Saturday 21st November 2015.

I meet Tom, Charis and their friends at the British Library, to see the new Alice In Wonderland exhibition in the lobby. Or at least, we try to see the exhibition. A huge queue for it stretches across the width of the building, doubles up at the end, and appears not to be moving. A woman at the information desk tells me that interest in the exhibition has been overwhelming, and they were taken by surprise. This is the first weekend, though, after all the press coverage, and it’s open till April. So we postpone the visit for another day. How interesting, though, that a mid-Victorian children’s book can have such a hold on a twenty-first century public, and that people will queue to see old books in glass cases.

Well, people except us. Instead, we take a look at the Alice pop-up shop – also crammed – before I show them the Spice Girls Staircase in the St Pancras hotel next door. I also point out this year’s Christmas tree in St Pancras station. It’s a tottering pile of Disney soft toys, from Mickey Mouse to the heroine of Frozen. Among them is the White Rabbit from the Disney cartoon of Alice In Wonderland, which is a neat consolation. Then we go for refreshments in Drink Shop And Do, in the Caledonian Road. I suggest this crafts-based female-friendly venue, partly because most of our group is female, but mainly because I get nervous around football fans in pubs, and it’s a Saturday afternoon. There’s a pile of board games available, and I play my first ever game of Jenga.

* * *

Monday 23rd November 2015.

MA class on The Submission, by Amy Waldman. It’s a clever novel about the politics of post-terrorism grief, where the winner of a competition to design a 9/11 memorial turns out to be a Muslim, thus triggering a range of protests. The timing of this class with the Paris attacks makes the issues all the more relevant. There was an article this week about how one of ISIS’s aims is the elimination of the ‘grey zone’, as in toleration, nuance of thought, consideration of complexity, and the peaceful co-existence of different faiths. By firmly foregrounding this theme, Ms Waldman’s book works as a good memorial in itself.

* * *

Tuesday 24th November 2015.

I am in the British Library to work on my first MA essay. I’ve not been here since May, but there are a couple of staffers in the Rare Books Reading Room who still greet me with ‘Mr Edwards!’ when I go to collect my requested items. They also add that they enjoyed seeing me in the book I Am Dandy.

The Rare Books room still has 40 desks where laptops are banned. I tend to favour these, partly to keep up my longhand writing, but also because they are rarely occupied.

* * *

Wednesday 25th November 2015.

To the private view of Quentin Blake – The Hospital Drawings, at South Kensington and Chelsea Mental Health Centre. This is a clinic next to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on Fulham Road. Mr Blake has made specially commissioned drawings for the walls of British hospitals for ten years now, and this exhibition features a selection of these works. His productivity is all the more impressive, given he is now in his eighties. Asked to provide nineteen drawings, one for each bedroom on a mental health ward, he delivered sixty. His scribbly, sketchy style is typically colourful and lively for a sequence designed for a children’s ward – images of friendly space aliens, to help children be less fearful of doctors. But the drawings for adult clinics are more restrained. There’s dots for eyes instead of his usual googly circles, and his signature messy lines are calmed through washes of pale watercolour – greys, greens, light browns and golds. There’s still plenty of silliness, though: he illustrates therapeutic activities by having elderly people sitting in trees playing cellos or feeding mad-looking birds. One sequence has older people performing circus tricks on a senior-friendly level – a tightrope walker is mere inches from the ground.

Mr Blake himself turns up tonight to open the exhibition in person. A consultant introduces him as ‘Britain’s most famous living illustrator’, which is surely true. ‘At first I worried,’ QB says in his speech, ‘that the drawings of elderly people might be in bad taste. Then I realise I’m part of the same social group as they are, so I’m allowed.’ The last time I was in the same room as him, it was at a Puffin Club Show in the early 80s. I would have been about ten. The prints and drawings in this exhibition are all for sale, in aid of the Nightingale Project, an organisation that puts art into British hospitals. Many of the works are a mere £300 each. He is an artist of the people, in many ways.

One of my favourite lesser-known Blake works is The Bed Book, where he illustrated Sylvia Plath’s poems for children. (Link to an article about it here: https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/04/04/the-bed-book-sylvia-plath-quentin-blake/)

* * *

Thursday 26th November 2015.

After last night’s free wine in the corridors of a mental health clinic, I enjoy more free drinks in an unlikely space – the London Library’s Reading Room, in St James’s Square. It’s the Members’ Christmas Party, and I chat with the likes of Travis Elborough, Andrew Martin, and various fellow Library members, some of whom turn out to be fellow Birkbeck postgraduate students too. I’ve found that my seahorse brooch is perfect for getting conversations started with strangers. I rarely go up to people I don’t know, so it’s good if they have a reason to come up to me. If only to say they like the brooch.

* * *

Friday 27th November 2015.

Afternoon: I give another tour at Wynd’s Museum of Curiosities in Mare Street, some of it filmed by a lady from Time Out.

Evening: to the East Finchley Phoenix for the film Carol, directed by Todd Haynes. His last big screen affair was the experimental Bob Dylan biography, I’m Not There. After seeing Carol I realise that both films end with a shot of Cate Blanchett looking directly at the camera. Then she was in male drag as the 60s Dylan. In Carol she’s in a more conventional female role, but still with an otherworldly air. Her character is a spellbinding New York society wife during the 1950s, who draws a young shopgirl into a romance. Like many of Mr Haynes’s films, the emphasis is on outsiders coping to be themselves in an artificial world, though this is his most accessible work yet. In fact, it’s based on Patricia Highsmith’s autobiographical novel of the same name, which was notable for reaching selling nearly a million copies in the 1950s, while daring to give its gay characters a happy ending. So it’s only right the film version is aimed at a mass audience.

Despite this, Carol still has an arthouse sensibility. Every frame of this film is ravishing and balletic in its rendering of the era, much like an Edward Hopper painting. The two leads (Rooney Mara as the younger) manage to channel the mannerisms of the films from that period, with much blowing of cigarette smoke in stylish directions. Ms Blanchett has a touch of a slowed-down Katharine Hepburn (in a dreamy reprise of her actual Hepburn in The Aviator), while Ms Mara closely resembles Audrey Hepburn, albeit a more inscrutable, guarded version. Just when it can’t get any better, Carrie Brownstein from Portlandia and Sleater-Kinney turns up.

It’s only occurred to me now that the title ‘Carol‘ is not just a reference to the Blanchett character, but a play on the Christmas setting of the story, and how this links to the gift-giving themes of the story. So the release date is well-chosen, too.

* * *

I leaf through the London Evening Standard. As it’s a free newspaper, I take pains to save waste and only read it after it has been discarded by someone else, usually onto the seat of a Tube carriage. A few years ago, when the ES cost 50p and had to compete with two free papers, it ran a poster campaign depicting a carriage covered with copies of its rivals. ‘No one throws away the Standard‘, the poster boasted, making the connection between litter and financial worth. Today the Standard is free, and people indeed throw it away. The poster turned out to be the advertising equivalent of Neville Chamberlain’s ‘Peace For Our Time’ speech. It’s the same lesson: never make hasty claims about pieces of paper.

* * *

Tonight’s ES carries a decent interview with Sian Berry, the Green candidate for next year’s mayoral election. She turns out to be the only candidate who lives in a rented studio flat, being one room with an en-suite bathroom. I suspect that this fact alone could swing things in her favour. There may be more to London’s problems than the property crisis, but (to misquote The Smiths) not much more. Other problems – crime, poverty, the closing of small businesses, the overcrowding of transport networks – all link to the failure to do something about property prices. This week sees the closure of yet another Soho landmark, the Stockpot café in Old Compton Street.

Another property story in the paper has an element of schadenfreude, though. In Barnes, a multi-million-pound Georgian townhouse has collapsed ‘like a deck of cards’, while undergoing construction work. It had been in the process of having its basement enlarged; a fashionable move among London’s wealthy. It always seems to be the basement, and always to accommodate a range of further luxuries, in this case, ‘a cinema, gym, and wine room’.  As if there was a shortage of such things on their doorstep.

