A near-Frequently Asked Question from the mailbox:

I have been listening to On Earth to Make the Numbers Up non-stop lately… and, upon hearing the line in ‘Storytelling Johnny’ about t-shirts which proclaimed “Lose friends in days: ask me how”, I remembered that you actually have had such t-shirts (and badges) printed. I was just wondering if the t-shirts and badges were available online anywhere, or if they were only done for the Swedish tour? The prospect of Fosca merch is pretty enticing…

Yes, there are indeed t-shirts with that lyric now in existence, made by But Is It Art? of Stockholm. Or at least, there were when we toured Sweden. I can’t find a reference to the t-shirts on their website, so I suggest you use their Contact page to find out if they have any left:

http://www.butisitart.org/index2.html

***

Am pleased to find the Fosca album on sale in HMV near Piccadilly Circus. So it must be elsewhere too.

Also pleased that the music news site No Rock And Roll Fun has the album in their sidebar of ‘This Week’s Key Releases’:

http://xrrf.blogspot.com

The huge Zavvi megastore by the Circus that used to be Tower Records (and then Virgin) doesn’t stock the CD. When I ask an assistant, she looks it up and tells me it’s not out till May 8th. And they’re not sure if they’re going to get it in even then. So today HMV are officially better than Zavvi.

Fosca are filed between Forward Russia and Fountains Of Wayne. I’m slightly aware of the latter, but entirely ignorant of the former. What I do know is that more than a few other people must have heard of them, because Zavvi have crammed seven copies of their album into the racks where one by Fosca would ideally be, while on the front on their CD is one of those little stickers singing media praise.

Says Uncut Magazine on the sticker: “Pushes the punk-funk template into brave new territory.”

I’m sure they’re terribly good, but ‘brave’? How brave can punk-funk be? Do they regularly parachute into Middle Eastern warzones, naked except for t-shirts with that Danish cartoon on one side, and the words ‘COME AND HAVE A GO IF YOU THINK YOU’RE INSURGENT ENOUGH’ on the back? THAT would be brave. Playing guitar in a manner pleasing to someone from Uncut doesn’t necessarily have me reaching for the George Cross nomination form. But what do I know? I hear the Carling festival can be pretty tough.

Then again, maybe it’s the potentially euphemistic kind of ‘brave’ that’s not always what a band wants to hear. As in Lou Reed’s ‘brave’ Metal Machine Music. Or Scott Walker’s ‘brave’ Tilt. Brave is in ‘well done, but don’t expect anyone to play it too often.’

And indeed:

A: Do you like my new trousers?
B: Um. They’re very… brave.

Still no reviews from the music mags for the Fosca album, brave punk-funk or not.

But I do know I’m not quite the pariah dog of the UK rock press yet. Because yesterday I received an email from a journalist at Q Magazine.

They wanted to ask me… if I knew how to contact Shane MacGowan.

The Fosca album has just been released in the UK, distributed by Forte. I’m going to pop out and see if I can spot it in London record shops.

If anyone sees a review in the UK press, please do let me know. I’m not holding my breath, but it would be nice.

***
Have had a few job suggestions put to me. One is being a medical guinea-pig. I realise how this is known to be well-paid but it’s out of the question for a terminal hypochondriac such as myself. However much I’d be assured the tests were mild and safe, the relief afforded by the money would be several times offset by all the additional anxiety over imagined side-effects for days, if not years after the testing. My apologies to medical science. After I’m dead, though, they can help themselves. Assuming they’d want to. And here I think of that Graham Chapman song: ‘I’ve left my body to science / But I’m afraid they’ve turned it down.’

Someone else suggested I do a bit of voluntary work, as it always looks good on a CV. Well I already do, in a sense. Plan B Magazine have asked me to review five CD albums this week, and they can’t afford to pay occasional contributors like myself. I suppose I should really use my cache of clippings to try and secure paid reviewing work. It’s just the hustling side of things that balks me. Naively, I sit here hoping someone will just offer me work – not just opening the proverbial door but grabbing me and pulling me through it too. I watch others getting on in the world, knocking on doors or, if necessary, taking an axe to them. And of course, some just go into the door-making business. And the axe business. And the over-stretched metaphor business.

