Friday – visit Mum and Dad in Suffolk. I take the train from Liverpool Street to Colchester. The trains are now run by National Express, as in the coach company. Seems odd getting on a National Express train, but the previous owners were worse, going by the snooty and slightly pretentious name of ‘One Railways’.

Wonder if that Divine Comedy song, ‘National Express’ is thus rendered anachronistic. Taking a National Express now means getting a train too, at least in East Anglia.

I always choose the designated Quiet Zone on trains. This is one of those recent developments that hints at a whole side of 2008 UK mores, desires and lifestyles. It’s a chapter in the history of personal space in public places, and the changes in what people expect.

Firstly there’s the idea that a default train carriage is one that’s brimming with noise and cacophony. That noise is the norm, while quietness is unusual. Just as there were once areas where it would be assumed you would either smoke, or not mind people smoking next to you, whether in trains, buses, cinemas and so on.

Then comes in the designated ‘Non’ area, the single non-smoking carriage, the rule that smokers on buses have to go upstairs. Then the Non-area becomes the norm, from all of trains to all of pubs.

Two Beatles images leap into my mind at this point. One is from 1968, where the mustachioed band are sitting in cinema seats, watching Yellow Submarine at its premiere. What’s most noticeable is that they are all smoking. Smoking in a cinema. The other is the lyric from ‘A Day In The Life’, where the narrator catches a bus, then says ‘found my way upstairs and had a smoke.’ Both ideas seem unthinkable now.

Well, except on a few occasions when I’ve been witness to people on buses and trains taking their chances and lighting up, and I’ve been the only other passenger. These bold offenders tend to be groups of giggling young men who assume – rightly – that I’m not likely to come over and ask them to desist. In these recent examples, the smoke in question is always spliff smoke.

Hypocrite that I am, although I’ve smoked (both types of leaf) and have indeed been loud in public, I think I do slightly resent being at the mercy of nearby strangers, when they’re indulging in the things I’m going without, when their smoke – and their noise – carries over into my space. I suppose what one really wants is private booths on all forms of public transport: little sci-fi bubbles. Different sizes, for the times one is travelling in company, and the times one is alone.

I do wonder who started the idea of the Quiet Carriage, whether there was a series of complaints, a campaign, or dedicated lobbying (perhaps by the Noise Abatement Society), or if it was a consensus decision reached by the relevant committee at the top of the company, which is usually the way change happens.

When I talk about Quiet Carriages to Mum later that day, she says that it’s always worked fine for her. In her experience, the QCs have indeed been silent to an extreme level, where things like someone rustling a newspaper are curiously amplified by comparison.

I’ve had no such luck. Every time I’ve been in a Quiet Carriage, there’s been as much noise as I’ve been used to in normal carriages. If anything, they’ve been noisier. I’m starting to think it’s a conspiracy.

On the train to Colchester: two groups of small girls being perfectly normal, but in the wrong carriage for it. They are running about, whining, crying, playing beeping handheld computer games. Their mothers are frequently telling them off, even one saying ‘this is the Quiet Carriage – shh!’. So, one wonders, why doesn’t she take them to a non-Quiet carriage? It’s not as if it’s a packed train – there are plenty of empty seats in the other carriages.

Coming back to London: again, plenty of seats in all carriages. I go for the Quiet Zone once more. A man comes in, sits directly under one of the many window signs depicting a mobile phone with a ‘Non’ slash through it, and proceeds to make a loud series of calls throughout the journey. I should add that he is drinking from a can of lager. It’s one thing to tell off someone for transgressing a rule based on consideration for one’s fellow man, it’s another when the possibility of them reacting drunkenly – and maybe violently – has been introduced to the mix.

Again, lager or no, it is not going to be me who goes over and tells him off.

Getting into a Quiet Carriage a few months ago – three other passengers there. They are ALL talking away on mobile phones. And once again, there’s plenty of seats in the Noisy Carriages. I start to wonder if there’s a kind of reverse psychology in action: an ‘I dare you’ aspect to the signs. Or if they all think they’re being perfectly quiet on their mobiles: speaking a lot lower than usual, at least according to their own Index Of Noise. It’s other people who are noisy, not them. Their idea of noise is different to mine. And so I’m forced to wonder if my idea of noise is the unacceptable thing here. That – as ever – it’s me that’s the odd one out.

