Friday 2nd May 2014. This week’s work: researching the final essay of the academic year, due in on May 22nd. Today I realise that I’ve lost one of my pages of notes – a fairly important one with my bibliography. I do the dutiful trying to remember where I had it last, and after much straining to peer inside my mind’s fuzzier corners I recall dropping it on the floor of the café in Birkbeck’s School of Arts, in Gordon Square. The terrible thing is, I also recall thinking ‘well, I’ll pick that up in a minute, before I go’, and then completely forgetting to do so. But thankfully I now remember that I forgot.

I phone the man on reception at Birkbeck, who immediately goes over to speak to the café staff next door. They locate the messy-looking piece of paper, and it’s waiting for me at reception the next day. At no point do they give the impression that I’m being a scatter-brained pest, nor do they even ask who I am to make such demands. They just help. It’s moments like this that defy the impression of London life as unfriendly.  It also makes me want to make more of an effort to spot other people’s lost property, and take the best action that will lead to its reunion with its owner. One snowy day, I too will know what it’s like to pick up a lost mitten and spear it on a nearby railing.

* * *

Saturday 3rd May 2014. I get a letter from the GP regarding the results of my blood test. The very sight of the letter chills my heart, because it automatically means something is up. If a blood test gets the all clear, they don’t bother to write – you just phone a week later to check.

So I’m relieved to find that the cause of my recent lack of energy seems to be minor and easily treatable. It is the fault of my inadvertent vampire lifestyle, hiding in libraries all day. I have been getting so little sunlight that I now have a Vitamin D deficiency. So I officially, medically, do not get out enough. They’ve given me some turbo-charged vitamin supplements, ones that the pharmacy has to specially order, and I look forward to those taking effect. I’m certainly not the type to hit the beach.

I also think this means I can be officially referred to as a Goth.

* * *

I impulsively try out a quiet café in Whitcombe Street. It’s called Bubbobar and specialises in  ‘bubble tea’. This is a Taiwanese creation where the ‘bubbles’ are not carbonated but little balls of tapioca, which one sucks up through a straw and chews. There’s a magazine article pinned to the wall about how such cafes are a fashionable new trend in London. I am the only person there.

* * *

To the Odeon Panton Street to see We Are The Best!, or to give it its original Swedish title, Vi är bäst!  It’s by Lukas Moodysson, and like his earlier work Together (which I saw with Dad), it has a completely naturalistic, organic feel. It’s truly hard to believe the characters on screen aren’t those people in real life. We Are The Best! is set in Stockholm in 1982, and depicts two tomboyish schoolgirls who form a punk rock band, though at 12 years old they are barely much bigger than their instruments. They’re later joined by a shy blonde girl who’s only a year or two older, but who towers above them like a Nordic amazon. This is very much something I remember from when I was that age. Not the Nordic amazons, but the feeling that when you’re 12, a 14 year old might as well be an adult. The film is a little slight in plot, but it’s sweet and funny and as lovable as the characters. The big, indestructible grin of Klara, the little girl with the mohawk, stays with me long after the credits.

There’s an advert before the film that campaigns against movie piracy, with John Hurt ominously narrating images of cinemas turning into windswept, dusty ruins. ‘Imagine an experience shared… lost forever’. If cinemas do shut down due to lack of use, the blame should not be left purely at the foot of piracy. When I buy a small, unpleasant cup of diet Pepsi, dispensed from the tap, the Odeon charges me £2.95. No one will miss that, not even John Hurt.

* * *

Tuesday 6th May 2014.  Signs of the times. The begger outside The Ritz has a sign which adds ‘and British’ to the usual ‘Hungry and homeless’.

Meanwhile, the Big Issue seller on Jermyn Street is chatting on a mobile phone. He’s not the first I’ve seen do this, either. Mobile phones, once thought in the late 1980s to be a luxury and even a status symbol, are now a lifeline to many. The anti-poverty campaigner and cookery writer, Jack Monroe, has written about how near-starvation led her to sell many of her possessions, but not her phone. In fact, she used the latter to write a blog about her situation, which led directly to her new career.

This evening I go to the ICA and see a new film that reflects the idea of living through phones: Locke. It’s effectively a one-man play, and very nearly a radio play at that. It entirely consists of Tom Hardy in a car during one single evening, making calls. The audience hears the voices of those he speaks to, but the camera never cuts away to show them.

The script is by Steven Knight, whose Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises I found admirable, yet frustrating. Mr Knight tends to write about lives in Britain that don’t get much of a look-in: immigrant workers, victims of foreign gangsters, and in this case a Welsh foreman of a building site. The problem is that Mr Knight tends to surround his well-written and well-researched characters with two-dimensional, unrealistic ones. Every film of his has moments that made me want to shout ‘oh come off it!’ at the cinema screen. Locke is no exception: there are things said in this film that just wouldn’t take place over a phone call. And though the format is original, the story resembles any number of Friday night plays on Radio 4. Still, I come away from the cinema knowing more about concrete and road closures than I did going in.

* * *

Thursday 8th May 2014. My two final classes of the third year at Birkbeck. Last class for Fin De Siecle (on the poetry of Amy Levy and Arthur Symons), and last class for 21st Century Fiction, which is just a short meeting about the essay. And that’s it for those courses. I won’t have any more classes until my fourth and final year begins in October. From now till May 22nd it’s all about the 21st Century essay, which I’m doing on Tokyo Cancelled and Inception.

What fascinates me about Inception is the way it manages to be successful popcorn entertainment – making over 800 million dollars world wide – while inspiring academic studies as well. There’s already been two books of essays: Inception and Philosophy: Because It’s Never Just a Dream and Inception and Philosophy: Ideas to Die For. Today I read an essay called ‘Narrative Metalepsis as Diegetic Concept in Christopher Nolan’s Inception’.

There’s an interview with Nolan where a critic points out his film’s resemblance to Last Year at Marienbad, the dreamy 1960s arthouse classic. Nolan agrees but adds – rather brilliantly – ‘but we have way more explosions’.

Tags: birkbeck, inception, locke, mobile phones, tokyo cancelled, we are the best