Tuesday 25 July 2023. Living far from a cinema, the availability of so many films on digital TV comes into its own. Tonight I watch with Mum All That Jazz, from 1979, the Bob Fosse film that’s essentially a self-portrait. The real footage of open-heart surgery makes me cover my eyes, and I feel slightly angry that Fosse thought it necessary to include at all. The main character’s constant smoking is also shocking for a professional choreographer, all the more so today. Do dancers smoke much now? Perhaps it’s like nurses, the type of work making no difference to the addiction.
The film’s fantasy dance scenes around a hospital bed precede The Singing Detective, and I wonder if that’s where Dennis Potter got the idea. Mum thinks the final sequence goes on too long. ‘I’m afraid I was wanting him to hurry up and die’.
**
Friday 28 July 2023. A kind and unsolicited email from Alan Hollinghurst, who sought out my Firbank thesis online to read. He says he read it ‘with enormous admiration’, and admires my ‘amazingly extensive and detailed research’, with ‘so many new details and insights’. My prose style is also ‘marvellously free of rebarbative theoretical jargon’. Given that I regard him as the greatest living English novelist, this is encouragement indeed.
As a result he’s sought out Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and the works of Richard Paul Nugent. If the next Hollinghurst novel has references to those writers, I suppose it may be my fault.
**
Saturday 3 August 2023. Mum has had a fall while away in Birmingham. She is now in hospital with a fractured thigh bone, recovering from surgery. Her life will now be shared with a walking frame or crutches for at least six weeks, probably more. It’s just as well I’m about to fetch things, particularly from upstairs. The important detail is that this happened while she was line dancing at a quilting festival. The silver lining of accident is anecdote.
**
Monday 7 August 2023. An appointment at Ipswich Job Centre. I am instructed to increase my earnings as a self-employed writer, or they may force me to look for other work to justify my claiming benefits to avoid starvation. Not sure what best to do. I was rather hoping that reaching this age would have garnered me some sort of following by now. One only needs about 1500 fans to each pay £20 a year for a book or a gig or some other sort of regular content, and that’s a living. But I’ve still yet to achieve that. Perhaps I’m just too niche. Which is putting it kindly.
**
Wednesday 9 August 2023. I’ve changed the title of the Substack newsletter from ‘Letter from a Dyspraxic Dandy’ to ‘Svelte Lectures’. Much better. And they are lectures, really. Proper research, with rare findings, useful scholarship, and (I hope) lasting insights. I intend to compile them into a book once I’ve clocked up enough of them.
**
Thursday 10 August 2023. I’m listening to a calming BBC music mix by a woman who advocates ‘slow living’. I wonder if she manages to make a living from being slow. The fable of the tortoise and the hare is lost on many employers. They’ll go for a shoddy job done quickly over a worker who is slow but painstaking any time. I am of course talking about myself.
My mother has pointed out that in the 1970s Shirley ‘Superwoman’ Conran did all her admin on a Monday. I suppose one could try that with emails now and see what happens.
**
Saturday 12 August 2023. To Ipswich to see the film Oppenheimer at Cineworld Ipswich’s IMAX screen. The last bus home to the village is 5.40pm. In the English countryside there is no life after tea-time. Thank goodness for matinee screenings.
Despite its three hour duration, Oppenheimer breezes along. The nuclear test scene aside, it is essentially handsome men in shirts and ties talking quickly in rooms. And that’s more than enough: one thinks of Twelve Angry Men. On its own terms, it’s a better film than Barbie, if only because it knows how to end.
But comparing the two is silly anyway: both films are playing to expectations on some level. The way forward now is for Greta Gerwig to only be allowed to make films about troubled men in suits, while Christopher Nolan should only be allowed to make spangly dance routines with all-female casts.
**
Sunday 13 August 2023. I’m looking at adverts for rented rooms in St Leonards-on-Sea. Today I find one on the Spare Room website which has the following description:
This is new room. There is everything has been. There is included everything. There is all of nice guy. Make sure I need a.
Eat your heart out, Gertrude Stein.
**
Tuesday 15 August 2023. Sitting in a Hadleigh cafe, a woman comes over to ask me if I’m all right. I’m fine, the lack of income aside. But I’ve had people coming up and asking me this all my life. I can’t help having a Resting Sad Face.
**
Tuesday 22 August 2023. Today’s dial-a-ride bus to Hadleigh is shared with an older man from Kersey, Paul Dufficey, who turns out to have worked with Ken Russell. He was involved in Tommy and Savage Messiah. In the latter case, he also worked with Derek Jarman.
Kersey is an idyllic place for an artist of any age. As we reach the top of the hill the driver actually stops the bus so we can admire the view, unchanged since it was painted by John Nash in the last century.
**
Friday 25 August 2023. A kind fellow Birkbeck alumnus books me to give a one-off lecture to American students on the Sally Potter film Orlando, along with the Woolf novel. I know both inside out so it’s perfect work for me. By way of homework I watch Sally Potter’s more recent film The Party, which couldn’t be more different: a kind of twisted Alan Ayckbourn farce set in a house in contemporary London. It has Cillian Murphy, making it the second film in two weeks that I’ve seen him in black and white.
[Update, a week later] The lecture job falls through. Pity. It would have been £150. I’d started writing it too.
**
Saturday 2 September 2023. My Associate Research Fellowship at Birkbeck has expired. I’m now just a struggling self-employed writer with a PhD in English and Humanities. But at least I’m not doing anything I don’t want to do.
**
Sunday 3 September 2023. Not sure what best to do about turning 52. Except to finally embrace jazz. Not sure if I’ll quite become one of those people who can bang on about Pat Metheny till sunrise. But there’s still time.
I usually like to spend my birthday taking a day trip somewhere. But it’s Sunday in Suffolk, so there’s no buses, plus there’s a train strike. Happily, culture has come to the village this weekend courtesy of the BNatural music festival. Established in 2010, it has now become a miniature Latitude, complete with colourful branded beakers. First class sound. Three pop-up music venues, including a stage in the market square, on which the superb indie band Collars played yesterday. There’s a bar, a tea and cake stall, and several food vans. And slightly too many people: the organisers deliberately restrict publicity to prevent overcrowding.
**
Wednesday 6 September 2023. Signs of the post-Covid world. Adverts for rented rooms now often stipulate ‘no homeworkers’. They always say ‘lovely sunny room’, yet they don’t want anyone to spend any daylight hours in it.
**
Thursday 7 September 2023. I watch the Tour of Britain cycle race on television, then open the front door and watch it in person as it goes through the village. Quite a feat by the local police to clear the various roads of parked cars, not least in Hadleigh High Street. Psychology plays a part: no one likes to be the one motorist who won’t move their car.
**
Sunday 17 September 2023. To Ipswich Hospital, where I was born, for a hernia repair operation. The ward is called Raedwald, after the Anglo-Saxon king who is thought to be the one buried at Sutton Hoo. The ward is accordingly decorated with glossy panels of Sutton Hoo imagery. Tea, toast, and jam in bed once I come round from the anesthetic. Heaven. And now, eight weeks of no heavy lifting. Not that I ever do very much. I even balk at hardback books.
**
Wednesday 27 September 2023. A day in London. Within seconds of stepping into the British Library I hear someone calling out ‘Dickon!’. My heart lifts at returning to the city.
I see the new David Hockney installation at The Lightroom, one of the buildings in the spotless new development north of King’s Cross.
The installation is one huge room, on the walls of which is projected a looped film of Hockney’s work lasting 50 minutes or so. All four walls are covered in this immersive projection, which at times spills onto the floor as well. The man himself narrates over music.
For all its high-tech wizardry, the installation is in the tradition of Victorian dioramas, when large and dramatic paintings like those of John Martin were shown in dark auditoriums, and changing lamp patterns would pick out different parts of the art.
Children run about in the room, and it’s quite a family friendly way of turning art into spectacle. Except, perhaps for the occasional nude bums in Hockney’s work, and his comments like: ‘Spring, when nature has an erection’. The presentation ends with a huge painted slogan, ‘LOVE LIFE’. Which one can’t argue with. Particularly when the entrance fee is only £5 for those on Universal Credit.
**
Tuesday 3 October 2023. To Woodbridge, where I’ve never been before. The Tide Mill Museum has sublime views of the Deben river, with the boats and trees in the distance. All very peaceful and idyllic, though I don’t feel wealthy enough to linger in the town too long.
**
Saturday 7 October 2023. The film director Terence Davies dies. In 1988 my father was so moved by Distant Voices Still Lives that he wrote a fan letter to Davies. TD replied by phoning Dad to thank him. They then talked at length about working class childhoods in Britain during the 40s and 50s.
**
Sunday 8 October 2023. I’ve applied for a job with the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. Freelance assistant and researcher, part-time, temporary (7 months). Just the sort of thing I’m keen to do: Isherwood is in my PhD thesis. The job ad was pointed out to me by two friends, separately, who know me but not each other. So that’s a good indication that the job might suit me.
In my eager researcher way, I’ve looked up the Suffolk connection with Isherwood. His mother Kathleen grew up in Bury St Edmunds. She spent a lot of time at Nether Hall, the mansion in Pakenham, then owned by her wealthy uncle Walter Greene, of Greene King brewery fame. In 1903 she married Isherwood’s father, Frank, in the nearby St Peter’s Church, at Thurston, one of those enviable villages which has a railway station.
**
Monday 16 October 2023. Am approached for another job: compiling the index to an academic book, which I’ve done before. I say yes. A few days later the client, who I don’t know, then decides they’d rather go with someone with more experience. What with the Orlando lecture falling through, and my Substack earnings dropping to a trickle, I’m now hoping that the Isherwood job will prove to be a case of third time lucky.
**
Saturday 21 October 2023. Floods in Suffolk. I plug a leak in the loft with rubber duct tape, but otherwise we are okay. Framlingham and Debenham to the east are hit hard. Homes wrecked, pubs and post offices damaged, cars under water, insurance apparently not applicable. Still, Framlingham is also the home of Ed Sheeran, so I wonder if he can help.
**
Sunday 22 October 2023. I’m still looking at studio flats in St-Leonard’s-On-Sea, but the situation for renters remains grim. This time I am not even offered a viewing for a flat that went on the market two days ago: they’re booked solid. Just as well my current landlady isn’t going to throw me out of her house until I have somewhere to go to.
What I definitely don’t want is a basement or ground floor flat. I’d be paranoid about the flood risk (and as I publish this Hastings, which is next to St Leonard’s, is suffering a new bout of flooding).
**
Tuesday 24 October 2023. I have time to kill in Stowmarket, so I go to the public library, which is near the town’s pretty church. Run by the local council and open from 8.30 in the morning, this library is not just a place of free books but an all-round social support hub.
Here, librarians are the quiet saints of community. Gone are any concerns about silence: there is a chatty knitting group at a table in one corner, and some sort of pensioners’ group at another. Children run about (it’s half term), people make phone calls or do jigsaws, and the whole ambience is cheery, cosy and safe. There’s even a coffee machine, though one important aspect stops this place resembling a coffee shop: no piped music. Just the gentle melody of chatter.
Some are here just to take advantage of the heating. This has long been one of the attractions of libraries, but today there is a designated phrase for such places: ‘warm banks’.
There are free internet terminals for those who don’t have computers at home, which is still a lot of people. That said, there’s room for improvement: the council’s own website is not user-friendly enough. I know this because the old man at the computer next to me is sighing a lot as he taps slowly at the keyboard, one finger at a time. He turns to me by way of explanation:
‘They make these forms so complicated. I’m just trying to order a bin.’
**
Saturday 28 October 2023. After an interview via Zoom, I am offered the job with the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. It will mean working from home with the occasional trip to London, which suits me fine.
On reflection, I think I was successful because I made it to the interview stage, where I feel more at ease. Many people are uneasy about crowbarring their whole lovely complexity into the inflexible templates of cover letters and CVs. Give us an interview, though, and we come alive.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
On 17th February 2023 I moved from London to a room in my mother’s house in the village of Bildeston, Suffolk. The following diary entries cover November 2022 to the present.
**
21 November 2022. This week saw the comedian Joe Lycett threaten to destroy thousands of pounds of his own money unless David Beckham addressed Qatar’s poor record on gay rights. After Beckham failed to respond, Mr L instead sent the money to charity. I was glad about this. The act of destroying money carries a depressing banality. As ways of grabbing attention go, burning money is cheap.
**
24 November 2022. The English department at Birkbeck is to be hit with staff cuts, enough to make the national news. University staff across the country are striking, as are many from other professions. Today I pass some striking Royal Mail workers on my walk into town today, outside the Mount Pleasant sorting office. They have one of those embroidered union banners, as beautiful as a tapestry.
**
25 November 2022. I wince at the phrase ‘instant classic’. Not just because it’s a cliché, but because it’s often proven wrong with time. Today I come across the Melody Maker best albums of the year list for 1991. The critics back then rated the Wonder Stuff’s Never Loved Elvis above My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Today, Loveless is a classic, while Never Loved Elvis is rather more ephemeral and of its time. Maybe it was a hair thing.
**
26 November 2022. The dry cleaners on Liverpool Road have lost one of my new shirts. They try to replace it with a shirt in the same size, but it’s a button cuff. I only wear cuff links. Worse: mine was a Charles Tyrwhitt, theirs was a Burberry. I’d rather die.
**
30 November 2022. My hypocritical rule for the deployment of Christmas practices in November: I wince at the jumpers but am fine with the food.
**
3 December 2022. My job rejection emails carry a double hurt. It’s not just the rejection but the lack of individualism. They’re just templates, off the peg, sent out to every unsuccessful applicant regardless. When I’m abused on the street for my appearance I’m at least having my uniqueness acknowledged.
**
9 December 2022. I go to the Natural History Museum in Kensington to see one particular exhibit. There are now conversations about the role of museums in an age of information, not least the ones filled with the spoils of empire. Perhaps the way forward for the Elgin Marbles is to do what the Natural History Museum now does every Christmas with its robot Tyrannosaurus Rex. Put them in a Christmas jumper.
**
10 December 2022. This time last year I defended my PhD. Panto season is the best time for the process. ‘This premise isn’t evidenced’. ‘Oh yes it is.’ ‘Oh no it isn’t.’
In fact, I now realize that my thesis has a reference to the pantomime dame Widow Twankey in it. The character pops up in Joyce’s Ulysses, in the ‘Circe’ chapter.
I take advantage of the football to go to Sainsbury’s on Liverpool Road for gin. This time a middle-aged staffer makes my day by asking me to ‘solemnly swear’ that I am over 25. Cruising’s not dead.
**
11 December 2022. I buy the Christmas Radio Times. It’s now the Midnight Mass of magazine issues, attendance suddenly swelling for the one occasion in December.
Radio Times these days turns out to be an existential attempt to apprehend the infinity of streaming TV platforms. As Camus said: ‘The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ Such is the feeling when choosing between Die Hard and Love Actually.
**
15 December 2022. Today is the centenary of the OED‘s earliest citation of ‘gay’ to mean ‘homosexual’. Their source is Gertrude Stein’s book Geography and Plays, published on the 15th of December 1922. This reading is debatable, but an innuendo effect is certainly there. I especially like the idea that ‘gay’ may have first appeared in print in a book by an avant-garde lesbian.
**
30 December 2022. I manage to get a cheap ticket for the new play of Orlando, at the Garrick Theatre, Charing Cross. In the title role, Emma Corrin is more energetic and more camp than Tilda Swinton in the 90s film, jumping around the stage and changing their voice (Corrin is indeed a ‘they’), to suit the teenage boy Orlando, then the young man, then again for the female version. What with the drag and the wintery scenes set during the Great Frost, plus the time of year it is now, the production is a kind of modernist pantomime. It taps into the sense of intellectual fun that Woolf intended.
**
31 December 2022: I stay in and watch Sooz Kempner’s live show on the Twitch platform – a very modern means of entertainment. She sings showtunes, including ‘Unworthy of Your Love’ from Sondheim’s Assassins. She also does Kate Bush’s ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ while dressed as the politician Nadine Dorries, known for championing Boris Johnson.
**
4 January 2023. I manage to land a paid job, if a temporary one. I’m compiling the index for a new book, Jewish Women in Comics. Today I learn that academic books file the Batman character Harley Quinn under H rather than Q. The reasoning is because of the pun on ‘harlequin’: her surname is the 2nd half of a joke. James Bond, Harry Potter, and Sherlock Holmes, meanwhile, are meant to be realistic names rather than jokes, and so are filed under B, P, and H. It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t really matter, except when it does. I like the way it feels wrong to index ‘Loaf, Meat’, or indeed ‘Man, Iron’.
Certainly, the act of indexing has something of the pleasure of polishing: the final step towards perfection. If a new non-fiction book lacks an index, I tend to take against it.
**
Monday 18 January 2023. Ronald Blythe has died. The one pull-quote in the Times obituary is that he had a one-night stand with Patricia Highsmith. The lesson being that if you live to 100 and have sex with a woman just once, the least you can do is make sure it’s a name worth dropping. I feel the touristic side of this unlikely liaison was more Highsmith’s, though. She moved all the way from America to Suffolk, after all. Blythe was just part of the landscape.
**
20 January 2023. The housing association in Angel ask me to move out. They’re designated as a service for postgraduate students, and as my student life is finally over, I can’t really complain. I’ve been lucky to have lived there at all. Living in Zone 1 of London was always something I wanted to do, and now it’s done. Time to move on.
**
23 January 2023. The effects of the pandemic are reflected in adverts for shared flats. Many of them now stipulate limits on working from home. ‘No more than 1 day per week’ says one. Home is becoming time as much as place.
**
27 January 2023. Battling another job application form. One box says: ‘demonstrate your professional development’. I want to say: ‘Development is for darkrooms.’
**
28 January 2023. I’m now resigned to leaving the city. 29 years is probably enough. I need to see if I’ll miss it. I spent 23 years in Zone 3 (Highgate). Then 3 years in Zone 2 (Dalston). Then 2 years in Zone 1 (Angel). In theory I should now get an internship as a Beefeater at the Tower of London. Or move out altogether.
I’m now curious about the arty seaside life, which I hear is particularly possible in St-Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex. The first thing I will do after moving there is accept that the name has two hyphens and no apostrophe.
**
2 February 2023. I spend a day in St Leonards, looking at a top floor flat in Warrior Square, as well as registering at a handful of estate agents. The flat is still being renovated, and my gut instinct is to pass rather than rush into a move for the sake of it.
I’d ideally like a studio flat rather than have to share a kitchen with complete strangers. Paradoxically I can work well in libraries and cafes, but feel uneasy in kitchens of shared houses. I think it’s the way public spaces are blank slates, reset on every visit. Whereas a shared kitchen is a disputed territory.
If I have to share a house at all, I’d rather do it where all parties are predisposed to forgive each other’s border incidents. That means either moving into a monastery or living with my mother. And with monks, I’m really not keen on the hours.
**
Wednesday 16 February 2023. A selfie from the public roof garden of the Post Building, New Oxford Street. My last day in London as a resident, 1994 – 2023. For now.
**
Friday 17 Feb 2023. Day of the move. I travel separately from the van, which is driven by the charming and very strong Tommy, from T With A Van Removals, Sudbury. I pack a suitcase to take with myself just in case. This includes the one book I’d want to still have if my entire possessions vanished. It’s The Complete Firbank. Specifically the fat Picador paperback edition from 1988. My bible. Quentin Crisp once said that he thought Vile Bodies was the wittiest book ever written, and it’s essentially diluted Firbank.
**
2nd March 2023. Living in a village while not being able to drive rather limits one’s cultural outings. There’s a good arthouse cinema in Ipswich, the King Street Cinema, but the bus from Bildeston takes a whole hour, and doesn’t do evenings.
Most of the concerts in Ipswich and Stowmarket seem to be for tribute bands. Symptoms of living where the action isn’t. You go expecting no surprises. Unless it’s a Radiohead tribute band, in which case you go expecting ‘No Surprises’.
**
26 March 2023. I’m neutral about the upcoming coronation, though being a slight postal geek I take an interest in the redesign of the stamps. They have Charles’s silhouette now, though he has no crown. It’s like vicars who are uneasy about mentioning God, in case it puts people off.
**
31 March 2023. Another job application. ‘Please list your core attributes’ Me: An antipathy to the phrase ‘core attributes’ for a start.
**
3 April 2023. I apply for a research job, but although I’m told I have an ‘impressive’ CV, it still goes to someone else.
Freelance writing seems to be my only way forward, with the hope that enough readers will want my particular perspective. I can’t compete with writers who might as well be anyone.
In my favour, I am at least AI-proof. Artificial intelligence programs are now thought to be sophisticated enough to imitate any writing style. But in my case, so much of my style is influenced by books so obscure that they’ve never been digitized.
What’s also different with me, I hope, is my recent academic training. I know a lot more about stuff, and I know a lot more about which stuff is known. If Hunter S Thompson can call himself a ‘doctor’ out of narcotic cool, I can surely do so likewise as Dr Dickon Edwards. And besides, I like the alliteration of the ‘D’ sounds.
**
6 April 2023. Easter in a Suffolk village. A mobile library calls once every four weeks, for half an hour; I make sure I use it. The post box in the square has been ‘yarnbombed’. It sports an unsolicited woollen cap of crocheted chicks and lambs, put there in the dead of night by a guerrilla knitter. There are real lambs in the field on the south of the village, by the Hadleigh road.
