From the Radio Times website:

TUESDAY 5th DECEMBER
BBC1 London & South East
10:35pm – 11:25pm

“Alan Yentob journeys into the world wide web to find out how it began, who’s out there, and where it’s taking us. He meets Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the web, and explores how Lee’s creativity has fuelled the creativity of millions of others – such as Dandy blogger Dickon Edwards and sex blogger Abby Lee, the hardcore members of the Arctic Monkeys message board, masked animator David Firth, and Ewan Macdonald, the young Scot who wrote the millionth entry in Wikipedia.”

So I’d better start writing entries more regularly, then. Maybe this is the slap up the arse I need. Or is it a kick in the face? I always get those confused.

Saw Dad last Friday in Suffolk. He seems pretty much his old self now, and is recovering slowly at home. The only lasting damage from the dreaded stroke is a lack of grip in his drawing hand, and severe fatigue, though he’s not bed bound. It seems entirely possible that these symptoms will improve too, though it has meant his 70th birthday bash I was to DJ at has had to be postponed till another time. I put all the songs he’d requested for this occasion onto one CD compilation, and included it with his birthday present. Which was a DVD of Miyasaki’s ‘Porco Rosso’, as he’d ogled it when we were last out shopping in London.

Happy 70th Birthday for tomorrow, Brian ‘Bib’ Edwards.

Let’s get my own ailment stuff out of the way, as it’s so boring when people bang on about their health. Forgive me. But I do feel that writing it down helps to purge it from the ever-babbling maelstrom of anxiety in my mind.

Have been feeling a bit sorry for myself lately, and thus have neglected my diary. The aches and pains are still there, despite my bodily fluids being tested for everything possible (all clear), along with two different checks for hernias, appendicitis and what they now euphemistically call Men’s Health Issues. At the Naughty Health clinic, I am poked and prodded in every known orifice, including the tiny one that you’re meant to wince at. I don’t wince, not really. I’ve never seen this as my body, just a kind of vessel I’ve been set down in and asked to deal with. I harbour lifelong fantasies of being entirely genderless between the legs, after all. I must try that as a chat-up line.

I’ve always felt genitals should be applied for as an optional extra, with proper licensing from the authorities. Like firearms. Indeed, the gun analogy goes further: they’re too often the source of trouble across the world, and in my mind are best restricted to the movies.

Yesterday, the GP gives me a full examination, finds nothing worrying, and just sends me away saying ‘It’s just one of these things. Come back in two weeks if the aches are still there.’

He didn’t even give me anything to deal with the pain. It really is bothering me. I may have to ask for some kind of painkiller at one of those new NHS drop-in clinics, or try a third GP. It can’t be right to be in pain whenever you sit down. Unless you’re in love. (Yes, I know, couldn’t resist it).

The only explanations that spring to my mind are nocturnal probing by extraterrestrial aliens, or that someone out there is sticking pins into a voodoo effigy of me, having previously secured clippings from my hair.

Which reminds me.

“Nice syrup!” shouted a van driver at me, on the Archway Road the other day.

[Cockney rhyming slang: syrup = syrup of figs = wig]

The response to which is of course, who would dare pay for a wig that looked like this?

And who would want to make a voodoo doll of me? Don’t answer that.

I’ll end on another couple of clippings, and promise to have another entry written tomorrow morning. I know there’s a lot of catching up to do.

These are reviews of The Decadent Handbook, to which I’ve contributed. Published by Dedalus Books, out now. White gift-book style hardback with a shiny gold spine, for obvious Christmas present compatibility. Also features Rowan Pelling, Vanora Bennett, Robert Irwin, Belle Du Jour, Michael Bywater, Salena Godden, Louise Welsh, John Moore, Xavior Roide, and Sebastian Horsley.

“The book is an antidote to bland modernity…It covers everything from decadent sex (we’re talking fornicating with lobsters) to decadent death styles, and includes contributions from contemporary libertines such as Dickon Edwards (Shane McGowan’s New Romantic Butler’, pictured left with pet lobster), to the godfathers of decadence – The Earl of Rochester. J.K.Huysmans and Oscar Wilde. Five stars.”
– The Leeds Guide Book of the Fortnight

“…’El Hombre Indelible’ by Dickon Edwards seems to send up rock journalism by accompanying Shane MacGowan of the Pogues to Tangier, but the piece has a wonky charm of its own, with sentences such as, ‘He re-reads Finnegans Wake every day.”
– Duncan Fallowell in The Daily Telegraph.

‘Wonky charm’, indeed.