Merchandise to sell and sign. There were copies of the beautiful new issue (#18) of the New Escapologist journal, which includes a new interview with me, with lots of quotable lines to cut out and keep. The journal also has a fascinating interview with August Lamm, an anti-computer activist whom I admire:
We also had the new postcards of myself that were made to go with the limited edition Kickstarter copies. I took the idea from seeing limited editions of manga comic books that came with postcards. I really wanted a stash of them for myself, though, as I regularly send letters and cards in purple fountain pen ink. And I love getting replies, usually handwritten, but sometimes typed on old typewriters. Unique objects, all.
Limited edition vinyl records are part of the same pattern. Hastings HMV sells a £37 orange vinyl version of Taylor Swift’s latest album The Life of a Showgirl. The music can be heard online for free, and Ms Swift probably doesn’t need the financial support. Nevertheless, many people clearly do want to own her music in a form that is as offline and as physical as possible. The appeal is indicated in this salivating description from the HMV website:
Portofino orange glitter vinyl (translucent orange vinyl with gold glitter). Collectible double gatefold jacket with unique front and back cover. Full size gatefold photograph of Taylor. Double-sided foldout panel attached to gatefold which includes a unique poem written by Taylor on one side and a photo strip with 4 unique photos on the other side. Collectible album sleeves which include never-before-seen photos and album lyrics.
The Swift album is also available on audio cassette, which does baffle me a little. But I understand the appeal.
As for the popularity of live events, one can look to Oasis, with their expensive reunion shows in 2025. They played only old songs, thus imitating their own younger selves. People bought the pricy tickets in droves. The point was made.
Which brings me back to my own opening photograph – such value!
In the background, to the left of my right shoulder, is a Yates Wine Lodge that used to be a Victorian music hall. There’s a plaque outside that marks a performance there by Charles Dickens, one with a pleasing Christmas connection:
The plaque is a reminder that Dickens too did greatest hits tours in his later life, reading from A Christmas Carol and Pickwick Papers twenty years after they were published. Like Oasis, and now me, he was imitating his younger self. My diary book is a kind of greatest hits of the internet diary, as chosen by Mr Wringham.
Dickens also used a lectern to enhance the unique and physical nature of his performances. At my first book event in October where the books did arrive, at the St Leonards Reel Bar and art gallery, I was delighted to be provided with a lectern, and a balcony to read from. I’m hoping to do more such readings in 2026, with my own fold-up lectern if needs be.
This, then, would seem to be the Epiphanic message. Do more in the physical realm. More books, more events, more classes, more art galleries, more live performances, more merchandise, more limited editions, more zines, more dressing up, more dancing, more walking, more flowers and trees (artificial or real), more physical exercise (even for me), and more moving in space full stop.
AI has meant that the only way forward is to become your own deep fake. And no world is deeper than the one where AI cannot go: offline.
Happy 2026!
Christmas Rose, aka Helleborus Niger. My present for Mum’s garden in Suffolk.
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You can buy Diary at the Centre of the Earth Vol 1 by clicking here.
Angela Carter’s Pasts: Allegories and Intertextualities is primarily aimed at university libraries, but can be ordered in paperback here.
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Some other favourite things of 2025:
Novel (new): Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain’s Bone Horn (Cipher Press).
Novel (reissued): Brigid Brophy’s In Transit (Lurid Editions)
Memoir: Jodie Harsh’s You Had To Be There (Faber). The drag queen DJ whose fake name – a pun on the celebrity model Jodie Marsh – became their real name. More imitation as a way of becoming oneself.
Album: Kae Tempest’s Self Titled (Island Records). CD zine edition with printed lyrics and images.
Film: The Ballad Of Wallis Island. Seen at the Kino cinema, St Leonards-on-Sea.
Thursday 23rd October 2025. Recently I crossed Warrior Square to get to the Goat Ledge café on the beach. It was overcast and lightly raining, but I was in one of my cream linen summer suits. As I crossed the road, a woman stuck her head out of a passing car and shouted at me: “What are you wearing?”
I shouted back: “Optimism!”
I’ve been living in St Leonards-on-Sea since June 2024. When I moved there, a London friend told me: “You’ll get bored.” This may have been true of St Leonards a few years ago, but there’s barely a day here now where there’s not a new exhibition opening, or a new dress-up event, or indeed the appearance of a new record shop. Even the coffee shop on the platform at St Leonards Warrior Square Station has a turntable, with a copy of Mr Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde usually propped up beside it.
