Tuesday 25 July 2023. Living far from a cinema, the availability of so many films on digital TV comes into its own. Tonight I watch with Mum All That Jazz, from 1979, the Bob Fosse film that’s essentially a self-portrait. The real footage of open-heart surgery makes me cover my eyes, and I feel slightly angry that Fosse thought it necessary to include at all. The main character’s constant smoking is also shocking for a professional choreographer, all the more so today. Do dancers smoke much now? Perhaps it’s like nurses, the type of work making no difference to the addiction.
The film’s fantasy dance scenes around a hospital bed precede The Singing Detective, and I wonder if that’s where Dennis Potter got the idea. Mum thinks the final sequence goes on too long. ‘I’m afraid I was wanting him to hurry up and die’.
**
Friday 28 July 2023. A kind and unsolicited email from Alan Hollinghurst, who sought out my Firbank thesis online to read. He says he read it ‘with enormous admiration’, and admires my ‘amazingly extensive and detailed research’, with ‘so many new details and insights’. My prose style is also ‘marvellously free of rebarbative theoretical jargon’. Given that I regard him as the greatest living English novelist, this is encouragement indeed.
As a result he’s sought out Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and the works of Richard Paul Nugent. If the next Hollinghurst novel has references to those writers, I suppose it may be my fault.
**
Saturday 3 August 2023. Mum has had a fall while away in Birmingham. She is now in hospital with a fractured thigh bone, recovering from surgery. Her life will now be shared with a walking frame or crutches for at least six weeks, probably more. It’s just as well I’m about to fetch things, particularly from upstairs. The important detail is that this happened while she was line dancing at a quilting festival. The silver lining of accident is anecdote.
**
Monday 7 August 2023. An appointment at Ipswich Job Centre. I am instructed to increase my earnings as a self-employed writer, or they may force me to look for other work to justify my claiming benefits to avoid starvation. Not sure what best to do. I was rather hoping that reaching this age would have garnered me some sort of following by now. One only needs about 1500 fans to each pay £20 a year for a book or a gig or some other sort of regular content, and that’s a living. But I’ve still yet to achieve that. Perhaps I’m just too niche. Which is putting it kindly.
**
Wednesday 9 August 2023. I’ve changed the title of the Substack newsletter from ‘Letter from a Dyspraxic Dandy’ to ‘Svelte Lectures’. Much better. And they are lectures, really. Proper research, with rare findings, useful scholarship, and (I hope) lasting insights. I intend to compile them into a book once I’ve clocked up enough of them.
**
Thursday 10 August 2023. I’m listening to a calming BBC music mix by a woman who advocates ‘slow living’. I wonder if she manages to make a living from being slow. The fable of the tortoise and the hare is lost on many employers. They’ll go for a shoddy job done quickly over a worker who is slow but painstaking any time. I am of course talking about myself.
My mother has pointed out that in the 1970s Shirley ‘Superwoman’ Conran did all her admin on a Monday. I suppose one could try that with emails now and see what happens.
**
Saturday 12 August 2023. To Ipswich to see the film Oppenheimer at Cineworld Ipswich’s IMAX screen. The last bus home to the village is 5.40pm. In the English countryside there is no life after tea-time. Thank goodness for matinee screenings.
Despite its three hour duration, Oppenheimer breezes along. The nuclear test scene aside, it is essentially handsome men in shirts and ties talking quickly in rooms. And that’s more than enough: one thinks of Twelve Angry Men. On its own terms, it’s a better film than Barbie, if only because it knows how to end.
But comparing the two is silly anyway: both films are playing to expectations on some level. The way forward now is for Greta Gerwig to only be allowed to make films about troubled men in suits, while Christopher Nolan should only be allowed to make spangly dance routines with all-female casts.
**
Sunday 13 August 2023. I’m looking at adverts for rented rooms in St Leonards-on-Sea. Today I find one on the Spare Room website which has the following description:
This is new room. There is everything has been. There is included everything. There is all of nice guy. Make sure I need a.
Eat your heart out, Gertrude Stein.
**
Tuesday 15 August 2023. Sitting in a Hadleigh cafe, a woman comes over to ask me if I’m all right. I’m fine, the lack of income aside. But I’ve had people coming up and asking me this all my life. I can’t help having a Resting Sad Face.
**
Tuesday 22 August 2023. Today’s dial-a-ride bus to Hadleigh is shared with an older man from Kersey, Paul Dufficey, who turns out to have worked with Ken Russell. He was involved in Tommy and Savage Messiah. In the latter case, he also worked with Derek Jarman.
Kersey is an idyllic place for an artist of any age. As we reach the top of the hill the driver actually stops the bus so we can admire the view, unchanged since it was painted by John Nash in the last century.
**
Friday 25 August 2023. A kind fellow Birkbeck alumnus books me to give a one-off lecture to American students on the Sally Potter film Orlando, along with the Woolf novel. I know both inside out so it’s perfect work for me. By way of homework I watch Sally Potter’s more recent film The Party, which couldn’t be more different: a kind of twisted Alan Ayckbourn farce set in a house in contemporary London. It has Cillian Murphy, making it the second film in two weeks that I’ve seen him in black and white.
[Update, a week later] The lecture job falls through. Pity. It would have been £150. I’d started writing it too.
**
Saturday 2 September 2023. My Associate Research Fellowship at Birkbeck has expired. I’m now just a struggling self-employed writer with a PhD in English and Humanities. But at least I’m not doing anything I don’t want to do.
**
Sunday 3 September 2023. Not sure what best to do about turning 52. Except to finally embrace jazz. Not sure if I’ll quite become one of those people who can bang on about Pat Metheny till sunrise. But there’s still time.
I usually like to spend my birthday taking a day trip somewhere. But it’s Sunday in Suffolk, so there’s no buses, plus there’s a train strike. Happily, culture has come to the village this weekend courtesy of the BNatural music festival. Established in 2010, it has now become a miniature Latitude, complete with colourful branded beakers. First class sound. Three pop-up music venues, including a stage in the market square, on which the superb indie band Collars played yesterday. There’s a bar, a tea and cake stall, and several food vans. And slightly too many people: the organisers deliberately restrict publicity to prevent overcrowding.
**
Wednesday 6 September 2023. Signs of the post-Covid world. Adverts for rented rooms now often stipulate ‘no homeworkers’. They always say ‘lovely sunny room’, yet they don’t want anyone to spend any daylight hours in it.
**
Thursday 7 September 2023. I watch the Tour of Britain cycle race on television, then open the front door and watch it in person as it goes through the village. Quite a feat by the local police to clear the various roads of parked cars, not least in Hadleigh High Street. Psychology plays a part: no one likes to be the one motorist who won’t move their car.
**
Sunday 17 September 2023. To Ipswich Hospital, where I was born, for a hernia repair operation. The ward is called Raedwald, after the Anglo-Saxon king who is thought to be the one buried at Sutton Hoo. The ward is accordingly decorated with glossy panels of Sutton Hoo imagery. Tea, toast, and jam in bed once I come round from the anesthetic. Heaven. And now, eight weeks of no heavy lifting. Not that I ever do very much. I even balk at hardback books.
**
Wednesday 27 September 2023. A day in London. Within seconds of stepping into the British Library I hear someone calling out ‘Dickon!’. My heart lifts at returning to the city.
I see the new David Hockney installation at The Lightroom, one of the buildings in the spotless new development north of King’s Cross.
The installation is one huge room, on the walls of which is projected a looped film of Hockney’s work lasting 50 minutes or so. All four walls are covered in this immersive projection, which at times spills onto the floor as well. The man himself narrates over music.
For all its high-tech wizardry, the installation is in the tradition of Victorian dioramas, when large and dramatic paintings like those of John Martin were shown in dark auditoriums, and changing lamp patterns would pick out different parts of the art.
Children run about in the room, and it’s quite a family friendly way of turning art into spectacle. Except, perhaps for the occasional nude bums in Hockney’s work, and his comments like: ‘Spring, when nature has an erection’. The presentation ends with a huge painted slogan, ‘LOVE LIFE’. Which one can’t argue with. Particularly when the entrance fee is only £5 for those on Universal Credit.
**
Tuesday 3 October 2023. To Woodbridge, where I’ve never been before. The Tide Mill Museum has sublime views of the Deben river, with the boats and trees in the distance. All very peaceful and idyllic, though I don’t feel wealthy enough to linger in the town too long.
**
Saturday 7 October 2023. The film director Terence Davies dies. In 1988 my father was so moved by Distant Voices Still Lives that he wrote a fan letter to Davies. TD replied by phoning Dad to thank him. They then talked at length about working class childhoods in Britain during the 40s and 50s.
**
Sunday 8 October 2023. I’ve applied for a job with the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. Freelance assistant and researcher, part-time, temporary (7 months). Just the sort of thing I’m keen to do: Isherwood is in my PhD thesis. The job ad was pointed out to me by two friends, separately, who know me but not each other. So that’s a good indication that the job might suit me.
In my eager researcher way, I’ve looked up the Suffolk connection with Isherwood. His mother Kathleen grew up in Bury St Edmunds. She spent a lot of time at Nether Hall, the mansion in Pakenham, then owned by her wealthy uncle Walter Greene, of Greene King brewery fame. In 1903 she married Isherwood’s father, Frank, in the nearby St Peter’s Church, at Thurston, one of those enviable villages which has a railway station.
**
Monday 16 October 2023. Am approached for another job: compiling the index to an academic book, which I’ve done before. I say yes. A few days later the client, who I don’t know, then decides they’d rather go with someone with more experience. What with the Orlando lecture falling through, and my Substack earnings dropping to a trickle, I’m now hoping that the Isherwood job will prove to be a case of third time lucky.
**
Saturday 21 October 2023. Floods in Suffolk. I plug a leak in the loft with rubber duct tape, but otherwise we are okay. Framlingham and Debenham to the east are hit hard. Homes wrecked, pubs and post offices damaged, cars under water, insurance apparently not applicable. Still, Framlingham is also the home of Ed Sheeran, so I wonder if he can help.
**
Sunday 22 October 2023. I’m still looking at studio flats in St-Leonard’s-On-Sea, but the situation for renters remains grim. This time I am not even offered a viewing for a flat that went on the market two days ago: they’re booked solid. Just as well my current landlady isn’t going to throw me out of her house until I have somewhere to go to.
What I definitely don’t want is a basement or ground floor flat. I’d be paranoid about the flood risk (and as I publish this Hastings, which is next to St Leonard’s, is suffering a new bout of flooding).
**
Tuesday 24 October 2023. I have time to kill in Stowmarket, so I go to the public library, which is near the town’s pretty church. Run by the local council and open from 8.30 in the morning, this library is not just a place of free books but an all-round social support hub.
Here, librarians are the quiet saints of community. Gone are any concerns about silence: there is a chatty knitting group at a table in one corner, and some sort of pensioners’ group at another. Children run about (it’s half term), people make phone calls or do jigsaws, and the whole ambience is cheery, cosy and safe. There’s even a coffee machine, though one important aspect stops this place resembling a coffee shop: no piped music. Just the gentle melody of chatter.
Some are here just to take advantage of the heating. This has long been one of the attractions of libraries, but today there is a designated phrase for such places: ‘warm banks’.
There are free internet terminals for those who don’t have computers at home, which is still a lot of people. That said, there’s room for improvement: the council’s own website is not user-friendly enough. I know this because the old man at the computer next to me is sighing a lot as he taps slowly at the keyboard, one finger at a time. He turns to me by way of explanation:
‘They make these forms so complicated. I’m just trying to order a bin.’
**
Saturday 28 October 2023. After an interview via Zoom, I am offered the job with the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. It will mean working from home with the occasional trip to London, which suits me fine.
On reflection, I think I was successful because I made it to the interview stage, where I feel more at ease. Many people are uneasy about crowbarring their whole lovely complexity into the inflexible templates of cover letters and CVs. Give us an interview, though, and we come alive.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
On 17th February 2023 I moved from London to a room in my mother’s house in the village of Bildeston, Suffolk. The following diary entries cover November 2022 to the present.
**
21 November 2022. This week saw the comedian Joe Lycett threaten to destroy thousands of pounds of his own money unless David Beckham addressed Qatar’s poor record on gay rights. After Beckham failed to respond, Mr L instead sent the money to charity. I was glad about this. The act of destroying money carries a depressing banality. As ways of grabbing attention go, burning money is cheap.
**
24 November 2022. The English department at Birkbeck is to be hit with staff cuts, enough to make the national news. University staff across the country are striking, as are many from other professions. Today I pass some striking Royal Mail workers on my walk into town today, outside the Mount Pleasant sorting office. They have one of those embroidered union banners, as beautiful as a tapestry.
**
25 November 2022. I wince at the phrase ‘instant classic’. Not just because it’s a cliché, but because it’s often proven wrong with time. Today I come across the Melody Maker best albums of the year list for 1991. The critics back then rated the Wonder Stuff’s Never Loved Elvis above My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Today, Loveless is a classic, while Never Loved Elvis is rather more ephemeral and of its time. Maybe it was a hair thing.
**
26 November 2022. The dry cleaners on Liverpool Road have lost one of my new shirts. They try to replace it with a shirt in the same size, but it’s a button cuff. I only wear cuff links. Worse: mine was a Charles Tyrwhitt, theirs was a Burberry. I’d rather die.
