Saturday 13th June 2015.

I walk through Waterloo Station. The whole building has been turned into an advert for the new Jurassic Park film. Looped video trailers flank the train announcement boards, while the movie’s logo dots the entire concourse floor. In the centre of the station, a tableau of fibreglass full-sized dinosaurs are caught in the act of breaking out of their container. I bristle at this assault by Hollywood on my consciousness, but then feel guilty when I see small children taking delight in posing with the daft static creatures. It’s got dinosaurs in it, so children will be happy.

I’ve not seen the film, but I’m guessing that it involves something going wrong at a dinosaur park.

* * *

Evening: I watch a nostalgic TV show marking 20 years since Britpop. It feels far too soon, but I suppose two decades ago is long enough. A whole generation ago. The funny thing is it gives me flashbacks, not of the 90s, but of a previous 90s nostalgia show from the early 2000s: I Heart the 1990s. One episode had Edwyn Collins introducing himself with the phrase, ‘Hi! I’m Edwyn ‘A Girl Like You’ Collins!’

So a new 90s nostalgia show triggers my nostalgia for an old 90s nostalgia show.

In the same way that Wikipedia has outsourced knowing things first hand, TV’s love of editing history to suit a convenient format has replaced first hand, organic, untidy memory. I feel that many of my actual memories of the 90s have been taped over in my head, replaced with 90s nostalgia pieces.

However, one thing that the run of 90s programmes seems to omit is how OK Computer changed music in 1997, just as much as Britpop did in 1994. After that, a huge swathe of rock bands switched from trying to be Oasis to trying to be Radiohead. The blueprint was now for big, mournful, stadium-friendly rock, devoid of any sense of a generational or national identity; angsty yet tasteful. The end result was Coldplay. But perhaps the full meaning of 1997 is something to look forward to in 2017.

* * *

Sunday 14th June 2015.

I visit the club The Nitty Gritty, at the Constitution bar in Camden. The DJ is Debbie Smith, a fellow 90s rock survivor, given her stints back then in the bands Curve and Echobelly. At The Nitty Gritty though, she plays a highly enjoyable set of vintage soul, R&B and 60s girl groups, to a very cool-looking crowd of vintage-dressed, and queer-friendly customers. One woman – a staffer, I think – has a kind of immaculate rockabilly take on Amy Winehouse’s look. Camden still has a certain fizzy life to it, if you know where to go.

As I enter the bar from the Regent’s Canal towpath, Ms Smith is playing ‘Sometimes I Wish I Were A Boy’ by Lesley Gore. It’s a tune I used to have as my band Fosca’s going-onstage music. And here I am entering a room to the song once again.

* * *

Monday 15th June 2015.

More coincidences. Today I’m re-reading Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat, including the part where the narrator imagines the whole Magna Carta ceremony. It’s only afterwards that I realise today is the 800th anniversary of the signing.

Jerome’s ‘J’ subscribes to the theory that the event took place on Magna Carta Island itself, rather than on the opposite bank of the Thames, at Runnymede:

Had I been one of the Barons, I should have strongly urged upon my comrades the advisability of our getting such a slippery customer as King John on to the island, where there was less chance of surprises and tricks. (Three Men In A Boat, Chapter 12).

* * *

The Queen’s Birthday Honours this week. My favourite reason for declining an honour: ‘So aging!’ – Francis Bacon. Favourite for accepting: ‘I thought of the people it would annoy’ – Kingsley Amis.

* * *

Tuesday 16th June 2015.

I watch the second episode of How to be a Bohemian with Victoria Coren Mitchell, the BBC4 series. Pleased to see Stephen Tennant given a look-in. And lots of shots of Birkbeck’s School of Arts, inside and out, due to its previous life as a Bloomsbury Group location.

Ms Coren Mitchell manages to have her moral cake and eat it, regarding Eric Gill’s incest and bestiality. ‘I’d like to go back in time and kneecap Eric Gill’, she says at one point, in case anyone was in doubt on where she stands on sexual abuse. Still, I suppose this is 2015, and it’s the BBC, with its Gill sculptures on the outside of Broadcasting House (one of which is now surrounded by the livery of a Caffe Nero), so some obvious things still have to be said aloud.