Today I’m in London to have my hair cut and coloured (at Open Out , formerly Open Barbers, on Clunbury Street), and also to visit the bar Colony Room Green. This is in the basement of Ziggy Green, one of the several David Bowie-themed bars and cafes in Heddon Street, the site of the Ziggy Stardust album sleeve. Bowie is a big draw for London now: the new V&A East in Hackney has a permanent David Bowie Centre.
In Haddon Street there’s a plaque marking the Bowie connection, close to a pub opposite called The Starman. The “Green” in the title of Ziggy Green is due it being part of a franchise of cafes, all with “Green” in their title. In the case of Colony Room Green, though, the title is a neat pun. The original Colony Room members’ club, in Dean Street, Soho, had distinctive green-painted walls. I became a member myself in November 2007, just before it closed. Sebastian Horsley and Sophie Parkin were my referees.
Colony Room Green is a bar decorated in tribute to the old Colony Room, with green-painted walls covered in photos of the old regulars in situ at Dean Street: Francis Bacon, Jeffrey Bernard, Tom Baker, George Melly. There’s a picture of Sebastian H by the till.
I chat to the bartender here, Genta. It turns out she lived in St Leonards for a while, over a decade ago, and can only think of how that place used to be, with not much going on but sea, sun, and drug-related violence. Things change, I muse, and with consummate irony I order an alcohol-free beer. I’ve given up drink for good now. It’s been forty days and counting.
London is more expensive than ever, but it’s still the centre of all things, and still where all the big concerts and shows and art happen. The public transport is as frustrating as ever: the last train back to St Leonards is five to midnight, assuming there’s no engineering works and replacement buses.
Hotels are as overpriced as everything else in the city. However, there’s now a new solution, which I’m curious about. A ‘capsule’ hotel has just opened in Piccadilly Circus, the Zedwell. You can have a clean, modern, cosy room of your own there for just £30 a night. The only drawback is that the room is the size of a coffin. It’s a self-contained windowless bunk: you can’t even sit up.
Still, capsule hotels have already been a success in Japan and around the world, and a second one in London is already planned, in Leicester Square. I’m not claustrophobic; indeed, I’m a fan of minimalism, so I’m keen to try one.
I tell this to my hairdresser today, Davidas, who says they’d rather sleep on the streets.
Photo: Royal Victoria Hotel, St Leonards-on-Sea, 28 December 2024.
Earlier this year, shortly after I had moved to St Leonards-on-Sea, I received a letter from a 21-year-old stranger – a handwritten letter, in fact. They explained (and they are indeed a they/them) that as part of their love of analogue media they had recently acquired a cassette player.
This stranger had been listening to their mother’s old tape collection. One tape particularly intrigued them: a handmade music compilation – now known as a mixtape – made by a school friend of the mother’s around 1991. This was before the stranger was born, and indeed when both the tape-maker and the mother were younger than the stranger was now.
The tracks were mostly indie guitar pop from the time: the Field Mice, the Pastels, the Pooh Sticks, the Blue Aeroplanes, McCarthy, the BMX Bandits. But the stranger’s fascination was not so much the choice of music as the wider meaning of the tape as an object. A meaning that had accumulated over time.
I have been listening to the tape on repeat for the past week, imagining you, all those years ago. Holding it in your hands, picking out the songs, listening to them, thinking of my mum as you did so.
This led to the stranger looking me up on the internet, which in turn led to them, poor thing, reading my online diaries, my Svelte Lectures series on Substack, and even my thesis.
Until recently you have only existed to me as a character in the story of my mum’s childhood.
Now I had become something else. Certainly not, I hope, a real life, three-dimensional human being. I would never live that down. I can’t really see myself as a role model, either, except perhaps as a cautionary tale. I think instead that I must have moved, in their eyes, from being a dusty young character of the anecdotal past, small ‘c’, to a living but middle-aged Character of the digital present, capital ‘C’.
I love the way you write. I hope you are going to write more.
The stranger wrote to me, and I wrote back. And now, with their mother’s blessing, I’m giving them advice on their university studies, pleased to put my PhD to some use.
