Sunday 24th January 2016.

I am on something of a Gore Vidal tip, after watching Best of Enemies for the third time. Am delighted to find there’s another documentary on Netflix, United States of Amnesia, entirely about Mr Vidal’s life. I don’t always agree with his relentless cynicism – he even finds something negative to say about the election of Obama. But his wit and style is a delight. Vidal’s utterations on chat shows contain epigrams worthy of Wilde:

TV interviewer (on Vidal’s running for a Democrat candidacy in 1982): Did you like that experience? All the hand shaking?

Gore Vidal: Oh yes. I love that. I like crowds. I have depths of insincerity as yet unplumbed.

* * *

Sitting in the Barbican Cinema Café this evening, I am recognised from the I Am Dandy book. This time it’s by one of the other dandies within its pages: the pristinely moustachioed Johnny Vercoutre, there to see The Revenant (‘It’s very Boys’ Own,’ I tell him).

Getting out the dandy book at home, I see he’s on page 238. I’m on page 42, looking rather otherworldly in my chalk white suit. There’s whiteness around me too: the picture was taken in a snow-covered Parkland Walk, here in Highgate. Being a Douglas Adams fan, I can’t help feeling pleased by my page number’s association with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Here, 42 means the answer to life, the universe, and Highgate dandyism.

Which Hitchhiker’s character do I most resemble? I admit to having Marvin the Paranoid Android moments. I recently caught myself grumbling about my inability to turn a high IQ (well, 141) into a decent income, before realising that this was all too close to Marvin’s catchphrase: ‘Here I am, brain the size of a planet…’ Mustn’t be a Marvin. He moans about his health too: ‘And me with this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side.’

Of course, Marvin’s saving grace is that his depression manifests as a form of amiability, much like Eeyore’s does in Winnie the Pooh. Huggable depressives. In the film version of Hitchhiker’s, Marvin’s voice was perfectly cast in the form of Alan Rickman, who died the other day. He was an actor I was lucky enough to see on stage in the 80s, at the Barbican in fact. Back then he played another great huggable depressive – Jacques in As You Like It.  I don’t know if a recording exists of Mr Rickman doing the ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech, but given his voice was so memorable, it’s easy to imagine it.

There’s a further Rickman connection here: one of his best films, Truly Madly Deeply, is set in Highgate. In one scene Juliet Stevenson walks out of Highgate Tube station, very close to where the I Am Dandy photo was taken.

* * *

Monday 25th January 2016.

Am finally exhausted with reading commentary pieces on David Bowie. The more original and personal pieces aside, the bandwagon is rather showing its wheels, often adding little more than affirming Bowie’s obvious worth. In some cases, the facts are not even checked (the BBC website seems to think Bowie acted in the film Cat People, instead of providing the theme song). What I’m not exhausted with is the man himself: the actual music and concert footage. I rewatch the superb BBC documentary, Five Years. Rick Wakeman is amusing about his piano part on Life on Mars, which he recreates on a keyboard for the cameras. He demonstrates the cleverness of the key changes, while admitting having not played it for decades. ‘It’s a joy to perform.’ He pauses. ‘I must go home and learn it properly.’

Shanthi S points out to me how Bowie in drag (as seen in the ‘Boys Keep Swinging’ vid) rather resembles Billie Whitelaw, she of Samuel Beckett fame. Indeed, it’s a shame Bowie never acted in a Beckett play himself: he’d have been perfect.

* * *

Thursday 28th January 2016.

MA class tonight: Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour. An environmentally-themed novel, with lots of detail about working class farm life in the Appalachians. Some Hardy-esque elements: strong female characters with Biblical names, dreaming of affairs amid the sheep-shearing. Less Hardy-like are the references to the internet and Google, though the protagonist is too poor to have her own computer, despite being a twenty-something American in 2010. There’s a wry scene in which an environmental campaigner suggests the heroine cuts down on her carbon footprint by taking fewer flights. She and her husband have yet to travel outside of the state. It’s a neat illustration of media solipsism – the way one forgets how plenty of people in the US (and indeed the UK) still have none of the technological convenience enjoyed by the majority.

I look up the latest figures for adults without internet access. It’s 11% in the UK (6 million people), 15% in the US (47 million). It’s one reason why public libraries are still essential, with their free internet terminals.

