Laurence visits and plays me his Minidisc recordings of choirboys. He lends me a couple of videos: a bootleg of The Smiths live in 1985 and Quentin Crisp’s first television interview, in 1970, which I promptly dub onto audio cassette for permanence in my home. Both offer me great hope.
Quentin talks of death: “It can’t be long now.” Nearly thirty years later, he’s still waiting. Still in one bedsit, depending on the kindness of strangers. The only difference is the bedsit is in Manhattan, not Chelsea. And he’s become famous. After the 1970 interview, he was asked to write his autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant, which was made into a film, and the world finally recognised him for the star and velvet guru that he was. Is. I still hope to meet him one day, when my fare is paid to New York. I go wherever my fare is paid. Now more than ever!

Sex is the P.E. of adult life. And I’ve got a note from my mother.

Sex is a poor substitute for masturbation. (Internet users will doubtless agree.)

Contrary to popular belief, sex is not the adult compensation for having to pay rent.

Sex is only worth doing for any reason other than self-gratification.
In order to shut someone up.
In order to earn money.
In order to do research.
In order to pass the time.

Also: In order to talk about it to the world afterwards.
The time was when it was something you simply never spoke about. Now it’s everywhere, and people just do it so they have something to talk about to their friends, or to the poor wretch they have found themselves in a Relationship with. It makes sense.

Sex is worth reading about, hearing about, talking about, joking about. I was going to add for watching in films, but I then realised that all my favourite films’ least favourite moments are the sex scenes, if there are any. But sex is never worth doing for its own sake. Once you realise this, life is so much easier.

Celibacy and solitude (as opposed to loneliness) are raison d’etres for anyone interested in getting through this tiresomely unpredicatable stagger to the grave with as little fuss as possible.

Rejoice! For it will end!

Charley gets her picture in The Face magazine, in a feature on the band that’s currently paying her wages, Gay Dad. I’m not sure about the look of the rest of the band. Very Mansun. Corporate alternative rock. First single is limited edition only, building that fanbase, a familiar tactic to the careerist band process. See also Embrace, Stereophonics etc. It’s all getting so… repetitive.. Still, I’m happy for her, there are worst jobs. Wish I could pay her wages myself. She’ll be on the Fosca album, and promises to play whatever dates she can.

Turns out Mandelson was outed as long ago as 1987, so Matthew Parris wasn’t really outing him after all. The media just…. forgot.

Sarit’s Queeruption site has accounts of the recent event, including an arty photo of Fosca playing live.

It finally happened. I’m broke. The remnants of the advance I banked back in February when I left Orlando have run out. Gone on recording equipment, new instruments and their upkeep, Fosca rehearsals (not cheap when you have to hire drum kits and bass amps), umpteen taxis, computer equipment, countless expensive books (hardbacks sometimes), astronomical Internet-related phone bills, mobile phone costs, CDs and CD-ROMs, drink, concerts, cinema and theatre tickets. Ten months of living like an eccentric aristocrat (which I always felt I was meant to have been…), not having to worry about bills. Ten months of hospital bills, I call them, because they’re all attempts to stave off my depression with consumer indulgence. Shopping to cheer oneself up whenever one is extremely miserable. Which as you might imagine, is virtually all of my waking hours.

I suspect that with careful planning, I could have made the money last two or three times longer. But I never was one for careful budgeting. I’m proud to admit that a good deal of it went on treating poverty-stricken friends of mine. But now I’m as poor as they are. Actually, I’m better than poor. I’m in debt. Which looks better.

I’m fairly pleased that this now means a new order of discipline. Whether I like it or not. I simply have to get myself organised. I spent money like there was no tomorrow, but sadly there indeed does seem to be a tomorrow, despite all my apocalyptic concerns.

So now I have a genuine excuse not to buy people drinks or go to gigs I don’t really enjoy.

And I’m still deaf in my left ear. Doctor says it’s probably just a wax build-up. But it doesn’t prevent me feeling even more sorry for myself.

What I AM glad about is that I can’t put off selling all this rubbish I bought that clutters up my room. The vast majority of books, CDs and CD-ROMS that I really don’t need, but bought anyway to… cheer myself up. I’ll be glad to get the space back. And with all these scare stories about mobile phones and cancer, I’ll not be that sad to see the back of that either, if it comes to that.