In fact, now that my job with the Christopher Isherwood Foundation has ended, I’m looking once again for a source of income. Mentoring students like this might be in fact be one way forward. Another is to get back into serious writing. I have various plans for books, including one based on my diaries, one based on my thesis, and a novel. But books tend to not make much money compared to teaching, or indeed compared to Substack. So watch this space.
I used to make mixtapes all the time in the late 80s and early 90s. It’s been years since I made one. But it might be argued that this time of year, late December, is a kind of mixtape season. People offer their taste to the world in the shape of lists: their Favourite Things of the Year.
Mixtapes, lists, writing, it’s all creativity and expression. All statements of love, life, living in time. No matter how ephemeral and niche these acts might seem, one cannot rule out the possibility of their having a useful and lasting effect upon others. Even upon others not yet born.
Best to just do it, and send it out there.
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A Mixtape for 2024:
SONGS:
Chappell Roan, ‘Good Luck, Babe!’,
Jessica Pratt, ‘Life Is’
Gigi Perez, ‘The Sailor Song’
Tess Parks, ‘California’s Dreaming’
Pet Shop Boys, ‘Loneliness’
Bruno Mars and Rosé, ‘APT.’
Claire Rousay, ‘Head’
Laurie Anderson, ‘Road to Mandalay’
Emma Anderson, ‘Taste The Air (Julia Holter Mix)’
Charley Stone, ‘Free Food’
Janis, Perez & YANIS, ‘Pharmacoliberation’
Noel, ‘Dancing is Dangerous’
Abstract Crimewave ‘The Longest Night’
Fuse ODG, ‘We Know It’s Christmas’
BOOKS (fiction):
Alan Hollinghurst, Our Evenings
Nat Reeve, Earlyfate
H. Gareth Gavin, Never Was
Khaled Alesmael, Selamlik
Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn
Iain Sinclair, Pariah Genius
Justin Torres, Blackouts
Adam Macqueen Haunted Tales
Henry Van Dyke, Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (reissue)
BOOKS (non-fiction / memoir)
Katherine Bucknell, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out
Claire Dederer, Monsters
Xiaolu Guo, My Battle of Hastings
Liam Konemann, The Appendix
Salman Rushdie, Knife
Hanif Kureishi, Shattered
Claude Cahun, Cancelled Confessions
BOOKS (poetry):
Peter Scalpello, Limbic
JP Seabright, George Parker, Jaime Lock, Not Your Orlando
Camille Ralphs, After You Were, I Am
Jen Calleja, Goblinhood (poems and essays)
FILMS / TV:
Orlando, My Political Biography
Wilding
Scala!
Poor Things
Feud: Capote Vs the Swans
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Some Christmas traditions can be personal, like a ritualistic re-watching of The Box of Delights or an unfathomable return appointment with Mr Schwarzenegger’s Jingle All the Way. For my part, I used to have my photo taken with a different Christmas tree every year for the web diary, until I lost interest.
This year finds me posing by a tree once more. I’m in the market square of Bildeston, Suffolk, where I’m currently living. In fact, I was less interested in the tree than in another tradition visible in the square: a crocheted cap on the post box, featuring an elaborate Christmas cottage. This is an example of ‘yarnbombing’, the anonymous art of local knitters, typically to brighten up post boxes for a short time. This year they have covered the square’s traffic bollards as well, with woollen caps in the shape of Christmas puddings. I love this kind of thing, as it means I can talk about Christmas camp.
One of my books of the year was Paul Baker’s Camp: The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World (2023), and not just because it cites my PhD thesis. As calendar festivals go, Christmas, Baker argues, is more camp than, say, Halloween. While Halloween is rich in parodic frivolity, Christmas has the extra symptoms of incongruous excess, failed sincerity, and sheer bad taste.
Christmas camp can sometimes be put to serious use, though. According to Baker’s book, when the Stonewall riot took place in New York in 1968, those involved taunted the police by forming a line of high-kicking, synchronised dancing in the style of the all-girl dance troupe the Rockettes. The Rockettes are one of New York’s own Christmas traditions, having put on the same festive show at Radio City Music Hall since the 1930s. Transplanted to the Stonewall riot, this camp style of dancing, with its anachronistic, overtly feminized ‘kick line’, became a defensive weapon that particularly suited gay identity.
Camp can do good as an aesthetic too. By playing with notions of exaggeration, it offers a sense of spontaneous distance from the normal world. It’s that psychological space that can offer somewhere to escape, or to belong. Camp is not for everyone, but it remains a tool in the universal human toolbox of how to cope.