***
Feeling a little sad for the deaths of old men from Radio 4 or the pages of Punch who cheered up my youth: Ned Sherrin, Miles Kington and now Humphrey Lyttleton. The latter two made the connection between jazz music and joyously silly comedy (‘Let’s Parler Franglais’ still a hilarious series of books, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue managing to be the funniest show on the BBC right up to the end – or the end of Humph’s watch, at least), while Mr Sherrin’s just had a double CDs of his live show released, all anecdotes and quotes from a life in the theatre. I take a fogeyish pleasure in telling people the only CD I’ve bought so far this year is An Evening With Ned Sherrin rather than The Kills or The Killers or The Kooktons or the Ting Tings or the Dirty Pretty Tings or Get Ting Wear Ting Fly or the Yeah Yeahs Yeahs or Does It Ting You, Yeah?

Yes I know it fits my out-of-time image, but it also means I don’t feel qualified to write about new bands. I think proper music critics do have to know what’s going on in the new band scene per se, and I really don’t. From the age of 16 till 30 I read the music press religiously and knew at least something about every artist in the charts or in the NME or on the festival posters. But I now read reviews that compare a band I’ve never heard of with five others I’ve also never heard of. I read the line-up of a festival and shrug at about 90% of the names. I also feel the same way about books – the sense of a limited time on earth, that reading one means another goes unread, or an album goes unheard, or a movie unseen. The sheer volume of choice versus time running out.

So I lay awake at night, thinking of these things. Isn’t about time I properly got into folk music? Classical? Free Jazz? Or that kind of jazz you can actually stay in the same room as? In terms of enlightenment and pleasure, should I finally get around to reading Proust or investigate the full back catalogue of AC/DC? We just don’t know.

The CDs I tend to be given to review are often reissues from a time outworn, and this suits me fine. Today it’s the 50s recordings of Linda Hopkins, a blues singer who’s still performing and recording in her 80s. So my review will muse on things like age and how you can be 84 in blues, yet feel too old at 36 for indie music; and how recordings are a form of time travel, how the album is on the same label as Shampoo and Peter And The Test-Tube Babies (ie Cherry Red). All rather than pretend I’m an authority on blues.

I’m also writing about a new CD of some early 40s radio plays by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre, including his dramatisation – live with adverts – of Saki’s ‘Sredni Vashtar’, one of my favourite stories full stop. Music by Bernard Herrmann, too. It’s on El Records (obviously) – and is called ‘Orson Welles – Your Obedient Servant’. As you might imagine, this sort of album is really what ‘rocks my world’ in 2008. If I can’t be paid for reviewing, the next best thing is to be paid in the things I would be spending the money on if I were. The Welles CD is one of them.

Having said that, I feel okay about covering the Dresden Dolls, as I get the impression they’re in a genre of their own rather than part of any current trend. And they have that cross-over element with musicals and cabaret, with and without a big ‘C’.

And I do like the occasional new pop song, if it manages to find its way to me. Here’s ‘Little Bit’ by Stockholm’s Lykke Li, brought to my ears by a diary reader, with much thanks. I have no idea what you’re meant to think about this track in the UK, or even if she’s known in the UK at all, but I absolutely adore it and that’s all that matters:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mUC0ezAlHwE

Now I bet someone’s going to email in and tell me it’s been Number One for eighteen weeks.

This is for London readers only. I appreciate people who don’t live in London are probably fed up with having to hear about Ken v Boris and so on.

The London Mayoral & Assembly election is on Thursday. I’m voting Green – i.e. Siân Berry for first choice. Met her once, when she was handing out leaflets on Camden Road in the rain. Very nice she was too.

Then Ken for second choice. Not just because Siân recommends doing so, but because I think he’s doing a pretty good job, all things considered.

It’s frustrating that the media has limited much of its so-called balanced coverage to the Big Three, lumping the Green Party in with all the tiny have-a-go parties, despite the Greens’ long history and high membership.

I think the really important thing is to vote at ALL, as opposed to not bothering. Where this is particularly essential is on the less-hyped side of the election – the voting for Assembly members on a London-wide basis. Using the peach-coloured ballot paper, voters pick a single party and the seats are allocated accordingly.

