Friday 20th December 2013. I am pleased to receive about two dozen cards this year, made all the more special by the high cost of postage and the dominance of the internet. Post from abroad is especially meaningful: I’m sent a beautiful pop-up one from Eileen C in New York and a pictorial Christmas aerogramme from Danika H in Australia.

Although people rarely send cards and letters today, two Christmas books this year on the subject have proved to be very popular. There’s Shaun Usher’s anthology Letters of Note and Simon Garfield’s historical account, To The Letter. The Usher book is based on his website, where the very technology that killed off the letter – the internet – has turned out to be perfect for celebrating it. I feel all the more grateful for receiving an actual letter at Christmas, from Danika, and I’ll make sure I reply in kind.

Another sign of the times this week: the gay section in Time Out magazine has been axed. It’s assumed that, like cinema listings, there’s no longer any need to turn to a paper magazine to find out about events: Facebook events pages and online listings have become the default. Gay issues, meanwhile, are more mainstream than ever, with Conservative politicians supporting campaigns for gay marriage, and campaigns against homophobia around the world (such as in Russia and Uganda) given decent coverage by the media. This week has also seen Alan Turing finally pardoned for the crime of having consensual sex with another man. His mistake was to have it in the 1950s. Actually, as my dad once told me, it was pretty much frowned on to have sex in the 1950s if you were heterosexual, too.

But the question of promoting gay culture separately in terms of identity and role models is an ongoing one. As it is, London still has its annual LGBT film festival (at the BFI) and its own gay bookshop (Gay’s The Word in Marchmont Street – hitting 35 years old next January). Coming out as gay is still a big issue – Tom Daley making the headlines of late. So Time Out’s decision does seem premature. But then, like all paper listings magazines, it’s been struggling full stop.

* * *

Saturday 21st December 2013. To Somerset House with Ella Lucas, to see the exhibition on the late British fashion editor, collector, string-puller, muse and Lady Gaga lookalike, Isabella Blow. Ingeniously, the exhibits that can’t go on mannequins, such as letters and faxes, are in white display cases which sit surreally on mannequin legs – with shoes from Ms Blow’s collection on the cases’ feet. One letter, on Harpers notepaper, is from Hamish Bowles, who is also one of the other dandies in the I Am Dandy book. He writes to Ms Blow, ‘Long for your next appearance – stepping out of a reverie by Ronald Firbank…’

Much of the exhibition is of Philip Treacy’s exotic hat and mask creations, Ms Blow being his biggest champion. One mask has a grid of jewelled Swarovski crystal nails in a black silk net, rather reminding me of the Pinhead monster in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. I check the caption, and it turns out to be a direct homage: ‘Hellraiser mask with nail detailing‘. Any exhibition which references Ronald Firbank and Hellraiser is fine by me.

A word learned: ‘chopine’. A historical type of women’s platform shoe, popular in the 15th to 17th centuries. Modern versions of which are in the Blow collection. More like a platform clog, really.

One of the information panels on Ms Blow’s history begins with the phrase ‘Forced to work for a living…’

* * *

Sunday 22nd December 2013. I visit the Museum of London, and am pleased to see that its shop stocks A London Year, the diary anthology which includes me alongside Pepys and co. It’s the closest I’ve come yet to being a museum piece.

On the raised pedestrian walkway around the corner, I take a look at the ruins of the original London Wall, where the layers of medieval brickwork can be seen on top of the Roman foundations. There’s an information panel about the ruins, provided by the museum. It’s dated 1980 and has been laminated against the elements, though 33 years later the elements have won, and much of the text is now faded and illegible. The panel about the ruins is itself a ruin.

In the evening I turn a corner in Clerkenwell Green and suddenly see the Shard and St Paul’s from a distance, both lit up. From this angle they appear as if standing right next to each other, though the Thames and several districts separate them geographically. Tonight the former looks like a Christmas tree, and the latter like a bauble. I stare up from the silent street at them, thinking how London always was this constant shrug of old with new, just like the two parts to the Wall and the ruined panel. Inside the Crown Tavern, more shrugging: Wizzard’s eternal Christmas song on the pub stereo, while the first word I overhear as I enter is someone saying  ‘Facebook’.

