Have completed my fortnight of training for the new job. It’s been Monday to Friday, 9-5, but no longer. Felt like opening a bottle of champagne purely to celebrate not having to get up in the morning again. I have the utmost sympathy for those who willingly endure the bodies of strangers crushing them (and worse) in a packed Tube carriage at 8am every day, year after year, from college to retirement. There’s ways around it, of course, one of which is to take up cycling (I’m not the cycling type, or I would), another is to get up even earlier – 6 ish- to avoid the crush period. I did the latter on Friday, and thus had over an hour to kill in the City before work started. Very pleasant start to the day, just sitting in an Aldgate cafe reading and thinking about life, but it did mean that by the time I got home in the evening, I was falling asleep at 9pm.

So on top of improving my speed and prowess at reading and writing to order, I’ve now learned to properly re-acquaintance myself with the sheer importance of time and energy, and the divisions one places upon them. I can now properly feel – taste – just how these resources are fixed, limited and dwindling from the moment you wake up. And that when one is the wrong side of 35 (and counting), the energies are that much more harder to sustain. Time is running out, one way or another. Everything matters. Even frivolity.

And I know just how every moment spent doing one thing – or nothing – is a moment missing out on everything else. But as opposed to getting upset about this, I’m learning more how to shrug off the stuff that should be shrugged off. How to find out more quickly what truly matters. How to crack that self-discipline whip. Is my journey on the Internet today really necessary? Could it be quicker, shorter? Could I bring efficiency to idleness – get more nothing done when I doing nothing?

I’m having to tighten my belt on daily Internet time full stop. The new job isn’t one of those where one can go online when the boss isn’t looking (the work computers block much of the Web). But each day I receive dozens of non-spam emails and Facebook invites to London events. I’m flattered to be invited at all, naturally, but obviously I have to pick and choose – and get better at it.

Before the new job, I could spend hours merrily going through them all, umming and erring, wondering which people would be a little sad if I didn’t show at their soirees, which ones wouldn’t mind my absence but would be delighted to see me there, and which ones would be utterly indifferent, they’re just kindly letting me know of something I might like to attend, if I’m free. Now the process has to be sped up and streamlined.

But the great thing is this: the job I’m doing actually trains me how to better manage the stuff I do in my own time. It’s all about having to assess information and make decisions, and do it again, and do it quicker, just like one does in life anyway. My typing speed has perked up, my writing errors have decreased, and I’m getting more done across the board. Previously, a trip to the shops to replenish my shower gel could somehow take up my entire day.

It does mean I’m now one of those people who break into volleys of phrases like ‘Sorry, have to go, have to Get On, you know, work, busy, things to do, not on a School Night, must dash.’ But the guilt of not replying to emails, not going to events I’ve been invited to, has lifted like a veil. People understand Work.

I still make sure I read everything I’m sent. It’s just replying that’s harder. Sometimes I get emails from people in need – whom I don’t know – asking me to pass on contacts, details, names of others I do know. I feel both uneasy about complying, and uneasy about not helping the person who’s taking the time to write in, but have to choose the latter. There’s very good reasons I don’t tend to give too much away in the diary, such as names of real people or companies. It’s not so much avoidance of libel as trying to be gentlemanly.

Plus not quite telling the whole tale is good storytelling (one hopes) and keeps readers turning the page. Or scrolling down. Coming back for more, anyway.

(That’s one reason why those new ‘e-readers’ are never going to replace paper books, I think. ‘A real page-turner’ doesn’t have quite the same resonance as ‘a real content-scroller’ or ‘a real button-clicker’.)

Looking at the previous entry, I’m now wondering if I’ve used the phrase ‘fetchingly epicene’ before.

Actually, I’m wondering if anyone has used the phrase ‘fetchingly epicene’ before? On the Internet, at any rate. If so, I may have to marry them. 

(goes to Google… deep breath…)

It’s pathetic of me, I know. But as I go to bed – with no fetchingly epicene bedfellow in sight – it’s things like this that help my day feel, well, vaguely worthwhile. Just about. In lieu of anything else. 

Still, if you can’t add new phrases to the world – ones that spring accidentally, unbidden, directly and unselfconsciously from the heart – what else is writing for? 

