Leafing through older diary entries, I’m shocked at some of the unkind and occasionally quite extreme things I’ve said in the past; for instance about certain groups or individuals I actually rather admire today. I genuinely don’t recognise the person saying those things as myself. A lot of it just hints at jejune envy at others’ success, which is probably close to the truth. It would be rather Orwellian to revise those old words to fit the person writing this entry today, so I’ll resist the temptation and let them stand. All you can do is hope that people bother to check with you today before presuming you still hold a certain opinion voiced years ago. I voted Labour then, after all. The world changes, and some parts of people change.

I’m not the DE of 1997, that’s for certain. Whether this is for better or for worse is up to others. I’d certainly never dare to say I’m a ‘better person’ now. It’d be like saying David Tennant is the best Doctor Who (though I think he is). Or that ‘Match Point’ is the best Woody Allen film. One man’s development and experimentation is another man’s inconsistency. But the other man is a fool. I feel it’s like inheriting a wardrobe of clothes from an ancestor, and choosing which garments not only fit you, but can represent you. And which bits you chuck out.

Onwards and upwards is the only way to think. After all, my only sibling gets married tomorrow.

Fosca have been invited to submit a song for a new compilation organised by Ian Watson’s club, “How Does It Feel To Be Loved”. We’ve offered him a freshly mixed and mastered track called “I’ve Agreed To Something I Shouldn’t Have”, which will probably end up on the next Fosca album.

For the time being, it can be heard online here:

http://www.myspace.com/foscatheband

Lyrics and music by DE, arranged by Fosca, produced by Tom Edwards.

Nice to get something new up there at last, given we’re looking for a suitable new label.

This is an archly anthemic song with too many instruments. I get to play a kind of sliding-chord guitar solo at the end, though I’m not actually sure what notes I’m playing. I just experimented with unfamiliar fingerings. As must we all.

Now I’ve got that moaning about my health out of the way, I can catch up with happier things.

Recently I went to The Albany to see the comedian Natalie Haynes’s new solo show. I should have contacted a friend in time to accompany me, as going to comedy gigs alone really is a strange affair. It’s not like seeing films or concerts or art shows. Stand-up comedy is all about crowds and company. If you go to a comedy gig by yourself, it’s very hard not to feel you should be elsewhere.

The manic Ms Haynes is worth it, though. Thanks to an excellent Radio 4 programme on comedy she presented a year or so ago, I know that her heroes include Dorothy Parker, Jessica Mitford, Fran Leibowitz, Rebecca West, and Cynthia Heimel. So it’s no surprise her style comprises intelligent, acerbic and often bittersweet observational humour, while not caring about being liked in return. Which of course, is an entirely likeable trait.

Her new show is ostensibly about her addiction to US TV detective shows, particularly “Diagnosis Murder”, but the highlights for me are her tangential rants about the joy of childlessness, unabashed middle class pride, campaigns to be nicer to paedophiles, her fear of bats, and her affair with a 17-year-old boy from the school at which she taught. Although her stand-up persona may be a gabbling anti-social compulsive-obsessive, she’s at pains to point out she’s happy with it. “Bear with me, there will be cake”, she announces at one point. And there was: tubs of those Marks & Spencer mini-flapjacks and party cakes handed around after her set.

The only slight on the occasion was her highly naff choice of intro and outro music: hits from The Wonder Stuff circa 1990. I ask her about this at the gig, and she explains it’s due to her Midlands upbringing. Not good enough, frankly. There must be other groups from the Midlands that don’t make one want to explode into a volley of execrations. Felt and Denim spring to mind.

After the gig, I also get to chat to Sue Perkins, another favourite comedian of mine. She buys me a drink. She and Ms Haynes often appear on those radio and TV panel games and pundit shows, discussing the news or reviewing something in the arts. Some people think this trend of comedians being instant TV experts on everything can be unhelpful and annoying. To which I would say: yes, if they’re lazy, obvious and unfunny with it.

Ms Haynes and Ms Perkins are definitely witty exceptions to this blanket complaint. I find they tend to perk up an otherwise dull show. I happened to catch a recent edition of the Channel More4 debate programme “The Last Word”. It really does illustrate Mr Coward’s adage that TV is for being on, not for watching. Except when Ms Haynes is on it.

On this occasion she upstaged the otherwise irredeemably dull preceedings (featuring the entirely unnecessary Mr Dominic Lawson) with a brief explanation on why she regarded the word ‘c***’ as far less offensive than the word ‘vagina’. She explained it was due to their relative Latin stems (the former being ‘triangle-shaped’, the other ‘sword sheath’).