And I’ll finally get in touch with the publications that want me to do some paid writing for them. And the modelling agency that popped a card into my breast pocket the other day. And follow up all those kind souls who offered to pay my fare to foreign lands.

And I’ll get some Fosca work done. Because there are no more distractions anymore. No matter how hard I want there to be.

Didn’t enjoy the Catpower gig much. Mainly because I was more concerned with my ear. Wanted hugging badly. I don’t mind not being kissed, but I crave hugs at times. It occurs to me that I’ve never had a massage. Ever.

What fresh hell…

G. was at the gig. Hadn’t seen him for months. “I’ve been looking for fuckable girls in this place, but there don’t seem to be any”.

The singer out of Catpower hides behind a curtain of hair for most of the gig, which riles my patience. I’m consumed with the urge to leap on stage with a trimmer set to No.1 buzzcut. Get the feeling many people are here just because they fancy the Suzanne-Vega-ish singer. Which is entirely fair enough, of course. It’s always been a good way to get people fancying you, being in a band. Mousey girls in indie circles tend to have no problem getting attention from boys, who are just grateful to see something female at all.

I get approached by a young stranger from Islington at the end. She’s not an Indie type, and wants me to explain the concept of Gigs. “What brought you here?” I ask. “It was recommended in the Evening Standard, which was only 10p today. So I thought I’d check it out”. It occurs to me how little music matters to some people. To real people. She asks me if I’m single. I can’t remember what I replied.

Jonathan glances at my video collection, which I hope to brutally whittle down shortly. “I’m not sure which is worse,” he says. “Triumph Of the Will or The Best Of The Beautiful South”.

Thursday November 13th – evening

I’m already regretting my “come terminal disease” archness below. I seem to have lost the hearing in my left ear. So it’s off to Catpower at the Garage with semi-deafness, Otex eardrops dripping down my neck.

Getting ready, I listen to the Field Mice compilation, “Where’d You Learn To Kiss That Way?”. It’s vitually everything they recorded for Sarah Records. The songs left out from the Sarah canon include a number of forgettable instrumentals, plus “Song Six”, “Think of These Things” and “You’re Kidding Aren’t You”.

I’m reminded of dropping in on Matt Haynes’ place in Lambeth last week. I’d just been to a poetry reading at the Imperial War Museum, and he lives round the corner, so it seemed silly not to finally pop round. The last time I visited him was when he lived with Clare Wadd in Bristol. She helped me move to London, before they both upped and followed my example, albeit separately. I still owe them far too much, both culturally and in the line of friendship. Their sheer selflessness and striving for independent integrity in, all of all place, the British music business, never failed to startle me.

And it did so again last week. Matt’s flat was strewn with cardboard boxes of Field Mice CDs, sleeves and booklets, all waiting to be individually sleeved and packaged by hand. By his hand, mainly, though friends have helped. It looked like a particularly twee episode of Starsky and Hutch. I offered to help of course, but he was having none of it. I asked him why couldn’t he sell the double, suavely designed album at £12 rather than £10, and pay a factory to do the business for him. “I don’t really trust them”, he ventured.

I asked him about choosing which songs to not include on the compilation, and he told me the lyrics of “Song Six” etc never really fully endeared themselves as much as the others. “Think of These Things” could be interpreted as worryingly possessive, almost stalker-like, being as it is a song about a boy wanting to possess every aspect of his girlfriend’s life. and “Song Six” is a little wince-inducing by going too far the other way: “they don’t see there’s a difference/ between a woman and a slave”. These are only minor niggles, but faced with the choice of a flawed three-CD album and a perfect double one, I think Matt/Clare/the band chose wisely. Two and a half hours is long enough of any band too, even the sublime Field Mice.

This is always the problem with “best of” compilations. More often than not, one’s favourite songs are left out. The new Culture Club compilation doesn’t include “The War Song”, which is a good thing, but it also omits “The Medal Song”, which is frankly criminal.