In fact, on both journeys this week, when the ticket collector passes through, he doesn’t do anything about the noisy passengers himself. And on that Norwich journey with the cannabis-smoking boys, the collector passed directly through the cloud of their pungent smoke. Maybe he was their friend. I’m in no position to start playing the role of the Everyman.

What if on these occasions I’m the only one who minds? It would be wrong to expect others to fit in with my world. I have to fit in with theirs. I keep quiet, I promise not to start fights, and the world agrees not to kill me. That’s the whole Dickon Edwards deal.

So the etiquette of the Quiet Zone is based not on the wishes of the conductor, but on the wishes of the least tolerant passenger: one who is also capable of challenging an offender. And I would never like to be thought of as the least tolerant / most telling-off-capable person in the room.

I envisage the challenged person retorting ‘But I’m not being noisy! This isn’t noisy! This is consideration!’

And then they ask everyone else in the carriage:

‘Hey! Do YOU think I’m being noisy? Do YOU? What about you?’

And whether through sincere agreement, or just English embarrassment, they all take the side of the noisy phone user rather than mine. After all, I’m the weird one. I hardly use phones at all, in fact. I’m a creature of email.

Then – as my nightmare spirals – a conductor comes in, asks about the commotion, and I am pointed to. ‘That’s the troublemaker!’ Then all the passengers rise as one, form a mob, grab me, lift me above their heads, carry me to the door, and hurl me from the moving train, cheering.

It is me that is the strange one. So it is me that must never speak up.

So I sit and simmer and sigh while Mr Lager brays away on his i-Git Phone beneath the No Mobiles sign, hoping someone else in the carriage will play the part of the Outraged Common Sense Everyman for me. Because I cannot.

(I’m also secretly hoping there will be a bit of a conflict if he is challenged. Maybe even a fight. In which case I’ll get a ringside seat…)

But no one challenges him, and he natters away till the train pulls in at Liverpool Street. In fact, he continues chattering loudly on the platform – he seems to be in more of a monologue than a conversation. I find myself lengthening my stride to the point of running, desperate to get away from him. As I scramble to put my ticket into the barrier and make for the Tube, I can still hear him, behind me, walking and talking. I wonder if he ever stopped?

I suppose all I am saying is Give Intolerance A Chance.

It’s an update of the old joke – ‘I can’t stand intolerant people… Except when I want there to be one.’

Promised photos, mostly from Sweden two weeks ago. Credits: Charley Stone, David Hill, DE.

A break from the bleach:

Line-up of Fosca for the Swedish tour, March 2008 (Charley Stone, DE, Rachel Stevenson):

Lund poster:

Rachel and Ylva (Friday Bridge singer) and a reference to Truman Capote in ‘Murder By Death’ (or if wet, Fawlty Towers):

Rachel models the Fosca t-shirt:

Charley’s self-portrait:

I think I’m better at being in photos than taking them:

Recording ‘The Man I’m Not Today’ / ‘My Diogenes Heart’ in Karlstad:

Throwing a snowball in Stockholm, circa midnight:

TV acoustic session:

Always dress appropriately when writing lyrics (using a hotel pen from the Stockholm Crystal Plaza, and a London Library notebook):

Youtube video footage:

Stockholm:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw-YvBKAlNE

Gothenburg – note crowd frenzy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEAE5Co2saE

Gothenburg – acoustic instore:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIR_Fd-69mM

More photos at Charley’s blog (click on ‘Pictorial Evidence’):

http://charleston.livejournal.com/235769.html

Am feeling a world away from the slump of the last few days and the illness of the week before. After the sensation of being knocked to the bottom of life’s staircase one time too many, then seeing the stairs shift and transform into a sheer slide – as escalators do in common nightmares – something has clicked or cleared. The stairs are no longer terrifying, and the idea of lightly picking my own funny way up them (and at my own speed) seems natural once more.