**
30 November 2022. My hypocritical rule for the deployment of Christmas practices in November: I wince at the jumpers but am fine with the food.
**
3 December 2022. My job rejection emails carry a double hurt. It’s not just the rejection but the lack of individualism. They’re just templates, off the peg, sent out to every unsuccessful applicant regardless. When I’m abused on the street for my appearance I’m at least having my uniqueness acknowledged.
**
9 December 2022. I go to the Natural History Museum in Kensington to see one particular exhibit. There are now conversations about the role of museums in an age of information, not least the ones filled with the spoils of empire. Perhaps the way forward for the Elgin Marbles is to do what the Natural History Museum now does every Christmas with its robot Tyrannosaurus Rex. Put them in a Christmas jumper.
**
10 December 2022. This time last year I defended my PhD. Panto season is the best time for the process. ‘This premise isn’t evidenced’. ‘Oh yes it is.’ ‘Oh no it isn’t.’
In fact, I now realize that my thesis has a reference to the pantomime dame Widow Twankey in it. The character pops up in Joyce’s Ulysses, in the ‘Circe’ chapter.
I take advantage of the football to go to Sainsbury’s on Liverpool Road for gin. This time a middle-aged staffer makes my day by asking me to ‘solemnly swear’ that I am over 25. Cruising’s not dead.
**
11 December 2022. I buy the Christmas Radio Times. It’s now the Midnight Mass of magazine issues, attendance suddenly swelling for the one occasion in December.
Radio Times these days turns out to be an existential attempt to apprehend the infinity of streaming TV platforms. As Camus said: ‘The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ Such is the feeling when choosing between Die Hard and Love Actually.
**
15 December 2022. Today is the centenary of the OED‘s earliest citation of ‘gay’ to mean ‘homosexual’. Their source is Gertrude Stein’s book Geography and Plays, published on the 15th of December 1922. This reading is debatable, but an innuendo effect is certainly there. I especially like the idea that ‘gay’ may have first appeared in print in a book by an avant-garde lesbian.
**
30 December 2022. I manage to get a cheap ticket for the new play of Orlando, at the Garrick Theatre, Charing Cross. In the title role, Emma Corrin is more energetic and more camp than Tilda Swinton in the 90s film, jumping around the stage and changing their voice (Corrin is indeed a ‘they’), to suit the teenage boy Orlando, then the young man, then again for the female version. What with the drag and the wintery scenes set during the Great Frost, plus the time of year it is now, the production is a kind of modernist pantomime. It taps into the sense of intellectual fun that Woolf intended.
**
31 December 2022: I stay in and watch Sooz Kempner’s live show on the Twitch platform – a very modern means of entertainment. She sings showtunes, including ‘Unworthy of Your Love’ from Sondheim’s Assassins. She also does Kate Bush’s ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ while dressed as the politician Nadine Dorries, known for championing Boris Johnson.
**
4 January 2023. I manage to land a paid job, if a temporary one. I’m compiling the index for a new book, Jewish Women in Comics. Today I learn that academic books file the Batman character Harley Quinn under H rather than Q. The reasoning is because of the pun on ‘harlequin’: her surname is the 2nd half of a joke. James Bond, Harry Potter, and Sherlock Holmes, meanwhile, are meant to be realistic names rather than jokes, and so are filed under B, P, and H. It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t really matter, except when it does. I like the way it feels wrong to index ‘Loaf, Meat’, or indeed ‘Man, Iron’.
Certainly, the act of indexing has something of the pleasure of polishing: the final step towards perfection. If a new non-fiction book lacks an index, I tend to take against it.
**
Monday 18 January 2023. Ronald Blythe has died. The one pull-quote in the Times obituary is that he had a one-night stand with Patricia Highsmith. The lesson being that if you live to 100 and have sex with a woman just once, the least you can do is make sure it’s a name worth dropping. I feel the touristic side of this unlikely liaison was more Highsmith’s, though. She moved all the way from America to Suffolk, after all. Blythe was just part of the landscape.
**
20 January 2023. The housing association in Angel ask me to move out. They’re designated as a service for postgraduate students, and as my student life is finally over, I can’t really complain. I’ve been lucky to have lived there at all. Living in Zone 1 of London was always something I wanted to do, and now it’s done. Time to move on.
**
23 January 2023. The effects of the pandemic are reflected in adverts for shared flats. Many of them now stipulate limits on working from home. ‘No more than 1 day per week’ says one. Home is becoming time as much as place.
**
27 January 2023. Battling another job application form. One box says: ‘demonstrate your professional development’. I want to say: ‘Development is for darkrooms.’
**
28 January 2023. I’m now resigned to leaving the city. 29 years is probably enough. I need to see if I’ll miss it. I spent 23 years in Zone 3 (Highgate). Then 3 years in Zone 2 (Dalston). Then 2 years in Zone 1 (Angel). In theory I should now get an internship as a Beefeater at the Tower of London. Or move out altogether.
I’m now curious about the arty seaside life, which I hear is particularly possible in St-Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex. The first thing I will do after moving there is accept that the name has two hyphens and no apostrophe.
**
2 February 2023. I spend a day in St Leonards, looking at a top floor flat in Warrior Square, as well as registering at a handful of estate agents. The flat is still being renovated, and my gut instinct is to pass rather than rush into a move for the sake of it.
I’d ideally like a studio flat rather than have to share a kitchen with complete strangers. Paradoxically I can work well in libraries and cafes, but feel uneasy in kitchens of shared houses. I think it’s the way public spaces are blank slates, reset on every visit. Whereas a shared kitchen is a disputed territory.
If I have to share a house at all, I’d rather do it where all parties are predisposed to forgive each other’s border incidents. That means either moving into a monastery or living with my mother. And with monks, I’m really not keen on the hours.
**
Wednesday 16 February 2023. A selfie from the public roof garden of the Post Building, New Oxford Street. My last day in London as a resident, 1994 – 2023. For now.
**
Friday 17 Feb 2023. Day of the move. I travel separately from the van, which is driven by the charming and very strong Tommy, from T With A Van Removals, Sudbury. I pack a suitcase to take with myself just in case. This includes the one book I’d want to still have if my entire possessions vanished. It’s The Complete Firbank. Specifically the fat Picador paperback edition from 1988. My bible. Quentin Crisp once said that he thought Vile Bodies was the wittiest book ever written, and it’s essentially diluted Firbank.
**
2nd March 2023. Living in a village while not being able to drive rather limits one’s cultural outings. There’s a good arthouse cinema in Ipswich, the King Street Cinema, but the bus from Bildeston takes a whole hour, and doesn’t do evenings.
Most of the concerts in Ipswich and Stowmarket seem to be for tribute bands. Symptoms of living where the action isn’t. You go expecting no surprises. Unless it’s a Radiohead tribute band, in which case you go expecting ‘No Surprises’.
**
26 March 2023. I’m neutral about the upcoming coronation, though being a slight postal geek I take an interest in the redesign of the stamps. They have Charles’s silhouette now, though he has no crown. It’s like vicars who are uneasy about mentioning God, in case it puts people off.
**
31 March 2023. Another job application. ‘Please list your core attributes’ Me: An antipathy to the phrase ‘core attributes’ for a start.
**
3 April 2023. I apply for a research job, but although I’m told I have an ‘impressive’ CV, it still goes to someone else.
Freelance writing seems to be my only way forward, with the hope that enough readers will want my particular perspective. I can’t compete with writers who might as well be anyone.
In my favour, I am at least AI-proof. Artificial intelligence programs are now thought to be sophisticated enough to imitate any writing style. But in my case, so much of my style is influenced by books so obscure that they’ve never been digitized.
What’s also different with me, I hope, is my recent academic training. I know a lot more about stuff, and I know a lot more about which stuff is known. If Hunter S Thompson can call himself a ‘doctor’ out of narcotic cool, I can surely do so likewise as Dr Dickon Edwards. And besides, I like the alliteration of the ‘D’ sounds.
**
6 April 2023. Easter in a Suffolk village. A mobile library calls once every four weeks, for half an hour; I make sure I use it. The post box in the square has been ‘yarnbombed’. It sports an unsolicited woollen cap of crocheted chicks and lambs, put there in the dead of night by a guerrilla knitter. There are real lambs in the field on the south of the village, by the Hadleigh road.
**
25 April 2023.
With Mum to Dollops Wood, Polstead. Despite growing up in Suffolk I don’t think I’ve explored one of the county’s bluebell woods until now. Encountered in person, the colour is breath-taking. Afterwards we find the little Polstead community shop on the village green and have tea and cake outside. There is no one about. The shop has a post office section: a tiny self-contained glass booth in one corner, like an amusement machine on a seaside pier. In Bildeston’s only shop the post office section is just one end of the same counter.
**
29 April 2023. The Hadleigh Morrison’s supermarket sells a small number of books. Mostly popular crime and romance titles, but today they have Douglas Stuart’s literary novel Young Mungo in paperback, with its cover photo of two sweaty young men passionately kissing. I buy it not so much for its cheapness (£5.50) as for a kind of voting. To buy it is saying ‘more of this sort of thing at Morrison’s, please’.
**
1 May 2023. The order of service for the coronation will include a request to the public to pledge allegiance to the King. Some people are up in arms about this, but it is clearly meant only as an option. Or to put it in the language of tinned peas, it is a serving suggestion. With the emphasis on the serving.
**
Thursday 4 May 2023.
Wanting to put my PhD to good use in the community, I’ve started a Substack newsletter. It’s aimed at being a kind of travel-sized lecture series, explaining connections across the arts to a general public, typically involving camp, dandyism, and otherness. It’s called Letter from a Dyspraxic Dandy. I am bursting with ideas for it, buoyed with the freedom but also mindful of keeping it concise.
What I need now is enough subscribers to sign up, with the hope that enough of them will deem it worth paying for (£5 a month, £30 a year).
Saturday 6 May 2023. I watch the Coronation with Mum. She was a child when she saw the last one. Or at least when she saw part of it. She remembers being given a jigsaw puzzle to do in the next room. Her mother called her in to catch the actual crowning.
The crowds in the streets have their smartphones out, but inside the Abbey all is offline. Charles swears his oaths while touching a new red-bound leather bible – which he also kisses. He uses a fountain pen to sign the oaths. Not Face ID, but not a quill either. The texts for Archbishop Welby to read are printed on little white cue cards, held discreetly in his line of sight by the other priests. No iPads.
The ancient age of the throne is highlighted, but so too is the gold anointing spoon, which is to me is pure Monty Python. There is nothing that is not funny about the word ‘spoon’. The BBC commentator refers to it at one point as ‘the humble spoon’, which nearly has me in hysterics. The implication is that in normal circumstances a spoon is a complete diva. The boastful spoon. The full of itself spoon. The takes too long in front of the mirror before hitting the town spoon. Perhaps one argument for keeping the monarchy is moments like this.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
I’ve left this online diary go fallow for too long, with the last update in October 2020. Some sort of explanation is warranted.
In George Orwell’s essay Why I Write (1946), he boils down his motivation for writing to four desires:
Sheer egoism. The desire to seem clever, to be talked about and remembered after death.
Until January 2022, I was working on a PhD in English and Humanities. I was paid full-time by the UK government to do this from 2019 to 2021. The PhD was my day job, and had to take priority over any other writing. Any desire to seem clever was therefore spoken for.
As for any desire to be talked about or remembered after death, that waned. With the pandemic causing a surge in online self-presentation for all, I became all too aware how much I’d failed to elevate my voice above the crowd of Instagrammers, YouTubers, Twitchers, and Tweeters, all broadcasting the scrolling minutiae of their lives to the world. It’s all diary writing of a kind.
By late 2020 I had spent twenty-three years writing the diary, posting millions of words and keeping them all online in a searchable archive. But I still couldn’t get enough donations from readers to make the diary pay. I have to accept that I’m a niche ‘content provider’ – and that’s putting it nicely.
The egoism is starting to return now, however. The PhD is finished, and I continue to exist. So I need to write.
One remaining ambition is to publish books. I’m more fascinated with printed books as objects than ever: their offline quality, their calm immersion, their freedom from pop-up adverts for Volvos.
Aesthetic enthusiasm. The desire to take pleasure from the firmness of good prose.
Orwell’s essay goes on to include his remark about prose needing to be plain and unembellished in its style. That there should be nothing between the words and the reader: ‘good prose is like a window pane’.
The thing is, some of us like a bit of stained glass from time to time.
The PhD made me so sensitive to bad writing that it put me off writing anything new myself. But that’s over now. I’m now back in the mindset where I know what I like, and want to make more of it.
Historical impulse. The desire to find out facts and to store them for the use of posterity.
I switched to Twitter and Instagram for the desire to ‘store’ the facts of my life. This was a combination of laziness and loneliness. The need for ‘Likes’ and the sense of an instant audience can be powerful. But it’s a false satisfaction. My idea of hell would be a tweet going viral. I’d hate to be famous for writing a tweet. I should return to the diary for that reason alone.
Political purpose. The desire to push the world in a certain direction.
I do believe in trying to change the world for the better, particularly in the sense of promoting imagination, literacy, difference, wit, art, and intelligence, over, say, violence, conformity, exploitation, and thuggery. This urge left me during the depths of the pandemic, when the ability to ‘push the world’ felt secondary to the need to prevent the spread of Covid. I became downright paranoid about the virus, as the following new diary entries will demonstrate.