Flipping through the Standard, one gets an impression that Londoners either live in overpriced rented rooms, or that they own vast mansions which must nevertheless be remodelled, with much disruption to the neighbours, in order to be even bigger. The abiding question with all of this is: what is a city for?

* * *

Saturday 31st October 2015. 

Halloween. A lone young man is at Barbican Tube platform, staring glumly at the screen of his phone. It’s a typical sight for 2015, except he is dressed as the Incredible Hulk.

* * *

Wednesday 4th November 2015.

(photo by Mum)

My graduation ceremony, for my BA in English from Birkbeck, University of London. Mum and my brother Tom attend.

For a while I wasn’t sure whether I’d attend. Graduation ceremonies are entirely optional to graduates. The diploma certificate is sent out whether one attends the ceremony or not.

Early on in the four-year course, I was umm-ing and err-ing about attending my ceremony. Then Dad became too ill to travel, and Mum had to look after him. A further reason to decline presented itself when I was walking past the LSE, and saw a group of young students standing outside in their gowns. They reminded me how graduation is mainly associated with students in their early twenties; the ones who get those inspiring ‘commencement’ addresses (though some time after writing this I found out such speeches are mainly an American tradition). These ceremonies are as much a rite of passage as they are benchmarks of achievement.  Watching these pert young students in their gowns, I felt a bit too ‘commenced’ in the tooth to join them.  No, a ceremony wasn’t for me.

And then Dad died. And time passed. And the ceremony came around. Mum wanted to go – assuming I did. This time I had to admit I was curious. I felt an anxiety of the era: that looking at a computer screen to get one’s results, or receiving them in the post, isn’t a proper memory. This is why people dress up at Halloween more than ever, or go to festivals more than ever, or go to dressed-up graduation ceremonies, or have big weddings. They crave a life beyond screens. This means going to a special place, wearing special clothes, performing a symbolic act. So I said yes.

Graduating in public isn’t cheap. It’s £45 to hire the gown, including the mortar board and hood. Then there’s the guest tickets for relatives and friends at £33 each. Still, this does include wine, buffet food (both of which are quite decent) and Birkbeck Alumni mugs. Thankfully, I discovered that the pricey portrait services can be waived. I’m not keen on a formal portrait as it is, and in my dark mind I can’t help associating those images with tabloid reports of murder. ‘HAPPIER TIMES… Mildred on her graduation day. The inquest continues.’ 

Students can also get a photo taken for free at Birkbeck’s publicity stall. This was all I wanted by way of an image, really. Proof.

(from Birkbeck’s official Facebook page)

For the ceremony itself, Birbeck borrows a venue from one of its Bloomsbury campus neighbours: Logan Hall, in the Institute of Education, Bedford Way, off Russell Square. The architecture is pure 1970s Brutalism – lots of wide, unsilly lobbies that now have a vintage feel. It’s a close stylistic relative of the Barbican Centre. I especially like the little ‘airlock’ rooms that funnel out from the Logan Hall doorways.

The ceremony begins with a procession onto the stage by the gaudily-gowned ‘platform party’, which includes the Master, Professor David Latchman, the ceremonial President, Baroness Joan Bakewell, and the School of Arts Executive Dean, Professor Hilary Fraser. There’s also a few tutors, including Fleur Rothschild, who taught me how to fix my recurring essay problems. And there’s a gentleman in white gloves who carries a ceremonial mace.

The actual graduation performance is a simple but symbolic act of ‘going forth’. As Professor Fraser announces each name, the student comes up to one side of the stage, walks across  to shake hands with the Master and the President, then returns to their seat via the opposite side. No mention of First Class, or Second Class – all graduates are equal. However, if the student has won a prize for an ‘outstanding achievement’ during their studies, this is the one time it’s publicly announced. Today I had my name read out as the joint winner of the John Hay Lobban Prize, ‘for a student who is judged to have shown the greatest promise in English Literature’, and as the winner of the Stephen Thomson Prize, for my work on the Writing London module.

Learned today: PHD grads (who shared the ceremony) have to kneel on a Special PHD Cushion, so they can be anointed with a Special Hood.

Also learned: Birkbeck graduation colours can trigger pangs for Liquorice Allsorts.

There’s no honorary degrees or commencement speeches, but Baroness Bakewell’s speech does include advice. She mentions the current hot topic in academia  – whether Germaine Greer should be allowed to speak at university events, in the light of her unkind thoughts on transgender people. While not judging Professor G’s words, or indeed the petition to stop her speaking, the Baroness suggests that today’s graduates be mindful of both the content of their public statements and the proportion of their public responses. My own thoughts lean to a third party – the way the media stir up heated reactions as a kind of spectator sport.

At the wine reception afterwards, I chat to fellow graduates: Hester, Colin, Kim, Keith.

Keith: Would it be corny if we did that thing where we throw our mortar boards in the air?

Me: Yes.

Keith: Let’s do it.

Me: Okay.

(photo by Mum)

After this photo is taken,  we retrieve up our hired mortar boards from the dry and clean Brutalist floor. Only unthinking graduates would throw up their hats outside, with the mud and wet pavements.

I then realise the hat I have is in the wrong size. There follows a sheepish amount of label checking and hat swapping. It’s a scene that must follow every photo of group hat-throwing.

Afterwards, to an Edwards family dinner at Smollensky’s restaurant in Canary Wharf, where cousin Jonathan had his wedding reception. Mum opens the curtain that looks out onto Reuters Plaza, then closes it again when it exposes our table to the huge dot matrix sign on the building opposite, which displays Reuters news headlines in a constantly moving, ticker-tape fashion. ‘We don’t want to have our dessert serenaded by the latest on ISIS, do we.’

* * *

Thursday 5th November 2015. 

To Dulwich Picture Gallery with Mum, for the big MC Escher show. Even though it’s a wet Thursday lunchtime, and the gallery’s slightly out of the way for most tourists, the exhibition is packed. At times I feel in danger of becoming one of Escher’s animal tessellations, my body precisely filling the space between two other visitors.

The show is billed as ‘The Amazing World of MC Escher‘, which is a telling indication of his critical reputation. The title rather consolidates his image as a circus showman, a maker of absorbing posters for maths classrooms and dentists’ surgeries, rather than what this exhibition reveals him to be: a fine surrealist artist in the vein of Leonora Carrington. One early woodcut is a simple, charming rendition of a white cat, from 1919. The cat was a gift from his landlady. I’m reminded of my own late landlady, Mrs Wilson. For 20 years she gave each tenant boxes of chocolates at Christmas. Sometimes at Easter too.

Random kindnesses. The zip-pull on my shoulder bag falls off. I go into Ryman’s on Regent Street and ask if they sell something I could use as a replacement – a luggage keyring, perhaps. The assistant says, ‘Let me try something.’ He takes a large paper clip from a drawer, carefully bends it into shape and fixes it onto my bag. It works perfectly. No charge.

Saturday 24th October 2015.

Ed Sheeran is one of the biggest rock stars of the moment, yet he seems to evince no traits of ego or megalomania whatsoever. There doesn’t seem to be a single photo of him in existence where he doesn’t look like a competition winner.

* * *

I give another tour of the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities. Some of the visitors have come for the Sebastian Horsley ‘Dandies Corner’ display, to my delight, as that’s where I feel the most knowledgeable. There’s now a single lipstick smear on the glass of the Horsley case, in the fashion of the lipstick marks on the Oscar Wilde tomb.

Sunday 25th October 2015.

Modern language. A phrase being bandied by some disability campaigners is ‘inspiration porn”. This denotes the packaging of a personal struggle, such as in a TV programme, primarily to tug at the heartstrings, rather than raise awareness. It follows on from ‘poverty porn’, to describe shows like Benefits Street. There’ll be ‘sex porn’ next.

