I’m sitting at home with my hair wrapped in the usual polythene hood holding my latest application of cheap purple peroxide. Once more unto the bleach, dear friends.

Someone asked me if I’ve developed any grey hairs yet, but their guess is as good as mine. I’m not too interested in properly growing out the blond to find out, just as I’ve never been interested in not shaving to see what a beard would look like. My face is more or less fixed for life.

Watching a video of the movie Resident Alien, the feature-length documentary about Quentin Crisp in New York circa 1989. This is in preparation for a Crisp-themed event at the Hanky Panky Cabaret tomorrow evening. The occasion has the official blessing of Phillip Ward, the executor of the Crisp estate, and I intend to perform some of the great man’s many comforting words of wisdom.

My main concern is that the audience will shut up and listen. Holding what is essentially a spoken word evening in a cabaret bar, on a Friday night, and in the now fashionable Hoxton area, runs the risk of attracting people who are only present to have a drink. They may well not care for whatever’s going on onstage and will assume it’s okay to chat loudly among themselves just like any other bar.

It’s the wrong kind of drunkenness – where alcohol bevels down any individuality until the crowd becomes one cliched, amorphous chattering idiot-creature with many heads. Turning what should be a special event into any other bar in London. Which is rather missing the point. I vividly recall one book event at the Boogaloo where the author Joolz Denby stopped her reading to directly address those chatting away at the same time.

“Hey – If you want to have a drink and a loud chat,” she spat at some volume, “I believe other London pubs are available. I am only performing in this pub, nowhere else. So please either shut up, or go elsewhere.”

Though she used rather more f-words than that.

I was terribly impressed, and wish I had the same nerve when I take to the stage.

There’s a scene in The Naked Civil Servant that springs to mind. It’s an evening in the 1930s, and a bunch of flat capped ‘roughs’ invade the queers’ Compton Street cafe, looking for trouble. Or rather looking for fun, which translates as trouble for those on the receiving end.

ROUGH: (aggressive, intimidating) You’re going to buy us a cup of tea, aren’t you darlin?

THE YOUNG QUENTIN CRISP: (smiling, one hand on hip, going on the camp as defensive) I thought it was for the gentleman to buy the drinks.

ROUGH: Well, we’re not gentlemen, see. We come from ‘oxton.

In 2005, this gets a knowing laugh. Hoxton is now a haunt for loud club-going media types, including plenty of metrosexuals and indeed fashion-following homosexuals. And yet one could say they are still the town roughs, travelling in packs to gigs and cabarets and chatting loudly over the performance about their high incomes, ‘edgy’ advertising campaigns or their tacky reality TV pilots. The meek individualists of London, whatever team they play for, are at their mercy.