Sometimes, though, such utterly offline lives might be enviable. I watch a programme tonight on internet abuse, ‘Troll Hunters’. Various recipients of malicious Twitter messages are shown tracking down their antagonists, then confronting them in person. What’s unexpected is the way one 40-something working-class man – his face blurred – is utterly unrepentant about his behaviour. He even claims a kind of moral defence. The people he attacks, he says, like the former MP Louise Mensch, are far more powerful than he is, so they need taking down a peg or two. ‘It’s all about destroying authority… The world owes me. If they block me, I move onto someone else.’

Certainly the programme touches on one unassailable truth about the appeal of trolling. It’s about wanting to feel powerful.

* * *

Friday 29th January 2016.

Another phone call from someone claiming to be from ‘the technical department of Windows’. They want to provide remote access to my computer so they can deal with ‘hacking’. Apart from anything else, the people behind these obvious scams don’t seem to realise that Windows is a product, not a company. This one hangs up at the slightest challenge.

Sunday 17th January 2016.

I’m reading Dave Eggers’s The Circle. It’s a novel that sounds an Orwellian warning about the rise of Google and Facebook. Much is made about the growing desirability of ‘transparency’. This is meant figuratively, in the sense of increased accountability. But it’s also implied architecturally, in the sense of modern workplaces tending to be cathedrals of glass. Buildings where the workers can be easily seen, and so easily monitored. The price in both cases is privacy.

Today I walk past the shiny new Central St Giles development, near the east end of Denmark Street. There is now a branch of Caffe Nero there, one so entirely made of glass that I don’t know where to put my eyes as I pass by. It’s like walking past a display case of knees and hands and lattes. I’m used to seeing this in stations like St Pancras (particularly with the all-glass Starbucks there), because of the obvious security concerns. But in a central London street it feels very odd, and very fragile.

One of my favourite things about the Harry Potter books is the idea of Diagon Alley, the secret wizards’ street in London. It seemed so deliciously believable, making imaginative use of London’s reputation as an unplanned patchwork of hidden worlds. Now, with the current trend for see-through developments like Central St Giles, the nooks and crannies can only disappear. A surfeit of glass undermines a site’s potential for secrets, intrigue, and magic. Transparency is a plot spoiler.

* * *

Monday 18th January 2016.

My review of Popkiss, the book about Sarah Records, is published in the new issue (February 2016) of the music magazine The Wire. Quite happy with it: it’s full of little points I hope will pique the interest of the casual Wire reader, someone who may be unfamiliar with Sarah. The death of Bowie is a reminder that music – of any level of success – never has a fixed reach. Never one generation, never one era, never one ear.

Bowie tributes are still appearing in the press. Some journalists use the U-word – ‘us’. It means well, but it makes me wince. Who is this ‘us’? Can you really speak for the entire human race? If so, who appointed you spokesperson? I find ‘you’ equally suspicious (‘you know how it is when you’re flying to Monaco in First Class…’). Even though it seems more vain to say ‘me’, it’s more honest and precise. Better to accept that all writing is vanity of a kind.

* * *

Tuesday 19th January 2016.

I meet with Shanthi S. in the NPG, and we wander around the National Gallery next door, taking in the free exhibition on Botticini’s sublime Assumption of the Virgin. I show S my favourite painting in the gallery, Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man (1550-5, with the pink curtain). We bump into Sophie Parkin, who is sitting right in front of the painting.

Then to the ICA for The Revenant – a mere £3 each. Currently the most talked-about film in town, having become a favourite for the Oscars. For all its technical innovation, it’s really a traditional Western, albeit a snowy one. The story is a simple one of survival against the elements, followed by revenge. There’s plenty of stunning set pieces, presumably enhanced by state-of-the-art CGI graphics: the bear attack, the white-water rapids, the gutting of the horse, and the Saving Private Ryan-like opening, as Mr DiCaprio’s party are besieged by Native American tribesmen. Whether or not Mr DC is putting in an Oscar-winning performance really depends on one’s definition of acting. He certainly suffers, but his character isn’t much more than that – just a man who has a terrible time. He grunts, he gasps, he crawls. He does things that regularly has the audience saying ‘Ouch!’, and ‘Goodness, that must be painful!’ and ‘Don’t hurt, though!’