I’m all for etymological debate in modern comedy. Well, it makes a change from telling a crowd how funny it is getting the ‘munchies’ while being ‘high’ in the small hours.

How I hate chronicling ailments: it’s so boring. No one wants to know how well or how ill you feel. It’s as boring as relating a dream, explaining the entire plot of a movie the other person didn’t see (for a reason), or telling someone you’re going to be doing a charity fun-run. Even when they ask, “How are you?”, they don’t want a true answer to the question. Just a cursory “fine” to reciprocate the polite interest.

But I have to report my current state. Better that than write nothing.

I’ve had this dull, sporadic headache that’s been coming and going over the past ten days. It’s accompanied with nausea, feverishness and general wooziness, plus a lack of concentration, low energy and an inability to do, well, anything much at all, really. No actual blackouts or throwing up, though. Thing is, I can’t tell how much of this is just me being my normal unfit Dickon Edwards self.

I type the symptoms into the Internet, and of course it tells me I’m dying. Brain tumour is the first worry, so I’ve just had a new eye test (and passed fine), plus have seen my GP and voiced my fears. He thought it wasn’t anything serious. But I still feel rotten. And worrying about what could be making me feel rotten doesn’t help.

Something that could be connected is a nasty bang on the head I received at the Windmill gig ten days ago, lifting my head up too quickly under a low shelf when I was plugging something into the mains. It hurt pretty badly at the time, but I was drinking all night and didn’t really notice any pain for the rest of the evening. I was pretty anaesthetized.

From the day after, though, I got these new kind of dull and throbbing headaches, and they don’t seem to be going away. They feel more like the kind of pain you get after banging your head, so the GP thinks it’s a combination of delayed concussion, coupled with post-viral goings-on from the flu that I’ve had off and on for the last month. He took a look in my eyes with a pen torch, asked me to do a few hand-to-eye co-ordination tests, and told me he thought it was nothing to worry about: the headaches would go soon. He prescribed paracetemol till then.

I do hope he’s right. I’m sitting here feeling headachey and sick. And sick with worry over feeling sick. It’s driving me mad. Put down the voodoo doll, please, Unkind Reader.

Rachel Stevenson (who is of Doncaster stock) alerts me to a staff document posted on the website for Doncaster West NHS. It’s a much-requested glossary of South Yorkshire slang compiled from patient consultations, aimed at assisting doctors from other countries. Or indeed, other counties.

Terms used by patients for menstruation:
I’ve got a visitor
Got me friend
Had a show
On my Honda
Barnsley’s at home
Rotherham are at home

One phrase that genuinely made me fall off my chair today:

I’ve got fishdocks: I have an odiferous vaginal discharge

And something directly from Alan Bennett country:

My husband/partner is good to me: My husband/partner doesn’t expect sex

I often wander about London in a bit of daze. This is just my way. Full of thoughts, ideas, musings. Sometimes I stop on the pavement and stand still, thinking. I’m just thinking about things, that’s all. Some people sit in parked cars for ages. I see these car-lurkers as I saunter along the residential avenues, and I’m slightly disturbed by them. Why are they sitting there? They can’t all be cab drivers.

But I don’t have a car. So I can only be strange and contemplative on foot. That’s my excuse.

I went to the Green Party office this afternoon to collect some leaflets, and when I left I was convinced they thought I was a bit strange. Then again, they must be used to dealing with people far stranger than me. Famously, their British media spokesman was once Mr David Icke, just before he got those visions about the importance of wearing turquoise, shape-shifting lizards controlling the world and being a Son Of God. And once he did start making public declarations about that sort of thing, the Party understandably relieved him of his position. There’s off-message and there’s really off-message.

I may not be that eccentric, but I do feel unusual enough to tempt suspicion from some strangers. My defence is, I’ve never been strange in a dangerous way. I’ve never gone up to someone and physically threatened them for no reason, for instance.

Which is what happened to me today on Archway Road at about 5.30pm. I was standing in my usual thoughtful daze, looking at the Green Party Shop from the other side of the busy road, trying to work out if its closed door meant it was actually closed or not. Sometimes the owner Mr Lynch keeps it open at this time, you see. I was also daydreaming at the same time about, oh, everything and nothing.

I then was aware of a 40-ish white man in a white baseball cap, white tracksuit and white trainers dodging the traffic and crossing the road from the other side, walking towards me. He was carrying a large plastic tray of washing-up implements: sponges, cloths, brushes, that sort of thing. They looked brand new, so my first assumption was that he was selling these items door-to-door, and that he was now about to ask me if I wanted to buy anything. I got ready with my expression of kindly dismissal. I was entirely unprepared for what happened next.