**
25 April 2023.
With Mum to Dollops Wood, Polstead. Despite growing up in Suffolk I don’t think I’ve explored one of the county’s bluebell woods until now. Encountered in person, the colour is breath-taking. Afterwards we find the little Polstead community shop on the village green and have tea and cake outside. There is no one about. The shop has a post office section: a tiny self-contained glass booth in one corner, like an amusement machine on a seaside pier. In Bildeston’s only shop the post office section is just one end of the same counter.
**
29 April 2023. The Hadleigh Morrison’s supermarket sells a small number of books. Mostly popular crime and romance titles, but today they have Douglas Stuart’s literary novel Young Mungo in paperback, with its cover photo of two sweaty young men passionately kissing. I buy it not so much for its cheapness (£5.50) as for a kind of voting. To buy it is saying ‘more of this sort of thing at Morrison’s, please’.
**
1 May 2023. The order of service for the coronation will include a request to the public to pledge allegiance to the King. Some people are up in arms about this, but it is clearly meant only as an option. Or to put it in the language of tinned peas, it is a serving suggestion. With the emphasis on the serving.
**
Thursday 4 May 2023.
Wanting to put my PhD to good use in the community, I’ve started a Substack newsletter. It’s aimed at being a kind of travel-sized lecture series, explaining connections across the arts to a general public, typically involving camp, dandyism, and otherness. It’s called Letter from a Dyspraxic Dandy. I am bursting with ideas for it, buoyed with the freedom but also mindful of keeping it concise.
What I need now is enough subscribers to sign up, with the hope that enough of them will deem it worth paying for (£5 a month, £30 a year).
Saturday 6 May 2023. I watch the Coronation with Mum. She was a child when she saw the last one. Or at least when she saw part of it. She remembers being given a jigsaw puzzle to do in the next room. Her mother called her in to catch the actual crowning.
The crowds in the streets have their smartphones out, but inside the Abbey all is offline. Charles swears his oaths while touching a new red-bound leather bible – which he also kisses. He uses a fountain pen to sign the oaths. Not Face ID, but not a quill either. The texts for Archbishop Welby to read are printed on little white cue cards, held discreetly in his line of sight by the other priests. No iPads.
The ancient age of the throne is highlighted, but so too is the gold anointing spoon, which is to me is pure Monty Python. There is nothing that is not funny about the word ‘spoon’. The BBC commentator refers to it at one point as ‘the humble spoon’, which nearly has me in hysterics. The implication is that in normal circumstances a spoon is a complete diva. The boastful spoon. The full of itself spoon. The takes too long in front of the mirror before hitting the town spoon. Perhaps one argument for keeping the monarchy is moments like this.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Wednesday 3 August 2022. To the Wallace Collection for the exhibition Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts. On the audio guide is a new commentary by Angela Lansbury (I edit this entry after she dies in October, which must make the audio guide one of her last professional credits). There are stills and working drawings from some of the Disney cartoon films, mainly Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. These are displayed alongside examples of the eighteenth-century Rococo art that inspired them, including some elaborate Sevres vases and a number of paintings from the same period.
The Wallace is home to Fragonard’s The Swing, which is often used to define the meaning of ‘Rococo’ itself. It’s only now that I realise how Disney-esque the painting is, avant la lettre: the privileged girl’s playful abandon, the sugary colours, the sense of timeless delight. Much parodied, there was a spoof cartoon in the Times during the first Covid lockdown, with the then Chancellor Rishi Sunak on the swing, throwing pink pound notes into the air in place of the pink dress. In this exhibition there’s a video screen showing a clip from Frozen, where the sister Anna jumps up in front of the painting to mimic the pose. Next to the screen is the actual painting. While Walter Benjamin might be right about a work of art losing its ‘aura’ in an age of mass reproduction, seeing the Frozen spoof on a screen alongside the actual painting has its own thrill, if a postmodern one. But then, I’m the sort of person who buys National Gallery Covid face masks.
**
Thursday 4 August 2022. With Shanthi to Café Kick in Exmouth Market, followed by drinks in the Shakespeare’s Head, before ending up performing tipsy karaoke at a private booth in Lucky Voice, Upper Street. It’s my first time, I think, since doing karaoke in a proper Tokyo hotel room-style venue, a la Lost in Translation. This was a post-gig activity by the band Spearmint, with whom I played circa 1999 and 2000. I rather like the boast of saying one only does karaoke when in Japan.
It’s too hot for a jacket, so I’m wearing purple braces over a white shirt. David B says this makes me look like a packet of Silk Cut.
**
Sunday 7 August 2022. A recurring conversation in the media is the value of arts degrees, as opposed to studying science or business. By value, they mean the ability for arts graduates to earn large sums of money. The value of nothing and the price of everything, as someone who worked in the arts once said.
In my case, I’m certainly getting used to receiving rejection emails with the phrase: ‘due to the high volume of applications’. That really makes one feel special. It feels like there’s too many people with arts PhDs applying for too few vacancies. I believe it’s called the ‘postdocalypse’.
I’m grateful, though, that I haven’t yet been forced by the government into taking an unlovely job against my will. It’s true that one of the downsides of getting older is that the world is more likely to ignore you. But in some respects, that is one of the benefits.
**
Tuesday 9 August 2022. The Wire magazine asks me to review a book about C86, the cassette compilation of new bands put out by the NME in 1986. ‘C86’ soon came to mean a whole genre: jangly, tinny guitars, rendered in a scratchy indie rock style. On the cassette this was exemplified by bands like the Wedding Present and the Bodines. The problem with the term was that many of the other bands on the C86 tape didn’t sound that way at all. They were more arty, avant-garde and strange, more like Captain Beefheart than Orange Juice or The Smiths.
I learn from the new book that one of these artier bands, The Shrubs, was fronted by Nick Hobbs, with whom I once shared a Japanese hotel room. He managed Spearmint when I played with them, and was once impressed with me not for playing guitar but for recognising a photo on a restaurant wall of Derek Jarman’s Dungeness cottage. The implication was: what was I doing playing melodic indie pop guitar (and not very well) when I knew about Difficult Art?
This was long before Jarman became the brand he is today. Even normal people like Derek Jarman now. He’s become like Southwold, Stewart Lee, and Brutalism.
Also learned from the book: a former tambourine player with Primal Scream calls Bobby Gillespie’s autobiography a work of fiction, made to make the singer look good.
I think that’s the case with all autobiography, this diary included. There is vanity in every creative act, even when indulging in self-pity. Consciously or unconsciously, all memoirs are full of fiction, just as all novels are full of memory.
The author of the C86 book, Nige Tassell, has also written a whole book about the football transfer window, whatever that is.
**
Sunday 21 August 2022. I give a paper at an Aubrey Beardsley conference, ‘AB 150’, at St Bride’s Foundation, off Fleet Street. I enjoy the day, with the nice Beardsley aficionados, one of whom links Beardsley’s pierrot characters to costumes used by David Bowie and Harry Styles, another of whom references the film Suspiria. I reference Donald Trump, Brigid Brophy, and the film Carry on Loving. We go for drinks at the Punch Tavern, and I end up joining the Oscar Wilde Society afterwards.
**
Thursday 25 August 2022. To the Waiting Room venue, in the basement of the Three Crowns pub, Stoke Newington. I’m here to see Charley Stone play with her own band, which she calls The Actual Band. Also on the bill are Panic Pocket: very good, intriguing and original. I chat to old friends, some not seen for years: Anna Spivack, Debbie Smith and Atalanta K, Tim Baxendale, David Barnett. I share the tube journey home with Debbie and Atalanta, who mention the documentary film that they’re both in, Rebel Dykes,about the 1980s lesbian subcultures in London.
**
Friday 26 August 2022. Treated to a kind lunch at Le Sacre Coeur in Islington, by Roz Kaveney, who knows I don’t have much money at the moment. By a coincidence Roz is also in Rebel Dykes, proving that lesbian clubs of the 80s accepted trans women too. I watch the documentary itself in the evening, via the Channel 4 streaming platform. It’s exactly the sort of alternative, subcultural film that Channel 4 used to stand for, before the era of Big Brother made it into just another mainstream channel.
Rebel Dykes depicts the busy London squat scene of the 80s, before the law was changed to make squatting illegal. This was when London, like Channel 4, was a place for the displaced. Given the current cost of living crisis, I wonder if the law will have to change again, and a new age of squatting begin.
**
Sunday 28 Aug 2022. To a mini festival in Spa Fields off Exmouth Market. There’s stalls selling food and clothes and so on, and some rock bands playing on a small stage. I’m made aware of just how visibly middle-aged the audience is, perhaps because I’ve not been to a daylight gig for a while. But then, so many of the practitioners of the genre are greying too: Paul McCartney headlining Glastonbury this year at the age of 80. Rock music now feels more claimed by the older than the young.
The C86 book, which I’m clearly not finished with, reveals that even some of the fairly obscure indie groups of the 1980s have recently reformed, the members now in their late 50s or older. This is often because there’s a proliferation of small festivals who want to book them, particularly abroad. The phrase ‘has been’ is now itself a kind of has-been. If fame just means attracting an audience, even a small one, you can stay famous forever. Or at least, for as long as YouTube exists.
After the festival I go for drinks at the very pleasant Victorian pub The Peasant, in St John Street, with Travis Elborough, Alex Mayor, and Dave Callahan, who is in the C86 book, being a member of the Wolfhounds. We are thrown out of the pub at 9pm, not because we are rowdy but because it’s a Sunday.
**
Saturday 3 September 2022. Getting older myself. I spend my 51st birthday in Bexhill on Sea, having lunch in the De La Warr Pavilion, one of those places I’ve always meant to visit. I haven’t been abroad since 2009, partly due to lack of money but also because there’s a lot of places in the UK I’ve still not ticked off.
Then afternoon tea at the wonderfully crumbling Royal Victoria hotel in St Leonards-on-Sea with Kitty Fedorec. This is close to the Marine Court Art Deco apartment block, one of my dream places to live if I had the choice, the other being the Barbican. This is followed by a game of mini golf in Hastings with her Kitty’s friends. After which we go for cheese bingo in a nearby pub, which turns out not to be a joke. I’m surrounded by wry geeks and bohemians in their 30s and 40s, one of whom is carrying a bag of vinyl albums, including Edward Woodward Sings.
**
Thursday 8 Sept 2022. The Queen dies at 96. I was convinced she would beat her mother’s age of 101, given the progress of medicine. But then, unlike her mother she did have rather more to do than drink gin and watch racehorses.
I go to the Shakespeare’s Head with David Barnett and try HMQ’s reputed tipple: Dubonnet and gin. Two parts Dubonnet to 1 part gin, with a slice of lemon plus ice.HMQ, who was not much of a drinker, inherited this choice from her mother, who was. Quite a 1920s drink, in fact, also associated with Noel Coward, and a reminder that the Queen Mother was of the Bright Young Things generation. The drink itself is not unlike absinthe. Unexpectedly strong, which seems apt. I don’t have more than one.
**
Saturday 10 September 2022.Trying to get used to having a new King, without thinking of spaniels. The Prince Charles Cinema in Soho has affixed a notice to its door: ‘No, we are not changing our name.’
**
Monday 12 September 2022. To the Barbican for The Forgiven, an Evelyn Waugh-esque melodrama about decadent white people in Morocco. I’m slightly shocked to see that film has an 18 certificate, not for violence or gore or sex but for scenes of drug use, namely cocaine. There’s some footage of Tangier early on. I think I recognise the El Minzah hotel, where there might still be a photo above the bar of me and Shane MacGowan.
**
Wednesday 21 Sept 2022. I read the comic memoir Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe. Kobabe is a young American cartoonist who mentions the music of David Bowie as part of their path to coming out as non-binary. Their other cultural references include Harry Styles. Harry Styles is not David Bowie, but there certainly seems to be a gap in the current world of role models for a Bowie-esque figure, a pretty male who can combine mainstream pop music with acting and fashion and being just unmanly enough – but too strange that he can’t appear on the cover of Grazia. Mr Styles has done his best to take up that position.
Tonight I see the big new Bowie documentary, Moonage Daydream at the BFI IMAX in Waterloo, with Shanthi and Rob, bumping into Erol Alkan in the lobby beforehand.
Moonage Daydream recycles a fair amount of footage I’ve seen before, from Alan Yentob’s Cracked Actor to the Mavis Nicholson interview. Easily found on the internet, but it’s nice to see these ancient clips cleaned up and stretched across the giant IMAX screen. Mavis Nicholson died recently, the same day as the other queen. She specialised in getting the best out of unusual men: Quentin Crisp, Kenneth Williams, Tom Baker. If I had my way, the IMAX would show a whole season of her interviews. The venue would be renamed IMAVE.
After the film Shanthi takes my photo in the IMAX Exit 1 subway, where someone has scrawled on the wall ‘PANSY MOB’.
**
Friday 23 September 2022. Still on a Bowie tip, I find myself going down a Bowie / camp research rabbit-hole. In the film there’s footage of Bowie fans in the early 70s, queuing up outside one of his concerts. They chat to the camera about Bowie, saying ‘he’s so camp’, and it’s meant in a positive, even hip sense.
I find the 1972 Melody Maker Bowie interview, the one where he says he’s gay. In the article the journalist, Michael Watts, calls Bowie’s presentation ‘camp as a row of tents’. In 2006 Watts wrote about his memories of doing the interview, and wondered if he actually invented the phrase ‘camp as a row of tents’. It would be nice to think so, but I can’t resist doing the research to find out. This is what prevents me from being a regular journalist, on top of my slowness. I can’t make some sweeping claim and let it stand with no citations, no evidence.
According to Gary Simes’s exhaustive article ‘Gay Slang Lexicography’ (2005), ‘camp as a row of tents’ is at least as old as 1948, and may be Australian in its origins. Barry Humphries was using ‘camp as a row of tents’ in the 1960s, which I can believe, while the Times used the phrase in 1968, to describe the TV series The Avengers.
‘Camp’ also appears in another significant piece of Bowie journalism: Ray Coleman’s concert review for Melody Maker, 15 July 1972. There, Bowie is called ‘the undisputed king of camp rock’, combining the Velvet Underground with ‘a Danny La Rue profile’.
I wonder if young people who now look to Bowie as they look to Harry Styles would get both these references. Perhaps Todd Haynes should follow up his documentary on the Velvet Underground with one on Danny La Rue.
**
28 September 2022. So hypersensitive to language that I take against emails beginning with ‘Hi’ rather than ‘Dear’. ‘Hi’ is shrill, mercenary: a salesman who doesn’t care who you are. ‘Dear’ is an oasis of gentle.
**
30 September 2022. The last time I bought a packet of cigarettes it would have been Sobranie Cocktails. I’m delighted to be told by Kate Levey, Brigid Brophy’s daughter, that Brophy smoked them in her nursing home.
**
10 October 2022. What keeps me alive right now is my taste. One current passion is books and bookshops and indeed books about books and bookshops. I’ve read at least three such books from the latter category this year: Dennis Duncan’s Index, A History of The; Robin Ince’s Bibliomaniac,and Emma Smith’s Portable Magic. I’m also more fascinated than ever with elegance in English prose. Recently I watched a documentary about the history of the BBC and found myself drawn to a description of Winston Churchill’s manner of speaking as ‘Gibbons-esque’.
The well-honed phrase is usually best put to service in a song lyric or in a immersive narrative, style being nothing without content. But not always. Truman Capote said of Firbank that ‘all he had was style, bless him’. Sometimes it can be more than enough to just enjoy the performance of another mind.
**
Saturday 15 October 2022. Current projects: an academic chapter on Angela Carter for Bloomsbury Books, plus a novel set among studenty dandy types. I’m trying to put the camp in ‘campus novel’. One character is based on Sebastian Horsley, which seems like such an obvious thing to do. I think of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford preserving their own dandyish friends in their fiction.
**
17 October 2022. Lots of coughing about. Mum in Suffolk is now poorly with Covid for the first time, having avoided it entirely until now. Two and a half years on, though, and with the vaccines well established, one’s anxiety over the virus is a lot less acute. [Indeed, Mum goes on to recover more quickly than I did]. People are now much more worried about the cost of living, climate change, and Russia.
**
18 October 2022. I decide to get my thesis bound, choosing the style of Firbank’s first editions. Black cloth hardback, gold lettering. A reminder to myself of what I can do, and what I’ve managed to do, and that for better or worse I’m now a creature of books.
**
20 October 2022. Liz Truss follows several months of campaigning to be prime minister with barely a month in the actual job. The political news in the UK is getting so ridiculous that I feel like having a one-person riot. It will not last long but it will be very well dressed.
**
24 October 2022. I think I’ve just about got the hang of the author-date reference system now. This is from the Angela Carter article. I don’t trust referencing software, preferring to bring as much manual labour to the task as possible. It’s probably another way that I’m too slow to do this for a living, but I’m pleased with the results.
**
28 October 2022. I admire professional writers who take their time, or at least are allowed to take their time. Alan Hollinghurst taking six years to write a new book, Donna Tartt taking ten. But I also admire writers who produce regularly but who manage to do so without using a computer. At Housman’s bookshop in Kings Cross I treat myself to Ronald Blythe’s new book Next to Nature. This is a collection of his weekly Word from Wormingford column for the Church Times, which ran from the 1990s up till his retirement in 2017 aged 95. The religious content, which I’m not so interested in, is offset with Blythe’s reflections on nature, literature, and history, which I am interested in. I’m fascinated with the circumstances behind the writing: Blythe living alone since the 1970s in a lone house up a long track in the Stour Valley countryside, yet never learning to drive. He typed up his books and journalism on a typewriter and sent the copy off by post, and kept doing so into the 2010s. With writers these days churning out words like the wind, I find a sense of slowness, of polish and pause, all the more precious.
**
Saturday 5 November 2022. The computers at Birkbeck Library respond to a user logging into the system with a pop-up message of confirmation. For ten years, I used to see: ‘Dickon Edwards: Student’. Now that I’ve moved on to be an Associate Research Fellow, which is a form of unpaid affiliation, the system labels me as ‘Dickon Edwards: Other’. I read far too much into this official designation of otherness.
Going through old clutter, I find an out of date CV. Under ‘Other Work’ there is a long list. I suppose this is part of my problem. I have done too much Other Work, and not enough Normal Work. The list includes the following.
Custodian, Kenwood House (English Heritage), 1998 to 2000. Essentially a glorified security guard, standing around in beautiful rooms full of beautiful paintings and furniture. I had to ensure visitors didn’t damage or steal anything, but I was also required to give information about the art. It meant for a crash course in Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Gainsborough, which I loved.
Shop assistant, Archway Video DVD & VHS library, Archway Road, 2004 to 2007. I actually rebuilt the shop’s website myself, using the program Dreamweaver. Free access to films, which was bliss. And the shop was 5 minutes’ walk from my bedsit in Southwood Avenue.
Guest columnist for Green Wedge, political website. One-off.
Blogger for Latitude Festival.
Gig reviewer for Drowned in Sound.
Concert guitarist with the band Spearmint. 1999-2000. Toured the UK, Sweden and Japan. Amicably sacked for inability.
Concert guitarist with Scarlet’s Well. 2004. Amicably sacked for inability after 1 gig, which suggests my guitar skills declined even further after Spearmint. Today I don’t own a guitar at all, having taken the hint.
DJ at club nights ‘The Beautiful and Damned’, at the Boogaloo, Highgate, and at my own night in Camden, ‘Against Nature’. Also DJ’d at the British Library, Latitude Festival, Last Tuesday Society, Curious Invitation, White Mischief, How Does It Feel to be Loved, and other club nights. Have since thrown out my DJ CDRs along with my guitar.
Model for the cover of the academic book Materializing Queer Desire by Elisa Glick.
Extra in the films Shaun of the Dead (zombie in shirt and tie), Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (party guest in suit and tie), and Gambit (restaurant diner in suit and tie).
Life model at art classes – somewhere near Holloway Women’s Prison.
Personal assistant, or ‘New Romantic Butler’ as one of his friends put it, to the musician Shane MacGowan, mainly for two one-off trips to Tangier, and one to New York.
Standing for election to Haringey Council, Highgate ward, as a Green Party candidate (May 2006). Wore heavy make-up.
Invited as guest of honour for an exhibition on menswear at the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands. Lent one of my suits to go on display, as an example of a modern dandy.
Invited to be sole UK performer at the 2008 Stockholm International Poetry Festival.
And these are just the things I haven’t put on my current CV.
The world of CVs expects all people to choose one thing – a ‘career’ – aged 18, and to stick to that to the grave. I’ve never been like that. I now have a BA (1st class), MA (distinction), and a PhD, and four academic prizes, on top of my varied list of experiences. And still the job market views me as, well, too ‘Other’.
I don’t know really what to do. Except to carry on looking and applying, and to carry on writing.
**
Thursday 10 November 2022. To the Vue cinema near Angel for Bros, an American mainstream romcom about gay men. There’s a reference in the film to You’ve Got Mail, but the main character is no Meg Ryan. He doesn’t stop being neurotic long enough for the audience to care about him. His love interest, the Tom Hanks figure I suppose, is physically handsome but utterly dull. But both actors play well enough, and the ‘com’ is certainly all there, if not the ‘rom’. There’s plenty of one-liners, and I find myself laughing aloud. But it’s one of those films where I come away wondering what could have been improved.