I put this recovery partly down to publishing my own unseemly wails in the diary: a selfish unburdening which was purely a last resort and which I will do my utmost never to repeat. Public admission of depression for me – once I’m on the other side of it – now seems embarrassing and tedious. That I might sound like a typical depressive – or a typical anything – appalls me so much, the recovery is accelerated a thousandfold. I have effectively shamed, bored and embarrassed myself out of my own predicament. Or at least that’s how I prefer to see it.

What also helped was meeting Ms S in Islington, and going to the cinema (Vue) to see ’27 Dresses’. An unabased fluffy romantic comedy – a genre which, it’s easy to forget, evolved directly from the Restoration ‘comedies of manners’ – with just enough quips, social observation and ripostes to justify its stay: it’s exactly what the doctor ordered. Sometimes one wants a film or book or piece of music to take oneself somewhere new, sometimes one wants to be told ‘me too’, and other times it’s a slight variation on an familiar journey that the soul requires. I’m an unabashed admirer of Richard Curtis’s films for the same reason. Though when I confessed this to Ms Stone in Sweden, she replied, ‘That’s because you ARE Hugh Grant.’

I have photos to upload. A selection of Sweden, plus my short brown hair. Tomorrow, then.

This morning: I’m hungover, have spent money I wish I hadn’t, and last night I nearly burst into tears on the tube home. It probably wasn’t a good idea to go out after all.

***

After the Adam Green gig, Ms S wants to go to a nearby pub. Which is fine, except that en route she bumps into a couple of her friends, and they come with us. Then at the pub, after sitting in silence while Ms S and her friends talk – with each other rather than me – and I attempt to smile amiably, a third friend of hers appears out of the blue and sits down at our table.

At which I point I suddenly get up and run out of the pub without saying goodbye.

Make a slight mess of that, in fact. I bolt for the door only to find it’s bolted, and have to try the next one along. There’s always a comedy edge to my tragedy. Which is the way I like it.

Sheltering in the doorway of Woolworths on Camden High Street, I send Ms S a hasty apology by text. ‘I’m so sorry for running out like that. I’m not feeling too sociable around strangers right now.’

Her reply: ‘That’s okay. They thought it was something they said!’

***
All I could really cope with – and wanted last night – was a one-to-one chat with a friend. Not to have to do the group sociable bit. Apart from anything else, it was one of those pubs where the jukebox music is too loud to be able to join in on conversations between two other people. So I just sat there morosely and tried to pretend I could hear what they were talking about. And I felt like the most excluded person in the world. Didn’t help when one of her friends tried to make conversation with me:

‘And what do you do?’

Which as you can imagine, is exactly the wrong question to ask me right now. And another reason not to talk to people I don’t know, in case they ask me this.

It’s such a silly question anyway. Few people like to talk about their jobs at social gatherings, even if they have jobs. I once made the mistake of asking this at a party years ago, searching for a conversation opener at an awkward moment. The lady in question snorted, ‘I refuse to be defined by what I have to do for a living!’ and stormed away. That’s one way of doing it.

I should have just not gone out at all. Or made it clear that I’m only capable of one-to-one company, and certainly can’t cope with introductions to a group of strangers. Not right now. Ah well.

It also didn’t help that this was the fourth bar we went to in three hours, including Koko. ‘Merry’ would be quite the wrong term. ‘Alcohol-enhanced malaise’ is closer.

The pub in which we agreed to meet before the gig turned out to be dominated by a TV football game. We repaired to another down the road, only to find the same problem. When you’re feeling excluded from much of the human race, and you don’t care for football, it’s really not a good idea to go to any pub with a sports screen. Which is most pubs. Large amounts of men suddenly shouting when you’re at a fragile and sensitive moment in your conversation doesn’t do wonders for one’s mental well-being. London is meant to be a city of choice, of possibilities, of diversity. But not when you want a drink with a friend and there’s a big match on.

