Sunday 12th July 2015.

Reading Francesca Martinez’s memoir, What the F*** Is Normal? She writes wittily about the difficulties of not only living with cerebral palsy, but living with the way others react around her. Comedy programmes have decided against adding her to their panels, apparently because her slow, slurring way of speaking makes people ‘nervous’. To understand a voice like hers is just a question of adjusting registers, like understanding an unfamiliar accent. Her book’s main message is that if disabled people are sufficiently included in every aspect of society, ‘normal’ will be redefined as something that applies either to everyone, or to no one.

* * *

Monday 13th July 2015.

I’m doing the Birkbeck ‘Step Up To An Arts MA’ summer course, which mainly involves downloading texts from the college website and working at home. One section about learning how to structure critical arguments includes watching a video of a Monty Python sketch – the one about paying to have an argument. Amongst all the silliness is a perfectly serious definition of an argument, as said by Michael Palin’s character: ‘an argument is a connected series of statements to establish a definite proposition’. Interesting to think that even though John Cleese went on to make proper light-hearted training films, there was an educational element to the comedy he’d already made. ‘Undergraduate humour’ is a pejorative term often thrown at the Python or Footlights style of comedy. Indeed it was once flung at Palin and Cleese in person, during the notorious TV discussion of Life of Brian. But here’s an example of Python used as postgraduate humour, whatever that may be. Comedy that’s still clever, but more elegantly thoughtful, perhaps.

* * *

Errand for the day: picking up a box of pills in my neighbour Phil’s flat, and delivering it to a sound man’s letter box in Hornsey. He can then pass it on to Phil on tour in Europe. No need to involve the postal service. On the way I walk through Ducketts Common, near Turnpike Lane station, where grey-faced men in grey hooded tracksuits sit glumly on benches and swig from cans. Wood Green is not an unsafe part of London, but it is not a particularly happy one either. As the film Dreams of a Life shows, it’s a district where people can just die in their homes, with no one to check up on them. So this errand reminds me how glad I am that I know at least some of my neighbours, and that I can help them out.

* * *

Tuesday 14th July 2015.

I spend some time reading in The Smithfield Café, a tiny but cheeringly old fashioned working man’s café in Long Lane, opposite the market. Tea at 60p.

* * *

Wednesday 15th July 2015.

Ticking off another little emporium I’d always been meaning to investigate: the Huntley bar, on the corner of Gower Place and Gower Street. It’s part of the UCL student union facilities, though they seem okay with me using it (and I think my University of London membership covers it anyway). One has to walk through the modern canteen on Gower Street to get inside. Nice traditional pub décor, pumps on the counter, booths and more seats upstairs. All converted from one of the creaky Victorian houses in the area, the kind I imagine that the poet Amy Levy once lived in. Glass of wine £2.50, packet of peanuts 30p. London is not always overpriced.

* * *

Thursday 16th July 2015.

 I decide to splash out on a new Pay As You Go mobile phone. My current one is about ten years old and starting to fall apart. It’s so old, I can’t find it listed on the phone recycling lists. Today, the O2 shop on Tottenham Court Road sells me a cute little Nokia for £9.99, though not without their valiant attempts to tempt me with something fancier. When I insist on the Nokia, they ask me, ‘Is it for a music festival?’

* * *

Friday 17th July 2015.

To a brand new local cinema: the Everyman Muswell Hill. It’s essentially the same building as the Odeon – a listed one, I think – now bought up and given a repaint. The Everyman chain’s pricy nibbles and wine-bar décor have replaced the Odeon’s unpretentious but unlovely blue livery, along with its suspect hot dogs and sullen plastic beakers of Coke.

What’s ironic is that a chain calling itself Everyman has associations with middle class exclusivity. Some local pundit has called the Everyman’s arrival ‘the final stage in gentrification’ for Muswell Hill, though financially there’s little difference for the customer. In terms of tickets and food prices the Odeon chain really isn’t that much cheaper than the Everymans. I have to admit I prefer Everyman to the current Odeon style aesthetically. And if pressed, I do favour the arthouse. I was always more carrot cake than popcorn. In the end, though, I just go wherever there’s films.