The Greens already have two accomplished Assembly members – Jenny Jones and Darren Johnson – who are hoping for re-election this way. But ideally this result would be doubled and the Greens would add two more members: another dedicated Green, Noel Lynch (who also reads this blog – Hi Noel!), and… Siân Berry. Which given her Mayoral campaign has made her the best known Green in the capital, seems fairly, well, fair.

The peach paper is also where the BNP might gain seats. Hence the importance of voting on this sheet at all. BNP supporters never ‘forget’ to vote. They never ‘can’t be bothered’. So it would be wrong for the BNP to gain seats purely because through apathy by others, or because voters weren’t aware they had more to do in the booth than just vote for a Mayor.

(There’s a third ballot paper, an even less trumpeted yellow one for Assembly Constituency candidates. This is where voters – tending not to recognise any candidate names on this sheet at all, or even the name of their Assembly Constituency – usually plump for candidates according to party. Which given this is worked out per local district, means the smaller parties don’t stand a chance. The Lib Dems didn’t win a single Assembly Constituency seat in 2004, let alone the Greens. Still, I will be voting Green here too – for Pete McAskie, who is also terribly nice. It’s all about sending a message, as they say.)

I suspect many dyed-in-the-wool supporters of one of the Big Three parties would rather the fourth biggest party on the London Assembly was Green rather than BNP. In which case, I hope they consider voting Green on the peach paper, regardless of who they want as Mayor.

From today’s Observer editorial:

There is a stronger case to be made for casting ‘first preference’ votes for Siân Berry, the Green candidate. The party has already used its toehold on the London Assembly to wring green concessions worth millions of pounds out of the mayoral budget. A respectable score for Ms Berry, an intelligent and articulate advocate of her cause, would send a clear signal to whoever wins the mayoralty that London cares about environmental policy. It would also deprive the British National Party of fourth place, a small but notable step towards the mainstream.

Full article here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/27/london08.livingstone

Sian Berry’s columns at the New Statesman site are also worth reading:

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/sian-berry

I really must post SOMETHING rather than let the diary go into silence for days. If only to pass on a few YouTube links I’m currently enjoying. What have I been up to? Reading, writing, lurking. Commuting to the London Library whenever I can, browsing obscure works, stumbling on new authors. Getting electric shocks from the ancient stacks.

Plan B Magazine have charged me with reviewing the excellent new Dresden Dolls compilation, ‘No, Virginia.’ It’s made me muse on singer Amanda Palmer’s vocal style: a kind of mannered, surly growl. More European – after Marlene Dietrich – than American. She doesn’t always use it, sometimes slipping into her Bostonian burr for her ‘uh-oh-oh’ refrains. As Kim Deal (of the Pixies and Breeders) proved, you really have to use a Boston accent to properly sing ‘uh-oh-oh’.

But thoughts of the ‘Dietrichian bitterness’ style made me revisit some 80s pop hits of a similar vocal hue. Not least Hazel O’Connor and Toyah Willcox. Lene Lovich too, who was more eccentric than grumpy, but I’d argue her tonsils were cut from the same dark cloth. I saw Ms Lovich onstage with the Dresden Dolls at their Roundhouse gig in 2006, and wondered how many younger Dolls fans were familiar with the hits of such sulky sirens from a time outworn.

So behold! Hazel O’Connor singing ‘Will You’. Excellent hair plus a very 80s white tunic thingmy:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3UbHXSsiUnE

Here’s Ms O’Connor again, with ‘Eighth Day’, the other big hit from ‘Breaking Glass’. It’s the kind of ‘Crazy Robot Woman From The Future’ style ripe for pastiche (Pamela Stephenson MUST have had a go on ‘Not The Nine O’Clock News’). But how else can it be sung? Regardless, it’s still a fabulous song:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=4gJKgXq4u78

Here’s Toyah doing ‘I Want To Be Free’. An instant anthem for every sulky schoolgirl at the time. Take that, baffling piles of plastic cutlery! Favourite lyric: ‘So what if I dye my hair? / I’ve still got a brain up there.’ I say those words to myself daily. Again, it all helped to make the Top 40 a rather fun world:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=bCHEO477u44

