Friday night and I decide to eschew going to see Gentleman Reg, much to my own chagrin. These days, I make these funny little pro v con arguments in my head when choosing to not go to something.

Pro: Reasons why you should go.
– You really like his music.
– He rarely plays in the UK.
– The venue is an intriguing gay indie club night called Lippy at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Maybe you’ll bump into someone you know there. Or maybe you’ll make exciting new contacts or friends.
– His stage time is midnight, so the normal buses and tubes will have stopped running by the time you make your way home. But drinking enough will help you deal with the long journey home alone via night buses. Yes, I know you’ve decided to never take a night bus journey by yourself again, but tonight you could make an exception.
– But then, perhaps you’ll get an offer to go on to someone else’s house for the night. Who knows?

Con: Reasons for not going.
– He’s on at midnight, and in recent weeks you’ve been going to sleep about this time. You wouldn’t get back to Highgate till at least 3am, factoring in the night buses and the waiting for the night buses.
– He’s playing again at the Brixton Windmill on Sunday. You can catch him then. He’ll definitely be done before the last tube.
– The club will be full of younger people. You will feel alone and depressed and thinking constantly to yourself “When I can go home?”, as you’ve done for too many nights out lately.
– You will be by yourself, and so will drink too much out of nervousness. You haven’t got enough money to get drunk this weekend, and besides you’ll feel ill and fragile for at least the next 24 hours. The price is far too high.
– You will have to go all the way to Vauxhall by yourself, which isn’t so bad. But the journey back will have to involve night buses. And waiting for night buses. By yourself. On a Friday night, at the mercy of London’s drunken bully population.

Cut to a few weeks ago, in a late-night Highgate take-away. I’m starving. And now I’m starving and frightened. Because a group of young men enter and gather around me.

“Come and look at this guy. He looks like a batty boy.”

Here we go again.

One is sipping from a large polystyrene cup. He asks me why I’m wearing make-up (and I wish I could fire back, “Are you quoting the thugs in that scene in The Naked Civil Servant? Is this a 1930s tribute attack?”).

“Do you f— men?. Are you a batty boy? Hey. Do you f— men?”

I grin sheepishly at my shoes, thinking no response is the best response.

And then he throws his drink fully in my face.

I can’t NOT respond to this. Fight or flight? Well, I’m me. So I get up and leave, without collecting my food.
Then as I walk past them, the drink-thrower touches my shoulder and says “We’re cool, mate, yeah? We’re cool?”

Is this his apology? Is he in conflict with his own thuggery? Is he having his own interior dialogue? “I had to do something. I can’t let a man who looks like that remain in my field of vision without doing something. And now I wish I hadn’t.”

To be fair, it’s just the one man out of the group that’s confronted me. His friends aren’t bothered after the initial curiosity. In fact, one of them sucks his teeth in disapproval when my interrogator throws the drink. A possible translation: “Ooh, that was unnecessary, Dave / Steve / Gary / Marmaduke. Let the funny-looking man be.”

I walk away, upset and angry. I think “That’s the last time. That’s the last night out by myself. Ever. ”

I feel I’ve had this too many times before for one life, and at the age of 35 I don’t have the stamina to take it any more. I’m already sworn off lone nightbus rides, taking taxis or nothing. Now I’m really thinking of putting the kibosh on going out in the evening by myself at all. At least, on a Friday or Saturday night. I’m just exhausted with having to be on my guard against my fellow man all the time. Going out shouldn’t mean having to deal.

I recount this to Ms A. She says I’m overreacting. That it’s a terrible shame if I completely curtail my London nightlife purely out of fear of attacks like this. That it’s like not crossing the road just because you can get run over.

Some rather more tongue-in-cheek comments from friends, defusing my whining with a certain gallows humour:

“Well, you do ask for it, frankly.”
“I’m just surprised you’re not actually attacked on a more regular basis.”
“Well, take-aways are bad for you.”
“You love it really. Lads expelling their liquids in your face in the middle of the night…”

It’s fair to say such acquaintances are having none of any drama-queen histrionics. So the diary gets them instead.

