I am appearing in two books by other people, both due out this autumn.

One is I am Dandy: The Return of the Elegant Gentleman. Published by Gestalten (Link here). Portraits of modern dandies, of which I am one, as taken by Rose Callahan. Nathaniel Adams provides a text. I’ve not seen a copy yet, but the cover looks like this:

The other is A London Year: 365 Days of City Life in Diaries, Journals and Letters, compiled by Travis Elborough and Nick Rennison. Published by Frances Lincoln (link here). My online diary is in there, along with the diaries of Samuel Pepys, Derek Jarman, and Alan Bennett.

In both cases, I’m enormously flattered to be included. It’s heartening to feel of abiding use in two fields I feel at home with: dandyism and diary writing. It’s also a reminder that I need to do more with both.

The third field I’ve felt of use to lately is academia. In mid-July, I got the results for the 2^nd year of the BA in English which I’m doing at Birkbeck. I was very, very pleased to receive a First in each of the three modules that made up the year, despite my misgivings about the exams and suffering what I suppose must be Difficult Second College Year Syndrome. The novelty of being a mature student had worn off, the work became harder, and I was constantly faced with wondering if I should stick with the degree at all.

So the results remind me that despite the lack of paid work coming my way at present, I know I can at least produce written work in a particular style (in this case, academia) and deliver it on time, and that it’s objectively regarded as Of Worth. So I have that to cling to, for now. Having no money beyond the basics is always going to be frustrating,  but it’s really the sum of my problems at present, and it could be much worse.  I hope something turns up. I’ve no idea what, though.

In the meantime, I’m getting on with studying the texts for the next term.

***

Reading about rare words, I come across one which seems to sum things up for me: ‘aestivation’. It means the act of passing the summer. More particularly – when referring to animals – it means spending the summer in a state of inactivity; the summer equivalent of hibernation.  In Alan Hollinghurst’s The Spell it is used to describe a character’s sex drive: ‘it seemed to have gone into a monkish kind of aestivation.’

***

Saturday August 24^th. A rainy day in Soho. Parts of the district are still being clawed out of the earth by the diggers, as part of the endless Crossrail development. Some of the building site hoardings are used as a kind of outdoor museum, laminated boards telling the history of Soho. I find the section about The Colony Room, tucked away in the northwest corner of Soho Square, by the junction with Soho Street. I brave the rain and take a few photos. The images on the hoarding are mainly taken from Sophie Parkin’s book on the Colony (link: http://www.thecolonyroom.com/).

 

There’s a portrait of Sebastian Horsley, with Babette Kulik:

Taylor Parkes comments: ‘That’s London these days, isn’t it? Let all this stuff die, then set up a bloody museum in the street about how great it all used to be.’

Sebastian H certainly shared this sentiment about the Crossrail works affecting Soho, just before he died. So it’s quite amusing to see him decorating the building site like this – I like to see it as a defiant reclamation of territory.

Later, I walk around the newly expanded King’s Cross station. A regular sight there is a crowd of tourists queuing up to have their photograph taken with the half-embedded luggage trolley beneath the obliging sign for ‘Platform 9 and 3/4’.  For eight pounds, a couple of enthusiastic staffers from the nearby Harry Potter souvenir shop provide each tourist with extra props – a Hogwarts scarf and an owl cage – and take the photo for them. ‘One! Two! Three! Jump! Awesome!’ And again, for the next person in the queue.

Once again, I find gaps in my diary impossible to properly fill. Skimming over the unrecorded seems unfair, but leaving it out altogether seems worse. Am constantly amazed how anyone else gets anything done at all. There seems so much to keep tabs on – literal tabs in the case of the Web. Other people manage to easily write things on Facebook AND Twitter AND update their Goodreads account AND top up their various portable gadgets with power and credit (something that constantly defeats me) AND presumably earn incomes as well. And many of these people have children and partners too! I frequently feel like I’m the slowest person on earth.

Archaeology:

Weds 22^nd May – Last exam of the 2^nd year, as in my BA English degree at Birkbeck. The exam was half on Chaucer’s Troilus & Criseyde, half on a selection from the renaissance plays we’d been studying. I chose The Tempest  and Eastward Ho!

