Saturday 26th September 2015.

Much discussion in the media – and on social media – about the attack on the Cereal Killer Café in Brick Lane, by anti-gentrification protesters. Since it opened last year, this harmless novelty café that purely serves bowls of cereal has received a baffling amount of ire. Usually the criticism is based on the fact that the cafe serves cereal for several pounds more than it would cost to buy in a supermarket, as would be the case with food in any café. This is such a mind-scorchingly obvious point, yet there’s something about the café that has led to it being held up as a symbol – nay, the symbol – of The Trouble With London Hipsters. In recent years, East London has seen a surge in fashionable emporiums aimed at the affluent young, but with little of this wealth reaching the poverty-stricken communities who have lived there for generations. When the cereal café opened, the owners were forced to justify their very existence to the press. This is despite London having always been a city for quirky concept shops – I’m rather a fan of the Tintin and Moomin shops in Covent Garden, and the Cybercandy shops, with their imported sweets.

It would have been far more logical to throw accusations of gentrification at East London estate agents, landlords, and the corporate coffee franchises that speckle the streets. But as with the David Cameron pig story last week, the man-bites-dog angle wins out. Tonight’s anti-gentrification protests did indeed attack estate agents too, but once the cereal café – an independent business – was splattered with paint, and had the word ‘scum’ scrawled on their windows, a lot of public sympathy for the protest was lost.

A few days later, some of the protesters complained of biased reporting. They stressed that the café attack was collateral damage, rather than a prime target. It seems the revolution will not only be televised, it will be unfairly edited.

I wonder, though, if the attention on the café also borders on a form of phobia. ‘Hate crime’ is too much, but there is certainly a disproportionate level of hatred being thrown about. This week, the café owners, two young-ish brothers from Belfast, are ludicrously called ‘the most hated men in London’ by the Evening Standard. Perhaps some of this is to do with their having not only the current hipster look of bushy beards and swept-back hair, but also being identical twins. To be a fashionable-looking man is yearning to be a twin too – a twin of thousands. So the brothers are twins twice over, which must add to the resentment.

For years, a common question in games like Trivial Pursuit was ‘what is pogonophobia a fear of?’ Answer: beards. Writing this entry, I learn the word for an irrational fear of identical twins: geminiphobia. This must be an instance where both words can legitimately be used.

* * *

Monday 28th September 2015.

First class of the MA. A gentle introduction to the course, in a Birkbeck building in the north-west corner of Russell Square, which I’ve not been in before. Seems to be a converted townhouse. Spiral stars (like the ones in Somerset House), moulded patterns on high ceilings. Then a group trip to a pub. This turns out to be the aptly-named Perseverance, in Lamb’s Conduit Street. A pleasant and quiet little bar, the kind one wants to keep a secret.

* * *

I read the shortlisted entries for this year’s BBC National Short Story Award, as I’ve done most years. Comma Press publishes them in an attractive little paperback, brought out in time for the announcement of the winner, which will be next Tuesday.

All five are well-written enough and do what they set out to do, though this year there’s nothing as truly ambitious as, say, a story by Jorge Luis Borges, or as stylistically bold as something by Angela Carter.

I admire the straightforward style of Mark Haddon’s ‘Bunny’, about a lonely and chronically obese man, though I’m disheartened by the grim ending. I wonder if Mr H thinks that, as his name is synonymous with the feel-good resolution of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, he could use this new tale to play against that expectation. It’s also a reminder of the joke about the difference between commercial and literary fiction. Commercial fiction pleases with happy endings, literary fiction pleases with miserable endings.

Of the others on the shortlist, Jonathan Buckley’s ‘Briar Road’ demands a certain amount of re-reading to fill in the blanks. It’s one interpretation of that popular piece of creative writing advice: ‘show, don’t tell’. In this case I rather prefer Mr Vonnegut’s maxim: ‘pity the reader’.

Frances Leviston’s ‘Broderie Anglaise’, meanwhile, has a touch of Woolf about it, with its relatives using domestic tasks to take up power positions. It’s well-crafted, but doesn’t quite come alive for me.

My choice of runner-up would be Jeremy Page’s ‘Do it Now, Jump the Table’. A young man negotiates the awkwardness of staying with his girlfriend’s parents, who like to be naked around their house. There’s a similar scene in David Nicholls’s Starter For Ten, and one in The League Of Gentlemen TV series. But Mr Page properly explores the implications of this awkwardness, bringing in pathos and character depth alongside the humour.

But my favourite is Hilary Mantel’s ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’. I realise Ms Mantel does not need the extra acclaim, and the collection that includes this tale has already been a bestseller (a feat indeed for a book of short stories). But if it were down to me she would still win. Her story thrills, amuses, shocks and grips from start to end, and shares the confidence and precision of a sniper, appropriately enough. One line particularly stays with me, describing the walk of the doomed Baroness: ‘High heels on the mossy path. Tippy-tap. Toddle on.’

* * *

Thursday 1st October 2015

My first ever visit to an osteopath, at the Highgate Holistic Clinic on Archway Road. I come away feeling better twice over. Once for the treatment of my back’s muscular tension, then again for not making a comment about the osteopath’s name, Ms Payne.

* * *

Friday 2nd October 2015.

To the ICA to see By Our Selves (£3), directed by Andrew Kotting. I enjoyed his last film, Swandown, and this is a similarly experimental documentary based around a journey in contemporary England, again with a lot of Iain Sinclair and a little of Alan Moore. No Stewart Lee this time, though the comedian appears in the thank-you credits.

The subject matter is the nineteenth-century poet John Clare, and specifically Clare’s four-day walk across Middle England in 1841, from a mental asylum in Epping Forest to his home near Peterborough. Clare is personified by the actor Toby Jones (looking like a dishevelled Samuel Beckett character), while his father Freddie Jones also appears (now in his late 80s). Jones Senior once played Clare in a 1970 BBC film, and can still recite some of the poems by heart. He shares the narration with Iain Sinclair, the latter stalking Jones Junior while wearing a Wicker Man-esque goat mask.

There’s lots of dream-like sequences merging Clare’s work and English folk costumes with 2014 props and landscapes. One of the discussions speculates on Clare’s initials, J.C. – did they give him a messianic complex? Do all people with those initials have a sense of self-importance? (Jeremy Clarkson? Jeremy Corbyn?). Am surprised that Ronald Blythe isn’t involved with the film – he constantly champions Clare in his Word From Wormingford diaries.

* * *

Then to Gordon Square for the launch party of the Open Library of Humanities digital platform. This is a major project built by two Birkbeck lecturers, Caroline Edwards and Martin Eve, involving the publishing of academic humanities journals in an ‘open-access’ space online, so everyone can read the articles without having to pay, subscribe or be a member of an institution. The OLH is also a ‘megajournal’, a charity, and a community space, as well as a non-profit publisher. Tonight in Gordon Square there are speeches, wine, and a special OLH launch cake, courtesy of Bea’s of Bloomsbury. I have ‘open access’ to that too (delicious).

Tags: alan moore, andrew kotting, BBC National Short Story Award, birkbeck, by our selves, cereal killer cafe, iain sinclair, OLH, open library of humanities