* * *

Monday 23rd December 2013.

The London Library’s last day before closing for Christmas, and the last day of its late night hours, closing at 9pm. It transpires that not enough members use the library quite that late, so in 2014 ‘late closing’ will mean 8pm instead. I sit in the historic Reading Room from 8.30pm till the end, which as expected means I am the only one there. Just me, all the books and journals, the famous soporific armchairs, the fireplace, and the Christmas tree. Utter, serene peace. I soak it in.

As soon as I leave, though: chaos. Heavy wind and rain has hit Britain, causing transport shut downs and power cuts at the worst possible time of year. Although the effect on London is relatively minor, my umbrella is a wreck before I make it out of St James’s Square. At Piccadilly Circus, where I get the tube, the clear plastic bubble over Eros has burst, scattering polystyrene chips of fake snow all over the road. Like some Biblical retribution against worshipping false gods, this idealised image of Christmas weather – pretty fake snow in a bubble – has been eclipsed by real Christmas weather – ugly, uncontained wind and rain.

* * *

Tuesday 24th December 2013.

To the Hackney Picturehouse to see a 1940s Christmas-themed film I’d not seen before, The Bishop’s Wife, in which Cary Grant plays an angel helping a troubled New York priest, played by David Niven. Despite his otherworldly role, Cary Grant is just dressed as Cary Grant, with the usual immaculate dark suit. One character is an eccentric aged scholar,  an atheist who nevertheless loves the traditions of Christmas. On discovering Cary G’s celestial identity, he remarks ‘Oh, that’s annoying.’ I think that’s how I’d feel.

Even though the story centres on David Niven’s bishop, the film’s parting message about Jesus feels unusual, even jarring. Yet I remember how it works fine in The Holly and The Ivy, a British film from the early 50s, also about priests at Christmas. I think the fact that Niven’s daughter is played by ‘Zuzu’ from It’s A Wonderful Life reminds me why: American films are happy to tell Christmas stories about angels, but they usually leave out Christ himself.

It’s still an issue today. I read a piece in the Guardian this week where an American writer remarks how the British are perfectly happy to say ‘Merry Christmas’ to each other, as opposed to ‘Happy Holidays’, regardless of religion – or lack of it – of those present. It’s just tradition. But among the cards from British people I get, some are indeed saying ‘Happy Holidays’, so perhaps that’s changing.

The first time I saw the word ‘holidays’ used to mean Christmas was in a TV advert. The product was that great ambassador of the American way, Coca-Cola. That may be another reason why ‘Happy Holidays’ has yet to catch on: for some (and I include myself), it feels too American.

* * *

Wednesday 25th December 2013. I spend Christmas by myself in Highgate, once again enjoying the palpable and rare peace in the city. The changed background hum of low traffic without buses. Morning spent hungover from mixing prosecco and Baileys the night before. I chat to Mum at length on the phone.

At 1pm, I meet up with Silke R once again for my own tradition of feeding the ducks in Waterlow Park. Silke is currently staying in the flat attached to Archway Video, the film rental library on Archway Road where we both once worked. An independent family business since the 1980s, the shop stocked a huge range of films, first on VHS, then DVD, and eventually, Blu-Ray. The customers included Daniel Craig, Maureen Lipman, Ray Davies of the Kinks and Brett Anderson of Suede. This year, the shop is an empty shell, closed for good since the summer. Silke now works for Odeon, an irony given that video shops were first thought to be bringing about the death of cinema. It wasn’t cinema that killed video shops, though, but online services like Lovefilm, Netflix, and of course Amazon.

In Muswell Hill a few months ago I bumped into one of the shop’s old customers. ‘I do miss that shop,’ he said fondly. ‘Though of course I hadn’t been in for years.’ He didn’t seem to notice how one statement was related to the other.