I don’t feel at all confident of getting a decent mark for this last exam, as I’d spent most the time I’d hoped to spend on revising on instead writing the final two essays plus revising for the other exam. I ran out of not just time, but also energy and motivation. By the 22^nd of May I was utterly drained and found it hard to care very much about memorizing the names and arguments of Chaucer critics.

On top of that the stress for the exams gave my first ever migraine. The week before the last exam the sight in my left eye suddenly failed completely. It stayed like that for about an hour. The GP packed me off to Moorfields A&E, as he couldn’t rule out something retinal that might need emergency surgery. Thankfully Moorfields and all their eye machines diagnosed a ‘bilateral’ migraine. I was told to lie down in a darkened room and avoid whatever it was that was causing the anxiety. So my exam revision suffered there as well.

I understand why universities still hold exams – they’re proof one can spontaneously come up with the goods without access to books or the internet. But I’m grateful that the rest of the course has the option of being exam-free. They just don’t agree with me.

After the exam, I celebrated with a few fellow students: Jasmine, Kim, Jon et al. Cheap drinks in the university bar, then a restaurant meal in Marchmont Street.

***

The good news is that my two last essay marks for the 2^nd year were Firsts. I also received a First in my overall grade for the Narratives of the Body module, the first grade to actually go towards my final degree grade. I get the other two overall module grades of the 2^nd year when the exam marks come in, sometime in late July.

Since then I’ve mostly been recovering from it all. Attended a brilliant talk by Philip Hensher on vocatives, an entertaining one by Will Self on his novel Umbrella and one by Alan Bennett at the ICA doing his usual ‘Evening With’ set-up. Also saw the new Star Trek  film (fun), and the new Great Gatsby movie in 3D (absolute heaven).

***

Read Clampdown, a new cultural studies book by Rhian E Jones on the effect of 90s UK music on class and gender. What’s unusual is that it focusses on the cultural meaning of Britpop from the personal yet highly academic perspective of someone who grew up with that music – the author. I think previous books on Britpop have tended to be either by people working as journalists at the time (John Harris), or by those who were involved in the music business (Luke Haines). People who were actually informed by that culture during their teenage years logically have a different take, one that is only now starting to emerge. In Ms Jones’s case she talks about the importance to her of Kenickie and Shampoo as signifiers of female agency. But there’s so many other points in the book: many of which just hadn’t occurred to me. I could argue with some of her conclusions, but then I was never a working class teenage girl in the 90s. It’s an essential text for anyone trying to make sense of that ludicrous era.

Saturday May 4^th: With Mum to the Duchess Theatre off Aldwych to see the new Alan Bennett memoir show, Untold Stories, featuring Alex Jennings playing Bennett. First half is Hymn, a monologue from 2001, written to accompany music performed by a live string quartet (who are quite brilliant). Second half is Cocktail Sticks, a brand new collection of dramatised reminisces about his parents, acted out by Jennings with a small cast. Much of the material is hardly ‘untold’ – the bit about finding an unused tube of cocktail sticks in his mother’s old home dates back to at least the early 80s, when he talked about it on The South Bank Show (something I found online recently). In fact the piece is like an Alan Bennett Greatest Hits gig, with lots of quotes from older work, like the line about his parents finally discovering an alcoholic drink that they like – ‘bitter lemon’. But I think he’s never dramatised this material before – it just feels like he has. And he is meant to be a playwright first and foremost, so it makes sense to finally get such lines into the context of a staged narrative.

Quentin Crisp quoted himself all the time, to the point where the answers he gave in interviews were like picking from a set of cue cards. Wilde did it too, reusing at least one quip from Dorian Gray in Importance of Being Earnest (the one about a widow’s hair turning gold with grief). If it’s a good answer, why not keep giving it? Everything is brand new to someone. Like Judith Butler says about gender, information of worth needs to be repeated or risk erasure. Records can be kept, but they still need to be read.

In fact, that’s what happened to Mrs Thatcher’s ‘the lady is not for turning’ quote, which was bandied about on her death the other week. The point of it was that it was a pun on the Christopher Fry play The Lady’s Not For Burning. But the longevity of the Thatcher quote has eclipsed mainstream awareness of the Fry play, so now it looks like Thatcher (or rather her script writer) coined the euphonious phrase from scratch. As it is, she didn’t even get the Fry reference herself. It’s clear from the way she puts the wrong emphasis on ‘not’.