There’s been a few articles which employ the irksome trend of adding ‘porn’ as a suffix. This seems to be a way of judging any film that a critic views as indulgent. The Revenant has been described variously as ‘pain porn’, ‘torture porn’, ‘wilderness porn’, and ‘forest porn’. Certainly all those elements are present in the film, and to an intense level, but calling them a form of ‘porn’ is helpful to precisely no one. Whatever happened to discussions of catharsis?

It’s also too long. My father used to judge films on the amount of times he looked at his watch. He once told me how he didn’t do this once during Lord of the Rings Part 3 – Return of the King, despite the three hour-plus duration. ‘That’s how good it was’. I’m afraid I checked my own watch four or five times during The Revenant.  For all its focus on immersion, it really doesn’t need two and a half hours to tell such a straightforward tale.

* * *

Thursday 21st January 2016.

To Gordon Square for this week’s MA seminar. The text is Lorrie Moore’s A Gate At The Stairs. There’s several witty scenes consisting entirely of overheard dialogue between middle-class liberals, on such topics as the state of racism after 9/11. To me, these come close to Ronald Firbank, though it’s a style better known from his disciple, Evelyn Waugh. According to DJ Taylor’s new book The Prose Factory: Literary Life in Britain Since 1918 (which I’ve been leafing through), one legacy Firbank ‘bequeathed’ to fiction in the 1910s and 1920s is his ‘talking heads’ device. This is a depiction of a conversation as a long series of detached utterations, in which no speaker is named, and where there’s a sense of a satirical rhythm at play. The ‘chattering classes’ in action, then as now.

Not everyone in the seminar is enamoured of Moore’s use of humour for serious issues, though: one student even calls it ‘irritating’. This is always a risk, but it’s why I admire comedy, or comedy drama, over wholly dramatic texts. Comedy is hard to get right, but the best comedy can produce rich, lasting, soaring effects. Tragedy is closer to ground level.

In A Gate At The Stairs there’s also some scenes of violent death, and some occasionally grotesque imagery. But Moore manages to control the tone at every stage, and it’s never jarring. Knowing what happens also makes a second reading all the more rewarding: early details take on a pleasing new significance. It’s not a flawless novel, but it’s one of the best I’ve read in a long time, and it makes me want to read more of Ms Moore.

* * *

Sunday 10th January 2016.

Sometime during the late 90s, when Orlando were on tour. A catcall from a schoolchild, in my direction: ‘Is that… David Bowie?’

(Answer: Sort of…)

Today, David Bowie dies.

I was going to start this week’s diary with an explanation of a term I used last week – ‘queer’. One reader asked what exactly I meant by this, given it’s such a slippery term. ‘Do you mean gay?’ Well, yes and no.

‘Queer’ used to be a pejorative insult for gay people, from the early 20th century up to the 1980s. Then it started to be reclaimed by gay rights activists as a positive term, particularly as a more defiant and politicised form of identity.

Today, though, I have to admit it’s more complicated. I tend to use it to mean a look or attitude that plays with conventions of gender and sexuality, but also with an anti-authoritarian air. I forget, though, that some people (particularly young people) now identify with ‘queer’ as a separate identity away from gay, hence the use of ‘Q’ in the community acronym of ‘LGBTQI’ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex).

In academia, there’s also queer studies and queer theory. These tend to denote a certain troubling of conventions in society by non-heterosexual activity, a scrutinising of what ‘normal’ means – ‘to queer’ as a verb. ‘Queer’ in this sense is a spanner in the works, a critique, a pointing at the core from the margins. It is the moment in The Wizard of Oz where the man behind the curtain is paid attention to.

All this has a direct connection to David Bowie. He is a good example of someone who was not necessarily gay but who definitely could be read as a queer icon. His lasting relationships may have been with women, and he was more or less content with his gender, but he very much put out and amplified queer signals in his work, and these were of incalculable importance. To those looking out for such signals, they were nothing less than a lifeline. Whether it was the dress he wore on the cover of The Man Who Sold The World, his use of androgynous make-up and homoerotic poses in his Ziggy Stardust phase, or his dragging up in the Boys Keep Swinging video, Bowie was queer enough.