All of which seems positively shy and retiring next to Lene Lovich and her goggle-eyed yet groovy ‘Lucky Number’:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=1nu2QX3GU-U

Back to 2008, and here’s one of my favourite songs on the new Dresden Dolls release, as played in concert. It’s ‘Night Reconnaissance’, about unconventional children – the ones who at school are labelled everything from thieves to deviants – taking revenge at the homes of bullying rich kids. Rather recalls the film ‘Heathers’. The melody manages to hint at Madness’ ‘It Must Be Love’ AND Roxy Music’s ‘More Than This’ (in the chorus section). Brilliant chorus lyrics, too:

‘And we hide from the c****s / On a night reconnaissance / Steal flamingos and gnomes / From the dark side of the lawn’

http://youtube.com/watch?v=CjefxkO7eg4

In this case, it’s the USA usage of the C-word, of course. As used against ultra-bitchy girls, rather than ultra-unpleasant boys. Funny how some elements of American slang find their way over to the UK easily (like, yeah?), while others never quite make it past Slang Customs. Maybe we just like our Derek and Clive albums too much.

There’s an underrated TV drama from a few years ago, ‘The Book Group’, set in Edinburgh (EDIT – It was in the West End of Glasgow, not Edinburgh. Though writer Annie Griffin did go on to set her similarly-toned film ‘Festival’ in Edinburgh. Because it’s about the Edinburgh Festival. Hence the name). A globe-trotting young Englishman (played by James Lance) uses the C-word in the American sense – against women, unkindly – and it’s clearly meant to indicate his pretentiousness. He desires to be ahead of the game, the first on his trendy block, even when it comes to swear words. To which one can only say… go figure. Dude. Whatever. Meh.

Yesterday – more posing around Brick Lane for Phoebe A’s photographic project. This time I’m in a change of clothes, including a rare airing of my black Ben Sherman shirt. The forensic mannequins in Hoxton Square have gone.

Also: I meet Rob Cowan for a coffee in the Edgware Road. He’s working on Radio 3’s forthcoming ‘Chock-Full Of Chopin’ weekend. Well, that’s not the official title, but that’s what it is:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2008/04_april/14/chopin.shtml

I ask him if he’s seen the romantic comedy Impromptu, starring a pre-Richard Curtis Hugh Grant as the consumptive composer:

http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0102103/

It’s one of my favourite movies that people haven’t heard of. The director is James Lapine, better known for the original stagings of Sondheim musicals like Sunday In The Park With George and Into The Woods, and it has the same sense of anachronistic wit in a period setting, not least Judy Davis’s constant exclamation of ‘Balls!’

In fact, it ties in with my theme of the other day – a romance between a butch woman (Ms Davis as the cross-dressing novelist George Sand) and a fragile, stuttering man with floppy hair (guess who). Add Emma Thompson as a dim aristocrat, and Mandy Patinkin in funny, swaggering Princess Bride mode, and it’s something of a gem. How much of the Chopin history is correct I have no idea, but I’d say the film could be compared with Moulin Rouge and the BBC version of Casanova (the one with David Tennant), in eschewing period accuracy in favour of unabashed fun.

Two other favourite Chopin things:

– Take That’s ‘Could It Be Magic’ (Mr Manilow’s melody taken from whichever Prelude it is)

– Monty Python’s silly, yet impressively educational, Oliver Cromwell song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObI4eaK_GIA

Something of a classified advert. Fosca seek a London-based Tour Manager for their proposed gig in Madrid this September. And possibly other gigs too.

One thing I’ve learned from the Swedish tour – and ten years of foreign gigs – is that there are bands who can do the whole DIY, self-management thing when playing abroad. And there are bands that can’t, or at least would really rather they didn’t. We’re in the latter category.

Though we’ve never quite dipped into the realm of proper touring horror stories – thank goodness – Fosca have still had a certain amount of ill fortune when playing live. We’ve had illness, loss of property, tears, incapacitating tiredness, or all of the above. I’m starting to worry about what will happen in Madrid. A goring from a bull? A civil war? Melting clocks?

