Tuesday 9 May 2023. To the Ipswich Job Centre to register as ‘gainfully’ self-employed. I now have a year in which to ‘build my business’ and see if I can make enough from freelance work to live on. This means writing, reviewing, indexing, giving talks, whatever I can turn my funny little hand to. After a year of looking for conventional employment, armed with a newly minted PhD in English and Humanities, the only positions the government could offer me were prison warder or tube train cleaner. I exaggerate, but not by much. These jobs obviously need to be done, but probably not by a middle-aged disciple of Quentin Crisp.
**
12 May 2023. My review of the new Sparks album is published in The Wire magazine. I’m pleased to see that the magazine is sold in the WH Smiths at Ipswich station. I’m also pleased that magazines still exist at all, and indeed that Sparks still exist at all, the Mael brothers now in their seventies.
I sit in a café by the newish Ipswich waterfront area. Close by are shiny new university buildings, a dance school, and a new archive, ‘The Fold’, which is a pleasing pun for a repository of manuscripts in a rural town.
The main part of Ipswich, alas, is more unhappy and run down. Local newspapers speak of the area as ‘no-go’. Many shops in the centre are empty and unused, even the Ancient House, which was such a pleasant bookshop when I was a teenager. The others have been turned into a surfeit of charity shops, that ominous symptom of decline. Still, there’s talk of turning these zombie spaces into new housing, which makes sense. As long as it’s housing that people can afford.
Meanwhile, bored teenage boys in black hooded tracksuits loaf on street corners, their signature smell of marijuana announcing them from a distance. Once associated with hippies and liberalism, this scent is now the stink of poverty, pack survival, and abandonment.
And yet the waterfront is full of education, trendy cafes, and creativity. Whatever went right there clearly needs to be extended to the rest of the town. Perhaps local boy turned rich singer Ed Sheeran could step in. He already sponsors the football team.
**
17 May 2023. My Substack newsletter is now up and running, with the first subject Angela Carter and the Beatles.
Ronald Firbank characters do not write weekly columns. They write, to quote The Flower Beneath the Foot, ‘hebdomadal causeries’.
**
18 May 2023. My Substack subject this week is Postmodernism and Eurovision. I’m rather enjoying writing scholarly stuff for a non-scholarly readership. It’s the fun of playing to a crowd while wanting to take them somewhere new.
**
19 May 2023. Andy Rourke dies, the bassist with the Smiths. What is less well known is that after the band split up he wrote the music to several of Morrissey’s solo songs, including one of my favourites, ‘Girl Least Likely To’.
**
22 May 2023. Martin Amis dies. Dream casting for a drama about the Amises: Hugo Weaving as Martin, Roger Allam as Kingsley. Mum thinks Allam could also play Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters. As they say on the internet, I can’t unsee that now.
**
25 May 2023. This week’s Substack: Heartstopper, Carry On Loving, and skeuomorphism. Just typing those three things in the same sentence, and knowing it’s probably not been done before, is a pleasure. Lateral thinking, which comes easily to dyspraxics like me, is a kind of superpower, like X-ray vision. One can see connections and solutions that others cannot.
Very pleased today to discover that my PhD thesis has been cited in Paul Baker’s new book, Camp! The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World. This is unexpected – I don’t know Professor Baker at all, though I’ve enjoyed his books on gay slang and Polari. This is pretty good going for a thesis that is still officially unpublished. It’s certainly a boost to my self-worth.
**
27 May 2023. To Felixstowe Museum. The main town has the nice beach and gardens, as well as the Treasure Chest used bookshop, which my father loved and which is still going after forty years. The museum, on the other hand, is not in the town but next to the container port, Britain’s biggest. This necessitates an extra bus ride going south to the estuary, and the museum is only open at the weekends.
Worth the effort, though. There’s much at the museum about the history of the port, but there is also a more unexpected room dedicated to 1980s pop culture, the justification being that the museum opened in that decade. Live Aid plays on a TV in a mock-up of a living room. There’s a BBC Micro and a Betamax video recorder: items of my youth, now museum pieces. And plenty of record sleeves.
**
28 May 2023. Reading the news coverage over Martin Amis’s death and thinking he would have hated the phrase, ‘tributes pour in’. Such a cliché. Do tributes ever do anything else? Saunter in? Trickle in? Penetrate osmotically through a viscous membrane?
