Friday 14 July 2017. I’m clearing out boxes of old clutter, in preparation for moving house. Today I go through a folder of old song drafts and unused lyrics. One idea for an album title, from 2002 is ‘The Ladybird Book of Resentment’.

***

Saturday 15 July 2017. The big move. I still have two boxes of clutter to go through, but time has run out. So the boxes have to come with me, to be tackled some other day.

At 10am Ms J arrives with her white van, which has a tendency to stall. ‘You have to give it twenty minutes, then it’ll be okay’.

There are more slapstick antics when we’re loading the van and Ms J somehow receives a cut on the hand (no good turn goes unpunished). As it turns out, she carries plasters with her at all times: she works with the Girl Guides.

A single van load covers my twenty-three years of possessions – though that’s after I’d spent the week paring them down. We trundle cautiously along the full length of the Holloway Road, then it’s Eastward Ho, turning left into the Balls Pond Road. Soon after this, we turn left again into the Dalston and Stoke Newington borderlands. My new street is partly in N16, partly in E8. At the end, the satnav demands a turning that makes no sense. So I take enormous delight in ignoring it.

My new landlady Ms K comes out to help unload, as does Ms Shanthi. So I move in with the aid of three women: the Three Graces of Removals. My new room comes with an antique bureau, which suits me perfectly.

Shortly after I’m unpacked I walk out onto Kingsland High Street for the first time. It’s a warm Saturday evening, about 8pm. I’m wearing my linen suit trousers with braces and no jacket. A dressed-up group of men and woman in their thirties pass me, probably on their way to a bar or a restaurant. One of the women grabs one of my braces as she passes, and pings it. This is the full extent of the encounter. She says nothing by way of annotation, not even to her friends. I’m left slightly shocked and confused.

I wonder if this means my appearance is already too much for Dalston, mere hours after I move in. But then, walking south and passing Dalston Kingsland Overground station, I see the sort of person the area is meant to be notorious for. He is a tall man with floppy greying hair, glasses, and a beard. In his hair are two pink ribbon bows. I wonder if the braces-pinging woman would grab at those. Perhaps not: he has the confidence of the 2017 hipster about him.

Still, I get another kind of welcome. I look in at Dalston Superstore, the gay bar which doubles as a café during the day. It currently has a fascinating exhibition of qay London history. There’s party invites going back to 1920, private letters, and a photo of Quentin Crisp.

***

Sunday 16 July. To Café Oto for a talk by Val Wilmer, the veteran music writer and photographer, notably of black American jazz musicians. I bump into various Wire Magazine types, including Frances May Morgan.

***

Friday 21 July 2017. The first of what will surely be many trips to the Rio cinema, given it’s on my doorstep. I go with Shanthi to see The Beguiled, a Civil War drama starring Nicole Kidman. Colin Farrell is forced to stay at a girls-only boarding school. It’s no surprise that this situation doesn’t turn out well. Sophia Coppola maintains her usual unearthly atmosphere, though very much with a Female Gaze in evidence, more so than The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. We also have a meal at The Stone Cave nearby, a quirky Turkish restaurant which really does look like a cave (fibreglass, I’m told).

***

A quote from Hunter S Thompson: ‘Everybody is looking for someone who can stand up in the wind. It is lonely standing up and crowded lying down.’ (from Proud Highway, 1994).

***

Friday 28 July 2017. To the Rio to see Christopher Nolan’s new film, Dunkirk, with Ewan B. I find it hard to persuade any female friends to join me, their reason being a dislike of Mr Nolan’s style. This is reasonable enough. His films do tend to be overtly interested in the struggles of men in harsh, often paranoid situations. Women, if there are any, exist at the mercy of said men. A war film by Nolan promises to be even more male-heavy. And so it proves: the only line uttered by a woman in Dunkirk is ‘Cup of tea, love?’

Nolan’s aesthetic tends to also be one of architectural tidiness. The most recent cinematic depiction of the Dunkirk evacuation was Atonement, with its five-minute shot gliding around a cluttered and muddy beach, teeming with soldiers, horses being executed, bonfires, bandstands and seaside rides. Messy, in a word. In Nolan’s Dunkirk, even the chaos is tidy. Soldiers queue up in nice lines along vanishing points, or collapse to the ground in perfect choreography. Kafka at the ballet.