***

Here’s a nice photo of myself and the Teaists at the Wallace Collection last Saturday. Courtesy of Helen McCookerybook.

Left to right: Tallulah, Tobias, DE. I appear to be posing for the side of a coin.

Second and final week of training at the new job. I’m enjoying the discipline of having to properly take in the world’s press every day, rather than just reading the stories that interest me. I feel like a kind of flaneur sans loisir: a detached but attentive observer, strolling through the day’s boulevards of Fact.

According to the BBC News site, Marxism is back in fashion thanks to the ‘credit crunch’ (a phrase that I promise to never, ever use again).

Amid all this talk of collapsing economic souffles and self-raising unemployment, it seems fitting I’ve managed to suddenly get myself a job, at this time, and in the City too. Fitting also that I’m commuting to Bank on the rush hour Tube, hemmed in by men and women of the fiscal cloth, while I listen to one of my favourite ever bands, McCarthy, on my iPod.

Sample McCarthy song titles:

‘And Tomorrow The Stock Exchange Will Be The Human Race’

‘Use A Bank I’d Rather Die’

‘The Home Secretary Briefs The Forces Of Law And Order’.

‘Can The Haves Use Their Brains?’

‘The Drinking Song Of The Merchant Bankers’

(The iPod’s an obsolete model – but then, aren’t they all, a split-sigh after you’ve left the shop. Cue an HM Bateman cartoon set at Apple Headquarters – ‘The iPod Development Engineer Who Said “If It Ain’t Broken, Don’t Fix It”‘.)

McCarthy were a UK indie group from the late 80s, who married charming & jangly 12-string guitar tunes with viciously satirical Marxist lyrics, often with a dash of roleplay and irony.

I pretty much adore everything they did, but have plumped for offering you this, Dear Reader:  ‘I Worked Myself Up From Nothing’, from their final album ‘Banking, Violence & The Inner Life Today’. The sentiment might be sardonic (an Orwellian take on self-help), but the sheer loveliness of the melody has the very effect that eludes the narrator. A kind of ‘let them eat cake and have it’: 

The track features Laetitia Sadier on Nico-esque extra vocals, perfectly complementing Malcolm Eden’s fetchingly epicene trill. Much as I love Stereolab, the band Mlle Sadier and McCarthy guitarist Tim Gane formed the year after this was recorded, I can’t help wishing they’d stuck with this line-up just that little bit longer. 

‘You have it in you / though there are holes in your shoes’

Actually, there IS genuinely a hole in my shoe, too. I’d fixed it a few weeks ago with Super Glue, but today’s rain made short work of said adhesive’s fabled ‘super’ powers. I need new shoes. Hence, yet again, the job.

[Buy two sublime albums’ worth of McCarthy, via official download, from Cherry Red Records.]

Saturday – afternoon tea at the Wallace Collection with the Teaists. Service is criminally slow – over an hour and a half till we see our food. ‘Trouble in the kitchen’ apparently. For mere cakes, scones and sandwiches. But they do offer us free wine by way of compensation, and let us waive the tip.

Seventeen at table – a record turn out. Those present include Jamie from the Irrepressibles, Jake, Suzi L, Helen McCookerybook (singer and Monochrome Set associate – my first meeting with her, I think), Sebastian G, Tobias, John Joseph Bibby, David Ryder-P, and Lucinda & William. We are quite a vision to the eldery Ladies Who Tearoom around us, and I’m not sure if they side with the appalled tearoom customers in that Withnail & I ‘finest wines known to humanity’ scene, or if they enjoy us. Either way, we get more than a few stares.

The occasion is Lawrence Gullo’s joint birthday and deportation back to the US, as his work visa has expired, and the retail job he has is not deemed Highly Skilled enough to allow him to stay. A sad case of affairs, and not the first ‘deportation party’ for a much-loved American friend that I’ve been to, either.

There really should be a green card system that recognises Proper Friends in number, in the same way as the points system currently used by the Home Office for determining what is a ‘skilled’ enough job. Prove you have enough UK friends living nearby, those who might as well be family members, who are willing to commit the level of support you’d expect from a spouse (seeing them regularly, rushing to hospital beds,  being by their side when needed etc) and the cumulative ‘Attachment Points’ would count towards an extended stay.