To her credit, though, Ms CM also lets interviewees with opposing views make their case. Grayson Perry challenges her scorn of the Bloomsbury Group’s snobbery and privilege: ‘Are we awarding creative points for being poor, or for being creative?’, while Richard Coles asserts how important it is that Gill’s sculptures remain in place, not only on the BBC building, but also in Westminster Cathedral: they serve as a reminder that ‘the sinner stands at the heart of Christianity’. Trust the art, not the artist.

* * *

I never felt like those people formerly in bands who look back on their music as a weird ‘phase’. I’m even weirder now.

* * *

Wednesday 17th June 2015.

To Senate House for the London Graduate Fair. Very crowded, lots of stalls. The actual type of work seems to be quite limited. Nothing arty. No publishers of literature, no arts organisations. As far as I can tell, the main options for graduates seem to be: the warzone of corporate management, the warzone of school teaching, or, given the prominent British Army stall, actual war.

A group of uniformed soldiers have various weapons lined up on trestle tables: bazookas, grenade launchers, rifles. It’s like a Fresher’s Fair, only with fewer Pot Noodles and more guns. I last fifteen minutes, which is longer than I’d last in the army. I suppose an ability to write High First Class essays on Oscar Wilde might be handy when battling insurgents in Helmand Province, but I didn’t stay to find out.

* * *

Thursday 18th June 2015.

To Jacksons Lane Community Centre for a new experience: a class in Pilates. ‘This is not going to be pretty,’ I think. ‘Not least because I have to wear something other than a suit.’

I turn out to be the only man in a class of women, and the least experienced by far; I’ve still never stepped inside a gym. But the female tutor is very sympathetic. She comes over to me whenever I’m struggling (which is often) and never makes me feel a fool. It’s hard work, and confusing at times, as I’m trying to work out how to move parts of my body which I’m fairly sure I’ve never moved before. On top of that, I have to work out when to breathe – something I keep forgetting to do, on account of trying to keep up with the instructions. But the effect is like blowing the dust off an entire lifetime. I feel the better for it afterwards, and decide to keep it up.

As for what I wore: my baggy grey jogging bottoms (though I haven’t gone running in years). Plus my sole t-shirt. It’s a promotional shirt for an absinthe company.

* * *

Friday 19th June 2015.

I walk up Shaftesbury Avenue and see that the new Picturehouse cinema has just opened: Picturehouse Central. It’s in the shell of the old CineWorld Shaftesbury Avenue, in the northwest section of the Trocadero. Although much of the Picturehouse is still not ready (including the rooftop members bar), it is already a vast improvement on its former self. The Cineworld Shaftesbury Avenue will not be missed. Tacky, windowless and claustrophobic, it always felt like part of a run-down regional 1980s shopping mall. But then, a run-down regional 1980s shopping mall was pretty much what the Trocadero had become in recent years. Central London has always been torn between an embracing of garish franchises and souvenir shops, and a love of rarer emporiums steeped in history, character, and personality. The Picturehouses may be a chain, but they’re closer to Waterstones than WH Smith. A sense of humanity, rather than raw, faceless commerce.

The new cinema’s ground floor café does look a bit like a Shoreditch eatery, with its ceiling stripped back to the bare brick and concrete, and its air ducting and dangling light fittings on conspicuously trendy display. But there’s some nice proper booths with tables – rather like those in the late New Piccadilly Café in nearby Denman Street. When my veggie sandwich arrives on a proper china plate, and not on a recycled hubcap or an on old vinyl album, I find myself warming to the place.

(There is currently a popular social media account called ‘We Want Plates’. It campaigns against the trend in arty restaurants to present their meals on anything from wooden boards to slabs of rock. I have to admit I, too, want plates).