Which is why I bought yet another Supremes/Diana Ross collection. The new one is the first to include both 60s and 70s Supremes hits, plus Diana Ross’ “Doobedood’ndoobe, Doobedood’ndoobe, Doobedood’ndoo”, an early 70s solo song, and possibly one of the best ever songs with a worst ever title. I probably now have about 8 different albums with “Where Did Our Love Go” on them. Which is no bad thing, of course.

Thursday November 12th

After reading my Anti Pro Life rant below, I’ve just remembered what Pro Lifers do to their enemies. And what happened to Bill Hicks. No, what the conspiracy theory says.

If I die suddenly, you will see that there’s a full investigation, won’t you?

Saturday was spent watching the band Pansy Division at the Garage. Hot in from California, and the house is packed, though after chatting with the singer, the amiable Mr Jon Ginoli, it transpires they are spending their UK tour sleeping on floors. Touring on a small-to-medium indie level is so expensive and loss making that major labels put aside a fund called Tour Support for their bands, counted as part of the promotional budget. It means Orlando stayed in hotels or on sleeper buses when we were playing to three gerbils and a stamp book.

I buy a Pansy Division plectrum. With their own logo on it. Not a common article of band merchandise. I presume it’s to encourage gay kids to pick up guitars rather than get into boy bands or dance music. Or perhaps just because they really like the idea of having their own brand of plectrums. They put on a hell of a Show, as opposed to a Gig, complete with costume changes and charismatic stage banter. Pansy Division Live is an wonderful experience of glitter, jokes, and punky tunes even the grumpy, frumpy likes of me can mosh to. In my winsome way.

By way of distinct contrast, I spend the following evening at a classical piano recital, invited by a charming composer called Laurence Armstrong Hughes, who has a very fast walk. It’s a Percy Grainger event, he of the “English Country Garden” and maverick invention fame. One piece is written for 11 hands. To my disappointment, they didn’t produce a mutant Shiva-like creature from the wings, but instead crammed six pianists around three Steinways. I feel about classical music in the same way I feel about art: I get the sense I’m dwarfed by the sheer history of it, that I’ll never “catch up”, but that I can take the bits and pieces I like and enjoy them in my own way: Modern minimalists like Nyman, Glass, and Reich mainly, but I’m also an admirer of (and listen to) Chopin, Debussy, Mussorgsky, Mozart, Stravinksy, Beethoven, and today, Haydn.

After the show we crash the aftershow party. For a classical concert. It’s a different class of people, let me tell you… Outside, Westminster looks beautiful by night, and Laurence points out the balcony in Whitehall where Charles I stepped out to be executed. We also pass the Cenotaph, decorated with fresh wreaths from the Remembrance ceremony earlier that day.

After reading about where Edmund White got the title for his novel “The Farewell Symphony” from, I seek out the Haydn work in question and enjoy it immensely. The story goes that Haydn’s patron was overworking the composer and his orchestra to the point where the musicians were so eager to go home that Haydn wrote a piece where the players could walk off, one by one, during the piece, until there was just Haydn and his first violinist left duetting.

This is now an evergreen stage gimmick often used by bands, the singer going first, then the guitarist, and so on until either just the bassist and drummer or even merely the drummer, are left alone on stage to finish the song. Fosca #1 did this a couple of times. It’s always an entertaining and memorable way to end a show, as long as the rhythm section don’t decide to end with an excruciating ten-minute “jam”…

The end of year polls are already out, and it’s not even halfway through November. Still, I venture my own choices:

1998:
Best Single: Lauryn Hill “Doo Wop”
Best Album: Trembling Blue Stars “Lips That Taste of Tears”
Best Compilation: The Field Mice “Where’d You Learn To Kiss That Way?”
Best Film: “The Last Days of Disco” and “Love and Death on Long Island”

“Public NME”, the gossip column, mentions Orlando for no other reason than to be nasty. Erstwhile journalist stalkers that are to be avoided at parties, goes the gist, presumably by Mr Mark Beaumont, whom for some reason has always had it in for me and/or Orlando. Once again, I sigh but feel flattered that I don’t even have to go out to get into gossip columns, that I made a mark in his world, even if it is that of whipping boy.