* *
24 October 2020. I pass a loud young couple on Tottenham Court Road. They’re dressed in punkish alternative wear: black t-shirts, black jeans, Goth hair (or as they say now, Emo hair). They are singing a mantra in the faces of passers-by, to the tune of ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’: ‘You can stick your Covid tyranny up your arse’. The couple are obviously walking home from one of the regular Saturday protests by the anti-vaxxer brigade. Except that these two are young, as opposed to the more typical conspiracy theorists, who tend to be greying and Gandalf-like. With young people, all rebellion is the same and all rebellion is good.
* *
29 Oct 2020. On the tube. Everyone is meant to wear a face mask, but the last carriage of an Overground train tends to be the Noses Out zone. The lads zone. Like the back of the bus.
* *
30 Oct 2020. Eating by myself at the Plough pub near the British Museum:
* *
31 Oct 2020. Desperate for somewhere of my own to work, I am lent by Birkbeck the use of a tutor’s office. It’s on the second floor of 47 Gordon Square. The Ginger Jules café in the square provides takeaway soup. My view from the window must be more or less the same view the young Virginia Woolf would have been used to when she lived there:
* *
16 November 2020. It feels like we’re past the End Times and into the blooper reel.
* *
23 November 2020. I am interviewed via email by a writer researching the Sarah Records music scene, of the early 90s. I have to apologise to her about the scantiness of my recollections. At this point my mind is entirely dominated with the world of my thesis: the life and work of Ronald Firbank and the history of camp in fiction. I feel I’m too steeped in my present to access my own past. It’s like stopping halfway through lunch to discuss breakfast.
* *
29 November 2020. I watch the film Happiest Season, a glossy Christmas romcom aimed at the mainstream Love Actually market, but with young lesbians as the leads. I think of Derek Jarman writing in his diary in 1993 about appearing on the Channel 4 special, Camp Christmas: ‘The depths of our dislike for this family event was hardly disguised. It’s not easy for gay people to enjoy Christmas, the two don’t mix’. Perhaps the mainstream hype over Happiest Season is a sign that this is no longer the case.
* *
30 November 2020. I read an article from 1963 wherein Dennis Potter praises the very first series of Doctor Who. He calls the Tardis ‘a distinctly Marples-free machine’. It’s a topical reference to Ernest Marples, the Transport Minister at the time, who oversaw the Beeching cuts to the railways.
* *
2 December 2020. At this time of year I usually like to sit in the café next to the ice rink at Somerset House, just to enjoy the atmosphere. I never skate. This year there’s no skating. Instead the space is host to pricy transparent igloos, ‘dining pods’, for groups to hire, assuming they’re all in the same Covid ‘bubble’.
* *
7 December 2020. I go for a symptom-less Covid test at the former ULU in Malet St. There’s a row of white testing booths set up in the auditorium where they used to hold concerts. I first visited this room in 1989 or so, damaging my hearing to see groups like My Bloody Valentine and (the rather less noisy) They Might Be Giants. I feel relieved at the negative Covid result, but it does nothing to assuage the worry over how long this is going to continue.
* *
14 December 2020. It’s looking likely that there’s a second wave of the virus on the way. Mum and I call off meeting for Christmas. She says it’s the first time that she’ll be spending Christmas by herself in her whole life.
* *
19 December 2020. With my Covid paranoia sky-high, I look at ads for single flats and bedsits. Just one day looking is enough to turn one into an extreme Marxist, such is the greed on view.
* *
21 December 2020. Thanks to Bibi Lynch on Twitter I find a small bedsit in Angel, off the Liverpool Road. It’s within walking distance of Birkbeck and the British Library. A Christmas delivery.
**
24 December 2020. I move to Angel on Christmas Eve, with all the pleasing connotations of the Nativity. I unpack my library, feeling like Walter Benjamin, except with more plastic laundry bags, the zip-up kind with a plaid pattern. I buy a dozen from a pound-shop on the Kingsland Road. This is a tip from none other than Alex Kapranos, of the band Franz Ferdinand. If you have to move house on a budget, and you have no sturdy boxes, the bags are perfect.
* *
26 December 2020. Eating Roses chocolates. I find Celebrations too butch, Quality Street too post-colonial.
* *
8 January 2021. A new lockdown begins. London has been declared a ‘major incident’. In the infinite Sainsbury’s on Liverpool Road there’s still many people with no masks. Salad days for the paranoid.
* *
21 January 2021. I prefer the earlier, funnier lockdowns.
* *
25 January 2021. My review of It’s A Sin, the new TV series: It’s Alright.
* *
1 February 2021. With so many people working from home and communicating via video call software like Zoom, one question is how to present oneself onscreen. A common background is a set of bookshelves. It’s been reported that used bookshops have done well out of the pandemic, with the well-off hastily buying books in bulk, purely for this decorative purpose. To paraphrase Anthony Powell, books do furnish a Zoom.
* *
4 February 2021. I find myself increasingly irritated by memoirs, which I find, paradoxically, too fictional. William Burroughs on Paul Bowles’s memoir, Without Stopping: ‘It should have been called Without Telling‘. Many memoirs are essentially the same book: ‘I once had a hard time but I’m now fine and I’m using this to build a brand’. Exceptions being The Naked Civil Servant, last line ‘I crawl towards my grave…’ Except that too built a brand. The most truthful opening line is Viv Albertine’s: ‘Anyone who writes an autobiography is either a twat or broke’.
* *
5 February 2021. Hate having to write a short biography to go with a piece of writing. What counts? The form tempts parody:
‘He divides his time between Paris and Rome. Which are his pet names for the bed and the fridge’.
‘He has been a Writer In Residence. By writing in his residence’.
* *
10 March 2021. I finish the first draft of the thesis, after three and a half years of work. Now editing. It’s far too long to be submitted, at 108 thousand words. The maximum allowed for a thesis is 100k.
* *
14 March 2021. A sticker for Twitter: ‘this machine kills nuance’.
Also, the first rule of Twitter: if something can be taken the wrong way, it will be taken the wrong way.
* *
9 April 2021. Prince Philip dies. His one entry in the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations is the ‘slitty-eyed’ comment.
* *
14 April 2021. I receive my first dose of a Covid vaccine. This takes place at the Business Design Centre in Islington, Upper Street, a huge Victorian brick building which once hosted the first Crufts. The vaccine recipients are marshalled into a series of snaking queues, outside and inside the building. We are all socially distanced, and everyone is in face coverings. There’s some live music as we wait: a young man sits in a corner playing soothing jazz improvisations on an electric guitar. Islington in a nutshell.
* *
22 April 2021. An excited email from an academic friend who has just discovered that I was in the 90s band Orlando. He is now accusing me of ‘keeping that quiet’.
* *
27 April 2021. I do hope what makes Boris J go is his wallpaper, if only for the Wildean connotations.
* *
1 May 2021. I visit Islington Council’s South Library on Essex Road, the red-brick branch where Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell were caught customising the covers of library books. Today South Library doesn’t stock any of Orton’s own books but it does use his name in its publicity for the building’s centenary. Orton is officially the most interesting thing to happen to that library. And they put him in jail.
* *
6 May 2021. I vote at Thornhill Primary School, Thornhill Road, N1, in the mayoral elections. As I make my mark in the booth with the usual stubby pencil on the usual piece of card, a teacher outside in the playground swings a hand bell to signal the next class. Both practices remain unchanged in decades.
* *
18 May 2021. Drinking in Fitzrovia means you risk overhearing film & TV people saying things like ‘the DP was a legend’.
* *
5 June 2021. On Saturdays in London, one thinks of Quentin Crisp’s remark that protest is a game any number can play. Today, walking around central London, I am collared by anti-vaxxers (aggressive), eco warriors (civil), and Free Julian Assange activists (feral).
* *
13 June 2021. Walking along Upper Street on a hot day, I am the only man in trousers rather than shorts. If nothing else, I supply punctuation.
* *
2 September 2021. Shanthi S marks my 50th birthday with a meal at Le Sacre Coeur, Theberton Street.
* *
3 September 2021. I spend my actual birthday visiting St Leonards-on-Sea and Hastings. Royal Victoria Hotel for afternoon tea. I eye the flats of Marine Court, the 1930s block that’s modelled on the Queen Mary ocean liner, with the same yearning as I do the ones in the Barbican.
* *
4 September 2021. A boozy night at Vout-o-Reenee’s in Tower Hill. Sophie Parkin makes me an impromptu birthday cake. It’s also the birthday of the fashion designer Roberta (on Instagram at @gownsbyroberta). We have a joint photo:
* *
29 September 2021. I submit the PhD thesis and start revising for the exam.
* *
20 November 2021. I start writing occasional reviews for The Wire again.
* *
7 December 2021. My PhD examination (the ‘viva voce’). Result: Pass with Minor Corrections. My examiners are Joseph Bristow and Kirsten MacLeod. I have until early January to resubmit with the corrections. The exam is via video call, but I’m at 46 Gordon Square, 1st floor, once home to the Bloomsbury Group, which pleases me immensely.
* *
24 December 2021. Christmas with Mum in Suffolk.
* *
8 January 2022. I resubmit the thesis with the corrections.
* *
19 January 2022. Officially notified by Birkbeck of my PhD award. I’m now allowed to call myself Dr Edwards.
* *
31 January 2022. Current activity: applying for grants to write an academic book based on the thesis. Going to seminars on CVs and careers. Also sending out book proposals: one for an experimental monograph-cum-memoir, one for a novel.
It turns out that getting a paid job after doing an English PhD is even harder than doing an English PhD.
* *
18 February 2022. My thesis, ‘Ronald Firbank and the Legacy of Camp Modernism’, is now online at Birkbeck’s online library. It’s available for anyone in the world to download, and for free, and is indexed by Google:
I still want to turn the thesis into a printed book, but my honour is satisfied in terms of getting the research out there. There are still thousands of words left out, though, which I need to turn into articles. A whole section on Anthony Powell, for instance.
* *
28 March 2022. I review the new Soft Cell album for the Wire, which includes their collaboration with Pet Shop Boys. The continuing creativity of both groups is inspirational when considering my own aging body and wondering what best to do with it. Sparks even more so: now in their 70s, putting out manifestly brilliant work like their 2020 album A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip.
* *
24 April 2022. A kind reader of the thesis sends me £50 out of the blue, knowing as they do the difficulties in getting paid for academic writing. It’s the three boxes to tick: getting paid to do what one is good at, getting paid to do what one enjoys, and getting paid enough to live on, modestly but autonomously. It’s the third box that’s still elusive.
* *
3 May 2022. My PhD graduation ceremony at Senate House. Mum attends, up from Suffolk. Dame Joan Bakewell, the college President, gives a speech. The ceremony has a little bit of extra business for the PhD graduates: they have to kneel on a padded wooden frame while the Master of Birkbeck puts a sash-style hood over them. The hood represents the PhD itself. Then the candidate arises, symbolically transformed into a Doctor of Philosophy. PhDs also wear soft Tudor-style caps rather than mortar boards.
This is Birkbeck’s first ceremony in person since the pandemic. No social distancing or mandatory masks. The audience of graduates and their proud relations packs out the hall on the ground floor. One change, however, is the omission of the traditional handshake with the Master. Today a nod suffices.
My diploma arrives by registered post a few days later. With that, my ten years at Birkbeck as a mature student are finally done: BA, MA, and now PhD. The ‘triple’, as it’s called.
* *
8 June 2022. I spend the weeks after graduation being the most sociable I’ve been since the pandemic began. I meet friends and go to the cinema. And then, perhaps inevitably, I get Covid. It lasts the best part of 14 days. Fever for the first four days, then it feels like a heavy cold afterwards, though with an added unfamiliar fuzziness.
* *
6 July 2022. One of my applications meets with success. Birkbeck has now conferred a new title on me: Associate Research Fellow in the School of Arts (Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing). Starting October 2022 and lasting a year. The title is an unpaid affiliation role, though I am rewarded with a staff ID card, a staff email address and full library access. In return, I’ll be expected to contribute to the department’s research activity on a light basis. It’ll be good to have a sense of belonging, and to have something to point to while I’m looking for the next thing.
* *
19 July 2022. I win Birkbeck’s Margaret Elise Harkness Fellowship Prize, for my research into Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. It’s my fourth prize at the college, following one in 2014 for my work on the Saint Etienne film Finisterre, one in 2015 for getting the highest grade in my year for the BA English course, and one in 2017 for getting the highest grade on the MA Contemporary Literature and Culture course. It’s a nice thing for my student years to go out on, not least because it comes with £2000 (though I have to wait until late August to actually receive the cash).
* *
28 July 2022. Still looking for a regular source of income. The Job Centre are about to put me on their mandatory Restart Scheme. All job adverts ask the same question: ‘can you pretend to be normal?’
Today I have an intense panic attack after hours spent clicking through an interminable application form for a university post. It asks me to provide ten supporting statements. I eventually abandon the application altogether, all enthusiasm quashed. All I want to do is to earn a living wage doing something that doesn’t hurt too much.