When yarnbombing happens in an English village, there is also the suggestion of English cosiness being camped up. Popular films like The Holiday indulge in visions of Tudor-framed English cottages in the snow, while the book charts and TV schedules are full of ‘cosy crime’ mysteries set in English villages, from Agatha Christie to the bestsellers of Richard Osman.
This is obviously unabashed escapism. One of the more poetic writers of the English countryside, Ronald Blythe, who died this year, was careful to depict Suffolk as a place of struggle and poverty as much as beauty. This endures; in Duke Street, a few yards from Bildeston Market Square, is a tub for donations to the local food bank.
But I’m fine with cosiness as an art form. Truman Capote’s story A Christmas Memory is cosy enough to have been adapted as a TV movie by the Hallmark Channel, though the 1966 version with his own narration is the one to seek out. It’s about unconventional yet vulnerable people living in rural isolation. Capote manages to keep any excess of emotion – the same sense of spontaneous excess that sentimentality shares with camp – this side of poignant.
Whether cosy, camp, or otherwise, the lesson of yarnbombing is to channel time and energy into not just making new art – or content as it’s now called – but putting it out into the world. One never knows if others might take delight or comfort from your efforts, so do it anyway. This year has seen new music from the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, so age and even death is no excuse.
With this in mind, I wish you safety, health and happiness in 2024. Onwards!
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Tuesday 25 July 2023. Living far from a cinema, the availability of so many films on digital TV comes into its own. Tonight I watch with Mum All That Jazz, from 1979, the Bob Fosse film that’s essentially a self-portrait. The real footage of open-heart surgery makes me cover my eyes, and I feel slightly angry that Fosse thought it necessary to include at all. The main character’s constant smoking is also shocking for a professional choreographer, all the more so today. Do dancers smoke much now? Perhaps it’s like nurses, the type of work making no difference to the addiction.
The film’s fantasy dance scenes around a hospital bed precede The Singing Detective, and I wonder if that’s where Dennis Potter got the idea. Mum thinks the final sequence goes on too long. ‘I’m afraid I was wanting him to hurry up and die’.
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Friday 28 July 2023. A kind and unsolicited email from Alan Hollinghurst, who sought out my Firbank thesis online to read. He says he read it ‘with enormous admiration’, and admires my ‘amazingly extensive and detailed research’, with ‘so many new details and insights’. My prose style is also ‘marvellously free of rebarbative theoretical jargon’. Given that I regard him as the greatest living English novelist, this is encouragement indeed.
As a result he’s sought out Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and the works of Richard Paul Nugent. If the next Hollinghurst novel has references to those writers, I suppose it may be my fault.
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Saturday 3 August 2023. Mum has had a fall while away in Birmingham. She is now in hospital with a fractured thigh bone, recovering from surgery. Her life will now be shared with a walking frame or crutches for at least six weeks, probably more. It’s just as well I’m about to fetch things, particularly from upstairs. The important detail is that this happened while she was line dancing at a quilting festival. The silver lining of accident is anecdote.
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Monday 7 August 2023. An appointment at Ipswich Job Centre. I am instructed to increase my earnings as a self-employed writer, or they may force me to look for other work to justify my claiming benefits to avoid starvation. Not sure what best to do. I was rather hoping that reaching this age would have garnered me some sort of following by now. One only needs about 1500 fans to each pay £20 a year for a book or a gig or some other sort of regular content, and that’s a living. But I’ve still yet to achieve that. Perhaps I’m just too niche. Which is putting it kindly.
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Wednesday 9 August 2023. I’ve changed the title of the Substack newsletter from ‘Letter from a Dyspraxic Dandy’ to ‘Svelte Lectures’. Much better. And they are lectures, really. Proper research, with rare findings, useful scholarship, and (I hope) lasting insights. I intend to compile them into a book once I’ve clocked up enough of them.
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Thursday 10 August 2023. I’m listening to a calming BBC music mix by a woman who advocates ‘slow living’. I wonder if she manages to make a living from being slow. The fable of the tortoise and the hare is lost on many employers. They’ll go for a shoddy job done quickly over a worker who is slow but painstaking any time. I am of course talking about myself.
My mother has pointed out that in the 1970s Shirley ‘Superwoman’ Conran did all her admin on a Monday. I suppose one could try that with emails now and see what happens.