Besides, I urgently need to have my hair cut and re-bleached. That’s the main reason for not going out tonight, I tell myself. The No voice wins.

After a few weeks walking around in glasses, I go back on the contact lenses. I have to choose between spending what little money I have on upgrading my Internet service to tackle the domain spam, or I can subscribe to the lenses. I choose the latter. I like playing with the ‘Ipcress File’ black frames look, but my default image when photographed is without specs, so I do have a certain duty. This morning, despite months of being out of practice, the lenses go in without any fuss. It’s if my eyes are telling me, “About time too.”

A note from my mother:

If any of your friends take Country Living magazine (probably not, unless they are closet Green Wellies types), then tell them to take a look at the January issue just out, as it’s got the profile on me in it. You can’t take a peek on the newsstands, sadly, as it’s packaged up with a free copy of She magazine.

A message from a student:

I’m studying you in my A level art on 19th century Decadence. Perfect contemporary flaneur methinks… I’m painting you with a mountain of lilies at the moment, very stylistic and impressionistic.

Am getting around to writing up events uncovered by the diary, so a few thoughts on the last two Beautiful and Damned outings.

The November event attracts the largest gathering of dressed-up people than ever, and at the end of the evening I am surprised and delighted to be thrown roses. I’m aware the club is used as a birthday party for some, which suits me fine. In fact, I’ve been booked for a wedding in the Lake District in May. I still don’t know what the hell I’m doing when I take to the decks, but perhaps that’s part of the appeal. And I’m a shameless crowd pleaser, to a fault.

The only times I displease members of the crowd is during the Christmas event. In my early evening set of painless Christmassy songs, two women demand I play ‘Fairytale Of New York’ and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You”. They are not dressed up in the B&D way, and it’s clear they are from that solipsistic breed of Christmas pub goers, installing themselves in a pub they wouldn’t normally go to, already drunk by 8pm, and often giving the bar staff a hard time. I politely decline their requests, though adding that I actually like hearing those records myself. Just not right here, and not right now.

They get quite insistent, and I end up almost screaming at them to leave me alone.

“This night is all about hearing records you don’t normally hear in pubs,” I shout. “This is London in the week before Christmas! ‘Fairytale Of New York’ and that Mariah Carey song are very probably being played elsewhere tonight! Other pubs are available in London! I’M ONLY IN THIS ONE! Between you and me, I’m the only one contractually obliged to be here. I’d happily refund your money if it wasn’t a free event.”

They’re having none of it.

“We’re asking you to play that Pogues song. Go on. You have to play it, I’m Irish”. And this is added as if makes it any difference. Her accent is, of course, entirely English.

“Well, I’ve been on holiday with Shane MacGowan!” I retort, an equally meaningless counter-argument. Name-dropping only serves to make you look an absolute fool, even though it feels impressive on the tongue. I wince as I write this admission, even weeks later.

The Christmas edition is a Masked Ball, and there’s plenty of people making an effort with wearing masks, not all of whom are personally known to the DJs. We screen Mr Chaney’s 1925 Phantom Of The Opera, complete with its stunning “Bal Masque” sequences in an early, two-colour form of Technicolor.

Miss Red appears in the Christmas 2006 issue of Time Out to talk about the club. Her set covers the awkward section of the evening when people start to finally get up and dance. Then I take over on the decks, and as the clientele are in the mood for dancing, I more or less ride on her coat-tails. Partly literally, as Miss R often dresses in genuine top hat and tails.

For the Christmas outing, my eye mask is a half-black, half-white affair, which I like to think makes me look a little like the villain from the classic 80s Doctor Who story The Caves Of Androzani. A journalist from the Evening Standard interviews me in the Boogaloo kitchen, but can’t speak to me until I unmask. “I suppose this is how Jack Straw feels about talking to women in veils”. She is accompanied by a photographer who’s a bit pushy in getting shots of my friends. Whether a piece appears in the newspaper or not I have no idea. My policy is to let others tell you.

