Saturday 23rd August 2014. To the Phoenix cinema for Doctor Who – Deep Breath. It’s the first episode of the new series, and the first to properly feature Peter Capaldi in the title role. It’s on TV as usual, but as part of a huge publicity campaign the BBC have arranged for some cinemas to screen it at the same time. One has to pay for the cinema (about the same price as a standard cinema ticket), so it is a fascinating test of the interest in such a thing. One incentive is that there’s a couple of extra little films. First up is an amusing monologue from Strax the Sontaran, who comments on the Doctor’s various incarnations. ‘The fifth Doctor’, he says, indicating a hologram of Peter Davison, ‘had no distinguishing features whatsoever’. Then after the episode there’s a live Q & A with the main actors and the main writer, Steven Moffat. But it’s really the sense of occasion one pays for: the experience of watching the episode on a big screen in the company of Doctor Who fans.

There’s a mixture of all ages here. A small boy in the row in front of me is wearing a fez and a bow tie, a la Matt Smith. Elsewhere in the cinema, I see another fez, this time worn by a grown woman. I enjoy the episode: lots of good lines, such as ‘There’s nothing more important than my egomania!’ The plot is the usual goings-on (alien robots up to no good in Victorian London), but Capaldi himself is enough to keep one on tenterhooks for what happens next. His older Doctor is intriguing, shrewd, spiky, capricious and (so far) volatile. As I watch, my only worry is that small children won’t take to him as much as they did the boyish Doctors of recent years. But while walking out through the foyer I see a tiny girl of eight or so, having her photograph taken next to a life-size cardboard cut-out of Capaldi. She is hugging him.

* * *

Sunday 24th August 2014. To Spa Fields Park in Clerkenwell. A mini festival. A stage is up, there’s a few stalls, a bouncy castle is in one corner, and a not-entirely-serious dog show is in the tennis court (some of the dogs’ ‘tricks’ include lying down and getting up again). I’m here for two reasons: Kitty Fedorec’s birthday gathering, plus a performance by Joanne Joanne, the all-female Duran Duran tribute band. I still love that two of the band really are called Joanne. I chat to: Pete M of Talulah Gosh (and umpteen other bands), Ian Watson, Charley Stone (once a guitarist with Fosca, today in Joanne Joanne), David Barnett, and Alex S & Alex P. The event has the feel of my 90s gig-going past – I keep seeing people in the crowd whom I nearly recognise, old regulars from gigs at Upstairs at the Garage. One face I do recognise is Jim Rattail, the dedicated London gig-goer of old. He still has his long plait of hair.

* * *

Monday 25th August 2014. A Bank Holiday. There’s constant heavy rain all day, the weather unaware of its own Bank Holiday cliché. I discover that my only other pair of older but still comfortable shoes are also leaking water, a crack having developed in the sole.

On an impulse, I travel to Paddington to see if the floating bookshop there, Word on the Water, is open. It isn’t. The steps into Paddington station are covered in rainwater. In the station, revellers from the Notting Hill Carnival are mingling with backpacked-up Reading Festival refugees. Many wear all-over transparent raincoats, half poncho, half giant condom. One carnival lady slips and falls on the stairs. She’s in pastel-coloured platform heels, drenched yet defiant. Her gales of laughter are a relief; her pride more wounded than her ankle.

I end up at the Royal Festival Hall, where there’s ballroom dancing in the open space by the ground floor bar. It’s to do with the South Bank’s ‘Love’ festival. A large pinboard is nearby, covered in paper pink hearts. Each has a handwritten declaration of love. Most are to people, but one is ‘I LOVE WEST HAM’.

After my sadness over Foyles St Pancras closing, I’m pleased to find there are two branches of Foyles in the South Bank area, both of which are open late on Sundays and Bank Holidays. One is tucked under the Royal Festival Hall on the riverside, while another is in Waterloo station nearby. In the South Bank one I see the History Boys actor Dominic Cooper, being pleasant and chatty with the staff.

* * *

Tuesday 26th August 2014. To Suffolk. Train to Sudbury around noon, lunch in Bildeston with Mum, then north to the village of Bardwell to visit Mal and Kev Shepard, old family friends. Mal’s son Don is a professional jester and magician, now going by the name of Phoenix The Fool. There’s a large gold trophy of a conjuror in the living room, which he won at a magic tournament in China. I look at their vintage copy of Kathleen Hale’s picture book Orlando the Marmalade Cat – A Seaside Holiday. The seaside destination in it, ‘Owlborrow’, is based on Aldeburgh circa 1950.