So I’m thinking we should really hire a third party Tour Manager for this jaunt, preferably one with a dab of sound engineering experience. Someone to take care of the nuts and bolts, and to stop the nuts from bolting.

They’d need to round up Fosca members who wander astray, help carry the heavy cases when one of us feels they are about to actually pass out, liase with the promoter and ensure that the venue can accommodate our set-up in advance (as opposed to finding out at the soundcheck that there’s not enough channels… sigh), and generally take the organisational pressure off us.

Even though it’s for one gig and less than 48 hours out of our lives, I think it would make all the difference.

The successful applicant would be paid. Really. Enquiries to the usual email address (or use the Contact Page). Please pass this on to anyone you think could help. Thank you.

Favourite joke, out of many, from Mike Leigh’s new film, ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’:

‘Bear with me…’
‘Is there?’ (looks around)

It’s Mr Leigh’s ‘Pollyanna’. But with better jokes. And you can play Spot The London Location: Finsbury Park, Crouch End, Camden and so on. Early on in the film, the protagonist is seen dancing at Koko with her friends to Pulp’s ‘Common People’, then they stagger drunkenly across the bridge near the Market, as the sun comes up. A common experience indeed. Funny that Britpop tunes are now used to soundtrack the lives of nostalgic thirty-year-olds on a girls’ night out.

Nice detail that the driving instructor complains about a Britain covered in CCTV cameras – at the very moment he turns onto Holloway Road. The street is meant to have the most security cameras in the country: one for every 35 yards.

The film’s star Sally Hawkins also shines in another new favourite thing of mine, the excellent Radio 4 sitcom, ‘Ed Reardon’s Week’:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/edreardon.shtml

It’s a kind of Nathan Barley for the over-40s, or those of us who might as well be over 40. Ms Hawkins plays the titular scribe’s literary agent, the ultra-posh Ping. Or as Reardon refers to her, part of the ‘Cheltenham Ladies’ College Diaspora’.

Nice use of the latest youth slang for her character – or at least, the bits of youth slang employed by middle-class young women. In a recent episode, Ed is commissioned to write the history of his rich friend’s cottage in the Dordogne. Turns out Ping’s family are neighbours:

Ping: My parents’ve got a house on the other side of the valley, so we’ve known each other for, like, HUNDREDS of years (snorts).

Reardon: Yes, well I think that’s a slight exaggeration.

Ping: No, really. Our families had a battle in, like, 1640 or something. We won. Yay! Get in! Our cleaner was in the Resistance too. She’s BRILLIANT value…

***

Recent activity. To Hoxton and Shoreditch three days in a row. First to the Rich Mix cinema to see ‘Lars And The Real Girl’ with Ms Shanthi. Then to be photographed around the district by Ms Phoebe Allen for her degree course. Her project is a mock fashion shoot for a magazine, and I’ve agreed to be her model. Except her camera plays up, and we have to return the next day.

In Hoxton Square on a rather cold morning: I pose next to a very realistic-looking art exhibit comprising life-size manniquins in forensic white suits and masks, posed as if they’re combing a section of the square in the manner of a crime scene. Except the fluttering tape around them isn’t labelled ‘POLICE’, but ‘THE TELL-TALE HEART’. As in the Edgar Allen Poe story.

On the bench nearby sits a shivering lady with a clipboard and one of those handheld clicker-counters used to count visitors. She tells me it’s part of a Harland Miller show at the nearby White Cube gallery, influenced by Poe.

Shoreditch life: every single cafe is full of trendily-attired students on laptops. In fact, nine times out of ten their computers are all the same model. As opposed to Henry Ford on cars (‘Any colour as long as it’s black’), in the coffee shops of Brick Lane it’s any laptop as long as it’s a black MacBook.

The mind is just another music player stuck on Shuffle Mode. When I wake up, there’s usually some song playing in my head, entirely unbidden.

Today it was ‘Einstein-A-Go-Go’ by Landscape.

Yesterday it was the theme from ‘Champion The Wonder Horse’.