What keeps me going? A belief that, contrary to what the job market implies, difference is an asset, not an obstacle. That, and the conviction that my best work is still ahead of me. The Harkness prize certainly helps, too. Money isn’t everything, but it is one way of telling people what sort of work they are good at, and what sort of work they should keep doing.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Wednesday 14 August 2019. I renew my passport. This is not because of any panic over Brexit, but because the ten year expiry date happens to be this month. I opt for the no-fuss renewal service offered by the Post Office. Contrary to the stereotype about the British, no true Londoner likes to queue. Queuing in London is for tourists. Real Londoners know there’s usually a less busy version of whatever one wants, whether it’s a chain of cafes, a Post Office, a bank or an ATM. One quiet Post Office is in Grays Inn Road near Chancery Lane station. It’s hidden in the basement of a branch of Ryman’s, like a secret members’ club. There’s no one else there at all when I go today, even during lunchtime. Today I present my old passport, they take my photograph with a machine at one end of the counter, and it’s all done in five minutes.
Within
the week, a new passport arrives in the post. It looks the same as the old one,
with the same burgundy red colour. It takes me a moment before I realise there
is one difference, though. The words ‘European Union’ are missing.
Evening:
Drinks and Thai food at the Hemingford Arms with Shanti S., which warrants a
selfie:
**
Friday 16 August 2019. To Bethnal Green Working Men’s
Club, to DJ for the wedding reception of Maud Young. I play many of my old
Beautiful & Damned tracks. It’s a fun return to a previous life, but as
with making music I don’t have any further interest in dj-ing. Passions can wax
and wane across a life. Some people are happy doing one thing all their life, and
I envy them. Others are drawn to paths not yet travelled, even if it means leaving
old worlds behind.
**
Saturday 17 August 2019. Some old worlds are never quite
left behind, though. In Russell Square today I receive a catcall from an older
man on a bike: ‘Stop dying your hair, you poof.’
I
wonder if that happens to Nick Cave?
**
Sunday 18 August 2019. To the Rio for Marianne and Leonard, Nick Broomfield’s documentary
about Leonard Cohen and his muse. Mr Broomfield declares an interest early on:
like Cohen, he too once dated Marianne. There’s a sense of bragging here, and
indeed Mr B can’t resist showing photos that show just how attractive he was in
the 1960s, like Liam Gallagher with a thesaurus.
As
with all Nick Broomfield documentaries, the choice of interviewees is wonderfully
suspect. We get the testimonies of sacked collaborators, spurned relatives, or
just some passing maniac. Still, Mr B always makes his subjectivity clear. The
‘official’ documentaries try to pretend otherwise.
**
I
visit a new bookshop and café in Dalston, ‘Ripley & Lambert’. It
specialises in books about film. This might seem rather niche, but then ‘niche’
is now thought to be the way forward. Magazines on prog rock are thriving,
while general music ones like NME have
bitten the dust. A display about women in science fiction explains the shop
name: Ripley and Lambert are the two female characters in Alien.
**
Monday 26 August 2019. A stiflingly hot bank holiday. I
loaf in Dalston all day, only venturing out to see Once Upon A Time in Hollywood at the Rio. Mr Tarantino is acquiring
a Dickensian touch with age. There’s an idealised little girl who offers advice
on acting for Leonard DiCaprio: ‘It’s the pursuit that’s meaningful’. Sadly,
there’s not enough of this sort of thing, and the end of the film is the usual
Tarantino bloodbath. Except that times have changed, and this sort of trashy
violence – particularly against women – is now more of a problem. Or perhaps
not. Perhaps this is what his fans just expect. Comfort in the familiar,
however problematic. All of which makes Quentin Tarantino the Boris Johnson of
cinema.
**
Wednesday
28 August 2019. Pain and Glory at the
Rio, the new Almodovar. In a way, this film is just as indulgent as the
Tarantino, with much idolising of the culture of old films. But Almodovar at
least nods towards the universal. There’s a beautiful scene early on of women
washing blankets in a country river while singing, straight out of a painting
by Sorolla.
**
Thursday 29 August 2019. Seahorse at the Rio, being a documentary on a British trans man as
he goes about becoming pregnant. The birth itself is in a birthing pool, making
a neat extra nod to the seahorse analogy. Though the film is subtitled The Dad Who Gave Birth, the experience
is not previously unrecorded. Last year saw a documentary on a different trans
male pregnancy, A Deal with The Universe.
And in Seahorse Mr McConnell mentions
being in a Facebook group for ‘seahorse dads’, plural. The logical next film
would be a portrait of such a group.
The
collective noun for seahorses is a ‘herd’, which seems too commonplace for such
an unconventional and ornate creature. A
better choice now, given the analogy for pregnant trans men, would surely be a ‘pride’.
**
Sunday 1 September 2019. To the Posy Simmonds exhibition
at the House of Illustration. I like her cover design for the 1966 gay-themed
novel The Grass Beneath The Wire by
John Pollack, with two men in dinner jackets, one with his arm around the
other. Her 1981 book True Love is
labelled as ‘the UK’s first modern graphic novel’.
The
gallery also shows Marie Neurath’s illustrations for 1950s children’s science
books. One caption has a response from an 8-year-old reader: ‘They are wizard
books! I can read them by myself. I don’t need help from anyone.’
A
third exhibition is Quentin Blake’s latest work, direct from his studio.
There’s a John Ruskin children’s story, a wordless book of his own called Mouse on a Tricycle, a collaboration
with Will Self titled Moonlight
Travellers, and drawings for the corridors of Sheffield Children’s Hospital.
And this is just Mr Blake’s work for the first half of 2019.
**
Tuesday 3 September 2019. My 48th birthday. I go
to Rye and Camber Sands, mainly on an EF Benson tip. There is a beach café that
does prosecco at eleven o’clock in the morning.
Dinner
at the Mermaid Inn, then a look at Radclyffe Hall’s house.Back to Dalston in time for the launch of La JohnJoseph’s book A Generous Lover,at Burley Fisher. At 48, I am all about books and book-related places.
**
4 September 2019. I read an Observer review by Peter Conrad, which discusses Benjamin Moser’s
new biography of Susan Sontag. It seems
the woman who gave the world ‘Notes on ‘Camp” wasn’t immune to moments of camp
herself: ‘When, on one rare occasion, a man chivalrously supplied her with an
orgasm, she complained that the sensation made her feel ‘just like everybody
else”.
The
phrase ‘a man chivalrously supplied her with an orgasm’ also says something about
Mr Conrad. All reviews review the reviewer.
Mr
Moser’s book claims that Sontag’s partner in later life, the photographer Annie
Leibovitz, treated her to limousines, first class air travel, and an apartment
in Paris. As Sontag never earned very much from her books, compared to Leibovitz,
her partner served as her ‘personal welfare state’. Some welfare. Mr Conrad supplies
these details to suggest Sontag was a terrible role model. But I see nothing
wrong with being a kept intellectual.
**
Tuesday 10 September 2019. To Stanford’s in Covent Garden
for the launch of Travis Elborough’s latest, The Atlas of Vanishing Places. I chat to Daniel Rachel. Last time I
met him he was telling me he was writing a book on the 1990s Cool Britannia era,
Don’t Look Back in Anger. The book is
now out and has had good press. Mr R tells me tonight that he wanted the subtitle
to contain the phrase An Oral History,
but the publishers had vetoed this wording, worried that the average reader of a
book on Britpop might not know what ‘oral history’ meant.
I
wonder if this is down to the image of Britpop as anti-intellectual and laddish
(or laddettish). Both Gallagher brothers still seem happy to perpetuate this
image, like the cool boys at school who belittled the geeks. When Brett
Anderson of Suede received rave reviews for his memoir recently, the reviews
had overtones of surprise. The implication was that, as he was a rock star from
the 1990s, it was a miracle he could string a sentence together at all.
**
Monday 9 September 2019. A useful retort: ‘I’m afraid I
don’t have the budget for any more unpaid work’.
**
Thursday 12 September 2019. To Kings Place to be in the
audience for a recording of the podcast, Girls
on Film. The film critic Anna Smith presents three guests – all women –
discussing the latest releases. Two are actors, Ingrid Oliver and Tuppence
Middleton, the other is the BFI’s Director of Festivals, Tricia Tuttle.
The
rise of podcasts against mainstream radio hit a tipping point for me when a
young guest on Radio 4’s A Good Read recently
called the programme ‘this podcast’ – and was not corrected.
Drinking
in the Kings Place glass-plated bar afterwards, looking over the canal and
Granary Square. This shiny redevelopment, all plate glass and escalators, seems
popular and utopian, if still finding its feet.
**
Tuesday 17 September 2019. All work is acting work. The
trick is not to be miscast.
**
Thursday 19 Sept 2019. I meet Shanthi at a cocktail bar
in Islington, only to realise that drinks start at £9 – and that’s just for a
glass of house wine. There has to be a word for the trick of trying to keep a
straight face when such prices are communicated, and indeed for a staffer
communicating them with their air of complete normalcy.
**
Friday 20 Sept 2019. From today I’m being paid the
Living Wage (17k) to do a PhD. Less money than the office job I had ten years
ago (which was 19k, in 2009), but my gratitude for not being forced to do unsuitable
work more than makes up for it.
**
Monday 23 Sept 2019. I read an article about a young Instagram
‘influencer’, Caroline Calloway, and the world of pursuing internet fame for
its own sake. This is new and yet not new. I’m reading about the Bright Young
Things of the 1920s: pretty people whose lives and relationships were
documented in the press without them appearing to actually do anything. So
perhaps social media has just made that kind of lifestyle more democratic. Today,
a 1920s figure like Stephen Tennant would have to maintain an Instagram account.
Or rather, as seems to be the case with ‘influencers’, he’d have staff to
ghost-write his posts for him.
**
Wednesday 25 Sept 2019. I read Olivia Laing’s Crudo. The use of Kathy Acker reminds me
how Acker has become hip all over again. I think of KA’s line ‘Dear Susan
Sontag, please can you make me famous?’, the most honest statement in the
history of literature.
**
Wednesday 25 September 2019. Tonight, my seahorse brooch is
described as ‘very Lady Hale’.
**
Saturday 5 October 2019: Checking in on Twitter after a gap
one feels besieged by the sheer infinitude of the lives of others. All I can
add in response is that I too am alive. Still.
**
Tuesday 8 Oct 2019. One of the delights of library
books is encountering the traces of previous readers. In a London Library copy
of Ronald Firbank’s Five Novels, from
1949, I recently found a ticket for Carmen
at the New York Met opera house, dated October 2014. Today I’m reading a
book from 1927, Movements in Modern
English Poetry and Prose by Sherard Vines, which has an early assessment of
Firbank. A slip of paper falls out. It is a handwritten note from the London Library
to an anonymous reader, informing them that a couple of books they ordered are
unavailable.
This
would normally be dull, but the note is dated 20 April 1954. I can’t help
scrutinising the handwriting of the librarian – a beautiful looping hand in
fountain pen ink, and wondering about the lives of the reader and the staffer, and
if this disposable note has now outlived them. I look up the unavailable books it
mentions. Time and Place by Lyde and
Garnett, a 1930s geography book which was ‘not possessed by the Library’, and A Myth of Shakespeare by Charles Williams
– one of the Inklings – which in 1954 was ‘missing from the Library shelves’. I
look both up in the Library’s catalogue. The Library never did acquire Time and Place, but the Wilkins is back
in stock.
**
Tuesday 15 October 2019. The Booker Prize is awarded
jointly. One book is Margaret Atwood’s The
Testaments, the sequel to The
Handmaid’s Tale,which has had a
huge amount of publicity already, including midnight bookshop openings with actors
dressed as Handmaids. The other is Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, which hasn’t. If you can’t decide between two
books in a prize set up to raise the profile of literary fiction, why not give
it to the book that hasn’t already had its profile already massively raised?
There’s something of the spirit of the times in this decision: a misplaced
sense of righteousness, and with a terror of divisiveness.
**
Wednesday 16 October 2019. On a Sontag tip again, this time
because of an excellent essay by Johanna Hedva on the White Review website. A quote by Sontag connects with my own
thoughts: ‘I wanted every kind of life,
and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive’.
**
Saturday 19 October 2019. Finish reading Firbank’s New Rythum (sic), his unfinished novel
set in New York. There’s a couple of superb set pieces, such as the
strawberry-picking tea party held in a ballroom, and the arrival at the city
harbour of a huge nude male statue. I wonder if the latter inspired the end of
Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw,
Orton being a Firbank admirer. There
was talk lately of a new statue to Orton in his home town of Leicester. He’d
have like that to be nude, too, but with his socks on.
**
Sunday 20 October 2019. I listen to two long interviews
with Chris Morris, on the Adam Buxton podcast. The latest Morris project is a
feature film, The Day Shall Come,
which I’ve just seen at the Rio. The film is in a similar vein to Four Lions: a conventional comedy drama,
scripted and directed by Morris, and based on his research into real life
incidents. Morris himself doesn’t perform in the film, and I come away missing
his greatest asset, the one which made On
The Hour so distinctive: his voice.
**
Wednesday 28 October 2019. To the Tim Walker exhibition at
the V&A, which ticks so many of my boxes: Tilda Swinton as Edith Sitwell
(who turns out to be a relative of hers), Aubrey Beardsley, Angela Carter, Lord of the Flies, fashion, glamour,
camp. In the exhibition shop, there’s a display of Mr Walker’s favourite books.
