Sitting here preparing CDRs for tonight’s DJ stint at the Last Tuesday Society’s Masked Ball, in the heart of the West End. Even at 8pm in comparatively sleepy Highgate, the New Year’s Noise has started outside. The increased banging of car doors, shouts in the street, vehicles careering too fast in side streets, parties to get to, parties to get from. Where’s the party? Everywhere.

So I’ve plunged myself into the core of it all – DJ-ing from 1am to 3am at the Arts Theatre, near Leicester Square.

Trying to decide which version of ‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’ to play. The Monroe original is too stop-starty, and isn’t quite as danceable as one might think. There’s a recent remix which splices Marilyn’s vocals with a modern swing arrangement, which I’m toying with. But then there’s Nicole Kidman’s version from Moulin Rouge, which is certainly full of rhythm (and which I suspect the Monroe remix is trying to ape). Possibly goes a little far in the giddy sweetshop direction. On New Year’s Eve, though, giddiness is rather the point.

***
New Year’s Resolution: never write in the diary about something which hasn’t happened yet. It can tempt fate.
Earlier this year, there was my being collared by a woman who wanted me to model suits for Paul Smith. I gave her my details, but did she get in touch? Did she Prada.

More recently, I mentioned here that the Guardian Guide emailed me, asking for a few words about my ideal ‘Midnight Track’ for their NYE club listings. They also wanted them by the next day. I duly replied at once. They said thanks.

Bought the Guide yesterday, only to see my bit wasn’t used after all. Oh well.

Here’s what I wrote:

BUGSY MALONE (Original Movie Soundtrack): You Give A Little Love / Finale

A dissonant piano chord rings out and the party noise stops. Then a simple, childlike vaudeville riff gingerly nudges the song to life, and songwriter Paul Williams (voicing the male cast of the 1975 childrens’ film Bugsy Malone) offers a wounded but triumphant melody of hope: ‘We could have been anything that we wanted to be / You give a little love and it all comes back to you….’ It’s the end of the movie, the end of the big custard pie fight, it’s charming and winning, it’s the styles of the 1920s via the kids of the 1970s, and it’s as powerful as ever. What better song to mark the passing of Father Time than this jaunty and defiant celebration of the child-adult axis in life? And you can dance to it.

***
Still, my mum is elsewhere in the same Saturday Guardian, in the New Year’s Honours List. I note that the Guardian goes with ‘quilt maker’, while the Times prefers ‘quiltmaker’.

***

Thank you, Dear Reader, for granting me your attention in 2007. See you in 2008. Take care. Don’t talk to any strange men. Do talk to a few strange hermaphrodites, though. At least you know where you are with them.

O, you bloated interregnum between Christmas and New Year’s Eve! You mute limbo of inertia and fetid leftovers! You Sunday Squared, you!

Where was I last time? Oh yes. Talking of leftovers, here’s the rest of my Christmas Day photos.

11am: Avenue Road. Vyvian the cat suddenly throws himself into a nearby cardboard box. I didn’t put him there, honest. He wants to play.

11.30am. Walk from Avenue Road to Waterlow Park, via Hornsey Lane. It’s raining heavily. Stop on Archway Bridge. Also known as Suicide Bridge. So this is the view looking towards Central London on Christmas Day 2007.

A Wet Christmas, needless to say. Given the time of year, I’m on a bridge favoured by the suicidal, and I’ve banked a cheque on the 24th, I can’t help thinking of It’s A Wonderful Life. ‘No man is a failure while he has friends.’

As I’m musing on this, a car comes by and drenches my entire lower half via this very puddle:

1145am. Meet Silke in Highgate Village, and we walk to the duck pond in Waterlow Park. I have this annual ritual of feeding the local waterfowl on Christmas Day. Don’t ask me why, or indeed how long I’ve been doing it. This time, Ms Silke is also spending Christmas by herself in Highgate, so I invite her to join me.

Here, defiant in the pouring rain, we throw bread to the coots, moorhens and mallards, pull crackers, wear party hats, and drink hot mulled wine from Silke’s Thermos. Joggers pass by us with bemused expressions. It’s quite a Capra moment.

(Actually, I think going jogging in the rain on Christmas Day is equally eccentric, but anyway).

Pulling crackers in the freezing rain:

Mulled wine in Emily Strange & Virginia Woolf mugs:

Afternoon: Sleep off the effects of the wine. Have bought some special gluten-free, dairy-free dark chocolates, in the hope of preventing any IBS stomach aches. They are so delicious that I wolf the entire box down in one session. Thus giving me, yes, a stomach ache.