* * *

I read the latest Ian McEwan novel, The Children Act. Like Saturday, I wince at the author’s love of privileged protagonists with central London homes and top professional jobs – a High Court female judge in this case – and the main young character seems impossibly idealised. But his prose style still impresses: a clear and controlled flow which completely draws the reader in.

Meanwhile, Mr McEwan’s chum Martin Amis is in the Sunday Times, penning an attack on Jeremy Corbyn. The piece is meant to be scathing, but Amis uses imagery that inadvertently appeals. Because of his ‘incurious domesticity’, he says, Corbyn is like a ‘marmalade cat’. It’s like the time in the 90s when John Major said Labour and taxes went together like ‘strawberries and cream’. The negative sentiment is eclipsed by an entirely pleasant image.

* * *

Monday 26th October 2015.

MA class at Birkbeck, on Atwood’s The Year of the Flood. Lecture by Hallvard Haug. The novel’s suitability becomes evident in the seminar: the more we discuss it, the more we realise it covers a rich variety of contemporary themes. Environmentalism, fundamentalism, feminism, globalisation, trauma, literary genres – it’s all there. A good, all-purpose novel.

* * *

Tuesday 27th October 2015.

Some unexpected praise this week. One is my inclusion in a list of ‘Top 5 pop lyricists of all time’, by La JohnJoseph, at the Dandy Dicks website. It’s a site that features erotica, though the article in question is clean enough: https://dandydicks.com/blog-entry/lyricism. ‘Dickon Edwards – ‘The only man living with any real right to call himself both a flaneur and a dandy’.

I also receive a lengthy email from a young man in Baltimore, who only stumbled on the blog this year: ‘Thank you for existing – You have restored my faith in so many things’.

Plus a handwritten letter from a reader on a Scottish island, who took comfort from my entry about my father. When her own mother died, she dug it out of the archives to re-read.

I’m grateful for these responses. Too often it can feel like no one’s reading, and too often I wonder if I should continue.

* * *

Wednesday 28th October 2015.

A visit to the Foundling Museum, in Brunswick Square. The museum tells the story of the Founding Hospital, which cared for abandoned children and orphans. Though it turns out that the story is more complicated than I’d thought. By the mid-19th century, the demand for admittance was so high that the Hospital had to implement a ‘petition’ system, where the mother had to prove she had been ‘seduced’, which often meant raped, or ‘abandoned’. The idea of single parent families was so shameful that many women give up their children to institutions like the FH, rather than raise them on their own. There’s a temporary exhibition, The Fallen Woman, which focuses on these women’s stories, while the permanent collection portrays the children. A sound installation by Steve Lewinson features the mothers’ petitions read out by actresses like Maxine Peake and Ruth Jones.

I really like the café’s mural, Superman Was A Foundling by Lemn Sissay. The walls are covered in statements about the foundling status of so many characters from popular culture. From Harry Potter to Snow White to Wolverine to Sophie Fevvers, as in the heroine of Angela Carter’s Nights At The Circus. Two characters are illustrated by logos between the café windows: the ‘S’ symbol of Superman, and a dragon tattoo, for Lisbeth Salander.

* * *

Thursday 29th October 2015.

I meet Ms Atalanta for a drink in the Marlborough Arms, in Bloomsbury. The pub is a favourite with students from the nearby colleges. Many students in Halloween fancy dress tonight, two days before the 31st. A party of young men are in animal ‘onesies’, while a group of girls are dressed as characters from Scooby Doo, with one as the titular dog. The pub décor is somewhat schizophrenic in its festive theme: there’s Christmas presents and a Santa Claus cut-out in one corner (with a sign, ‘Book Now For Christmas Dinner’), alongside Halloween pumpkins, skeletons and cobwebs.

We walk to King’s Cross and decide on another drink while waiting for Ms A’s train. Really, thought, it’s an excuse for me to show her The Parcel Yard pub at one end of the revamped station. This in is the former King’s Cross postal sorting office. There’s stripped wooden floors, white-painted dividing walls, old railway signs that manage to be tasteful rather than twee, and an interior covered courtyard with potted trees. Plenty of alcoves and small rooms in which to feel safe – this way, no single loutish party can dominate the whole bar. The pub is right by the Harry Potter embedded trolley, yet it doesn’t feel too tourist-heavy, or even too commuter-heavy.

* * *

Friday 30th October 2015.

To the Tottenham Court Road Odeon with Jon S, to see Spectre, the new James Bond film. I miss the jokier, almost Carry On-like aspect of the Bond films in the past. In one of the Roger Moore films, there’s a moment following a punch-up in an exotic den, where a belly dancer bemoans the loss of a diamond. ‘I’ve lost my charm!’ she wails. ‘Not from where I’m standing,’ says Moore, straightening his tie.

This sort of thing was attempted more recently with the Piers Brosnan films – where strained innuendos were exchanged with the likes of Madonna – but the tiredness of the style was showing. It made perfect sense to move on to a more gritty, realistic approach, with a suitably serious actor in charge. So enter Mr Craig. This means that the violence that would have been read as jokey in the old days (such as Sean Connery and the laser beam) is now made all too believable and unpleasant – one scene in Spectre with Craig strapped to a chair is particularly wince-inducing. I also feel Lea Seydoux’s character here, though nicely acted, is a touch too youthful for the forty-something Craig. Far more interesting are his earlier romantic scenes with Monica Bellucci, who is not only closer to his age, but has more chemistry. Otherwise, the action set-pieces are breathtaking without being banal, the globe-trotting locations dazzle, and the tailoring of the menswear is immaculate. All the male characters, even the absolute thugs, somehow manage to stop off between punch-ups to collect a fresh new ensemble, clean and pressed. The Bond world may be less jokey, but it is still steeped in wish-fulfilment.

* * *

Monday 12th October 2015.

This week’s MA class is on Hollinghurst’s Line of Beauty. I’d read it before earlier this year, but read it again anyway. It’s a joy to do so: the carefully-controlled wit running through every sentence. The seminar takes in ‘retromania’, via Simon Reynolds’s book and the TV series Mad Men. We’re shown a clip where Don Draper gives a speech to clients about a new home slide projector. He muses on the nature of nostalgia, how the word is based on a sense of an ache, or a form of pain, while showing snaps from his own troubled family. The scene is as good as any from literature.

* * *

Tuesday 13th October 2015.

To the Barbican Cinema 2 in Beech Street for Suffragette. The trailer for this film has played heavily in cinemas for months, so much so that at times the actual film feels like the extended 12-inch remix. Trailers should tease, not summarise. And yet all of Meryl Streep’s moments as Emmeline Pankhurst turn out to be the same as those in the trailer. It’s barely a cameo role. The posters mislead too, implying that Ms Streep is in the film as much as Carey Mulligan and Helena Bonham-Carter: the image is just of the three of them, lined up against the Suffragette flag. Today at a Tube station I see a small girl jump in front of the poster, and point out Helena BC to her parents – I’m guessing because of her vampy role in the Harry Potter films. Is Suffragette for children? It has the air of an important history lesson, and bears a 12A certificate, so technically children are allowed to go and see it if accompanied by an adult (I can certainly see it used in schools). But there are one or two scenes that are certainly not for smaller children. One is the unpleasant and painful force-feeding of Carey Mulligan’s fictional heroine, in order to thwart her hunger-strike in prison. The real death of Emily Davison at the Epsom Derby is also presented as a traumatic moment (if a brief and gore-free one).

I feel the film’s script is a little eclipsed by its mission to educate. Its characters are more illustrations of issues than they are living, breathing humans in their own right. But everyone involved with the project clearly believes in it wholeheartedly. The acting and staging lifts the film out of the Worthy History Lesson field and into something more lasting. It’s designed to get people talking about feminism, the value of voting, and the morality and pitfalls of ‘deeds not words’.

* * *

Thursday 15th October 2015.

