To Cad & The Dandy in Hanover Square for a second tailored suit: this time for summer wear. Mohair, two button, light navy blue: their recommendation as an alternative to linen. The trouble with linen suits is their tendency to look utterly creased and grubby within minutes. Which I don’t mind so much, but I’m curious about the mohair argument and as a known-suit fancier I think I should own one.

C&D were featured in an article on the summer suit debate in City AM, which a kind colleague on the night shift had put aside for me. The sentiment ‘I saw this and thought of you’ is responsible for about 90% of my wardrobe, and indeed my library.

==

At the Whittington Hospital’s Imaging Department the other day for an ultrasound on my left leg. A decade after the removal of a large varicose vein, it’s come back to haunt me once more. Dad is apologetic about this, as it’s his family’s hereditary condition. I tell him not to feel bad, that it’s a small price to pay for the privilege of being his son. Being English, I can’t let this statement hover for too long and quickly add, ‘And thanks for the full head of hair.’

So here I am again, back at the Whittington a decade later. I stand on a footstool in my underwear while a lady engineer applies the gel and the plastic thing on a wire and insists I look at the screen. I can’t make out what she’s referring to, and the only comment that springs to mind is ‘Isn’t there a Joy Division sleeve that looks like this?’

She says it’s good news: the new vein is operable after all.

‘You’ll be able to wear shorts again!’ she beams.

Preparing to go out to two soirees: a birthday gathering at the Flask in Highgate, then onto the Phoenix in Cavendish Square to DJ at How Does It Feel To Be Loved. Always a pleasure to do the latter as it means I can indulge my lesser aired taste in 60s girl group pop alongside 80s jangly guitar indie.

Thursday last was DJ-ing at the Boogaloo for Beautiful & Damned, the warm up for our slot at next month’s Latitude Festival. We put on the silent movie Pandora’s Box by way of a backdrop. Louise Brooks’s iconic bob hairdo always looks more extreme than one expects: from some angles it’s nearly a butch crop. In one scene she wears a helmet-like black hat which actually looks exactly the same as her hair. When she takes the hat off, there’s no overall difference. It’s like someone wearing two pairs of glasses.

It dawns on me that the haircut also crosses over for both of my DJ-iing incarnations this week. How Does It Feel… runs a label for latterday indiepop groups, one of which, the Pocketbooks, has a girl singer whose hair is pure Ms Brooks – or indeed the singer from Swing Out Sister, echoing the 80s echoing the 60s echoing the 20s. Some music scenes are joined at the haircut.

But never mind my own dipping into different worlds – Fosca’s Tom Edwards, my brother, is now playing guitar for none other than Edwyn Collins. He replaces Roddy Frame, with his first gig being T In The Park. Quite a leap from playing with Fields of the Nephilim. Though not such a leap, of course, from playing with Fosca.

Tom tells me much of Mr Collins’s back catalogue is more muso-y and trickier to play than you might expect from the Godfather of Indie. Even though those early recordings with Orange Juice are often out of tune and vocally wavering (in all the right ways) the guitar lines are elaborate and downright fiddly to copy. With the notable exception of the break in ‘Rip It Up’, Orange Juice’s only bona fide chart hit. Amid all the polished funk-pop production, Edwyn sings ‘And my favourite song’s entitled… ‘Boredom” before going into a replication of that Buzzcocks song’s two-note guitar solo. How many Top Of The Pops viewers got the reference at the time, heaven knows. So very sly, so very arch, so very Edwyn.

The process of writing a non-fiction book is fascinating. Mr Agent now wants to know if I’m going to write ‘Forever England’ as a straight narrative or as a more guide book shaped affair.

Which is better? 14 chapters of 5000 words (narrative style) or 40 chapters of 2000 words (guidebook style)? I have to decide this now, really.

My gut reaction is go with 14 long chapters with a decent index, as once I start to write about something, I like to really explore and get settled in. But maybe shorter chapters would be more readable, more dip-into-able, and perhaps make the book more commercial, in these days of compact attention spans. Ultimately, I want as many readers as possible. Which path to take?

==

Saturday last – a trip to Brighton for the wedding party of Simon Price and Jenna Allsopp. Staying with Rhoda B at a hotel near the station.

Venue is the basement of the Al Duomo Italian restaurant, round the side of the Pavilion Buildings. Inside, each table has its own designated 7-inch pop single floating above it, anchored to a helium balloon. I look inside each sleeve, and it really is the actual records. All impeccable choices, given the bride and groom DJ at their own long-running club in Camden, Stay Beautiful. There’s The Specials – Ghost Town. Siouxie and the Banshees- Spellbound. Manic Street Preachers – Love’s Sweet Exile (underrated in my book). The single which happens to be above the table I’ve randomly installed myself at turns out to be David Bowie – Ashes To Ashes. Perfect.

I drink too much and enjoy myself too much, with the result that I spend the day after with a twitching right thumb. I’d collapsed into bed drunk and slept on a nerve or muscle in the wrong way. It’s a new degree of hangover for me- actual palsy.

At the party I boozily flirt with younger people yet bemoan (and bore them with) the tragic way one’s romantic taste doesn’t change as one gets older.

There’s no solution to this, really. There are those of my age who think nothing of visiting their paramours in student halls of residence, happy to attend birthday parties full of 20-year-olds when they’re nearly 40.  I enjoy the company of the young, but if I’m the only person at a party who’s over 22, part of me thinks, ‘This Looks Unseemly, Frankly’.

And then again… Another part thinks, ‘Well, I’m not getting any other offers, damn it. And they can’t be after me for money.’

