On 17th February 2023 I moved from London to a room in my mother’s house in the village of Bildeston, Suffolk. The following diary entries cover November 2022 to the present.
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21 November 2022. This week saw the comedian Joe Lycett threaten to destroy thousands of pounds of his own money unless David Beckham addressed Qatar’s poor record on gay rights. After Beckham failed to respond, Mr L instead sent the money to charity. I was glad about this. The act of destroying money carries a depressing banality. As ways of grabbing attention go, burning money is cheap.
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24 November 2022. The English department at Birkbeck is to be hit with staff cuts, enough to make the national news. University staff across the country are striking, as are many from other professions. Today I pass some striking Royal Mail workers on my walk into town today, outside the Mount Pleasant sorting office. They have one of those embroidered union banners, as beautiful as a tapestry.
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25 November 2022. I wince at the phrase ‘instant classic’. Not just because it’s a cliché, but because it’s often proven wrong with time. Today I come across the Melody Maker best albums of the year list for 1991. The critics back then rated the Wonder Stuff’s Never Loved Elvis above My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Today, Loveless is a classic, while Never Loved Elvis is rather more ephemeral and of its time. Maybe it was a hair thing.
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26 November 2022. The dry cleaners on Liverpool Road have lost one of my new shirts. They try to replace it with a shirt in the same size, but it’s a button cuff. I only wear cuff links. Worse: mine was a Charles Tyrwhitt, theirs was a Burberry. I’d rather die.
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30 November 2022. My hypocritical rule for the deployment of Christmas practices in November: I wince at the jumpers but am fine with the food.
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3 December 2022. My job rejection emails carry a double hurt. It’s not just the rejection but the lack of individualism. They’re just templates, off the peg, sent out to every unsuccessful applicant regardless. When I’m abused on the street for my appearance I’m at least having my uniqueness acknowledged.
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9 December 2022. I go to the Natural History Museum in Kensington to see one particular exhibit. There are now conversations about the role of museums in an age of information, not least the ones filled with the spoils of empire. Perhaps the way forward for the Elgin Marbles is to do what the Natural History Museum now does every Christmas with its robot Tyrannosaurus Rex. Put them in a Christmas jumper.
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10 December 2022. This time last year I defended my PhD. Panto season is the best time for the process. ‘This premise isn’t evidenced’. ‘Oh yes it is.’ ‘Oh no it isn’t.’
In fact, I now realize that my thesis has a reference to the pantomime dame Widow Twankey in it. The character pops up in Joyce’s Ulysses, in the ‘Circe’ chapter.
I take advantage of the football to go to Sainsbury’s on Liverpool Road for gin. This time a middle-aged staffer makes my day by asking me to ‘solemnly swear’ that I am over 25. Cruising’s not dead.
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11 December 2022. I buy the Christmas Radio Times. It’s now the Midnight Mass of magazine issues, attendance suddenly swelling for the one occasion in December.
Radio Times these days turns out to be an existential attempt to apprehend the infinity of streaming TV platforms. As Camus said: ‘The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ Such is the feeling when choosing between Die Hard and Love Actually.
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15 December 2022. Today is the centenary of the OED‘s earliest citation of ‘gay’ to mean ‘homosexual’. Their source is Gertrude Stein’s book Geography and Plays, published on the 15th of December 1922. This reading is debatable, but an innuendo effect is certainly there. I especially like the idea that ‘gay’ may have first appeared in print in a book by an avant-garde lesbian.
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30 December 2022. I manage to get a cheap ticket for the new play of Orlando, at the Garrick Theatre, Charing Cross. In the title role, Emma Corrin is more energetic and more camp than Tilda Swinton in the 90s film, jumping around the stage and changing their voice (Corrin is indeed a ‘they’), to suit the teenage boy Orlando, then the young man, then again for the female version. What with the drag and the wintery scenes set during the Great Frost, plus the time of year it is now, the production is a kind of modernist pantomime. It taps into the sense of intellectual fun that Woolf intended.
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31 December 2022: I stay in and watch Sooz Kempner’s live show on the Twitch platform – a very modern means of entertainment. She sings showtunes, including ‘Unworthy of Your Love’ from Sondheim’s Assassins. She also does Kate Bush’s ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ while dressed as the politician Nadine Dorries, known for championing Boris Johnson.