The wall of the café is covered in a mural rendered in a naïve, David Shrigley-like doodle, on the theme of cinema. There’s scenes from cinema history, diagrams on narrative theory, and fictional examples of cinema archetypes, such as ‘Man Shouting Out Of A Prius In LA, On His Way To A Thing’. As for the actual films, there’s seven screens, including a 341-seater with Dolby Atmos, whatever that is. The type of films on offer seem to be a bit of everything: in this first week, you can choose between the arty likes of Carol Morley’s The Falling, the critically loved Girlhood and London Road, and documentaries like The Look of Silence and Dark Horse. And if you absolutely must, there’s also Jurassic World 3D.

* * *

To Senate House Library in Malet Street, where I hand back my remaining library books in time for the expiry of my BA-affiliated membership card. Another sign of the degree coming to an end.

Birkbeck’s summer term still has a couple of weeks left, so tonight I attend an open lecture in the basement of Gordon Square. It’s on the history of sexuality, by Heike Bauer, one of the tutors who marked my dissertation.

Dr Bauer quotes the building’s old resident Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own. One problem when it comes to discussing sexuality in history is that as Woolf puts it, ‘fiction is likely to contain more truth than fact’.

Dr B also quotes a more modern example of a discussion on the subject: a recent Twitter conversation between herself and various other academics, who managed to boil down their arguments into 140 characters. Less than 140, in fact, as they need characters for the hashtags and the other ‘@’ names. In 2015, a paper’s abstract (its summary) is not nearly abstract enough.

Today, Woof’s ideal of a private room is less urgent, as so many writers enjoy working in crowded cafes and libraries, or even outdoors (a common sight on social media is a photo of a sunny park, with the caption: ‘My office today!’). Now, it’s more important to have an ‘@’ sign of one’s own.

Dr B also focuses on the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, he of the 1920s Berlin Institute of Sexology, as visited by Isherwood in Christopher and His Kind. She talks about how Hirschfeld visited Cambridge sometime around 1905-7, while Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland was studying there. However, he was careful to avoid bumping into young Holland and embarrassing him, due to the shame associated with his father. The very words ‘Oscar Wilde’ were, at this time, absolutely synonymous with male homosexuality, and his reputation was yet to recover. Instead, Hirschfeld witnessed a group of students – a kind of secret Edwardian Cambridge Gay Soc- who gathered together to read ‘ The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ in a ritual of solidarity. On their shirts they wore Wilde’s prison number: C33.

I’m reminded of John Betjeman’s poem ‘Narcissus’, about his childhood. In the poem, Betjeman’s mother chastises him for bonding too much with a friend. This would have been in the early 1910s:

My Mother wouldn’t tell me why she hated
The things we did, and why they pained her so.
She said a fate far worse than death awaited
People who did the things we didn’t know,
And then she said I was her precious child,
And once there was a man called Oscar Wilde.

Monday 22nd December 2014. Mum comes up to London, and we spend the day together. We do Somerset House Ice Rink (always as café spectators, never as skaters), then the National Gallery for Maggi Hambling’s new ‘Walls of Water’ paintings, and Peder Balke’s nineteenth century Nordic landscapes. Obligingly, one of the Balke paintings has reindeer.

Then to the NPG for Grayson Perry’s ‘Who Are You’ show. His gaudy portraits of Britishness are striking enough, but best of all is a unique self-portrait: an etching in the style of an old-fashioned map of a fortified town, ‘A Map Of Days’. We also visit the Museum of London, where there’s a mini-exhibition about Paddington Bear, tying in with the film. One of the exhibits is Michael Bond’s old portable typewriter, a 1950s Olympia Splendid 33. I point this out to Mum, because we had one exactly like it at home, originally owned by my grandmother. There was a mysterious key on the left which had four dots in a square pattern. I never did find out what it was for.

A surprise sight at the Museum of London: the 2012 Olympic cauldron, with an accompanying video of its building, lighting and extinguishing at the Games.