I air ‘Jesus Christ’ by Big Star along with selections from Christmas albums by Phil Spector (naturally), Peggy Lee, Doris Day, The Carpenters and the Rat Pack, plus a Judy Garland compilation taken from the soundtrack to her early 60s TV series. She duets with Mel Torme on “Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire”, and reminds us that he actually co-wrote the thing.

I haven’t seen the programme, but from the CD’s spoken word segments, Ms Garland’s TV set must be a mock-up of a Christmas living room. As she informs us in the introduction, “Liza’s outside, skating”.

My mailbox has lately become deluged with ‘Returned Mail’ spam. Someone somewhere has been using my dickonedwards.co.uk domain as the return address for their unnecessary little emails. Apparently there’s nothing I can do about this. Except echo Bill Hicks’s words about asking for people who work in advertising to please kill themselves. I have no problem with advertising in its proper place. But spam email, however automated, is the result of certain human beings deciding that spam is desirous to humanity. They are wrong. They must desist and dismantle their software which causes spam, and do something else with their time at once. Get a job in proper marketing if they must.

One of the many awful jobs I had to endure in my twenties was cold calling in a telesales office. I was paid to phone the blameless residents of Bristol, taking their names from the phone directory, and would try to sell them burglar alarms. I lasted about a week before the irony of the situation hit me: I was, after all, breaking and entering by phone. I literally walked out mid-session, and can still recall the ponytailed boss shouting after me “Oh you’re off then? You’ll be back.”

It’s not as if the money was any good: the equivalent of minimum wage. And I should add that this was literally the only position that my Job Centre could find for me at the time; I ran the risk of losing benefit by not giving it a go. But once I realised what it entailed, I preferred to risk starvation. There’s no two ways about it. Unsolicited emails, phone calls or texts are wrong. I would add to this the so-called ‘chuggers’: charity workers who leap at you on the street with their clipboards. I once shouted at a particularly persistent chugger in Charing Cross: “Other jobs are available! Ones which leave people alone! Please get one!” As you might imagine, this was completely out of character for me. He really pushed me too far, following me up the road as I was trying to avoid him.

The only permissable unsolicited mail I can think of is the occasional distribution by letter box of flyers for events and local services, and leaflets from political parties during elections. Material which people might actually be interested in looking at.

But the practice of sending out gibberish email to someone without their consent, while using a return address of someone ELSE without THEIR consent, not only is morally wrong, but seems like a complete waste of time for all parties. Why DO they do it? It can only be out of pure spite against humanity. It does rather bring out one’s inner Daily Mail Reader.

The sadness of taking down Christmas decorations abounds, with people walking into the temporary tree recycling service in Highgate Wood carrying their now less perky Christmas trees. I bin my chocolate Advent Calendars and like the idea of thinking that was all I lived on in December. It wouldn’t be true, but it’s a good image.

To a preview screening of Amazing Grace, a historical drama about William Wilberforce to mark the 200th anniversary of the Abolition bill. This was just the curtailing of the slave trade and not slavery per se, which didn’t end till 1833. But as the drama points out, political change – then as now – had to be implemented gradually, so it became inevitable rather than radical. Anything that looked vaguely like revolution – particularly at a time of uprisings in America and France – was branded as nothing short of sedition. Seems ridiculous now that something so obviously wrong couldn’t be stopped as soon as the campaign gathered public support in the hundreds of thousands, but one only has to look at a million people marching against the Iraq War (and ignored) for a modern echo.

In 1788, supporters of Abolition could wear fashionable cameos depicting a Negro in chains and inscribed with the Abolition Committee’s seal, “Am I not a Man and a Brother?”. Rather like the Make Poverty History wristbands today.

In the movie, Mr Wilberforce is played by Ioan Gruffudd, last seen as Mr Fantastic in The Fantastic Four. For this real-life 18th Century superhero prone to bouts of illness, his hair is frequently tousled and messy. I can’t help thinking he looks like a young Bob Geldof. Which is rather fitting.