**
Saturday 12 November 2022. Wearing a linen suit due to the unseasonal warmth. If the world is ending, one might as well look one’s best for it.
Looking for a seat on a train today, I walk past a young couple. She bursts into a manic giggle. He says, ‘What da f— was that?’ Still got it.
Saturday 19 November 2022. One of the most quoted lines from Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Notes on “Camp”‘ is:
‘It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized – or at least apolitical.’
There have been many refutations of this claim ever since, often indicating the many political and subversive uses of camp, from drag queens at the Stonewall riots, to Donald Trump’s use of the Village People song ‘YMCA’ at his rallies. Sontag herself changed her mind on this position in a 1975 interview. Her own example of political camp was Mae West, arguing that she used camp as a form of feminism.
Today I watch Joe Lycett’s new stand-up show on video. He manages to blend mischief, pranks, and camp smut with a very contemporary form of social activism. His style of camp speaking is old-fashioned in the mode of Kenneth Williams, yet his material is closer to that of Michael Moore. Although Michael Moore is unlikely to refer to Lisa Scott-Lee from Steps.
If you need proof that camp can be political, Joe Lycett is it.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
I’ve left this online diary go fallow for too long, with the last update in October 2020. Some sort of explanation is warranted.
In George Orwell’s essay Why I Write (1946), he boils down his motivation for writing to four desires:
Sheer egoism. The desire to seem clever, to be talked about and remembered after death.
Until January 2022, I was working on a PhD in English and Humanities. I was paid full-time by the UK government to do this from 2019 to 2021. The PhD was my day job, and had to take priority over any other writing. Any desire to seem clever was therefore spoken for.
As for any desire to be talked about or remembered after death, that waned. With the pandemic causing a surge in online self-presentation for all, I became all too aware how much I’d failed to elevate my voice above the crowd of Instagrammers, YouTubers, Twitchers, and Tweeters, all broadcasting the scrolling minutiae of their lives to the world. It’s all diary writing of a kind.
By late 2020 I had spent twenty-three years writing the diary, posting millions of words and keeping them all online in a searchable archive. But I still couldn’t get enough donations from readers to make the diary pay. I have to accept that I’m a niche ‘content provider’ – and that’s putting it nicely.
The egoism is starting to return now, however. The PhD is finished, and I continue to exist. So I need to write.
One remaining ambition is to publish books. I’m more fascinated with printed books as objects than ever: their offline quality, their calm immersion, their freedom from pop-up adverts for Volvos.
Aesthetic enthusiasm. The desire to take pleasure from the firmness of good prose.
Orwell’s essay goes on to include his remark about prose needing to be plain and unembellished in its style. That there should be nothing between the words and the reader: ‘good prose is like a window pane’.
The thing is, some of us like a bit of stained glass from time to time.
The PhD made me so sensitive to bad writing that it put me off writing anything new myself. But that’s over now. I’m now back in the mindset where I know what I like, and want to make more of it.
Historical impulse. The desire to find out facts and to store them for the use of posterity.
I switched to Twitter and Instagram for the desire to ‘store’ the facts of my life. This was a combination of laziness and loneliness. The need for ‘Likes’ and the sense of an instant audience can be powerful. But it’s a false satisfaction. My idea of hell would be a tweet going viral. I’d hate to be famous for writing a tweet. I should return to the diary for that reason alone.
Political purpose. The desire to push the world in a certain direction.
I do believe in trying to change the world for the better, particularly in the sense of promoting imagination, literacy, difference, wit, art, and intelligence, over, say, violence, conformity, exploitation, and thuggery. This urge left me during the depths of the pandemic, when the ability to ‘push the world’ felt secondary to the need to prevent the spread of Covid. I became downright paranoid about the virus, as the following new diary entries will demonstrate.
* *
24 October 2020. I pass a loud young couple on Tottenham Court Road. They’re dressed in punkish alternative wear: black t-shirts, black jeans, Goth hair (or as they say now, Emo hair). They are singing a mantra in the faces of passers-by, to the tune of ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’: ‘You can stick your Covid tyranny up your arse’. The couple are obviously walking home from one of the regular Saturday protests by the anti-vaxxer brigade. Except that these two are young, as opposed to the more typical conspiracy theorists, who tend to be greying and Gandalf-like. With young people, all rebellion is the same and all rebellion is good.
* *
29 Oct 2020. On the tube. Everyone is meant to wear a face mask, but the last carriage of an Overground train tends to be the Noses Out zone. The lads zone. Like the back of the bus.
* *
30 Oct 2020. Eating by myself at the Plough pub near the British Museum:
* *
31 Oct 2020. Desperate for somewhere of my own to work, I am lent by Birkbeck the use of a tutor’s office. It’s on the second floor of 47 Gordon Square. The Ginger Jules café in the square provides takeaway soup. My view from the window must be more or less the same view the young Virginia Woolf would have been used to when she lived there:
* *
16 November 2020. It feels like we’re past the End Times and into the blooper reel.
* *
23 November 2020. I am interviewed via email by a writer researching the Sarah Records music scene, of the early 90s. I have to apologise to her about the scantiness of my recollections. At this point my mind is entirely dominated with the world of my thesis: the life and work of Ronald Firbank and the history of camp in fiction. I feel I’m too steeped in my present to access my own past. It’s like stopping halfway through lunch to discuss breakfast.
* *
29 November 2020. I watch the film Happiest Season, a glossy Christmas romcom aimed at the mainstream Love Actually market, but with young lesbians as the leads. I think of Derek Jarman writing in his diary in 1993 about appearing on the Channel 4 special, Camp Christmas: ‘The depths of our dislike for this family event was hardly disguised. It’s not easy for gay people to enjoy Christmas, the two don’t mix’. Perhaps the mainstream hype over Happiest Season is a sign that this is no longer the case.
* *
30 November 2020. I read an article from 1963 wherein Dennis Potter praises the very first series of Doctor Who. He calls the Tardis ‘a distinctly Marples-free machine’. It’s a topical reference to Ernest Marples, the Transport Minister at the time, who oversaw the Beeching cuts to the railways.
* *
2 December 2020. At this time of year I usually like to sit in the café next to the ice rink at Somerset House, just to enjoy the atmosphere. I never skate. This year there’s no skating. Instead the space is host to pricy transparent igloos, ‘dining pods’, for groups to hire, assuming they’re all in the same Covid ‘bubble’.
* *
7 December 2020. I go for a symptom-less Covid test at the former ULU in Malet St. There’s a row of white testing booths set up in the auditorium where they used to hold concerts. I first visited this room in 1989 or so, damaging my hearing to see groups like My Bloody Valentine and (the rather less noisy) They Might Be Giants. I feel relieved at the negative Covid result, but it does nothing to assuage the worry over how long this is going to continue.
* *
14 December 2020. It’s looking likely that there’s a second wave of the virus on the way. Mum and I call off meeting for Christmas. She says it’s the first time that she’ll be spending Christmas by herself in her whole life.
* *
19 December 2020. With my Covid paranoia sky-high, I look at ads for single flats and bedsits. Just one day looking is enough to turn one into an extreme Marxist, such is the greed on view.
* *
21 December 2020. Thanks to Bibi Lynch on Twitter I find a small bedsit in Angel, off the Liverpool Road. It’s within walking distance of Birkbeck and the British Library. A Christmas delivery.
**
24 December 2020. I move to Angel on Christmas Eve, with all the pleasing connotations of the Nativity. I unpack my library, feeling like Walter Benjamin, except with more plastic laundry bags, the zip-up kind with a plaid pattern. I buy a dozen from a pound-shop on the Kingsland Road. This is a tip from none other than Alex Kapranos, of the band Franz Ferdinand. If you have to move house on a budget, and you have no sturdy boxes, the bags are perfect.
* *
26 December 2020. Eating Roses chocolates. I find Celebrations too butch, Quality Street too post-colonial.
* *
8 January 2021. A new lockdown begins. London has been declared a ‘major incident’. In the infinite Sainsbury’s on Liverpool Road there’s still many people with no masks. Salad days for the paranoid.
* *
21 January 2021. I prefer the earlier, funnier lockdowns.
* *
25 January 2021. My review of It’s A Sin, the new TV series: It’s Alright.
* *
1 February 2021. With so many people working from home and communicating via video call software like Zoom, one question is how to present oneself onscreen. A common background is a set of bookshelves. It’s been reported that used bookshops have done well out of the pandemic, with the well-off hastily buying books in bulk, purely for this decorative purpose. To paraphrase Anthony Powell, books do furnish a Zoom.
* *
4 February 2021. I find myself increasingly irritated by memoirs, which I find, paradoxically, too fictional. William Burroughs on Paul Bowles’s memoir, Without Stopping: ‘It should have been called Without Telling‘. Many memoirs are essentially the same book: ‘I once had a hard time but I’m now fine and I’m using this to build a brand’. Exceptions being The Naked Civil Servant, last line ‘I crawl towards my grave…’ Except that too built a brand. The most truthful opening line is Viv Albertine’s: ‘Anyone who writes an autobiography is either a twat or broke’.
* *
5 February 2021. Hate having to write a short biography to go with a piece of writing. What counts? The form tempts parody:
‘He divides his time between Paris and Rome. Which are his pet names for the bed and the fridge’.
‘He has been a Writer In Residence. By writing in his residence’.
* *
10 March 2021. I finish the first draft of the thesis, after three and a half years of work. Now editing. It’s far too long to be submitted, at 108 thousand words. The maximum allowed for a thesis is 100k.
* *
14 March 2021. A sticker for Twitter: ‘this machine kills nuance’.
Also, the first rule of Twitter: if something can be taken the wrong way, it will be taken the wrong way.
* *
9 April 2021. Prince Philip dies. His one entry in the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations is the ‘slitty-eyed’ comment.
* *
14 April 2021. I receive my first dose of a Covid vaccine. This takes place at the Business Design Centre in Islington, Upper Street, a huge Victorian brick building which once hosted the first Crufts. The vaccine recipients are marshalled into a series of snaking queues, outside and inside the building. We are all socially distanced, and everyone is in face coverings. There’s some live music as we wait: a young man sits in a corner playing soothing jazz improvisations on an electric guitar. Islington in a nutshell.
* *
22 April 2021. An excited email from an academic friend who has just discovered that I was in the 90s band Orlando. He is now accusing me of ‘keeping that quiet’.
* *
27 April 2021. I do hope what makes Boris J go is his wallpaper, if only for the Wildean connotations.
* *
1 May 2021. I visit Islington Council’s South Library on Essex Road, the red-brick branch where Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell were caught customising the covers of library books. Today South Library doesn’t stock any of Orton’s own books but it does use his name in its publicity for the building’s centenary. Orton is officially the most interesting thing to happen to that library. And they put him in jail.
* *
6 May 2021. I vote at Thornhill Primary School, Thornhill Road, N1, in the mayoral elections. As I make my mark in the booth with the usual stubby pencil on the usual piece of card, a teacher outside in the playground swings a hand bell to signal the next class. Both practices remain unchanged in decades.
* *
18 May 2021. Drinking in Fitzrovia means you risk overhearing film & TV people saying things like ‘the DP was a legend’.
* *
5 June 2021. On Saturdays in London, one thinks of Quentin Crisp’s remark that protest is a game any number can play. Today, walking around central London, I am collared by anti-vaxxers (aggressive), eco warriors (civil), and Free Julian Assange activists (feral).
* *
13 June 2021. Walking along Upper Street on a hot day, I am the only man in trousers rather than shorts. If nothing else, I supply punctuation.
* *
2 September 2021. Shanthi S marks my 50th birthday with a meal at Le Sacre Coeur, Theberton Street.
* *
3 September 2021. I spend my actual birthday visiting St Leonards-on-Sea and Hastings. Royal Victoria Hotel for afternoon tea. I eye the flats of Marine Court, the 1930s block that’s modelled on the Queen Mary ocean liner, with the same yearning as I do the ones in the Barbican.
* *
4 September 2021. A boozy night at Vout-o-Reenee’s in Tower Hill. Sophie Parkin makes me an impromptu birthday cake. It’s also the birthday of the fashion designer Roberta (on Instagram at @gownsbyroberta). We have a joint photo:
* *
29 September 2021. I submit the PhD thesis and start revising for the exam.
* *
20 November 2021. I start writing occasional reviews for The Wire again.
* *
7 December 2021. My PhD examination (the ‘viva voce’). Result: Pass with Minor Corrections. My examiners are Joseph Bristow and Kirsten MacLeod. I have until early January to resubmit with the corrections. The exam is via video call, but I’m at 46 Gordon Square, 1st floor, once home to the Bloomsbury Group, which pleases me immensely.
* *
24 December 2021. Christmas with Mum in Suffolk.
* *
8 January 2022. I resubmit the thesis with the corrections.
* *
19 January 2022. Officially notified by Birkbeck of my PhD award. I’m now allowed to call myself Dr Edwards.
* *
31 January 2022. Current activity: applying for grants to write an academic book based on the thesis. Going to seminars on CVs and careers. Also sending out book proposals: one for an experimental monograph-cum-memoir, one for a novel.
It turns out that getting a paid job after doing an English PhD is even harder than doing an English PhD.
* *
18 February 2022. My thesis, ‘Ronald Firbank and the Legacy of Camp Modernism’, is now online at Birkbeck’s online library. It’s available for anyone in the world to download, and for free, and is indexed by Google:
I still want to turn the thesis into a printed book, but my honour is satisfied in terms of getting the research out there. There are still thousands of words left out, though, which I need to turn into articles. A whole section on Anthony Powell, for instance.
* *
28 March 2022. I review the new Soft Cell album for the Wire, which includes their collaboration with Pet Shop Boys. The continuing creativity of both groups is inspirational when considering my own aging body and wondering what best to do with it. Sparks even more so: now in their 70s, putting out manifestly brilliant work like their 2020 album A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip.
* *
24 April 2022. A kind reader of the thesis sends me £50 out of the blue, knowing as they do the difficulties in getting paid for academic writing. It’s the three boxes to tick: getting paid to do what one is good at, getting paid to do what one enjoys, and getting paid enough to live on, modestly but autonomously. It’s the third box that’s still elusive.
* *
3 May 2022. My PhD graduation ceremony at Senate House. Mum attends, up from Suffolk. Dame Joan Bakewell, the college President, gives a speech. The ceremony has a little bit of extra business for the PhD graduates: they have to kneel on a padded wooden frame while the Master of Birkbeck puts a sash-style hood over them. The hood represents the PhD itself. Then the candidate arises, symbolically transformed into a Doctor of Philosophy. PhDs also wear soft Tudor-style caps rather than mortar boards.
This is Birkbeck’s first ceremony in person since the pandemic. No social distancing or mandatory masks. The audience of graduates and their proud relations packs out the hall on the ground floor. One change, however, is the omission of the traditional handshake with the Master. Today a nod suffices.
My diploma arrives by registered post a few days later. With that, my ten years at Birkbeck as a mature student are finally done: BA, MA, and now PhD. The ‘triple’, as it’s called.
* *
8 June 2022. I spend the weeks after graduation being the most sociable I’ve been since the pandemic began. I meet friends and go to the cinema. And then, perhaps inevitably, I get Covid. It lasts the best part of 14 days. Fever for the first four days, then it feels like a heavy cold afterwards, though with an added unfamiliar fuzziness.
* *
6 July 2022. One of my applications meets with success. Birkbeck has now conferred a new title on me: Associate Research Fellow in the School of Arts (Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing). Starting October 2022 and lasting a year. The title is an unpaid affiliation role, though I am rewarded with a staff ID card, a staff email address and full library access. In return, I’ll be expected to contribute to the department’s research activity on a light basis. It’ll be good to have a sense of belonging, and to have something to point to while I’m looking for the next thing.
* *
19 July 2022. I win Birkbeck’s Margaret Elise Harkness Fellowship Prize, for my research into Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. It’s my fourth prize at the college, following one in 2014 for my work on the Saint Etienne film Finisterre, one in 2015 for getting the highest grade in my year for the BA English course, and one in 2017 for getting the highest grade on the MA Contemporary Literature and Culture course. It’s a nice thing for my student years to go out on, not least because it comes with £2000 (though I have to wait until late August to actually receive the cash).
* *
28 July 2022. Still looking for a regular source of income. The Job Centre are about to put me on their mandatory Restart Scheme. All job adverts ask the same question: ‘can you pretend to be normal?’
Today I have an intense panic attack after hours spent clicking through an interminable application form for a university post. It asks me to provide ten supporting statements. I eventually abandon the application altogether, all enthusiasm quashed. All I want to do is to earn a living wage doing something that doesn’t hurt too much.
What keeps me going? A belief that, contrary to what the job market implies, difference is an asset, not an obstacle. That, and the conviction that my best work is still ahead of me. The Harkness prize certainly helps, too. Money isn’t everything, but it is one way of telling people what sort of work they are good at, and what sort of work they should keep doing.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Friday 29 May 2020. We’re all in this together. Except that some of us are more in it than others. The pandemic has exposed everyone’s technological limitations; if you can’t afford super-fast broadband and a decent computer, your lockdown life is going to be rather more locked than others.
My old desktop is dying, and the cheap (£75) mini-PC I bought to replace it can barely run Microsoft Word without stalling. So I finally buy a new laptop. The price is £250, which is the most I can afford. Happily, this just about works for video meetings, a function which for many is now the difference between employment and the dole. I have to spend an arduous volume of time updating the software. One might have thought that someone who had written a diary online for twenty years would be good with computers, or at the very least interested in their workings. But I am entirely incurious. I just want the things to work. And if you’re living on a low budget, things tend to not work. Still, I can speak to Mum via video now. At the beginning of the lockdown, we spoke every day.
*
Sunday 7 June 2020. The schools remain closed. I read a Sunday Times supplement on home schooling. Here, parents are provided with ready-made lessons written by teachers. One lesson on English grammar requires the pupil to identify ‘forward adverbials’. This is aimed at 8-year-olds.
*
Thursday 11 June 2020. A day of relief. I have my PhD funding extended, to allow for the obstacles created by the pandemic. I’ll now remain a full time PhD student until October 2021. By that point I’ll be fifty and (I hope) finishing the thesis. What then? No plans, but then no one knows what the world will be like in late 2021 anyway. The grant is still only £17k a year to live on, but it’s work I enjoy. And it certainly could be worse.
*
Tuesday 13 June 2020. I ‘attend’ an online arts event: a Q & A with the film director Carol Morley. The software encourages you to have your webcam switched on throughout the event, even if you’re not asking a question. I am distracted by seeing the silent faces of the other attendees watching in their various homes. If this were a physical event it would be like letting audience members spend the occasion clambering over the seats, scrutinising each other’s’ faces and demanding them to explain their bookshelves.
*
Wednesday 14 June 2020. I watch You Don’t Nomi, an arthouse documentary about the strange afterlife of the 1990s big-budget film Showgirls. When Showgirls was released it was deemed laughably poor. Since then the film has acquired a cult following, almost on the level of Rocky Horror. It’s a good example of Sontag’s ‘naïve camp’ at play; camp by accident. That said, in this new documentary the Showgirls star and director insist that the whole thing was meant to be tongue-in-cheek from the off. I believe Gina Gershon, one of the other actors, though, when she says she played her role like a drag queen.
We now speak of ‘optics’ – how something looks, though whom to is never quite specified. Something looking ‘bad’ can result in the tainting of a brand, even the sacking of staff.
But not always. Consider our prime minister, a ‘character’ with a strong look, who cares little what people think, as long as they’re looking. This is how camp becomes a weapon. If you make a surface exaggerated enough, it becomes non-stick. Bad films are redeemed with new appeal, bad politicians keep their jobs.
*
Thursday 15 June 2020. One sign of things returning to normal is that today I get a catcall in the street. On Dalston Kingsland High Street I overhear, in my direction: ‘Exterminate! Exterminate! He looks like f–ing…’
I presume they mean Peter Capaldi’s Doctor Who. Particularly in his later episodes, with his hair grown out, looking mad and untamed. He rather anticipated the lockdown look.
*
Tuesday 20 June 2020. My local bookshop, Burley Fisher, has re-opened but cannot let customers inside. Instead they have a table across the entrance. The staff stand behind this, fetching books like a kiosk.
*
Friday 26 June 2020. To Clissold Park for tentative drinks in the park with Ms Shanthi and friends. We try to socially distance, but this turns out to be quite difficult, particularly when we stand under a tree to shelter from the English summer rain. The instinct when in company is always to move closer. After a few drinks, even more so. The fear now is that two’s company, three’s an outbreak. Fun has become a minefield of worry.
*
Wednesday 28 June 2020. People are starting to go on foreign holidays where they can. I can’t share the sentiment: the germ is abroad too. At the moment, I’ll settle for being allowed to visit other parts of London.
*
Monday 6th July 2020. The lockdown has relaxed to the point where the London Library has reopened. This is my idea of civilisation returning. I’m keen to avoid public transport as much as I can, so I begin a new routine of long walks every morning, from Dalston into the city.
In the main reading room of the LL the armchairs have gone. All the desks are carefully marked, with chairs removed at some desks, so that everyone is at least 2 metres apart. I don’t last long in this particular space, though: someone behind me starts coughing.