And to top the day off, we see Santa Claus. Or rather we glimpse the one installed in a corner of the Museum’s Victorian street, grotto-style. ‘That’s okay,’ he says to one particularly shy child.  ‘You don’t have to know what you want.’

* * *

Wednesday 24th December 2014. Most of the museums are closed today, but I find that the Cartoon Art Museum is open. Dad was a member, so I go hoping they’ll have a Christmas tree to take my photo against, thus making a perfect photo for my Christmas diary. Alas, no tree.

I visit the current exhibition anyway. This turns out to be one on Hogarth. ‘Gin Lane’ is present and correct, but I learn today that it was one half of a pair. Hogarth also drew ‘Beer Street’, the solution to the problem of gin. In contrast to ‘Gin Lane’s decrepitude and despair, ‘Beer Street’ has well-dressed workers balancing work with play, all thanks to the right kind of booze, the ‘Industry and Jollity of Wholesome English Ale’. There’s one character who appears in both scenes: the pawnbroker. In Gin Lane his premises are well-kept and prosperous – he is the only person doing well out of all the poverty and decline. But on Beer Street, his shop sign is askew, and his shop itself is a crumbling hovel. This time, it is the pawnbroker who is fending off the bailiffs.

Another Hogarth sequence in the exhibition is ‘The Four Stages Of Cruelty’. In the first picture, the protagonist is a boy torturing stray dogs in the street. By the fourth panel he has become a highwayman, a murderer, and now a hanged corpse, dissected for the benefit of medical students. Underneath the operating table, a stray dog chews on his heart.

* * *

Drifting, ghost-like, through the frantic North Londoners. Sadly, I tend to associate Christmas Eve with witnessing the desperation of the not-particularly-desperate. And not just empty supermarket shelves (panic-buying for one single day – as if it were a nuclear winter). Traffic on Archway Road is stressful on the 24th as it is, but today there’s also been a water mains leak. And so, roadworks. I do not envy the people stuck in the cliche of holiday gridlock, but I envy the Thames Water workers even less. Outside my window as I write: the distinct sound of cars using this side road as an unofficial diversion (‘I know a short cut!’). An angry velocity in the noise. I want to throw up the window and shout: ‘calm down!’

* * *

Thursday 25th December 2014. I call Mum, then go off to feed the ducks in Waterlow Park. My funny little tradition. Just me this year.

Other people’s presents. In the park, a group of men try out a miniature drone. This year’s must-have gift, say the supplements. £400 or so. This little robot helicopter in question soars up, lights flashing, far higher than seems possible. Then it pauses in the sky, menacingly, rotates on the spot (where there is no spot) and zooms off into the void. It makes a horrible, wasp-like noise throughout. I hope they take it back and exchange it for a kite.

* * *

Channel 4’s Alternative Christmas Message is this year delivered by William Pooley, the British nurse working in Sierra Leone. He survived Ebola himself, then went straight back to treating the victims in Africa. In the TV broadcast, he mentions he’s from Suffolk: Eyke, in fact, near Woodbridge. As I’m from the same part of the country, his point about the good fortune of one’s birthplace is all the more affecting.

* * *

Friday 26th December 2014. I’m looking after a couple of cats in a house off the Seven Sisters Road. At about ten in the morning, I arrive and let them out into the back garden, as per the owner’s instructions. They are barely over the threshold when they freeze in their steps. A few feet away is a large fox, its bright orange beauty all the more striking in this December sun. There’s a pause, then it nonchalantly trots off through the neighbour’s hedge. It is only later that I realise how apt this is for Boxing Day, so synonymous with fox hunts.

It’s reported today that over 250,000 people have come out on rural ‘hunt meets’, which are effectively protests against the ban. Horses, hounds, costumes, horns. Everything but the fox. I sometimes glimpsed hunts while growing up in Suffolk. They seemed so obviously out of time. Yet many still want the full-on fox killing to come back. I’m reminded of the Hogarth pictures.