The thing is, I still am a stalker of journalists. Here I am, obsessed with my own press, naming the anonymous hacks, putting it in my diaries, wasting time and energy on the negative. Will I never learn? No. When Orlando started, it was all part of the plan. Tim and I loved the tales of the Manics keeping dossiers on individual music journalists, and then of Menswear taking such buttonholing and press obsession to the level of an art form. If the Richey thing hadn’t happened, would the Manics be on the same level as Menswear today? Examine and discuss.

And I have to plead guilty to the other count, that of being the sort of person to avoid in public. I was filmed today for an interview that features as part of a project by another journalist, Mr Jonathan Selzer. It was about, fittingly, the personae assumed by people who use the Internet to be more “themselves” than they are in real life. He laughed at my badger jokes, which was nice. When it came to checking the recording, I flinched, even grimaced at the sight of my own face, nattering away on the TV. I can’t stand looking at myself move about and speak, if truth be told. If my double got on the same Tube carriage as me, I’d have to get out at the next stop. If I saw myself in the street, I’d have to cross the road to avoid a conversation.

And I’d definitely avoid myself at clubs and parties. So who am I kidding?

This kind of self hatred is only tempered with a thin veneer of vanity, to keep me afloat, to avoid facing the void. The make up, the bleach, the suits: it’s all correction, and protection, not decoration.

This is my predicament: a vain, self obsessed narcissist that hates his own guts, his own image and wants to die, but doesn’t have the courage to take the easy way out. (“come, o terminal illness!”) I’m in love with my reflection, but only when it shows the bits of me I prefer. The edited highlights.

This is what makes me, in essence, a ridiculous, tragic, doomed figure.

I always was a bit of a drama queen.

Wednesday November 11th

I spent last Friday evening at Popstarz, a club that takes place weekly at the Leisure Lounge, a huge hangar like underground space in Central London. An expensive night out, but there are three main rooms, an indie one, a trashy disco one, and a quiet “chill out” one. In other words, you can actually have a conversation there without shouting directly into someone’s ear, dance if you want to dance, or go into another room if you want to dance, but they’re playing something you don’t like.

Like Club V, it’s another gay indie night (though you can dance all night to 70s and 80s disco if you want), but one which feels it necessary to display in large yellow banners across the entrance “PLEASE RESPECT THAT THIS IS A GAY CLUB”. As if they’ve had Trouble there previously. Not nice.

I was there to meet Kate, a gloriously androgynous creature, brimming with style and immaculate dress sense. She used to be called Richard. She looks rather like the Jack Fairy character in “Velvet Goldmine”, though I suspect she’s tired of having this brought up. She tells me about the difficulties of getting a job, looking the way she does. There’s only one thing you can do if you find yourself born into an unusual frame, whether it be hermaphrodite, androgyne, transsexual, transvestite, or just odd to the conformist’s eye, and that’s get paid for being yourself. The Profession of Being, to which we really must all aspire before it’s too late.

Meanwhile, Agnes Apocalypse is in the air: reports of the armed forces being put on standby for New Year’s Eve, 1999, in case the Millennium Bug really does create all the unthinkable events the doomsayers forecast: massive failure of electricity, hospital life supports fail, traffic lights thrown haywire, missiles being launched. And then there’s the Global Economy Crisis. And Honduras lies in ruins. And today Mr Hussein is at it. Again. He’s a one, isn’t he?

Turn the pages: pop stars dropping babies like crazy, while Pro Lifers take the lives of doctors at US abortion clinics, and Jack Straw goes on about The Family. As if the solution to all this forthcoming death and misery is to reproduce yourself as quickly as possible. Babies are sacred, emotive devices used by tabloids to gain favour, to get the populace on Their Side. “Lesbian Moms: A Mockery of Motherhood”. “Mom Dies to Save Unborn Child”. “I Won’t Abort My Baby Because I’m Vegetarian, Says Teen Rape Victim.” As if infants or even foetuses have more use, more worth than fully grown human beings with proven qualifications, resources, training, experience, character, personality. “So what are you saying, that once someone reaches a certain age, they’re instantly off your Wish List?” (Bill Hicks).