Marlon James, the new Booker Prize winner, is interviewed in the Guardian. He mentions how his first novel was rejected 78 times by publishers. One of the rejection letters included the phrase ‘not for us’. ‘Luckily for them,’ says the interviewer, ‘James can’t remember their name’. This is a common narrative in tales of literary success, the inspiring message for budding writers being that those whose job it is to spot talent frequently fail to do so, even when it is offered to them on a plate. So don’t give up. It’s an idea that has been backed up with experiments, such as the one a few years ago where one of the more obscure Booker winning novels was submitted to slush piles under a pseudonym. Inevitably, it couldn’t find a publisher. But the explanations that arose, once the true nature of the manuscript was revealed, were perfectly reasonable. Tastes change, tastes differ, and sometimes publishers really are just looking for something else. Everything is ‘not for us’ to someone. It doesn’t mean the publishers in question are fools; it just means one should look elsewhere.

* * *

I give another tour of the Viktor Wynd Museum for an attentive group. After that, to Vout-o-Reenee’s for a talk by the author Petra Mason, fresh in from Miami, on the subject of 1950s American Pin-ups. Her books are glamourous tomes in every sense: one covers the career of the striking model Bettie Page, while another celebrates Bunny Yeager, the beauty queen turned photographer, who indeed often worked with Ms Page. There’s much leopard skin in evidence, whether on bikinis or on actual live leopards, used as props. These days, one need only look to the videos of Katy Perry to see the influence. That same cartoonish sexuality – and so very American.

Ms Mason’s latest book turns to the same era’s male ‘beefcake’ photography. 100% Rare! All Natural!  These are essentially muscular male nudes and near-nudes, which appeared in ‘health and fitness’ magazines – the camper side of Charles Atlas. Obscenity laws meant that the only ‘permissible interactions’ between two men in such photographs were for ‘wresting or fighting’ only. Then it was okay. What’s also interesting is that this was a pre-steroids era, so all the muscles on show have a quaint bygone aesthetic to them. They are the same kind of gym boys that Jane Russell tiptoes around in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, as she sings that knowing number, ‘Ain’t There Anyone Here For Love’.

In Ms Mason’s talk, she mentions that sometimes the beefcake genre crossed the line, and many photographers found themselves in jail. ‘But prison only gave them more ideas… and more models.’

* * *

Friday 16th October 2015.

To the Imperial War Museum for the exhibition Lee Miller – A Woman’s War. Like Bunny Yeager, Ms M was another American model turned photographer. This must be the third Lee Miller show I’ve been to in ten years – she clearly remains a reliable subject for an exhibition, with her fascinating life story. The commercial modelling, the Surrealist muse work, the move into photography, and then into war photography. Here the focus is on the latter, with lots of her shots of women in wartime, in uniform, in the workplace (typists in bomb-proof basements in London), or just women caught in the day-to-day coping with it all. Fashion shoots against Blitz ruins, girls in Paris cafes, casually sipping drinks against bullet-shattered windows.

The news this week says that Kate Winslet is about to play Ms Miller in a biopic, and there’s certainly some photos of the older 1940s Miller in this new show where there’s a resemblance, particularly the mouth. The one of Miller washing in Hitler’s bathtub is present and correct, but I’m also impressed by the large amount of her personal possessions on display: her war correspondent uniforms, her portable typewriter, her camera equipment, letters to and from the Front. There’s also a rare colour photo in which she returns to a kind of War Effort Surrealism by posing nude in camouflage-coloured body make-up, under a net, while lying on a garden lawn in Highgate (The Elms, Fitzroy Park, to be precise). Apparently this was to help illustrate Roland Penrose’s wartime lectures in camouflage instruction – but it’s clearly meant to provoke more than educate. The pose is Penrose’s idea but like the Hitler bathtub photo, it’s taken by the US photographer David E. Scherman. Scherman was also Miller’s lover, a relationship that Penrose – her husband- consented to at the time.

Saturday 3rd October 2015.

Evening: to the Silver Bullet rock venue in Finsbury Park. I’m here to see Debbie Smith’s band Blindness, playing as part of a benefit for women’s charities, ‘Loud Women’. Entrance is donation only, and there’s a raffle and a table of home-made cakes. Let it not be said that noisy bands cannot provide a good cake stall. Blindness have a textured, gothic and moody sound, a bit like Garbage and Curve (the latter being another of Ms Smith’s groups). I also catch the band on before them, Argonaut, who sound like a classic post-punk indie group with female vocals – a touch of the Raincoats, perhaps.

What is rather more up-to-date is a machine in an alcove at back of the venue: a Bitcoin ATM. I try asking people how exactly Bitcoin works (other than being a ‘virtual currency’), but no one around me seems to be in the know. My gut feeling is that it’s the money version of Esperanto: a nice idea but no, really, you go first, I’ll wait and see. As it is, tonight the futuristic Bitcoin machine is out of order.

(As I write this, my internet broadband has also broken down. Douglas Adams: ‘technology is the name we give to things that don’t work’).

Still, a trio of young men come into the venue at one point, purely to use the ATM, and leave disappointed. And near to the Bitcoin ATM is a poster advertising the services of ‘London’s first Bitcoin-accepting professional photographer’.

Raffle prizes at this gig include CDs donated by the bands (I win an Argonaut CD), and books such as Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman, and a collection of Anais Nin’s erotica. I chat with Dawn H, Deb from Linus and Scarlet’s Well (and from Fosca at one point), and Jen Denitto, also of umpteen bands. It’s good to see such faces again.

* * *

Sunday 4th October 2015.

I’m reading some academic texts for the first MA class. The ideas are stimulating enough, but my brain seems to be resisting the dense and sometimes convoluted style of the authors. These are sentences that need a run-up from a distance; sentences that still refuse to give up their meaning after running one’s eyes over them for a fifth time. And there is the anxiety that there is still another fifty pages of this impenetrable stuff to go, and it’s late on a Sunday night, and I’m still not sure I’ve grasped the basic argument. But as I lack the excuse of the novice, the only excuse I can offer is the analogy of starting a car on a frosty morning. I feel I need a few seminars to properly warm up.

What I also suspect is going on, though, is a question of taste. After steeping myself in literary prose for four years, I find myself automatically thinking about style, even for a text where all that matters is content.

In the Sunday Times bestseller list is a rare appearance of a graphic novel, Username: Evie. In fact, it’s the fastest selling graphic novel in the UK full stop. This turns out to be written by Joe Sugg, one of the young stars of YouTube. His sister is an even bigger star, Zoella. Spin-off books by celebrities are nothing new. What is new is the DIY type of fame that has emerged with video bloggers, where the stars cultivate an audience on the internet directly, without having to go through a more traditional showbiz system of agents, magazines, TV shows and so on.

Recently, Mr Sugg’s sister came under fire for using a ghostwriter for her novel, which also broke all kinds of records. A famous person using a ghostwriter is again nothing new – one thinks of Katie Price’s novels. But what fascinated me in the case of Zoella was that she said she had to hire a ghostwriter because books take a lot of time to write. As a YouTuber she was already busy making videos (sometimes on a daily basis), on top of having to write all the comments and tweets that are necessary for sustaining internet stardom. In effect she was too busy being creative online, to be creative offline. Her brother has similarly confessed to using a more experienced co-writer on his graphic novel.

I suppose a positive spin on this is that it shows how an invention as ancient as the book can have a role in ultra-modern, digitally-steeped young lives. The blogging fame is not enough: a tactile product is needed too.

* * *

Monday 5th October 2015.

First proper MA seminar, for the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. The class room is familiar from the BA (Room 124 of Birkbeck’s School of Arts, in Gordon Square), as is the tutor (Anna Hartnell). I also recognise a couple of my fellow students from the BA course. But what’s changed is the atmosphere. There’s a much higher ratio of academically articulate students than there was for the BA. It’s very clear that this is a class of not just students, but high-achieving graduates. To use a suitably contemporary phrase, for an MA on contemporary culture, I have to ‘up my game’.

* * *

Tuesday 6th October 2015.