* * *

The Daily Telegraph‘s website has a ‘paywall’ warning: ‘You have reached your 20 article limit for this month’. Its angry, punitive tone doesn’t make me want to subscribe one bit. Instead, it rather implies that reading Telegraph articles is an unhealthy habit, and one should try to cut down. Perhaps not the effect they intended.

* * *

CHRISTMAS MESSAGE 2014

Given this is my last Christmas as a Birkbeck undergraduate, this year’s tree is from the main Birkbeck foyer, in Torrington Square, Bloomsbury. Taken on Christmas Eve, with the kind permission of the security guard.

It’s been a year of ups and downs, to put it mildly. My college grades went through the roof, thus bolstering my feelings of self-worth (though it’s still a struggle). It proved – if only to myself – that I was demonstrably good at something, even now, and after so long of feeling surplus to the world’s requirements.

In February my father died. I’m still coming to terms with this. But while I am, I’m grateful that I still have a mother, and a brother, who have both helped me so much this year.

One thing I’m particularly proud of is that I managed to keep this diary updated every single weekend, always adding at least 1,000 new words per week. This is the first time since the diary began (in 1997) that I’ve kept to a weekly routine. It takes me a lot of time to write, and I still don’t find it easy. I’m slow, and I don’t get paid. So I was delighted to be included in Travis Elborough’s Guardian piece on his ‘Top Ten Literary Diarists’. It is also gratifying when I receive donations from readers, proving that it’s worth doing, worth keeping free of adverts, and worth carrying on. If that includes you, thank you.

Sometimes I receive messages from readers who don’t donate but who say that they’re enjoying the diary. This is always cheering, particularly with the way social media has made public or group-shared comments the more usual interaction. A recent message said the diary was ‘like having a friend I’ve never met’. That’s exactly what I’m trying to convey, and why I don’t have a comments box. The writing needs to feel as solitary as possible. There are no browser-crashing commercials here, no videos suddenly starting up, no links to celebrity gossip stories. Hardly any links full stop. This is a quiet place. A detached place. This is somewhere else to go. This is a letter to a friend I’ve never met.

Thank you for reading in 2014. I hope you’ll continue to do so in 2015. I’ll be right here. And I wish you a very Happy Christmas and a wonderful, beautiful New Year. Here it comes. Look.

Saturday 4th October 2014.

To the Conway Hall in Holborn for a spot of DJ-ing. It’s Suzette Field’s Black and White Masked Ball, inspired by Truman Capote’s 1966 party (a party which has its own Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_White_Ball).

There’s a strict dress code of black and white colours only. I don my chalk white suit, freshly cleaned. Ms Shanthi meets me at the event, and says I look like an advert for Daz Automatic. There’s several rooms packed with dancing, arty bands and cabaret acts, plus there’s an oversized chess game. Naked stewards walk around offering plates of food, their body paint conforming to the rules. They literally are wearing only black and white. I’m impressed that the punkish marching band Perhaps Contraption have eschewed their bespoke yellow and plum uniforms for some one-off black and white apparel. Their spiky-haired glockenspieliste and co-vocalist Felicity is in a stunning white ballgown. I play my usual mix of 1920s jazzy pop, easy listening, showtunes and anything else that fits the moment. It’s a joy watching a room full of such beautifully dressed up people dance and indeed strut to my hopeful selections.

* * *

Sunday 5th October 2014. I write a presentation script on literary camp for college, and put together Powerpoint slides to go with it. I do this at home while standing up at my desk. This is partly because I have to keep referring to books from my bookcase, but mostly because I’m restless. Not sure if lectern-style writing is better, but it certainly feels healthier. I am also a great lover of frequently getting up to pace around the desk, which is only really acceptable in the privacy of one’s home. If I tried that in a library, it would only be a matter of time before other members set fire to me.