*
Tuesday 7th July 2020. Haircuts are allowed again. Kommy at Cuts and Bruises, 57 Stoke Newington Road, cuts mine while wearing a clear visor. I wear a mask. Somehow he pins back the straps on my mask to the collar guard, so he can cut the hair around my ears. Colouring appointments are still not available, though, so I bleach my hair myself, using a Jerome Russell ‘B-Blonde No.1’ kit. £5.
*
Wednesday 8 July 2020. The pandemic has meant there’s more bicycles about, along with e-scooters, those powered standing platforms that are suddenly everywhere. The e-scooters manage to look unsafe on both the road and the pavement. I’ve seen a dad take his small daughter to school on one, the child holding onto his legs as he swerves around cars. I suppose that’s an example of risk assessment: avoiding death by virus, at the risk of death by traffic accident.
Each to their own, I suppose, though I resent the way this new trend also endangers pedestrians. Quite often now I find myself close to being hit by an e-scooter or a bicycle going at full speed, even though I am just walking on the pavement.
*
Thursday 9 July 2020. Am sitting in outdoor cafes more often, a new favourite being the one in Red Lion Square Gardens.
The virus has brought out the city in spots. London is covered in circular stickers on the pavement, marking the limits of two metres, or a one-way route, or both.
At the junction of Clerkenwell Road and Grays Inn Road: a sticker on a post: ‘MASKS ARE BAD FOR YOU’.
*
Saturday 11 July 2020. To Vout-o-Reenee’s in Tower Hill for a private view of Sophie Parkin’s paintings. All painted by her during the lockdown. This is my one big social evening out of the summer, though there’s still only a handful of people here, all invited and registered. I enjoy myself, but as with many of my occasional social occasions during the pandemic, I spend subsequent days worrying in case I’ve done something irresponsible.
*
Wednesday 15 July 2020. Much conversation online about the meaning of statues. Something about the invisible nature of a virus has heightened the awareness of more visible cruelties. Statues of slave traders are being pulled down by protesters, most sensationally with the Edward Colston statue in Bristol.
Toppling statues activates their meaning. It blows off the dust. Only then does the ‘valuable history lesson’ that their defenders point to take place. The Colston statue certainly failed to enter my consciousness until now, and I lived in Bristol for three years.
I’m intrigued by the date of the statue: late 1800s, a whole century and a half after his death. So it represents not just Restoration prosperity but also late Victorian anxiety over the end of Empire. And now, the toppling says something about the anxieties of 2020.
*
Friday 17 July 2020. Tickets are released for the reopening of the British Library. Predictably the servers crash at once. It’s Glastonbury for researchers.
*
Saturday 25 July 2020. First time back at the British Library. We’re allocated a specific desk in the reading rooms, but it’s only for three hours maximum per week. And we have to wear a mask.
I manage to stop my glasses fogging up after much initial frustration. What I don’t do is wear a mask with my nose poking out, which many people do as a compromise. Half-arsed faces.
*
Tuesday 28 July 2020. Thinking of Hilary Mantel’s new essay collection Mantel Pieces, I’m now wondering if Shooting an Elephant should have been called Orwell and Good. Against Interpretation could have been Sontag, Bloody Sontag.
*
Thursday 30 July 2020. Something the film director Whit Stillman shares with Angela Carter: they both put seminars on Ronald Firbank in their work (Stillman’s film Damsels in Distress; Carter’s radio play A Self-Made Man).
*
Friday 31 July 2020. Working from home isn’t easy for a lodger. My rented bedroom is not designed to be a full-time office for months on end. Thankfully, Birkbeck have allocated an empty classroom on the Torrington Square campus, in Bloomsbury, to myself and two other full-time PhD students. This will last until the college library reopens in October.
I’m usually the only one in the empty classroom; the security guards have to unlock the room for me specially. There’re so few people in the building, it’s like The Shining. One of the security guards says they’ve had to remove the occasional homeless person from the classrooms.
*
Thursday 6 Aug 2020. At the Museum of London. Some of the displays are still closed off, as they’re in alcoves where socially distancing is impossible. Instead there are barriers with signs saying ‘Please view from here’. With bleak irony, these include the ones on the Black Death.
*
Saturday 8 August 2020. To Enfield to house-sit for Shanthi S. ‘It’s like The Detectorists around here’.
*
Tuesday 18 August 2020. From a documentary on Philip Glass, I learn that the composer has an Allen Ginsberg quotation taped to his piano, by way of motivation. It’s from Memory Gardens (1969):
‘Well, while I’m here, I’ll do the work – And what’s the Work?
To ease the pain of living.
Everything else, drunken dumbshow.’
*
Weds 19 August 2020. First trip out of London since March, to see Mum. We choose to meet for lunch in Manningtree, a halfway point between Mum and London. I’m still too nervous about going much further out of the city. We eat outdoors in the garden of the restaurant Lucca. As per the advice, we sit at an angle rather than directly facing each other, and we don’t hug or touch.
*
Monday 24 August 2020. The more likely the end of the world, the more I shave and put on a tie.
*
Saturday 29 August 2020. Hurtling towards the age of 49. I ponder the increasing evidence in my face and consider damage limitation. And yet, I don’t want to be one of those men who grow a beard out of sheer resentment at not dying young.
I’m uneasy that I’m still a very odd person. On the plus side, it’s such a comfort.
*
As part of my PhD, I’m consulting the British Library’s archive of Angela Carter’s papers: her unpublished letters, manuscripts and notebooks. I recognise much of the material Edmund Gordon included in his biography The Invention of Angela Carter. One example is the phrase she uses when ending a letter to her partner Mark, written while she was away in America. ‘Please miss me’.
*
Tuesday 1 Sept 2020. To the Rio cinema for Tenet with Jon S. I give up trying to make sense of the premise and just enjoy the nice suits.
*
Thursday 3 Sept 2020. My 49th birthday. I take a solo day trip on the train to Brighton. Quite a lot of people about, albeit with signs advising social distancing, including on the pier. Prosecco dinner in the Palm Court on the pier. I sit in various cafes and bars, including the ‘Loading’ gaming bar on the beachfront. I don’t join in with any of the computer games or board games. I just look on with my glass of wine, a little confused as to how I ended up here or where I’m going next. But happy to still be around.
*
Saturday 5 September 2020. At the British Library, I find a note by Angela Carter in one of her journals from the 1980s, all the more amusing given she was once a Booker Prize judge: ‘The Owl of Minerva as a title – from ‘The Owl of Minerva flies at dusk’- Hegel. It’s got a nice, solid, Booker-Prizeish ring to it.’
*
8 September 2020. Life in 2020: seeing an unknown number on the phone and immediately worrying that it’s Track and Trace (it was a wrong number).
*
13 September 2020. A favourite quote, usually attributed to Doris Lessing: ‘Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.’ I’ve seen this quote many times, and though I like the sentiment I can’t find any proof that Lessing said these actual words.
‘Do it now’ risks giving Lessing’s name the quality of a Nike ad. Though perhaps that’s the ultimate goal for a writer anyway.
*
Friday 18 September 2020. To Bildeston in Suffolk for dinner at the Crown pub with Mum. This is my third trip out of London since March, and my first to the village I grew up in since last Christmas. We eat outdoors: it’s warm and pleasant. Mum is now making online videos for her classes on quilt-making. She has over two hundred subscribers.
*
Sunday 27 Sept 2020. Reading The Young and Evil, which is so rare I have to refer to a copy at archive.org. Some authors are claiming that archive.org breaches copyright to the point of piracy. They have no idea what a lifeline it’s been to students during the pandemic. I think of the remark made (I think) by Tim Berners-Lee around the time of Napster, with people downloading music. ‘Make it easy for people to do the right thing’.
It’s also like the 1980s campaign, ‘Home Taping Kills Music’. Home taping did the reverse: new generations of people, unable to afford records, were inspired to make music of their own. Why are these lessons never learned?
*
Friday 2 Oct 2020. The National Gallery does Titian face coverings. I wonder what kind of person would buy such a thing. Then I realise it’s me, and buy one.
Branded masks are the way forward now. Bands who do t-shirts need to get into masks. If this was 1990, the Inspiral Carpets would be known for selling more masks than records.
*
Tuesday 6 Oct 2020. Dinner with Shanthi S in Pizza Express, Upper Street, Islington. The place is close to empty. Many of the other branches of PE in London have closed temporarily or for good. She takes a couple of photos, giving me the air of an Edward Hopper painting.
*
Friday 9 Oct 2020. From my bedroom I attend the first online lecture of the new academic year. The lecturer supplies a video recording, seven days in advance, complete with slides and subtitles. Then on the evening itself we can put questions to her live. The lack of being in the same room is a drawback, but being able to pause a lecture and revisit different points is a great help to retaining the information. Something is lost, but something is gained.
*
Tuesday 13 Oct 2020. Mr Johnson announces a ‘three tier’ system for new restrictions, as the coronavirus cases are rising once again. New metaphors take the stage. What might happen now is a short return to lockdown, or a ‘circuit breaker’. What depresses now is the feeling of being trapped in time as much as place. A sense of these things never ending.
*
Thursday 22 October 2020. To the Dalston Rio to see Saint Maud, an arty British horror film. The film is atmospheric and confident, if small in scale. It plays throughout with the question of whether supernatural events are really happening, or whether they’re all in the mind of the protagonist. There’s a good use of an off-season Scarborough, its beach and hills. The lead actor, Morfydd Clark, couldn’t be more different from the last role I saw her in, the dog-wielding Dora in David Copperfield.
The Rio cinema has managed to stay open into the second wave of the pandemic, and tonight there’s a healthy amount of audience, all socially distanced and masked, our temperatures checked on the way in. The nearest rival, Hackney Picturehouse, has closed along with the rest of the Picturehouse and Cineworld chains. The blame has gone on the big studios for postponing the noisier, big-budget titles, such as the new James Bond. This is a time of quieter films, for quieter streets.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Monday
24 June 2019. Working slowly on the third chapter of the
thesis. It is currently like walking in mud. To stretch the analogy further,
one fears either becoming stuck for good or that one’s shoes will come off,
leaving our hero looking foolish. Well, why stop now?
This evening I go to
the Birkbeck arts department in Gordon Square and attend my Graduate Monitoring
Interview for the second year of the PhD. This is an annual check-up with a
tutor who is not your supervisor. You can discuss any problems that may have
emerged over the past school year, which includes any difficulties with one’s supervisors.
Supervisors often get a
bad press, the stereotype often being that they have flings with their students.
Even the hip Netflix series Russian Doll continues
this rather tired tradition. I’ve never heard of any such goings-on at Birkbeck,
though perhaps the less traditional set-up of evening classes and mature
students makes that possibility less likely. In real life, the student’s concern
is not so much that a supervisor might be too hands-on, but that they’re not
hands-on enough. One hears horror stories of supervisors failing to reply to
emails for months on end, or of them being too busy for even the briefest
meeting, or of them forgetting that their students even exist. In this respect,
I have been lucky, as so far mine have been perfectly responsive. The problems I
have had are entirely my own fault: wobbles of doubt, worries over my
abilities, bouts of procrastination.
So that’s what we
discuss tonight. The tutor I have for this meeting, Dr Owen, suggests a useful
motto: ‘write ugly words first’. Don’t worry about the quality of the first
draft. Just hit the word count. Only afterwards, during the editing stage, are you
allowed to turn it into The Great Gatsby.
This may be an obvious lesson, but I still have problems learning it.
**
Thursday
27 June 2019. I give a tour of Birkbeck for my
friend Sonja T and her daughter Daisy. Daisy is about 18, and is keen to do a
degree. She’s apprehensive of the competitive side of being among her own
generation, so the mixed-age aspect of Birkbeck appeals. Indeed, the class
discussions are much more interesting as a result: glimpses of different domestic
situations, of people with different daytime jobs, of people who’ve already had
long lives and are now topping up their intellect, and of younger people who can
be surprising with their choices of favourite texts. Brideshead Revisited was one such book on my BA course: despite its
snobbishness and sentimentality, the younger students, including girls of
ethnic and religious minorities, could not get enough of it. It was the
character of Sebastian Flyte they liked: for all his wealth and privilege he is
still a troubled young person, struggling with sexuality, family and faith. No
shortage of that in the world, whatever the background.
I also remain a fan of the 1980s TV adaptation, the influence of which could be seen in an episode of Killing Eve recently. When Villanelle turns up in Oxford, she dresses in what she imagines is an Oxford boy look: light shirt, brown slacks and a cream tie, with a cricket jumper knotted over her shoulders. According to the costume designer, this was a deliberate nod to Anthony Andrews as Sebastian in the TV Brideshead.
**
Friday 28 June 2019: I have a rule on not going to any festivals unless I am invited to appear. It rubs in my own sense of failure otherwise.
**
Saturday 29 June 2019. I read Bret Easton Ellis’s White, his new collection of essays. I’d been enjoying his podcasts, with his soft-spoken monologues railing against the world. So I was interested to see how he would render them into prose. Sadly the result on the page is a shapeless rant lacking any sense of cohesion. It doesn’t help when he admits a tendency to go on Twitter in the middle of the night fuelled by ‘a mixture of insomnia and tequila’. That says it all. To update Capote, that’s not writing, that’s tweeting.
Still, there’s something in his theory that the hyper 1980s world of his novel American Psycho has come to pass on today’s social media, with the valorising of ‘likes’ and dislikes’ and the posting of photographs of one’s restaurant meals.
**
The Women’s Football World Cup has becoming immensely popular this year. I don’t know much about football, but I like Megan Rapinoe’s hair.
**
Saturday 6 July 2019. I see Yesterday at the Everyman cinema in King’s Cross. This turns out to be in the rather soulless new buildings to the north of the Granary Square development. The film has a bizarre premise about a struggling singer-songwriter waking up in a world where the Beatles never existed, except in his memory. So he goes about becoming a pop star by passing off their songs as his own. Unlike Groundhog Day, the magical conceit isn’t properly connected to the love story, so the latter feels added to pad out the film. However, the lead actor Himesh Patel’s rendition of ‘In My Life’ – simple and sincere – quite takes me by surprise, and I’m in floods of tears when he does it.
**
Sunday 7 July 2019. The day after Pride, Holborn tube platform is covered in little silver gas canisters, as well as the discarded box they came in. This reveals that the objects are manufactured as ‘cream chargers’, intended to go in dispensers of whipped cream. Not here, though. The gas, nitrous oxide, can be sniffed (once decanted into a balloon) to produce a legal high. But not a harmless one: there’s reports of the things causing permanent nerve damage, breathing problems, and even death from asphyxiation. I’m more grumpy about the litter aspect. Knock yourself out, just be tidy when you do it.
Nitrous oxide is better known as laughing gas. With the clown-like Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, the idea of his Britain being one where the drug of choice is laughing gas might read as a corny political metaphor. That’s the trouble with reality. It’s so badly written.
**
Monday 8 July 2019. Going in through the barriers at Dalston Junction tube station, a woman going the other way calls out my name. This turns out to be Suzy Woods, with whom I was at Great Cornard Upper School, Suffolk in 1989, last seen briefly at a Spearmint gig in Brighton circa 1999. Suzy has two hulking teenage boys in tow. ‘These are my sons’.
**
Tuesday
9 July 2019. The strangest catcall in my life – which
for me is saying something. An grey-haired, red-faced man passing me in Covent
Garden today: ‘You’re not in France, you’re in Britain!’. I am wearing my usual
cream linen suit and tie. Still, Ã chacun
son goût.
It’s since occurred to
me that he might be one of the slightly crazed pro-Brexit protestors that are
currently a common sight in central London, often walking to or from the
protests at Downing Street and Parliament. The Pro-Brexit lot are usually found
installed next to an equally passionate group of anti-Brexit protestors, kept
apart by a few bored-looking police officers. I think of Quentin Crisp’s quote from
the late 1970s: ‘protest has become a game any number can play’. I also keep
thinking of that phrase in Decline and
Fall, used for the Bullingdon Club: ‘confused roaring’. That rather sums up what’s going on in Britain
now: a huge amount of confused roaring.
**
Weds
10 July 2019. Last week of summer term, and my last
supervisory meeting of the academic year. I’ve agreed to crank out at least 1000
words a week from July 22 onwards, after a proper break.
**
Friday
12 July. To the Rio for The
Dead Don’t Die, Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy. It’s entertaining at first,
but when the characters start making comments about being in a film, my
patience evaporates. Blazing Saddles or
Airplane might be able to do such a
thing, but this film isn’t in the same league. It’s one big indulgent shrug.
Not awful, just inert (there’s a comment for the poster).
**
Saturday 13 July 2019. Another auteur horror film at the Rio: Midsommar. Unlike The Dead Don’t Die, the aesthetic in this case cares about its viewers. It slowly pulls one into a hyper-sunny world, about a sinister pagan community in rural Sweden. As the film goes on, the flowers pulsate with CGI irises, and the film’s own colours become as bleached as the linen frocks. There’s an upsetting moment of two of violence, which has a couple of people at the Rio walking out (I’ve heard some have even fainted), and which is arguably unnecessary. A further criticism is that the debt to The Wicker Man prevents the film from being entirely original. But Midsommar’s confidence in its own vision is spellbinding. After it’s over I have to take time to adjust to the normal world, as I did with The Neon Demon. This is the highest compliment one can pay: a film that can shift reality.
**
Sunday
14 July 2019. I read Fabulosa! by Paul Baker, a new book on Polari, the historical gay slang.
Baker’s other two books on the subject came out a while ago; I’ve read those
too. One is an academic linguistic study, the other a straightforward
dictionary, beefed up with more general gay slang. I was once going to write a
book on the subject myself. One of the reasons I didn’t is that, as Baker
proved, there’s not quite enough on the topic to fill a whole book on its own.
Polari makes for a good magazine article, or a few pages in a book on gay history,
but that’s about it. Where it does come in handy is when it’s used as a way in
to the wider story of homosexual social life during times of criminalisation. This
is what Baker focuses on with this new book, adding his own life story into the
mix.
I’m especially
fascinated by a section on a late 1990s debate in the pages of Boyz, the free magazine in gay bars (in
which I once appeared, though not as one of the nude pin-ups). In this debate,
the magazine polled its readers for their views on reviving Polari, and by
extension on camp in general. There’s evidence for an anti-camp attitude among
gay men from at least as early as the 1930s; it’s also in Angus Wilson’s novels
of the 1950s, with the rise of straight-acting ‘golden spivs’, not unlike the Kray
twins. In the 1990s the surge in interest in indie rock gave rise to gay indie
nights in London like Popstarz and Club V. One consequence was letters to Boyz like those in Baker’s book, which railed
against gay men for listening to Kylie Minogue.
Why does camp persist now? Why are there TV programmes about drag queens in 2019? My answer would be because there’s still a sense of rules about what ‘normal’ looks like. A rainbow flag on a town hall may say ‘we are fine with LGBT people’, but by implication it also says ‘LGBT people are not the ‘we”. Camp responds to the idea that there’s still a ‘normal’, and has fun in the process. As Judith Butler puts it, camp is ‘working the trap’. The only thing that would really make camp die out would be a world in which everyone was exactly the same.
**.
Monday
15 July. To the Rio for a third horror film with an arty
aesthetic. This time, In Fabric. I
find Peter Strickland’s faux-1970s stylings impressive, but am not convinced
they sustain a whole film. As with The
Dead Don’t Die,there’s a
detached indifference that tests one’s patience. I’m glad these films exist and
get made – they are, after all, art rather than commerce – but I prefer Midsommar‘s more immersive approach.
**
Weds
17 July 2019. Trying to calm myself with the thought of Boris PM with the phrase
‘interesting times’. Either that or the end of Planet of the Apes.
**
Thursday 18 July 2019. Vita & Virginia at the Empire Haymarket. Mrs Woolf is played by the towering Elizabeth Debicki. I’m reminded of the line in Alan Bennett’s play Forty Years On about Woolf being proud of winning the Evening Standard Award for the Tallest Woman Writer of 1927, ‘an award she took by a neck from Elizabeth Bowen’.
Also today: the Kiss My Genders exhibition at the
Hayward. Lots of portraits of gender-bending figures, some of which, like
Luciano Castelli’s androgyne in sparkling gold, seem very up-to-date, but turn
out to be from the 1970s.
Friday 19 July 2019. To Knole mansion on a whim, inspired by seeing the house in Vita & Virginia the day before. This takes a mere 23 mins on the train from London Bridge to Sevenoaks, in Kent. Then one has to walk (or get a taxi) from the north of Sevenoaks, through the town, to get to Knole on the southern side. The rooftop views are startling: straight out of Orlando, with the deer in the grounds and the countryside going back for miles all around. The gatehouse has been converted into a sub-museum of its own, recreating the 1920s rooms of Eddy Sackville-West, the gay cousin who inherited Knole in place of Vita, even though she grew up as a child there. As Orlando satirises, she was disinherited purely by being female. A letter from Vita is quoted on a panel, on what she thought Eddy had done to Knole: ‘It made me cross; it was all so decadent, theatrical, and cheap. And Eddy himself mincing in black velvet. I don’t object to homosexuality, but I do hate decadence.’ It takes me a minute to realise that Vita, no stranger to same-sex love herself, used the word ‘homosexuality’ to mean men only.
There are signs in the grounds at Knole asking visitors people not to pet the fawns, ‘as this confuses their mothers’. I’d have thought mothers being confused by their offspring was an occupational hazard. Particularly in the case of the sort of people who lived at Knole.
The café at the house
is so busy that I walk back into Sevenoaks to get something to eat (fish and
chips at the Chequers pub, the staff kind and charming).