He made it to the pavement, stuck his face very close to mine, and burst into a torrent of expletives and violent threats.

“What the f— are you looking at, you c—? Are you f—ing looking at ME, you f—-ing c—? Why are you looking at me? Eh? Well? I’ll cut your f—ing face open. Were you f—ing looking at me?

Some of his teeth were missing.

I was very shocked at all this, suffice it to say. I wanted to say, no I wasn’t looking at him. That I hadn’t noticed him at all until he started crossing the road towards me. I wanted to say I had been staring at the shop across the road, and that he must have been standing in front of the shop and thought I was staring at him. I wanted to say he had made an entirely understandable mistake. Even if he was now reacting in a rather less understandable manner.

I wanted to say all that. But I just said, “No, I wasn’t looking at you. ”

He continued his onslaught of violent strangeness in my face, now telling me to go away. Not in so many words, of course. In fact, I think I’m pretty sure I heard him say “get the f—- out of here, you bald c—t.” Even though he was the bald one in this relationship. Presumably he meant to say “blond c—t”, but I definitely heard it as “bald”. It’s fair to say neither one of us was thinking particularly clearly at the time.

Part of me was thinking about what he was actually going to do to me, and what it might feel like. Could it be I secretly, sexually wanting him to hurt me? Was I deliberately acting in my dazed way in order to attract people like this, because I’m so untouched by human hands right now? The pain as proof of attention, as proof of deliberate contact. Masochism as a by-product of intense loneliness. A boy’s bullying at school being his first formative sexual experience, colouring everything in later life. These are, after all, things I’m fascinated about as a writer.

But this is what a therapist might infer. I disagree. I am not my work. Not all of it. Not all of the time. So I walked away down the street.

I really wanted to tell him, “You’ve just crossed a busy road at the risk of your own life, purely in order to come over and threaten mine. Can’t you f— off?”

But I didn’t, of course. I just staggered home, my Dickonish daze now upgraded from thoughtful and daydreamy to upset and shocked.

I got in and wanted someone to put their arms around me and comfort me. But there was no one, of course. I’m too strange for that.

A reminder. This Easter Monday (April 17th) I’m playing a four-song acoustic set. I’m billed as Dickon Edwards solo, but will be accompanied by Tom Edwards on guitar.

It’s at the Boogaloo, as part of Ms Anna Page’s 4×4 night. Four songwriters each play four songs, and I’m one of them. Not sure what the running order is, but it all starts at 9pm. Free entry.

The Boogaloo, 312 Archway Road, Highgate, London N6 5AT, UK.
Nearest tube: Highgate (Northern line).

Please come.

Muriel Spark dies. Tributes rightfully abound, concentrating on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but I prefer A Far Cry From Kensington, with its depiction of 1950s Highgate. And most of all, for the following priceless piece of advice to budding novelists (which I feel also applies to public diarists). I was alerted to it by John Mortimer’s Where There’s A Will.

“[When you write, you must feel like] you are writing a letter to a friend… Write without fear or timidity. What you have to say will come out more spontaneously and honestly than if you are thinking of numerous readers. Before starting, rehearse in your mind what you are going to tell. But don’t do too much, the story will develop as you go along, especially if you write to make your reading friend smile or laugh or cry. Remember not to think of the reading public, it will put you off.”

Photos taken during last night’s Fosca gig at The Windmill, Brixton.

Photo credit: Bob Stuart from Underexposed.org.uk

DE:

Tom Edwards:

Kate Dornan:

Rachel Stevenson:

Just a reminder that Fosca are playing tomorrow night at the Brixton Windmill, supporting Amelia Fletcher and Claudia Gonson in Tender Trap.

Full information on the gig here.

I’m told the gig is close to selling out, so if you’re coming it’s advisable to book tickets online at:

http://www.wegottickets.com/event/9462

You should also be aware that Brixton tube station is closed this week, with bus replacement services running from Stockwell. However, Brixton National Rail station is open as usual, and trains run there from Victoria every 30 mins.

Once in Brixton town centre, you can take a longish walk or get a bus to the venue: 59, 159, 133 or 333.

Alternately, take a tube to Oval then one of the above buses directly to the venue.

The Windmill is three stops up Brixton Hill from Brixton town centre. Get off at the Blenheim Gardens stop, cross the road (Brixton Hill), and walk down the small road opposite (Blenheim Gardens). It looks all residential, but the venue is at the end on the right; just before you get to the actual real windmill.

Fosca are onstage at 9.30pm.

(thanks to Matt Haynes for the travel info)