These include The Swimming-Pool Library and
Tintin in Tibet. And inevitably, Orlando.
**
Tuesday 29 October 2019. To Homerston Hospital for surgery.
This is a septoplasty (with ‘reduction of turbinates’) to correct a deviated
septum. The procedure is to address the nasal breathing problems I’ve been
having for some years. I go under general anaesthetic. All is well, though I have
to spend the next 14 days at home to minimise the risk of infection. My
landlady K is my designated escort, in that she collects me from the hospital
and checks up on me during the first 24 hours. It’s a level of concern for a
tenant that is difficult to imagine from many landlords.
**
Thursday 31 October 2019. Halloween. It’s only today that I
notice the first name of Kenneth Williams’s vampiric character in Carry On Screaming is Orlando.
**
Saturday 9 November 2019. Irritations over redundant adjectives. A book review in the Sunday Times refers to ‘a little novella’.
**
Sunday 10 November 2019. Less Boris Johnson, more BS Johnson.
**
Sunday 17 November 2019. I read about the rise of gender
reveal parties, and wonder if fans of Judith Butler hold gender congeal parties.
**
Sunday 24 November 2019. Today’s disproportionate
irritation: Eve Sedgwick making the common error of thinking the song ‘Over the
Rainbow’ is called ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ (Epistemology of the Closet, p. 144).
**
Sunday 1December 2019. I’ve turned my PhD thesis into an
online Advent calendar. Every day in December I post an image on Instagram and Twitter,
relating to camp modernism. Some of these ‘windows’ are writers like Gertrude
Stein. Others are illustrations like Alan Cumming in Cabaret, to represent Christopher Isherwood. The resulting Camp
Modernism Advent Calendar bears the hashtag #CaMoAdCal.
Thursday 12 December 2019. I cast my vote in the constituency
of Hackney North and Stoke Newington. The polling station is Colvestone Primary
School, near Ridley Road market. I’ve voted here twice before for council
elections, with barely anyone about. This time there’s a long queue that snakes
out into the playground, some forty people strong, even at 7.30am. I put my X
next to Diane Abbott, for Labour. It’s not without some guilt as I’d rather
vote Green, but removing the Conservatives has never been more important. The
local result is that Ms Abbott is re-elected, while the Greens increase their
vote, no thanks to me.
As
I walk away I am so convinced of the unsuitability of Mr Johnson and the
nobility of Mr Corbyn that I feel even long-standing Tory voters will not bring
themselves to vote Tory now. Only masochists.
**
Friday 13 December 2019. Masochism triumphs.
The
subsequent days see constant post-mortems. I have to admit that I was ignorant
of Mr Corbyn’s complete lack of appeal to voters outside of cities. My mother,
who lives in the English countryside, is utterly unsurprised by the result.
Whereas I am not immune to social media bubbles, little illusory worlds in
which everyone appears to share the same opinion as you.
It
seems incredible that between these two men Mr J appealed to more people than
Mr C. Between Johnson’s Wodehousian blather and Corbyn’s inflexible sternness,
it was the former that offered more space
to more people. I thought that the public might at least give Corbyn a
tentative go at the steering wheel, what with a decade of the Tories and
several disastrous months of Johnson. But no: better the devil you know.
The
overnight TV election coverage does not help. All the presenters and pundits seem
unlikely to know what it’s like to, say, live in a rented room over the last
five years. Channel 4’s programme is billed as an ‘alternative’ election night,
but the pundits are equally comfortable and well-off, including Rachel Johnson,
sister of Boris. In the 1980s Channel 4 was synonymous with proper ideas of the
alternative: seasons of foreign films, a simulcast of Derek Jarman’s Blue with Radio 3, the Dennis Potter
‘Seeing the Blossom’ interview. Today, ‘alternative’ just means a different
member of the Johnson family.
**
Tuesday 24 December 2019. I’m so easily tired that even the
idea of fun exhausts me. Whenever I see an event is sold out, I feel the warm
glow of a lucky escape.
**
Wednesday 25 December 2019. Christmas at Bildeston in
Suffolk, visiting Mum, including a visit to Dad’s memorial in the village
graveyard. Mum finds an old photo of myself where I’m slouching on the sofa in
the living room, the cards on the wall dating the image to a Christmas past. I
think it’s from 1989, so I would be 18. My hair is my natural brown, but I can
tell it’s from my phase of slightly lightening it with Sun-In spray – my gateway drug to full
peroxide. I’m also wearing a black polo-neck jumper, a look I took to during my
stage management trainee phase, first as an intern at the Wolsey Theatre in
Ipswich (1989-1990), and then formally at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School
(1990-1992). I now think I just wanted a job that allowed me to wear black
polo-neck jumpers. By 1992 I had lost interest in the jumpers, and indeed in
stage management. But working on productions of Company and Side By Side By
Sondheim made me realise that I did want to be a writer of thoughtful and
quotable phrases, beginning with lyrics for songs. I still use ‘Move On’ from Sunday In The Park With George as
inspiration. There is also the pleasing irony of not moving on from listening
to ‘Move On’.
**
Thursday 26 December 2019. I make the mistake of looking at
Twitter over Christmas. Such relentless anger. It’s one thing to disagree about
something, quite another to devote large amounts of passion arguing with people
who have no intention of changing their mind, at least not on Twitter. Less energy
on what one dislikes or finds offensive, more on what one likes and finds
beautiful.
**
Tuesday 31 December 2019. The cover of the late Alasdair
Gray’s Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)has as good a New Year’s resolution as
any: ‘Work as if you were living in the early days of a better nation’.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
Thursday 22nd September 2016. I read this year’s shortlist for the BBC National Short Story Award. All five stories are by women, including Hilary Mantel and Lavinia Greenlaw. Were it down to me I’d give first prize to Ms Greenlaw’s ‘The Darkest Place in England’. It’s a tale of teenage life in a part of rural England where the skies are free from light pollution, hence the title. My runner up would be Mantel’s ‘In a Right State’, about the regular characters one sees in an A&E ward.
A few days later, my choice fails to agree with the judges’, who anoint KJ Orr as winner, with Claire-Louise Bennett as runner up. Both stories are perfectly well-written, it’s just that I feel the Greenlaw and Mantel entries connected more with me. One of my criteria is to notice if a piece of writing gets me underlining a memorable phrase in pen – I always read them on paper. Out of the shortlist, it was only the Greenlaw and Mantel stories that had me reaching for my Bic Orange Fine.
Ms Bennett is getting attention as one of the new trend of Irish writers who are influenced by James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, along with Eimear McBride. The Bennett story in this shortlist is full of Beckettian monologue and thought-stream, with touches of Woolf’s ‘Mark on the Wall’ too. I read Ms McBride’s A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing recently, and like the Bennett story I admired it but found myself yearning for a little skylight of exteriority. A Modernist Style Is A Hard-Going Thing.
My favourite phrase in the Mantel entry captures the hand-gel dispensers in hospitals. One joke I’ve heard about these is that they make everyone in hospitals look like they’ve just thought of a cunning plan. Ms Mantel has another comparison in her story:
‘Sombrely she hand-gels herself, like jesting Pilate’.
The Lavinia Greenlaw story goes one better, with a line spoken by one teenage girl to another, during the latter’s first visit to a night club. Not only is it memorable and witty, it also encapsulates character, place and time:
‘Remember the rules. Don’t queue in groups of more than three, ditch the lads and don’t smile’.
***
Sunday 25th September 2016. To Tate Britain for Painting With Light, a juxtaposition of photography and paintings from the mid 1800s up to the early 1900s. The exhibition shows the way the two mediums influenced each other, with paintings becoming more realistic and detailed, and photographs emulating the poses and subject matter of paintings. Some familiar works are here, like Wallis’s Chatterton, but this time they’re used to show their photographic spin-offs. There’s a 3D stereogram of Chatterton, where some Victorian male model has mimicked the reclining corpse of the poet. Funny how depictions of suicide now often carry a ‘trigger warning’, while the Chatteron painting and its imitative photographs are deemed perfectly family-friendly. Â It’s a snuff movie as a painting. But then, so is Ophelia.
Rosetti’s Proserpine is also here – the one with the woman holding a half-eating pomegranate. It’s a painting so often reproduced that it all but bounces off my vision when I look at it, like a repelled magnet. I’ve not been to the Louvre, but it’s how I imagine seeing the Mona Lisa. An image so firmly fused into one’s memory that one’s brain goes into a state of unease when encountering the real thing. Two opposite reactions struggle to take control. There’s the starstruck, selfie-grabbing reaction: ‘I can’t believe it! It’s that famous painting! And I’m here with it!’ And there’s the resentful one: ‘What a cliché this painting is! I’ve seen it so many times that it’s become bland and meaningless. It’s been killed through overexposure.’
But here Proserpine comes alive, freshened up by its position alongside photographs and illustrations of similar wistful maidens clutching pomegranates. Wilde’s House of Pomegranates is here too, and one can now see how Rickett’s illustrations for the book were a nod to the Rossetti painting and its various photographic imitations. Something about that particular fruit made it an essential prop for images of women at the time: exotic, sensual. A craze of pomegranates, in fact.
(Which sounds like Marks and Spencer’s attempts to give their packets of dried fruit silly names. ‘Mango Madness!’ ‘A Craze of Pomegranates!’).
Then to the Royal Festival Hall’s riverside café, where I witness the BBC Radio 3 pop-up studio in action. It’s a large transparent box bisected into two rooms: a control room with an outer door, and an inner sanctum of a studio. The actors Fiona Shaw and Robert Glenister are seated in the latter, performing for the public vocally, yet otherwise pretending that the crowd gawping in at them is not really there. They are reading the texts for the ‘Words and Music’ programme, as it goes out live. A pair of speakers outside the box broadcast the show at a modest volume, but for a better experience one can approach some youthful BBC staff in t-shirts, who loan out special Radio 3 wireless headphones, which only work in the café. It’s like a Radio One Roadshow for the delicate.
This is all to mark Radio 3’s 70th anniversary. When it began in 1946 as the Third Programme, a BBC statement at the time said the station was intended to be ‘new and ambitious’ and ‘evidence of national vigour’ after the war. I watch Ms Shaw exert her vigour on TS Eliot as I queue for my latte.
***
Wednesday 28th September 2016. To the Camden Odeon for Bridget Jones’s Baby. I’m waiting in the foyer for a female friend – name redacted for reasons which will become clear – when I realise that in a crowded foyer, I am the only male in sight. Overwhelmingly, this film seems to attract pairs of women, and youngish women at that. Mostly late twenties. Given the heroine is in her forties, and indeed much of the film is about the ups and downs of being a forty-something, it seems odd that the bulk of this audience should be of a younger stripe. Perhaps it’s a Camden thing.
The most intriguing moment occurs when the Patrick Dempsey character returns to his Glastonbury yurt after a one-night stand with Ms Jones. He turns up with a tray of coffees and croissants, only to discover that she, mortified about the liaison, has fled. It’s at this point that my particular audience emits a huge female sigh en masse – ‘aww!’ – purely at the sight of breakfast in bed. It surprises my friend, too, who is closer to Bridget J’s age. We wonder later if today’s young women crave breakfast in bed as a romantic ideal, much more so than their elders. Perhaps the rise of Tinder and the general digitisation of love has amplified the appeal of more physical treats.
Bridget Jones’s Baby turns out to be much funnier than it needs to be. After the Absolutely Fabulous movie, which really did just tick the boxes for pleasing the fans, this one makes some sharp satirical quips on social mores. Here we have the perils of search engines, the rise of hipster beards, Middle Englanders having to move with the progressive times, and most of all, the now-common experience of ‘geriatric’ mothers. ‘Geriatric’ is still the medical term, as the film points out, for a pregnant 40-something.
Our evening ends on a somewhat less fun note when we repair to the Good Mixer, now joined by my friend’s boyfriend. We enjoy a couple of drinks for about an hour, but are then suddenly confronted by the bar’s owner. Accompanied by a muscled bouncer, he pulls up a chair opposite our seats and proceeds to interrogate my friend about her behaviour on a previous occasion. She is outraged and defiant, her boyfriend is protective, the argument becomes a repetitive loop of accusations (as all arguments do) and I’m shrinking into my seat. We eventually leave to a volley of execrations shouted across the darkness of Inverness Street. I’m just relieved it didn’t come to blows.
I don’t think I’m barred – the owner apologised to me – but I wonder if this is the last time I can go to the Good Mixer. Still, other bars are available.
***
Thursday 29th September 2016. To Suffolk to stay with Mum. We watch the new DVD of Akenfield together. I note the scene where the Suffolk workers go on a day trip to Southwold.
***
Friday 30th September 2016. And fittingly enough, we go on a day trip to Southwold. We’re treated to lunch on the pier by Mum’s friend Mary Gough, who owns the whole pier as a business. She tells me about the graffiti artist responsible for the huge George Orwell mural on the wall nearest the beach end: ‘He goes by the name of Pure Evil, but he’s very nice, really.’
I have a go on one of the arcade games in Tim Hunkin’s ingenious and satirical Under The Pier Show. This game is a new addition for 2016, ‘The Housing Ladder’. The player has to stand on the rungs of an actual ladder and frantically move its side rails up and down. This makes a little figure inside the machine rise to the top of its own ladder in order to reach the goal: a home. An ‘Age Indicator’ ticks away the time: if the player doesn’t get the house by the time he’s 80, it’s game over. Several ‘villains’ pop out of doors on the way up, making the figure fall back down the ladder. The villains in this case are The Foreign Buyer, The Developer, The Buy to Let Owner, and The Second Home Buyer. I make it to the house at the age of 70. ‘Good luck with that,’ says Mum.