We emerge to a real-life mess of conflict: the aftermath of a small riot on Kingsland Road. Like a Nolan film, the riot seems to have been contained along the long straight line of the high street (one of the straightest roads in London – possibly Roman). It’s all over when we come out of the cinema, so I have to read local news reports to find out what happened.

The death of Rashan Charles, a young black man who died in police custody, led to a protest outside the off-licence where he was arrested. Some of the protestors then blockaded the whole road with bins, cones and mattresses. When the police arrived, bottles and fireworks were thrown. The officers later returned with heavier reinforcements: helicopters, dogs, horses, armoured riot squads, dozens of vans. The blockade was pushed further north– like a World War rout – where it seems the protestors were bested; though not before several shop windows and cash machines were smashed. Only one person was arrested.

Though virtually ignored by the national media, the skirmish was enough for some emporia to lock their customers inside with them while it was going on (I refuse to write ‘while it was kicking off’). One patron of Dalston Superstore said that seeing the goings-on from the inside of a gay bar was like watching The Line of Duty soundtracked by Abba.

***

Having lived here for three weeks, I know that Dalston is not quite the overtly bohemian paradise its present reputation would have one believe, but it’s also not the multicultural, inner city locale it used to be either. It’s more like a multiverse, a patchwork of different worlds. All of London is like that, but Dalston has a more concentrated version.

Thinking how the 2011 summer riots spread from an incident similar to Rashan Charles’s death, I wonder what’s changed. Perhaps the patchwork quality of Dalston works as a kind of protection: no single world can take over for very long (except the world of the police). Or perhaps it’s now hard for a riot to spread in an era of constant distraction. Even anarchy needs a sense of focus. Or perhaps, as some people have said, tempers were doused by the heavy rain the next day.

***

Wednesday 9 Aug 2017. I take a break from my dissertation and meet Mum for afternoon tea at the Academicians’ Room, in the Royal Academy. We’re the guests of Minna M. I like how the Club has its own entrance, to the right of the main RA doors in the Piccadilly courtyard. It’s the Brideshead Revisited phrase, following on from The Secret Garden and Alice in Wonderland: ‘that low door in the wall’. The V&A Member’s Room is hidden behind a wall of mirrors.

The British Library in St Pancras has opened its own plush Members’ bar (a bar in a library!).  Private members’ clubs seem to be more popular than ever, possibly thanks to Soho House. I wonder if the rise of non-places, like franchise cafes and transport plazas, makes people yearn for places steeped in uniqueness. There’s so much emphasis on the identity of humans, while the identity of places is often overlooked.  And yet the two are connected. Being a member of a place is a declaration of identity. I used to acquire my own identity from being a fan of bands. Now I get it from being a fan of places.

***

Thursday 10 Aug 2017. Notes on language. Saying ‘you get to’ do something, rather than ‘you can’, is becoming widespread. In the news today, a young American woman describes her battle to stop a corporation running some sort of pipeline through her neighbourhood. She says, ‘This isn’t a protest you get to come home from’.

I wonder why she says ‘get to’. ‘Get to’ has more overtones of permission than ‘can’, but specifically it’s a child’s permission. ‘On Friday I get to stay up late’. ‘If you don’t do your homework, you don’t get to watch TV’. There’s an aura of youthful irony about the usage, but also the implication that all adults are now permanent children, with the real ‘parents’ being systems, institutions, networks. There may also be a touch of gaming language, along the lines of using ‘it’s all kicking off’ to describe a riot. See also ‘achievement unlocked’ and ‘goals’.

Outside Senate House Library today, an angry woman bellows into her mobile: ‘You don’t get to tell me off for eavesdropping!’

With some irony, I realise that my writing this event down is itself a form of eavesdropping. But then, in an age when people are so used to consuming the intimacies of others, from social media to loud private phone calls made in otherwise silent public spaces, the meaning of eavesdropping has rather changed. Now, whether one likes it or not, one ‘gets to’ be an eavesdropper.

Tags: dalston, dalston rio, Dalston superstore, moving house