The place names on the way back immediately suggest medieval scenes: Stowlangtoft. Ixworth Thorpe. And Woolpit, with its legend of the green children.

* * *

Wednesday 27th August 2014. On the tube. The man in the seat next to me suddenly says, ‘I have to ask you, what on earth are you reading?’

I tell him: Probably Nothing, by Matilda Tristram. From a glance it might look like a children’s book. In fact, it’s a very adult (as in sweary) comic book memoir. It covers Ms Tristram’s time in 2013 as a cancer patient, made all the more complicated by her being pregnant as well. I read parts of it last year when it was an ongoing black-and-white webcomic. Since then, Penguin got involved – not a publisher known for putting out comic books. So now it’s a beautiful full colour hardback. Her drawing style is an urgent and simple doodle, suggesting snatched moments of meagre yet driven energy. I like her raw honesty, her depiction of life in the artier parts of Hackney, her accounts of the tactless things others say to her, and especially her trips to Walberswick and Southwold on the Suffolk coast, places I’m familiar with too:

* * *

Thursday 28th August 2014. The shoe repair man in Muswell Hill says he can’t stretch my new Clarks, or repair my leaky sole. I come out feeling like I’ve been in a Monty Python sketch – a shoe repair shop that can’t repair any shoes. And so it goes on.

* * *

I enjoy reading the umpteen reviews of Kate Bush’s comeback gig. Referring to her simply as ‘Bush’, though, as in ‘Bush takes to the stage’ seems wrong somehow. Unlike David Bowie, her surname is not unusual enough to define her alone – there’s those pesky presidents for a start. But there’s also something about her work that makes ‘Bush’ sound wrong too, as if she demands a gesture of intimacy to properly describe her. The ‘Kate’ needs to be there.

As it is, I read the word ‘Bush’ so often today that I start humming the closing theme to Only Fools and Horses:

 ‘Bush. Bush. Bush. Bush. Bush. Bush. Bush. No income tax, no VAT…’

* * *

Friday 28th August 2014. To the Curzon Soho to see Obvious Child. It’s a New York indie comedy-drama starring Jenny Slate, about a wise-cracking young woman’s romantic woes. It’s similar in genre to Frances Ha but closer to Knocked Up and Juno in terms of subject matter. In the latter two, the possibility of abortion was never properly addressed, at least not to the extent it might be had the stories taken place in real life. One theory I read at the time was that the jokes would just be eclipsed. Well, Obvious Child certainly dismisses that idea. It dares to treat the subject matter properly, while keeping the comedy going too – if letting it turn bittersweet and wry rather than laugh-out-loud. I also like the wordplay of the title (a reference to a Paul Simon song). It plays on the way the lead character is childlike herself, yet her choice is very much a grown up one. The film is not perfect, but it certainly makes other comedies’ moral squeamishness look, well, a bit childish.

Saturday 16th August 2014. My reading matter this week includes Samuel Beckett’s short stories from the 1940s, such as ‘The Expelled’ and ‘The End’. They’re all about lonely layabouts trudging the streets in existential woe. I come away wanting to look at pictures of kittens.

* * *

Currently struggling with two mundane but time-consuming problems: the procurement of new shoes and new glasses. I record these non-experiences in the hope of exorcising their hold on me.

I put off these sort of purchases as long as I can. Partly out of poverty, but also because I know purchases of need rarely satisfy me, compared to purchases of luxury (such as alcohol, cinema tickets or books).

In the cases of the glasses, the nice optician at Boots Muswell Hill tested my sight and told me it had changed slightly. She gave me a new prescription. Then it emerged that (a) they cannot put new lenses into my current frames, and (b) Boots no longer make my current frames.

I tried on the free NHS frames they had, but couldn’t find any I liked. Then I tried some of the priced ones I can just about afford (ie under £100) and settled for a pair I thought were okay. Black rimmed, Boots own brand, a bit big and cartoonish. I was aiming for Vintage Michael Caine, rather than Current Gok Wan. £95, from a half price offer.