Then a walk into town, via the Sailors’ Reading Room, which is one of my favourite places in the world. I also browse in the Southwold Bookshop, and buy a novel that’s being promoted as a recommended reissue: The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, from 1978. Fitzgerald’s inspiration was the bookshop that used to be on the other side of Southwold High Street. I visited it during our family’s regular holidays in the town since the mid-1980s.
This newer emporium is really a branch of Waterstones pretending to be an indie, at least aesthetically. All traces of company branding have been removed in order to please the locals. Almost all: the receipt informs me of my ‘Waterstones Reward Points’. I wonder if this might be the future of high streets: branches of corporate franchises pretending to be unique local businesses. Pubs already do that.
Evening: We were going to watch a DVD of Terence Davies’s Sunset Song, but I’m keen to finish the set text I’m reading, Jackie Kay’s Trumpet. At the back of the book is a new interview with Ms Kay, in which she discusses how Trumpet couldn’t be set in the internet era, because it’s so much harder to keep a secret. I think of the exposing of JT LeRoy and more recently, Elena Ferrante.
Ms Kay also discusses her influences in Scottish literature. One of the books she mentions is Sunset Song, the novel behind the film. It got me in the end.
***
Saturday 1st October. Off the train at Liverpool Street, and straight over to the Liverpool St branch of Wahaca, the Mexican food chain. The occasion is Tom’s one year anniversary for being sober: no mean feat if you play guitar for a living, which means regularly being in bars and licensed venues. About twenty friends turn up for this meal, all eschewing alcohol by way of tribute. It’s my first restaurant meal to be paid for via an app; the calculation of who ordered what is thus made much simpler.
***
Sunday 2nd October 2016. To the Royal Academy for the David Hockney show, 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life. It’s the last day, and the gallery is absolutely packed (or ‘ram-packed’, as Jeremy Corbyn would have it). The portraits are all standardised in a kind of handmade tribute to Warhol: the same size, the same chair, the same simple background of two horizontal blocks of colour, though the colours are sometimes switched. The show suggests that painted portraits take on a new meaning in the age of the selfie. But more personally, it’s a touching record of his friends. If the measure of friendship today is tapping one’s finger on the word ‘Like’, painting someone’s portrait is a ‘Like’ of true commitment; three days’ work each one. The subjects are Hockney’s friends, including Barry Humphries (very dandified, in tie and fedora), and Celia Birtwell, of Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy fame.Â
***
Tuesday 4th October 2016. A day trip to Brighton, partly because I enjoyed Southwold so much and fancied another dose of the seaside, while the weather was still warm (just about). But also because Dennis Cooper’s new film is getting a screening at the Duke of York’s Picture House, and I seem to have missed it in London.
In the afternoon I walk on the pier and write letters in the café. The seagulls seem to be more aggressive than usual, hovering close to people in number. One touches momentarily on a woman’s head. She laughs it off, but it makes me stick to walking under the pier’s canopies.
I stop off at a new café in York Place, The Yellow Book. It’s decorated in Aubrey Beardsley illustrations, and calls itself ‘Britain’s First Steampunk Bar’. The bar man has a bowler hat with goggles on the brim. There’s some contemporary art on the wall with a steampunk theme. I wonder if they’d exhibit Dad’s Captain Biplane comic art; people were always telling him it was steampunk avant la lettre.
Then to the Duke of York’s cinema. The Dennis Cooper film, Like Cattle Towards Glow is really a series of five short films, each one touching on Mr Cooper’s trademark transgressive themes: trauma and gay sexuality, the world of male escorts, obsession, the death of pretty boys (in the tradition of Chatterton), and youthful vulnerability. In some ways, Mr Cooper is a more X-rated descendent of AE Housman.
Some of the film is unsettling, some of it is surreally funny. There’s several moments of explicit sex which make Brokeback Mountain look like a Disney cartoon. But the final story is virtually U-certificate: a woman uses drones and CCTV cameras to conduct a relationship with a homeless young man (a little like the Andrew Arnold film Red Road).
After the screening there’s a Q&A with Mr Cooper, along with his director Zac Farley and a couple of academics from the nearby University of Sussex. The event is supported by two of the university’s departments: the Centre For American Studies, and the Centre For The Study Of Sexual Dissidence. I assume at first that this must be a recent groovy development, but it turns out the Centre has been going for 25 years. It’s known on campus as ‘Sex Diss’. All very Brighton. Â I get Mr C to sign a copy of his book of essays, Smothered By Hugs.
***
Thursday 6th October 2016. First class of the new college year, and the start of my sixth year as a student at Birkbeck. This term’s module for the MA is ‘Post-War to Contemporary’. Tonight is an induction class, discussing the various artistic movements since 1945.
There must be a little chaos behind the scenes, as the room is changed at 3.30pm in the afternoon, for a class that begins at 6. An email goes out , but as I don’t have a smartphone I don’t get it in time. Myself and another phone-less student are left sitting like fools in the previously-announced room at the BMA building in Tavistock Square. No indication of a change here: no sign on the door. We only realise something is wrong when 6pm comes and goes, and no one else has turned up. Thankfully I’m texted on my non-smart phone by Jassy, one of my fellow students. I rush off and make it to the new room in Torrington Square, several blocks away, and am thus 15 minutes late. I hope this isn’t the beginning of a ‘zero hours’ approach to students.
Thinking back now, it’s an indication that the world increasingly expects people to be constantly online and checking their emails. In my case though, I have to go offline and off-phone for hours at a time or I can’t concentrate. I wonder if this is a new way of being ‘difficult’.
***
Friday 7th October 2016. Meeting with my personal tutor, Grace Halden, in Gordon Square. I don’t finish the MA until September of next year, but I’m now starting to look into what I should do with myself after that. Grace H thinks I’m a ‘perfect’ candidate for doing a PHD. It seems to be possible to be paid a full-time salary for such a thing. I have to keep up the good marks, though. And my PHD needs to be ‘crucial to the international field’, if I’m to receive funding. This will be the tricky part. I sometimes struggle to feel I have any intrinsic worth as a human being, let alone a ‘crucial’ one.
***
Saturday 8th October 2016. With Tom to the Islington Screen on the Green, to see Louis Theroux’s My Scientology Movie. Like many people on their first trip to the venue, Tom is delighted by the sense of luxury, never mind the film. There are plush sofas, foot stools, and a bar at the back of the screening room. The staff even bring your drinks to your seat.
At one point in the Theroux film the camera glances at a cease-and-desist letter received from the Church of Scientology’s lawyers. I make out the words ‘BBC’ and ‘John Sweeney’. Mr Sweeney was the reporter whose own attempts to converse with a Scientologist a few years ago, for Panorama, left him shouting at the top of his voice.
Mr Theroux is much better suited to the job. When the Scientologists turn up with their own cameraman, who refuses to reply to Theroux’s questions, Theroux gets out his phone – a cheap little flip-up one – and holds it up to the man’s camera in response, like a crucifix in a vampire film. They both stand like this for several seconds.
It’s more silly than aggressive, and a move that I think only Louis Theroux could make.  His approach is often called ‘faux-naïve’, but it’s closer to a kind of weaponised passivity. It also helps to make the film unique, given the umpteen documentaries on the subject. Even Jon Ronson, whose journalistic style and taste is close to Theroux’s, wouldn’t hold up his phone like that.
Evening: to the Rich Mix in Bethnal Green for another film documentary: Supersonic, about the band Oasis. Despite this being the film’s opening weekend, Supersonic only seems to be playing in two central London cinemas tonight. I wonder if this is to do with the way music documentaries have a much narrower appeal than documentaries about other subjects: the Theroux screening was packed. The exception was Amy, because it was more of a biography about a tragic public figure who happened to work in music. Supersonic can’t even claim to look into a pop cultural moment, as the recent Beatlemania film, Eight Days A Week did, as Oasis never quite reached that level. There were no Oasis Boots and Wigs on sale, no spin-off cartoon series and films. There were a very popular band, but ultimately just that: a band.
Rather cheekily, the film leaves out any mention of Blur or Britpop, even though it purports to tell the story of the band, up till their enormous Knebworth concerts of 1996. According to this film, no other guitar bands existed in the 1990s. No wonder so many people came to their shows: there apparently weren’t any others to go to. These days, history is rewritten by the documentary makers.
That aside, the anecdotes about the Gallagher brothers and their endless spats and scrapes are imaginatively presented here, using lots of lively animations of letters and photos. The film moves quickly, and the melodies still impress. I remember hearing ‘Supersonic’ when it came out and thinking how ingenious it was to meld the aggressive, swaggering grind of Happy Mondays (the verses) with the aching, fuzzy sweetness of Teenage Fanclub (the choruses). ‘Live Forever’ and ‘Wonderwall’ were similarly impressive; what they lacked in intellectual prowess they made up for in heartfelt drive and emotion. It’s unlikely that their lyrics will ever merit a Nobel Prize, but the film certainly illustrates what a lot of fun it must have been, to be Liam and Noel Gallagher in the 1990s.
***
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Sunday 7th February 2016. Days in a chilly city, feeling the nervous hints of climate change. Lots of freezing winter rain, but still no snow. Some confused-looking daffodils poke their heads up by the front of the house.
Mum forwards me a clipping from Country Life (issue dated 6 January 2016), as spotted by Cousin Jim. I’m mentioned in a feature by Matthew Dennison, about diaries. I’m the example of an online diarist, as opposed to a blogger. It’s flattering company to be in: not the other diarists (Woolf, Pepys et al), but the magazine. Going by the adverts, the Country Life readership consists of people who buy and sell English country houses, or who come from English country houses, or those who are just wistfully attracted to that world. I may be far from that world financially, but a part of me is drawn to it aesthetically, in my Vita Sackville-West, Brideshead-loving way. Every article ends with a little silhouette of a peacock.
The article suggests that diaries differ from blogs through the latter’s ‘anticipation of an audience, and in some instances, a commercial intent’. I’d agree with this. Diaries, even public ones, are about stepping out of the world to record an individual’s experience. ‘Blog’, meanwhile, in its original definition, is short for ‘weblog’: a log of things on the web. Early blogs discussed and shared web links. It was all about the linking. Soon the term ‘blogosphere’ appeared, and blogs were seen as units within a new internet community, a textual form of society. When comment boxes appeared in the early 2000s, these took the social aspect further. At this point I tried to join in; one of my misguided attempts to belong. I converted this diary from the raw HTML text it had been, and moved it onto the fun and shiny LiveJournal platform. People could comment on my entries, and did. I felt Part of the Gang. I was a blogger.
But I soon disliked the way comments became an expected part of the reading experience. Â Of course people should be free to discuss an entry, but did it have to be in the same place? For better or worse, my style doesn’t work as part of an interactive experience. It’s too stand-offish, too aloof, too wary. In this sense, I suppose I am more of a traditional diarist rather than a blogger. I try to write to step out of the noise, not to join in.
* * *
Monday 8th February 2016.
I’m reading Eternal Troubadour, an extensive new biography of Tiny Tim, the dandyish American ukulele-playing singer, whose single ‘Tip-toe Thru’ The Tulips With Me’ became a huge novelty hit in 1968. I can’t help peppering the margins with exclamation marks: such are the unexpected anecdotes and revelations. Given the wealth of recent discussion about Bowie, it’s fascinating to note that Tiny Tim was often described as ‘camp rock’, a term that was soon applied to Bowie. I’m surprised to discover that the phrase ‘glam rock’ rarely appears in a magazine special on 1972: The Year In Rock, as culled from the archives of NME and Melody Maker. Presumably it came later. In 1972, artists like Bowie, Lou Reed and Alice Cooper are all questioned about the nature of ‘camp’ in their performances. The implication is that they may not ‘mean it’ when they perform – an accusation that Bowie is happy to confirm with his Ziggy Stardust persona.
Tiny Tim, however, did indeed ‘mean it’. He couldn’t help it: he was the same offstage as well as on. According to the book, his widow thinks he had a touch of autism. This made him difficult to work with yet endearingly honest. He had long hair before the Beatles, wore make-up before Bowie, and possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of American popular song, from wax cylinders onwards. A man of childlike gestures, dandyish affectations, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, and some startling ideas about career moves, such as his late 70s attempt to appear in a porn film.
The book also states that David Bowie was ‘in the crowd’ for a Tiny Tim appearance at the London Palladium, 30th November 1969. This is a slight error: Bowie was actually on the same bill. There’s photos of them on the web standing in the same line after the show, waiting to shake hands with Princess Margaret. In one, Tiny is showing the Princess his shopping bag, which he carried everywhere, even on stage.
More camp connections: Bowie and Tiny Tim both covered Biff Rose’s ‘Fill Your Heart’, and both duetted with Bing Crosby on TV. Crosby to Tiny: ‘Boy, you could throw a Labrador through that vibrato of yours.’
* * *
Tuesday 9th February 2016.