He could be explicit about the q-word in his lyrics, too. There’s the following line from his 1993 single ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’, written for the BBC TV adaptation of the Hanif Kureishi novel. I’ve only now realised that it also nods to the Lou Reed song ‘Vicious’:

Screaming along in South London / Vicious but ready to learn / Sometimes I fear that the whole world is queer / Sometimes but always in vain

* * *

This week, the wealth of coverage of Bowie’s death provoked a couple of grumpy letters in the press. Complaining about an excess of Bowie articles in the Independent, one reader wrote, ‘Anybody under 40 probably didn’t know who he was’. Another saw little value in ‘pages of nostalgic outpourings about musicians… I suggest your editors stop trying to relive their youth.’

I find this fascinating, partly as a study of sheer solipsism, but also as a gauge of the way culture and celebrity are subjective. To whom does Bowie’s death matter, and can this be turned into a proportionate amount of news coverage? What have people heard of? What do people care about? To quote ‘Hello Spaceboy’, ‘it’s confusing these days…‘

Certainly, the disgruntled letters are disproved by the content of the articles. True, there’s been lots of greying nostalgia (which I have no problem with), but there’s also been tributes by young musicians and artists too. Among those who cite him as an influence are La Roux, Grimes, Janelle Monae, Florence Welch, and Desiree Akhavan, the thirty-year-old director of Appropriate Behaviour, my favourite film of last year. She says, ‘I listen to ‘Modern Love’ at least once a day. It happens to contain the secret to successful filmmaking: ‘It’s not really work / It’s just the power to charm.”

As it is, I don’t think the media coverage has been excessive at all. At least, not compared to the last Royal Baby.

Besides, music connects directly to the emotions. So when a popular musician dies, there’s obviously going to be lots of emotional expression. Why is that hard to understand?

As for my own favourite Bowie songs, there’s the aforementioned ‘Buddha of Suburbia’, released at a time when he was considered to be artistically treading water. I remember it sounded then, as it does now, as vintage Bowie, pure and simple.

I adore Hunky Dory, particularly ‘Changes’, and ‘Queen Bitch’. I love his Plastic Soul phase, especially ‘Young Americans’. From his 80s commercial pop phase, I’m fond of ‘Modern Love’ and ‘Absolute Beginners’. I love the way the former is used in the 2012 film Frances Ha, while Greta Gerwig is running through New York (itself an homage to the 80s film Mauvais Sang).

Though I’ve never tried to explicitly resemble him aesthetically, I know there’s a subconscious influence at work. I bleach my hair. I have a dandyish, Modern Weirdo look. Ergo, I owe a debt to Bowie.

It’s also important to remember he wasn’t perfect. Despite some of the more messianic pronouncements this week, Bowie was never a sacred cow. His late 80s albums and Tin Machine records (late 80s to early 90s) were given an extremely hard time by the critics. Bowie survived as long as he did by being a first-rate manipulator of as much information as possible – as evidenced in the way he kept his illness secret. He couldn’t stop the bad reviews, but I noticed how he played down his flops in the authorised V&A David Bowie Is… show.

Something else, then: he welcomed and encouraged praise. He liked being a star, and took himself seriously as one. What’s commendable is that this is a more honest trait than the false modesty which society usually requires (Oscar Wilde was another expert, Lady Gaga is a current example). Make no mistake: most people who make art do want praise from as many people as possible. It’s not selling out or vain, it’s basic self-validation.

What isn’t in question is his cultural influence. If the message of the Beatles was ‘all you need is love’, Bowie’s was ‘all you need is curiosity’. Another line from ‘Modern Love’ springs to mind: ‘But I try…’

He tried so many different styles and looks and genres and personae, and kept trying. Why did he do all the acting roles too (some of which, again, were better than others)? Why is he there at the beginning of The Snowman, introducing a children’s cartoon? Because he liked to try things. He tried. That’s inspiring in itself. I rather liked him.

* * *

Monday 11th January 2016.

I’m reading Lorrie Moore’s A Gate At The Stairs (2009). It’s a witty post 9/11 tale of Midwest America. Some favourite lines:

‘Death would come to me – I knew this from reading British poetry’.

‘Having no dog in the race doesn’t keep people from having extremely large cats’.

* * *

Thursday 14th January 2016.

MA class tonight, on The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I’m intrigued that it’s dedicated to the son McCarthy had at the age of 65, and so comes with an older parent’s fear of not being able to see their offspring reach adult life. The Road is so relentlessly bleak and grim that I can’t say I enjoy it, though I do admire it.

