No chance in Cambridge to write diary entries, so today the world gets two.
Sunday, 10pm. Back in Highgate. Phone back an odd voicemail message from an elderly couple, and it transpires they have a wrong number. Could I please go and let my Uncle Jack into his flat as he’s locked himself out? I have to shout down the phone to convince them I’m not the nephew in question.
“No, you’ve got the wrong number, really… I have no Uncle Jack. Well, actually I think there is a Great Uncle Jack in the family somewhere, but he’s either remote or mad or dead or fictional… No, my name is DICKON! DICKON! Do you have a Dickon in your family?”
“Oooh, no. No Dickon, no…”
“Well, there you go.”
I probably shouldn’t have shouted. But they did seem rather confused at the other end. I thought it only proper to alert them to their error so they could re-dial more carefully and chase the nephew in question. Hope Uncle Jack didn’t spend a night on the street.
Travelling on trains on a Sunday isn’t currently the Great British Escape it should be. Sunday is The Day Of Engineering Works, for trains which are already less frequent than normal. One often has to allow an extra hour or more.
I sit opposite a woman with artificially coloured hair who spends the hour-plus journey to Liverpool Street in silence, while I read and a young man to my right enjoys his iPod. I would love to say I wonder what he is listening to, but he’s already made it clear. The volume is high enough for the music to leak out and reach me. I can hear the drum patterns, and the guitars, and what the vocals sound like, if not what they are saying.
It is Heavy Metal, or perhaps Death Metal. And whether from an iPod earphone or not, it all sounds exactly the same to me. After a while, though, what initially threatens to be an hour-long irritation becomes curiously bearable. That the music all sounds the same to my ears means it’s like any other repetitive background noise, like traffic or the ticking of a clock, or the white noise of a fan heater or air conditioner. Its repetition actually becomes soothing, and even helps me concentrate on my reading.
As the train pulls into Liverpool St, the silent woman with the coloured hair suddenly speaks to me.
“I enjoyed your guitar playing.”
The event she means is my slot at the Decadent Cabaret at Cambridge Word Fest on Saturday night, the whole reason for this journey back. I’m thrown by both the unforeseen nature of her utterance and the meaning behind it.
She smiles and gets off the train.
Her words are the only thing said to me by another human being in the last hour and a half, though I’m surrounded by people on a packed train. And I start to go gently insane inside my head.
It’s always a combination of things that start my mad thought-streams off. Thoughts flailing through the haze of post-gig fatique, compounded with walking alone through miles of bicycle-saturated streets in Cambridge with a heavy guitar and overnight bag. Add to which the draining nature of negotiating Sunday Engineering Works on the railways and knowing the Northern Line on the Tube will be similarly affected. Top off with the effects of sleeping and rising in a hotel Family Bed by oneself, and of lately feeling more lost and alone in my life than ever before.
The thoughts gibber and panic, brooding on her words.
Just my GUITAR PLAYING? As in not my singing or the self-penned song I performed? (Rude Esperanto, off the Fosca album Diary Of An Antibody). Does she mean she dislikes my singing and songwriting, that I should do less of that and more guitar playing? How does that equate with the fact I’ve been sacked by three bands in the past for not being a good enough guitarist, and that even many of my guitar parts on Orlando and Fosca recordings are by someone more proficient on the instrument, with my full blessing? Or was she being sarcastic? That I was truly dreadful all round and I should know it, and in particular my guitar playing? I did mess up one of the chords… Was she being patronising and unkind, or kind and taking pity on me? Or was she drunk, and all bets are off?
What the HELL did she mean?
Why can’t ANYONE just say what the hell they really mean to me, for once?
(the universe gets its coat)
This is all temporary madness, of course, and I soon calm down. But it does hint at another reason I’ve set up the Diary Angels. It’s one thing to say “Dickon, I like your diary”. It’s another altogether to pay for it. Money is concrete proof of approval, of confidence, of encouragement, of enjoyment, of worth, of work done that’s not been a waste of time. Of wanting more, and more often.
It’s an unassailable reminder that if the better parts of my decade-old online diary were set down in text, say in a newspaper or magazine or book, some people out there do think it’s worth paying for. Most of whom I’ve never met. Ten pounds for 365 entries of at least 500 words each (as detailed in my forthcoming Pledges To The Diary Angels). Works out at 3p an entry, or 20p for a week’s worth. And no adverts, either. And as I have to make abundantly clear at all times I mention the Angels, it’s not even my idea. It’s something two separate readers have suggested. The price is their idea, too.
Next entry, to be posted later today: I finally make my Pledges to the Diary Angels. Plus I meet Billy Bragg, Michael Bywater and Ali Smith. And I tell the latter about something interesting that we have in common. Something she mustn’t hear from strangers too often.