The winner of the BBC National Short Story Award is announced. Jonathan Buckley wins with ‘Briar Road’; Mark Haddon gets the runner-up with ‘Bunny’. My own choices were quite different: I favoured Hilary Mantel’s ‘Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’, with Jeremy Page’s ‘Do it Now, Jump the Table’ as second. I really am baffled by the judges’ choices this time. I wonder if it’s to do with Ms Mantel and Mr Page daring to employ elements of humour, and the judges mistaking humour for relative lightness. I think the opposite: humour adds depth.

* * *

Wednesday 7th October 2015

I give another tour of the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, this time to a visiting party of foreign tourists. I’m wearing the Horsley suit once more, and have freshly bleached my hair. One of the tourists comes up to me, looks me up and down and says, ‘Wow! What a… personality!’

The photographer Philip Woolway is taking photographs for a feature on the museum. He asks me to pose for a shot of the cocktail bar.

Then to the crypt café of St Martin-In-The Fields, near Trafalgar Square, to meet up with my friend Maud Young. Maud is one of the people I sometimes exchange letters and postcards with. This time we see if we can actually arrange a meeting purely via postcards, without recourse to the internet or phones. It takes three or four cards, but we manage it, and here we are today. I wonder, out of all the thousands of meetings set up in London today, if ours is the only one organised via postcard. If nothing else, it has lasting anecdotal value.

Then to the basement of Stanfords Travel Bookshop, in Long Acre, Covent Garden, for the launch of A Traveller’s Year. This is a new anthology of diary entries on the theme of travel, edited by Travis Elborough and Nick Rennison. There are extracts from my blog in there, covering trips to Brighton, Tangier, Bruges, New York, Sweden and The Hague, and then one on taking forever to get from Harwich back to London, on a day of replacement rail services. It’s a reminder how a lot of travel is carried out in a spirit of undiluted irritation, and even murderous rage. As anyone who has tried to take a train in Britain on a Sunday will tell you, sometimes travel narrows the mind. I read the Brighton extract read aloud tonight, for the crowd. Also say hello to Emily Bick, Andrew Martin, Cathi Unsworth, Karen McLeod, and Guy Sangster Adams.

Then off for drinks at the French House in Soho, where we’re joined by Shanthi S and her friend Helen, finishing with a late meal at Café Boheme on Old Compton Street. At which point I am visibly wilting and dash off to catch a late tube home.

* * *

Thursday 8th October 2015.

Something of a hangover, thanks to the large amounts of free drink at three different locations on Wednesday (the Wynd museum bar, the book launch, the French House).

Despite this I stagger off to a private view all the same, this time at the Stash Gallery, in Vout-O-Reenee’s. The show is called ‘held’, by Jane Fradgley, and comprises many black and white photographs of Victorian straitjackets, spookily shot again black backgrounds for a ghostly effect. The collar label of one is clearly identified as ‘Bethlem Hospital’. If it were not for the sinister straps at the end of the sleeves, some of the garments look quite pretty.

* * *

Friday 9th October 2015.

To the East Finchley Phoenix to see the new film version of Macbeth, starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. It’s a gritty and intense rendition, dominated by outdoor locations. Lots of battle scenes, smoke, mud, and (naturally) blood. Some nice medieval make-up and costumes, when they’re not covered in mud. There’s a number of interesting choices taken with the text, though the cutting of the ‘toil and trouble’ speech by the witches is quite common these days, particularly as the supernatural details are thought to be added by Thomas Middleton. What is original in this film is visions of dead children as justification for the whole plot – either visions of Macbeth’s own offspring, or boy soldiers whom he feels responsible for. The dagger he sees before him is actually held by a ghostly boy, while Lady M’s ‘damned spot’ is not a vision of indelible blood on her hands, but spots of disease (or possibly burns) on the face of a dead child.

On leaving the cinema, I overhear a group of middle-aged women in front of me. ‘I think we’ll choose something cheerier next time’, says one. As if they were expecting Macbeth to be a light-hearted romp.

* * *

Saturday 26th September 2015.

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Monday 28th September 2015.

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Thursday 1st October 2015

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

* * *

Friday 2nd October 2015.

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

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

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

* * *

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

Saturday 22nd August 2015

My over-sensitivity to traffic noise is put to a new test. This week, gas works at the junction between Archway Road and Southwood Lane have meant that my quiet little avenue is soaking up some of the traffic from the A1. Today I learn that diverted traffic has a special sound all of its own. It’s not just an increased volume of vehicles: it’s an increased volume of newly angry vehicles. As they turn into the avenue, the drivers hit the accelerator and take out their frustration on the residents, just because they can. It is the motorist equivalent of flouncing out of a room and slamming the door.

* * *

Tuesday 25th August 2015

Days of rain and bad temper. I am beginning to discover how much of the financial help I’d received as an undergraduate isn’t available to postgraduates. MA students are expected to just have reserves of money. Today I have the confirmation that my discounted Tube travelcard cannot be extended for the MA. I put down the phone, seething, as the clouds burst over the city.

I brood on this an hour later, having trudged through the rain onto a Tube train. Then I learn something else: that my only summer shoes go into aquaplane mode if they so much as look at a raindrop. They also have the ability to retain a lethal amount of water on the soles. I learn this hard, as in the hardness of a tube station platform. I step off the train, and immediately slip over. Fully and bodily, the impact of the platform easily eclipsed by the impact of the watching tourists. I feel their eyes far more than the ground, and it is my dignity that really suffers. By Charing Cross Station I Fell On My Arse.

Miraculously, my white suit remains unsullied. A passing passenger checks I’m okay, as I scrabble to stand up. ‘Take it easy, man’.

* * *

Writing this up days later, I feel the need to apologise to the blameless escalator at Charing Cross. I’m ashamed to say that I suddenly thumped it – once, but as hard as possible – as I made my ascension from the platform. I was still reeling from the fall, but of course there was more to be angry about. It had really been the worry over money, as much as the rain, and the shoes. The punch was my version of the motorists diverted from Archway Road, with their little angry bouts of needless noise.

* * *

Wednesday 26th August 2015.

I’m reading Clive James’s new book of literary essays, Latest Readings. Given Mr J’s terminal illness, and its very public nature, it must have been tempting to call the collection Last Readings. But as Mr J himself has commented, with the dark humour suggested by the title of his book of poems (also just published), Sentenced To Life, medicine has developed to the point where a terminal diagnosis can still mean another five years. In which time, Mr J has had the condolence of the career-boosting attention of death, while still being alive to enjoy it. And he is no Harper Lee: there’s no shunning of the press. Despite being housebound, he still gives interviews and poetry readings for visiting media. Perhaps one reason is that he disliked the way an actor read his poem ‘Japanese Maple’ on the radio. ‘I tuned in on the web to listen,’ he says. ‘And I felt that I had been tied to a chair and beaten up by Basil Rathbone.’

Latest Readings is an account of the prose works he has consumed since falling ill (he’s already covered poetry in Poetry Notebook). The one work that ‘cured’ his fear of lacking enough energy for prose was Boswell’s Life of Johnson, which is over a thousand pages. Then he found himself devouring Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey yarns, the novel sequences of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, and large swathes of Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. His rediscovery of Conrad became an unexpected compulsion: ‘Time felt precious and I would have preferred to spend less of it with him, but he wouldn’t let me go.’ He also sings the praises of Game Of Thrones on DVD, while assuring the reader that he has not become an all-embracing saint either: Dan Brown’s novels are still of ‘semi-mental merit’, and the Carry On films remain ‘brain dead’. I can’t agree with the latter, though I have to admit it applies to Carry On Emmanuelle.

In the book’s last essay, ‘Coda’, Mr James links his reading of a new Florence Nightingale biography to his experiences of the nurses at Addenbrooke’s hospital, in Cambridge. On a night nurse who had to clean up his burst urinary tract, he notes how she herself ‘had a deformed body, with limbs all the wrong lengths. Life could never have been easy for her. But now she was making the end of life easier for me. […] I can only hope that the sum total of my writings has been as useful to the world as her kindness, but I doubt that this is so’. He dedicates the book to the hospital.