This evening I watch the restored (1998) version of Orson Welles’s 1950s crime thriller A Touch of Evil. It’s been given a cinema re-release in the wake of the new documentary on Welles, Magician.

A Touch of Evil is one of those much-referred to classic films that I always feel I’ve seen in the past, but somehow haven’t. The film’s opening is the part that people tend to go on about: a single night-time crane shot that follows a time bomb placed in the boot of a car. As the car drives off, the camera lifts and swoops around the whole neighbourhood to follow it, as the ticking gets louder.

The story itself is pure pulp noir: all the characters are stereotypes and grotesques one way or another. Welles’s obese cop has the kind of startling pudgy make-up that doesn’t look like make-up at all.  Charlton Heston’s dark skin for his Mexican character might have made some modern audiences feel unconvinced if not uneasy, but it works fine for the film’s style. Even Janet Leigh is a grotesque of sorts: the whiter-than-white damsel in distress. Meanwhile, the actor playing the demented motel manager is so outrageously over the top, he threatens to break the film.

With its expressionistic close-ups and moody use of Mexican border locations (which makes me think of No Country For Old Men), the film is an extraordinary world spun around a standard crime plot. Just when I think it can’t get any better, Marlene Dietrich appears. Her gypsy madam role is minor, but she gets the last line. And what a line: ‘He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?’

* * *

A life event. Today I am officially notified by Birkbeck about my degree, via their website. As of now, I have graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in English, with First Class honours.

I also received the BA English course’s John Hay Lobben Prize, which is awarded to a student who is ‘judged to have shown the greatest promise in English Literature’. This is formally announced at the graduation ceremony in November, but I’m allowed to tell the world now.

I’ve never had a degree before. I think this is my greatest feeling of achievement since hearing Fosca played on John Peel.

* * *

Saturday 4th July 2015.

Noon: tea at High Tea of Highgate with Ella H. The place has changed a little since it changed hands. Gone is the vintage 1940s and 50s music, and the VE-day bunting. Gone is the painted clock on the wall. It’s now a bit more generic, but then again it might still be finding its feet. This must always be a problem when taking over a café. The dilemma is between pleasing the old regulars (like myself), while bringing in the new owner’s taste.

Afternoon: Hot and sunny, so I fancy hiding in a cinema. To the East Finchley Phoenix for Magician, a new documentary on Orson Welles (£5). Much is made of the way Citizen Kane became his life’s early peak, never again to be matched, and looks at how much of this was down to his reputation, as someone difficult to work with. The ever-fattening Welles is seen on umpteen chat shows down the years, forever recounting tales of people asking him if he’d ever done anything else after Kane. The film also makes a case for raising the reputations of Chimes Of Midnight, The Trial, and A Touch of Evil, all of which I’ve yet to see.

* * *

Sunday 5th July 2015.

To the Roundhouse in Camden for a gig by the Jesus and Mary Chain. Specifically, it’s a live performance of their debut album, Psychocandy, from 1985. I’m invited by my neighbour Phil King, who is the JAMC bass player, and I take the artist K Tregaskin, who says she knows all the drum parts to the album by heart. Before I go out, I listen to Psychocandy in preparation, and find myself still shocked by the sheer extremity of white noise enveloping all the songs. And to have this raggedness appear on a major label too (the same label as my band Orlando,– Blanco Y Negro, part of Warners). Psychocandy still sounds like a train accident, one where the collapsing metal has somehow managed to turn its own terrifying noise into an approximation of sweet, twangy guitar rock songs.

The band play a half-hour set of other material first (including ‘April Skies’, a stunning ‘Some Candy Talking, ‘Reverence’, and the riot-teasing ‘Upside Down’). Then after a short break they unleashing all fourteen songs from Psychocandy, with no encores. The youthful surliness is still intact. Jim Reid’s preying-mantis body language is still there; he’s still the reluctant frontman, still apparently annoyed to exist. ‘I wanna die on a sunny day’ he sings. Well, not yet.

