Saturday 16 June. I DJ at the Last Tuesday Society shop at 11 Mare Street. The event is to mark the opening of an exhibition of Sebastian Horsley’s art, though there’s also quite a few exhibits which count as posthumous relics of his life, as in the medieval saint sense. One is his Filofax appointments diary, open at the week in which he died in 2010, now mounted in a box as if it were just as much a considered artwork as his huge paintings of crosses and sunflowers. It is art as souvenirs of a life. Which is one way of describing all art.

I wear his silver velvet suit, the one that his girlfriend Rachel Garley picked out for me. Rachel is there herself, as is Ms Manko and Jason Atomic – people I knew from my Kash Point days. A few people say hello who read my blog, which is always nice. Particularly when they buy me drinks. Someone says the suit makes me look like… (wait for it)…  ‘David Bowie during the Serious Moonlight tour’.

***

Monday 18 June:  one of the buttons on The Sebastian Shirt has broken, its plastic clasp split. So today I look for a replacement. In his book (and in the Tim Fountain stage play), Sebastian quips about needing covered buttons because ‘there’s nothing so rude as an uncovered button’.

It is only now that I realise just what the phrase ‘covered button’ truly means. It means that not only has the shirt been handmade, but the buttons have been handmade too, covered with the same material as the shirt. I don’t think I can cut a piece off the shirt to do this – that feels rather wrong. It is, after all, made by Turnball and Asser, shirtmakers to The Prince Of Wales.

So, seeking a replacement, I take the broken button to John Lewis. They’re not much use, as they deal only in the uncovered sort.  Then to The Button Queen shop in Marylebone Lane. They are very nice but they send me away to hunt down a ribbon of matching material first. This feels too much like hard work. I like errands to be self-contained and finite, not to give birth to further errands with no end in sight.

Taylors Buttons in Cleveland Street saves the day. The business has been going for over 100 years, and the lady who runs it, Maureen Rose, has herself owned the shop for 60 years.

Ms Rose suspects correctly that I want the problem solved with zero further effort on my part. She finds some white material in a bag and makes me a replacement button on the spot. It takes her about two minutes, and she charges me £1.

News story about Maureen Rose here.

***

Evening: to the Wheatsheaf pub in Fitzrovia, for a book event hosted by the Sohemian Society. Cathi Unsworth talks to Laura Del-Rivo about her wonderful 1961 novel of bohemian Soho life, The Furnished Room. Ms Del-Rivo describes the sense of needing to find other bohemians in her youth vividly – the sheer relief at discovering the shared houses and bars where there were people like her. These days all one needs to find people as strange as oneself is just to go on the Internet; back then, you had to move house.

Afterwards I chat with Travis Elborough in the alleyway outside. Suddenly a taxi drives through – Ms Del-Rivo and the rest of us have to stand aside – and out gets Ben Goldacre, who is a kind of Cult Author of today. He happens to be on his way to something nearby, but stops for a quick chat. It’s all Very London – different worlds of writers, different interests, but always colliding.

Another Very London moment is when I arrive before the talk and join Travis as he chats to a blond woman. I’d assumed she was some friend of his. In fact he’d arrived by himself, and has known her about five minutes; it’s just that the atmosphere is of such unabashed and open friendliness, the kind people might associate more with New York. Halfway through the event, she is sitting with us when, without a word, she gets up and leaves and is never seen again.

A line from The Furnished Room (paraphrasing), which seems Very London, 50s and now:

‘But what exactly are you looking for?’

‘Something to look for.’

***

The Furnished Room has just been republished by Five Leaves, available here. Highly recommended.

I love this photo of Laura Del-Rivo, taken by Ida Kar in the early 60s:

Some unrecorded recent activity.

27 May: I attend the BAFTA TV awards at the Royal Festival Hall. Ms Sarah D has tickets to the public gallery, and I’m curious, so I go.

The public ticket holders get to walk the red carpet on the way in, though in this instance the carpet is a red, white and blue jigsaw pattern, which as someone points out looks the opening credits to Dad’s Army after a bad drug trip. The public attendees are asked to arrive before the proper guests, and then are kept upstairs in a kind of apartheid section. There’s a separate balcony bar and stewards preventing you from going downstairs into the main stalls area, in case – shock horror – you dare to speak to the scriptwriter of The Fades. Don’t touch the TV people!