**
I read Normal People
by Sally Rooney, the biggest-selling literary novel of the moment. There’s a
story in the news that the most played song on UK radio since 2000 is ‘Chasing
Cars’ by Snow Patrol. Normal People
is the literary equivalent. It’s tasteful, competent, well-crafted, and
able to appeal to a huge amount of people. It seems designed not to put anyone
off. And that rather puts me off.
The main idea of this novel – checking in with an
everyman-ish couple over a period of years – rather recalls One Day by David Nicholls, another
massive-seller, except with the quotation marks taken out. There’s no spikiness
or oddness. For me, it’s too… normal.
**
Tuesday
23 July 2019. Boris Johnson becomes Prime Minister. Reality
has officially eaten itself. It seems that there is no amount of gaffes,
ineptitude and misconduct that can stop him. In giving up his journalism to be
PM, Mr J has had to take a substantial pay cut. That says it all.
Perhaps Brexit really is the last gasp of the old ways. The photos of Boris meeting the Queen show him absolutely in his element – though according to the Sunday Times even the Queen has apparently voiced her concerns. Still, in a culture of ‘confused roaring’, of laughing gas canisters, of a babyish obsession with colourful characters, who else is there?
**
Thursday
25 July 2019. A ludicrously hot day in London: 37
degrees. I decide against braving the tube, and instead work at home, followed
by seeing Varda By Agnes in the
air-conditioned Rio basement. Still feel so lucky to have a cinema on my
doorstep.
**
Saturday
27 July 2019. Only
You at the Rio. A low budget British drama about a couple’s relationship, and
how they try for a baby against the odds. Despite the gritty realism, I can
only see the couple as a couple of actors. Still, the IVF injections seem real
enough – and very unpleasant. I really had no idea that women put themselves
through such ordeals. In the educational respect, at least, the film is a
success.
**
Wednesdays 31 July 2019. I finally get around to reading Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936). Quite a wry introduction by Jeanette Winterson, saying that the book is now mainly read by students. What really interests me is the story of TS Eliot, Dylan Thomas and others championing the book while trying to play down its camper, gayer aspects. This was not so much out of homophobia as the desire to get Nightwood taken as seriously as The Waste Land. Which is where my research comes in: campness as thought to be incompatible with serious art, because of the element of humour. Or rather, queer humour, and so the wrong kind.
**
Thursday 1 August 2019. A book event at Burley Fisher Books: Savannah Knoop, Lee Relvas, Linda Stupart and Isabel Waidner. There’s a volatile, disruptive, older woman in the audience with a loud voice and wild, staring eyes, whom I’d seen shouting at passers-by on the Kingsland Road earlier. I assume she hasn’t come for a free literary event so much as just wandered into the bookshop off the street. But perhaps I am wrong. At the event she’s given the benefit of the doubt by the staff, and is provided with a seat, albeit with much ‘shush!’-ing when she occasionally shouts over a speaker. Linda S sits down to talk with the woman afterwards, which makes me feel guilty for tending to avoid such people pre-emptively, fearing as I do sudden violence. I suppose I also think, ‘one of us has to be mentally stable here, and it sure as hell isn’t going to be me’.
Roz K, Jonathan N, Laura B also here. Savannah Knoop reads a piece on their experiences in a gym. With their non-binary pronouns and self-designed clothes, a mixture of Dickensian rags, Alice skirts, and lycra, Knoop is a good example of a gender-neutral dandy.
**
Saturday 3 August 2019. To the Rio for a screening of JT Leroy, the dramatization of Girl Boy Girl, Savannah Knoop’s memoir. There’s a nice parallel here with Vita & Virginia. Both films have scenes in which a woman writer gets a camera and takes photos of a (rather wary) androgynous friend, in order to represent a fictional character. Just as Virginia Woolf used Vita Sackville-West as Orlando, Laura Albert used Savannah Knoop as JT LeRoy. In JT LeRoy, though, Savannah hints at the more exploitative aspects of the arrangement, yet still tries to be sympathetic to Ms Albert’s need for artistic ventriloquism.
By way of balance, I also watch The Cult of JT Leroy on Amazon Video, a more investigative documentary in which Laura Albert is called everything from ‘predatory’ to ‘ill’ to ‘evil’ to ‘genius’. What with Author, the documentary that presents Albert’s own take, it’s fascinating that there’s now at least three films telling exactly the same story from different sides. One can imagine a Borges-like situation in which every possible real life narrative, however mundane, is turned into an infinite number of documentaries and dramatisations, each one edited to represent every possible take. There is no such thing as the truth, only a forking path.  Â
**
Monday 5 August 2019. I read an interview in the Guardian with Noel Gallagher. Typically the focus is less on music as it is on celebrity gossip, as in his broken relationship with his brother Liam. He calls Liam’s solo music ‘unsophisticated music for unsophisticated people’. This is probably fair, but in the same interview he admits to never having heard of gender fluidity: ‘What’s that? I know what gender I am – Mancunian’. It’s probably too much to expect Noel Gallagher to be au courant with the theories of Judith Butler, but if he thinks himself to be more ‘sophisticated’ than his brother, a little more curiosity about the world is surely in order. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a good (and short) introduction to the subject of gender fluidity, and one which other rock stars have manage to endorse, namely Kim Gordon and Carrie Brownstein. So there’s no excuse. I used to enjoy Mr Gallagher’s music, and indeed his interviews, but now I worry when I see intelligent people making jokes about being ignorant. If the legacy of Britpop means laddish incuriosity as something to aspire to, then speed its death.
Still, this all says rather more about me than Noel G. I’m less curious these days about rock music and more curious about books, so that’s a kind of ignorance on my part. I feel I have to be epicene to be believed.
**
Thursday 8 August 2019. Today I find myself delving into the Terry Pratchett archive at Senate House Library, by way of a diversion from my own research. I’m working in the library anyway, and stumble upon the Pratchett items as part of the integrated catalogue. One item intrigues me, so I call it up to take a look. It’s a printed manual for a 1991 computer training course, ‘Introduction to Word For Windows 3.1’. The manual uses licensed extracts from Good Omens, the 1990 fantasy novel written by Pratchett with Neil Gaiman (and lately adapted for TV).
In the manual, the extracts are presented as raw text with which to teach the correction of typos, play with fonts and paragraph breaks, and so on. Quite why the manual used a copyrighted novel rather than one from the public domain (like Dickens), I don’t know. But the screenshots of pre-Web computer programs fascinates me: so inelegant in their two-colour blockiness. And those floppy disks and diskettes to save the files upon: cutting-edge materials then, now obsolete and difficult to access. This 1991 manual, however, printed on paper, has long outlived the software it was designed to serve. Such manuals are maps of lost worlds.
**
Friday
9 August 2019. A cat-call from three crisp-munching
teen boys as I turn a corner in Bloomsbury: ‘Look at THIS c—.’ It could have
been worse.
Once again, I think to
myself: ‘Still got it!’ (to be sung to the tune of Louis Armstrong’s ‘What A
Wonderful World’).
**
At Birkbeck’s main building in Torrington Square, one of the men’s toilets has been refurbished and renamed on the door as ‘gender neutral’. Inside, the urinals have gone. The four stalls now have walls and doors running from ceiling to floor. Inside each stall is a bin for sanitary towels, plus an advert for Birkbeck’s counselling service aimed specifically at men. According to the advert, some men might feel that they cannot easily talk about their mental health problems, because they might be told to ‘man up’ and ‘grow a pair’, in the parlance of today. Recently, someone got out a marker pen and scrawled over one of these adverts with the words ‘MAN THE F— UP’.
I wonder if this commentator realises that the phrase they used already appears on the advert underneath, thus justifying its existence in the first place. And what course is this graffiti writer doing, anyway? An MA in self-defeating irony? I wish I could meet this person, if only to tell them that if being unkind and unintelligent is their idea of manliness, then they need to man the f— down.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Thursday
11th April.
Some happy news. I am waiting for a train en route to a book event in Peckham
(Isabel Waidner talking with Jennifer Hodgson) when I check my emails. I may
have resisted the heroin lure of the smartphone but I do enjoy the methadone
substitute of an iPod Touch, which can access wireless internet.
One email is from CHASE, the government
organisation to whom I’d applied for PhD funding a couple of months ago. Before
opening the mail I pause and brace myself for rejection. This application was,
after all, my third and final attempt. The rules forbid any more.
This time, though, I am told I was successful.
From October the government will pay me the
minimum wage in order to work on my thesis full-time. There is also the likelihood
of additional expenses for research trips.
This is a significant event for me, mentally as much as financially. It is
the first time in twenty years that I’ve bagged a full time job that I want to
do, as opposed to not mind too much. The last time was when I had a major label
record deal in the mid 1990s. Now I will
be paid to read and write what I want to read and write. My project has been
deemed, by a group of professionals who do not know me personally, to be of use
to the real world.
I can confidently pre-empt accusations
of boastfulness over this by indicating the money: a minimum wage in one’s late
forties, even for doing something agreeable, is no popular index of success. My
accommodation still cannot advance beyond the level of the rented room. But
perhaps this new stipend, once it kicks in from October, will give me the focus
and energy to undertake more paid work, such as journalism and talks. More things
now seem possible. I have work to do, and works
to do.
**
Friday
12 April 2019. A
visit to the British Library imbues one with the feeling that everyone is a
student, a writer or a researcher, and no other life exists. The public areas
are so crowded, even just the benches around the walls. A young man with a laptop
hovers by me when he notices I’m preparing to get up and leave, so he can grab
my space. This is paradise of a kind. By which I mean it’s too popular and
there’s hardly any room.
Meanwhile, a brand new UCL student building
has opened nearby in Gordon Street, next to the Bloomsbury Theatre, with 1000 desks.
I think of the TV documentary from the 1970s in which Kenneth Williams laments
the rise of university buildings in the Bloomsbury area. Perhaps this would
upset him even more. It cheers me, though, as I like the way Bloomsbury manages
to be a university campus without the campus, lacking the detachment one feels
with the more obvious universities, from Oxford to UEA. There may be an ivory tower – Senate House
Library – but it’s as much a part of the city as its next-door neighbour, the
British Museum. For Birkbeck students, this aspect is particularly appropriate.
Mature students have spent some time in the wider world already. To study on a
more isolated campus might be like moving into a dormitory: fine for the young,
but awkward for a forty-seven-year-old.
One now hears the word ‘campus’ used for
the headquarters of tech companies like Google. It’s a kind of university envy
by corporations, who even dub their training set-ups as ‘academies’. While this
is reasonable for a youthful workforce, one wonders if older workers, if any
are allowed at Google, are required to act like students too. In which case, in
my funny child-like way, perhaps I am more a sign of the times that I thought.
Google has meant that everyone is a
student researcher now. Even student researchers. And yet the majority of
writers still look so ordinary and non-descript. Given the way I look I have a
vested interest in this aspect, obviously; a literally vested interest.
**
Sunday
14 April 2019.
To the sun-kissed paintings of Sorolla at the National Gallery, then the Nitty
Gritty club night at the Constitution in Camden (with Debbie Smith DJ-ing),
which is also my landlady K’s birthday bash. My previous unease at group events
is now diminished: if nothing else, the funding means I can answer the dreaded
question ‘and what do you do?’
**
Tuesday
16 April 2019.
A news story in the Times: ‘Hundreds
of students with the worst A levels are going on to get first-class degrees
each year, fuelling fears of grade inflation at universities’. One explanation
which escapes the Times is the
concept of change. Birkbeck responds on Twitter in this spirit: ‘We make admissions
based on students’ future potential, not just their past attainment.’
I add my voice to confirm this, summarising
my last decade in a single tweet: ‘Birkbeck admitted me for a BA despite my
lack of A-Levels (had a crisis at 17). Got the BA, stayed on for an MA, now
doing a fully-funded PhD, all at Birkbeck. Still no A levels.’
A little later Joan Bakewell quotes my
tweet, adding: ‘As Birkbeck’s President I’m proud of the chances we give people
and congratulate Dickon on his success’.
I’m not sure of the correct way to
address the Baroness, though I find an article where she likes people to call
her by her first name. So I tweet back: ‘Thanks Joan!’
**
Friday
19 April 2019.
Rather aptly, I spend the morning of Good Friday in an act of self-sacrifice. I’m
using the sink in the bathroom when a pool of water creeps onto my toes from the
cupboard below the sink. I crouch down to open the cupboard doors and immediately
identify the source of this impromptu Nile: one of the joints in the sink ‘s outlet
pipe is leaking, so it’s probably a blockage. As my landlady is away, and I
don’t fancy calling out a professional on a bank holiday weekend (the only time
when these things happen), I decide to have a go at tackling the issue myself. I
unscrew the u-bend section of the pipe, take it out, and then clean it out in
the bath using the shower hose. Lumps of awfulness emerge to a satisfying
relish: dark compounds of hair, mini-fatbergs and what the characters in Withnail and I would describe simply as
‘matter’. I replace the pipe and use a plunger on the sink for good measure.
This fixes the problem.
My joy over this comes not so much from
the feeling of making things better as it does from the relief that I haven’t
made things worse.
**
Monday
29 April 2019.
I submit my revised Chapter Two to my supervisors.
**
Thursday
2 May 2019.
To the Curzon cinema in Aldgate to meet Shanthi S. The area is highly
gentrified: clean and pristine new blocks of flats, probably hugely expensive,
and with the usual feeling that no one actually lives here. We miss the film
but end up having a pleasant evening at local bars like The Pride Of Spitalfields
off Brick Lane, one of those older pubs which still manage to exist. The pub’s
cat, Lenny, comes to sit next to me. Shanthi takes a photo, which I tentatively
share on my Instagram account.
**
Friday
3 May 2019.
I read Jenny Turner’s article in the LRB on
the Mark Fisher anthology, K-Punk.At one point she suddenly pulls off a haughty
flourish regarding Fisher’s favourite music: ‘I’ve always made a point of not
being impressed by Joy Division or New Order’. It’s the choice of words, rather
than simply ‘I’ve never liked’. Indeed, much as I admire Mark Fisher and Joy
Division myself, neither were much at home to camp. Though they did deal in a
certain type of masculine sentiment, which Ms Turner appreciates.
My credo, if I have one at all, is that art
can be witty, and wit can be art. Hence my interest in camp modernism, which
goes back to naming my first band in 1992 after Woolf’s Orlando. In the same way, I never thought it incompatible to be a
fan of the band the Field Mice, along with Sondheim musicals, the Smiths, Stock
Aitken Waterman and Take That, all at once without any tiresome claims to
irony. With unlikely intersections comes new space, and new freedom.
**
Tuesday
7 May 2019:
To the Odeon Tottenham Court Road with Jon S to see Avengers: Endgame. I go mainly because the previous Avengers film ended on a cliffhanger,
and I’m admittedly curious to see how the superheroes cheat death. The answer is
they cheat.
On the way out, the other cinemagoers are
discussing which of the preceding films they managed to see: ‘I missed Iron Man 2 but I did see Thor 6: Hard Rock Café.’ This is the triumph
of the series: to blend a brand with a mythos, while allowing each film to make
sense on its own terms. More or less. It will be interesting to see if
superhero films continue to dominate cinemas; this is surely their peak moment.
**
This week sees the Met Gala in New York,
as in the glitzy launch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition.
This year’s theme is camp, with reference to the Sontag essay, hence my interest
from afar. The BBC News site initially refers to the author of ‘Notes on Camp’
as ‘photographer Susan Sontag’. The coverage of the Gala is nearly eclipsed by
the hyperbolic coverage of the Royal Baby, which itself is a camp moment.
Many of the looks on the red carpet,
such as Harry Styles’s lacey catsuit, would not look out of place on the
mid-1990s Romo scene. Or indeed, at Kash Point in the mid 2000s. Vogue magazine
has called Mr Styles ‘the King of Camp’. This is debatable, though does have a
certain Caravaggio-esque look to him.
**
Weds
8 May 2019.
To the ICA for their Kathy Acker exhibition. Some of the late Acker’s books are
on display in glass cabinets, including her copy of – what else? – Woolf’s Orlando. Was Kathy Acker camp? She had
her moments, such as the poem that goes ‘Dear Susan Sontag, Please Can You Make
Me Famous?’
**
Thursday
9 May 2019.
I like to think zookeepers regularly say to each other ‘we need to talk about
the elephant in the room’, and that the joke never gets old.
**
Saturday
11 May 2019. Much
of the news is now based on journalists simply scouring Twitter and helping
themselves to other people’s words. It’s now quite common to see people sacked
from their jobs for something they idly typed on Twitter years ago. The format
lends itself so easily to the removal of context, that it is perilous to use it
for anything other than the blandest of statements. The First Law of Twitter: if a tweet can be taken the
wrong way, it will be.
**
Sunday
12 May 2019.To the Rio for Cleo From 5 To 7 (1961), directed by Agnes Varda. I’d never seen it
before; it’s mesmerising. Though it’s not shot in one take, as the more recent Victoria was in Madrid, there’s a
magical sense of real time unfolding in a city, and that this is a liberating
idea rather than a limitation. There’s currently a vogue for nature writing,
and for narratives of going to the countryside to be healed, but despite
sharing my name with the boy in The
Secret Garden I’m rather on the side of finding answers in the city.
**
Saturday
18th May 2019. I’m walking along a street in Hoxton. As I pass a
man mutters ‘freak’ at me. I used to get upset about this, but my reaction now
can only be: ‘Still got it!’
**
Tuesday
21 May 2019.
There really should be some sort of HGV test for backpack wearers. Despite the ability
of human beings to access whole centuries of culture from a small flat oblong, many
of them still need to carry yet more stuff on their back as well. Twice today
on crowded tube carriages I am nearly hit in the face with the things, their
owners oblivious. A backpack wearer is a long vehicle, but it’s hard to get to
their face to tell them. Would Truman Capote wear a backpack in the city? No. There’s
no excuse.
**
To Waterstones Gower Street for a book
event. The subject is ostensibly Woolf’s Orlando,
but the focus is really on Paul Takes The
Form of A Mortal Girl, a new novel by the American writer Andrea Lawlor,
which I’ve just enjoyed. Paul is set
in the indie band culture of America in the early 1990s, and features a
shapeshifting queer protagonist who makes his own music fanzine. The publishers
have sent out copies of the book with a promotional fake fanzine, Polydoris Perversity. I’ve managed to
get hold of one. The publishers have done their homework (presumably with the
author in consultation): the fanzine looks entirely authentic to me. I remember
buying and making such zines myself. It’s A5 sized, photocopied and stapled,
and features text that’s been cut and pasted, in the days when the phrase meant
real scissors and real paste (or at least Pritt Stick). At the back of the zine
there’s a tracklisting of a home-made compilation tape – ‘mixtape’ was always a
purely American term. Anachronistically, there’s a Spotify code for the
playlist. It works, too.
Lawlor is the same age as me, and I get
a nostalgic thrill from this book, despite the American setting. It works as a
vivid document of gay social history, along the same lines as Tales of The City and Alan Hollinghurst’s
novels. Indeed, Lawlor’s Paul and
Hollinghurst’s Sparsholt Affair both
reference Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’ as a gay song. And as with
Hollinghurst, Lawlor is fond of gay sex scenes, though there’s plenty of
lesbian sex too, thanks to Paul’s ability to change sex at will. On top of the Orlando references there’s a touch of Brideshead Revisited,when a soft toy is named Aloysius. ‘Of
course it is’ says another character, Robin, another androgyne, who in turn is based
on the Russian princess in Orlando.
What Lawlor gets most of all, though, is
the importance of iconography to identity:
‘Paul
remembered seeing a picture of Patti Smith for the first time, that flash of
recognition when he first came across the Mapplethorpe postcard at the gay
bookstore in Binghamton, thinking that’s what he looked like on the inside,
taping that postcard up in every room he’d lived in since.’ (p. 121)
**
Wednesday 22 May 2019. Another book event, this time at Burley Fisher in Haggerston. This is the launch of the Andrew Gallix anthology We’ll Never Have Paris. It’s so packed that I have to leave early just to be able to breathe. The Andrew Lawlor event was similarly popular, with an extra row of chairs added at the last minute.
This week also sees me fail to get into
a couple of other book events, because they both sell out in advance. I wonder
if something is going on. The way forward for writers, as with bands, would
seem to be more live events, and more festivals.
**
Thursday 23 May 2019. The EU elections. I go to my local polling station,
Colvestone Primary School near Ridley Road, and vote Green. Labour win in my
borough, Hackney, while most of the country chooses Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
Interesting times.
**
Friday 24 May 2019. I cram in three exhibitions: Beasts of London at the Museum of London, in which a plague
bacterium is voiced by Brian Blessed. Then with Mum to Mary Quant at the V&A, in which I learn that Ms Quant’s fashion
line was genuinely affordable by all. Then on to Manga at the British Museum in the evening. The manga show reveals
the influence of Alice in Wonderland,
which I didn’t know about, and selects three titles for its gay section: Poem of Wind & Trees (the men very feminine
looking), My Brother’s Husband (the
men very muscular and hairy), and What Did You Eat Yesterday, an
unexpected tale of an middle-aged gay couple’s domestic life (the men very
ordinary). There’s also a section on cosplay and conventions, with a set of
garments for visitors to try on. I don’t join in, believing as I do that
dandyism is already cosplay; the cosplay of the self.