To the ICA for Tony Benn: Last Will and Testament. It’s billed as a documentary, but is better described as a fond memorial. There’s certainly no critical voices explaining just why some newspapers called Mr Benn ‘dangerous’ or ‘evil’ or even in one case, ‘werewolf’ (?). But then, there’s no other voices full stop: this is entirely narrated by Benn himself, who took part in the film’s making before he died. Regardless of one’s political views, the film is an excellent whistle-stop through decades of British political and social change, from the 1940s till Mrs Thatcher’s funeral last year. It also uses emotive scenes from archive news footage and even from other films, such as Brassed Off (captioned as Benn’s favourite), and Network, for Ned Beatty’s speech about there being ‘no more countries, only companies’. I’m delighted by the inclusion of shots of the Sailors’ Reading Room in Southwold, along with the beach huts. The Reading Room now reminds me not just of my own regular visits there with Mum and Dad since the 80s, but also of Sebald’s Rings Of Saturn.

Tony Benn’s analogy for the old House Of Lords. ‘It’s like your dentist saying, “I’m not really qualified for this, but my dad did it.”‘

* * *

Monday 6th October 2014. I finish a short story I’ve been chewing over all summer. It’s called ‘Forova, Not Found’ and features a Tube station theme bar in Tangier (which exists and which I’ve been to), a Moroccan Amy Winehouse impersonator and Wilde’s Dorian Gray. The story is a response to a piece of art by Eleanor Bedlow. I’m pleased with it. I need to write more fiction. Editing fiction is the real pleasure: watching themes emerge naturally, then nudging them into place. A form of gardening, really.

* * *

Tuesday 7th October 2014. Autumn temperatures at last. I take the cream linen suit to be cleaned for the last time this year, and slip back into my dark ensembles. It’s my version of putting the clocks back.

Back to Birkbeck for the first classes of the final year of the degree. Henry James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’ kicks off the course on US modern literature, while a lecture by Roger Luckhurst begins my Post-War UK module. This is the shape of my Tuesday and Wednesday evenings from now till next May. I also have to work on my year-long thesis, which has the working title of ‘The Satirical Usage of Camp in Twenty-First Century Fiction.’ As well as defining literary camp (via Sontag etc), I’m discussing three texts: a camp moment in Alan Hollinghurst’s Line of Beauty, a camp main character in James Hamilton-Paterson’s Cooking With Fernet Branca, and a camp narrative style in Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader. Fairly confident about it, as long as I can keep it academically rigorous, as they say in the classroom.

* * *

Thursday 9th October 2014

Grayson Perry is in the news for writing a provocative essay in the New Statesman. It’s about how middle-class, white straight men are still dominating UK culture, and how this needs to change. He uses the term ‘Default Man’, which he says he’s invented. In fact, I was bandying it about in my diary ten years ago. There’s evidence in this old entry from 2004 (if one scrolls down past the whining about my health): http://www.dickonedwards.com/diary/index.php/archive/this-is-dickon-edwards/

Admittedly, I only coined it in a spirit of flouncy cattiness, and certainly didn’t extend it into a sociological proposal. Still, it’s amusing to see the phrase getting such prominence all these years later.

* * *

To the British Library for its latest big exhibition, Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination. It covers everything under the G-word from Walpole’s Castle of Otranto to a set of Martin Parr photographs taken at this year’s Whitby Goth Weekend – the latter being typically vivid portraits of ways to be British. So many treasures on show. My favourites are: the manuscripts of Frankenstein and Jane Eyre, a Jan Svankmajer film on Otranto, a vintage cardboard model of Fonthill Abbey, the ‘horrid’ novels from Austen’s Northanger Abbey all lined up in their own case, a Victorian alarm clock in the shape of a skeleton riding a coffin, a ‘Dear Boss’ letter from the Ripper case, a calling card from Oscar Wilde in exile, when he was ‘Sebastian Melmoth’, manuscripts for both Clive Barker’s Hellraiser script and its source novella The Hellbound Heart, and a manuscript of Angela Carter’s ‘The Company of Wolves’, as in the original story.

I note how some works are Goth-Compatible rather than only Gothic. Kate Bush’s song ‘Wuthering Heights’ is quoted in the section on the Brontes, for instance. In terms of modern Goth-Compatible literary ficition, there’s Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. To go with the exhibition, the British Library shop sells moustache wax, razorblade cufflinks, and – inevitably – black nail varnish.