Read the Alan Moore LOEG Black Dossier, including the further adventures of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Treats for bookish trainspotters: one alias for Orlando’s many female incarnations is ‘Vita’ (Ms Sackville-West being the original muse for Orlando). There’s also a reference to a period spent as a ‘bloody orange cat’ (a nod to Ms Hale’s series of children’s books, Orlando The Marmalade Cat).

6pm. Off to Claudia Andrei’s in Archway. Claudia has been forced to snake-sit for her upstairs neighbour. Turns out the lady in the flat above couldn’t fit her pet snake’s tank in her car at the last minute. So poor Claudia has had to feed the thing over Christmas. And she has a phobia of snakes. I would offer to feed it for her, but I’m even more fearful of the things. Rather negligent of the neighbour to leave it to the last minute, really, telling Claudia it’s her or nobody. With snake power comes snake responsibility.

I’m easier to feed. Claudia cooks me dinner, we pull more crackers, and enjoy the rip-roaring disaster movie that is the Doctor Who special:

Claudia and Sevig:

8.30pm. To Lucy & Dale’s new flat in Muswell Hill, for TV console party games: quizzes (Buzz) and karaoke (SingStar). Charley Stone and Alex P are there, as are Lucy’s sister Pheobe and mum Jill, plus alcohol, and we all have a suitably dizzy, fizzy time. Dale cooks me yet more dinner while I sit out the Rock Guitar game. A toy guitar, with buttons instead of strings, is connected to the console. You have to get the buttons in the right order for the likes of ‘Smoke On The Water’ to play out, in time with the screen. If you make a mistake, the game makes clunky feedback noises. Sadly, there’s no Jesus & Mary Chain version, where to NOT make clunky feedback noises would be the mistake.

Somewhere in all this, I tell Charley that Fosca are touring Sweden in March, and that neither Kate nor Tom can make it. Would she – as a member of Fosca herself circa 1998 – be willing to help out and play guitar for us? She says yes, all being well. A ten year symmetry in line-up.

The two of us walk home at about 1.30AM, back to Crouch End and Highgate. I have been fed and watered several times over, and now I have a guitarist for the tour who’s talented and fine company, and whom I’ve managed to stay friends with since 1994. No man is a failure, indeed. Thank you, O Christmas Day Friends, O London Family. Ducks, cats, rain and puddle water included.

A proud day. My mother gets an MBE.

There she is in the New Year’s Honours List, alongside Kylie Minogue, Michael Parkinson, Ian McKellen, Jacqueline Wilson, Hanif Kureishi, Richard Griffiths, Julie Walters, Leslie Phillips, Ian Anderson (of Jethro Tull), and the president of The Lute Society.

In today’s Times, she’s between Llewelyn Goronwy Edwards, ‘councillor, Ceredigion County Council, for services to local government in West Wales’ and Francis Egerton, ‘lately opera singer, for services to music’:

Lynne Edwards, quiltmaker, for services to arts and crafts

From the East Anglian Daily Times:

Lynne Edwards of Bildeston, near Ipswich, is to receive her MBE for services to Arts and Crafts for her reputation as an international renowned quilt maker.

I can never think of the word ‘renowned’ without being reminded of the opening line in The Da Vinci Code. Also, shouldn’t that be ‘internationally renowned’? And it’s probably a matter of taste and newspaper style, but I think ‘quiltmaker’ looks better as one word, rather than two. Like ‘storyteller’.

Anyway, never mind me, for once. The EADT goes on:

Mrs Edwards, a trained teacher, has been making quilts for over twenty years and is regarded as one of the finest patchwork and quilting experts in the world. She has written a number of books to pass on her vast knowledge of techniques.

All of which is a pushover to having me as a son, frankly.

Congrats, Mum. See you at the Palace. She’s taking me, Tom and Dad along.

John Julius Norwich’s Christmas Cracker is an annual selection of quotes and clippings from his commonplace book. He prints it up as a thin, elegant booklet and distributes it to the counters of a few London bookshops (Daunts, Waterstones Piccadilly).

From the latest Cracker, here’s some ‘howlers’ found in school compositions. They made me laugh a little too loudly in public places, so be warned.