It’s difficult to mourn politicians who didn’t even get the jokes they had someone else write for them.

***

In the BA English course I’m doing at Birkbeck, the proper classes for the second year have ended, and I’m now in the exam revision period; the exams are on May 20^th and 22^nd. One on Chaucer and Renaissance plays, one on the history of the novel. But I’m also rushing to get the last essay of the year – on the acquiring of masculinity in Middlesex and Boys Don’t Cry -finished over the next two or three days. Get it done and delivered and then… on with the revision.

I keep forgetting how irksome I find the editing part of writing. Today I finished the first draft of the essay, which came in at 4500 words. The essay word count is 3500 words. The trick with the subsequent drafts (I always force myself to do five rewrites) is to hope that the bits I cut out don’t leave the tutor writing feedback comments along the lines of ‘You needed to say more about this’. To which the answer is, ‘But I did say more! The word count wouldn’t let me…’

All finished writing is just edited highlights of what one really wanted to say.

The fear is that the real highlights are in the bits one has edited out.

London is deep in snow. I try to spend the days in cafes and libraries, to save on heating.

Monday 7th Jan was start of the spring term at Birkbeck; we’re now into the third week. Managed to finish the ‘Body’ essay on Woolf’s Orlando and Carter’s Nights At The Circus, polishing it with minutes to submission time. Probably could have used a few more days on it, but I’m just glad I made the deadlines for both of the Christmas essays. Trouble with this last one was that it took me a whole first draft before I realised what I really wanted to say. So I had to cut out 2000 words or so, worth hours of research and writing. One so wants to put in a note to the tutor with the offcuts, asking if they could somehow be taken into account. ‘I did all this extra work. I know it doesn’t show, but I still did it.’

Am back into the swing of lectures and seminars, while (still) battling a series of colds followed by a weekend of full-blown flu. Could barely think straight over the weekend. Am now feeling much better, but probably out of sheer boredom at not feeling better.

***

Set texts for the first half of term are: Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy, Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, and Woolf’s  To the Lighthouse. The humanities ‘Body’ class, meanwhile, continues to be wonderfully diverse from week to week: architecture by Le Corbusier and Eileen Gray, a video dance piece by DV8, photographic art by Ingrid Pollard and Deborah Padfield, poetry by Thom Gunn, and Oscar Moore’s newspaper columns about AIDS.

The DV8 piece – ‘Enter Achilles’ – has really made me want to go and see some modern dance shows. London is perfect for this: suddenly trying a whole new branch of culture, just in case you might like it. It’s just a question of finding cheap tickets.

Taste does change with time. For all you know you might now suddenly love, say, avant garde jazz, or ballet, or heavy metal, or modern opera, and not realise it. How would you know? You need to try a little of everything every now and then. With the possible exception of bungee jumping.

But it works the other way too. There’s been reports of people going to see the new Les Miserables film only to realise – while watching it – that they didn’t like musicals after all.

Not me, though. I’ve managed to see two excellent stage musicals in two weeks: Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate at the Old Vic with Mum (Jan 9th), then Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along at the Menier Chocolate Factory (Jan 17th, by myself). They reminded me that, yes, I definitely do still like musicals – the well-written ones.

***

Right now the media are going a bit silly over David Bowie’s new material, but it’s a kind of weird doublethink – they want something new, and yet they don’t want something new. Not too new. The new Bowie songs will be judged as part of the long-running Bowie narrative first and foremost, rather than on their own merit. The fact he retired for years then suddenly ‘came back’ is treated as if it were as important as the music itself. But that’s how critics work: they can’t actually deal with art in and of itself, it needs to be framed in narratives around the art – genres, biography, backstory, influence. The Story Of The Art is all part of the Art, they imply. Which is unfair. But then, I’m biased.

The college course is into the ninth week of its Difficult Second Album phase. Tonight at Gordon Square we discussed Goethe’s Sorrows Of Young Werther, and the nature of solipsism in literature. This reminded me of a philosophy joke:

Q: How many solipsists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: One. He holds it still and the whole world revolves around him.