* * *

Friday 15th January 2016.

To the Maritime Museum in Greenwich for the exhibition Samuel Pepys – Plague, Fire, Revolution. The one exhibit it doesn’t have is Pepys’s actual diary, due to his will forbidding it from leaving his old Cambridge college. But what is does have is a richness of everything else from the era: animated presentations of the Great Fire, excerpts from the diary on touchscreens, Charles 1st’s ornate gloves from the day of his execution, a pair of green glass spectacles Pepys wore when he thought the diary was making him blind (it wasn’t), and the shorthand codebook he used to encrypt his writing. When a Victorian scholar came to decode the diaries for the first time, he spent years trying to work out the code from scratch. It’s hard to imagine how he must have felt when he finally noticed the codebook was there too, just inches away on a different shelf.

Something I have in common with Pepys, and indeed Joe Orton and Kenneth Williams: not only diarists of London, but of spells in Tangier too.

* * *

Afterwards, dinner with my brother Tom and friends. We try the new Jamie Oliver restaurant in Nelson Road. Quite pleasant, food agreeable. The restaurant has the feel of a converted warehouse: spacious, high-ceilings, exposed brickwork, plenty of room. Perhaps a little too spacious for midwinter, though, and many of the diners keep their coats on.

Modern eating. My veggie burger arrives on a wooden chopping board, with the chips in a small tin pail.

Tom’s friend E teaches photography to schoolchildren in East London. ‘It’s hard to get them to do any work. We’re trying to get the examination board to accept selfies.’ This is not meant as a joke.

Taking selfies and using social media is a form of work, though: the work one must do in order to keep one’s friends. The problem for teens is when the need to fit in eclipses the need to do well at school. The technology involved may be new, but the dilemma is eternal.

Monday 21st December 2015.

Mum comes up to London for the day, and we do our own metropolitan version of the family get-together. First: to Somerset House Ice Rink, now a favourite symbol of Christmas in twenty-first-century London, as immortalised in the opening of Love Actually. Unfortunately today it rains like mad, and the ice rink is waterlogged. But this doesn’t stop the skaters, and they carry on gliding through the puddles.

We stick around at Somerset House to have a look at the current exhibitions. I’m delighted to see there’s a Tintin show, Tintin – Herge’s Masterpiece. Every inch of the gallery walls and windows are covered in Tintin illustrations. There are detailed scale models of scenes from the books, including a dolls’ house of Marlinspike Hall.

Then to the Courtauld next door, for Soaring Flight – Peter Lanyon’s Gliding Paintings, and Bridget Riley – Learning From Seurat. I always wonder how Ms Riley managed to create her 60s works without getting dizzy. A mere five minutes of her op-art canvases unsteadies my sense of reality. Though admittedly, that doesn’t take much.

We revisit some of the Courtauld’s permanent collection too. Paintings as old friends, world-famous masterpieces, right here by the ice rink. The Van Gogh self-portrait, Manet’s barmaid, Modigliani’s nude, Monet and Cezanne’s landscapes, Degas’s dancers.

Lunch in the top floor café of Foyle’s in Charing Cross Road, then a spot of book browsing, moving onto in Waterstone’s in Trafalgar Square. We’re impressed by their Book of the Year, The Fox and the Star by Coralie Bickford-Smith. It’s a beautiful children’s picture book, printed in blue cloth hardback on thick, high quality paper. Ms Bickford-Smith is a book designer by profession – her work can be seen in the Penguin English Classics range. Hers is an ornate and symmetrical  style that nods to William Morris’s woodcut designs for the Kelmscott Press, but also to Jan PieÅ„kowski’s more recent silhouettes. With The Fox and The Star Ms Bickford-Smith not only writes the original story, but illustrates, designs and typesets the finished object as well. Even the credits for the font and the paper stock have a touch of the exotic: ‘set in Agfa Wile 12pt/15pt, printed on Munken Pure Rough’.

Waterstones are also making a small point here about the current role of print books in a digital age. 2015 saw them withdraw Kindles from their shops, while the sales of print books rose for the first time since the rise of ebooks. Significantly, although The Fox and the Star has clearly been produced using the latest digital design and publishing programs, the end product is entirely physical; there is no ebook edition. In this sense, print is the ultimate upgrade of digital. The page is a screen that finally stops moving, and the viewer can finally relax.