**
Friday
31 May 2019. I
read Jarett Kobek’s Only Americans Burn
In Hell, an entertaining
satirical novel which uses a lot of what’s now called autofiction, and manages
to be very funny too. Very Tristram
Shandy, in fact, with its mad, skittish digressions.Mr Kobek often apologises to the reader for being unable to write
a particular scene, and makes a perfectly good point as to why: ‘I’m burnt out.
Donald J Trump was elected to the Presidency of the United States! So there’s
really no point. Stop hoping that books will save you.’
On corporate
celebrations of diversity, he writes: ‘Native American women had a
statistically better chance of being caricatured in a Google Doodle than they
did of being hired into a leadership position at Google’
Steve
Jobs, meanwhile, is glossed as ‘a psychopath who enslaved Chinese children and
made them build electronic devices which allowed American liberals to write
treatises on human rights’.
**
Saturday 1 June 2019. To
the Tate Modern for the Dorothea Tanning show. Her first painting in her Late
Surrealism style, from the 1940s, is a Dali-esque self-portrait amid infinite
doors and strange creatures. It is titled Birthday,
such was her sense of new life through art. But the exhibition reveals two
further ‘births’. In the 1950s she changes to a more abstract technique, more Pollock
than Dali. And then there’s a third style of soft sculptures run off her sewing
machine. The centrepiece is an installation of a hotel room, where the
furniture is turning into such sculptures, while further shapes burst through
the wallpaper.
Tanning worked until her death at 101. I
think of Leonora Carrington’s similarly long life, and while talking to Mum on
the phone I wonder if there’s a connection between surrealism and longevity.
Mum suggests that it might be because such women had to be tough in the first
place to tout their art in such a male field.
**
Monday
3 June 2019.
I see Booksmart at the Rio, a high
school comedy about two bookish teenage girls having a late try at being party
animals. It’s uproariously funny. There’s a couple of boy characters – drama queens
in every sense – who threaten to steal the film from the girls.
**
Thursday
13 June 2019.
I help to organise a student conference at Birkbeck, Work in Progress. The staff had picked me, along with three other 2nd
years (Katie Stone, Matt Martin, Helena Esser), because they knew I had
experience of organising club nights. In the weeks leading up to the event, the
process soaks up a lot of time, and there’s some hitches with people cancelling,
but it’s mostly a smooth running affair. Katie Stone live-tweets a lot of the day,
using the hashtag ‘#bbkwip’.
We host twelve speakers in all,
including our keynote speaker Anthony Joseph, who discusses his novel Kitch, about the Trinidad calypso singer
Lord Kitchener. I do some tech supervising, chair one of the panels, and chair
the plenary summing-up session, which I learn is pronounced ‘plee-nary’, and
not ‘plenn-ary’. My main mission is just to keep the event running to its
schedule, with echoes of the joke about Mussolini.
**
Monday
17th June 2019. To the Rio with Shanthi to see Gloria Bell (£5). A subtle and nuanced
tale of ageing people going on dates. Very little really happens, but at a time
of shrillness and noise, quiet films can be a tonic. Julianne Moore’s character
has to struggle with two pairs of glasses. This is a detail I recognise in my
own life now, finding as I do that fiddling with specs is still preferable to
working with varifocals.
I’ve also discovered that increased
myopia helps stage fright, or anxiety about public speaking. All I have to do
is take my distance glasses off, and the audience disappears. I believe Dusty
Springfield used the same technique.
**
Tuesday
18 June 2019.
I watch the last episode of Years and
Years, the highlight of which is a speech by the grandmother about people
buying into the more ridiculous type of politician: ‘I didn’t see all the clowns
and monsters heading our way. Tumbling over each other, grinning. Dear God what
a carnival.’
By coincidence, this piece of fiction is broadcast after a live debate between the five candidates for the next Prime Minister, all sitting on stools like some grotesque five-part harmony boy band. The favourite is Boris Johnson, now trying his best to be quiet and sensible. Close on his heels is the bland Jeremy Hunt, who has a record of forgetting things, from his wife’s nationality to his ownership of seven luxury flats. If Hunt wins, it will be because people want to forget about Boris Johnson. Rory Stewart seems the most reasonable of this gaggle, and seems to realise that if he is to succeed he needs to play up his clownishness. Which in fact, tonight he does, suddenly taking off his tie and slouching in his seat, his gauntness making him look like a character from Mervyn Peake. To borrow Sontag’s phrase about camp, we are in an age of Instant Character.
**
Thursday
20th June 2019. To Sudbury to meet Mum. Sudbury seems mostly
unchanged from my teen years, though Great Cornard Upper School (where I spent
1985 to 1989) has been renamed Thomas Gainsborough School. When I was there
there was no uniform, just a dress code favouring plain grey shirts and
jumpers. This was deemed to be progressive and modern at the time. Not any
more. Today in Sudbury I see pupils of TGS wearing a full traditional uniform: blazer,
striped tie and even a crest, which must have been invented yesterday. I wonder
at this paradox, a twenty-first century school choosing a style that seemed out
of date in the 1980s. Perhaps one can blame Harry
Potter.
Naming buildings simply after the area
they are in is no longer enough. One thinks of Liverpool’s Speke Airport becoming
John Lennon Airport. It seems difficult to imagine that Mr Lennon needs the
extra publicity, so omnipresent are the Beatles. That said, Mum has told me of
a child who asked who Paul McCartney was. ‘He’s a bit like Ed Sheeran’.
The painter Thomas Gainsborough already has a prominent statue in Sudbury marketplace, and there’s also the nearby Gainsborough House gallery, which we visit today. Now he has a large school too. Even the local train line, which I take today from Liverpool Street, changing at Marks Tey, is labelled the Gainsborough Line. My fellow Sudbury alumni really need to hurry up and produce some masterpieces, if only so the town has more names to choose from.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
I find a couple of old photos of myself online, and rather like them. One (at poor resolution) is of myself singing back-up with Fosca’s Kate Dornan, while onstage with Bid’s group Scarlet’s Well, sometime in the mid-2000s. The venue is the Spitz in Spitalfields Market, London, now no longer there.
The other is from 2008, in my old room at Highgate. It’s taken by Jamie McLeod, capturing me in bedsit dandy mode. I rarely smoke cigarettes today.
Tuesday 5th February 2019. To the British Library to appear as part of a panel discussion hosted by Travis Elborough, Diaries – Lives and Times. The other guests are Simon Garfield, Virginia Ironside and Anita Sethi. The five of us are seated on a stage in an auditorium, in a separate building which, despite being physically part of the same gently utopian mass as the British Library itself, is accessed via a separate entrance in the courtyard. This event is accompanied by a live transcription on a screen, much like one has these days on TV news channels. Inevitably, ‘diary’ appears on the screen at least once as ‘diarrhoea’.
Mr G discusses his fat book of mid-century diaries, A Notable Woman. Ms Ironside’s anecdotes about Robert Maxwell at the Daily Mirror are pleasingly vicious: she says he used to enjoy firing staff in front of visitors, while giving tours of the Mirror offices. I like the title of one of her books about growing old: No! I Don’t Want To Join A Bookclub.
For
my part, I mention that it’s the centenary of a cult diary, Journal of a Disappointed Man by the
ailing WNP Barbellion. I also find myself demonstrating how diaries tend to
leave things unsaid between the lines, sometimes unconsciously, and use my own as
an example. A jokey entry from 1999 about Star
Wars: The Phantom Menace is now, I can see, an allusion to a boyfriend I
was seeing at the time, who was a fan of the films. Back then, I remarked how
there was a minor character in the film called Yarael Poof, and how I found
that childishly amusing. And clearly I still do.
Afterwards
for drinks at a pleasant pub nearby, the Skinners Arms, recommended by the
British Library staff. I invite along Max, a young fan of my work, such as it is,
who’s come up to London specifically to see me. They’re non-binary, even wearing
a badge which states their pronouns as ‘they/them’. Since discovering me,
they’ve sought out the Orlando and Fosca records, some of which were made
before Max was born.
Being
on a stage again after so long, and indeed being able to inspire young people
again, rather buoys my sense of usefulness. My concern now is that I am still billed
as a musician, even though I’ve not made music for ten years, being these days
more interested in books and prose. Clearly I need to hurry up and get some
books out of my own.
**
Wednesday 6 February 2019. I’m working on a new revision of my PhD funding proposal, allowed as I am to do so for a third and final time, after been turned down in 2017 and 2018.
Meanwhile I receive a rejection email from a conference in Princeton. The euphemism is ‘we are unable to find room for your paper’. I think I’d prefer ‘we didn’t care for it’, or even ‘it’s rubbish’; that would at least be more honest. There is no feedback attached to refusals from conferences, so exactly what I’ve done wrong, or not well enough, I’ll never know.
Still,
as my supervisors remind me, I have a ready-made abstract to use for another
time. And so, licking my bruises, I stagger on. I’m beginning to understand why
so many academics throw in the towel and get proper jobs.
**
A
useful note to all tutors and editors, from bitter experience. When giving
feedback in which you tell the writer or student they ‘need to say more about
X’, always follow with ‘you can afford to say LESS about Y’. Otherwise, you’ve
plunged them into the terror of fathoming which bits can be cut to make room
within the word count, at the risk of making the piece more skeletal rather
than concise. No one wants that.
‘Kill
your darlings’ is only a useful tip if it is clear which bits are the surplus darlings
in question. For the writer, it’s often not clear. Better to offer Hobson’s
choice rather than Sophie’s.
**
Saturday 9 February 2019. I do my first bit of peer reviewing, for my fellow PhD-er Katie S’s journal. This is for an essay by a non-English speaking student on the American activist and poet Wendy Trevino. The essay in question ticks the right boxes for the journal in terms of content, but the writer’s command of English grammar needs a fair amount of improvement. My problem is that my idea of good style is probably a step too far for many editors: I want all English prose to read like The Great Gatsby, even if it’s just the instructions for a microwave meal. But I also believe a certain amount of non-Englishness in the voice needs to be preserved, by way of national identity – which is the subject of the essay, after all. It’s not an easy task. Thankfully in this case I’m reviewing rather than editing, and am limited to making recommendations rather than hacking away with a red pen. I also end up buying the Trevino book, Cruel Fiction, so that’s surely a good thing on the part of the essay.
**
To
the Barbican to see the film Can You Ever
Forgive Me. Much has been made of Richard E Grant’s fine supporting
performance, for which he was nominated for an Oscar; the lead performance by
Melissa McCarthy is equally good. But I’m further delighted by a cameo by
Justin Vivian Bond, whom I once saw in the cabaret duo Kiki and Herb. Good to
see the British comedy actress Dolly Wells, too, as a lonely book dealer. Her
American accent is so perfect that it takes me a while to recognise her.
**
15th
February 2019. One effect of my late flowering
education is to find myself using a pen to edit the articles in magazines.
**
23rd
February 2019. To
the British Library’s hidden auditorium again, this time to be in the audience.
It’s an event to celebrate 40 years of the nearby bookshop Gay’s the Word. There’s a lot of lavender-coloured party balloons
in the bar, a colour I prefer to the more typical rainbow flag; I agree with
Hannah Gadsby that the latter is aesthetically ‘a bit busy’. Purple (and lavender,
and mauve, and violet) is a more historical queer colour, dating back to the
1890s, which were sometimes called the Mauve Decade. Then there’s Firbank and
his love of the colour, writing his novels in purple ink, and Brigid Brophy
doing the same by way of tribute in the 1970s, the better to write her big mad
book on Firbank, Prancing Novelist.
Leila Kassir keeps me company, and points out how Uncle Monty in Withnail and I uses the colour as part
of his antiquated gay lexicon: ‘He’s so mauve, we don’t know what he’s
planning’.
Much
of the event is, understandably, about gay books and gay writers. Neil McKenna
recommends Angus Wilson’s No Laughing
Matter, proving that Wilson is not quite as forgotten as I’d thought. The
evening ends with readings by poets, including Richard Scott, whose collection Soho is, as they say, right up my
street.
**
26th
February 2019. I
submit my application for funding. This time round the money has rather been
dangled in front of me. Whereas previously I was simply told by email that I’d
been declined, this time there’s a series of panels one has to please: first
one for the Birkbeck English department, then one for the department’s parent
‘school’, being the School of Arts, then one for Birkbeck college overall. Now
I’m up against about 170 other students from the London and South-East area,
all of us competing for 56 scholarships.
I
was given two further chances to revise my proposal, according to feedback from
a couple of the panels. It feels like being nominated for an Oscar, then told
you have to shoot parts of the film again, in order to give your performance
more of a chance at winning.
What I find difficult is that this process is less about the work as it is about selling the work. It’s really PR, marketing, pitching. These are things I’ve always resented doing, despite my reputed vanity. It’s the same as a job interview, or writing a CV, arrogantly providing the answer to the question, ‘Why do you think you’re great?’ Deep down, I don’t think anyone should give me anything at all.
Still,
I can’t pretend that being funded would not alter my mindset for the better. I
hear back in late April.
**
28th February 2019. To Hackney’s Earth venue, two blocks away from my rented room in Dalston, off Stoke Newington High Street. Earth is a brand new arts venue, though the building is a former 1930s cinema, The Savoy, which became an ABC in the 1960s. I like the sense of layers of history, especially as the street outside cuts through in time to the first century AD. The Romans built the road to link London to York; the Saxons named it Earninga Straete – ‘Ermine Street’. Every day I step out onto this road and have a clear view south into the City, with the Gherkin in the distance.
All of which seems apt for the electronic recording artiste Gazelle Twin, given her demonic stage costume as part English jester, part football hooligan, with a red stocking mask, red and white tunic and tights, and a white baseball cap. ‘What is century is this?’ she sings in the opening track of Pastoral, her 2018 album about Englishness after Brexit. She performs that album tonight, and only that album, never breaking character. I realise that her look evokes the costumes of Leigh Bowery, particularly when he was in the ballet I am Curious Orange. Indeed, that ballet’s accompanying album by the Fall, I Am Kurious Oranj, has a track called ‘Jerusalem’, as does Pastoral. Mark E Smith left a gap in British music when he died; for me, Pastoral helps to fill it.
**
Friday 1st
March 2019. With
Mum in town. We visit the ‘Unclaimed’ exhibition at the Barbican – an inspired look
at aging and elders in Britain, presented as a lost property office. It’s now
thought that half the current population could reach the age of a hundred. As
Quentin Crisp put it when talking about being in his sixties, ‘medical science
is so unkind’. Culture will have to change quite drastically: there’s now
protests about literary awards which favour the young. ‘Emerging writers’ is
preferred, instead of ‘young writers’.
**
Tuesday 5th March
2019. Read an
excellent article in The Guardian by
Emily Beater on dyspraxic students. Much of it rings true with me, especially having
to read a sentence several times before the meaning sinks in, and how this
affects self-confidence and career aspiration. It is still hard to convince
people that dyspraxics are suitable for higher education, but the evidence proves
that they can succeed and even win awards, if diagnosed and supported.
**
Thursday 7th
March 2019. A long
stint in the Keynes Library at Gordon Square, starting with an in-department
conference of papers by my fellow students, then finishing with a lecture by the
visiting academic Zara Dinnen, on ‘userness’ in narratives. Her examples are,
rather refreshingly, the plotlines of Batgirl
comics. In a gritty 1990s incarnation, Batgirl became a wheelchair-bound
computer hacker. More recently she was ‘rebooted’ as hip and wisecracking, with
a memorable cover image of her taking a selfie, in full costume, in the mirror
of a crowded women’s toilet. There’s so much that can be said about this single
image: satire, gender, society, the gaze in comics and so on.
One
of the students discusses her experience of organising a conference. When
looking to hire guest speakers, she found something of a gender pay gap. All
the male lecturers she approached quoted their usual fixed fee, even though
they were aware this was a low-budget, student-run event. Whereas the female
lecturers responded along the lines of, ‘How much can you afford?’ ‘Can you pay
the Living Wage?’
**
Sunday 10th
March 2019. A note
to myself: Be more fearless. Be more tender. Be more kind.
This
reminder is obvious, even glib. Yet without it a whole host of petty
irritations and cruelties creep in to make a nest of the day.
**
Tuesday 12 March
2019. Ms May’s
Brexit deal is kicked out of Parliament by 149 votes. I’ve definitely been
rejected 149 times. Can I be Prime Minister?
**
Wednesday 13th
March 2019. To the
Burley Fisher Bookshop for a talk by Isabel Waidner and Joanna Walsh. The world
of contemporary experimental fiction, including autofiction, fascinates me more
than ever, and these writers are among those producing the best of it today.
**
Thursday 14th
March 2019. To the
Stratford East Picturehouse, right next to the Stratford East Theatre Royal,
with its floating Joan Littlewood statue. I see a screening of two
documentaries on an LGBT theme. Poshida
(2015) is about the compromised lives of gay and trans people in Pakistan, and mixes
a style of mainstream news reportage with a cinematic aesthetic. There’s a lot
of questions asked in its short length, alongside beautiful imagery of the
Faisal Mosque and the Margalla Hills in Islamabad. The director is Faizan Fiaz,
who is British-Pakistani and now trans-masculine, and who once played bass in my
band Fosca. According to Faizan in the Q&A afterwards, all of the
interviewees have stuck with their Muslim faith.
The
other film, DES!RE (2017), is a black
and white ‘jazz meditation’ on butch and trans-masculine people in Britain, directed
by the dapper Campbell X. I spot Derek Jarman’s Dungeness cottage used as a
backdrop at one point: a reminder that Jarman’s tradition of queer DIY
filmmaking is still continuing and still needed.
The
Q&A is more of a community gathering than a film discussion. Many of the
audience speak up to thank the directors for simply making them feel seen.
Indeed, the English translation of Poshida
is ‘hidden’. These are still lives that are different from the default, and
so still tend to be less acknowledged. As Campbell X says tonight, these films
say: ‘We were here. They can’t erase us’.
**
Tuesday 19th
March. Blame the
systems, not the humans.
**
21st March
2019. ‘We can’t be
ordinary now because there isn’t the time.’ – Angela Carter, ‘Fools Are My Theme’, from her
essay collection Shaking a Leg.
**
Friday 22 March 2019. Something of a crisis. After
spending a large amount of time and energy writing a review of Music & Camp, a new book of academic
essays, the editor at the magazine isn’t happy and wants me to rewrite it. And
this is meant to be my specialist subject.
After much agonising, I tell the editor I’d rather ‘spike’ the piece instead, as in cancel it altogether. They’re sympathetic, and fill the space in the magazine okay without me. The world continues to turn. In the streets around me people are marching with blue pro-EU flag, in the hope of revoking the Brexit process. Perhaps some of that same spirit has leaked into my thoughts over my article.
After
a series of setbacks in recent months, this one completely derails me. I sink
into a fug of depression, questioning my ability to do anything much at all.
The depression is ontological rather than existential. There’s never any risk
of self-harming, because when it happens it feels like there is no self to harm
in the first place. It is more of a paralysis state: a complete alienation from
human systems, including the systems of reading and writing.
I
think one problem is that when one is immersed in a subject at a PhD level, it
can be difficult to shift between that mode and the more detached ‘general
readership’ mode for journalism. This is clearly a separate skill that needs
learning, but I’m already struggling how to write a PhD as it is.
I
wonder if I am simply not cut out to write journalism. Or, more likely, not cut
out to do both the PhD and journalism at this stage. It feels schizophrenic,
even fraudulent. Which one is the ‘real’ me? I don’t do impressions.
With
both types of writing, I resent the second-guessing aspect, that scent of
desperation always between the lines: ‘Please let me fit in with other PhDs /
other journalists!’. But I’m really aware that I don’t easily fit in anywhere.
I’d
been heading for this moment for some time. Every task, including this diary,
has felt more and more difficult, and my working speed has become slower and
slower. I have a fantasy of putting the universe on pause so I can just get my
breath back.
What to do? I remind myself of my achievements in recent years: 1st class BA, distinction MA, three prizes. This is not vanity, this is trying not to crumple into a heap.
**
Monday 25th
March 2019. To the
BFI Southbank for one of the special events in Flare, the London LGBT film
festival. Trans Creative at the Movies is
a panel discussion comprising clips from films. The five people on the panel,
all of whom identify as transgender, each pick a film which spoke to their trans-ness
when they were growing up, or, as in the case of Faizan Fiaz, when they were
reflecting on their identity more recently. Faizan’s choice is a Bollywood film
from 2013, Ram-Leela, seen when they
were looking at Bollywood films for the first time. Despite being
Anglo-Pakistani, or possibly because, Faizan was uninterested in Bollywood while
growing up.
The
clip in question is a colourful dance number in a city street, led by Ranveer
Singh, a muscular beauty in that pumped-up Love
Island fashion. Faizan points out how it’s the dozens of male dancers
around Singh who are more interesting, with their rather more achievable-looking
torsos.
Of
the other panellists, Jamie Hale’s choice is on a similar theme of men among
men, Lawrence of Arabia. Zorian
Clayton chooses Big, Kate O’Donnell
chooses Gypsy, and La John Joseph goes
for Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce.
I’ve
now realised that, with the revelation that Quentin Crisp explicitly declared
himself as transgender in his last months, The
Naked Civil Servant can now technically be classified as a trans-related film.
And indeed, the 1992 film of Orlando can
now be said to have a trans actor in its cast.