Books may indeed be little use when it comes to cleaning up urinary tracts (the absorbing properties of paper aside), but I like the way Latest Readings proves that sickbed reading can not only be a comfort, but a process of discovery.

When Dad was in the hospice in Ipswich, I found myself intrigued by the communal bookcase, noting which authors were deemed hospice-friendly. The most common names on the shelves were Agatha Christie, PG Wodehouse, and Terry Pratchett.

Tonight happens to be the release of Pratchett’s last Discworld novel, The Shepherd’s Crown. There’s news reports of a midnight launch at Waterstones Piccadilly, with photos of adult fans dressed up in wizard costumes (the practice is now called ‘cosplay’ – costume play). On Twitter I see a certain amount of sneering at this. And yet, how is this any different from the James Joyce fans who wear straw boaters when they go on ‘Bloomsday’ walks?

One Pratchett fan is interviewed. She says that her father found comfort in the Discworld books, while on his own terminal sickbed.

Terms like ‘award-winning’, ‘longlisted’ and ‘acclaimed’ are really all steps to the same thing; the one thing all writers want, whatever their genre or literary standing. They just want to be read. As Philip Glass says somewhere, to have an audience is success enough.

* * *

Thursday 27th August 2015.

I find a college jobs advert with a sentence in urgent capitals: ‘DUE TO THE HIGH NUMBER OF APPLICATIONS WE EXPECT TO RECEIVE FOR THIS POST, THERE WILL BE A CAP OF 100 APPLICANTS.’ It’s for a part-time library shelver.

* * *

To the Curzon Bloomsbury, and its documentary-only screen for The Wolfpack. This is a frustrating film on an intriguing subject. Six teenage brothers have been confined by their father to their New York apartment, for most of their life. They have been schooled at home by their mother, who has some kind of license and arrangement with the authorities to do so. In lieu of contact with the outside the world, the boys become avid DVD buffs, recreating scenes from Reservoir Dogs and The Dark Knight with the use of props made from cereal boxes.

Despite the appeal of such an unusual scenario, and the poignancy of letting these isolated boys tell their tale to a mass audience, I felt the film needed more voices. I wanted to hear from the social services, the police, the neighbours, even a narration from the off-camera director. It’s exactly the kind of film where a Q&A with the director feels necessary.

* * *

Friday 28th August 2015.

To the Curzon Victoria for Gemma Bovery. After my frustration with the true story of The Wolfpack, I thought I might be more satisfied with some straight-ahead fiction. Particularly as it was an adaptation of a graphic novel I’d enjoyed, Posy Simmonds’s 1999 book. I hoped it’d be as fun as the film of Tamara Drewe, the other graphic novel by Ms Simmonds. I also liked the symmetry of Gemma Arterton starring in both films, and I liked the way she was already called Gemma for this new one.

Or so I thought. The film turns out to be a lifeless bore. It omits all of Ms Simmonds’s wry humour and social satire, as if they were mere distractions from the plot. The film is French-made, so I wonder if Ms S’s style of comedy was just too English to be translated. Whatever the reason, what is left is a rather dull tale of English people in Normandy.

When I get home, I dig out the original graphic novel. As I thought, it’s packed with everything the film lacks: ingenuity, originality, wit. I love the French baker’s narration, the English husband’s matching of crossword anagrams to his ex-wife’s demands (‘”parent” is an anagram of “entrap”!’). I love the influence of Vanessa Bell on Gemma’s decorations for her farmhouse, the English ex-pat neighbours installing of red telephone boxes by their swimming pool (‘one for a shower, one for a changing cabin’), Gemma’s resentment that ‘all French women seem to have brand new handbags’, and her comment that her husband’s children ‘can recite the names of pizzas but not a single wild flower’. All this is missing from the film, every word of it, and I miss it madly.

The most revealing omission of all, though, is Gemma’s quip that her husband’s beret makes him look ‘like someone in a Stella Artois ad’. The film Gemma Bovery is exactly that. A misty, pretty idea of rural Frenchness, and not much more. I worry that far more people will see the limp film than will read the sparkling graphic novel. If so, it’s a real dommage.

Saturday 15th August 2015

Thinking about what to do on my 44th birthday, which is on 3rd Sept. My usual rule is to go somewhere I’ve not been before. Somewhere affordable, though. Still can’t afford to go abroad (and it’s been 6 years now). I get excited when I realise that the former NatWest Tower, in the City, has a bar at the top, and that I think it’s called Tower 44.  But when I check, I find out that it’s actually called Tower 42, is rather pricey (at least for me), and that they don’t take bookings for parties of one.

* * *

Currently reading Mindful London, by Tessa Watt. Some useful advice on finding quiet spaces, practicing mindfulness in the city, and dealing with over-sensitivity to traffic noise (a current problem of mine). Thje trick is to imagine yourself acting like a microphone, simple hearing the distracting sounds rather than thinking about them. Seems so simple, but for me it takes an enormous amount of effort. I’m still working on it. Some days I just feel besieged by irritations. ‘What fresh hell is this?’ – Dorothy Parker’s response to the phone ringing.

* * *

Current work: the Birkbeck summer course, ‘Step Up To PG Arts’. A lot of reading and academic exercises, all to help me warm up to doing the MA. I’m also going to one-off workshops on the separate ‘Get Ahead’ programme.

* * *

Wednesday 19th August 2015.

To the Keynes Library in Gordon Square, to deliver a short PowerPoint presentation, as part of the ‘Step Up to PG Arts’ course. .

I talk about the Alan Moore & Oscar Zarate graphic short story from 1996, ‘I Keep Coming Back’. It takes me long enough just to scan the pages into PowerPoint. I also make things harder for myself by linking it to a recent news story, about the controversial new museum in Cable Street. The museum reportedly applied for planning permission on the grounds that it was to be an archive of women’s history in the East End. When it opened, it was simply The Jack The Ripper Museum. Lots of protests, and the controversy is still ongoing. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to it. I should really take a look myself.

Moore typically stuffs his story with references to other books, like Peter Ackroyd’s 1985 novel Hawksmoor, and Iain Sinclair’s 1994 book Radon Daughters. The latter is particularly subtle: just a mention of an ‘author friend’ of Moore’s who has recently written about a one-legged protagonist. I feel disproportionately pleased about working out he means Radon Daughters. So much so, I can’t cut it out of the presentation, even though I know I need to. As a result I end up rushing through the slides, when I really should be pausing and reflecting. Still, it’s all good practice for the next time. Always more to do, always more to say.

* * *

Friday 21st August 2015.

I do some reading in the pleasant, anti-corporate café in the Quakers’ Friends House on Euston Road. I like how a centre for a religion based around silent meditation is on one of the most traffic-clogged roads in London. The café gives discounts for Birkbeck students, as the college rents some of its rooms for classes.

Then to Haggerston station on the Overground. Like a lot of the new-ish Overground stations (this one was opened in 2010), it’s airy and high-ceilinged. Filling one wall in the ticket hall is a trompe l’oeil mural by Tod Hanson. Titled The Elliptical Switchback, it’s based around a huge red and silver magnetic compass set within concentric circles. The design pays tribute to Edmond Halley, of comet fame, who was born nearby. It’s a reminder that Halley did rather more than just map the stars: he also invented magnetic compasses, put forth the idea of the Earth having a hollow structure (hence the concentric shells), devised weather charts, designed diving bells, translated Arabic, and commanded the first British scientific voyages around the world. So he’s something of a Haggerston hero.

From there, I walk west along Regent’s Canal. A bright and sunny day, not too hot. I take a look at The Proud Archivist, a new arts venue right on the towpath. It’s fashionable-looking but friendly. I note Richard Herring is doing some comedy previews here. There’s also an intriguing ‘Library’ with a wall of bookshelves, where the books are shelved according to the colour of their spines. Anthony Powell’s title Books Do Furnish A Room has never been more true. I’m reminded how another common decorative element in London cafés is old manual typewriters. Even the Caffé Nero outside BBC Broadcasting House has several on view. These spidery old machines now exist as a kind of visual punctuation between the lattes. They sit on their shelves and glower dustily at their upstart successor – the laptop.