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind from a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

Slink into dutiful over-indulgence for two days. Any excuse. The 25th is punctuated with visits to friends in the area, plus feeding a cat, in addition to the usual Waterlow ducks. The 26th is a day of happy solitude: loafing around, sitting in Muswell Hill cafes, dozing off.

I now feel I have eaten, drunken and slept enough to keep me going for all of 2008.

***

Notes from the 25th, with photos.

9 AM, Highgate. Mum & Dad’s presents to me include two graphic novels, Posy Simmonds’s Tamara Drewe, and Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier. Both are new works by old hands. In fact, I first enjoyed the authors when I was a teenager living with my parents, so it all makes sense. I phone Mum & Dad to chat and say thanks. They’ve also sent me a cheque, which I banked the day before. Going to the bank on Christmas Eve, and to deposit money, made me think of It’s A Wonderful Life.

10 AM. To Avenue Road in Highgate, to feed Jennifer Connor’s cat, Vyvian. Named after the character in the Rik Mayall series The Young Ones. So I recall how Anna S’s cat in nearby Archway is called Flashheart, after the Rik Mayall character in Blackadder. I try to think of a third Rik Mayall-related cat, but fail.

Jennifer’s house is a few doors along from the Romo After-Party House, where the band Persecution Complex – sisters Chesca & Becca Grover and their school friends Ryan & Liz – used to live. Pretty much everyone involved in that whole Romo scene circa 1995 regularly repaired to this quiet Highgate street, after Club Skinny or Club Arcadia chucked out. The walls were coated in tin foil, a nod to Warhol’s Factory, and the PC House had a similarly Warholian open house policy. All kinds of ruffians, ‘superstars’ and characters from the mid 90s music scene came by. Just as well no one was shot.

But oh, the tales to be told. I’ve just remembered the band The Longpigs were among the visitors. Which means Richard Hawley would have been there.

The PC sisters are still making music, currently as The Rum Circus, and have moved down the road, to Crouch End.

Becca got married this year. I was one of the few Old Romos at the reception. Didn’t really know the husband, or indeed most of their new rock band-type friends. It’s not like it is in Richard Curtis films, with the same group of friends staying together for decades, through marriages and funerals. So I now cherish invitations from those I’ve known for more than a few years, even if the later contact is sporadic.

At Becca’s wedding reception I bumped into Lucy Hunt, who grew up in Kettlebaston, a tiny Suffolk village close to my own, Bildeston. Her parents knew my parents, and I caught the same school bus as her when I was about 14. She became a Hunt Saboteur in her later teens, foiling the local fox and hare antagonists. I think the joke about her surname had been well and truly made at the time.

Ten years later, circa 1995, and I met Lucy again at one of my first music industry parties. This time, she was the press officer for the band Ash. I didn’t see her again until 2007. She grabbed me to say hi both times, though. Not the other way around. I prefer it that way.

So much of my life is like this, because I live in constant fear of being told off. Why am I at this party? I got an invite. Why do I have the Diary Angels scheme, asking readers to send me money? Because two readers suggested it, separately. Not me. What am I doing in Sweden, or on the cover of a Dutch newspaper? I was asked. What am I doing on a BBC1 documentary? I got a phone call. Why am I DJ-ing? I was emailed.

It wasn’t me. Not my idea. Not my fault. Don’t blame me. And so on. It’s about time I stopped this craven approach. Let 2008 see more action, more accountability, more instigation, and less arrogance and passivity for its own sake.

So this year I bumped into Lucy H at Becca Grover’s wedding reception. She’s now working for the people behind the Sugababes, or someone like that. I suppose the next time we’ll meet will be about 2019.

Also at Becca’s wedding was an older gentleman I didn’t recognise:

Man: Hi Dickon. You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of the McCanns.

For a few seconds my mind threw up a photo of this year’s most famous missing girl. I’ve been accused of all kinds of things in the past, and refuse to be surprised any more. But the cogs eventually clicked, and I realise he meant a friend of Shane MacGowan’s I know, also called McCann.

This is an absolutely typical occurrence for me. I try to tune my brain into Becca & Cheska Grover mode, and tune out all the other scenes and social circles and lives I’ve dipped into. And then when I bump into someone from the Shane MacGowan ‘scene’, or someone from my Suffolk childhood ‘scene’, I feel I should somehow be confused.

The phrase ‘small world’ is a cliche too far. People aren’t filed away in boxes in the way they are in one’s mind. I just need to tell myself this more often.