***

I’ve had my eyebrows raised by a Telegraph review of a John Barrowman concert. The journalist Michael Deacon wonders just why it is hordes of women squeal lustily at a man who’s openly gay and even works in jokes about his sexuality into the act. Mr Deacon ends the review by employing the old stand-up comedy trope, i.e. offering an observation, then positing a reverse comparison that seems unlikely, and thus funny (eg Eddie Izzard: ‘If bees make honey, do wasps make chutney?):

‘Still the women squeal their lust [at John Barrowman]. Do men wolf-whistle at kd lang gigs?’

I think it’s rather cheap to drag in Ms Lang for the sake of his ‘what’s all that about, eh?’ line of thinking. Mr Barrowman may be a gentleman’s gentleman, but he’s also known for flirting with female contestants on TV, rather like his anything-goes Captain Jack character. If anything, the knowledge he’s uninterested in any serious reciprocation makes such outpourings of affection all the more fun.

Now, despite her known membership of the Friends Of Jodie, Ms Lang’s fanbase is hardly male-excluding. For one, I recall Stuart Maconie including her ‘Ingenue’ album in his Radio 2 series on compiling the perfect record collection. And if she has plenty of male fans, I presume there must also be the requisite cheers and whistling at her shows – the very affection from men that the Telegraph critic finds so hilariously unlikely.

In fact, according to the website AskMen.com, Ms Lang is included alongside all the more feminine and heterosexual ladies of screen and stage, because she’s talented, her singing style is a seductive and sexy croon, and she’s confident inside her own skin. On top of which, her fetching ‘Female Elvis’ style of butch flirtatiousness, all dapper suits and waistcoats, is attractive across the board.

One thinks of more conventionally feminine performers – such as the actress Saffron Burrows – who have no trouble attracting swooning male fans despite their publicly-known gay relationships. So I wonder if Mr Deacon singled out Ms Lang because of her butch appearance as much as her Sapphic association.

In which case, it’s rather apt that this week also sees the passing of Joan Jackson, the inspiration for John Betjeman’s famous poem, ‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’. It’s the one where he sighs wistfully about her playing tennis with ‘the speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy.’ A wolf-whistle at a butch lady, if you like.

I’m also reminded of a few gentle male friends of mine who have a thing for ladies with a certain butchness of reputation:

‘You must meet my new girlfriend! She’s just been in prison for assault. Isn’t that fabulous?’

Though I concede that girlish boys into butch girls are less disposed to channel their affection into wolf-whistling per se. Instead, they’re far more likely to say something like, ‘Oh you fascinating creature, you! I drink from your every word!’

Thanks to Emelie H for sending me an English translation of that Swedish interview. Turns out it was me behind the ‘cute and puppy’ mention. Here’s an excerpt:

Fuzzy Dreamy Pop With Fosca

The British indie pop group Fosca has released a new record on a Swedish label.  Fria Tidningen met the band’s frontman, the writing dandy Dickon Edwards, over a glass of wine.

Emily Dean at Boyz Magazine has described the British pop band Fosca’s frontman Dickon Edwards as Andy Warhol meets Oscar Wilde meets Quentin Crisp.  It is a good description.  In Mr Edwards, both Warhol’s artistic skill, Wilde’s sarcasms and Crisp’s quick and philosophic reflections seem to be observable.

I meet Dickon Edwards at the Crystal Plaza  just before the bands gig at Landet by Telefonplan in Stockholm. He is radiating a brisk calm, where he is sitting with crossed legs reclined in an armchair, sipping white wine.  The singer, guitarist and writing dandy Edwards is dressed in a pinstriped suit today and is convinced that trainers should only be worn on the track.  Sophistication and reflection personified.

The theme of the new album is the outsider, the person outside the norms.  Edwards describes the record as “cute and puppy”.  Cute and puppylike, and with prominent guitars.

– But it is guitars without rock and sweat.  It is not heavy metal and it is not the Rolling Stones.  The guitar contributes to an organic sound.  It is fuzzy dreamy pop.

Dickon Edwards has, in connection with the release, published a book with a selection of his lyrics, poems and diary entries.

– It contains texts that I wrote ten years ago, but also later work.  You develop, you’re a walking cemetry of the former you.  The book is a monument, a compression of everything that is me.  And as I said, you are mortal; you won’t for instance have time to travel everywhere you want to.  But with a book your words can travel around the world instead.