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Saturday 12 August 2023. To Ipswich to see the film Oppenheimer at Cineworld Ipswich’s IMAX screen. The last bus home to the village is 5.40pm. In the English countryside there is no life after tea-time. Thank goodness for matinee screenings.
Despite its three hour duration, Oppenheimer breezes along. The nuclear test scene aside, it is essentially handsome men in shirts and ties talking quickly in rooms. And that’s more than enough: one thinks of Twelve Angry Men. On its own terms, it’s a better film than Barbie, if only because it knows how to end.
But comparing the two is silly anyway: both films are playing to expectations on some level. The way forward now is for Greta Gerwig to only be allowed to make films about troubled men in suits, while Christopher Nolan should only be allowed to make spangly dance routines with all-female casts.
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Sunday 13 August 2023. I’m looking at adverts for rented rooms in St Leonards-on-Sea. Today I find one on the Spare Room website which has the following description:
This is new room. There is everything has been. There is included everything. There is all of nice guy. Make sure I need a.
Eat your heart out, Gertrude Stein.
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Tuesday 15 August 2023. Sitting in a Hadleigh cafe, a woman comes over to ask me if I’m all right. I’m fine, the lack of income aside. But I’ve had people coming up and asking me this all my life. I can’t help having a Resting Sad Face.
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Tuesday 22 August 2023. Today’s dial-a-ride bus to Hadleigh is shared with an older man from Kersey, Paul Dufficey, who turns out to have worked with Ken Russell. He was involved in Tommy and Savage Messiah. In the latter case, he also worked with Derek Jarman.
Kersey is an idyllic place for an artist of any age. As we reach the top of the hill the driver actually stops the bus so we can admire the view, unchanged since it was painted by John Nash in the last century.
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Friday 25 August 2023. A kind fellow Birkbeck alumnus books me to give a one-off lecture to American students on the Sally Potter film Orlando, along with the Woolf novel. I know both inside out so it’s perfect work for me. By way of homework I watch Sally Potter’s more recent film The Party, which couldn’t be more different: a kind of twisted Alan Ayckbourn farce set in a house in contemporary London. It has Cillian Murphy, making it the second film in two weeks that I’ve seen him in black and white.
[Update, a week later] The lecture job falls through. Pity. It would have been £150. I’d started writing it too.
**
Saturday 2 September 2023. My Associate Research Fellowship at Birkbeck has expired. I’m now just a struggling self-employed writer with a PhD in English and Humanities. But at least I’m not doing anything I don’t want to do.
**
Sunday 3 September 2023. Not sure what best to do about turning 52. Except to finally embrace jazz. Not sure if I’ll quite become one of those people who can bang on about Pat Metheny till sunrise. But there’s still time.
I usually like to spend my birthday taking a day trip somewhere. But it’s Sunday in Suffolk, so there’s no buses, plus there’s a train strike. Happily, culture has come to the village this weekend courtesy of the BNatural music festival. Established in 2010, it has now become a miniature Latitude, complete with colourful branded beakers. First class sound. Three pop-up music venues, including a stage in the market square, on which the superb indie band Collars played yesterday. There’s a bar, a tea and cake stall, and several food vans. And slightly too many people: the organisers deliberately restrict publicity to prevent overcrowding.
**
Wednesday 6 September 2023. Signs of the post-Covid world. Adverts for rented rooms now often stipulate ‘no homeworkers’. They always say ‘lovely sunny room’, yet they don’t want anyone to spend any daylight hours in it.
**
Thursday 7 September 2023. I watch the Tour of Britain cycle race on television, then open the front door and watch it in person as it goes through the village. Quite a feat by the local police to clear the various roads of parked cars, not least in Hadleigh High Street. Psychology plays a part: no one likes to be the one motorist who won’t move their car.
**
Sunday 17 September 2023. To Ipswich Hospital, where I was born, for a hernia repair operation. The ward is called Raedwald, after the Anglo-Saxon king who is thought to be the one buried at Sutton Hoo. The ward is accordingly decorated with glossy panels of Sutton Hoo imagery. Tea, toast, and jam in bed once I come round from the anesthetic. Heaven. And now, eight weeks of no heavy lifting. Not that I ever do very much. I even balk at hardback books.