**
Wednesday 27th March
2019. I glance at
the Brexit mess in the news. It feels as if the nation is in one massive BDSM
relationship where no one can remember the safe-word.
**
Friday 29th
March 2019. Brexit
protestors of either stripe are currently a daily sight on the streets of
London. On the Mall I walk past a man brandishing a mass-produced pro-Brexit
banner: ‘NO DEAL? NO PROBLEM!’. Underneath this in smaller letters are the
words ‘Brexit means Brexit’. He’s white, in his sixties, with a Panama hat, blazer
and a striped tie. If it wasn’t for the banner, I’d have said he was on his way
back from watching cricket.
**
To the BFI Southbank for another screening in the Flare festival. United We Fan is a documentary about the fans who organise campaigns when their favourite TV series is cancelled. The oldest examples here are the Star Trek Trimbles, a married couple, now in their eighties. They’re credited with a letter-writing campaign which led to the original Star Trek returning for a third series.
The film then moves to the 1980s pressure group, Viewers For Quality Television, which campaigned not only to save a number of programmes from cancellation, such as Cagney and Lacey, but became a kind of index of well-made programmes. This was a time when TV was still thought to be a low quality, disposable medium de facto. The film brings us up to date with a young lesbian supporter of the recent series Person of Interest, which had a same-sex relationship among its storylines. When the series returned thanks to her online campaigning, however, one of the gay characters was killed off. Thankfully, this fan didn’t take after Kathy Bates in Misery, whose response was to imprison and torture the writer in question. Nevertheless, the hurt felt by fans when this is happens is real enough. The Person of Interest fan responded by dropping her support of the show altogether. It was soon cancelled for good.
All of which begs questions not just about the changing role of the fan, from consumer to consultant, but also the role of the writer, from trying to gain an audience, to trying to keep them satisfied. The Person of Interest creator protests, quite reasonably, that a gay character can’t not be killed off just because they’re gay and have gay fans. A story has to go somewhere; that’s what makes it a story. What some fans want is really a static loop. I think of the Stevie Smith poem ‘To An American Publisher’:
You say I must write another book? But I’ve just written this one. You liked it so much that’s the reason? Read it again then.
But of course, fans already do this. They re-watch or re-read their favourites again and again, and still it’s not enough. It’s there in Sherlock Holmes, killed off halfway through the stories by Conan Doyle, then brought back by popular demand. It’s the same with music fans, with reunion tours, jukebox musicals, tribute bands, and now the Queen film Bohemian Rhapsody, a manifestly bad film that exists to make fans of the music happy. Re-playing the original songs a thousand times is still not enough. Fans want more, as long as it’s more of the same.
I’ve
just found myself watching all of the first series of Russian Doll again. Do I want a second series? Hard to say.
**
Sunday 31st
March 2019. To the
Rio with Jennifer H for Out of Blue,
the new Carol Morley film. It’s steeped in woozy originality, secretive and
strange. I feel I need to see it again to appreciate it. It’s one of those.
**
Wednesday 3rd
April 2019. With
Jon S to the Odeon Tottenham Court Road for Us,
a horror-thriller by the man behind Get
Out.There is a theme about
America and oppressed selves, personified by sinister doppelgangers in red
boiler suits. It’s tempting to ask questions about the logic of the plot, which,
like the end of Get Out, dips
jarringly into realism after what seems to be a lot of allegory.
There’s a final twist which forces the audience to rethink the meaning of everything that’s gone before. I’m not sure that’s fair on the audience, or indeed fair on the rest of Us. By that point the film has already delivered a rich parade of symbolism, striking visuals, thrills, terrors, and ideas. A plot twist undermines those achievements, as it forces the audience to make one reading only. Whereas an inscrutable film like Out of Blue may make demands on its viewers, but the bond of trust is never in question.
If Us becomes a classic, it will be because of everything in the film except the twist ending. The same, after all, became true about Citizen Kane.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Monday 10th December 2018. One reason for carrying with this diary, or carrying on with writing at all, is the hope of being understood, if only by myself. I find my own existence more baffling than ever, and writing the diary is one way to stop myself going absolutely mad. Except I’m not even sure what madness means. Still, it wouldn’t do for me to feel normal. I can’t pull off ‘normal’ as a look.
**
Friday 18th December 2018. I’m reading a lot about Angus Wilson, partly in preparation for a discussion on the Backlisted podcast, but also because he relates to my ongoing interest in camp, in this case as a kind of literary style. But he was camp in his own persona too. He makes a cameo in Ian McEwan’s novel Sweet Tooth, where he’s described as ‘camp as a tent peg’. And McEwan should know: he was Wilson’s pupil at UEA.
Angus Wilson was known for dressing in linen suits, with flamboyant bow ties, colourful shirts, and a swept-back leonine mane of hair. He spoke in a rapid, verbose kind of nattering; intellectual, but with a hint of gossip, not unlike Ned Sherrin. Margaret Drabble’s biography notes how in his older, fleshier years Wilson joked about his close resemblance to the actress Margaret Rutherford.
From what I can tell, Wilson currently tends to be left out of discussions of post-war British literature. The degree course I did a couple of years ago preferred the likes of Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis (but not Martin), Philip Larkin, Colin McInnes, John Wyndham, Sam Selvon, Anthony Burgess, Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing, and John Fowles. I now can see how Drabble’s Ice Age, which depicts 1970s Britain through a Victorian realist style, owes a debt to Wilson. It’s also mentioned in The Clash song, London Calling.
Wilson’s books are currently only available via Faber Finds, the automated print-on-demand service. While better than nothing this does lack the sense of care one has with a proper reissue. It’s telling that the most recent proper edition is the New York Review of Books one for Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, from 2005. Sometimes it takes America to value Englishness.
The novels aside, Angus Wilson should be better known for at least four other things. First, there was his work as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during the war – against Mussolini rather than Hitler. Despite his later work among the world of fiction, his choice of a book on Desert Island Discs was a Bletchley nod: ‘any volume on mathematical logic’.
Another achievement was his work in the late 1940s and early 50s as Deputy Superintendent at the British Museum Library, now the British Library. Wilson had to organise the replacement of thousands of books destroyed in the Blitz. The British Library now has a painting of him in the Humanities 1 Reading Room, right by the entrance.
Then there’s his co-founding, with Malcolm Bradbury, of creative writing as a British university subject, which happened at UEA around 1970. This is probably his greatest legacy, given the huge industry that creative writing is today. This particular fact was even included in the general knowledge round on an edition of Mastermind.
Still, it’s the fourth achievement that really interests me: his campaigning for gay rights. In 1980 he became the first openly gay man to be given a knighthood, a mere thirteen years after the law was changed. That really can’t be underestimated. Even though he was at pains for Hemlock and After not to be called a gay book, or for himself to be called a gay author, he nevertheless went out of his way to help the cause. In 1985, during the height of AIDS paranoia, when the same government who had honoured him raided the Gay’s the Word bookshop, Wilson used his position to intervene. ‘It is intolerable’, he wrote, ‘that officials should have such wide-ranging powers of indiscriminate seizure of books. It is even more intolerable that those powers should be exercised’. The shop was acquitted.
If books do furnish a room, Angus Wilson’s books rather furnish second hand bookshops. Today I’m browsing in Any Amount Of Books in Charing Cross Road, and have no problem finding some cheap Wilson paperbacks. The man at the till remarks on my choice: ‘Angus Wilson! I didn’t think anyone read him these days!’ He tells me that Wilson appears in a scene in ‘a recent novel’ which has a party at a gay bookshop. He can’t recall the name of the author, or the title of the book, but as the fictional shop is probably based on Gay’s The Word, he advises me to ask there.
So I walk to Gay’s the Word, twenty minutes away in Marchmont Street, where Uli and Jim confirm the book in question: it’s Philip Hensher’s The Emperor Waltz (2014). It is instances like these that show how bookshops can be better at providing information than Google, and better at providing a memorable shopping experience than Amazon.
The novel I’m talking about, Hemlock and After (1952), is mainly set in a fictional Hertfordshire village, Little Vernon. It’s probable that Wilson drew inspiration from Little Hadham, near Bishop’s Stortford, where he lived just after the war. The same village was later the home and inspiration for Fairport Convention, who immortalised the Angel Pub in their album Angel Delight.
**
Wednesday 19th December 2018. It’s become something of a cliché for successful writers to say they read ‘all the books’ in their school library when they were growing up. At which I always think: except any books on humility.
**
Thursday 20th December 2018. A rather silly article in the New Statesman, arguing that the role you were given in your primary school nativity play is connected to who you are as an adult. I indulge the idea, though, and recall how at primary school I was the only boy angel. Though I did insist.
**
Friday
21st December 2018. I must stop mistaking
irritability for a cheap source of happiness.
**
Saturday
22nd December 2018. The great thing about Christmas
jumpers is that they allow one to identify a gang of lads approaching with
vital seconds of notice. I’ve found that there now seems to be divergence in
the colour scheme. The jumpers with a blue background tend to be more tasteful
and wry. It’s the red jumpers that mark out lads who are out to make trouble.
At least, that’s what’s worn by a group of drunk men in St Pancras Marks &
Spencers tonight, as they hijack some wheeled stacks of baskets and push each
other around in them.
**
Sunday
23rd December 2018. Statistically, Christmas
is responsible for an awful lot of depression. I myself run low on money today,
hitting that dreaded ‘card declined’ moment in shops. I walk the streets in
despair for some time. But what helps me snap out of it is the realisation that
Christmas was, like many midwinter festivals, invented as a remedy against the despondency
and fear caused by the season’s lack of light. Beneath the surface of the
enforced jollity and the pressure to buy and to consume, it turns out that
Christmas was your friend all along.
I also cheer myself up by noticing that there’s a mosaic
of a Christmas pudding on the floor of a certain public building in central
London, so I take a photo and run a quick seasonal quiz on Twitter. Alexandra
Chiriac (@arthistorynomad) wins. The answer is Boris Anrep’s mosaics in the main
entrance hall of the National Gallery. Specifically, it’s the east vestibule
mosaic, ‘The Pleasures of Life’ (1929). â€Also in the mosaics are Virginia
Woolf, Winston Churchill, and Greta Garbo. But unless you look down, you miss
them.
**
To Hackney Picturehouse for Mary Poppins Returns. The audience applauds at the end, which doesn’t
easily happen at the self-consciously trendy Picturehouse.
**
24th
to 27th December 2018. I spend Christmas with Mum in Suffolk. Just
the two of us. An entirely pleasant and happy time.
**
Saturday 29th December 2018. I watch an ‘alumni’ edition of University Challenge. There’s a question put to the Peterhouse, Cambridge team, which is led by the former Conservative leader, Michael Howard. ‘Name the author of these books: The Sadeian Woman, The Passion Of New Eve, and The Magic Toyshop.’ None of them know the answer. Then again, perhaps it would be more upsetting if Michael Howard was a fan of Angela Carter.
**
Monday
31st Dec 2018. I’m reading Sentencing Orlando, a new book of essays on the Woolf novel. One writer
remarks that Woolf’s Orlando would have voted for Brexit. There’s no
explanation as to why this might be the case, other than a vague indication of
Orlando’s conservatism, on account of his/her aristocratic status. I’d have
thought that given Orlando’s defiance of the boundaries of gender and
mortality, for them to embrace geographical boundaries would then be out of
character. Still, this is a parlour game for the times: which among the dead or
the fictional would have voted for Brexit? And so it goes on.
I see in the New Year alone in my room in Dalston, half
watching TV, half looking at Twitter, with pleasant drinks and food to hand. And
I wouldn’t want it any other way.
**
Tuesday
January 1st 2019. Resolution: to embrace my
oddness. I used to, but in recent years I’ve tried to be more normal in case it
led to being more liked. It rather backfired: I just met with more rejection.
So here’s to Weirdo Visibility. But in a good way.
**
Thursday
3rd January 2018. In 1970 my father, Brian
Edwards, was hired to illustrate the cover of the first UK edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse Five. They sent him
Vonnegut’s own manuscript to work with. The publishers didn’t use his design on
the finished book, instead going for a straightforward title-only design:
Today I’m searching the web and find an auction of a rare
proof copy, which has Dad’s design. It must be something of a collector’s item.
I tell Mum and she finds one among Dad’s things in the house in Suffolk. This
is the front cover:
The illustration carries on to the back of the dust
jacket:
Dad’s name appears on the bottom of the back flap:
**
Friday
11th January 2019. I submit my third &
final annual attempt to secure a maintenance grant for my PhD. Applying for
funding makes me think of that line from Michael Frayn’s Clockwise: ‘It’s not the despair. I can take the despair. It’s the
hope’.
**
Friday
18th January 2019. Editing my own work. Note
to self: ‘Dear Dickon, you are only allowed one ‘accordingly’.
**
Sunday
20th January 2019. I watched the Fyre
Festival documentary, or at least the one on Netflix. There’s another one out
at the same time. In 2017, Fyre was a ‘luxury’ music festival on an island in
the Bahamas, which quickly became a disaster. The documentary is an entertaining
piece of storytelling, depicting the hubris of the Instagram generation, how
young people with too much money can come a cropper of the need to be ‘where
it’s at’. A sort of Bullingdon Club mentality, in fact, just like the opening
scenes of Decline and Fall.Some good has come of this glossy
schadenfreude: there’s crowdfunding sites to help the local caterers and
builders who worked on the festival, only to be left out of pocket. While this
is cheering, there’s still the uneasy sense of, as with Bullingdon, rich people
getting away with it, or even profiting, because of who they are.
**
Wednesday
23rd January 2019. To Islington, and the
offices of the publisher Unbound, to be the guest on the Backlisted podcast. The discussion takes place after office hours,
on a table in a corner of the open-plan, modern building, close to the canal. They
dim the lights and provide pink gin. Andy Miller and John Mitchinson, the regular
hosts, are extremely good at what they do. They carve out their own territory
on a spectrum between an amateur book group, with its connotations of rambling indulgence,
and a Radio 4 book programme, which, while more professional, can evoke an unconvincing
stiffness. Backlisted captures the
appeal of old books for those who take their interest seriously but never
without a big, kind heart. The Unbound office is also close to Noel Road, where
Joe Orton lived and so graphically died. There’s a nice connection there for
talking about the different ways a post-war English gay writer might align himself:
Wilson the establishment man, Orton the outlaw.
**
Saturday
26 January 2018. In Russell Square I walk past a lad sitting
on a bench. He shouts at me.
‘Like your hair, mate.’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘I was joking.’
‘I’m afraid I have to accept your first answer.’
I feel I should add that this retort was a prepared one. I’ve had these sarcastic, two-part cat calls before.
It’s the desperation of the second part that intrigues: the catcaller is now anxious to inform you of their true intention. In the case of the Russell Square lad, if I’d just said, ‘Thank you very much’ after his initial remark, and immediately put in my headphones, it’s not a stretch to imagine him getting off the bench and racing after me. ‘OY! You need to know that I was joking!’
Why make a two-part catcall? Perhaps, contrary to the song, the second cut is the deepest.
**
Sunday 27th January 2019. To the Lexington for a charity gig by The Fallen Women, being the all-woman Fall karaoke band, with Fosca’s Charley Stone on guitar. The guest singers, who do one song each, include a bearded Stewart Lee, who does ‘Iceland’ (I think), and takes it extremely seriously. Another young woman, a DJ with afro hair whose name I can’t remember, does ‘Repetition’ and turns in a first-class post-punk performance.
Sharon Horgan, the comedy actress, also sings – I’m later told she’s something of a Fall expert. I chat to Beth and Bobby of Trembling Blue Stars, plus Sarah Bee.
**
Saturday 2nd February 2019. I listen to the podcast version of the BBC Radio 4 programme, A Good Read. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is the choice of Scarlett Curtis, the Sunday Times’s pink-haired voice of young women. The Argonauts really is a book of these times, the talisman of a generation which thinks more fluidly about gender and sexuality, though Maggie Nelson herself is a little older. This issue may indeed end up as a fleeting fashion (I’m thinking of The Bisexual line: ‘Everyone under 25 these days calls themselves queer’) but I nevertheless find it cheering and exciting.
Something else on A Good Read that defines this age: one of the guests, the comedian Catherine Bohart, calls the radio recording a ‘podcast’, even though it’s been a BBC radio show for years. She is not corrected. Perhaps all audio recordings are now podcasts full stop, while live radio is ‘live podcasting’. It’s all content from the web. Except that the device that spawned the ‘pod’ part – the iPod – is nearly obsolete. The word is already a tribute to recent history.
**
Monday 4th February 2019. The Backlisted podcast was published (or uploaded) today. I listen, and squirm at the sound of my voice, gabbling and lisping in my strange little way. Still, I take comfort from the speaking career of Slavoj Zizek, who has a similar lateral lisp and air of tenseness, but who also has that strong Eastern European accent. Does that stop him from being booked to speak? Quite the reverse. He’s worked his shortcomings into a unique brand. All the same, while I can’t help the lisp, I need to put more effort into making my voice slower and more controlled next time. But this is vanity. The best result from the podcast appearance would be that people seek out the books of Angus Wilson.
I take comfort from Wilson too, who clearly had a level of camp hysteria to his personality, but which he managed to channel into productive writing and clear (if fast) speaking. That’s one reason why I chose Hemlock and After: it tries to explain why people are the way they are, with an emphasis on camp men.
**
Announcement: On the 5th of February at 7pm I shall be appearing at the British Library in London, as part of the event Diaries: Lives and Times. Tickets are available online at: https://shar.es/aaPxH6
** This diary contains twenty years of exclusive material, free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Friday 28 September 2018. Further to my wistful renaming of the DLR line as the Delightful Little Railway, my friend Miriam gets in touch with her own interpretation. She thinks of it as the Dave Lee Roth.
Mum is in London. We have lunch in the Stratford Palace of Glittering Delights, otherwise known as the Westfield shopping centre. The place is pure postmodern excess: too many floors of too many shops. Though at least it’s above ground, unlike the underground mall at Canary Wharf, which is clearly modelled on the Hell of Beckford’s Vathek.
Whoever hires waiters at Wagamama’s has a thing for muscular young men. It seems unlikely that a Love Island six pack is the basic requirement for serving pad thai, but it certainly helps with one’s digestion.
In the nineteenth century, the department stores in London were spaces that women could feel safe inside, walking about by themselves. (Source: Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping For Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (2000)). Malls these days are also safe spaces environmentally: safe from traffic and pollution. But the main attraction is the comfort of global brands. Here they are arranged in such proliferation, the experience mimics online shopping. The paradox of a non-place like Westfield is that it makes shoppers feel entirely at home.
**
Tuesday 2 October 2018. Learned today: Woolf’s Orlando was labelled as ‘camp’ in the mid-1960s, thanks to the articles responding to Sontag’s 1964 essay ‘Notes on Camp’. Here’s Thomas Meehan in the New York Times Magazine, 21 March 1965 (p. 30):
‘The favourite parlor game of New York’s intellectual set this winter has been to label those things that are Camp and those that are not Camp. Moreover, finding nuances within nuances, they have now divided Camp into high Camp (e.g., Virginia Woolf’s Orlando), middle Camp (Winnie the Pooh), low Camp (Batman comic books), intentional Camp (Barbra Streisand), unintentional Camp (Lana Turner in Love Has Many Faces), active Camp (dancing at the Dom), passive Camp (sitting through seven straight days of the Bette Davis film festival at the New Yorker Theater) and summer Camp (Cherry Grove).’
I look up ‘The Dom’ and ‘Cherry Grove’ – both are very New York references. The Dom was a trendy hangout for the Beats in St Mark’s Place, while Cherry Grove was, and still is, a summer beach resort on the nearby Fire Island, popular with gay men.
**
Monday 8 October 2018. I watch some of the new Doctor Who, with Jodie Whittaker. I’m intrigued that they’ve made one of the companions, Ryan, dyspraxic. Another character accuses him of blaming things on his dyspraxia, including an alien invasion. Both actions are understandable. The irritation of being diagnosed as dyspraxic should at least allow one to blame things on it. But of course this only makes others suspicious.
Evening: to the Rio with Ms Shanthi, to see A Star Is Born. For all the glamour of Lady Gaga, the film’s focus is really on the troubled masculinity of Bradley Cooper’s character, whose music here is a strange form of 90s grunge rock. One theme is the way gender works in showbusiness: Mr Cooper first sees Lady Gaga’s character when she’s performing as the token ‘real’ woman on a cabaret bill of drag queens. The film equally suggests that the bad behaviour of famous men might be due to the stresses of trying to be a ‘real’ man, whatever that may mean.
**
Tuesday 9 October 2018. History repeats itself. This week the media is full of articles about camp, and it’s New York’s fault once again. The Met Museum’s Costume Institute has announced that ‘Camp’ will be the theme of their 2019 exhibition and gala, and the 1964 Sontag essay will be the inspiration. Says the curator Andrew Bolton, ‘We are going through an extreme camp moment. Trump is a very camp figure — I think it’s very timely.’ Even The Sun runs a story.
**
To the Rio to see Female Human Animal. This is an experimental thriller based loosely around the work of Leonora Carrington. It’s shot very cheaply, as if on an 1980s camcorder. There’s footage from a number of real life arty events. I’m nearly in the film myself: one scene is at a Last Tuesday Society event, at which I’m certain I DJ’d. Viktor Wynd’s Shop of Horrors is also in there, for which I’ve given guided tours. One of the cast is the artist Philippa Horan, who lived at the Boogaloo in Highgate for a while: I used to go to parties with her. At the screening I chat to the man in the seat next to mine. He turns out to be Brian Dillon, author of Essayism, which I read and enjoyed. He asks me about Momus.