But this mundanity expands, sucking up hours. It takes me two visits to decide on this new pair, then a third visit for collecting them after the lenses are in. And then a few days after that, I decide I don’t like the specs so much after all. They feel heavy and clunky and goggle-like. Is it the newness? A resentment of change? Or is it that I just wanted to get out of the opticians as fast as possible, knowing I had to choose something? On top of this, I’m now unconvinced my eyesight has changed – my old pair seem to correct my vison well enough.

I can barely speak for sighing. I stand on a train platform on St Pancras, holding both the old and the new pairs, switching between the two while testing my sight on the train information signs. I must look mad.

* * *

And then, later in the week, I have a similar frustration with new shoes. I try to go for years without buying a new pair. My current everyday black shoes now have holes in the top. Seconds of rain leave both feet drenched. The cobblers in Muswell Hill have told me to throw them out, but I haven’t. I can’t, yet.

I go to Clarks in Oxford Street and spend a good hour trying on sand-coloured shoes to go with my linen suits. One pair seem right: Clarks Classics, suede Jinks, priced £75. Fine, done, happy. Yet a few days later I’m in pain. The suede creases when I walk, cutting into my left foot at the base of my big toe. I’m close to limping.

The Clarks receipt says ‘full refund if unworn’. By this point, I have dragged the shoes through a mile of London grime. I spend hours trying to solve the dilemma with Scholls padded plasters, stuck on the painful areas of my foot. That in turn means time has to be spent at Boots St Pancras, peering at their complex range of foot-based products. I go back to stock up on more when I realise the pads come off in the shower. And so it goes on. Incredibly, the world turns.

I worry that I’ll never find a single pair of comfortable yet affordable shoes. And then I worry that it’s my feet that are the problem; that they’ve become vertically misshapen with age, and that this pain is just another petty ache one has to get used to. Or: perhaps I’m walking wrongly. I’ve caught myself staring at how others walk on the street (evidence of more madness). I see other people tilting their feet at a much higher angle than I do. Maybe that’s it. Have I forgotten how to walk properly? I wouldn’t put it past me.

(At this point I fear I am turning into a Samuel Beckett character. You are what you read.)

So this is what dominates my life this week, to my utter shame. The resentment of simple self-maintenance that fails to be simple. I try to dwell on more important things, but my shoes have rather gone to my head. The only response I take away from reading the news is, ‘I bet Barack Obama’s shoes fit him okay.’

Another thought. Perhaps Imelda Marcos wasn’t so greedy after all, with her palace of infinite shoes. Perhaps she just couldn’t get it right.

* * *

Sunday 18th August 2014. I’m reading Ronald Blythe’s diaries, as collected in Under A Broad Sky (Canterbury Press, 2013). He says this on the student protests of 2011:

‘It is sad to grow old and to have never rioted.’ He’s about 90.

* * *

Monday 19th August 2014. Penguin’s annotated edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four includes a letter from Evelyn Waugh to Orwell, criticising the novel in a respectful, friendly way. Waugh’s main reservation is ‘the disappearance of the Church’ in Orwell’s vision. He means Catholicism, but he implies that religion as a whole is ‘inextinguishable’ – a word that directly recalls the ending of Brideshead Revisited.

The edition also reprints Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, next to a reader’s report by the publishers, Secker & Warburg, about Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the former, Orwell lists his rules for how to write clearly, which have been much quoted ever since (‘If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out’). In the latter, the publisher notes ‘It is a typical Orwellism that Julia falls asleep while Winston reads part of [O’Brien’s book] to her. Women aren’t intelligent in Orwell’s world’. And that’s from his own publisher! The lesson seems to be: feel free to take Orwell’s advice on how to write, but bear in mind that he wasn’t perfect either.

* * *

Tuesday 20th August 2014. I realise my ongoing shoe discomfort is not rare. Today I’m in Humanities One of the British Library Reading Rooms, studying Larkin’s The Less Deceived. The woman at the desk next to me has taken her shoes and socks off. One bare foot rests on her other knee, in a kind of bookish yoga position.