Characters like Bridget Jones and Ally McBeal brainwash women into thinking they are slaves to their wombs, that the “biological clock” is ticking, that they’re not Proper Women without children. Childless women are branded, the inference goes, as “selfish”. As if blocking already crowded streets with pushchairs, and breaking the quiet of cafes with the sounds of howling and crying is somehow a far more philanthropic move. Yes, I know that says rather more about me than society, but you get the general idea.

People in the public eye, whether celebrities or subjects of Human Interest features, rattle tirelessly and tediously on about their new offspring being The Most Important Thing In My Life, when really such publicity hounds are talking about themselves. Be honest, kids are great copy, great press angles, great excuses for a spread in “Hello” magazine, great cries for attention, great boosts to the ego in convincing yourself that you’re a Good Person, and nothing else whatsoever. Babies are not beautiful. They all look like Winston Churchill chewing a particularly rancid dead wasp. They add a large side order of Stress to an already stress saturated existence. And I haven’t even mentioned the noise, the smells, the piss, shit, vomit and jam.

“Ah, but Dickon, you’re a MAN. It’s so easy for you to rant on like you do. You don’t know what it’s like to have a WOMB…” And this is it, of course I don’t. Which is why I love the respect Germaine Greer gets when she suggests sterilizing people after freezing their eggs and sperm in banks, only letting them have children when they can prove to the State that they’d make good parents. Exactly like people applying for adoption have to. Ms Greer goes on: you need a license for a dog, why not a permit for a child?

If I said things like that, I’d get into terrible trouble, so I tend to hold the coats and leave it to the feminists, stifling a “right on!” cheer under my cowardly Liberal breath.

But until I come back in my next life as a woman (and boy, you’ll have trouble shutting me up then…), of course I realise it’s as unfair for a man to persuade women not to have children as it is for Pro Lifers trying to stop women seeking abortions. Of course I’m Pro Choice when it comes down to it. It’s just that I can’t pretend this tabloid sponsored relentless rush to breed like there’s no tomorrow doesn’t depress and obsess me more than ever.

Such sprog-worshipping hysteria only really fuels the Pro Life way of thinking: Babies Uber Alles. It’s also a great way of Keeping Women In Their Place, something that people of both sexes still think is actually A Good Thing even in 1998. It’s one of the reasons that throughout the history of civilisation female artists, philosophers, scientists, musicians and so on are somewhat dwarfed in number by their male counterparts, that the Woman’s Section in bookshops is a Minority Section, when 51% of the world are female. It’s the reason for global patriarchy. Female emancipation starts from Day One with both A Room of One’s Own and the right to abortion. But apparently it’s not that obvious to some people, male and female. Actually, I wish it was just “some” people.

You’ll realise I’m not even daring to touch on the subject of religion here. That’s an even more fruitless rant. It’s glib and inappropriate to get into the subject of Faith if you’re an unbaptised heathen like myself that only has faith in the immediately obvious and apparent.

So I’m speaking only of what IS the immediately obvious and apparent to me. Of course abortion is no picnic. But compare it to spending the rest of your life compromised, living a lie, trying to convince yourself daily that you’re a Good Parent, that homelessness and poverty and Just Having A Really Rubbish Life don’t exist, and neither does the world population problem, baiting War and Nature to do some serious levelling even more. It pretty much comes out as the lesser of two evils in my book.

If this misguided trend of headlong reproduction for its own sake isn’t voluntarily, sensitively challenged on our own terms, we may find it gets curbed externally and brutally in the near, dark future. Something’s got to give. And that’s what really keeps me awake at night.

Oh, that and the thought of Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon. Yes, yes, all right.

Pro Lifers really astound me though. Going so out of their way (snipers?!) to stop people who have already made a pretty difficult decision, as if termination was just some kind of whim, one of someone’s funny little ways. All that campaigning throughout the century by feminists to get abortions available free to those that need them, and it means nothing to these self-righteous idiots. It’s not enough that in Catholic dominated countries, Ireland included, where abortion is illegal, dead babies are regularly found in litter bins, in rivers, in lay-bys. Pro Lifers don’t seem to make the connection at all.

It’s what keeps me going, you know. I can always set a Bad Example. “Don’t have children… they might turn out like Dickon Edwards”.

Or worse, they might grow up to be a Pro Life campaigner.