What’s astounding is how perfectly they replicate the Psychocandy feedback noise. It’s a very specific, mid-80s type of feedback, which the guitarist William Reid seems to have carefully set up for the relevant songs. At several moments I feel the urge to reach out my hands as if to touch this thick wall of sound that fills the Roundhouse, this former Victorian railway shed. And it is a proper wall of sound, with all the connotations of Phil Spector. The opening drum pattern of Be My Baby, is used three times on Psychocandy, not least in ‘Just Like Honey’, the song that many people know from the end of Lost In Translation, as Bill Murray drives off. Here, Miki from the 90s band Lush supplies the female vocal. More shifts in time.

Aferwards, K and I install ourselves in one of the red booths in the Roundhouse bar, and we chat about the ‘land grab’ side of music fandom. How these ‘vintage album in its entirety’ gigs demonstrate the way rock music has created a territory to belong to, and how these gigs can show such territory being passed down from generation to generation. It’s nostalgia for elders, of course, but it’s also raw primary joy for the younger fans, who are fresh to the songs. They’re the ones down the front at these shows, doing much of the jumping around.

I bump into Ms Shanthi in the bar. ‘One of Birdland is here. He’s not got blond hair anymore.’

Then we wander Camden around midnight, drunk on theories of indie rock history (as well as just drunk). I end up putting my hands on the wall of The Falcon, the pub venue where so many indie bands once played, now turned into a couple of residential flats. History, memory, territory, ghosts colliding. Giddy on palimpsests.

It’s too easy to assume one’s own generation is the default. Beautiful art for the lonely does not belong to one era. We must remember this, and pass it on.

* * *

Monday 6th July 2015.

I am embarrassed to read how men drinking rosé wine – as I do – is now considered fashionable. A term is coined by a magazine: ‘brosé’.

* * *

Wednesday 8th July 2015.

To Birkbeck for the first seminar in a free ‘summer camp’ module, ‘Step Up: Arts’, aimed at would-be MA arts students. We have to watch a documentary on Vivian Maier in preparation. I’d already seen Finding Vivian Maier, the cinema film, but this one is a BBC Imagine take on Maier. It covers much the same story, except that it turns out Ms Maier’s photographs were discovered by a trio of different collectors, and not just the youngish man who presents himself as the hero of Finding Vivian Maier. Deliciously, Alan Yentob says at one point that the missing collector declined to be interviewed, ‘because he’s making his own film’. It’s a reminder that there’s no such thing as the truth, only a truth.

* * *

A tube strike starts up in the evening. My Northern Line dodge is to take a network rail train from St Pancras to Kentish Town, then a 214 bus to Highgate Village, where it terminates. As this bus only has a few stops left to go, it is less likely to be full up. While I wait, various 134 buses pass by, all rammed with people, all not stopping.

* * *

Thursday 9th July 2015.

 The tube strike continues. Thankfully I have nothing to do in town that I can’t postpone, so I spend the day in Highgate. In the evening I walk to East Finchley (20 minutes) to see Amy at the Phoenix cinema (£5). I hadn’t realised the aptness of this: Amy Winehouse lived in East Finchley in her teens, before she moved to Camden Square. The Phoenix used to be her local cinema. Indeed, Amy includes a beautiful aerial shot of East Finchley rooftops.

The film is terribly sad, needless to say. I come away thinking Ms Winehouse should have taken the Kate Bush path: escaping the trappings of fame by becoming a recluse, somewhere far from the reach of photographers. But then again, she loved London so much. Tony Bennett appears – she records a stunning duet with him, and he endorses her as not just a talented singer, but a classic jazz singer in the traditional style. Commenting on her death, he says ‘If I’d known, I’d have told her: slow down. Life teaches you how to live it, if you live it long enough.’