***

At the guestlist booth for Koko, I noticed Geoff Travis was briefly next to me. Adam Green is on Rough Trade, his label. Mr Travis once signed my old band. I don’t know if he recognised me, because I currently don’t look like me. I’ve had my blond hair cut off, leaving a thick ‘Action Man’ style crop of mousy brown. I intend to re-bleach it shortly, but fancied a night out looking unlike myself. The links between depression and cutting one’s hair off are all too obvious, I know, but in this case it was pure coincidence. I’m just giving my hair a mini-break.

Mr Travis has been good enough to grant permission for use of the Orlando lyrics in The Portable Dickon Edwards, and I’ve since sent him a copy of the book along with the new Fosca CD. So if I did broach a conversation with him, we’d have to talk about what he thought of the Fosca record. Which I’m guessing he doesn’t care for. Maybe’s he’s not heard it. Maybe he has heard it and likes it, but is too busy right now, what with being in Adam Green Label Manager mode. Regardless, I was in no state to say hello.

Ms S pointed out one tall, long-haired man standing at the Koko bar. It was Chris Gentry from the band Menswear. Or so she said. He was unrecognisable from the cute boyish guitarist I remember from those mid-90s days of Britpop hubris. Again, I felt surround by ghosts, the past, that I was returning to somewhere I’d left: it felt like an uneasy school reunion.

***

On stage, Adam Green does his best. It’s a sold-out gig, and I wonder how many people here are proper Adam Green solo fans. The sweet duet at the end of the film Juno, ‘Anyone Else But You’, is by Mr Green’s old band The Moldy Peaches, from 2001. He doesn’t do this song tonight, or any of the other better known Moldy Peaches numbers, but I wonder if he feels the pressure to do so, given the ubiquitous success of the film.

Instead he does his unkind song about the pop singer Jessica Simpson. I wonder if Jessica Simpson has been tempted to respond in kind? Maybe her reply could go something like this, written and sung in the Moldy Peaches ‘anti-folk’ style:

Adam Green, Oh Adam Green
You do indie rock songs that are slightly obscene…
Your backing band’s tight, your singing voice’s awesome
Yet people only want you and Kimya Dawson
To get back together, at least till, you know,
Until they’ve worn out their DVDs of ‘Juno’

Only joking, Mr Green. You were fine. I liked your skinny t-shirt with fringed white tresses.

(argh)

(…)

(argh)

(…)

(sigh)

(…)

(oh god)

(oh no)

(argh)

(…)

Say something, Mr Edwards. Go on.

This is always the trouble when going for a while without writing. I spiral into myself and become addicted to nothing. Even the things I normally do for fun seem like the hardest work imaginable. I can’t concentrate on following a TV show for more than a few minutes, let alone read a book. I feel like whole receptors have been switched off, and all that’s left to feel is dull annoyances and irritations. Noises off. And on top of which is the usual voice: ‘Why bother? What’s the point?’

Daily routine lately:

3pm: Wake up. Realise how late it is. Couldn’t sleep last night. Except, of course, I could – fell asleep circa 5AM.

Sigh heavily. Wonder what to do. Listen to sounds in the street. Listen to neighbours wandering about the building. My room is right next door to the shared toilet in the hallway. So every day I hear the rattle of the toilet door handle, the toilet door opening and closing, the pull-string light going on, the extractor fan kicking into life. Then: the toilet flushing, the door handle rattle, the stiff door opening, the neighbour going to their room, the neighbour’s door slamming shut. Repeat ad infinitum.

This has pretty much been my life most days: lying in bed, listening to the above. Listening to doors opening and closing.

***

You know, I’m sitting here and all I can think of writing is ‘Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.’ I can’t think straight. I don’t know what to do. Well, I do know what I want to do. Right now, I want to throw things, and howl, and cry.

***

I know I should really keep this more self-pitying fare for longhand notebooks when it comes to ‘writing out’ one’s depression. But I don’t like to go for too long without publishing an entry, and this stuff is all I can currently muster. So as this is really a placeholder against no entry at all, Dear Reader, I ask your forgiveness and forbearance. Hopefully it won’t last.