Thursday 26th December 2013.

With the lack of traffic on Boxing Day, combined with the sense of enforced family gatherings reaching the point of strained boredom, some local teenagers play football in the street outside. I first worry about them breaking any windows, but then I realise that young people playing ball games in the road is very old indeed. All the museum photos say so.

I walk around St Pancras in the afternoon. Most of the people I see fall into two categories. There’s aimlessly wandering tourists, who seem baffled that everything is shut for a second day. A handful of them climb on the gates of the British Library to take photos of the empty piazza. The other category is football fans, because Boxing Day means sport. People in Chelsea scarves are looking particularly pleased with themselves.

Friday 27th December 2013.

CHRISTMAS MESSAGE 2013.

This year’s photograph of me with a London tree is of course a ‘selfie’, one of 2013’s Words of the Year. With thanks to the London Review Bookshop for letting me take it on their premises on Christmas Eve.

The bookshop tree represents not just my current life as a student of literature, but my increasing concern about the effect of digital culture on independence, in every sense. On a blunt commercial level, the online tax-dodging colossus that is Amazon is obviously threatening the future of independent, non-corporate shops like the LRB. Bookshops, like cinemas and libraries, are pleasant places for staff to work in and for customers to go and immerse themselves in culture, at their own pace, offline and away from the ubiquity of the computer screen. No advertising sidebars tearing your concentration to shreds. One book I bought at the LRB this year was The Circle by Dave Eggers, which paints a near-future world where Amazon and Google and social media have reduced people’s lives to a banal flatness of public algorithms and vanished privacy.

This theme also connects neatly with Channel 4’s Alternative Christmas Message by Edward Snowden, the whistleblowing fugitive of the USA security services. Mr Snowden cited another novel about a world without privacy, 1984, and said some rather powerful things:

‘A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalysed thought… And that’s a problem, because privacy matters. Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.’

The Queen’s own Christmas message also touched on the need for personal time alone, though she linked it more with prayer and meditation.  Certainly a child born today in the case of baby Prince George has even less privacy than most children, but the point stands. What grabbed my attention with the Queen’s message was that she also mentioned ‘even keeping a diary’ as an example of creating a space for private reflection. Which is where I come in.

This year saw my online diary’s first emergence in book form, in the form of extracts in the anthology A London Year. Like the books about letters, it’s a celebration of individual minds reflecting in privacy. Their words are only later published when the appropriate permissions have been sought, and when an editor has done their own reflecting on what part of private writing might, as Shuan Usher puts it, be ‘deserving of a wider audience’. An amount of consideration and reflection has been applied, in other words. Although my own diary is published online first, it actually begins life as a series of far more personal notes made in my own paper notebooks. And even when published online, I try to evoke the more private nature of the printed page by the omission of one key element: no comments box.

A blog with no comments is as close to the reflective, personal and locked-off experience of the printed page as it can get. If you write online, I highly recommend it. Let comments belong on social media. Writing and reading are after all anti-social activities, and need to be. Humans are social creatures, but socialising needs to be kept apart from the production and consumption of writing. The more people can disconnect by way of balance, the better.

(I’ve now realised that Mr Usher also omits a comments box from his Letters of Note website too.)

It’s rather impractical to call for a boycott of Amazon, Google and social media now, and I wouldn’t want to. I use those things all the time myself. But my wish for 2014 is to try to resist the technology that wants us to only live through an endless scrolling of screens, that only what matters is to join the shallow noise, the unconsidered chatter, the indiscretion, the unkind photos passed around at the expense of others and the Fear of Missing Out. I wish to balance these activities with more appreciation of three beautiful ‘I’s: individualism, independence and immersion.

And I wish you a very happy what’s-left-of-Christmas, and a splendid New Year.