Like the Orson Welles and Vivian Maier films I’ve seen this week, Amy feels that it won’t be the last word. All three lives are essentially the same story: a person with a burning talent, but a talent that is compromised. And in each case, the reasons behind the frustration are not fully explainable. Questions still remain. There is always more to say, and so more documentaries to make.

* * *

Friday 10th July 2015.

Another hot day. I try to attend Joanna Walsh’s event at the BookArtBookshop in Old Street, but I can’t physically get inside the bookshop, such is the crowd inside. I understand the event is to launch a story about failing to find a certain book. Perhaps I should write a story about failing to get into a Joanna Walsh event.

Old Street on a Friday evening is more packed than ever, though the crowds don’t seem as overtly trendy-looking as they used to be. Just Londoners full stop. I look for a cash machine. On the corner of Pitfield Street I pass a new Sainsbury’s with an ATM, but it has a queue of some fifteen people. I walk two blocks further, to City Road, and find a trio of ATMs there, all free to use.

Quite why people still queue at cash machines in London is beyond me. There must be some sort of phone app by now, to locate the nearest machines, and yet few seem to use it. Is it the herd instinct? Or the madness of crowds?

I did once go up to a long ATM queue and tell the people at the back where to find another one nearby. They just looked at me strangely. Admittedly, I get that a lot.

I remark about this on Twitter, and am told that people are subconsciously attracted to standing behind someone using an ATM. To them, a machine without a queue signifies there’s something wrong with it. And I thought I was pessimistic.

Saturday 27th June 2015.

Summer in the city. My fellow males get out their shorts and flip-flops, I reach for my white linen suits and ties. The phrase ‘comfortable clothing’ is entirely subjective. I think of those women who say they always wear high heels, to the point where walking in flats would be more difficult.

* * *

Sunday 28th June 2015.

Watch some of the BBC’s impressive coverage of Glastonbury. Quite like the way Belle and Sebastian have become a party band for the shy. The singer Stuart Murdoch bounces around the vast stage, and gets people from the crowd to come up and dance with him. Very different to the time I saw them at the Union Chapel in 1997, when the band performed warily and nervously, as if scared of their own microphones.

* * *

Monday 29th June 2015.

I read Edward St Aubyn’s comic novel Lost For Words, just released in paperback. It’s an enjoyable if light satire, seemingly written by St Aubyn as a diversion into playfulness, following on from his more serious Patrick Melrose series. I’m reminded how James Hamilton-Paterson dabbled in camp comedy late into his career, and successfully so, with Cooking With Fernet Branca.

Mr St Aubyn’s tale concerns various figures involved with a high-profile British literary prize. It’s not actually called the Booker Prize in the book, but that’s obviously the main target, down to the televised ceremony in a London banqueting hall. Much of the comedy arises from the way the judging of the prize has little to do with literary merit, and everything to do with personal agendas and ego. The conceit that an unassuming cookbook by an Indian auntie is mistaken for an innovative postmodern novel may stretch credulity, but the pay-off is too irresistible for this to matter. St Aubyn himself has his own agenda, having been a Booker shortlister, and so a Booker loser, with Mother’s Milk a few years ago. So at first the novel might seem like a piece of blatant sour grapes. But any opportunity for true nastiness – like murder – is reined in, and it’s just egos that end up bruised. St Aubyn’s message is more about the arbitrary nature of arts awards per se, rather than an attack on the people who give them out.

I do have a soft spot for his elegant observations. One example is: ‘They had drifted apart, as people do when they promise to stay in touch; the ones who are going to stay in touch don’t need to promise‘.

Another is allotted to an inept editor, who sinks into depression but eventually talks himself round with this thought:

We were not put on this earth to hate ourselves.

The sentence is stark, useful, and meant. I like Lost For Words for that line alone.

* * *

Tuesday 30th June 2015.