The film lacks the wit of The Madness Of King George, and I note its screenplay is by the writer of Dirty Pretty Things, another well-intentioned but thinly characterised film of late. But it’s otherwise rather good, and definitely needs to be seen by anyone unware of Mr Wilberforce and the story of Abolition in the UK. The singer Youssou N’Dour plays Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who bought his own freedom and published a bestselling book of memoirs in 1789, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. It’s one of the earliest known British books by a black writer, and is still in print – I pop over to Borders after the screening to have this confirmed.

I’m reminded of Mr Blair’s statement last year to the New Nation newspaper, where he expressed sorrow for Britain’s role in the slave trade, but stopped short of an actual apology. Among those wanting him to go further was an irate caller to a local radio programme. She pointed out her lifelong anger at having to bear the surname given to her ancestors by a slave trader, and never knowing what her family name should really be.

Billy Reeves, former songwriter in The Audience turned BBC London traffic news reporter and general London character, is managing a new band called Friends Of The Bride. They are young men in impeccable suits who play a kind of Monochrome Set-type jazzy swaggering pop. I approve.

Alex de Campi writes:

Three days ago, in a small North African city on the edge of the Sahara, Mr B brandished his newly-purchased fez and declaimed, “I shall wear this to the next Beautiful & Damned!”

I thought it might amuse you to learn that your night was remembered even in deepest Tunisia.

Just filed my latest movie reviews for Plan B magazine. These include Notes On A Scandal, which is already one of my favourite films of 2007. Not least for quotes like these:

“You’ve got a basement flat off the Archway Road and you think you’re Virginia frigging Woolf!”

(Archway Road is my local high street)

“Her fetish for the boy was simply her snobbery manifested. ‘He’s Working Class and he likes Art’. As if he were a monkey who’d just strolled out of the rain forest and asked for a gin and tonic.”

I heard a critic on the radio the other day bemoaning the casting of Rene Zellweger as Beatrix Potter in the new film Miss Potter. His point was that she was stealing work from perfectly good British actresses. Well, Cate Blanchett isn’t British either, but I defy anyone to see her as the trusting if pretentious schoolteacher Sheba Hart in Notes On A Scandal and come to the same conclusion.

As for Miss Potter, it’s fluffy and visually sumptuous fare but has more modern substance than appearances suggest. Beatrix, Frederick Warne (Ewan McGregor) and Millie Warne (Emily Watson) are all careerless thirty-somethings dismissed by their families as aimless wastrels best kept on a leash. Rather reminds me of a few people I know in 2006. Though the film does move away from such issues to ultimately resemble an advert for the Lake District Tourist Board, I found it perfectly enjoyable. And Ms Zellweger’s casting is fine. Her accent may be a slightly posher Bridget Jones, but it works. Ewan McGregor twinkles sensitively behind his Christmas Cracker moustache, and all is well.

Another appeal to make, this time to my Swedish readers and those connected with the Swedish indie music scene.

The dazzling baroque-pop band Scarlet’s Well, who are fronted by Bid of The Monochrome Set, and with whom I’m an occasional lyricist and ardent fan, are keen to play in Sweden. They want to know if I have any contacts with promoters over there. Well, what happened with Fosca last time was a group of Fosca fans actually became temporary promoters themselves, purely to put us on. I don’t think I really know any proper professional Swedish promoters.
But if any are reading, do please contact Bid and Scarlet’s Well via their webpage.

That’s enough appeals for friends for now. I’ve got a backlog of requests, in fact, from all kinds of people asking me to publicise their projects or help them find collaborators, but this is meant to be a diary, so I must keep such announcements sporadic if I do them at all.
Back to me. A fellow Highgater with a blog consisting entirely of drawings suggested by readers has recently featured me as a subject. Link (with permission)

Donny asks: Please could you draw a picture of Dickon Edwards?

Anna asks: Please would you draw a robot wearing a feather boa and a hat with wax fruit on it?