Ms Bickford-Smith’s story is a simple fable for small children, about a young fox coping with the loss of his friend, the Star. But it lends itself to wider readings of grief and personal bereavement, particularly when one learns that the author was inspired by the loss of her mother at an early age.

Mum treats me to a copy. Later, I peruse the pages at home. My own reading of the tale is inevitably bound up with thoughts of Dad, and I get a little weepy.

By 4pm on this Shortest Day, it’s completely dark. We take a busy Clipper boat up the Thames to Greenwich, taking in the lights of the city. Then a further ride, this time on the Emirates Air Line cable car link, which spans the Thames from the O2 Dome in Greenwich to the Royal Victoria Dock in Newham. It turns out to be easy to just turn up and get a whole car to yourself. No queues; in fact, barely anyone on the thing at all. The moment when the car first ascends from the terminus and soars high above the water is the most heartstopping one. It swings a little in the wind, which is unnerving, but only a little.

We take the DLR and tube to Liverpool Street, where I see Mum off on the train to Suffolk.

* * *

Thursday 24th December 2015.

Adventures in youth slang. In a branch of Pret today, a young man at the table next to me says his companion, ‘I find that so jokes‘. As in funny. I knew about this usage from the internet, but thought it was confined to the enclaves of cyberspace. This is the first time I’ve heard it said aloud. But it’s still yet to appear on Gardener’s Question Time, I think.

I attempt to see a film in the evening with Shanthi S, but we’re thwarted by her news website employers, who force her to work late. She has to work on Christmas Day as well, via her computer at home. The news must not rest.

All the cinemas in London seem to shut down completely on Xmas Eve after 6pm, but we have a pleasant time with cocktails and food at the Dean Street Townhouse in Soho (see previous entry).

Shanthi reminds me how in New York it’s common for people to go to the cinema on Christmas Day, often combining it with Chinese food. There’s nothing like that in London. Many pubs, restaurants and convenience stores are open, but certainly no cinemas. The transport system still shuts down completely on December 25th – the only day in the year when it does. Even in 2015, London is essentially a Christian city.

* * *

Friday 25th December 2015.

Christmas Day, spent in Highgate. Rainy, windy, cold and overcast. I phone Mum for a chat in the morning, then brave the rain to walk up to Waterlow Park, for my traditional feeding of the ducks.

The rest of the day is spent in my room, hacking away at the essay, while swigging from a large bottle of Baileys. My Christmas lunch is a microwaved carton of ‘White Christmas’ soup from the New Covent Garden Soup Co. Plus Quorn cocktail sausages. And lashings of back pain (currently seeing a GP, trying treatments).

Still, I’m grateful not to be one of the thousands in Northern England affected by devastating floods. I think about how we’re now getting close to 2019, the year that Blade Runner is meant to be set in. A film in which the future means constant heavy rain.

* * *

Saturday 26th December 2015.

I upload a diary entry that was meant to be a few words, apologising for not writing a diary entry. It ends up ballooning into 1500 words.

Evening: to the Curzon Soho, a cinema that proudly advertises itself in its window posters as a ‘Force Free Zone’. Its three screens are showing a diverse programme of films, none of which are the new Star Wars. There’s Carol, Grandma, the Peggy Guggenheim documentary, The Lobster (still), and Ice and the Sky. I plump for Grandma, a low-key indie road movie in the vein of Little Miss Sunshine and The Daytrippers.

Grandma stars Lily Tomlin as a grumpy lesbian poet (in her first leading role since 1988’s Big Business with Bette Midler!). She drives her pregnant granddaughter around various locations in order to raise the money for an abortion. It’s a simple conceit, but full of wit, poignancy and thoughtful characterisation; with jokes that rely on the audience knowing who Simone De Beauvoir is.

* * *

Monday 28th December 2015.

Evening: To Vout-O-Reenee’s for Atalanta Kernick’s birthday drinks. Lots of queer, dapper ladies, and women from the 90s London music scene. I chat to the writer Ngaire-Ruth, Debbie Smith (AK’s partner), Harris (one of the Drakes, a performance group of besuited butch women), and also to Ms Shir from Israel (which she refers to as ‘the land of blood and honey’). Plus Alex, the (straight male) drummer from the band Nightnurse. He’s now in Department S, of ‘Is Vic There’ fame. I discover that he also pops up in Shaun of the Dead, as a zombie on a daytime TV talk show. Indulge myself with the bar’s ‘Dunkin Donut’ cocktail: milk, cacao, Kahlua.

