The Portable Dickon Edwards – as in the little book of lyrics and other writings – has now sold out at the record label. Entangled in the US seem to have a few left, though, so if you’re reading this and still want a copy, try here:

http://www.entangledrec.com/product_info.php?products_id=1354

There’s been a couple more Swedish reviews for the album. This one, Sydsvenskan, gives it three out of five:

http://sydsvenskan.se/nojen/skivrecensioner/article306287.ece

While Dagens Nyheter, the newspaper that interviewed me last year, gives it a more pleasing 4:

http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=2198&a=751208

Here’s a kind blog review that awards the album 8.5 out of 10, calling it ‘one of the best pop albums of 2008’:

http://kissmeivequitsmoking.blogspot.com/2008/03/your-list-of-top-ten-songs-to-self.html

By the way, the singer in ‘Kim’ isn’t mean to be anyone real or specific. Just any aging Britpop lothario. There’s plenty of those knocking about. Though the writer character is definitely inspired by someone I know.

At the rehearsal room:

Charley: Is ‘Kim’ about X?

Me: A bit. Unless they complain. In which case, no it isn’t.

Another clarification. Kate Dornan doesn’t sing lead on ‘Evening Dress’, even though she wrote it. That’s Rachel Stevenson. In the studio, all three of us took turns to see who could sing it the best that day, and Rachel won.

I can also announce that the album now has a proper UK release date: April 28th, via Forte Distribution.

We’ll try to organise a London show in May or so. Rachel says she knows of a hairdressers’ in Stoke Newington who put on gigs occasionally. Which would be perfect.

***

Have been traipsing around Hampstead Heath every day since last week, in a desperate bid to get fitter. I drawn the line at going to the gym, but am royally fed up with the permanently exhausted, ailment baiting state I’ve been in for the last year or so. Everyone tells me a brisk walk of at least 30 mins a day makes all the difference, so I try to make it an hour, and always aim to include a couple of steep hills, which is fairly easy to do around Highgate and the Heath. I’m endlessly passing people walking their dogs. Or walking their boyfriends.

When it comes to fitness, other people ‘train’. I traipse.

Passing the cafe by the tennis courts, I overhear some boys shouting ‘Batty Boy!’. Having become personally acclimatized to this particular catcall over the years, I turn round to see if they mean me. But no: it’s three or four schoolboys – their uniforms of the posh and expensive school nearby -  fighting and pushing and calling each other gay in that time-honoured, puppy dog, play-fight way that no one gets worried about.

Funny how childhood excuses cruelty. I vividly recall going in tears to a teacher at the age of 8 or so, having been attacked in the playground, only to get the teacher telling me off for apparently making it all up.  ‘Don’t tell tales’. More of a shock than a double hurt, it was my first realisation that the world might not be entirely on my side after all. I see, I thought. This life thing is not being to be the pushover it first appeared to be.

If the meek ever did inherit the earth, sooner or later the slightly meeker would be suffering at the hands of the slightly less meek, and everyone would be back where they started.

***

Coming back on the Tube one evening, two Rubenesque young women are pulling the carriage’s focus. Late twenties and in jeans, with the air of a few drinks about them, they are engaged in a half-hearted parody of pole dancing, using the support poles by the carriage doors. They swing and dance and giggle and whoop to each other, though as there’s not enough room in one space for both dancers, one girl opts to use the next exit space further down the carriage. So a whole row of seats – with a few bemused or uneasy passengers sitting on them – becomes an inadvertant no man’s land, across which the girls exchange their slinky, if tipsy, fire.

Still, they’re harmless enough, and a carriage at ransom to two drunken girls is preferable to one commandeered by lads in a similar state.

One man sitting near to me exercises his own control in a very male way. After the girls get out at the next stop, he offers a comment to the carriage at large:

‘Well, I wouldn’t pay for them.’