* * *

Wednesday 21st August 2014. To the Phoenix for The Congress. It’s a giddy, strange film that mixes live action with psychedelic animation. The actress Robin Wright plays a version of herself. The story starts out as a satire on the state of Hollywood, but then shifts into full-on science fiction. It’s often hard to keep up with what’s going on: only twenty minutes after I leave the cinema do I fully understand what happens at the end. The critics have been polarised, with some using the term ‘Yellow Submarine-esque’ as an insult. In which case, count me on the side of those who would take it as a compliment. I admit The Congress is not a perfect film, but there’s so much imagination and originality on show – and so many sights no one has seen before. It goes into the Top Five of my favourite films this year, along with The Grand Budapest Hotel, Only Lovers Left Alive, The Punk Singer, and Frank.

* * *

Friday 22nd August 2014. At home all day. Reading, writing, failing to write, filling out paperwork for the final college year, idly social media-ing. I leave the house just once, at about 6pm, to go to Sainsbury’s on Archway Rd. Barely a minute’s walk, and a passer-by says to me: ‘love the suit!’ The only words I hear in person all day. Well, if I must have a single comment from the world.

I suppose I really do put on a suit and tie just to buy a pint of milk. Didn’t even realise it.

Sunday 10th August 2014. I chat with Mum over the phone. She’s busy, giving classes and talks on quilt making all over the country, most recently at the NEC. Tom has now built her a website as a kind of shop window. It’s her first ever web presence. The URL is www.lynneedwardsquilts.com.

* * *

Monday 11h August 2014. To the Boogaloo to watch Lea Andrews perform with Sadie Lee, as part of the Blue Monday gig night. An evening of seeing old friends. Charley Stone is there, Charlotte Hatherley too. This is my only socialising this week; the rest of my time is spent in the British Library in St Pancras, communing with the dead.

Currently re-reading Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Last read when I was a teenager. This time round I’m older than Winston Smith. I’d forgotten that he has varicose veins; something I’m rather familiar with now. The themes are more relevant than ever, as evidenced by Edward Snowden’s mention of the novel in his Alternative Christmas Message last year. Fear of state surveillance, the removal of privacy, the state control of information, the daily get together to hate something for the sake of joining in (thus anticipating Twitter), war being used to keep populations suppressed, bad entertainment doing the rest of the suppression. Orwell’s prose style surprises me with its simple, unfussy realism. Stylistically, it could be written today. The only 1940s anachronism I pick up is the usage of ‘dear’ by the two lovers.

But slang comes around too. ‘Oh my days’ sounds pure Dickens. I’ve heard it used by all kinds of young people in London now, and by some not so young people too. A friend says it derives from Caribbean patois. So I wonder if it came from the effects of the Empire before that.  I like the idea of slang being exported across lands, passing through social groups, then returning after more than a century, like the orbit of a comet.

* * *

Tuesday 12th August 2014. Robin Williams dies. It’s thought to be suicide. A lot of discussion online of depression and the eternal archetype of the sad clown. My local cinema, the Phoenix, is putting on a screening of Good Will Hunting, as a benefit for the Samaritans.

People on Twitter have taken tribute selfies, standing on tops of desks, holding up signs saying ‘O Captain My Captain’. This is a reference to a scene in Dead Poets Society, the words taken from a poem by Walt Whitman. My band Orlando did a similar tribute in 1996, for the video to ‘Don’t Kill My Rage’. We even dressed as schoolboys and filmed in a beautiful old private school. And we stood on the desks.

I can’t think of the Dead Poets motto ‘carpe diem’ now without recalling a joke from I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue:

‘Carpe diem: Fish of the Day.’

What a range of work Robin Williams left behind, though. Particularly given his problems. Some roles wacky (Mork and Mindy, Good Morning Vietnam), some serious (Dead Poets Society, Awakenings) some sinister (Insomnia). In theory I should have found his comedy style irritating, but the sheer speed of his invention always impressed me. Completely over the top, yes, but also completely out of the blue. Where did that ability come from? It seemed utterly unearthly – hence Mork.

His big, rubbery, Punch-like features seemed to also fit that other extreme of emotion – sentiment. There’s something very Victorian about that mix; the need to complement the uproarious with the lachrymose. Knowing that Williams was built to erupt into loud comedy made his restrained roles all the more watchable. The energy had to be channelled into reverse. He’s perfect for The World According To Garp, as the quiet centre in John Irving’s outlandish parade. I also like him as the murderous author in Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia, or the avuncular gay radio host in The Night Listener (based on Armistead Maupin), or the nightclub owner in The Birdcage, teaching Nathan Lane how to act more manly. In one scene they try discussing sports like heterosexual men. Or so they imagine:

WILLIAMS: (putting on manly voice) Al, you old son of a bitch! How ya doin’? How do you feel about those Dolphins today?