It can be  about casting oneself in a role, before you’re cast by someone else. How does this look? It’s all very well saying ‘who cares what others think’, but if you take an interest in your external appearance per se, you can’t help considering the outside view when it comes to companions, too. Here is a man, you are saying, with someone far too young for them.

There are those who feel a younger lover keeps them young, while others think an age difference makes them feel twice as old. ‘Who’s this then? Kasa-been?’ ‘Kasabian, Grandad.’ ‘Ah, heard it all before. It reminds me of The Wedding Present circa 1987…’ ‘Who?’

I realise Kasabian don’t sound anything like the Wedding Present. Probably. I could find out. But the fogey-ish image suits me, and takes less effort, so why bother?

In fact, if I DO investigate new pop music, it arguably makes me look sadder.  I absolutely adore La Roux, a tomboyish Brixton girl singer sporting heavy 1980s make-up and a quiff (Tilda Swinton meets Molly Ringwald, as someone put it). She looks like she has no friends – except the posters on her wall. I’m sure she DOES have friends offstage, but the image is clear: defiant and refreshingly aloof.

Her records go from sounding a bit like Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry’ (‘Quicksand’) to budget synthpop recalling Romo and Post-Romo bands like Hollywood, Riviera, Client, or Baxendale (‘Bulletproof’).

But if I were to go to a La Roux show, given I’m 37 and she’s about 12, I’d just look deeply, deeply sad. Well, unless I hang onto the bar at the back for dear life. My taste is the same, it’s only my body that’s changed. My body isn’t me – sometimes.

In fact, I’ve just written an Angela Carter-ish fairy tale about this, ‘Gepetto’ (sic), which should appear in a fanzine for the comic Phonogram. It’s an attempt to map the story of Geppetto & Pinocchio onto a relationship between an older man (who’s keen to pull the strings), and a younger female-to-male transsexual who dreams of becoming a Real Boy. Or at least, that’s where it starts: I quickly became bored with the Pinocchio-transman idea (‘yeah, that old chestnut!’), and went onto, well, everything I had to tell the world full stop. There’s musings on rebelling against the body (the wrong age versus the wrong gender), and Phonogram-esque references to a song by the 90s band Belly.

I wrote the story just before leaving for Gibraltar, in three handwritten drafts (fountain pen, A4 lined), followed by a fourth on the computer. Heaven knows what others will make of it, but I’m pleased I did it. Next step: more.

An email:

Dear Mr Edwards,
We seem to have been staying at the same hotel in Sark at the same time; I presume you were the young man who had difficulties with his bicycle chain and who resembled a refugee from ‘Crome Yellow’.

==

Have given my notice at the night shift. My last night there is June 25th.

I’d been hoping to keep the job on and have it support the writing, but it was becoming increasingly obvious that I couldn’t muster the energy for both. However, I swore to myself I wouldn’t quit until, say, a literary agent contacted me out of the blue with a view to writing a book. Which is exactly what happened.

The proposed book is a non-fiction travel work, working title ‘Forever England: Corners of Belonging in Foreign Fields’. It’ll muse on versions of the displaced Englishness I’ve come across in Sark, Gibraltar and Tangier, as well as places I’d like to go, if the book deal allows. I’m fascinated with 2009 notions of belonging, where people escape a country yet take bits of it with them – or create a version of Albion from scratch. It’ll be about otherworldly bars, poignant shops and strange monuments. All from my point of view, as someone who thinks he doesn’t really have ‘roots’ or fits in anywhere – only to be told the moment I step outside the UK that I resemble a terminal Englishman. Whatever that means…

===

As I’m quitting the night job, it means I’ll be available for more London DJ gigs. There’s these between now and Latitude:

Thurs June 18th: Beautiful & Damned at the Boogaloo, 312 Archway Road, N6. The usual vintage, easy listening & showtunes.

Sat June 20th: How Does It Feel To Be Loved, The Phoenix, 37 Cavendish Square. 80s indiepop & 60s girl groups.

Mon June 29th: Book Club Boutique, Dick’s Bar, 23 Romilly Street, Soho. Gay Pride event. Not sure what I’ll play here. Perhaps everything I can’t get away with at the other places.

Sat July 4th: Last Tuesday Society’s Fairy Tale Masked Ball, after a talk by Marina Warner. The Vaults, 47 Chiswell Streets, EC. The B&D stuff with a slightly more hedonistic, giddy angle.

===

The sensation of finding out there’s a Big Brother contestant whose path has crossed yours is, I suppose, an increasingly common modern experience. This year’s series includes an intriguing Russian lady called Angel, who entered the BB house in top hat, tails and brandishing a cane. Last time I saw her she was married to the manager of Spearmint, the band I was in during 1999 and 2000. She designed and built the set of the video for Spearmint’s single, ‘We’re Going Out’, which I appeared in. I don’t watch the programme much these days, but I hope she wins. Her bohemian, arty charm might swing it for her. Niceness is the alibi of otherness.

===

Today the country has woken up to the results of the European Parliament elections, with the BNP acquiring two new seats. A closer look reveals the actual number of votes for the BNP in their two winning regions (Yorkshire, North West) has in fact decreased. It was the poor turnout by people who’d normally vote for the top 3 parties that gave them a higher percentage of the vote, and thus the seats. Proportional Representation is thought to be a fairer system, but if people aren’t voting at all, it’s useless. So now the rest of Europe – and people who aren’t looking hard enough – think the UK is becoming more right wing. No, it’s becoming more apathetic. More people than ever have chosen not to choose.

But they forget the trouble with choosing nothing. Like the laws of nature where a vacuum is abhored, something still has to go in nothing’s place. So now we have BNP MEPs. Well done, nothing.