* * *

I’ve had my blond hair cut off. It’s to give my roots a chance to breathe before the next round of peroxide. So today I have dark brown, very short hair. I like to think this means I’ll get fewer than usual catcalls. I like to think I even look more normal. But I hadn’t reckoned to something else that might invite comment from those who insist on offering it – my voice.

On the tube. An older, slightly grizzled-looking man gets on, sits down, and immediately starts talking to – or more accurately, at – the man next to him and the woman opposite him. I’m standing by those perches near the door, and have my earphones in, but I can tell he’s being humoured by these suddenly besieged passengers. They smirk demurely back. At the next stop, the man he sat next to gets up and leaves. The chatty older fellow then nods to me. I take out an earphone.

He says, ‘do you want to sit next to me, now?’

‘I’m fine here, thanks,’ I say.

Except I only get two words into the sentence when he suddenly puts out his hand, pulls a 1970s limp-wristed ‘teapot’ gesture, affects the attendant effeminate voice, and shouts ‘OH! He-LLOOOO!’ And he does this to the whole carriage, rather than to me.

I burst into laughter. Central London, 2014. No different to a Suffolk playground, 1980.

There was a time when this sort of thing used to upset me. Now I think to myself, ‘Still got it!’

Today: I watch a little bit of the Olympics – the dressage final – but as curious as the sport is (horses trotting very precisely to music), I’m still uninterested in it all. Not even at a time when people who don’t usually watch sport are now in fact watching sport. And lots of it.  But my taste seems immutable: I do not like sport. Pity, really. I take no pleasure in not sharing a common taste – no tiresome contrarian I.

On the subject of common tastes, I’ve just been watching a three part TV documentary, All In The Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry. Mr Perry is shown visiting people in Britain from across the class divide, in order to portray them in a series of colourful tapestries. With the tapestries, he manages to pay homage to Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress as well as classic religious paintings, while commenting on 21st century social behaviour, sometimes affectionately, sometimes scathingly.

The programmes themselves rather offend my own taste in documentary making, however. They do that irritating magazine-like thing of having a montage of clips at the start as a kind of framing device, so nothing is ever a surprise. It’s a reminder that when an artist or expert becomes a TV presenter, unless they have a hand in the whole process and treat it like an equal artform (like, say, Jonathan Meades), they’re at the mercy of a formulaic director, one who thinks they know what people like in a documentary. Which is rather ironic when it’s meant to be discussing the nature of taste. Still, at least the series justified itself with the tapestries, by acting as a conventional advert for unconventional art.

Mr Perry has some interesting interpretations on what makes taste, and where taste comes from. He sees it as part of peer group aspiration, of wanting to belong yet also define oneself as an individual. In my case, my taste in Not Liking Sport isn’t any kind of deliberate choice at all. It’s entirely innate; I don’t like sport in the same way as I am left-handed. Some people might point to my schooldays for reasons – I was a classic swot who was good in the classroom but useless in the gym, and one whose parents also were not big followers of sport. But neither was I forced to not like it. There’s certainly no escaping being exposed to sport, particularly football.

And right now, liking sport is the best way to feel Not Alone. But while I’m pleased for the people who take pleasure from the Olympics, I still can’t join in.

Something I am following, however, is another well-publicised discussion on taste. Obligingly, the BFI’s Sight & Sound magazine has released its Best Films Ever According To Proper Critics list, which it only does every ten years. The big news is that Vertigo has toppled Citizen Kane from the #1 spot for the first time in 50 years. I enjoy reading all the ensuing articles, until I come across one particular piece in The Guardian that makes a couple of rather sweeping assumptions about the masses:

‘We’ve all used the clapping Orson Welles gif to punctuate Tumblr posts, but have you ever watched all of Citizen Kane?’

No to ever using the clapping gif, yes to watching all of the film. I suppose that makes me officially too uncommon for The Guardian.