To Gordon Square for a meeting with my final year Personal Tutor, Peter Fifield, just to wind the degree course up. Then to a ‘taster’ class on the MA course I’m hoping to do, in Contemporary Literature and Culture. We look at Joyce’s Ulysses, which I still haven’t read in full. From the extracts I can tell I’ll really enjoy it if I do, as opposed to just reading it out of duty. Finnegans Wake is more off-putting.

* * *

Wednesday 1st July 2015.

The hottest day in London for nearly ten years. Many trains have to run slowly to stop the rails from buckling, so there’s lots of delays. Once the trains do arrive, the insides are like furnaces. All this, despite the expensive fares.

After much anguish, I decide against attending a friend’s birthday in Crystal Palace. One reason is it would mean over two and a half hours spent being baked alive on public transport. Another is that I’m riddled with a summer cold. I apologise and send a card, but the guilt eats away.

* * *

My dry cough is made worse by the heat. I go to Boots in Euston for a bottle of Pholcodine Linctus, a medicine so strong in its drowsy effects that it is kept behind the counter. Once taken, there must be no driving, no alcohol, and no captaining of nuclear submarines.

The pharmacist asks me a few questions before she lets me have the bottle.

‘Who advised you to buy this?’

I confess: ‘Mumsnet.’

* * *

Thursday 2nd July 2015.

 I write a letter to a US reader who is curious about my living arrangements. Do I really share a shower and a W.C. with ‘strangers’? This disturbs her.

Well, yes. It’s not quite like an American boarding house, as each rented room has its own little kitchen area inside – that’s what makes them bedsits. Two of the other tenants are people I knew socially before they moved in. The other two are only strangers in the sense that neighbours are strangers. I occasionally say hello to them in the hallway, and they seem nice enough. We operate the shared washrooms on a system of karmic consideration. If you use something, like a toilet roll, you replace it. If you make a mess, you clean it up. No rotas. Somehow we manage to get along.

I have lived like this all my adult life.

* * *

Evening: A second Pilates class at Jacksons Lane. The summer heat makes it much more like hard work, and I come away drenched in sweat, but glad I went. I’m still the only man there, out of a class of about a dozen.

* * *

Friday 3rd July 2015.

I love going to cinemas when it’s hot in London. The air conditioning is usually decent, and there’s the extra friendship of the darkness, now that the sun is so unkind. No skin cream needed for cinemas.

To the Curzon Soho for The Overnight, a small-scale American comedy, about two pairs of youngish, middle-class couples who spend a night at the artier couple’s house, getting to know each other. As the night goes on, the conventionally-minded guests are increasingly worried that their hosts want to know them much more intimately. This ‘middle class swingers’ plot is always good value – I think of the film The Ice Storm, Martin Amis’s Dead Babies, Julian Barnes’s Metroland, and even episodes of sitcoms like I’m Alan Partridge. But with its broad strokes and some crude humour, The Overnight is more a straightforward comedy of manners than social comment. The chief pleasure comes from watching Jason Schwartzman play yet another creepy but charismatic character, another little man who seeks to tower over others psychologically.

In the Curzon café, a woman at the table next to me uses what I assume to be a mirror, to pluck at a lone hair on her chin. Except on looking closer I realise it’s not a compact mirror, but the reverse camera option on her iPhone.

* * *

Dinner at the 5th floor student canteen at Birkbeck, in Torrington Square. Fish and chips for £4. I like the occasional comfort of ‘fish on Friday’, the alliterative tradition of the menu, as it was at school. Today is the last day of the summer term, and so it’s the last time to get a cheap evening meal here. I eat alone on the rooftop terrace. There are plenty of students chattering nearby, but they’re all in the Birkbeck bar, on the balcony level below. Here, it’s breezy enough to make the napkins flutter.

I’m told there are still some weeks to go before I am sent a ‘transcript’: the piece of paper which officially confirms my degree. In the meantime a long Pass List, covering all of Birkbeck’s Class of 2015, will go up on the college website on the 17th July. Not so far away now.

* * *