LANE: How do you think I felt? Bewildered! Betrayed…! (looks at Williams, wrist returns to limpness) Wrong response, right?

WILLIAMS: I’m not sure…

* * *

Wednesday 13th August 2014. London begging. On the tube today, a man gets on and promptly goes round the carriage carefully placing wrapped packets of pocket tissues (the Handy Andies type) on the empty seats next to each passenger. There’s also a piece of paper with each packet. Presumably it contains his written appeal for money, in return for the tissues, along with some detail of his circumstances. I say presumably because I don’t pick up a packet, and neither does anyone else. The British are so obsessed with taking the least embarrassing action in public as it is. Added to which, the London tube carriage is a place of non-action, of retrieving into yourself, of trying not to exist. Not the best place to ask for money.

The tissues man waits silently at one end of the carriage for no more than a minute. Then he goes round again, this time retrieving all the packets of tissues and paper notes and putting them back in his shoulder bag. He gets off at the next stop.

* * *

Thursday 14th August 2014. To the Phoenix cinema in East Finchley, for the film Lilting. It’s a low-budget piece in which Ben Whishaw acts his absolute socks off. He plays a grieving gay man trying to befriend the Chinese mother of his late partner. The added complication is that she speaks no English, she didn’t know her son was gay, and she lives in a London care home. Peter Bowles also appears (he of To The Manor Born and Only When I Laugh), playing an elderly Lothario. The film is emotionally tense, yet tender and quiet, and is clearly a labour of love. I recognise one of the locations: the canal towpath near the south end of Mare Street, in the East End.

* * *

Friday 15th August 2014. Today’s new word is ‘hoyden’. It means ‘a boisterous girl’. A dated expression, declares the Concise Oxford Dictionary. I’m introduced to it by a line in Brigid Brophy’s book Black and White: A Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley (1968):

 ‘Are they female fops, these personages of Beardsley’s: female dandies: female effeminates, even? Or are they male hoydens, male tomboys, boy butches?’

The book contains some of Beardsley’s sexually explicit art from the 1890s. More grotesque than titillating, I’d have thought. Yet the British Library keeps its copy of Black and White in the Special Materials collection, the place for anything very valuable or very naughty. As the book isn’t that rare it must be Beardsley’s rudeness that qualifies. To read the library copy a while ago, I had to sit at a special desk in the Rare Books Reading Room, within view of CCTV cameras and library staff. I was not allowed to leave the book unattended, not even to go to the toilet. They might as well call the desk the Table of Shame.

Thankfully, Faber have now reprinted Black and White as part of their Faber Finds series. Today I pick up a copy from Gay’s The Word bookshop in Marchmont Street. I take it home and enjoy it behind closed doors, where the Big Brother eyes of the British Library cannot watch me.

Saturday 2nd August 2014. Around the back of St Pancras station, I stumble upon a brand new public library. A rare thing in this era of cuts and closures. Camden Council has moved its St Pancras branch to a freshly-built building, 5 Pancras Square. There’s a leisure centre below, council offices above, the main library is up on the second floor, and there’s a pleasant café on the first floor, next to the children’s library. It’s a typical modern building: the usual open plan rooms, high ceilings, plate glass outer walls. Space, transparency, glass, geometry. I sit and watch the streets below. Goods Way to my right, Pancras Road to my left, the harsh blocks of the Eurostar terminus on one side, the greenery of Camley Street Natural Park on the other. I am the only person in the café. Peace and quiet can always be found, even in Kings Cross. ‘We’re still unpacking!’ says the librarian.

* * *

Sunday 3rd August 2014. In the British Library café, the man at the table behind me has no fewer than three devices plugged into power sockets on the wall. Two sockets by his table, one by mine. He is a mass of untidy cables. Today’s devices make life more convenient in some ways, less convenient in others. ‘Wireless’ life is still yet to be wireless enough.