**
Wednesday 27 September 2023. A day in London. Within seconds of stepping into the British Library I hear someone calling out ‘Dickon!’. My heart lifts at returning to the city.
I see the new David Hockney installation at The Lightroom, one of the buildings in the spotless new development north of King’s Cross.
The installation is one huge room, on the walls of which is projected a looped film of Hockney’s work lasting 50 minutes or so. All four walls are covered in this immersive projection, which at times spills onto the floor as well. The man himself narrates over music.
For all its high-tech wizardry, the installation is in the tradition of Victorian dioramas, when large and dramatic paintings like those of John Martin were shown in dark auditoriums, and changing lamp patterns would pick out different parts of the art.
Children run about in the room, and it’s quite a family friendly way of turning art into spectacle. Except, perhaps for the occasional nude bums in Hockney’s work, and his comments like: ‘Spring, when nature has an erection’. The presentation ends with a huge painted slogan, ‘LOVE LIFE’. Which one can’t argue with. Particularly when the entrance fee is only £5 for those on Universal Credit.
**
Tuesday 3 October 2023. To Woodbridge, where I’ve never been before. The Tide Mill Museum has sublime views of the Deben river, with the boats and trees in the distance. All very peaceful and idyllic, though I don’t feel wealthy enough to linger in the town too long.
**
Saturday 7 October 2023. The film director Terence Davies dies. In 1988 my father was so moved by Distant Voices Still Lives that he wrote a fan letter to Davies. TD replied by phoning Dad to thank him. They then talked at length about working class childhoods in Britain during the 40s and 50s.
**
Sunday 8 October 2023. I’ve applied for a job with the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. Freelance assistant and researcher, part-time, temporary (7 months). Just the sort of thing I’m keen to do: Isherwood is in my PhD thesis. The job ad was pointed out to me by two friends, separately, who know me but not each other. So that’s a good indication that the job might suit me.
In my eager researcher way, I’ve looked up the Suffolk connection with Isherwood. His mother Kathleen grew up in Bury St Edmunds. She spent a lot of time at Nether Hall, the mansion in Pakenham, then owned by her wealthy uncle Walter Greene, of Greene King brewery fame. In 1903 she married Isherwood’s father, Frank, in the nearby St Peter’s Church, at Thurston, one of those enviable villages which has a railway station.
**
Monday 16 October 2023. Am approached for another job: compiling the index to an academic book, which I’ve done before. I say yes. A few days later the client, who I don’t know, then decides they’d rather go with someone with more experience. What with the Orlando lecture falling through, and my Substack earnings dropping to a trickle, I’m now hoping that the Isherwood job will prove to be a case of third time lucky.
**
Saturday 21 October 2023. Floods in Suffolk. I plug a leak in the loft with rubber duct tape, but otherwise we are okay. Framlingham and Debenham to the east are hit hard. Homes wrecked, pubs and post offices damaged, cars under water, insurance apparently not applicable. Still, Framlingham is also the home of Ed Sheeran, so I wonder if he can help.
**
Sunday 22 October 2023. I’m still looking at studio flats in St-Leonard’s-On-Sea, but the situation for renters remains grim. This time I am not even offered a viewing for a flat that went on the market two days ago: they’re booked solid. Just as well my current landlady isn’t going to throw me out of her house until I have somewhere to go to.
What I definitely don’t want is a basement or ground floor flat. I’d be paranoid about the flood risk (and as I publish this Hastings, which is next to St Leonard’s, is suffering a new bout of flooding).
**
Tuesday 24 October 2023. I have time to kill in Stowmarket, so I go to the public library, which is near the town’s pretty church. Run by the local council and open from 8.30 in the morning, this library is not just a place of free books but an all-round social support hub.
Here, librarians are the quiet saints of community. Gone are any concerns about silence: there is a chatty knitting group at a table in one corner, and some sort of pensioners’ group at another. Children run about (it’s half term), people make phone calls or do jigsaws, and the whole ambience is cheery, cosy and safe. There’s even a coffee machine, though one important aspect stops this place resembling a coffee shop: no piped music. Just the gentle melody of chatter.
Some are here just to take advantage of the heating. This has long been one of the attractions of libraries, but today there is a designated phrase for such places: ‘warm banks’.
There are free internet terminals for those who don’t have computers at home, which is still a lot of people. That said, there’s room for improvement: the council’s own website is not user-friendly enough. I know this because the old man at the computer next to me is sighing a lot as he taps slowly at the keyboard, one finger at a time. He turns to me by way of explanation:
‘They make these forms so complicated. I’m just trying to order a bin.’
