Yesterday: Spend a nice day in the Reading Room. Enjoy some quotes in the museum literature about the space:

“Some are here because they hope these walls of books will deaden the drumming of the demon in their ears.”
-Louis MacNeice.

“That Happy Island in Bloomsbury”
– Matthew Arnold.

My favourite fictional references include, as ever, Three Men In A Boat. Jerome’s narrator goes to the Reading Room in order to look up the symptoms of a minor ailment. After consulting a medical encyclopaedia, he leaves the building a decrepit wreck, convinced he has everything from A-Z except housemaid’s knee.

I check my email in a nearby cafe during my self-imposed lunch break, and strike up a conversation with two men at a neighbouring table. It transpires they are organising the London International Cartoon Festival 2008, to be held in Museum Street. I ask whether they mean newspaper cartoons or the sort that move about on television. They say, “Both.”

Doubtless it’ll have something to do with the nearby Cartoon Gallery, a terrific little museum in Little Russell St that’s I’ve already visited twice this year. It covers everything from Hogarth and Gillray to Steve Bell and Giles, and includes the history of British comics too.

Speaking of which, I finish Alan Moore’s ‘Promethea’ comic series, which ends with a well-intentioned but rather preachy and dull hippy-ish rant about his interests in Kabbalah philosophy: how we’re all at one with the universe, and all part of the same cosmic consciousness, how time and death don’t really exist, and so on. I’m reminded of the children at the end of Philip Pullman’s trilogy suddenly spouting the author’s personal philosophy for living. And it doesn’t help that the best-known Kabbalah-inspired work in recent popular culture is Guy Ritchie’s Revolver, deemed the worst film of last year by rather too many critics.

Just give us the story, I say. Besides, ‘Sophie’s World’ does the ‘philosophy lesson as entertainment’ thing far better. ‘Promethea’ does have some terrific ideas and scenes, though, which is the sort of thing Mr Moore does best and should really stick to. At one point a lady FBI agent falls through the floor and out of the comic world itself, looking down on it from above and seeing the panel-by-panel structure that she’s been living in all this time. Ideas and beliefs should always be channelled into an entertaining linear narrative, I feel, because the reader needs a handrail. Otherwise you just get the feeling of being lectured, and there’s a reason why that term is often used pejoratively.

I go to Mark Moore’s Electrogogo club at Madame JoJo’s, mainly to see Gene Serene do a late night PA there. It’s been a while since I’ve gone out to a late-night club by myself, and the walk from Leicester Square is riddled with anxiety. Perhaps I’m in just an uneasier state at the moment, but I get such a sense of dread when going out by myself at night. I feel utterly exposed and at the mercy of the night’s louder, stronger denizens. It’s about 11.30pm, so I’m surrounded by drunken people exiting bars and venues, having already completed their night out. I’m stone cold sober, and all too aware of it.

None of your Promethea ‘we’re all part of the same consciousness’ here. Walking up Charing Cross Rd at night, I feel utterly at odds with every other person in this world. Stick THAT in your Kabbalah and smoke it, Mr Moore.

But once I’m at Madame JoJo’s, I calm down a bit. The door staff complement me on my appearance (white suit, a bit of make-up, cream scarf), and Mr Moore’s put me on the guest list. I feel safer, if not quite in my element.

I catch a bit of the band Coco Electrik, who have a rather full-on guitar/electro noise with a girl singer, and are pretty good at it. Meet a girl called Katy who has a feathered hat and says she remembers me from the Club Smashing days. Which is over ten years ago. Gene Serene is terrific as ever, her trademark streak of red across her raven hair still wonderfully intact, her performance full of attitude, but sincere rather than contrived for the music. She’s the Patti Smith of the London electropop scene. In one number, she sings while pretending to pluck the strings on a guitar-shaped shoulder bag.

I say hello to Ms Rhoda, pleased to meet someone I actually know, though tonight she seems rather caught up with her own romantic soap opera. Various attractively androgynous young things are there, all peacock hues and shifting genders, but the more I muse on THAT, the more depressed I get. If this were a movie I’d find someone I like who actually likes me back in the same degree, and we’d be together, and the credits would roll. But this is my increasingly desperate life. I know I’ve made my own narrow single bed and must lie in it, but I look on at the club, at the happy dancing attractive people, and think: it’s too late for me. I’ve had it.

After standing alone, stewing like this for too long, I leave the club and head for the bus stop. Bump into Grant The Club Promoter at the stop. He’s friendly and it’s good to always be able to find people to chat to like this, particularly when feeling fragile and exposed in the dark of Central London at 2am.

It’s not just my dwindling energy and dislike of nightbuses that puts me off going to other people’s clubs at the moment, it’s also the sense that I just don’t enjoy them as much as I used to. What are you supposed to DO there? I love dancing and chatting, but recently I have felt no inclination to dance while at a club, and have had enough of holding conversations that must be shouted directly into each others’ ears to overcome the noise. What I enjoy now more than ever is the company of friends, but preferably outside of crowds, clubs or concerts.

I feel I’ve forgotten how to have fun. Now there’s just a shroud of nerves and anxiety. I suppose I could see my GP about this, but I really don’t want to go back onto the dreaded paroxetine, or indeed any other kind of pill. So I’m reading and writing it out, in order to ride it out. Onwards and upwards, he typed with a heavy heart.

As Mr MacNeice says, I need to deaden the drumming of the demon in my ears. Which is where we came in.