The upshot of all this is that I feel I’m in the presence of a club I’m nearly part of, but not quite.
**
‘Disease is reductive in mode, and endeavours to reduce the world to itself’ – Oliver Sacks, Awakenings (1973).
I don’t have any serious health problems, but I do feel my body is starting to fall apart in various typically aging ways: more aches and pains, more slowness, more tiredness. But I’m also mindful of the reductive aspect of writing about them. The appeal of Derek Jarman’s diaries is the art he made despite being ill. One way of dealing with illness is embrace the outer world more forcefully.
I love the way Audre Lorde puts it:
‘I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my nose holes — everywhere. I’m going to go out like a f-ing meteor!’
**
Thursday 11 October 2018. I present a paper on Grant Richards, Ronald Firbank’s publisher, at the ‘Publishing Queer’ conference in Senate House Library. Richards, a monocled London dandy who put out books from the time of Wilde till the early 20th century, is often painted as ‘unscrupulous’, due to his financial unreliability. He sometimes asked untested authors to pay for the production costs themselves.
Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth devotes a couple of paragraphs defending Richards. Like Firbank, she had to pay for some of the costs of her first book The Dark Tide (1923). But she credits Richards with starting her writing career, and for enabling more lasting happiness. When The Dark Tide came out, she received a fan letter from a reader, George Catlin. This turned into a correspondence, and then a courtship, and then marriage and children. One child was Shirley Williams, the Liberal MP. So it can be argued that just as Grant Richards gave us Ronald Firbank’s novels, alongside Joyce’s Dubliners and Tressell’s Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, he also gave us Dame Shirley Williams.
On the same theme of queer publishing, today happens to be Orlando Day. Charleston in Sussex is marking the anniversary of the book’s publication date, 11 October 1928, with a 9-hour reading of the whole novel, in which different readers take it in turns. I’d forgotten how the date is in the story too, marking the end of the narrative. Woolf must have added it when editing the final proofs. Indeed, these days many books appear on Amazon with a release date and even a cover, long before the text itself has been finished.
Something else that I forget about Orlando is that it was Woolf’s biggest selling book at the time. More so than Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse. Despite all the in-jokery between her and Vita Sackville-West, Orlando really connected with the public. It was something about that fantastical gender-shifting premise, combined with the camp tone she adopted from Lytton Strachey’s jokey biographies (which aren’t nearly as read as Orlando is now). With fantasy, there’s also an element of giving readers a new world to play in. This is especially valuable for those who feel the real world isn’t built for them.
**
Friday 12 October 2018. Today’s finding. In 1934 Winifred ‘South Riding‘ Holtby wrote to Vera Brittain. She mentions having Sean O’Casey’s little son Brian to tea, along with the 5-year-old daughter of her friend John Brophy. I realise that this must be an early appearance in the world of letters by Brigid Brophy. (Source: Selected Letters of Winifred Holtby & Vera Brittain (1960), p. 297).
**
‘He had the vaguely distraught air of a kitten that had seen visions’ – Firbank, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli.
**
Sunday 14 October 2018. A copy of the new book Bus Fare arrives. This is an anthology of bus-related writings, edited by Travis Elborough and published by the AA. My diary is in there, along with the bus-related passage in Mrs Dalloway, Amy Levy’s poem ‘Ballade of an Omnibus’ (which I love and which I wrote about for my BA), and a fascinating memoir of Matt Monro, the London bus driver turned pop singer. It’s the fourth book to use excerpts from my diary.
**
Thursday 18 October 2018. The Metro has a paparazzi photograph of the pop star Harry Styles, one of the hosts of next year’s Met Gala ball. He is caught in the ultimate transgressive embrace: holding a book. It is Sontag’s Against Interpretation, which includes ‘Notes on Camp’. This can be no bad thing. The headline is ‘Harry Styles Rocks Pink Beanie And Gets Deep With Susan Sontag Book As He Leaves Recording Studio’ (Metro 18 Oct 2018). I suppose it’s possible that Harry Styles’s fans might now discover Ronald Firbank, who is named twice in Sontag’s essay. Either that or pink beanies.
**
The OED announces that it is adding new adjectives to describe styles of filmmaking: ‘Wellesian’, ‘Capraesque’, ‘Tarantinoesque’. ‘Firbankian’ has been in the OED since 1972. One goal of my research is explain what ‘Firbankian’ may mean, and why it might be useful today. Perhaps Harry Styles now uses it.
**
Friday 19 October 2018. To the Gielgud Theatre with Minna Miller, to see the new revival of Company, the Sondheim musical, originally from 1970. The main character, Bobby, has been gender-switched into ‘Bobbie’. In the wake of Doctor Who this might at first smack of some sort of concession to a zeitgeist. In fact it fixes a lot of the problems of doing the original show as it was. The plight of a single thirty-something man is now a lot less interesting, whereas with a woman one only has to point to Bridget Jones and Sex and the City.
There’s also an Alice in Wonderland theme, suggesting that an adult woman navigating the world of relationships has to put up with a lot of Carroll-like absurdities: people talking at her rather than to her.
My favourite detail is the switching of the girlfriend who sings ‘Another Hundred People’ into a male English hipster, complete with beard and skinny jeans. When he ‘city-splains’ New York to her, the irony is much funnier. And yet there’s poignancy too, as sets of figures in subway trains are shown acting out ‘Another Hundred People’ behind him, suddenly dancing or embracing each other, before separating and returning to their detached reality once more. This could be irksome, but thanks to the inventive spirit of the production it’s properly moving.
**
Sunday 21 October 2018. I’m reading Audre Lorde. ‘When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I’m not excluding you from joining – I’m broadening the joining.’ (Sister Outsider, p. 11).
I’m fascinated with the way Lorde’s late 1970s writings use a capital B for ‘Black’, and a small ‘a’ for ‘america’. But I’m also surprised that the term ‘homophobia’ was in use in the late 1970s at all. I’d previously thought it appeared around the early 1990s, seeing it in films like Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) or in the titles of records like Chumbawamba’s Homophobia (1994), or the Senseless Things’ Homophobic Asshole (1992).
**
To the Rio to see Fahrenheit 11/9, the new documentary by Michael Moore. Mr Moore’s films no longer have the same ‘event’ feeling of Bowling for Columbine. On that film’s release, around 2002, people in London sat in the aisles of sold-out cinemas rather than miss out. Now, Mr Moore is an establishment figure himself. Unexpectedly, Barack Obama comes under fire, over not doing enough about a water pollution scandal. The overall message is that real hope lies with younger activists rather than the present run of politicians.
**
Tuesday 23 October 2018. That eternal writing dilemma: knowing I need to explain some points further, while realising that the whole piece is over the word limit as it is. Â One always needs to say more, and always needs to say less.
**
Thursday 25 October 2018. To the Ivor Cutler exhibition at Goldsmiths CCA, reviewing for The Wire. Two 1970s easy chairs with headphones are set up as if to illustrate Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, one of his works. One set of headphones is connected to a vinyl turntable. The visitor is encouraged to put on Cutler’s LPs: Dandruff, Jammy Smears. There is a brand new LP here too: Gruts For Tea Again, a bootleg compilation on blue vinyl.
The exhibition next door involves some sort of noisy mechanical installation, the clunking and whirring of which leaks into the Cutler show. Cutler himself was a member of the Noise Abatement Society, so I wonder what he would have said about this.
**
To the Rio with Ewan Bruce for Bohemian Rhapsody, the dramatic film about the band Queen. We only go because Mandy sold out in the other screen.
Queen were one camp gay man who died and three Top Gear presenters who didn’t, and films are not made by the dead. This fact shapes the whole film.
The story is partly about sexuality, yet there’s no sex in it whatsoever. What it is full of is ludicrous inaccuracies, terrible impressions (apart from the Brian May actor, who is excellent), bad prosthetic teeth, and irksome attempts at pathos. But then, this is the band who gave the world ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’. High Art was never going to be high on the list.
The film ends with an extended recreation of the Live Aid gig, even though the real version is available for free on YouTube. But presumably there are lots of people who pay to watch Queen tribute bands, so who I am to deny them? The fairest thing I can say is that this film is not unwatchable.
**
Friday 26 October 2018. Despite the vast choice of recorded music now available, high street shops in London still insist on imposing the same few songs on their customers. One example is ‘Broken Stones’, by Paul Weller, from the mid-1990s. I quite like the song, or at least I used to. Today ‘Broken Stones’ is playing in Boots in Piccadilly Circus, while I look for their least butch deodorant. Then when I queue to buy a coffee in Pret A Manger in Regent Street ‘Broken Stones’ is playing there too. I wonder how this happens, and who is responsible, and whether they were ever really loved as a child.
**
‘None but those whose courage is unquestionable can venture to be effeminate.’ – Ronald Firbank, Valmouth (1919).
**
Tuesday 30 October 2018. Halloween has changed. The ‘een’ part has been deemed unfit for consumer purpose, and one evening is not nearly enough. In London, people are on the streets in costumes night after night, particularly on the weekend before October 31st. Still, the upside of this pumpkin-based Lebensraum is that the retreating forces of Christmas have finally been pushed back into early November. Retailers have admitted that even they cannot put fake cobwebs and fake snow on the same windows at the same time. To everything there really is a season; even to seasons.
**
Thursday 1 November 2018. William Sitwell, the editor of the free food magazine at Waitrose, is under fire for being unkind about vegans. If I could get a message to him, I’d say: ‘Why didn’t your great-uncle Osbert check his facts when writing his 1929 memoir of Ronald Firbank? It’s a mess.’
It is, though. Osbert confuses Vainglory with Inclinations, the fool (They are pretty similar, though).
**
Friday 2 November 2018. In the British Library reading rooms, St Pancras. When I go to the desk to collect my books, I am recognised by one of the staffers. ‘Aren’t you on the cover of a queer studies book?’ He means Elisa Glick’s Materializing Queer Desire: Oscar Wilde to Andy Warhol.
Perhaps I should have denied this to make things more interesting: ‘But it really looks like you…!’ ‘I can’t see it myself’.
**
Saturday 3 November 2018. To the Rio for the London premiere of Something Left Behind, a documentary about the band The Wedding Present. It includes a Q &A with the singer, David Gedge. The film is more specific than I’d realised: it only covers the band’s first album, George Best, from 1987, as framed by footage of recent gigs, in which the current Wedding Present line-up play all the George Best songs in order. This event might sound as if it’s aimed at a very small audience, but the screening is so popular that the Rio opens up its balcony to provide extra tickets. I’ve been going to the cinema regularly for over a year, and this is the first time I’ve seen this happen.
Specialization is the way forward now: the more niche, the better. One can see the evidence in newsagents. The general music magazines like NME have withered away, while magazines on prog rock or metal or just David Bowie are thriving. It is all about recognising that, more than ever before, people want to feel less lonely.
**
Sunday 4 November 2018. An obituary in the Times about Derrick Sherwin, producer of Doctor Who in the late 1960s. ‘He became fed up with television and moved to Thailand where he worked as a bungee-jump proprietor’.
**
Tuesday 6 November 2018. I go on a binge-watch of Killing Eve, managing five episodes before finally going to bed. Senate House Library is a location once again, this time doubling as MI5. The only other TV series I’ve enjoyed as much as Killing Eve this year is Please Like Me. They both dare to mix comedy with serious situations, and they do it with an individual own sense of style.
**
Wednesday 7 November 2018. To the Old Vic with Katie Stone, to see Wise Children. This is Emma Rice’s version of the Angela Carter novel. I enjoy it immensely: the performers rattle through the story at high speed, throwing in song, dance, puppetry, colour and pantomime too – reminding me that Carter herself wrote an essay on the latter, ‘In Pantoland’. One of the themes of Wise Children is legitimacy, which Ms Rice maps onto the idea of South London being less ‘real’ than the rest of London, or indeed that The Old Vic is not as ‘proper’ a theatre as the venues in the West End or on the South Bank.
Perhaps one can compare Ms Rice’s productions to Baz Luhrmann’s films: that sense of using pop culture as a giddy dressing-up box. Like Luhrmann, she throws a parade of ideas at the audience at such a rate, that if one doesn’t please, there’ll be another along in a few seconds. And for all her liberties with the text, she still captures that core Carter tone.
Katie tells me that a copy of Woolf’s Orlando has a cameo in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the new Netflix series. It’s used to hint that the Susie character may be gay, non-binary, or trans (Episode 9 of Series 1, about 20 mins in). What interests me is how this very contemporary topic maps so well onto Woolf’s 90-year-old novel. I suppose it’s the non-binary aspect of Orlando that most appealed to me when I named my band in 1992. I have always felt like a not-man, but without wanting to be a woman either.
**
Sunday 11 November 2018: Whenever Noel Coward needed to go to the toilet, he would say: ‘I must telephone the Vatican’.
**
Tuesday 13 November 2018. I’m reading Brigid Brophy’s Reads, her book of essays from 1989. On the cover is the Fabritius painting The Goldfinch, the subject of one of her essays. More recently, the painting appeared on the cover of Donna Tartt’s hugely popular novel The Goldfinch. I wonder now if Ms Tartt was influenced by Brophy.
**
Wednesday 14 November 2018. One of those days when I go from wishing I was more like a normal person, to being grateful that I’m not. The working title for the novel I’m writing is The Beautiful and Weird.
**
Thursday 15 November 2018. The news has become such an unending spiral of Brexit-ity awfulness that I’m doing my best to avoid it full stop. Ideally, a 3-minute morning bulletin on a music station is all one needs. That way, the reminders of humanity at its worst (news) can be quickly compensated with reminders of humanity at its best (music).
**
Friday 16 November 2018: I think of the title for my chapter on theorising camp modernism: ‘Vile Bodies That Matter’.
**
Sunday 18 November 2018. To the Barbican Cinema 2 for Never Silent, a screening of two Audre Lorde-related films. One is The Edge of Each Other’s Battles, a documentary about a 1990 conference. The other is The Body of a Poet, from 1995, a more experimental film which is inspired by Lorde, but actually features the work of other poets. When the old 1990s Channel Four logo goes up at the end, I’m reminded how this sort of thing used to be synonymous with the channel: strange and quiet little arty films, just put on TV for the general good. Still, this screening is sold out, so perhaps that indicates what has happened. Art films now need to be sought out at cinema screenings like this rather than stumbled upon while flicking through channels on the TV.
There’s more art than ever before, but it’s also more fenced off and carefully ‘curated’. While this means one is more likely to find the sort of thing one already likes, it does mean being less likely to stumble upon works that you never realised might speak to you. Serendipity is becoming harder to find.
**
Saturday 24 November 2018. My landlady Ms K hosts a cheese and wine party in the shared kitchen. I wear the Sebastian Horsley silver velvet suit, if only because it’s good for getting conversations going. I wear a seahorse brooch for the same reason. Always wear something a stranger can remark upon. I usually explain that I’m trying to promote the seahorse as a symbol of unusual maleness (because seahorses – and their close relations, like the rather cruelly-named Weedy Sea Dragon – are the only species where the males give birth). One can then talk about seahorses, or the art of weirdness, or just favourite animals.
Even though most people at the party are at least forty, people hang around late into the night. But I weaken and go up to bed at about midnight. With alcohol, I’m getting more tired more easily. But the upside is that my stomach is stronger. Perhaps it’s my sterner sense of an aesthetic: I can’t pull off vomiting as a look.
**
Monday 26 November 2018. I hand in Chapter Two of my thesis to my supervisors. It’s far too long (20,000 words), and yet not long enough; many of the points need more development. But I had reached the stage where I found everything I’d researched to be interesting, and so was unable to know what to cut. Thankfully, this is what supervisors are for. There’s some irony here, too, as Firbank, my main subject, was obsessed with conciseness. His novels are barely a hundred and fifty pages long, but they’re highly polished and dense with their brevity. ‘Firbank has loaded every rift with ore’, said Edmund Wilson.
But there’s also the spirit of the times here, with everyone typing so, so much, and saying so, so little in the process. Everyone’s writing too much, and everyone’s not writing enough. Perhaps, as Quentin Crisp, said, more of us need ‘chains of our own making’.
**
Tuesday 27 November 2018. I see the film Widows with Jon S. Essentially a crime drama – a remake of the Lynda La Plante series from the 1980s, moved to contemporary Chicago and touching on modern issues of race, class, and gender. For all its artistic ambition (there’s one unexpected scene in which characters in a car are overheard yet not seen), the story is still rooted to the genre. It can’t quite bring itself to be as goofy as Killing Eve. Even the inept people in Widows are still gritty and cool, because the genre demands it. Perhaps I should visit Chicago myself, to prove that someone like me can even be allowed to exist there.
**
Wednesday 28 November 2018. To the Barbican for their current major exhibition, Modern Couples. It is the exhibition equivalent of Love Actually, partly because it crams a large number of different love stories into one space, but also because it’s trying to please as many people as possible. Just like Love Actually, the sheer amount of characters on display means there’s an inevitable loss of detail. Once one finishes reading all the captions, it’s closing time. All one can do is wolf as much down as possible and try not to feel overstuffed.
In fact, I’m reminded how Love Actually is itself the film equivalent of one of those boxes of assorted chocolates one gets at Christmas. The bits with Emma Thompson and Bill Nighy are the popular chocolates that always get eaten first, while the bit with Keira Knightly standing in her doorway while her husband’s friend serenades her with signs, and she doesn’t call the police, is the kind of small baffling jelly best left uneaten.
In Modern Couples everything is interesting: there’s just so much of it. The actual manuscript of Woolf’s Orlando is here, for one. There’s also a wonderful photo of Nancy Cunard leaning over a printing press while dressed in a dandyish dinner jacket and bow-tie.
The Barbican gallery shop sells novelty pairs of socks, illustrated with the faces of famous artists. They have punning names: ‘Sole-adore Dali’, ‘Frida Callus’, ‘Feetasso’, ‘David Sock-Knee’, ‘Vincent Van Toe’. The woman behind me in the queue is buying great fistfuls, or rather footfuls, of these nearly amusing items. Perhaps I need to do my own line. ‘Dickon Footwards’ is the best I can think of. Though that’s surely no worse than ‘Frida Callus’.
I buy a postcard and hand over some money to the young woman on the till. She says: ‘Oh, your hands are really soft!’ Buying a postcard in the Barbican shop is the closest someone like me comes to having a sex life.
**
Monday 3 December 2018. Acquiring two degrees in English literature has made me disproportionately intolerant of errors. I no longer just read: I scrutinise. This week I see an article in a mainstream newspaper, which uses this quotation: ‘If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to – Dorothy Parker’.
I know that this is not the invention of Dorothy Parker at all. She did say it in an interview in 1956, but she pointed out it wasn’t her own:
‘I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it. At the moment, however, I like to think of Maurice Baring’s remark: ‘If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money, you have only to look at those to whom he gives it.” (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol 1 (Canongate, 2007))
The quip is much older as it is. There is a version recorded by Alexander Pope in 1727, who in turn is quoting his friend ‘D.A.’ – Dr John Arbuthnot:
‘We may see the small value God has for Riches, by the People he gives them to.’ (Thoughts on Various Subjects (1727)).
**
Friday 7 December 2018. Pete Shelley, singer of the Buzzcocks, dies. I always loved the way Orange Juice’s ‘Rip It Up’ suddenly references the Buzzcocks’ ‘Boredom’, quoting some of the lyrics (rhyming ‘dum-dum’ with ‘humdrum’), then copying the two-note guitar solo. This wasn’t just a tip of the hat but a declaration of affinity. Edwyn Collins and Pete Shelley both believed that arch humour could have its place in serious rock music.
In Pete Shelley’s case, his archness crosses over into bisexual camp: ‘Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)’ was written about a boyfriend. He became much more explicit with his solo synth-pop single, ‘Homosapien’. There’s a 1977 film clip in which he comments on the way punk rock gigs were being cancelled by local authorities. A local education committee spokesman had said that ‘punk rock is vile and obscene’ (Source: a news article in Sounds, 16 July 1977).
In the film Shelley says: ‘These people who are banning us, they’re saying that I’m vile and obscene.’ Then he smiles, widens his eyes, arches his eyebrows, and tilts his head: ‘Do I look vile and obscene?’
It’s the tilting of the head that does it, like a human italic. Firbank once said ‘I adore italics, don’t you?’ (Source: Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey 1916-1920 (1945), p. 136).
Susan Sontag’s idea of camp also applies. For her, camp is ‘seeing everything in quotation marks’. In the clip, Pete Shelley uses his whole face as quotation marks, reframing the words ‘vile and obscene’ with a flirtatious Bet Lynch voice. It was this sort of thing that made him so easy to love. Though, as so often with camp, it also made him easy to underrate.
**
I keep thinking about an employer who once turned me down with the words ‘you have the wrong kind of experience’. Today, brooding on my lack of money, I feel punished for wanting to do different things in my life, as opposed to picking one thing at 18 and sticking to it. Though as Anthony Powell says, growing old in itself is ‘like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed’ (Powell, Temporary Kings (1973)).
But to be fair to myself, there is one form of work I have stuck at: this diary. On February 5th, I will be speaking at a British Library event about diaries in general:
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