The friends in question would have to pledge their Proper Friendship under oath, and sign a binding contract subject to checks by the Ministry Of Friendship. But that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Goodness knows there’s enough of my friends whose degree of affection I’m never quite sure of. Would they stretch to donating a kidney, or are they happy to keep it at the ‘occasional friendly nod across a crowded bar’ level? It’d be handy to get these things in writing.

It would also help me when someone says ‘Hello Dickon’, and I can’t quite place who they are, or can’t quite remember their name. Which has happened at least once at the New Job.

So: I’ve just completed my first week of Proper Work, taking my place amongst the Bohemian Miners At The Coalface Of News.

How has it been? Surreal.

‘Surreal?’ says Ms D. ‘Hah! Normal work for you is surreal?’

‘REAL for me is surreal…’

It’s been tough, in fact. A shock to the system. A sobering, if salutary experience. I have to brave a packed, surly tube to Tower Hill for 0930. I sit at a computer screen. I scroll past scanned-in pages from national and local newspapers. I use the computer mouse to carefully slice up and duplicate the articles, deciding which ones should be sent to which news-hungry clients. Computers can’t yet fathom the subtleties of context, hence the need for human readers and editors. I repeat until 1345. I take 1 hour lunch. Then I carry on until 1730. With a 15 min coffee break here and there.

It really is pure work, so far. No phone use, no internet use. Not much conversation, either, as the one other nightshift trainee is as keen as me to get as much done as possible, and neither of us know how much counts as Enough.

We’re on the main office floor: umpteen long tables of chairs at screens. And as these two weeks of training are 9 – 5 and Mon – Fri, we’re sharing the room – and part of our table – with the daytime staff. They aren’t unfriendly but there’s a definite sense of separation, putting us in our place as not only mere trainees, but trainees for a completely different staff. So they talk to each other in the usual office way (the economy in crisis, Madonna’s divorce, did you see X TV programme last night, etc), but never including us. Which is fair enough, but it does make the week feel even more surreal than it already is for me.

So I accept my invisibility, and am just getting used to this, while immersing myself in the work, when out of nowhere someone comes over and says ‘Well well well, Dickon Edwards… What brings you here, prithee? How the mighty have risen…’

Or words to that effect. Not quite ‘how the mighty have risen’. That’s me.

This sort of thing has happened about four or five times. Jarring, sporadic bouts of non-invisibility in an otherwise undivided week of feeling like a ghost. Again, the overall word just has to be: surreal.

***

Thursday was the worse. Thursday I came close to tears. The work, the cold-shower shock of it, the sudden visitations from Friends Of Friends. But Friday was, in fact, fine. A normal Friday feeling, I suppose. And now it’s the weekend and it FEELS like a weekend. Bliss. Freedom. A connection with the working world, albeit a tentative one.

I suppose what I’m experiencing is a kind of jet-lag from crossing one world into another, with no halfway house.

***

The other trainee seems nice enough. Although he doesn’t know me, he does know the boyfriend of someone I know.

And at Lawrence’s afternoon tea party today, one of the seventeen turns out to be on the same night shift as me.

Anyone who says ‘small world’ at the Bohemian News Mine is immediately directed to the naughty step.

***

The work must be having an effect on my Ideas production, though. In addition to the Proper Friends contract system for saving much-loved Americans from deportation.

I think it’s about time one should be able to donate Testosterone.

I’m thinking of my dear female-to-male transsexual friends. They want to be physically more manly, and I hate shaving. And I don’t just shave my face. If in the future I ever want a beard, or a hairy chest, I shall just go out and buy one, frankly.

I’ve been offered a Full Time Proper Job.

Okay, that’s given you time to pick your jaw, and indeed the rest of you, up off the floor. We’ll go on.

My job title is “Reader & Editor, Night Shift”. With a private company that provides tailor-made ‘media monitoring’ services to various clients. Reading news stories on a screen, editing them to fit a morning press pack. Seven nights in row, then seven off, then back again. 10.30pm till 6.30am each night, in a large office building opposite the Tower Of London. Fairly intensive, battery farming-like work, too. (Nightingales: ‘No one here but us chickens’). No one talks or surfs the Net or goes on Facebook. No phones. Only the Work. Reading, typing. Conventional employment that’s not quite conventional.