Decided to combine the modern day dandy that drinks in the local and the robot dolled up for a nice cabaret show. Don’t they look cute together.

Actually, I think he’s drawn me as the fifth Doctor Who wielding a Sonic Screwdriver and a piece of Psychic Paper.

I’d forgotten to mention that Gentleman Reg’s songs have been featured on the soundtracks to the US TV series Queer As Folk and the movie Shortbus. You can hear a few on his MySpace page here. Lovely, lovely stuff.

An idle, aimless drifting around the clock governs my opening days of January, so I decide to impose a strict timetable. I force myself to be out of bed at 6am, into a sandblasting shower, strap myself into the uniform and start writing a diary entry by 6.30. The aim is to get a daily entry posted by 7am. I feel a diary should be written either last thing at night or first thing in the morning. I prefer the morning – the sense of being the first in the queue, as it were.

An announcement, first of all. The splendid Toronto singer-songriter Gentleman Reg, aka Reg Vermue, is coming to London to play a few gigs. He’ll be in town from the 10th to the 15th and tells me he’s looking for floors to sleep on for himself and his two bandmates. “I have the last few nights covered but not the first few. Let me know if you have friends with huge london apartments…”

I wouldn’t normally make such an appeal if I hadn’t got to know him in person the last time he visited. I can therefore vouch that Mr Vermue is as Gentlemanly as his recording name suggests, the very opposite of that rather uncouth young rock singer on Celebrity Big Brother. If you can help, Dear Reader, please contact Reg via his site at www.gentlemanreg.com.

He’s playing the 12th at the The Royal Vauxhall Tavern, and on the 14th at the Windmill in Brixton, and is well worth catching.

RIP today to two favourite London institutions: the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden and the Monday night club Trash. The former saw many a pleasant visit from my teen years to one of the rare attempts to use my college training as a Stage Manager in 1992. This was when some fellow Bristol Old Vic Theatre School graduates mounted a production of Mr Godber’s “Bouncers” in the Museum’s performance space. Still Bristol-based at the time, I stayed in Lambeth with a kindly gay gentleman who worked at the Drill Hall. His huge record collection consisted solely of classical and opera, with the exception of one pop album: “Behaviour” by the Pet Shop Boys. While I was staying there, I bought the latest Unrest album from Rough Trade (“Imperial” – still a favourite) and tried it out on his hi-fi. The stylus must have recoiled in horror.

I was last at the Theatre Museum a year or so ago, when it hosted some panel debate on circus arts versus burlesque or some such. The museum itself was always gorgeous and magical, and it’s a genuine shame it couldn’t keep going. Exhibits which spring to mind include the sinister skeletal horse costumes from the original National Theatre production of ‘Equus’.

Last time I was at Club Trash, I felt my age all too keenly: the clientèle always tended to be under 25, if a fashionably dressed under 25. In fact, I’m pretty sure some young acquaintances said “Aren’t you a bit old for this, Dickon?”. I’d been going since it opened in 1997 and was once featured as a ‘Face’ of the club in an Evening Standard feature circa 2000. In fact, I’d started going to Erol Alkan’s previous club Going Underground in 1995, recalling him spinning Pulp’s ‘Common People’ before it was released. Trash was more of the same, but gradually morphed from just another indie disco popular with students, NME readers and tourists into Britpop, and into something unique. Entirely down to Mr Erol’s infectious spirit, I think. For me, he’s always been one of the few London well-connected types who manages to buck the cliche of being stand-offish and unfriendly. He was serious and ambitious about the club, yet retained an amiable and open attitude. It’s impressive that he never missed a single Monday night for ten years, and that he kept the door price far below what he could have gotten away with given then club’s international reputation in its latter years. Again, bucking that London cliche of charging what you think you can get, and then adding more, just because it’s London.

I was a regular for about seven of its ten years, and Trash provided many happy memories. I’m sad it’s closing, but I’m sure Mr Erol will be okay. He’s passionate about what he does, always walking about with a bag full of records and a pair of headphones. The proper DJ all-enclosing sort, not those ubiquitous little white iPod bugs.