* * *

Thursday 31st December 2015.

New Year’s Eve. I stay in by myself. Again, by choice. Again, to work on the essay. I discover the true sound of NYE in residential city streets: the constant revving of pizza delivery mopeds.

In the essay, I suddenly find myself using the word ‘ekphrastically’. At which point it’s midnight, so I take a break, open the Prosecco, and watch the fireworks at the London Eye, via the internet. Far better than being surrounded by drunken people who don’t know what they’re doing. Here’s to choice, difference, and 2016.

* * *

Sunday 3rd January 2016.

I finish the essay – with a fifth draft – and deliver it online. Celebrate by watching the new Sherlock film, the Victorian one, which is superb. Also enjoy Charlie Brooker’s 2015 Wipe, his satirical review of the year. It ends on a pessimistic note, but I take comfort from the knowledge that Mr Brooker’s style of ‘loner grumpiness’ is now a necessary fabrication. It’s quite funny that he has to keep up the image of the angry, lonely outsider shouting at the TV from his sofa, when these days he is married and has children, and indeed a successful TV career. I worry, though, about my own grumpiness. I’m heading into a new year, still without any sense of a ‘career’, still very much feeling like a outsider. And yet Ms Shanthi said to me this week, when I was apparently acting in a bar like I owned the place, ‘You’re more like Hugh Grant than you think!’

* * *

Tuesday 4th January 2016.

To the ICA cinema to see Joy, the new David O. Russell film, starring Jennifer Lawrence. As was the case with Mr Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, it also has Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro, and the same mix of quirky plot details with straightforward realism. The quirky plot in this instance being the tale of a young woman who invents a self-rinsing mop. There’s a little of Frank Capra’s ‘American inspiration’ style in this particular mix, though, and thanks to Ms Lawrence being so utterly likeable, it all works. Indeed, I come out of the cinema with a real sense of warmth. It’s also a nice companion to Carol, being another Christmas tale of a woman finding out who she really is.

* * *

Thursday 7th January 2016.

First class of the MA’s spring term. I’m now on a module that’s specifically about contemporary US fiction. This week we study Paradise (1997) by Toni Morrison. It uses elements of mystery and magical realism, much like Beloved, but with a much larger cast of characters. As a result, the reader has to do a fair amount of work just to work out what’s going on – the narrative can switch perspectives and even historical eras, halfway through a sentence.

* * *

Friday 8th January 2016.

I finish reading Diana Athill’s Alive Alive Oh! Some new words: she calls Highgate ‘a bosky place’ (leafy, wooded). As a child she wore ‘jemimas’ – overshoes of waterproofed felt. ‘Galoshes were considered sissy, whereas jemimas, although they looked much more old-womanish, were perfectly acceptable on manly feet’.

Also, she expresses the unexpected luxury of having to use a wheelchair, especially when visiting art exhibitions. ‘The crowd falls away on either side like the Red Sea, and there you are, lounging in front of the painting of your choice in perfect comfort’.

On life advice at 98: ‘Avoid romanticism and abhor possessiveness’. And on her innate sense of not wanting to be a mother: ‘I remember thinking when looking at a small baby, ‘I’d much rather pick up a puppy.”

* * *

I look back over the previous year’s diaries. I think I saw more films than ever – it must be close to a hundred. In which case, here’s some Favourite Things of 2015. I recommend them all.

FILMS OF 2015 (FICTION):

1. Appropriate Behaviour
2. Birdman
3. Carol
4. The Falling
5. Inside Out
6. The Lady In The Van
7. London Road
8. Mistress America
9. White Bird In A Blizzard
10. The Lobster

FILMS (DOCUMENTARIES):

1. Best of Enemies (Gore Vidal)
2. Do I Sound Gay? (campness as identity)
3. Beyond Clueless (US high school films)
4. My Secret World (Sarah Records)
5. Regarding Susan Sontag

NOVELS:

1. St Aubyn – Lost For Words
2. DeLillo – White Noise
3. Carter – Passion of New Eve
4. Abrams & Dorst – S
5. Hamid – Reluctant Fundamentalist