***

Tonight I’m off to a gig, because a friend needs company and she chose me. I wish we could just do the company bit without the gig. But between staying home and feeling annoyed and depressed, and going out and feeling annoyed and depressed, at least the latter might be more likely to shake me out of the doldrums. The concert in question is Adam Green at Koko. I have no opinion about Mr Green one way or another, which I’m sure he’ll be interested to hear. In fact, I’ve seen him before. He just came on stage, played a few songs, and went off again. Where’s the entertainment value in that?

I’m not ENTIRELY joking. Nothing to do with the music or acts in question at all. It’s just that right now I feel like one of those mums or dads who might tap their feet to a song on the radio, but would never in a million years go out to a ‘gig’. I feel more like 86 than 36. Would you ask an 86-year-old along to a rock gig? Yes, I would like to meet my friends. No, I don’t want to go to a gig to do so.

So what’s really going on here? It can’t be unrelated to my mixed feelings about my own band, Fosca, and indeed about what I’m meant to be doing with my life from this point on. I’ve had offers for Fosca to play Leeds and Bristol. We’ve also been asked to play Madrid. I haven’t agreed to any yet, still feeling exhausted from Sweden (after a mere 4 gigs!) and uncertain about Fosca as a whole, at least as a gigging entity. I’m still not sure if that ‘unusual venue’ London gig is happening or not, because I’m waiting to hear back from a few people. I don’t know. It’s all so… (gestures feebly in the air).

What is certain is that I’m in dire need of a change. A break. Something. People talk about ‘turning their life around’. I think others in my position would just get out of London for a week or so and take a holiday to get their thoughts together about their life. Well, I just can’t afford that. And anyway, I’d still be bringing ME along with me.

Having no money and still living in the same bedsit after 14 years is rather getting to me as well. So I have tried to get a job, out of risible optimism. One friend piped up with details of a library assistant position, where everyone is a bit bohemian, implying I’d fit straight in. I also asked another friend about their office shift work which seems to also favour those who live a little at an angle to the world.

Well, I filled out the form for the former, and didn’t even get a response. And my shift-y friend didn’t reply to my email when I asked if I’d be suitable. Which I’ve presumed to be a polite way of saying ‘Dickon, much as I like you, I really don’t think I could bear to have you around at my place of work.’ Can’t say I really blame them. Again, my own gut feeling was that it’d be a bad idea anyway.

Problem is, my gut feeling is that doing anything AT ALL is a bad idea.

I suspect the library people just Googled me, as employers are apparently wont to do these days, found this diary and made their decision at once.

I mean, who would employ me? On this diary, I’ve publicly admitted to being:

– irresponsible
– cowardly
– weak
– naive
– arrogant
– tardy
– generally late with finishing things
– unreliable
– poor at working as part of a team
– given to falling ill
– prone to depression and panic attacks
– clumsy, with a curious poltergeist-like history of breaking things and destroying databases
– generally inept
– unable to grasp the basics about much of the real world
– reclusive
– stand-offish
– insular
– odd

Roll up, employers…!

So I’m officially too dysfunctional even for those jobs which employ bohemians. I would like to say I took some comfort from this confirmation of my so-called otherness. But in fact I was more aware of being doomed to loneliness and penury and hopelessness till the grave. The result was a lot of breaking down in tears and wailing and feeling like ending it all. But not just yet – it’s be silly to commit suicide before – oh – the current series of Doctor Who ends.

It’s my becoming acutely aware of the dichotomy between my ‘functional bohemian’ friends – people who can get and hold down jobs – and my own towering sense of unemployable dysfunction that’s really pushed me off the rails lately. So much of my waking life lately has been spent, well, weeping with despair, frankly. And you know, I don’t like feeling unhappy all the time. I don’t know about you.

***

‘Oh God…!’

I sighed this out aloud at a complete stranger yesterday. While walking around Highgate avenues in the dark, circa 9pm, trying to get away from myself. Passed a pool of street light and sighed ‘OH GOD!’ out aloud, thinking I was alone. At which moment (of course), someone passed by, appearing from nowhere. Wonder what they thought.

Oh dear. I wish I knew what best to do about All This. This whole… Being Alive business. This whole Coping business. This whole Enjoying Myself business.