***

An email asks me to elaborate on why I called London “the most complicated metropolis on earth’ in an entry about the Mayoral election.

I suppose I was thinking about its organic patchwork of buildings, where the streets – in defiance of Mr Bono – are a clutter of historical names, compared to the tidily numbered grids of New York and LA. How it has medieval streets (streets older than whole countries) as the addresses of very modern tower blocks, like the Gherkin on St Mary Axe. And how it’s constantly struggling to stay a modern metropolis on top of all this history – coping with old streets not built for new traffic, trying to bring its ancient Tube and rail networks up to date with the rest of the world, all of that. There’s also the complicated social structure, with its extremes of wealth and poverty often squeezed together on the same block; the problems which gave rise to the riots in August 2011, while elsewhere in the city luxury flats are continued to be built, purely to make money rather than actually house people. These are difficult problems to solve, because it means stepping in and forcing those who have wealth, property and power to give some of it away. And there’s a big palace with a Royal Queen in it. Who is in charge, and yet isn’t in charge. It’s hard to explain why. Everything just about manages to co-exist. Just.

So I think that’s what I mean by complicated.

***

A new take on old history.  During a lecture on Chaucer, the tutor points out that the Peasant’s Revolt isn’t called that any more. It turns out that it wasn’t all about peasants (there were rival factions of noblemen involved too), and they didn’t technically revolt. Instead, it’s now called the 1381 Rising.

That’s the trouble with learning facts: you have to check they don’t change behind your back.

Tuesday Oct 9th: First class on ‘The Novel’, half discussing The Handmaid’s Tale, half on the nature of novels full stop. Teacher is Anna Hartnell. Afterwards went for drinks at the Birkbeck bar with a group of fellow students – something I never really did in the first year, at least not as a group. They already have become a small gang of friends, at ease with each other. It was an atmosphere of ready-made affability, which I felt flattered to join. I’ve agreed to join them on a group outing to see a production of The Tempest in December – this year’s Shakespeare text.

***

Weds Oct 10^th: First class on ‘Narratives Of  The Body’. Mainly an introductory lecture on theories of the body as separate (or not) from the Self, by Descartes and others. Teacher is Sam McBean. Didn’t feel too different to the other English modules, but that will probably change when we start to look at films and non-fiction. Metropolis up next.

***

Thurs Oct 11: Another day at Suzette Field’s in Muswell Hill, helping her with occasional publicity duties for A Curious Invitation. While I’m there she gets some big news from her agent: the book has a USA deal. She treats myself and the other Last Tuesday Society helpers to champagne on the spot. Some emails to book reviewers come bouncing back with depressing automated messages along the lines of: ‘We’ve got enough to deal with! Stop writing new books, everyone! There’s too many! Go away!’

There is too much new stuff in the world, it’s true. It’s no wonder people feel more ready to pore their energies into commenting on the few things already rich in commentary (eg news, celebrity, blockbuster movies, blockbuster art shows) rather than spend that same time and energy making new content, just so they feel less alone.

A common emotion on social media is: ‘Is it just me?’  The very British herd instinct in unwillingness to stand out. It’d be nice if more of a Robin Hood approach was adopted to commentary. A redistribution of the wealth of attention. But it’s understandable – no one wants to feel alone. And so we get The X Factor, watched by lots of people who don’t even like it. It’s just the need to belong.

***

Friday Oct 12^th: To Suzette’s shop in Mare Street for the private view of The Party Show, a collection of artworks with a party theme, to tie-in with A Curious Invitation. My favourites are those by Abigail Larson, Chris Semtner, Slawka Gorna and Theatre Of Dolls. There’s also a couple of Cecil Beaton prints.  I chat to Rachel Garley, David Piper, Ella Lucas, and Durian Gray & Medlar Lucan, whose latest book for Dedalus is The Decadent Sportsman.

***

Sat Oct 13^th: to the Soho Theatre to see the play I Heart Peterborough by Joel Horwood. A two-hander about a drag artiste and her accompanist, who are also father and son. Full of poetic monologues that you have to keep up with, a bit Steven Berkoff but with rather more campness and music. Milo Twomey (last seen playing Sebastian Horsley) brilliant as ‘Lulu’, with Jay Taylor playing the son – and many off-stage characters in quotation -  equally impressive. Chat in bar afterwards with Clayton Littlewood and Clair Woodward.

