More emails suggesting ways of watching Region 1 DVDs on my iBook, this time recommending programs which copy the DVD to one’s hard drive and render it multi-region. I can’t burn my own DVDs, as it’s only a CDRW / DVD-reading drive. But the idea is I can watch it in situ, then wipe the space later. So I rip the disc, and spend over an hour fiddling with VLC trying to get the resulting files to play, but with no joy. Never mind. Thanks to the readers who mailed me about it, though.

To the ICA to see Prick Up Your Ears and drink strawberry beer with Ms Shanthi. She’s currently the sub-editor at Arena, one of those men’s magazines with thick spines. To my delight, the ICA cinema has improved since I was last here, for a terribly muffled and scratchy print of Metropolitan. This screening is a brand new print, because it’s the 20th anniversary of the film. There’s been little fanfare for this re-release of an 80s classic. Shame, as it’s certainly better than any new movie currently playing. The poster says, “From the director of The Queen and the writer of The History Boys.”

Prick Up Your Ears was itself made 20 years after the events it depicts: Orton and Halliwell’s last months in 1967. Apart from the occasional distracting blast of very 80s-sounding incidental music, it’s still as funny and as sad as ever. And I’m still noticing new things about it.

The young Orton utters one of Alan Bennett’s favourite phrases for his characters when thinking about all the books they’ve never read: “I’ll never catch up”. In fact, he says it twice.

A new favourite quote from the film, when Paul McCartney gets in touch to discuss the Beatles script Orton’s writing:

Orton: Was that Paul McCartney on the phone?
Halliwell: No, it was someone cultured. His chauffeur, I think.

We don’t get to see the young McCartney, but if we did, there’d be a scene where he’d play Orton the songs from Sgt Pepper, then in the recording stage.

Coming out of the cinema, we collide with the other event at the ICA. It’s some sort of O2-sponsored NME-compatible band night. Lots of photographers, security, people with those tell-tale laminated passes around their necks. For one night, the ICA has become Backstage At The Reading Festival. Loud, drunk young men everywhere. All of whom look like clones of Pete Doherty, or Russell Brand, or Alex Zane, or Mr Arctic Monkey, or Donny Tourettes.

Young men in 2007 London can dress any way they like. Yet they insist on picking one look from the above five; whether it suits them or not. It’s like those CGI crowd effects in films, where they take a small number of extras on the screen, and digitally repeat them to make a huge crowd. Their female counterparts are not only better dressed (which was always the case), but more individually dressed. You can look fashionable without being a clone. It just helps if you’re a girl. Boys can look good, but they have to look compatibly good.

Many young men here either haven’t shaved properly, or have yet to start shaving. While I’m at the urinal in the packed Gents, a gaggle of them make cackling comments about my appearance, saying I’m going off to King’s Cross to pick up rent boys, or some such. Though this crowd of rockist striplings aren’t at all typical of the venue, I feel it’s something of a wry achievement to solicit the usual idiot jeers in the supposedly broad-minded and arty ICA, especially after seeing Prick Up Your Ears there. It reminds me of the time I had the ‘watch your backs, boys’ comments in a gay bar near Charing Cross station, by unwitting businessmen having a drink before their train.

Amongst this young NME-friendly crowd, I feel terribly old, and terribly intimidated. But I also feel relieved that I’m not in that world anymore, that I have zero desire to attend any rock festivals as a spectator, Latitude excepted. However, I’m happy for these young men if they’re happy, what with their Maximo Party Chiefs or whoever it is.

In your twenties, you don’t really notice or care if you actually like the music you’re meant to like. It’s more important to be one of the crowd, or play to the crowd, or least know about what the crowd is talking about.

In your thirties, the crowd is the last thing you want to be involved with, particularly when they’re 10, or even 20 years younger than you. There is danger in numbers.

I don’t know where my place is. But I do know where it’s not.