‘Mr Edwards! You are NOT at the centre of the universe. Yes, someone you know from Simon Price’s club scene now IS dating the guitar player from a Sarah Records band you last saw in 1992. Yes, you DID know Ms X and Mr Y separately from their respective London scenes, before they met and moved in together. So what!

‘Your name and appearance may be filed away in the minds of many. But – get this – you are NOT at the front of their mental queues! At best, you are a slightly easy to spot footnote. Now get that understood, and get over yourself. Turn that vanity into productive work, or turn it off!’

This is my Christmas Message, by the way. Get Over Yourself, Me.

Now, here’s Vyvian the cat. Who belongs to Jennifer Connor. Who lives with Alex Mayor, the Baxendale member and producer of the new Fosca album. And she’s dating Chris, whom she met a couple of years ago, but whom I vaguely knew in 1997 when he was editing the early Belle and Sebastian videos and who was part of that whole Chalk Farm scene including people like David & Katrina from the Orlando fan club, and Mel whom I saw carrying a baby on Holloway Road the other day, who was in the Debutantes, who share members with Scarlet’s Well, who, who, who…

‘Mr Edwards! You’ve been warned. Shut up and feed the cat.’

***

Okay. Merry Christmas, Vyvian.

It’s Christmas Day. So I’ve bought crackers from John Lewis. They have little sequins on the outside.

Fine. I’ll pull it myself.

There you go, one party hat. No? Pfft. And they say cats are child substitutes. At least babies can wear party hats. Well, if you catch them asleep.

Not sure what this cracker gift is. A kind of miniature specs case. Or a coin case, perhaps. Here’s the joke.

When is a boat like snow? When it’s adrift.

I can find funnier jokes. Next entry, then.

This year’s featured tree is in the Reading Room at The London Library.

Photo taken just before the Library closed for Christmas (Sat Dec 22nd, 5.25pm). Thanks to the kind lady from Reader Services who gave me permission, and who took the snap.

Suffice it to say that, in this noted oasis of ringtone-free silence and study, I waited till all the other readers had left before striking my pose.

Peace on earth to you all. Shhh.

(tiptoes into the next entry)

Saturday afternoon at the barber’s. On entering, I am surprised to find the place empty.

Barber: Take a seat, sir.

Me: Already! Thank you.

(I sit in the chair.)

Me: I usually have to wait, you see. Sometimes I’ve sat through three other haircuts before it’s my turn. And that was first thing on a Saturday morning.

Barber: It’s because there’s a match on. Everyone comes here in the morning, before they go shopping or go to the football. It’s Saturday afternoons that are less busy.

Me: Ah. Just as well I don’t like football.

(The haircut begins. An awkward pause.)

Barber: So… Did you see the match last week?

So, this week I appeared in another national newspaper. He said casually.

To wit, Holland’s NRC Handelsblad. Welcome, new readers in Holland.

Here I am on the front page masthead, top left (click to enlarge):

Here I am on the supplement cover:

And here’s the double-page article. It’s about modern dandies, and includes Sebastian Horsley:

PDF files here and here.

Thanks to Joris Gillet for the scans, and Corine Vloet for the article itself. She adds:

The supplement cover reads ‘The dandy’s back’… The piece itself is titled ‘Phoney, but a real phoney’ – a quote by Sebastian Horsley. Incidentally, that photo of Sebastian being rude does in no way convey the gist of the article.

But it does convey the gist of Sebastian.

Interesting that I can get this kind of coverage when I have nothing to plug (not until the Fosca album in March), no agent or PR or manager, and zero hustling on my part.

Thursday: meet with Mum and Dad at Somerset House, by the ice rink. Then to the Sickert show at the Courtauld gallery next door, before making our way down to the Dulwich Picture Gallery for ‘The Age Of Enchantment’: a fantastic exhibition of Beardsley-influenced fantasy illustration up to the 1930s. Harry Clarke, Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham, Charles Robinson et al. Includes Beardsley’s own desk. Mum shocked about Beardsley’s death at 26. Easy to forget, given the enviable amount of work he still managed to put out. An above-average lifetime’s work, in a far too short lifetime. Bump into the artist Sina Shamsavari, whose drawing style carries something of the same influence down the line.

Friday: with Ms Silke to the Odeon Mezzanine to see Sleuth. It’s a slightly self-consciously modern remake, all jump cuts between surveillance cameras and overly close close-ups, with Jude Law in the Michael Caine role, Caine in the Olivier role, and Harold Pinter rewriting the script. Pinter the actor even gets a clever cameo.