How much am I being paid? On finding out, my first thought was similar to that moment in Big, when Tom Hanks’s boy in a man’s body gets his first pay check, and yelps out aloud like he’s won the Lottery. The co-worker at the next desk along replies miserably, ‘Yeah. They really screw you don’t they?’

Thanks to the dole, and the long-term dole top-ups one gets just by getting older (a kind of state compensation for being increasingly less pretty) I’m currently living on about £70 a week, after I’ve paid my rent. That has to pay for everything else: food, bills, Internet, phone, travel, dry cleaning, wine, going out and general London living. I’m rather hoping the post-tax wage will be a bit more than that. Lately I keep messing my dole up, overspending in the big Sweet Shop that is London, and having to borrow from friends and family, trying desperately to stop rent cheques from bouncing. Yes, I do know what it feels like to actually starve. It’s no Picnic, or even a Lion Bar. So the thought of more money coming in is very much a relief.

But then I calm down and remember there’s also that initial period of getting used to arrears payment, when you have to work and somehow survive for a month, perhaps more, before the first lot of cash finally comes through. At which point you realise you’ve been deducted Emergency Tax until the Revenue sorts it out. More hoops to jump through. Work really is too much like Hard Work.

But it might be fine. It might turn out to be more money than I thought. I might find it suits me, that I ‘perform’ well (which always has connotations of a seal getting its fish), and have my wages increased. I may even (whisper it) be able to start Saving. And then perhaps I won’t live in a bedsit forever after all. There’s only one way to find out.

(Though, yes, I know… it IS a bedsit in Highgate. It’s all relative.)

Anyway. Money, schmoney, as not nearly enough people in the news are saying right now. There’s another reason why I feel the job will be good for me. For the last year or so, I’ve had all the time in the world, yet I’ve become unproductive to the point of drying up completely. Even my diary entries have become sporadic. With no one else to prod me out of bed, I’ve tried to impose self-discipline, but the little voice in my head that constantly whispers ‘what’s the point?’ and ‘do it tomorrow’ has been winning all too frequently.

Once I have finally convinced myself life is worth getting out of bed for, I’ve found it impossible to settle my mind on doing any one thing. The mere idea that choosing one thing to do – to THINK any one thing, has made me brood on how this means every other possibility is being missed out on. Every alternate thought, every alternate sentence to write, every alternate way of spending the day, the evening, the month, the life. The harsh inevitability that whatever you do, you will miss out on a million other things. The sheer nature of being able to do anything has left me doing nothing at all.

Sounds close like madness, but it’s more a kind of mental build-up. There’s a recent Doctor Who episode where Catherine Tate’s character finds her newly-enhanced mind is starting to come terminally undone, in classic Flowers For Algernon style:

‘You know who I’d like to meet? Charlie Chaplin. I bet he’s great. Shall we, Charlie Chaplin? Charlie Chester, Charlie Brown, no he’s fiction, friction, fiction, fixing, mixing, Rickston, Brixton’. [she gasps]

Well, that’s the way my mind is all the time.

And normally I can work with it, enjoy it, be creative with it. But it needs a slap every now and then. Ideally, administered from somebody else. Hence the job.

My anxiety has also taken a turn towards physical manifestation lately. Though I’m never been a proper self-harmer, I have started to pull manically at my eyebrows when trying to concentrate, plus I’ve developed a severely itchy scalp, for which the doctor has given me both pills and a water-based steroidal balm. I didn’t know you could get pills for an itchy scalp until this week.

The skin on my arms has also become itchy: I keep checking there for insects, even fleas, but never find any. Might just be an allergy, but it does rather sound like just another anxiety outlet. My skin is crawling, and I’m crawling up the walls too. Something has to change. Hence the job. It can only be good for me.

The job will, one hopes, force me out of this rut, and sharpen up my faculties. The work is all about concentration, focus, reading speed, comprehension, English usage, grammar, deadlines. I can do those things. I can be very good at those things. I just need a bit of regular, external coercion to do them every now and then.

So I don’t really see it as just a job. I see it more as a kind of intensive, vocational college course. And I need it.

Training starts tomorrow morning, 10 am. Wish me luck.