***

I mean, I know it’s so wrong to feel like this, particularly when I still have a perfectly lovely and enviable life compared to real suffering and real destitution. I know I should give CBT therapy a go. But right now I barely have the energy to sift through the ever-mounting piles of untackled clutter and correspondance on the floor, to find the relevant letters about the local therapy services. And of course, there’s still all the clutter boxes, stuffed with untidy unfinished business going back years, eating away at my mental well-being just by existing. Some of it is pure ephemera: magazines I didn’t read then and still haven’t read now.

It’s taking me an incredible effort to even write this entry, let alone start sifting through my ancient clutter. I wish I could… I wish it would all be done for me. That’s the main emotion I’m feeling right now: utter excoriating dependency and a yearning to pass my life into the hands of someone else, for someone else to take charge. Ever the guest, never the host.

***

But even if I’m absolutely dreading going to Koko tonight, I know I still enjoy music. Here’s a song I absolutely adore right now. Rose Melberg’s ‘Each New Day’. The recorded version I have is backed with an echoey piano, but this live guitar version on YouTube is just as good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPIpPuy29Qs

Have spent most of this week in bed riding the waves of Swedish Flu. Hazy orange head-flames followed by violet shivers and back again. Charley and Rachel also have it, and so do Niklas and Ylva from Friday Bridge. Get well soon, everyone.

The GP prescribed a temporary inhaler to help me breathe more easily at night. Always thought I’d be given one of those at some point in life, given my tendency to come down with things. My first little L-shaped plastic blue puffing device. Except I have to attach it to this big oval plastic funnel called a – wince – Volumatic. With a little ‘TM’ after the name, as if it were a character from Transformers. Other than that, it’s the usual routine: paracetemol, Vit C, staying in bed, keeping away from others. I’m all too experienced in those last two, but at least I have an alibi. I’d prefer to be fit and well. Honest.

***

In the post office yesterday: man in front of me filling out a form to claim half-price bus fares with Income Support. He is wearing stripey leggings, a velvet jacket, and a floppy hat with a cardboard-cut out photo of the singer Grace Jones stuck in the brim.

***

Let’s get that second half of the tour set down before it fades any more.

FRIDAY – LUND
8.45AM. Breakfast in the Karlstad hotel with a queasy hangover, trying to work out which milk cartons are which. Rachel and Charley read my previous diary entry and point out that (a) they DO like both of the new songs we recorded yesterday, they just have different favourites, and (b) the observation about the Back To The Future-like square outside was Charley’s. ‘Credit where credit’s due’ – one of this tour’s Mike Leigh-ish catchphrases. Others are ‘Don’t stand on ceremony’, and ‘I like fun, I don’t know about you.’

10AM. As is the way in most Swedish hotels, the lift doors open outwards onto the floor in question and must be pushed or pulled by hand. I’m in the lift with my suitcase and am about to push the door as it arrives at the lobby, when I see it’s obstructed by an ambulance stretcher. An elderly woman is tucked in the blankets, moaning in pain as paramedics busy around her. Had I shoved the lift door open without looking first, I might have well have knocked both stretcher and patient onto the floor. In which case the rest of the day would have been immediately upstaged.

12 noon or so. Another close call. We stop outside the record label’s distributor in an industrial estate on the outskirts of Gothenburg. Rachel is tying her shoelaces when a huge chunk of ice plummets from the top of the warehouse roof and hits the ground with an almighty bang. It misses her by a few feet.

The ice is melting conspicuously everywhere we go now. Were this a novel, bored GCSE students would be forced to comment on what it all means. ‘At this point, do you think the author is using the melting ice to reflect what’s going on in the protagonist’s personality?  Is it just a normal description of the weather, or is there something more going on…?’

‘No, sir. It’s just a normal description of the weather…’

(This was how I used to play cheeky games with my English teacher, deliberately answering his ‘Is it… Or…’ questions with the duller option, knowing full well such ‘questions’ were just gentle nudges along the right lines. It’s like blurbs on the back of books along the lines of ‘Will Harry Potter Save The Day? Answer: Yes. Yes, he will.)