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4 January 2023. I manage to land a paid job, if a temporary one. I’m compiling the index for a new book, Jewish Women in Comics. Today I learn that academic books file the Batman character Harley Quinn under H rather than Q. The reasoning is because of the pun on ‘harlequin’: her surname is the 2nd half of a joke. James Bond, Harry Potter, and Sherlock Holmes, meanwhile, are meant to be realistic names rather than jokes, and so are filed under B, P, and H. It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t really matter, except when it does. I like the way it feels wrong to index ‘Loaf, Meat’, or indeed ‘Man, Iron’.
Certainly, the act of indexing has something of the pleasure of polishing: the final step towards perfection. If a new non-fiction book lacks an index, I tend to take against it.
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Monday 18 January 2023. Ronald Blythe has died. The one pull-quote in the Times obituary is that he had a one-night stand with Patricia Highsmith. The lesson being that if you live to 100 and have sex with a woman just once, the least you can do is make sure it’s a name worth dropping. I feel the touristic side of this unlikely liaison was more Highsmith’s, though. She moved all the way from America to Suffolk, after all. Blythe was just part of the landscape.
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20 January 2023. The housing association in Angel ask me to move out. They’re designated as a service for postgraduate students, and as my student life is finally over, I can’t really complain. I’ve been lucky to have lived there at all. Living in Zone 1 of London was always something I wanted to do, and now it’s done. Time to move on.
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23 January 2023. The effects of the pandemic are reflected in adverts for shared flats. Many of them now stipulate limits on working from home. ‘No more than 1 day per week’ says one. Home is becoming time as much as place.
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27 January 2023. Battling another job application form. One box says: ‘demonstrate your professional development’. I want to say: ‘Development is for darkrooms.’
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28 January 2023. I’m now resigned to leaving the city. 29 years is probably enough. I need to see if I’ll miss it. I spent 23 years in Zone 3 (Highgate). Then 3 years in Zone 2 (Dalston). Then 2 years in Zone 1 (Angel). In theory I should now get an internship as a Beefeater at the Tower of London. Or move out altogether.
I’m now curious about the arty seaside life, which I hear is particularly possible in St-Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex. The first thing I will do after moving there is accept that the name has two hyphens and no apostrophe.
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2 February 2023. I spend a day in St Leonards, looking at a top floor flat in Warrior Square, as well as registering at a handful of estate agents. The flat is still being renovated, and my gut instinct is to pass rather than rush into a move for the sake of it.
I’d ideally like a studio flat rather than have to share a kitchen with complete strangers. Paradoxically I can work well in libraries and cafes, but feel uneasy in kitchens of shared houses. I think it’s the way public spaces are blank slates, reset on every visit. Whereas a shared kitchen is a disputed territory.
If I have to share a house at all, I’d rather do it where all parties are predisposed to forgive each other’s border incidents. That means either moving into a monastery or living with my mother. And with monks, I’m really not keen on the hours.
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Wednesday 16 February 2023. A selfie from the public roof garden of the Post Building, New Oxford Street. My last day in London as a resident, 1994 – 2023. For now.
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Friday 17 Feb 2023. Day of the move. I travel separately from the van, which is driven by the charming and very strong Tommy, from T With A Van Removals, Sudbury. I pack a suitcase to take with myself just in case. This includes the one book I’d want to still have if my entire possessions vanished. It’s The Complete Firbank. Specifically the fat Picador paperback edition from 1988. My bible. Quentin Crisp once said that he thought Vile Bodies was the wittiest book ever written, and it’s essentially diluted Firbank.
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2nd March 2023. Living in a village while not being able to drive rather limits one’s cultural outings. There’s a good arthouse cinema in Ipswich, the King Street Cinema, but the bus from Bildeston takes a whole hour, and doesn’t do evenings.
Most of the concerts in Ipswich and Stowmarket seem to be for tribute bands. Symptoms of living where the action isn’t. You go expecting no surprises. Unless it’s a Radiohead tribute band, in which case you go expecting ‘No Surprises’.
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26 March 2023. I’m neutral about the upcoming coronation, though being a slight postal geek I take an interest in the redesign of the stamps. They have Charles’s silhouette now, though he has no crown. It’s like vicars who are uneasy about mentioning God, in case it puts people off.