Am recovering from either food poisoning or gastric flu.

Spend my first hours of 2007 sleeping on the floor of Mr Hughes’s boat moored on the canal in Oxford, but in utter agony. I am kept awake with stomach pains and having to make frequent visits to the toilet. My host Mr Hughes is enormously tolerant, even when I break the tap in his bathroom through turning it the wrong way.

I am tortured twice during this first night of the year: once with the stomach cramps, and twofold with the guilty knowledge that getting up for the toilet will probably awaken my host. I am the mercy of my condition, and therefore so is he.

The journey back to Highgate the next day is equally fraught – I find even sitting down makes my predicament worse, even though the train and tube have plenty of seats. I’m all for not being able to sit down after a night of debauchery, but in my case the reasons are more Joe Pasquale than Joe Orton.

The previous afternoon and evening – Dec 30th – is spent with Anna S and David B, drinking happily and steadily at The Flask pub and then in their Archway flat. This puts me in a state of severe hangover for the 31st itself. My plan was to escape London for New Year’s Eve, and take it easy with my boat-bound friend. I hadn’t banked on being first fragile and ill from overdoing it the night before, and then fragile and ill from contracting some stomach-related ailment. What a guest.

The pains are still ongoing, so I’ve cancelled all social functions till I recover fully. Shame, as this week I’ve been invited to TWO birthday gatherings, a book launch, a magazine launch and a concert. I’m behind with a couple of writing commissions, and I really should get those done as it is.

Back to Oxford, and for midnight we eschew the pubs. Walking through George St, the streets are like Anytown, UK. Loud young people – and the not-young people acting young – with the hint of violence about them, marching in packs from bar to bar. Screaming in shop doorways at each other to hurry up, and it’s barely 9pm.

Once we cross Cornmarket into Broad Street and the university part of town, it’s like crossing into Narnia. The streets are comparatively deserted, the neon hue of the High Street signs replaced by ancient college walls, and the noise dies down. Thank God. We spend a few minutes in The Turf Tavern, a pub which is so civilised it closes at 11pm on New Year’s Eve. The King’s Arms, another studenty haunt with lots of places to hide, is open, but is full of young men pretending to be Stephen Fry. Quite frankly I get enough of that at home.

Actually, that’s a good way of describing the difference between London and Oxford in 2007. In Oxford, all the young men think they’re Stephen Fry. In London, all the young men think they’re Pete Doherty or Russell Brand.

It’s battering down with rain. Mr Hughes has lent me a folding umbrella, and as soon as I get hold of it, the thing naturally turns inside out in the wind and falls apart, spokes akimbo. So we sit in the King’s Arms for a while. In a corner of the pub, the worse pub band in the world is attempting to play Radiohead’s ‘Creep’. An unkind passer-by adds ‘Perhaps it’s Radiohead.’

As soon as the rain clears, we stand by the dome of Radcliffe Camera to listen for the various city bells ringing in the New Year under a star-swept sky. Mr Hughes recites Yeats:

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

I retort by saying I’m feeling ‘old and tired and full of sleep…’.

On the stroke of 12, we exchange manly English handshakes and make our way back to the boat, taking a diversion to avoid the George St revellers. Or anyone else.

Happy New Year. He said, still feeling like someone has punched him in the stomach. It can only get better from here.

Here’s this month’s B&D details. If you’re in London that day, come, be nice, enjoy feeling lightly attractive and not saturated in London sarcasm.

THE BEAUTIFUL & DAMNED – JANUARY EDITION
Date: Thursday 25th January
Times: 9pm to 12.30am.
Venue: The Boogaloo, 312 Archway Road, London N6 5AT, UK. 020 8340 2928.
Tube: Highgate (Northern Line). Buses: 43, 134, 263.
Price: Free entry, but patrons are strongly encouraged to dress Timelessly Stylish.
More information on the News page.