Today the Proud Archivist is full of people in wedding dress. I wander into the main room, and catch the best man giving a speech by the DJ booth. I am not challenged, and wonder if it’s because of the way I dress. One of the cat-calls I have had on the street is, after all, ‘OY MATE – WHERE’S THE WEDDING? Har! Har!’  For a moment I compare my situation with the Owen Wilson film, The Wedding Crashers. Then I realise I am not Owen Wilson, not even slightly, and leave.

* * *

I walk further west to Whitmore Road, a quiet street between residential tower blocks, to visit an even newer café: The Trew Era, owned by Russell Brand. It was opened in March as part of Mr B’s social enterprise schemes. It’s also connected with his campaign to prevent the residents of the adjoining New Era estate from being evicted by greedy landlords. The cafe is small, but there’s a garden section in the back, and a pleasant set of seats al fresco out front. The staff are apparently recovering drug addicts, on the abstinence-based programmes that Mr B champions. All non-corporate brands in the chiller, as might be expected: Thirsty Planet bottled water, rather than Evian. I have a home-made iced latte in a jam jar. A slogan on the wall says ”To live will be an awfully big adventure’ – Peter Pan’.

* * *

I walk further west along the canal. There’s signs along the towpath that say ‘Priority to Pedestrians – Share The Space, Slow Your Pace’. To little effect. Most of the cyclists I pass this evening – and I should mention it is rush hour – just pedal aggressively at full speed and ring their bells at walkers like myself, firmly implying that they have priority instead.

I turn off the canal at Noel Road in Islington, take a moment to look at the Joe Orton plaque, enjoy a light vegan dinner at the Candid Café (a rare wifi-free cafe), then go to the Vue cinema to see the new Pixar film, Inside Out.

I learn today that it’s better not to see family films in the afternoon, in case the screening turns out to be one of the many ‘kids clubs’ screenings, where lone adults are not admitted. This is fair enough, except that the special nature of these screenings often doesn’t show up in the general cinema listings. So it’s better to go to an evening showing, and as late as possible. The Vue Islington audience, at 7.45pm, are mostly adults.

Inside Out is another Pixar triumph, up there with Monsters Inc. It’s based on a simple enough idea – the inside of a little girl’s head becomes a factory run by anthropomorphised emotions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust. But this is fully explored to a dazzling, hilarious & moving extent. It’s frequently sophisticated and original on a level far above most mainstream cinema (childrens’ or not), and is clearly influenced by some proper research into child psychology. Yet I’m sure small children can still enjoy it as a tale of cartoon characters having slapstick adventure. Just the opening sequence of Joy being ‘born’ and becoming self-aware, inside the darkness of a baby’s mind, is a breathtaking moment. The extra short film, Lava, is a little tear-jerking masterpiece, too.

Saturday 8th August 2015

Tired of my increasing sagginess, I start to make a concerted effort to live more healthily. Without resorting to the gym, that is. One measure is to clock up 10,000 steps worth of walking in the city every day. I record them by using the pedometer function on my pleasingly out-of-date iPod Nano (2011 vintage). I wince when I do so, however, as it means tapping a little red Nike symbol, presumably because of some Satanic corporate deal with Apple. It remains the only part of my life ever to have been invaded by the omnipresent multinational tick. ‘Just do it’, their adverts insist. I want to reply, ‘Just leave it with me and I’ll consider it.’

* * *

Sunday 9th August 2015.

I’m also trying the NHS diet plan: cutting calories to the recommended men’s limit of 1900 a day, until good habits kick in. I find that I can easily achieve this if I cut out two things: bread, and utter filth. By which I mean the sadly delicious oat cookies that Sainsbury’s do in £1 paper bags. Up till now, I’d been hoovering them up like Elvis, wondering why my suits were getting tighter. By the end of this week, though, I walk past the cookies in the supermarket with the brisk confidence of a divorcee, shunning their raisin stares.

My new love: low calorie popcorn.

* * *

Monday 10th August 2015.

On a walk around the Barbican, I discover that the Moorgate branch of HMV has quietly shut down. The only London branches left now are Oxford Street, Fopp in Cambridge Circus, and Westfield in Shepherd’s Bush. Mooching around Covent Garden later, I note how one entertainment store that seems to be thriving is Forbidden Planet, with its endless shelves of Doctor Who toys and Marvel comic spin-offs. Sci-fi and comic conventions seem bigger than ever. I wonder if it’s to do with the way cult entertainment plays upon the need to belong, in an era where identity can be up for grabs. At Forbidden Planet, you are not just buying something, you are buying into something. It’s there, too, in the explosion of literary festivals. Congregations of belonging, of praise (‘acclaimed’ ‘award-winning’), of sacred texts, of finding one’s tribe. ‘I am here because I am the sort of person that comes here’.

And yet some ages still take more traditional pleasures. In Forbidden Planet, a couple of small children seem to be ignoring all the superhero toys and dolls, and instead are gleefully chasing each other in and out of the silver bannisters, again and again.

* * *

Tuesday 11th August 2015.

My first High First Class mark at Birkbeck was for an essay in December 2013, written on ‘Touch Sensitive’, an iPad-only comic by Chris Ware, published in 2011. I’ve still never owned an iPad: Senate House Library rents them out to students for free.

One quote I used in my essay was from a 2012 New Statesman interview with Mr Ware, in which he glumly pronounced his comic to be a one-off venture into the digital world. One reason, he said, was that he felt uneasy about charging people for something that had no physical presence (a rather alarming view now). Another was that he regarded his printed works as still readable in years to come, whereas a piece of bespoke iPad software is at the mercy of its compatible devices and host apps, which tend to be upgraded and replaced. He gave ‘Touch Sensitive’ a five year lifespan, maximum.

Today I discover that the McSweeney’s publishing house has withdrawn its iPad app, which exclusively hosted Ware’s comic. He was right after all.

More lessons versus digital versus paper. I find out that Amazon won’t let me read my purchased Kindle ebooks on more than five devices or reading programs (this has come from upgrading to Windows 10). I have to uninstall one device first. Kindle books ultimately remain Amazon property, even when paid for. So digital book buying is more a form of renting.

* * *

Wednesday 12th August 2015.

I leave the house to buy milk, not wearing a tie. Later, I feel very ashamed about this omission, and resolve to never let it happen again. I think I blame the ubiquity of Jeremy Corbyn. (It’s since been pointed out to me that Mr Corbyn does wear a tie. Sometimes)

* * *

To the East Finchley Phoenix for Diary of A Teenage Girl. An acutely personal coming-of-age drama, set in 1970s California, and starring Bel Powley, the young English actress who played the teenage Princess Margaret so well in A Royal Night Out. More teenage recklessness here, this time with an impeccable American accent. Lots of 70s beiges and browns. The story focusses on the protagonist’s on-off affair with her mother’s boyfriend, amid the messiness of her wider sexual curiosity. It peters out narratively towards the end, but that may just be part of its honesty. Nice use of animations in a Robert Crumb ‘comix’ style, based on the character’s notebook drawings.

* * *

Thursday 13th August 2015.

Many corporate job descriptions aimed at English graduates appear to be steeped in exactly the kind of mangled language that students of prose are taught to avoid. Today I come across the following sentence in a recruitment newsletter:

“You will show a commitment to the team, protecting the company’s brand and market reputation through demonstrating the following core values; Trust, Smart, Fresh, Diverse, Energy, Value, Green and Results.”

If I know anything at all, it is this: I could never work for a company that mistakes adjectives for nouns.

* * *

Friday 14th August 2015.