The final marks for the first year of my BA English degree have come in.

For the exam I received another mark of 69, being the highest score for an Upper Second (where 70 means a First).

After getting a string of Firsts, I can’t pretend this isn’t frustrating. I even worry – half-jokingly – that I may have hit my peak, and that I might be getting worse as a student. But no, it’s still a good mark for my first attempt at an academic exam since Margaret Thatcher was in power.

And it’s still good enough to bring my final overall mark for that particular module into the realms of a First. They don’t give you a single mark for each year of the degree: instead you receive overall marks per module.

So, of the three modules that made up the first year, I received 72, 72, and 73. All Firsts, for my first year.

These results don’t actually count towards my final degree mark – students just have to pass all three modules in order to progress onto the next year. But I’m pretty pleased with the results. I don’t find academic work at all easy, and there’s still plenty of room for improvement, such as my exam performance.

The main thing for me is that I now feel officially justified in deciding to do a university degree at this stage in life, and for choosing English literature as a subject. I always liked the idea of having an English degree. I thought I was the sort of person who you’d think had done an English degree. Now it looks like I am actually am that sort of person. So much of education is about giving you self-belief and confidence in life, and becoming yourself; on top of the acquiring of skills and knowledge.

The plan now is to try and convert this personal form of success into the kind of success the world actually cares about – using it to find appropriate paid work, the sort I can do alongside the studies. The benefits people have sent me a letter saying they are about to make me jump through various undignified hoops. It’s part of the government’s drive to get as much people as possible off benefits and into jobs – even though the jobs are thin on the ground. My only fear is being cut off from benefits altogether, perhaps by my refusing to take a job that doesn’t fit with the degree. With these results I’ve proved I actually am good at something, and I want to continue down this path. One hopes even Mr Cameron, with his talk of making people ‘realise their potential’ won’t begrudge me that.

I’ve even bought the official Birkbeck college tie to celebrate. Many of the staff and students aren’t aware that Birkbeck, a college which specialises in evening classes for mature students, has its own colours and tie. But it does, and in this Olympic climate of heavy branding and rooting for teams (and indeed, of London mayors who come from the world of the old school tie) I thought it made sense to wear it:

July 2012. A big month for London. Festivals and events and publicity for the Olympic Games everywhere you look. ‘2012’ logos and Union Jacks plastered on even the most tenuous of products. Posters for the West End musical Billy Elliot have been adjusted to describe it as ‘The Great British Musical’. Similarly, a revival of Joe Orton’s What The Butler Saw has a huge Union Jack as its background, playing up the Swinging Sixties feel but clearly nodding to the general pushing of Britishness this summer.

It seems that Jubilee Union Jack flags also double as Olympic flags, even though the latter event is rather more international. I find the implied message vague and wonder: if the Jubilee hadn’t coincided with the Olympics, would such bunting still be out for the Games?

The bunting found nearest to my door was for the Jubilee street party in Highgate Avenue, stretched all along the road between the street lamps. After the Jubilee weekend it was mostly taken down, which made sense. Which baffles me now, however, is that some traces of the bunting are still there now, a few sorry strings left hanging from the road signs at either end, bedraggled and drenched in the rain. Perhaps this is a sign, too: a tribute to a very British lack of wanting to let something go. Or of hoping someone else will finish a job for you.

There’s a stepladder in my hall. I might do it myself. Put the dying bunting out of its misery.

***

My sole summer booking is this Friday 6^th: I’m DJ-ing for the Last Tuesday Society’s ‘Orphanage Masked Ball’, in Adam Street. More details here.

Later this month I’m visiting my parents on their holiday in Southwold for three days. I’ve also been invited to a wedding in South London at the end of August. Oh, and I have an outpatient appointment to test for food allergies before that. That’s pretty much my Olympic Summer 2012.

Which suits me fine, really. I have a long reading list of books to take notes on for the Autumn term, and I’m not the fastest of readers as it is.