Hot weather. A curly-haired man walks into the BL café wearing denim shorts that are so short, heads turn en masse. He was born to justify the adjective ‘callipygian’ – ‘possessing well-shaped buttocks’. Not necessarily to everyone’s taste, though. I once knew a woman who liked her men to be so skinny that the seat of their trousers had to hang as a sheer drop. That was her main requirement – a complete absence of buttock definition. So there needs to be a word for that too. It would be particularly useful when describing indie guitar bands.

* * *

Monday 4th August 2014. This week’s reading is Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. I sit in libraries and cafes reading it, accidentally dressed like one of its characters. It’s one of those novels that comes with a defensive-yet-defiant preface, the author alluding to a second story – that of the book’s first reception. Dorian Gray has one, which Wilde disguises as a list of aphorisms. Jane Eyre as well, and Oliver Twist: ‘the girl is a prostitute’. So shocking at the time. Thus Waugh’s preface apologies for some aspects of Brideshead, while being defiant about others. In 1944, he was so convinced that England’s country houses would vanish overnight that he stuffed the novel with a wistful ‘gluttony’ for the past. In the 1960 preface, he admits to finding this aspect ‘distasteful’ and offers the novel as a ‘souvenir’ – but crucially, of his feelings during WW2. So the preface is a memory (1960) of a memory (1944) of a memory (the 20s and 30s). And here I am, recording my memory of spending some time in 2014 reading that. All is explanation, reflection, apology, and not apology.

I also can’t resist revisiting the 80s TV series (no surprises, no apologies). It too is a kind of gluttony, with its many hours of screen time, its lavish detail and locations. An early version of the box set immersive TV drama. A kind of Game of Thrones of its day. All fantasy of a kind. Anthony Andrews, Jeremy Irons, Diana Quick. How can anyone not want to leap through the screen and run off with them?

* * *

Thursday 7th August 2014. To the British Library for its big summer exhibition, Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK. There is a sign on the poster for the show encouraging ‘parental guidance for the under 16s’. The poster makes this clear, too: an excellent new Jaimie Hewlett design, featuring a depressed costumed heroine slumped against an alley wall, brandishing a hip flask. The exhibition is constantly busy, with queues for some of the displays. I spend some of my visit looking discreetly at the visitors, partly because they’re in the way of the comics, but mostly because I’m curious to see what sort of people are interested in a comics exhibition today. There’s the expected amount of solitary, loafing men (and I am one too), but they do not dominate the crowd. Instead, there’s women with punkish haircuts and summer dresses, couples, besuited business people, foreign tourists, and hipster academics who narrate everything too loudly.

The show is fascinating, and full of unexpected curiosities. There’s a rare 1940s strip written by Bob Monkhouse, featuring monsters that look suspiciously like giant penises. I’m also intrigued by a 1970s strip by William Burroughs, a rare American in this UK-themed show. But then, he always was an exile. Any exhibition that manages to include Bob Monkhouse and William S. Burroughs (and Posy Simmonds!) can only be a good thing.

I particularly enjoy the documents that form the scaffolding behind comics. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman script is more like a chatty personal letter to a friend than a set of instructions to an artist. Alan Moore’s Watchman script is heavy in detail, yet it still leaves a lot of decisions up to the artist. The inspiring lesson from all this is that there’s no fixed way to write comics.

Peppered throughout the galleries are shop window dummies dressed as Occupy protestors, all wearing spooky Guy Fawkes masks, the ones from Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. The popularity of that mask is probably more down to the Noughties movie adaptation than Mr Moore’s 1980s strip, but the point is hammered home: new international activism has a connection with old British comics. Every Bonfire Night, one used to have to explain who Guy Fawkes was to visiting foreigners. Now we can say, ‘You know those masks…?’

A minor grumble. After three years of an English Lit BA, I’ve become hard-wired to always check the source of a literary quotation. So I wince when reading the following in the exhibition guide: ‘Everything in the world is about sex except sex – Oscar Wilde‘. No mention of where Wilde is supposed to have said this line. I don’t think he did say it. It’s a good quote, but it sounds a bit too twentieth-century for him.