At a service station, there’s a steady dripping along one side of the pumps’ canopy, but not the other. Asks Charley, ‘Why is it only raining on the left?’ Symbolism for a more politically-based novel, perhaps.

2PM. The van stops for lunch. We haven’t the time to venture into city centres, and the only eatery that presents itself is a branch of McDonalds attached to the back of an Ikea-type furniture superstore. Thankfully, Rachel (who once supported the McLibel protest) finds a near-empty Twinings-like tea shop among the other outlets, and it does mozzarella rolls.

Evening: finally reach Lund after spending the best part of the day in the van. The venue turns out to be the same one Fosca played in 2002, with the same sound engineer. It’s the student union building, on the local campus. All I can remember about that previous gig is that our accommodation consisted of ancient bunk beds in the one room in the basement, with a loud late-night indie club next door keeping us awake.

This time – thank heavens – we have the plushest hotel of the tour: Hotel Lundia in the centre of town. My room turns out to have a faulty radiator, and I am upgraded to a slightly plusher one down the corridor. I compare notes afterwards with my bandmates; for me, the highlight of my upgrade is a free pen. Everyone else thinks this is funny. Still, it IS an elegant rollerball in black and silver, as opposed to the more flimsy printed Biros offered by the other establishments. Definitely the best hotel pen on the tour.

Pause for…

MR DICKON’S ALL-DANCING HOTEL PEN REVIEW

Stockholm: Crystal Plaza.
Retractable ballpoint in see-through green perspex with twist mechanism. Hotel name and logo in white. Pretty, but clip breaks off too easily. 3/5

Gothenburg: Spar Hotel.
Another twist-operated ballpoint, this time in ugly opaque white with black lettering and red logo. Sturdy clip, but loses marks for wilful cheapness of design. Too Travelodgey. 2/5

Lund: Hotel Lundia.
See above. A serious player in the field of hotel ballpoints. Even makes a more expensive-sounding clunk when dropped on a desk. Pop-out retractable action, fat rubber grip along neck, lettering in confident and stylish silver on black. The kind of hotel pen you can take home to meet your mother. 5/5

Karlsberg: Savoy (Best Western)
No pen in room. Forgot to ask at reception. I just can’t follow any idea through properly, can I? Nice bath, though.

Back to Lund, where our dressing room is the infamous bunk bed basement of six years ago. The walls include not one, but two Secret Shine posters. As in the Sarah Records band, one of whom I once shared a Bristol house with. They’re back, it seems. Who isn’t?

Gig goes okay – lots of drunken students. A few books signed. More people than Karlstad, not as many as Stockholm. Sound quality better than Stockholm, not as good as Karlstad. But enough people to hear the lyrics being sung along with. Always nice, that.

***

SATURDAY – GOTHENBURG
Hungover once again, plus have developed a sore throat and slight cough (which develops into flu once I’m back in London). We have to make a diversion to a chemist’s purely to pick up Strepsils – in Sweden cough sweets are considered too pharmaceutical for corner shops and convenience stores.

Music in the van includes Kylie Minogue’s latest album, and Nico, who insists on being dead but  – as is the wont of record labels – always manages to put out new releases. It’s the most recent Marble Index / Desertshore re-issue, with requisite lovely repackaging and booklet. Perfect for sleepily soundtracking Swedish motorway vistas.

Gothenburg’s local Metro newspaper has a little photo of me on the cover, plus a small interview inside. In the afternoon, we play an acoustic set in the Blenda record shop in town, and sign a few CDs and books afterwards. Not exactly JK Rowling-style queues around the block, but enough to make it worthwhile. I like signing things. It’s fun. (‘I like fun, I don’t know about you.’)