Whenever I see an advert for a spectacles company, with a cheekboney lady in a power suit, hair up, and looking happy with her choice of eyewear to the point of madness, I now think of Sarah Palin. So that’s how pernicious the UK coverage of the US elections has become. Goodness knows what it must be like for Americans, if the British media alone is this saturated with comment and debate on Mr Obama, Mr McCain and their ‘running mates’, families, pets, and favourite choice of hunting rifle. Ignorance and lack of US nationality is no hindrance to comment, of course. And here I am joining in. Bait taken.

It seems odd to obsess so much over another country’s politics, even the US, when there’s more than enough to focus on over here. I just wish they’d concentrate more on, say, Caroline Lucas, who was recently elected Green Party leader. At least British newspaper readers can actually vote for her.

The general switch of focus from Mr O to Ms P seems less about ability to govern and more about appealing to people’s lust for a good story, with interesting characters. Ms Palin is a Good Character in this distant soap opera, so everyone perks up. On Radio 4’s News Quiz, mention of her name is given a sound effects burst from the Hallelujah Chorus, such is her gift to overseas satirists. If Mr O loses to Mr McC, or rather to Ms P, perhaps it’s because he’s just not funny enough, intentionally or otherwise. See also Boris Johnson.

***

Sunday last: afternoon tea at High Tea in Highgate, with Ms Crimson Skye, whom I first met in the Cabaret Tent at the Latitude Festival. High Tea is a new local haunt: homemade cakes, Doris Day and Cole Porter playing on the stereo, friendly young staff with a taste for old things. Right up my street in every sense. It’s popular today: there’s the sense it’s the Last Sunny Sunday of the year, so everyone is out in the cafes and parks. All the Sunday Couples, or in my case, the Couples Of Singles.

Then a drink in St John’s Tavern, Archway, now a trendy but pleasant restaurant & bar with chunky oak tables and a selection of broadsheet supplements by the beer pumps. A world away from the dingy pub in 1993 where Orlando played their early gigs.

And then to Ms Andrei’s flat in Upper Holloway for dinner and a movie. The Magic Toyshop: a rare 80s TV film of the Angela Carter novel. Adapted by the author, so it’s full of deliciously surreal, dream-like moments which a normal TV screenwriter would have cut for fear of confusing the audience. Has a creepy puppet swan and a creepier Tom Bell.

***
A Thursday past: the Boogaloo for Beautiful & Damned, with me DJ-ing there for the first time since I’d left the club night in Miss Red’s hands. Martin White and his Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra play a fantastic set (with Kate Dornan on tuba), and the bar is decked out in a Victorian Circus theme, complete with straw, bunting, an Unhelpful Fortune Teller booth, and lots of people in stick-on moustaches.

One lady is dressed up as a half-man, half-woman, with one gender on each side. I half chat her up, half-heartedly. My old neighbour and room decorator Liz also comes along and has such a nice time that she leaves a thank-you present outside my door: a little bejewelled make-up mirror, wrapped in ribbon and paper.

***

A recent Friday eve – outing to an art show with various Boogaloo associates (Nat, Red, Julia, Ms Annie S, Mr Russell, The General). Venue is a dusty Victorian house in the Kings Cross Road, formerly the shop Hats Plus. The old awning is still in place, still advertising the hat shop’s now-defunct website. Even website addresses can gather dust these days. I teach the word ‘awning’ to two Swedish women.

That Saturday eve – I Dj at the Magic Theatre event, at the Art Deco Bloomsbury Ballroom. Venue is outrageously plush and ornate, and I enjoy Ms Crimson Skye’s burlesque turn on the stage. She sings the Patsy Cline song ‘Crazy’ in a Texan drawl, while stripping from a Hannibal Lecter grill mask and straitjacket, her arms tied behind her back.  There’s also a Dexy’s-esque band with a full brass section, who cover the 80s song ‘Hey You, The Rocksteady Crew’.

Late in the evening, with much wine consumed, two men dressed as what looks like giant pincushions take part in an impromptu Flouncing Competition, on the dance floor. They each spin on their plimsolls and storm off in a camp huff to the nearest exit, their huge costumes bobbing around them. I am definitely enjoying myself.