Further diary for Friday 13^th December: I bump into Erol Alkan on the tube. I don’t see him much these days but today he’s as sweet and friendly as ever. There was a time in the mid 1990s when I would see him several times a week at various London clubs, pubs, gigs and music biz parties. I even met his parents in the house in Archway where he’d grown up. Back then he was a DJ at the more popular indie music clubs in London, like Going Underground and Trash. He then started playing in guitar groups himself (I saw his band Guernica a few times), before he concentrated on DJ-ing full time, then he got into remixing and producing, and today he is one of the country’s biggest DJs full stop.

On the tube he tells me he’s just released his debut single, after all these years: ‘A Hold on Love’. He’s en route that evening to Amsterdam for a charity DJ gig, along with the act Justice. I think I must have pulled an expression of barely concealed ignorance, because Mr A laughs and guesses (rightly) that I have no idea who they are. Later on I look them up. Wikipedia has a whole separate page titled ‘Awards and nominations received by Justice’.

I suppose I could attempt to keep up with the cultural big names one is meant to know, but it’s been years since I took a more than cursory interest in what’s on the A-list at MTV and Radio 1. The last time I was exposed to Radio 1 was about five years ago, when I had to visit the NHS sexual health clinic on Archway Road. It was their waiting room music of choice.  

There’s a fashionable acronym doing the rounds about this sort of thing: FOMO, short for Fear Of Missing Out. It’s the form of anxiety that technology has meant to have brought into people’s lives. It can be the need to constantly check updates in the personal lives of others (particular on Facebook), or the need to be up-to-date with current affairs due to its addictive overexposure (via Twitter, websites, free newspapers, screens in railway stations). People may become terrified of being the only person in the room who, say, wasn’t aware of X getting married, or of Y having children, or Z dying, or such and such a band reforming, or knowing what ‘selfie’ means. All because they missed seeing the right updates. They were looking in the wrong direction at just the wrong time, and so they Missed Out.

But missing out is nothing to be afraid of. It’s certainly nothing new. No one can watch every ‘must-see’ TV series, or investigate every vaguely celebrated new release in music, or read every shortlist of every literary award, and get the dog shampooed. So becoming anxious about missing out is nonsensical. Instead, we should cultivate our natural specialism, plough our own individual furrows of taste, and mutiny against the construction that is General Knowledge, whoever he may be.

Instead of Fear Of Missing Out, I propose we should embrace a Relief Of Missing Out. Or ROMO for short. It’s almost as if that acronym was made for me.

* * *

Tuesday 17^th December 2013. Something modern that I do get anxious about is the Mid Transaction Hustle. I go to Ryman’s on Lower Regent Street to stock up on stamps for Christmas Cards. Halfway way through the transaction, the assistant suddenly asks if I want to buy batteries as well. They are on special offer, and she gestures to a pile of them cluttering up the counter in an attention-seeking way. I have to stop myself saying ‘Please understand that if I had wanted to buy batteries, I would have asked for batteries. I have just come here to buy stamps and I rarely react well to mid-transaction surprises.’

In my case I think this particular anxiety is a symptom of my dyspraxia. One thought at a time is hard enough for a mind which is already struggling to get itself in order. The Mid Transaction Hustle can throw a spanner into some already fragile works. Thankfully, at the Ryman’s counter I manage to bottle up my cognitive confusion and mumble a simple ‘No thanks’. It is, after all, not the staff’s fault.

WH Smith are the worst culprits, though. For some time now, their till staff have been forced to ask every customer if they’d like all manner of additional unhealthy items to go with their newspaper or magazine. Haribo? Toblerone? An unacceptably oversized bar of Galaxy? As a result, the counter at Smiths is often covered in an unhappy clutter of these garish packets. Even if one uses the self-service machines (an innovation particularly suited for the British dislike of talking to strangers), by the time you’re about to pay, the screen suddenly asks you if you’d like to buy a reduced packet of Haribo there.