Acoustic set includes world premiere of ‘My Diogenes Heart’. Then I’m interviewed in the record shop office (many thanks to the Blenda staff, by the way). Surrounded by tottering boxes of other people’s records and CDs, I talk about just why I’ve deigned to foist another record on a saturated market. Why bother? What’s the point? And so on. I wave my fingers dramatically around the stockroom and say things like, ‘All these records, and not one of them contains a song called It Only Matters To Those To Whom It Matters! Someone has to do it. Might as well be us…’

Driving up to the venue in town, a boy with a huge Goth – or possibly Emo – backcombed hairdo crosses the road in front of us. His fringe is stretched so far over his eyes, I doubt he can see where he’s going. The suspicion is confirmed – he bumps straight into a building, missing the door he was aiming for.

We’d been singing songs from ‘Cabaret’ on the way, and I find myself altering the words to ‘Mein Herr’:

Bye bye my Emo hair
Farewell my Emo hair
It was a fine affair
But now it’s longer
It’s really hard to dance
To My Chemical Romance
You’re better off without
Emo hair

Maybe I should send it to Half Man Half Biscuit.

(Fave HMHB lyric in my head right now:

‘There is nothing greater in life / Than writing on the sole of a slipper with a biro.’

HMHB on Proustian joy via morphic resonance. I wonder if they still make those biro-baiting slippers?)

Charley’s favourite showtune is ‘People Will Say We’re In Love’ from Oklahoma.

Venue is called Stars ‘N’ Bars: a touristy sports bar by day, an indiepop venue by night. A larger than actual size fibreglass statue of Michael Jordan (I’ve asked) is in one corner, complete with basketball, while little sculptured figurines of the Blues Brothers flank the exit. You can never have too many figurines of the Blues Brothers flanking your exit, I find.

We soundcheck alongside some football match on a screen (Man U v oh, as if I’d remember… oh Rachel says it’s Aston Villa – score 4-0 she says). As we pack away, I notice the clientele has changed entirely. Gone are the white baseball caps and lone men on barstools of a certain glower. In their place are smiling girls and boys with nice coats and button badges. It’s a venue with a less butch life outside hours, like a weekend transvestite.

Except when we take to the stage, they’re anything but less butch. It’s our biggest crowd on the tour, the venue is packed, there’s more than one incident of stage diving, and it all ends in a full-on stage invasion. People are jumping all around us. My main thoughts are less ‘isn’t this an incredible response’, and more ‘I hope no one gets hurt and nothing gets broken.’ I’m all for stage invasions, they just have to be, as the Alan Partridge line goes, properly policed. No pint glasses of water near open power sockets, as there were here. No chance of anything being unplugged. Towards the end of our second encore (!), the drum track from ‘The Millionaire Of Your Own Hair’ disappears entirely. Presumably someone has tripped on a cable and pulled it out. So we finish doing a drum-less version, and retire from the proceedings dazed, but pleased. No one was hurt, nothing was broken.

Throughout the show, the crowd sing along with all the words, and even sing along with the lead synth and guitar lines. It’s a truly incredible response, and the best received gig I think I’ve ever played. Thank you, Gothenburg.

***

SUNDAY – RETURN HOME
Clocks have gone forward, plus we didn’t get back till about 5AM. I sleep through my alarm to noon, missing breakfast entirely. I’d like to say the seven hours of sleep leave me feeling fully refreshed, but not a bit of it. I’m typing this at Gothenburg Airport feeling like I’d been in a wrestling match with several large and slippery mammals.  When does ‘feeling okay’ start? No wonder so many proper bands are ripped to the gills on amphetamines and sundry other narcotics – you do need something. Of course, later I realise this is the beginning of flu on top of a hangover.

Stansted – long taxi ride home where driver insists on using Sat Nav to get directions. Never a good sign. End up stuck in traffic throughout bits of North London.

Then: fall into fluey haze for five days.

So with all the flu and expense, with all the feeling like tired husks in vans and taxis and planes, with the lack of financial reward, was it worth it?

I look at my mental ‘Reasons Against Bothering’ column. Then at the ‘Reasons For’ side. Between the cheers of the audiences – particularly at Gothenburg and Stockholm – and the nice hotels (thank god!), the nice hotel pens, the comfort and the general looking-after provided by Niklas, Salle, Mats, Ylva and the promoters (Mattias, Gustav et al), Fosca felt loved.

I like feeling loved. I don’t know about you.