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31 March 2023. Another job application. ‘Please list your core attributes’ Me: An antipathy to the phrase ‘core attributes’ for a start.
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3 April 2023. I apply for a research job, but although I’m told I have an ‘impressive’ CV, it still goes to someone else.
Freelance writing seems to be my only way forward, with the hope that enough readers will want my particular perspective. I can’t compete with writers who might as well be anyone.
In my favour, I am at least AI-proof. Artificial intelligence programs are now thought to be sophisticated enough to imitate any writing style. But in my case, so much of my style is influenced by books so obscure that they’ve never been digitized.
What’s also different with me, I hope, is my recent academic training. I know a lot more about stuff, and I know a lot more about which stuff is known. If Hunter S Thompson can call himself a ‘doctor’ out of narcotic cool, I can surely do so likewise as Dr Dickon Edwards. And besides, I like the alliteration of the ‘D’ sounds.
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6 April 2023. Easter in a Suffolk village. A mobile library calls once every four weeks, for half an hour; I make sure I use it. The post box in the square has been ‘yarnbombed’. It sports an unsolicited woollen cap of crocheted chicks and lambs, put there in the dead of night by a guerrilla knitter. There are real lambs in the field on the south of the village, by the Hadleigh road.
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25 April 2023.
With Mum to Dollops Wood, Polstead. Despite growing up in Suffolk I don’t think I’ve explored one of the county’s bluebell woods until now. Encountered in person, the colour is breath-taking. Afterwards we find the little Polstead community shop on the village green and have tea and cake outside. There is no one about. The shop has a post office section: a tiny self-contained glass booth in one corner, like an amusement machine on a seaside pier. In Bildeston’s only shop the post office section is just one end of the same counter.
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29 April 2023. The Hadleigh Morrison’s supermarket sells a small number of books. Mostly popular crime and romance titles, but today they have Douglas Stuart’s literary novel Young Mungo in paperback, with its cover photo of two sweaty young men passionately kissing. I buy it not so much for its cheapness (£5.50) as for a kind of voting. To buy it is saying ‘more of this sort of thing at Morrison’s, please’.
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1 May 2023. The order of service for the coronation will include a request to the public to pledge allegiance to the King. Some people are up in arms about this, but it is clearly meant only as an option. Or to put it in the language of tinned peas, it is a serving suggestion. With the emphasis on the serving.
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Thursday 4 May 2023.
Wanting to put my PhD to good use in the community, I’ve started a Substack newsletter. It’s aimed at being a kind of travel-sized lecture series, explaining connections across the arts to a general public, typically involving camp, dandyism, and otherness. It’s called Letter from a Dyspraxic Dandy. I am bursting with ideas for it, buoyed with the freedom but also mindful of keeping it concise.
What I need now is enough subscribers to sign up, with the hope that enough of them will deem it worth paying for (£5 a month, £30 a year).
Link:
https://dickonedwards.substack.com/p/letter-1-introduction
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Saturday 6 May 2023. I watch the Coronation with Mum. She was a child when she saw the last one. Or at least when she saw part of it. She remembers being given a jigsaw puzzle to do in the next room. Her mother called her in to catch the actual crowning.
The crowds in the streets have their smartphones out, but inside the Abbey all is offline. Charles swears his oaths while touching a new red-bound leather bible – which he also kisses. He uses a fountain pen to sign the oaths. Not Face ID, but not a quill either. The texts for Archbishop Welby to read are printed on little white cue cards, held discreetly in his line of sight by the other priests. No iPads.
The ancient age of the throne is highlighted, but so too is the gold anointing spoon, which is to me is pure Monty Python. There is nothing that is not funny about the word ‘spoon’. The BBC commentator refers to it at one point as ‘the humble spoon’, which nearly has me in hysterics. The implication is that in normal circumstances a spoon is a complete diva. The boastful spoon. The full of itself spoon. The takes too long in front of the mirror before hitting the town spoon. Perhaps one argument for keeping the monarchy is moments like this.
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Tags: bildeston, birkbeck, coronation, Dollops Wood, hadleigh, indexing, ipswich, London, mum, Orlando, Polstead, ronald blythe, royalty, spoons, st leonard's on sea, substack, suffolk, unemployment, what to do with a PhD in English