* * *

Thursday 19 December 2013. To the Odeon Tottenham Court Road to see the new Hobbit film, with fellow student Jon S. Like Mr Jackson’s other Middle Earth outings. it’s so beautifully designed and realised that I don’t mind the requisite ho-hum fight scenes and nick-of-time action scenes, which aren’t my sort of thing. What I do enjoy is the immersive creation of a whole world. The dragon Smaug is well worth the wait, made even more potent by being plummily voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch. Fans of Sherlock therefore get the double pleasure of seeing the two lead actors from one successful interpretation of classic genre fiction, playing hero and villain in another adaptation of classic genre fiction. On top of that, the new Hobbit films are themselves revisits of Mr Jackson’s Lord of The Rings series. So the Smaug scenes have an acute sense of genre celebration several times over.

Good to see Lee Pace in there too. He was the lead actor in Tarsem Singh’s The Fall, one of those films that really should be better known. In The Fall, Mr Pace had an otherworldly kind of prettiness about him, so it makes perfect sense that he’s now been cast as an Elf King.

* * *

Amid all the Doctor Who 50th anniversary celebrations was a welcome repeat of a radio documentary about Target Books. This was the range of paperback novelisations of the old Doctor Who TV stories. They fulfilled several generations of fans’ needs to relive the programmes, at a time when home video and DVD was yet to come. The documentary was by Mark Gatiss, and he reminded me of the stock phrase the Target writers used to describe the way the Tom Baker Doctor dressed: ‘casual bohemian elegance’.

It is only now that I realise two things about this phrase. One, that this would have been my first introduction to the use of the word ‘bohemian’ to mean a way of dressing. As a child, I remember being confused by it (wasn’t Bohemia a country?). And two, that ‘casual bohemian elegance’ sums up the way I think I dress now.

[Mark Gatiss article on Target Books: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8113603.stm ]

I have finally conceded that daily diary updates are beyond me. So starting with this entry I’m going to compile a weekly thousand-word diary instead. I hope to publish a new one every Friday morning, as that makes it feel like something to look forward to. Sunday night will have to suffice for this one.

* * *

Monday 9^th December 2013. The final set texts of the term are Olive Schreiner’s Story of An African Farm, Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled, and the Anglo-Saxon poem The Battle of Maldon. Schreiner’s novel  is a perfect example of a book I’d never pick up were it not for taking a course in literature. When I do, it moves me to tears.

* * *

Rachel Stevenson has been reviewing all the songs in John Peel’s 1991 Festive Fifty. This was the Year of Noisy Americans. I remember being in student haunts of Bristol at that time and seeing the ‘baggy’ fashions of long sleeved tops and flares give way to checked lumberjack shirts:

http://millionreasons.livejournal.com/tag/festive%20fifty%201991

In the evening I walk past the Kentish Town Forum. Despite the changing ways of consuming music, the sight of touts outside large venues still endures. It’s the same aggressive shouting at pedestrians. Only the band names being shouted come and go. Tonight it’s ‘Buy or sell tickets for Haim.’

* * *

Good to see critics agreeing with one of my favourite films of 2013: Frances Ha. In one scene, two characters discuss how to spend the evening:

‘We should go to the movies.’

‘But the movies are so expensive!’

‘Yeah, but you’re at the movies.’

* * *

Thursday 12th December 2013. On the day of my last classes for the term I receive my highest essay mark yet. It’s an 80. This is defined in the classification guidelines as a High First Class, for work that ‘may display characteristics more usually found at postgraduate level or that demonstrate the potential for publication.’ I’m rather stunned. I’m still uncertain about which direction to take this skill in order to earn a living, but at least it is proof that I can do this sort of thing well, and can do it on time, and should probably develop it further between now and the grave. The essay was on ‘technotext’ theories of materiality, with reference to Chris Ware’s comic strip story for the iPad, Touch Sensitive.

The same day sees a grading of my former work as a songwriter. The quarterly PRS statement arrives and pays me a total of £1.41. Orlando’s album Passive Soul has sold 7 copies on iTunes, while the Fosca song ‘Confused and Proud’ has been played 139 times on streaming services like Spotify and Last FM. Well, I’m pleased if the songs are being listened to at all.