To Printspace in Kingsland Road, a printing shop with its own gallery. It’s hosting a photography exhibition: Lost In Music, a huge collection of images from four decades of club culture, across the whole spectrum of music. I recognise some of the faces from my own past, at London clubs like Nag Nag Nag, Kash Point and Trash. Senay S has been to it the week before, and tells me I’m in it too, as seen at Trash in the early 2000s. So naturally I make the pilgrimage. But by the time I visit, the display with me in has been moved for reasons of space. There’s a lesson here about vanity, and about the past never hanging around long enough. Still, Senay took a photo when she went:
I meet Mum at the British Library, after which we go for drinks at the Victorian Gothic bar next door, the Gilbert Scott. Mum has just been featured in her own magazine special, a supplement that comes with the current issue of Today’s Quilter. ‘Lynne Edwards MBE: 40 Years of Fabric, Quilts and Classes!’
* * *
Friday 12th February 2016. First essay back from the MA course: 73, which is a Distinction. Interesting that MA grades aren’t Firsts, Seconds or Thirds but Distinction (70 or above), Merit (60-69) or Pass (50-59). Same numbers, different names.
It’s the best mark I could have hoped for. A good start, but with room for improvement. The tutor feedback says I need to work more on engaging with theoretical works. I also seem to have (again) cut things out which I thought could be taken as read. I killed the wrong darlings. Must remember that it’s better to bash the reader over the head several times with one point, than it is to tease with a whole range. Variety is not necessarily the spice of essays.
According to Viktor Wynd, a group of Hackney-based Christians attacked his Museum of Curiosities in Mare Street today. They threw holy water and crosses, and shouted about Satanism. It could be argued that this is a redundant gesture, given the museum already celebrates someone who was indeed crucified, albeit non-lethally: Sebastian Horsley.
* * *
The solipsism of the Sunday supplement journalist. An article in the Sunday Times today begins: ‘Summertime means one thing… beaches flooding your Instagram feed’.
I wince at the arrogance of insisting that one writer’s way of life is the default. A further implication is that this is the way the reader should live. I know I’m overreacting, and that many people these days do indeed have smartphones and Instagram accounts, and that for many, summertime must indeed mean this ‘one thing’, however depressing that sounds. But what is also true is that plenty of people do not live this way, and have no immediate plans to join in.
Good writing, even for a fluffy lifestyle article, should celebrate difference, and resist the urge to generalise. Communicating with readers should not mean bevelling down the richness of human experience to a single, banal approximation of common ground. My credo here would be: speak for yourself. Write for yourself. And let universality take care of itself.
* * *
Tuesday 21st July 2015.
Birkbeck’s website confirms the breakdown of my final year marks on the BA English course. As I’d hoped, all of them are the same as the provisional ones. This gives me a clean run of First Class module totals throughout the whole course. I only realise today that the average overall ‘weighted’ mark, the one which leads to the classification (as a First, or a 2.1 etc), is never published. It’s meant only as a guide for the college boards who approve the degree: they decide the classification according to what they think is most fair to the student, but with this unpublished score in mind. So my final grade is not a number, but a phrase – ‘First Class’. I think I like that – it’s more tidy.
* * *
Wednesday 22nd July 2015.
Another Life Event today, this one directly connected to my BA result. Getting a good degree means I am now qualified to take an MA. For much of the last year, friends and tutors have been advising me to do an MA next. A common tip was that I should also do it immediately, rather than put it off for a year, in case the academic skills go slack.
So today I enrol – online – to do an MA at Birkbeck, starting in the autumn. Part-time, 2 years, Contemporary Literature and Culture.
One big reason – and this is something that I’ve kept quiet about until now – is that I’ve managed to get a bursary to fully cover the fees.
I successfully applied for one of the limited studentships offered by Birkbeck’s School of Arts in Gordon Square. Effectively, Virginia Woolf’s old house thinks I’m worth investing in as a Master’s student. So once I won that bursary, and got a First in the BA, and won a prize for showing ‘the most promise’ as an English Literature student, I thought it’d be unwise to not go ahead and do an MA.
I don’t get a maintenance grant, alas, so it still means two more years of getting by on whatever I can eke out from the kindness of the State. I’m hoping to find part-time paid work that I can do alongside the MA. Writing work would be ideal.
The most important thing I’ve learned is that I am finally, demonstrably good at something: studying literature. People at Birkbeck not only believe I have ‘promise’ as a student, but that I’m worth sponsoring too.
So that’s my life for the next two years, or at least part of it.
* * *
Thursday 23rd July 2015.
A couple of gallery visits. First, to the National Gallery, to see a painting I’d been reading about in Clive Barker’s book of essays, The Painter, The Creature and The Father of Lies. Barker’s favourite paintings are The Raft of the Medusa, which I know well, and Carlo Crivelli’s Annunciation with Saint Emidius, which I don’t know at all. It’s in the National Gallery’s permanent collection (room 59 of the Sainsbury Wing), so today I take a look.
The picture is stunning: bright, busy, geometric, intricate, and full of details one doesn’t tend to see in Renaissance Annunciations. Barker points out how the beam of God’s Message, a ray of light running from the clouds down to Mary, isn’t subject to the laws of perspective, while everything else is rigidly organised around vanishing points. ‘The meaning is plain,’ comments Mr B. ‘The power of God’s gift upends the laws of physics. Space folds up at His command’.
The painting’s aspects which most fascinate me, however, are the ones to do with urban architecture. It was commissioned for the city of Ascoli Piceno, and it is this Renaissance Italian city that the Biblical Mary appears to have a flat in. In fact, the city appears twice: once as the backdrop to this whole scene, and again in the form of a scale model, carried by the local patron saint, Emidius. Emidius lurks outside Mary’s door while chatting merrily to the Archangel Gabriel as if this were something that happens all the time. Mary herself seems oblivious to all these goings-on, as she’s busy reading her book. There are clearly things for which even Dick Francis cannot wait.
Before I leaving, I pay my respects to my own favourite painting there, Bronzino’s Portrait of A Young Man. It’s next to his Allegory With Venus & Cupid, in which Cupid’s foot can be recognised as the one used in the credits for Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
* * *
Then next door to the National Portrait Gallery, for their big summer show Audrey Hepburn – Portraits of An Icon. Cheaper on Thursdays with an NUS card.
Someone I follow on Twitter remarked grumpily that such an exhibition was targeted purely at women. ‘What man would ever go to an Audrey Hepburn exhibition?’ I told him that I’ve known several men likely to do so, aside from myself, and heterosexual men too. But admittedly, that says more about the company I keep.
The implication was that Audrey Hepburn’s image was unusually inert and asexual for such an iconic female pin-up; that with her, it would all be about the Givenchy frocks and gamine hairdos. Her beauty was for those who swoon – and men are not meant to swoon. Well, apart from the ones I know.
Today I go along to find out for myself, mindful of a quote from Dorian Gray:
“The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse.’
I very much enjoy going to exhibitions to see the people as much as the pictures.
The Hepburn exhibition is busy – timed entry only – and indeed the visitors inside are predominantly female. I’d say 80%. One or two gay male couples, and a few attendant husbands and boyfriends, the types who do most of the talking, and I wonder if they’re doing so here as a defence mechanism. I count just other lone man. A typical older tourist sort: grey hair, backpack, shorts. Suddenly I realise I’ve never worn a backpack in my life, and that this too may have implications for my manliness, or at least my blokeyness. I am not a Backpack Bloke.
The show is mainly photographic portraits, as expected, but there’s also Audrey H’s ballet shoes, and some 1950s magazine adverts, when she was the face of calamine lotion. I especially like: the photo of her being read to by an ageing Colette, her costume as the water sprite in the play of Ondine, and her pre-acting cover for an issue of Dancing Times, 1952.
* * *
Friday 24th July 2015.
To Suffolk to celebrate my BA with Mum. We go for a lavish meal at Suffolk’s only vegetarian pub, The Red Lion in Great Bricett, then spend the rest of a rainy day in Bildeston, watching the DVDs I’ve brought. Â One is Charade – to follow on my Audrey Hepburn binge. It’s a Hitchcock-esque caper from the mid 60s, complete with Cary Grant, though Hitchcock would never let the Hepburn role have such an inner life. Even though she’s a damsel in distress, she has the air of a pre-existing character who has stumbled into a thriller plot, rather than a character who is defined by the plot. Lots of clever twists and unexpected revelations. We also watch Patience, a fine documentary on Sebald’s book Rings of Saturn, and Withnail and I. As we’re celebrating my student success, I thought re-watching a student-favourite film would be apt. I first saw it when it came out in 1987, while I was still at school. Today what stands out is what good value the film is: not just a sparkling, quotable script, but plenty of slapstick set-pieces too. The scene where Withnail tries fishing with a double-barrelled shotgun instead of a rod lasts about thirty seconds. Lesser films would have dragged it out into a central scene. The ending is still terribly sad: I used to think it was the film’s only flaw. Now that I’m older, I see the need for pathos and entirely agree with it.
Also: these days I empathise less with Richard E Grant and Paul McGann, and more with the old ladies in the tea room.
* * *
Saturday 25th July 2015.
Second day in Suffolk. The sun comes out. Mum and I drive to Southwold on the coast, the family’s favourite destination. We have Adnams champagne for two, in the high-class Swan Hotel. It’s a place Mum’s never actually entered before, despite her staying in the town most summers since the 1980s. Mum says that I look at home there, in my linen suit and my aloof Londoner air. Later on, I sit and read in the Sailor’s Reading Room, one of my favourite places in England. According to The Rings of Saturn, it was a favourite of WG Sebald’s too.
* * *
Thursday 30th July 2015
Thinking more about gender ratios at exhibitions, I go to one which is surely likely to attract more men than the Audrey Hepburn. Visitors to The Jam – About The Young Idea, at Somerset House, turn out to be about 65% male. A few Fred Perry shirts, indeed a few Paul Weller lookalikes – as he is now. Greying feather cut hair, Mods till they drop. The exhibition has a refreshingly unglossy feel to it, as if it were a fan club affair, despite the huge professional poster campaign at Tube stations. On display are carefully preserved guitars, clothes, records, gig posters, fan letters, videos of concerts, and calling cards from the Woking days (‘The Jam – Rock and Roll Group – Dances, Parties, etc. Woking 64717.’). A souvenir programme comes in the format of the old inky style of music paper. Much is made of the sheer boyishness of the Jam’s appeal – how they taught huge amounts of boys how to be a boy. In this way, the exhibition has a feel of a shrine to male identity, just as the NPG one is a shrine to a certain kind of female identity, via Audrey Hepburn. After a certain point, role models take on the appeal of secular saints.
Among the music paper clippings is a Smash Hits review for the Jam’s last London concert, in 1982. The reviewer is not especially upset about the band’s demise: ‘On stage you know what to expect – one reason they’re splitting up, I suppose.’ It’s written by a journalist who will himself go on to form a pop group, sing about London, and define a way of being a boy: Neil Tennant.
To the Little Baobab Bar in Lower Clapton Road, for fellow student Hester R’s birthday. It’s one of those times where I seem to only know the birthday person, and not any of their friends. But this time I surprise myself and chat happily away to whomever I’m with. I wonder if one reason for this is that no one has been to the venue before, so there’s an extra need to speak to each other and overcome the unfamiliarity. Â The bar is Senegalese and West African, and despite the usual décor of exposed brickwork and dangling light fittings that one finds in East London eateries, it doesn’t feel overly trendy. The mojitos are made with baobab juice: delicious and cheap (and so even easier to enjoy). Later on, a couple of musicians play in one corner: one on acoustic guitar, and one on a tall, harp-like stringed instrument. The music, presumably Senegalese, turns out to be classical, slow and soothing, almost ambient.
* * *
On the tube. A group of young people all get on at once, decked out in matching red tracksuits, green baseball caps, and big plastic sunglasses. They huddle in the aisle and reel off a series of chants together, cheerleader-style. At first I wonder if they’re part of a spontaneous people-power event, like a flash mob, or a wry protest, or an immersive film night. Eventually one of them comes over to me and hands me a card, now more subdued and sheepish as he does so. It’s for a company that provides home deliveries from shops.
This is a common London feeling: the realisation that something intriguing and unusual is just another advert.
* * *
Irritations over modern language. A common subject line on emails is ‘in case you missed it’, sometimes abbreviated to ICYMI. It’s the neediness of the phrase that irks me, as well as the way it bevels down individuality to join in with a consensus of limited catchphrases. Another is ‘a thing’, as in ‘I did a thing’ or ‘it’s for a thing’ or ‘is X a thing now’?
Perhaps one reason for my resentment of such phrases is the same as the one for my resentment over the ubiquity of beards: I don’t think I am capable of joining in. So it becomes another way of feeling that modern life is something other people do, not me.
In any case, the idea of ‘in case you missed it’ has a threatening quality, to my mind. It’s like another cliché that journalists like, when talking about something that’s reached saturation level in the media: ‘Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last month…’ The only sane response to this phrase is to become a cave-dweller at once.
In the news this week, the slang acronym FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out – is added to the Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Romo’ has yet to be included, twenty years on after its coinage in the UK music media, and its association with my band, Orlando. Given that all life is missing out, one way or another, I like to think that Romo has acquired a new meaning as an acronym. ROMO: Relief Of Missing Out.