I’m reminded of a quip by Dorothy Parker, which she definitely did say. It’s in her poem sequence ‘A Pig’s-Eye View of Literature’:

If with the literate I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it

* * *

In the evening: to the ICA for the film Boyhood. An ambitious undertaking, filmed in little annual bursts over twelve years. We watch the same four actors age by one year every fifteen minutes: the boy, his older sister, their mother, and their divorced father. The actual story is very slight – nothing too dramatic happens to the boy. His mother goes through a series of bad husbands, but otherwise he has a fairly safe, middle-class Texas upbringing, taking in references to the Iraq war, the last Harry Potter books, the rise of Obama, smartphones, and eventually Facebook. What the film does pull off is an all-encompassing sense of compassion and awareness of mortality: that time passes, life passes with it, we all watch it go, so we might as well be kind to each other. It’s one big shrug, but it’s a very big-hearted shrug.

Saturday 26th July 2014. I’m reading Orwell to the Present by John Brannigan, published in 2003. In the section on novels about London, Brannigan discusses The Satanic Verses. To his credit, there is no mention of the infamous fatwa. Instead, he concentrates on the way the book presents London as a ‘constantly shape-shifting liquid city of the imagination’. By omitting any reference to the controversy, I suppose he thinks that a book’s reputation can be shape-shifting too. That most terrifying phrase in the English language: ‘best known for’.

To High Tea in Highgate High Street, now run by the daughter of Jon Snow, from the TV news (an irrelevant detail which I nevertheless find interesting, if only because I quite like Mr Snow). I meet up with my neighbours David Ryder-Prangley and Philip King, and we swap anecdotes about playing in bands. Phil is the bassist in the Jesus & Mary Chain, who are about to tour with one of those ‘classic album in full’ shows, this one being Psychocandy.

There is, of course, much more to music than playing it. The look of a musician must be right for the band, and some groups are more sensitive to cliché than others. Phil tells me about a guitarist who was once fired from a band for doing ‘the indie knee bend’ pose on stage. Similarly, my own band Fosca had a stipulation when borrowing amps: anything except a Marshall. A Marshall was deemed far too Rock with a capital ‘R’. These things matter.

* * *

Sunday 27th July 2014. Tea at the Museum of London with Ella H. There’s a huge poster announcing a forthcoming exhibition on Sherlock Holmes. I’m sure that will do well. There really seems to be no limit to the mileage of Doyle’s character. I recently made a joke about pitching a series to HBO called Sherlock Christ. But the comparison isn’t so silly – the character has a following that borders on the religious. And he is, after all, no stranger to resurrection.

After this we walk along the Thames to the Black Friar pub for a few glasses of prosecco (which turn out to be inexpensive, so doubly enjoyable). The pub’s Art Nouveau décor is always worth the trip: bronze relief murals from 1909, all of cartoonish friars. Betjeman campaigned to save the pub from demolition, and it certainly looks like a survivor when you approach it. It’s one of those ancient pubs that resemble a disembodied corner, with the rest of the old street long since pruned away.

Across the road is the redeveloped Blackfriars station, now extended across the railway bridge so that the platforms are high above the water. When alighting at Blackfriars, one can choose whether to exit on the north or south bank of the Thames. This gives the station a disorientating sense of the liminal: to disembark is to step off in the middle of London, yet not on London land.

Evening: to the Boogaloo for a gig by Bid and Alice from Scarlet’s Well, backed by Martin White and his Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra. Kate Dornan is also in the MFMO, while drummer Jen Denitto is watching with me in the audience, so it’s a near reunion of the 2004 SW line-up.  The orchestral arrangement serves the songs beautifully, complete with jazzy trumpet solos. Still a fan, I note the set list: ‘The Dream Spider of the Laughing Horse’, ‘The Return of the Hesperus’, ‘Sweetmeat’, ‘Blubberhouses’, ‘The Vampire’s Song’, ‘Street of a Thousand Fools’, ‘Luminous Creatures’, ‘Purples Rushes’, ‘Mr Mystery’s Mother’. For me, this is a concert of utter joy. I just wish more people knew about the SW albums. Arch, whimsical and exotic, they’re not so far from the records of the Divine Comedy. Afterwards, I chat to Jessica Griffin from the Would-Be-Goods and Lester Square from the Monochrome Set.