* * *

Meanwhile my work as a diarist in the anthology A London Year has managed to receive some attention. Here’s a positive review, which quotes from my diary:

http://onelondonone.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/on-shelf-london-year.html

This further review calls me ‘as well-read as Samuel Johnson and Johnny Rotten but polished to a dandyish sheen’. I also have ‘a certain essential Londonness’:

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/new-anthology-diaries-explores-life-british-capita/

A few weeks ago, Kensington & Chelsea Today reviewed the book and called me ‘Dickson’ Edwards, which suggests I have some distance to go in the notability stakes. Still, it also called me ‘the youngest’ diarist in the book, which is the best possible thing you can say to anyone over, oh, 24. Here’s a pdf of the review:

http://www.chelseaspace.org/images/pdf/wilson/kct.pdf

Sat 30^th November 2013: My brother Tom and I visit Dad and Mum in Suffolk, for Dad’s 77^th birthday. Dad needs round the clock care, but at least he’s at home and gets much of the care from nurses, who visit the house and work in shifts. When Tom and I visit, Dad is dressed, seated on the sofa and is chatty. It’s very different from our visit the month before, where he was in bed and barely able to open his eyes. That time, he said to me: ‘This is all very boring, I’m afraid’.

***

Dad relies on mains power for his oxygen pump, so a recent power cut due to the now-regular floods proved to be something of an ordeal. I find out afterwards that the electricity network has a priority register for people who are particularly vulnerable when the power goes down.

[Here’s the link in case anyone reading this knows someone in a similar situation]

Something that I’ve insisted Mum gets for future power cuts is a ‘corded’ phone, as in the pre-digital sort that just plugs into the landline socket. No need for batteries, chargers or any sort of power supply. It’s everything else that needs electricity: mobile chargers, answering machines, speed dial buttons, hands-free bases. Strange to think the phone evolved from not needing electricity to needing it badly.

Tom is currently playing guitar for Roddy Frame’s band. They’ve been performing all the songs from the 80s Aztec Camera album High Land Hard Rain, one of the concerts being at a sold out Drury Lane. These ‘classics albums live’ gigs are more popular than ever, though not all the bands stick strictly to the list on the back of the (inevitably reissued) CD box. I’m told that when Primal Scream performed ‘Screamadelica’ live, they mucked around with the song order, and even missed some tracks out.

Meanwhile, Monty Python have reformed for live concerts too. I suppose they could tour a set-list of all the scenes from each of their films, in the way bands do their back catalogue albums.

* * *

A notice in St Pancras library today, announcing a book of condolence for Nelson Mandela, this particular one at Camden town hall around the corner. There’s also a book at South Africa House in Trafalgar Square, where people are shown on TV queuing around the block.

Colin Wilson, the cult writer of ‘The Outsider’ and countless other books, dies on Thursday 5th, the same day as Mr Mandela. It’s reminiscent of Jeffrey Bernard going on the same day as Mother Teresa: not just the timing but the contrast. Global humanitarian bumps selfish British writer in the scrabble for obituary space. Only The Times manages to run an obituary for Mr Wilson the next day. I myself find out about his death through social media. I also find it’s best to check Twitter for things like the status of rail services and power cuts when -as there was this week – floods in Suffolk. For all my misgivings about it, Twitter is much better at supplying news than, well, the news.

Two media clichés that make me wince. ‘Tributes pour in’ (the only thing that tributes ever seem to do, with no explanation of exactly how they’ve attained this liquid form), and ‘took to Twitter’, which gives what is often a  perfunctory, kneejerk act a misleading air of effort and considered choice. It’s also the alliteration that irks, giving it a unsuitable jaunty, skipping connotation. ‘He took to Twitter’. While I take to drink.

***

Recommended reading on Colin Wilson:

A highly naughty Guardian interview from 2004: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/may/30/biography.features1

An excellent piece on the blog Another Nickel In The Machine: http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2010/01/hampstead-heath-and-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-author-colin-wilson/