I also like the idea of the book (and indeed, blog) as telepathy and time-travel, albeit one-way only. I’m thinking up these words in a room in Highgate on April 15th 2008, and they then – I hope – journey into the minds of others in different places, different countries, at different times in the future. Maybe in the far future, when the Internet will run on sunshine (or if wet, rainwater).

***

Tim C suggests a theory that deliberate Quiet Carriage offenders are a kind of ‘conformist’s rebellion.’ That such people react as an after-effect of swallowing so much zeitgeist and fashion and hype – the rush to be a part of what everyone else appears to be doing and following, from giving a hoot about the minutiae of celebrities’ lives to indulging the growth of high street homogeneity, to getting the latest upgrade of the latest gadget for its own sake. Certainly true of the man on the Colchester train back, who used an i-Phone – the latest mobile of choice – to chat under a ‘No Mobiles’ sign for the best part of an hour. For conformists feeling lost and sheep-like, even gullible, tiny things like this may be a small way of saying ‘I exist. Really.’

If that’s the case, if the only way for some to make their existential mark in the world is by these petty acts of revolt, rudeness and inconsideration – litter dropping is another one – then they need to get an outside view of themselves fast. And that’s coming from ME…

Once more unto the bleach, dear follicles. Though as my hair is pretty short, I now look like Eminem with a side parting.

(Is Eminem still going? Is anyone still going? Who’s the Prime Minister again?)

Have overdone the peroxide a little, resulting in a few days’ shame with pink skin around the hairline, plus a tight, sore scalp that feels it might fall off. Must remember to spend less time under the chemical halo. It’s not as if I’m a novice.

Monday: to Wahaca, an affordable Mexican restaurant in Covent Garden. An evening meal in the company of the frankly godlike novelist Dennis Cooper, along with other visitors to his blog such as the photographer of note, Marc Vallee. I get DC to sign my copy of ‘All Ears’, his collection of non-fiction articles. One of which is an interview with Keanu Reeves, conducted just before the shooting of Point Break, plus the second Bill & Ted movie, plus My Own Private Idaho. A vintage Keanu year. The young Mr Reeves is funny and fizzy, and clearly great company – close to the ‘Ted’ character. One wishes he’d do one more comedy, after all the serious and portentous Matrix goings-on. Maybe a forty-something update: ‘Bill & Ted Get Into Endowment Mortgages’.

Mr Cooper is only in London for a couple of days, yet the Customs officers at Eurostar St Pancras (he’s an American based in Paris) gave him a hard time. Once he said he didn’t know exactly where he was staying (he was meeting a friend who would take him to a hotel), that was reason enough to install him in The Unkind Room. They grilled him about his last trip to the country a year ago (and expected him to produce the ticket for proof), then asked him to go online and prove he was who he said he was, and so on. Their parting shot was to tell him to ‘never to use Eurostar to enter the UK again’. Utterly baffling.

In other unfair Customs news, Tony O’Neill sends me his excellent interview with Sebastian Horsley for S Magazine in the US. It’s timed with the Stateside release of Mr H’s ‘Dandy In The Underworld’. After conducting the interview over the phone, Mr O’Neill goes to meet the notorious memoirist at his NYC book launch, only to discover the party’s off. It turns out US Immigration has banned Mr Horsley from entering the country, citing ‘Moral Turpitude’. They’d read the book. Still, if that sort of thing could boost any career rather than hinder it, it’s Mr Horsley’s. I’m flattered that the article also refers to me and my diary.

***

Yet another Swedish interview for Fosca is online:

http://www.stockholmsfria.nu/artikel/21327

I wonder what the bit about ‘cute and puppy’ means.

***

Greatly enjoyed this weekend’s Doctor Who, set in Pompeii. Top marks for an in-joke for Latin students: the main family in the story have their names taken from the Cambridge Latin Course. I took the course as part of my ‘O’ Level circa 1985, and it still seems to be in use today, judging by a few blog discussions. It was a series of orange booklets introducing Latin for beginners, following a Pompeii family as they go about their daily life (eg ‘Module 5 – The Baths’), until the final module when Vesuvius erupts and all the characters bite the volcanic dust. eheu! fugaces labuntur anni!