But even famous names are not necessarily famous faces. On getting his award for writing and directing This Is England ’88, Shane Meadows makes a semi-jokey comment that no one asked for his autograph on the red carpet.  It’s funny how the BAFTAs mix this British take on Oscars glamour, celebrating the celebrated, with giving the actual awards to non-famous creative types. People in the public gallery shout and scream when Sherlock‘s  Benedict Cumberbatch comes on with Doctor Who’s Matt Smith (to present the head writer of both shows, Steven Moffat, with a special award), but otherwise most of the awards are for less well known programmes like Appropriate Adult, Random, Borgen and The Fades. Then there’s awards for harrowing documentaries (like the Terry Pratchett euthanasia report), followed by ones for mindless drivel like Celebrity Juice, which baffingly beats Sherlock to the You Tube Audience Award. Still, that’s the variety of television. What makes it worthwhile is seeing what makes the televised version and what doesn’t.  Terry Pratchett and Stewart Lee in particular have their speeches cut down, and one wonders who decides such things, and what their rules are.

They give you special BAFTA chocolates, in the shape of the trophy:

photo by Paul @bitoclass on Twitter

***

Weekend of June 2nd: more celebrations where some people are marked out as intrinsically better than others: the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Four days of it: Saturday to Tuesday. On the one rain-free day I attend a street party across the road in Highgate Avenue, and meet some of my neighbours for the first time since I moved here. Which was eighteen years ago. The street is closed off, there’s trestle tables with drinks (I do my bit and add a bottle of wine) and there’s the ubiquitous Union Jack bunting dangling from street lamps. Small girls play hopscotch in the road, which is covered with chalk scribbles. It all looks very 1950s, till one reads some of the words the children write on the tarmac: ‘RIHANNA‘.

On the flotilla day there’s lots of people on the tube in soggy ponchos and Union Jack bowler hats, looking drenched yet perfectly happy. Some of my more republican friends find the Jubilee nauseating and in bad taste (particularly in a recession), and some even move out of the city till it’s all over. In my fence-sitting way, I inwardly support the republicans’ point, but I also recognise that plenty of people like the Jubilee events. I find myself enjoying the spectacle of the flotilla of boats (particularly the bit with the War Horse puppet on the National Theatre roof), and I love the  fireworks show at the end of the big pop concert (writing that, I sound like I’m the Queen’s age myself. I might as well be).

Where do I draw the line? I suppose it’s at the moment where someone at the street party asks me – very nicely – if I’d like a little Union Jack tattoo put on the side of my face.

No. Thank you, but no. I suppose that’s the limit of my tolerance for anything. Facial decoration.

Quick notice for UK readers.

If you think the UK law should be changed to allow gay couples to marry, please say so in the consultation at Out4marriage.com.

It’s essentially a questionnaire that takes about two minutes to click through. But the government will use the results, so it’s important.

What interests me in particular is that the current Home Secretary, the right wing Theresa May, is one of the pro-gay marriage campaigners. In the past she voted against equalising the ages of consent for gay people, and also voted against the repealing of the anti-gay Clause 28. But people change, and times change. There’s much about the current lot in power that worries me but this is at least one commendable state of affairs.

***

‘What a disgraceful lapse! Nothing added to my disquisition, and life allowed to waste like a tap left running. Eleven days unrecorded.’ – Virginia Woolf, from her diaries.

This appropriate quote managed to pop up in two very different books I’ve been reading: Alexandra Harris’s short biography of Ms Woolf, and Alison Bechdel’s comic book memoir Are You My Mother? 

Since my exam on May 22nd, which ended my first year as a born-again student, I’ve found myself wanting to get more books read. It’s the Deathbed Regrets test again: I imagine myself suddenly on my deathbed and think ‘if life ended now, what would I most regret not having done?’.

I never think, ‘I wish I’d read more newspapers and magazines.’

I never think, ‘I wish I’d spent more time on Twitter and Facebook.’

And I never think, ‘I wish I’d read more comments left underneath articles on the Internet.’

All of which I fear I’ve been doing too much of over the past year or so. What I do think is, ‘I wish I’d read more books’.  Particularly with the English Lit degree; it seems hypocritical to spend time reading ephemeral stuff online that I could have used on a book.  And I’m not convinced I even enjoy being on Twitter for very long or that I’m good at it. So I’ve been setting myself a goal of reading at least 150 pages of a book a day. For a dyspraxic reader like myself, that’s achievable. It might also help to increase my reading speed.

Another rule I’ve set myself is ‘one book at a time’ – no double-booking. I know many people read several books at once, but in my case it just leads to books not being finished.

I’m also trying to balance set texts for next year’s course with books for pleasure, mixing prose with comic books, fiction with non-fiction, favourite authors with unfamiliar ones, and classics with brand new releases. And it really works: the variety makes all the difference.

So since May 22nd, here’s what I’ve read, in order, with links to my reviews on the GoodReads website (a kind of non-Amazon global book group, which if nothing else helps to remind you what you’ve read).

Goodbye To Soho by Clayton Littlewood (memoir)
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams (novel)
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (novel)
Virginia Woolf by Alexandra Harris (biography)
Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel (comic book memoir)
The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes (novel)