**
Saturday 28 October 2023. After an interview via Zoom, I am offered the job with the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. It will mean working from home with the occasional trip to London, which suits me fine.
On reflection, I think I was successful because I made it to the interview stage, where I feel more at ease. Many people are uneasy about crowbarring their whole lovely complexity into the inflexible templates of cover letters and CVs. Give us an interview, though, and we come alive.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Tuesday 9 May 2023. To the Ipswich Job Centre to register as ‘gainfully’ self-employed. I now have a year in which to ‘build my business’ and see if I can make enough from freelance work to live on. This means writing, reviewing, indexing, giving talks, whatever I can turn my funny little hand to. After a year of looking for conventional employment, armed with a newly minted PhD in English and Humanities, the only positions the government could offer me were prison warder or tube train cleaner. I exaggerate, but not by much. These jobs obviously need to be done, but probably not by a middle-aged disciple of Quentin Crisp.
**
12 May 2023. My review of the new Sparks album is published in The Wire magazine. I’m pleased to see that the magazine is sold in the WH Smiths at Ipswich station. I’m also pleased that magazines still exist at all, and indeed that Sparks still exist at all, the Mael brothers now in their seventies.
I sit in a café by the newish Ipswich waterfront area. Close by are shiny new university buildings, a dance school, and a new archive, ‘The Fold’, which is a pleasing pun for a repository of manuscripts in a rural town.
The main part of Ipswich, alas, is more unhappy and run down. Local newspapers speak of the area as ‘no-go’. Many shops in the centre are empty and unused, even the Ancient House, which was such a pleasant bookshop when I was a teenager. The others have been turned into a surfeit of charity shops, that ominous symptom of decline. Still, there’s talk of turning these zombie spaces into new housing, which makes sense. As long as it’s housing that people can afford.
Meanwhile, bored teenage boys in black hooded tracksuits loaf on street corners, their signature smell of marijuana announcing them from a distance. Once associated with hippies and liberalism, this scent is now the stink of poverty, pack survival, and abandonment.
And yet the waterfront is full of education, trendy cafes, and creativity. Whatever went right there clearly needs to be extended to the rest of the town. Perhaps local boy turned rich singer Ed Sheeran could step in. He already sponsors the football team.
**
17 May 2023. My Substack newsletter is now up and running, with the first subject Angela Carter and the Beatles.
Ronald Firbank characters do not write weekly columns. They write, to quote The Flower Beneath the Foot, ‘hebdomadal causeries’.
**
18 May 2023. My Substack subject this week is Postmodernism and Eurovision. I’m rather enjoying writing scholarly stuff for a non-scholarly readership. It’s the fun of playing to a crowd while wanting to take them somewhere new.
**
19 May 2023. Andy Rourke dies, the bassist with the Smiths. What is less well known is that after the band split up he wrote the music to several of Morrissey’s solo songs, including one of my favourites, ‘Girl Least Likely To’.
**
22 May 2023. Martin Amis dies. Dream casting for a drama about the Amises: Hugo Weaving as Martin, Roger Allam as Kingsley. Mum thinks Allam could also play Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters. As they say on the internet, I can’t unsee that now.
**
25 May 2023. This week’s Substack: Heartstopper, Carry On Loving, and skeuomorphism. Just typing those three things in the same sentence, and knowing it’s probably not been done before, is a pleasure. Lateral thinking, which comes easily to dyspraxics like me, is a kind of superpower, like X-ray vision. One can see connections and solutions that others cannot.
Very pleased today to discover that my PhD thesis has been cited in Paul Baker’s new book, Camp! The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World. This is unexpected – I don’t know Professor Baker at all, though I’ve enjoyed his books on gay slang and Polari. This is pretty good going for a thesis that is still officially unpublished. It’s certainly a boost to my self-worth.
**
27 May 2023. To Felixstowe Museum. The main town has the nice beach and gardens, as well as the Treasure Chest used bookshop, which my father loved and which is still going after forty years. The museum, on the other hand, is not in the town but next to the container port, Britain’s biggest. This necessitates an extra bus ride going south to the estuary, and the museum is only open at the weekends.
