“Decide to be happy” can never be said enough.
***
Things to share:
Seaneen M’s 2010 article for the Guardian, more topical than ever: ‘Benefits helped me turn my life around‘
Dedalus Books has a brand new website, and there’s a recent tribute to Dedalus on the Workshy Fop blog.
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London is currently hitting sub zero temperatures, and my room is too draughty to be heated effectively (plus I can’t afford to have my electric radiator on all day as it is). It’s at times like this that I’m particularly grateful for living in a city full of heated public spaces. This winter is my first as a member of Birkbeck College Library, which has warmth, plenty of comfortable desks, areas with computers, areas for pen and paper only, and best of all the opening hours are 8am to quarter to midnight every day. Even Sundays.
Today: treated myself to the latest issue of the comic Locke & Key (so ingeniously written, so beautifully drawn). Plus Susannah Clapp’s A Card From Angela Carter (a pocket-sized lovingly-designed & illustrated tribute to Carter), and Rhodri Marsden’s highly amusing (and painful) collection of Tweet-sized anecdotes, Crap Dates.Â
***
Read half of The London Nobody Knows (1962) by Geoffrey Fletcher. It inspired the 60s documentary with James Mason, as well as Finisterre, which I’m writing my first big London essay about. Didn’t realise that Fletcher was an illustrator too – about a quarter of the book is his drawings of early 60s London nooks & crannies.  Much of it is his personal hymn to the city’s Victorian remnants – music halls, gas lamps, iron lavatories – and his vocabulary is often Victorian too: “a Teutonic thought occurred to me”, “Limehouse Chinamen”, and “turning a stone, one starts a wing”.
On further research, it turns out the latter is a reference to the Francis Thompson poem ‘The Kingdom Of God’ (1913). Which is also the source of the phrase ‘many-splendoured thing’:
The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.
But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry;—and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.Â
Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry,—clinging Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!
Tags: Angela Carter, birkbeck library, francis thompson, geoffrey fletcher, locke & key, rhodri marsden, susannah clapp, the london nobody knows