I have two university announcements still to wait for, though. On Monday 9th I find out which of the optional modules I’ve been allocated for the 2^nd year. It’ll probably be either ‘Fin De Siecle’ (Wilde, HG Wells, Dracula), or ‘Narratives Of The Body’ (connecting Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to the film Blade Runner). Either would suit me. As soon as I know, I can get on with the reading.

Most importantly, though, this month I’ll receive my mark for the exam, and have my final marks confirmed for the whole of the first year. The date of this result is officially known as ‘before the end of July’. I’m taking this to mean late July in general. Only then will I feel able to properly mark the end of my first year as a born-again student.

Yesterday (Tues 22nd): Took the exam for my degree course, marking the end of my first academic year. Although I’ve no previous exams to compare it with, I feel like I did okay, at least to get a basic pass. I get the results sometime in late July.

Answered questions on Jekyll and Hyde and the Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair graphic short stories in It’s Dark In London, with references to From Hell. Particularly pleased that I had memorized the Bible verse which mentions the founding of the first City of Man (Genesis 4:17). My only worry now is whether I properly justified the use of such tidbits. It’s so tempting to crowbar any memorized quotes  into one’s answer regardless. Ah well, it’s done now.

I’m now experiencing the strange aftermath of blankness that comes with finishing exams, not felt since I did my GCSEs in the 80s. It’s a dazed sense of ‘now what?’, made more dazed by the sunny weather. In fact, the moment I came out of college the weather suddenly changed from cold and damp to too hot and sunny, with no time spent in-between. Very apt for Jekyll and Hyde.

Celebrated in the evening with drinks at the Boogaloo, in the company of Ms Ella L. We talked about another common post-exam emotion: knowing you can get back to reading books for pleasure again. I have a reading list for the second year, but as that’s not until October, the pressure is somewhat off. First up on the pleasure pile is Clayton Littlewood’s new book, Goodbye To Soho.

Coming up for me: DJ-ing at the Last Tuesday Society on Saturday, then a trip to the Bafta Awards on Sunday, then a day out to visit my parents in Suffolk. However, as tempting as it is in London to spend one’s time idling, socialising and consuming the work of others, I do want to work on something of my own.

***

In Marks and Spencer today. The forthcoming Queen’s Jubilee has meant there’s union jack branding everywhere: sandwiches, cakes, drinks. M&S are even selling a ‘Rule Britannia’ door stop.

I currently have a weekly session with a study skills tutor, who checks up on my work habits; though in the nicest possible way. Her room is deep within the Orwellian confines of Senate House, with its pleasing sense of ghosts and past lives led.

We meet every Monday. Today I tell her about my current stresses and worries about not getting enough done (a final essay due in next week, plus an exam on May 22nd to revise for). She dares me to take a complete holiday from social media – a ban – until the next session. It might make me more productive. It might even make me more happy – my feelings about being on social media are still so mixed. Either way, it’s worth a try. As next Monday is a bank holiday, this effectively means staying off Twitter and Facebook for two weeks. So I’m starting today.

I’m tempted to add radio and non-essential Internet access too, just to see what it would be like to spend a fortnight fully immersed in books and offline writing.

***

Thursday last: a day out to Ipswich to meet with Dad. Many parts of the town of my birth are now conspicuously rundown, possibly even abandoned. The silvery Odeon cinema has been empty for the best part of a decade, while Upper Orwell Street is full of boarded up shop fronts, windows with eviction notices and broken pavements fenced off by steel barriers, forcing the pedestrian to dodge the cars in order to walk down the street. One empty shop’s upper storey has broken windows with pigeons flying in and out. What shops there are seem to be either franchise charity shops, or ‘cash convertors’, ie what used to be called pawn shops. The following weekend the Sunday Times runs its ‘Rich List’ feature.

***

Recent outings: a farewell bash in a King’s Cross bar for Emma Jackson and Adey Lobb, who are moving to Glasgow. Something of an end to an era, as I remember Emma’s first place in London, circa 1996. It was when she was in Kenickie, and she shared it with the other band members, Monkees-style.

Also there: Marie & Pete of Kenickie, Erol Alkan, Bob Stanley. Simon Price DJs, and even plays a Romo tune (Plastic Fantastic) just like he did when I met him, and met Kenickie. It feels long ago – it was long ago. A lifetime piling up, as the Talking Heads song goes.