Worth the effort, though. There’s much at the museum about the history of the port, but there is also a more unexpected room dedicated to 1980s pop culture, the justification being that the museum opened in that decade. Live Aid plays on a TV in a mock-up of a living room. There’s a BBC Micro and a Betamax video recorder: items of my youth, now museum pieces. And plenty of record sleeves.
**
28 May 2023. Reading the news coverage over Martin Amis’s death and thinking he would have hated the phrase, ‘tributes pour in’. Such a cliché. Do tributes ever do anything else? Saunter in? Trickle in? Penetrate osmotically through a viscous membrane?
**
3 June 2023. To Hadleigh for the Hidden Gardens event. A selection of the town’s private gardens are opened to the public for this one day, in aid of charity. They range from the large Tudor farmhouse at Benton End, with its synonymous irises, to small modern semi-detached back yards in the suburbs.
One garden on the High Street is inhabited by two gentlemen, Colin Platt and Frank Minns, who are, as they mention to visitors, married to each other. Just like Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, who lived together at Benton End from the 1940s to the 1970s. Except not officially married back then, of course. The High Street couple have a number of irises, in tribute not only to Benton End but to EF Benson. They’re named after characters from the Mapp and Lucia books. One is called Quaint Irene.
**
9 June 2023. A linen suit turns out to be impractical for walking Suffolk footpaths. Too many brambles and thorns. One solution would be switching to tweed, but that feels like an aesthetic step too far.
**
27 June 2023. I’m not inconsistent or hypocritical. I’m nuanced, multi-faceted, protean.
**
7 July 2023. Most of my week has been spent writing an essay that will take five minutes to read. This must be how animators feel.
**
8 July 2023. I am still keen to move to St Leonards-on-Sea, but even a room in a shared house there can now cost £850 a month to rent. Solitude has become a luxury.
**
14 July 2023. I finish up the first ‘term’ of Substack letters with an End of Term Revue, picking out what I feel are the highlights. All the letters are now archived at dickonedwards.substack.com.
**
18 July 2023. The prime minister is to restrict the numbers of students taking university degrees that are ‘rip-offs’ and ‘low value’. By this he means courses that tend not to guarantee a well-paid job, like those for the arts.
My earnings as a self-employed writer last month were just over £200. I prefer to think, however, that I am not so much low value as an acquired taste.
**
20 July 2023. Much talk over the two hyped Hollywood films of the summer: Barbie and Oppenheimer. Barbie for femmes, Oppenheimer for butches. Not so different, though. Barbie is about gender and toys. And so is Oppenheimer, bombs being toys for boys.
**
22 July 2023. Finding myself in London at short notice, I go and see Barbie at the Curzon Soho. This is only after spending a good half hour on the internet trying to get a ticket: most of the West End cinema screenings have sold out.
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie certainly manages to have its clever pink cake and eat it. Towards the end, though, it runs out of energy and dips into a kind of cinematic hypoglycaemia. But then, I recall, so does The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Both films achieve a camp pastoral, only to lose their breath, and then their nerve. They end up grasping for a conventional sense of an ending, but by then it is entirely out of character to do so.
Barbie does manage a startling final line, though, and has much to recommend it, with the jokes, the dance routines, the design, the serious ideas on society, and Ryan Gosling being a superb Ken, if an unlikely one.
**
23 July 2023. A Sunday lunch with Ronald Firbank admirers at a house in Borough Green. Also there are Alan Hollinghurst, Richard Canning, and Jenny and Charlie Firbank. We inspect the Alvaro Guevara portrait of Ronald, which is brought in, newly cleaned. As we speculate on this painting, which may or may not be a depiction of Firbank’s flat on Jermyn Street, I realize I’m in a scene that could be in one of Mr Hollinghurst’s novels.
I get home to Suffolk to a package from the London Library. It’s their copy of Richard Blake Brown’s My Aunt in Pink (1936), which I’ve borrowed. His other titles are even harder to track down, but they sound equally camp: Miss Higgs and Her Silver Flamingo (1931), A Broth of a Boy (1934), Rococo Coffin (1936), and my favourite, Spinsters, Awake! (1937).
My Aunt in Pink turns out to be a small pink 1930s hardback, the colour all the more pleasing given it’s the Barbie weekend. What’s most striking is that the last line of the book mentions a fictional portrait by Alvaro Guevera. Just like the real Guevara I was looking at only a few hours before.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