To the Curzon Bloomsbury for Mistress America, the new film by Noah Baumbach. More middle class New Yorkers exchanging quips about life, love, angst, age and culture.  This one is co-written with its star,  Greta Gerwig, so it’s closer to Frances Ha than While We’re Young. I loved Frances Ha enough to watch it twice at the cinema. I revelled in Ms G’s charming character, and her realisation that – as in Withnail & I – a refusal to grow up is unfair on those around you who do want to grow up. Plus I liked its use of an early 80s British pop song for no reason other than it worked – in this case, Bowie’s ‘Modern Love’.

In Mistress America, the inexplicable 80s pop song is OMD’s ‘Souvenir’. And just as OMD may not be as artistically interesting as Mr Bowie, but are still pleasant enough, the new film pales in comparison to Frances Ha, but still has much to applaud. The dialogue is written so densely that it often feels more like a recital of a script than the spontaneous product of characters’ thoughts. But whereas Whit Stillman’s Damsels In Distress (also starring Ms Gerwig) took this idea to an extreme, Mistress America allows moments of realism and humanity to break through. Ms G’s character here is much more self-aware than Frances Ha, and I like how the narrative shifts between two main characters: the thirty-year-old girl about town Gerwig, and the 18-year-old nervous college student Tracy, whose tale begins the film.

At times, it’s hard to actually keep up as a viewer, such is the rapid fire of the well-crafted retorts. I especially like the response when Tracy is accused of putting Gerwig’s character into a short story:

‘But you did the same. You used a joke of mine in one of your tweets!’

‘And it was my least favourited tweet ever!’

Modern love indeed.

* * *

Saturday 1st August 2015

An article in the Guardian about writers who spent their early years on the dole. The potted narratives range from jokey (Geoff Dyer) to political (Alan Warner) to ones showing off about their overcoming of hardship, like the Monty Python sketch about the four Yorkshiremen. All the writers end their tales with the information that they have a new book out. Except for one, which notes they are now a university chancellor. The British capacity for point-scoring knows no bounds.

Another common showing-off tale told by successful writers is ‘When growing up, I read all the books in the school library’.

This rather begs the response, ‘except for the one on modesty’.

* * *

Sunday 2nd August 2015.

Three of the bestselling books in the Sunday Times list are by authors described as ‘YouTube sensations’. They are all youthful; such is the connection between age and technology. Once, the standard older person’s joke was that they had no idea how to programme their VCR. Now, no one knows what a VCR is, much less how to programme it. Instead, older people have no idea how to record a YouTube blog. That is what young people are for. But it works both ways: it’s been reported that some of the YouTube spin-off books have been written by professional ghostwriters, who tend to be a bit older.

* * *

Monday 3rd August 2015.

An email from the MHRA. They thank me for pointing out a small typo in their style guide, which is used to instruct college students on the proper way to format their essays. The typo was for the wrong kind of numeral when referencing books in a series. This will now be corrected in the next edition.

Thus begins my seismic effect on academia.

* * *

To the East Finchley Phoenix for Best of Enemies, a superb documentary about the 1968 US TV debates between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Junior. Buckley, the right-wing founder of National Review magazine and advisor to Ronald Reagan, is all flashing teeth and glaring eyes. Vidal, meanwhile, is a mass of elegant flounces, pursed lips and pre-honed putdowns. The late Christopher Hitchens appears as a talking head- very much a Gore Vidal fanboy. Much is made of the way public discourse has changed since; that the coming of multiple TV channels and the internet means that there is no sense of a national ‘village square’ platform any more. Comment is not only free, it is everywhere, and it is customised. We choose the pundits we feel comfortable with, to feel secure in our own beliefs. Or we choose to consult the ones we know we disagree with – Katie Hopkins, say – for exactly the same reason. On Twitter, minor disagreements can lead to sudden anger, unfollowing, and blocking. There is no nuance, and no two-mindedness. The format doesn’t allow it.

That said, I think the film overestimates the nature of the Buckley/Vidal debates too. Despite the men’s intellectualism, these discussions on the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions quickly turn into personal attacks, just as they do on social media today. In one heated moment, Vidal calls Buckley a ‘crypto-Nazi’ for his support of police violence. Buckley immediately goes one further (and so loses the argument): ‘Now look, you queer. Don’t you call me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.’ It is a moment that both men are forced to revisit for the rest of their lives, whether in subsequent interviews, or in their memoirs.

Best of Enemies is essential viewing for anyone interested in the art of having an opinion. At the Phoenix cinema tonight, the audience applauded at the end.

The best thing about the film is that it asks questions as much as it entertains. One is: can nuanced debate exist on a medium that has a huge reach, but which suffers frustrations of time (or on Twitter, frustrations of space)? Right at the end, there’s a clip of Buckley on a chat show.

Interviewer: We’ve got ten seconds left. Can you sum up?

Buckley: No.

(cut to black)

* * *

Tuesday 4th August 2015.

More post-BA celebration. This time, Ella H treats me to pink champagne at the ornate Oscar Wilde bar in the Café Royal, followed by dinner in the all-vegetarian Coach & Horses pub, Soho. A bit of luxury, chased down with a bit of Bohemianism. It’s a perfect evening.

* * *

Wednesday 5th August 2015.

There’s Jeremy Corbyn posters all over the IOE student union bar, off Russell Square. Here at least, he seems to be the student favourite for the new Labour party leader. I wish him well, but I do wish he’d wear a tie.

* * *

Thursday 6th August 2015.

 I’m on the fourth of six units of the Birkbeck ‘Step Up’ summer module, aimed at students preparing to do an MA. It mostly involves logging onto a website and reading through various resources. One shortcoming is that some of the materials on non-Birkbeck websites have been deleted since the course was written. I click on a YouTube link only to see the standard error message for missing content: ‘this video does not exist’. With my head expecting some short film about cultural analysis, my response is to ponder this statement’s existentialist implications. If a video ‘does not exist’, did it ever exist in the first place? Or is it like an updated caption for a Magritte painting: ‘Ce n’est pas une vidéo’?

Often a video can be taken down purely because it includes a copyrighted song, however briefly. The burning down of the ancient library at Alexandria is nothing compared to the havoc wrought online by the employees of Universal Music.

* * *

Friday 7th August 2015.

To the Curzon Mayfair for Iris, a documentary by the late Grey Gardens director, Albert Maysles, about the ninety-something New York fashion collector, Iris Apfel. Unlike the psychological and tensely Gothic atmosphere of Grey Gardens, this film is lighter fare. It’s essentially a straightforward and even cosy profile, almost like a magazine article. Despite her advanced years, Ms Apfel is a busy professional who is careful to protect her ‘brand’, and the film seems to be complicit in this. Still, spending an hour and a half in Ms Apfel’s colourful and funny company is entertaining enough.

I knew nothing about her before the film. Apparently her fame only came recently, when the Met staged an exhibition of her collection of clothes and accessories. Up till then she was just known as an eccentrically-dressed interior decorator, albeit one with big name clients, including the White House. Her trademark look is a shock of short white hair, a pair of enormous round spectacles, almost like binoculars, and a clattering mass of chunky, multi-coloured necklaces and bangles. At times it’s a wonder she can stand up. Dressing for her, she says, is ‘like jazz’. She also quotes something she was told as a young woman, by a fashion retailer: ‘You’re not pretty and you’ll never be pretty. But it doesn’t matter, because you’ve got something more important. You’ve got style.’

In addition to her double-decker wardrobes, Iris Apfel’s home is crammed full of baroque furniture and kitsch toys. There’s a stuffed rabbit whose ears spring up to the sound of a Hanna-Barbera ‘boing’. A huge ostrich statue in the corner turns out to be a bar (‘His wing lifts up and he’s full of booze’). A Kermit the Frog doll is draped, drunkenly, around the ostrich’s neck.

One of my favourite comments in the film comes from behind the camera. Maysles is filming the 100th birthday party of Iris’s husband, Carl. On turning the big hundred, Carl comments to the camera, ‘I’m not sure what to do for an encore.’ Maysles is in his late 80s himself. He replies off-screen, ‘The way I see it, you’ve come this far, so you might as well keep going.’

* * *