**
3 June 2023. To Hadleigh for the Hidden Gardens event. A selection of the town’s private gardens are opened to the public for this one day, in aid of charity. They range from the large Tudor farmhouse at Benton End, with its synonymous irises, to small modern semi-detached back yards in the suburbs.
One garden on the High Street is inhabited by two gentlemen, Colin Platt and Frank Minns, who are, as they mention to visitors, married to each other. Just like Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, who lived together at Benton End from the 1940s to the 1970s. Except not officially married back then, of course. The High Street couple have a number of irises, in tribute not only to Benton End but to EF Benson. They’re named after characters from the Mapp and Lucia books. One is called Quaint Irene.
**
9 June 2023. A linen suit turns out to be impractical for walking Suffolk footpaths. Too many brambles and thorns. One solution would be switching to tweed, but that feels like an aesthetic step too far.
**
27 June 2023. I’m not inconsistent or hypocritical. I’m nuanced, multi-faceted, protean.
**
7 July 2023. Most of my week has been spent writing an essay that will take five minutes to read. This must be how animators feel.
**
8 July 2023. I am still keen to move to St Leonards-on-Sea, but even a room in a shared house there can now cost £850 a month to rent. Solitude has become a luxury.
**
14 July 2023. I finish up the first ‘term’ of Substack letters with an End of Term Revue, picking out what I feel are the highlights. All the letters are now archived at dickonedwards.substack.com.
**
18 July 2023. The prime minister is to restrict the numbers of students taking university degrees that are ‘rip-offs’ and ‘low value’. By this he means courses that tend not to guarantee a well-paid job, like those for the arts.
My earnings as a self-employed writer last month were just over £200. I prefer to think, however, that I am not so much low value as an acquired taste.
**
20 July 2023. Much talk over the two hyped Hollywood films of the summer: Barbie and Oppenheimer. Barbie for femmes, Oppenheimer for butches. Not so different, though. Barbie is about gender and toys. And so is Oppenheimer, bombs being toys for boys.
**
22 July 2023. Finding myself in London at short notice, I go and see Barbie at the Curzon Soho. This is only after spending a good half hour on the internet trying to get a ticket: most of the West End cinema screenings have sold out.
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie certainly manages to have its clever pink cake and eat it. Towards the end, though, it runs out of energy and dips into a kind of cinematic hypoglycaemia. But then, I recall, so does The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Both films achieve a camp pastoral, only to lose their breath, and then their nerve. They end up grasping for a conventional sense of an ending, but by then it is entirely out of character to do so.
Barbie does manage a startling final line, though, and has much to recommend it, with the jokes, the dance routines, the design, the serious ideas on society, and Ryan Gosling being a superb Ken, if an unlikely one.
**
23 July 2023. A Sunday lunch with Ronald Firbank admirers at a house in Borough Green. Also there are Alan Hollinghurst, Richard Canning, and Jenny and Charlie Firbank. We inspect the Alvaro Guevara portrait of Ronald, which is brought in, newly cleaned. As we speculate on this painting, which may or may not be a depiction of Firbank’s flat on Jermyn Street, I realize I’m in a scene that could be in one of Mr Hollinghurst’s novels.
I get home to Suffolk to a package from the London Library. It’s their copy of Richard Blake Brown’s My Aunt in Pink (1936), which I’ve borrowed. His other titles are even harder to track down, but they sound equally camp: Miss Higgs and Her Silver Flamingo (1931), A Broth of a Boy (1934), Rococo Coffin (1936), and my favourite, Spinsters, Awake! (1937).
My Aunt in Pink turns out to be a small pink 1930s hardback, the colour all the more pleasing given it’s the Barbie weekend. What’s most striking is that the last line of the book mentions a fictional portrait by Alvaro Guevera. Just like the real Guevara I was looking at only a few hours before.
**
This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Tags: alan hollinghurst, alvaro guevara, andy rourke, barbie, benton end, ef benson, felixstowe, hadleigh, ipswich, job hunting, Martin Amis, morrissey, oppenheimer, richard blake brown, ronald firbank, sparks, st leonard's on sea, substack, suffolk, the smiths
