Am now booked to appear at the Stockholm Poetry Festival on Nov 30th, flying there for rehearsals and TV interviews on the 28th, back on Dec 1st.
I’m performing three times: once as Dickon The Singer-Songwriter, singing a few Fosca songs solo, twice as guest vocalist with Friday Bridge, and thrice as backing musician for novelist Martina Lowden. She quoted from my lyrics and blog in her novel, hence this new pairing.
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Another item ticked off on my life’s To Do list. I have joined the Colony Room Club in Dean Street, Soho. Like most private members’ clubs, you have to have your name recommended or ‘put forward’ by current members. In my case, it was Sebastian Horsley and Sophie Parkin.
So now I have somewhere stylish and historic to take friends for a drink when they want to meet in town. I fall off Dean St, ring the buzzer, give my name, and upstairs I go. And the first time I buzzed, I did feel something of a buzz.
Up to the infamous little room with its bottle-green walls, photos and paintings of past staff and regulars (not least Muriel Belcher), amid the ghosts of Francis Bacon, Jeffrey Bernard and now George Melly. It’s the bar that’s in the Bacon biopic Love Is The Devil, where Derek Jacobi proposes his much-quoted toast:
‘Champagne for my real friends. Real pain for my sham friends.’
Have slightly fallen off the wagon as a result. Slightly. Knew it couldn’t last, but the period of complete sobriety has made me more of a slower, more moderate drinker, and far better at knowing when I’ve had enough. Honest. Oddly, I appear to have completely gone off wine, beer, lager and cider, and now will only drink spirits or champagne.
The current Colony owner, Michael Wojas, has written a new essay about the club for a charity book, Making Links. It’s about notions of modern community, from online enclaves to Soho drinking clubs to inner-city schools. Other contributors include Gordon Brown and David Cameron, incredibly enough.
In the Colony last night was Salina Saliva Godden, who I said hello to, and Cathal Smyth of Madness fame, who I don’t know but do admire. I’ve just remembered he did once email me about a club I was DJ-ing at, so maybe that’s the ice-breaker for next time.
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Earlier last night: with Claudia Andrei to the launch of the latest novel from Dedalus Books: Pleading Guilty by Paul Genny.
Mr Genny is a barrister turned novelist, writing about the changing ways of the modern courtroom. The tricks and dodges, the politics and petty hypocrisies. In this way he’s a little like John Mortimer, but with a more decadent bent.
In fact, when Mr Genny gave a speech about the writing of his novel, he reminded me of John Mortimer’s advice to writers in Where There’s A Will. Keep busy, keep your day job, particularly if it gets you out of the house and brings you into contact with fiction-ready people (I’m mindful of Mortimer’s meeting with an assistant hangman). Avoid the easy deletion of computers, and trust instead in pen and paper, where the joy of looking back over crossings-out becomes evidence that you’re getting somewhere. And write quickly, but rewrite slowly.
The launch was held in some legal chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It was a couple of doors along from Sir John Soane’s Museum, that curious attraction popular with discerning foreign visitors, yet overlooked entirely by many Londoners.
For some bizarre reason, the chambers’ walls sported expressionistic paintings of characters from BBC TV comedy: Del Boy and Rodney, Morecambe and Wise, Basil Fawlty and Manuel. I asked if it was because the lawyers in question worked for the BBC or some TV comedy company. ‘Unlikely’ was the answer. Maybe the QCs just really, really liked classic TV comedy.
‘Where IS our host tonight?’ asked Mr Genney in his author’s speech.
‘He’s away in St Albans,’ came an answer from the legally-inclined crowd. ‘Losing a murder.’