Very Pinter indeed, in fact, with more character study going on below the surface than Anthony Shaffer’s original. The 70s film was ultimately a straightforward cat-and-mouse thriller, despite its unique twists. No sign of the anachronistic Shaffer line that Morrissey purloined for ‘This Charming Man’: ‘You’re just a jumped-up pantry boy, who never knew his place.’

Pinter’s additions include Caine’s millionaire character listing various celebrities he claims to know: Madonna, Dick Cheney, Mike Tyson, even The Queen. Were I Pinter (or director K Branagh), I’d replace ‘Madonna’ with ‘Morrissey’, partly by way of reference, but also because the goings-on are more like a Morrissey lyric. Jude Law plays the young Caine as a bisexual gigolo – if not an actual rent boy – with elements of the young Terence Stamp in Billy Budd, while Caine is more tender and sympathetic than Olivier. So the games the men play hint at a Wilde v Bosie roleplay. Which makes sense given the focus on Pinteresque suggestion (the dialogue never quite what the characters are really saying) and the actors’ chemistry. It’s just that the film gets a bit lost in its own twists and double-bluffs by the end.

Bizarre detail: Caine’s gadget-heavy mansion is operated by a remote control that’s clearly an iPod Nano in disguise. Why?

Bump into Sina S again, this time in Cambridge Circus on the way home.

I have a little background voice in my head that constantly mutters ‘you’re a failure, you’re useless, you can’t write, you can’t earn a living, you’re ugly, you’re a waste of skin, no one likes you, you’ll never find love, just occasional toleration, it serves you right, it’s your own fault, give up, die, die, die’ and so on.

Thankfully I don’t believe the little voice. Particularly when for some reason it sounds frankly like Dick Dastardly from the kids’ cartoon show Wacky Races.

It’s just that it can be rather draining having to battle it all the time, particularly in the middle of the night. It’s 2.15AM as I type this, I can’t sleep, and I’m worried about all the writing I keep putting off. At this point, negative thoughts seize their chance.

So it’s a nice surprise when little positive things like this appear, not so much head-swelling as self-pity-demon-slaying. From last Friday’s Guardian, an evocative piece by Laura Barton that mentions my old band and quotes my lyrics:

Around that time, my friend Joe made me a compilation tape, full of Kenickie and the Pastels and Felt, and on it an Orlando song that seemed to sum up all that I wanted to leave: “This life that is measured out in bus stops and rain”.

The Orlando song in question is ‘Contained’.

Weirdly, that comforting Jonathan Richman song she mentions, ‘The Morning of Our Lives’ (from Modern Lovers Live), popped into in my head over the last week, for the first time in years.

Similarly, I’ve mentioned before that Swedish author Martina Lowden quotes me in her novel Allt, but I can’t resist mentioning this flattering detail, from her first email to me:

I quote your lyrics and your internet diary a lot in my book (actually more than I quote Philip Larkin).

I’m truly not worthy. However, if we must be compared, I would say (and I want this in my obituary), that if nothing else, I definitely have nicer hair than Philip Larkin.

‘And a nicer attitude towards your parents,’ says my mother.

Which reminds me of Roger McGough’s reply to that most notorious Larkin poem, ‘This Be The Verse’:

They tuck you up, your mum and dad.

[Erratum: the above is actually by Adrian Mitchell, not Roger McGough. Mitchell’s parody is called ‘This Be The Worse’.

Confusingly, his chum Mr McGough also wrote a Larkin pastiche, ‘This Be Another Verse’. But it’s a rather more serious response, and begins: ‘They don’t f— you up, your mum and dad / Despite what Larkin says…’]

***

Dear Dickon… just a short hello from me as i was impressed by what i read about you in a Dutch literary section of a national newspaper over the weekend. I’d say that the world would be better if everybody would know who they are and what they do, such as yourself.

Why, thank you. I presume this must be to do with the interview on New Dandyism that I gave the other week.

***

Someone from the Guardian Guide (London only edition, with local listings) emailed me, seeking a few quotes for their section on the city’s New Year’s Eve events. They’re including the Last Tuesday Society’s bash at the Arts Theatre, which I’m DJ-ing at.

Specifically, they wanted to know which song I’m most likely to play at the stroke of midnight. So I told them. I’ll tell the diary once it appears in the Guide, in the vague interests of suspense. But those who have witnessed my DJ sets in the past can make a pretty good guess.