* * *

Monday 28th July 2014. To Greenwich Picturehouse for a screening of the Globe’s enchanting Tempest. Roger Allam as an understated, sensitive Prospero; Colin Morgan – the young Merlin from BBC TV – as an aloof and intense Ariel. This is quite common now: cinemas showing specially-made films of stage shows. The films are always very well done, to the point where I can’t work out where the cameras must be placed. The Globe’s audience in the film is all ages, though the audience for this cinema screening – at noon on a Monday – is very much on the older side. I must be the only person there under fifty.

Afterwards I wander around Greenwich to look at some of the Books About Town book benches. I quickly discover a flaw in this pursuit: the benches often have someone sitting on them, thus obscuring the artwork. Still, I find an unoccupied one tucked away in the grounds of St Alfege Church. Although it’s celebrating The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, the bench actually depicts its artist Andrea Joseph as a teenager, lying in a cluttered bedroom and reading the Adrian Mole book. It’s also up to date: the book cover in the artwork is labelled ‘Sue Townsend, 1946-2014’.

* * *

Tuesday 29th July 2014. I’m at the outpatient clinic in UCLH to have my veins looked at. While I’m standing at the reception desk, arranging the next appointment, a woman is standing there to one side. She is talking loudly on her mobile phone (ignoring all the signs forbidding such activity). I’m in the middle of speaking to the receptionist when she suddenly says to the person on the phone, ‘Hold on, there’s a man here in a white suit.’ Then she interrupts my conversation with the receptionist.

WOMAN: (to me) Hey, I have to say… (she grabs my arm)... You look immaculate.

ME: Um, thank you. (to receptionist) So, six weeks from now is –

WOMAN: (to me) No, you look like… (to the phone) What’s that film we saw, with the man in the white suit?

ME: The Man In The White Suit, perhaps?

WOMAN: No, no. Hold on! Shhh! (she listens to the phone. Myself and the receptionist, and indeed all of the packed waiting room, are holding on. This is the world of the loud person on the phone. We only live in it).

WOMAN: The Two Faces of January. That’s it.

ME: Ah, yes. I’ve seen that. Thank you. Very kind.

And I go back to arranging my appointment, now feeling somewhat more self-conscious. Somehow, I come away thinking that this sort of thing is all my fault.

* * *

Thursday 31st July 2014. To the Curzon Soho for the documentary I Am Divine. It’s about the life of  the fleshy Baltimore drag queen turned cult actor Glenn Milstead, better known simply as Divine. As expected, a lot of it focusses on his parts in the John Waters films, such as Pink Flamingos and Hairspray. But it also covers his 80s pop career with Stock Aiken and Waterman, with hits such as ‘You Think You’re A Man’, and ‘I’m So Beautiful’. What I didn’t know is how much he grew tired of the Divine drag character. Instead, he wanted to move on and play different male characters in films and TV. The tragedy is that he died just before getting exactly that sort of work: a male role on the sitcom Married With Children.

In the evening: to a party at an arty house in Waterloo. It’s for Phoebe B, who is leaving London to live in Berlin. When I get there, I’m hit with the acute awkwardness of realising that the only person I know at the party is the host. I always seem to do this: befriending just one person, and never managing to connect with the rest of their social circle (I wonder why that is… don’t answer that). The upshot of this is that I once again spend an awful lot of the party standing around by myself.

I’m uneasy about introducing myself to a stranger. At least at the Birkbeck evening I had an actual name badge summing my relevant role up: ‘Dickon Edwards – BA English’. That made life easier. Perhaps we should all wear such badges, all the time. At least then no one would ever have to remember each other’s name.

After an hour or so of this sort of paranoid anxiety – and a few drinks – I do manage to start conversations with people who don’t walk away in horror. One is a lady who tells me about the ancient ponds on Hampstead Heath being under threat. She urges me to sign an online petition, and later I do.

[The petition is here:

https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/stop-heavy-construction-on-hampstead-heath ]

I also meet someone who wrote about me in their fanzine, and someone who follows me on Twitter. So my awkwardness is eventually dispelled after all. I make a mental note to remember that there is an easy solution to this sort of thing: always take a friend to a party, as you would a bottle of wine. Both are a form of safety net.

* * *

Friday 1st August 2014. I watch the documentary Tulisa: The Price of Fame. It should really be titled The Price of Buying Tabloids, as the whole source of Ms T’s courtroom ordeal is a sting by The Sun on Sunday. The message seems to be, yet again, that tabloid newspapers demonstrably make people’s lives a misery. And still people buy them.