* * *
I amuse myself watching a late night music documentary about Prince, spoofing it in my head with lines like ‘In 1985, Prince was accused of unabashed naughtiness… In 1986, Prince invented a new note, X, which he only ever played for extra naughtiness.’ And to the tune ‘When Doves Cry’, I find myself thinking of our new Lord Chancellor, and sing the phrase ‘When Goves Cry’.
* * *
Sunday 21st June 2015.
More thoughts of in-jokery, this time for humanities students who are also fans of Mean Girls: ‘Stop trying to make Orientalism happen, Edward. It’s not going to happen.’
On the internet, where context is the first casualty, there is now the added entertainment of watching other people not get the joke. On Twitter, there’s an account that purely caters to this curious mix of schadenfreude and scorn, @YesThatsTheJoke. But presumably it only works for the jokes that the YesThatsTheJoke person gets, too.
On The Quietus site this week, there’s a review of the new Muse album by ‘Mr Agreeable’. Mr Agreeable is a jokey fictional avatar created in a pre-web age. He first appeared in the early 90s (possibly earlier), as a regular feature in Melody Maker. The joke is that Mr Agreeable is anything but agreeable. He not so much writes as spews out a torrent of asterisk-spattered swear words, disproportionate vitriol, and downright violent imagery. His over-the-top-ness is, as they say, the joke. For aging readers of Melody Maker like me, seeing new Mr Agreeable reviews now is a nostalgic pleasure. But this being the internet, there is a comments section underneath. And in that section are lots of angry young Muse fans complaining that the review is not proper journalism. Yes, one wants to say, with deadpan resignation. Yes, that’s the joke.
How to explain to them that there was once a magazine – sorry, a ‘thing’ – called Melody Maker? More to the point, how to explain that once upon a time, columns of pure hatred were clearly meant to be read as jokes? I now realise that Mr Agreeable was a prophet of the Web. Disproportionate anger is what people do constantly now, sometimes professionally (Katie Hopkins, Jeremy Clarkson). Except that they’re not joking.
* * *
Wednesday 24th June 2015.
Put off by one job advert today, purely by its usage of exclamation marks.
Most days this week, I am wearing a white suit with seahorse cufflinks. I like to think of cufflinks as the squeamish person’s piercings.
I binge-watch the new (third) series of Orange Is The New Black. The phrase is apt, as I feel a little ill and bloated afterwards. The series is superb, though, finding new backstories for even the minor characters. There’s about thirty recurring roles, so if a plotline isn’t interesting, a better one always comes along soon enough. What I’d like to see now is Carol Morley writing and directing an episode. She’d be perfect.
* * *
Thursday 25th June 2015.
I meet Mum at St Pancras, and we have lunch at the British Library, to celebrate her birthday. The library café area finally has plenty of free seats, and in the afternoon too. All the students seem to have either taken their laptops outside into the nice weather (more chairs and tables there), or – more likely – they’ve finished their studies. Where are they all now, I wonder?
Glastonbury must be one answer. I try to balance my envy of those going to or appearing at festivals, with the consolatory thought that I also love sleeping in a room with four walls. Not to mention my love of indoor flushing toilets. As it is, going to Glastonbury purely as a punter seems increasingly redundant. These days, with the blanket media coverage, it comes to you.
Mum and I take a look at the current free exhibition in the British Library foyer. It’s one big exhibit: Cornelia Parker’s Magna Carta (An Embroidery). Marking the anniversary of the real thing – which is on show next door – this Magna Carta is a stitched version of the Wikipedia page about the Magna Carta, as it appeared on the day of the 799th anniversary, last year. Most of the text has been stitched by people in the Fine Cell Work charity, which trains convicted prisoners in needlework skills. Mum is thrilled about this: she went to a FCW talk a few months ago – given by a former convict – and found his story of finding new purpose through the art of stitching utterly fascinating. A few of the words have been stitched by public figures, such as Jarvis Cocker, whose selected words are, rather wonderfully, ‘Common People’. Somehow they got Edward Snowdon to stitch a word, too, and it’s one which sums up the essence of the project: ‘liberty’.
* * *
In a lonely mood, I overreact when I realise that I’ve been blocked by a music writer on Twitter. A second one, in fact. I have no idea why. I don’t think I’ve ever had any kind of interaction with the writer – I just want to read his work. I ask around on Twitter and find someone who assures me that blocking is what that particular writer likes to do, apparently notoriously, and often of people he either doesn’t like, or doesn’t like by association. I also find another writer who happily blocks people he doesn’t like pre-emptively, because he hates the idea of them reading his work.
So much for Forster’s ‘only connect’. I have a vision of books in a library snapping shut as a reader approaches: ‘Oh no, not you!’
I come away from this thinking that (a) I’m not as unreasonably grumpy as I think I am, not compared to others, (b) I would never block someone on Twitter unless they’d actively sent me abuse, and (c) I do hope Virginia Woolf doesn’t think I’m a twat.
* * *
Friday 26th June 2015.
I watch the third and final episode of How to be a Bohemian with Victoria Coren Mitchell. There’s a brief glimpse of one of Maggi Hambling’s paintings of Sebastian Horsley, which Ms Coren Mitchell narrates as ‘portraits of other bohemians…’
For me, this is particularly interesting. Mr H once told me how Ms M had cancelled an interview she’d intended to have with him, due to his using one of his typically provocative comments. As she said herself in her column (2 September 2007):
I rang him to suggest meeting in Belsize Park, a leafy area of north London.
‘I can’t bear Belsize Park,’ yawned Horsley. ‘It’s full of Jews.’
I have a vivid memory of actually telling Mr H off about this, as I couldn’t agree with this particular manner of épater la bourgeoisie. ‘Why do you say things you don’t really mean?’  I said. ‘Oh well…’ was his reply.
On another occasion, when Mr Horsley was reading from his autobiography and got to some general statement about sex and women, a lady in the audience shouted out ‘You chauvinist swine!’ (or words to that effect), and stormed out. Sebastian smiled sweetly after her. ‘I’ll say the reverse if it makes you come back!’
So I now wonder if Ms Coren Mitchell has forgiven Mr Horsley, by including him in her film, albeit very briefly. Or if she accepted him as a modern bohemian, in spite of her reservations, as she did for the Bloomsbury Group. Either way, it was good to see him included.
One fictional bohemian that I’m surprised wasn’t mentioned at all is Sherlock Holmes. The story that made him famous was the first of the Doyle tales which appeared in The Strand, ‘A Scandal In Bohemia’. Much of the story plays on the pun of his client being the blackmailed King of Bohemia, while Holmes is scandalised as a bohemian in terms of his bachelor lifestyle. He falls for a woman who defeats him: Irene Adler. Even the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock makes much of the main character’s bohemianism. The word might not be mentioned, but his bachelor status and sense of being an odd child-like man, among conventional adults, is certainly focused upon in the series.
* * *
And that particular bohemian lives on even more. To the Phoenix cinema for Mr Holmes. Ian McKellen plays an elderly take on the Victorian detective,  set in 1947. The conceit is that in this world, Doyle’s stories exist, but they are written by Watson as pieces of popular journalism. The story switches between a 60-year-old Holmes in Baker Street, with the circumstances surrounding his last case, and a 90-something Holmes in his Sussex cottage, teaching beekeeping to a small boy, while battling against memory loss. McKellen’s performance is worth seeing alone, but there’s also lots of standard Holmes deduction scenes, tied in with poignant hints of a denied emotional life. The price of bachelorhood.
* * *
I’ve had a week of feeling very ghost-like and detached from the world. Not quite knowing which path to take next. In fact, walking around in a white suit rather makes me resemble a ghost too.
However, today I have a nice surprise. At Foyles, the staffer on the till suddenly gives me £6 off the book I’m buying, by using his staff discount.
To Suffolk to spend three nights over Easter, guest of Mum. I have to do some college work while I’m there: revising the second draft of the dissertation, plus reading an Ian McEwan book of short stories (the creepy First Love, Last Rites). Spring flowers in the house and garden – anemones from me. Wild daffodils by the roadside, seen when driving from Stowmarket station. Egg-themed decorations on the dinner table. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed the Easter aesthetic so much. I have to remember to get an Easter brooch for next year. A tasteful rhinestone bunny, perhaps.
I seem to appreciate nature much more as I get older: flowers, blossom, birdsong. A replacement for youthful interests waning, perhaps, like my near-complete indifference to contemporary rock music. That said, I’ve been enjoying the new Monochrome Set album, Spaces Everywhere. Some superb new songs by Bid. Two dreamy ones remind me of Scarlet’s Well: Fantasy Creatures and Rain Check. I also love the catchy riff-based opening number, Iceman, which rather topically has references to voting.
* * *
Sunday 5th April 2015.
To a house near Stansted – dinner with the Kellermans (kind family friends whom I’m just getting to know). Many cats: on the drive there are signs warning delivery vans to watch out for curious felines sneaking into their vehicles. Accidental cat abductions have been known to happen. Tom joins us for dinner. He currently has an enormously bushy beard, though he shaves it off a few days later.
I watch Carry On Forever, a three part ITV documentary on the Carry On films. Very nostalgic, with lots of moments where the actors are filmed today, returning to the locations. Pretty girls from the 60s, now elderly of course. Tempting to judge which ones have aged better than others. Very touching moment when Bernard Cribbins and Juliet Mills reunite for the first time since Carry On Jack in 1963. Making what they thought was a disposable, lowbrow film at the time, but memories are still memories.
Funny how the films were getting a bit old hat even in the late 60s. I re-watch Carry On Camping – the UK’s most popular film in 1969! I’d misremembered the finale, where the regular characters sabotage a noisy, Woodstock-style hippy rock festival in the adjoining field. Sid James dresses in a hippy costume, and ludicrously threads the revellers’ beaded necklaces together, attaching them to a tractor so that they all get dragged off in a big lasso. Pure Beano stuff. The sentiment appalled me last time I saw the film: it seemed to be forcing the viewer into siding against youth culture. But on watching it now I realise the hippies have the last laugh after all. Barbara Windsor’s gang of finishing school girls go off with them, rather than continue to hang out with seedy old Sid James and Bernard Bresslaw. Makes rather more sense than the lasso strategy.
The broad performances and jokes still make me laugh – and I have to admit I like the social history side. Englishness on film. How we used to live, and laugh. The documentary points out how the BFI included Carry On Up The Khyber in their list of the 100 best British films. It was at no. 99, one place above The Killing Fields. I feel like re-watching the whole run now, with the exception of the late 1970s Carry Ons. No desire to revisit the underwhelming Carry On England though. Or the barely watchable Carry On Emmannuelle, with its ill-advised disco soundtrack.
* * *
Tuesday 7th April 2015.
Back to London, and straight to the London Library for more research on the essays. The dissertation is due in on April 20th, and I’m trying to get a shorter essay finished around the same time.
In the London Library’s comments book, one complaint begins ‘I have nothing against young people using the library…’ It’s one of those phrases that flag up the word ‘but’ from several miles away. In this case, the complaint is over the use of music on headphones. Carry On Up The Library.
* * *
Thursday 9th April 2015
 The general election campaign is underway. Today the news is that a UKIP candidate has been an adult film star (and I have to admit his lack of repentance is impressive, even refreshing). Meanwhile Ed Miliband has had his romantic past raked over, with the shocking revelation that he dated several different women in the years before his marriage. It doesn’t seem so far from the world of Carry On after all.
 * * *
Friday 10th April 2015.
To the Curzon Soho for While We’re Young, the new film written and directed by Noah Baumbach, of Frances Ha fame. Lots of advertising for this one, including huge screens at St Pancras station. A lot has been written about the film, but I suspect I’m the first to compare it to Carry On Camping. The main theme is, after all, an older generation’s fear of young people. Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts play a jaded forty-something couple whose lives are invigorated after they befriend two hipster twenty-somethings, played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. But suspicions of hidden agendas soon arise, and the alliance sours. The film sags in the last half-hour, when a plot about the ethics of documentary making takes over, but it’s more than made up for in the well-observed commentary on the anxieties of ageing, and on contemporary social habits, such as a moment where all four characters interrupt their conversation to Google something on their phones. At this point, the Adam Driver character insists that they put the phones down and just ‘enjoy not knowing something, for once’.
Another good moment is Stiller telling Driver off for helping himself to his video work: ‘It’s not ‘sharing’, it’s stealing!’ I think it’s also the first film where I’ve heard the beep of an Apple gadget being plugged into a charger, as part of the general background ambience. Two musicians turn in impressive minor roles: Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys is a tired aging dad, while Dean Wareham of Galaxie 500 is a New Age shaman – a convincing one, too.
* * *
I watch a BBC4 programme about bands that break up, and bands which manage to not break up. Coldplay’s longevity is attributed to a former manager kept on as the band’s ‘creative director’. I wonder if their drummer is known as an ‘implementer of percussion solutions’.
Sunday 8th February 2015. To the Barbican Centre cinema for Shaun the Sheep: The Movie. Though its official title appears to be Shaun The Sheep – Movie. I wonder if that elision of a second ‘the’ is something to do with the film’s lack of words on the soundtrack. There is no dialogue throughout, only animal grunts, sheep baas, and human mumbling. Not quite a silent movie, but not a talkie either. A third term is needed: perhaps a ‘gruntie’ (not to be confused with Mr Turner, which is a talkie with a lot of grunts). I also thought about The Plank, the Eric Sykes slapstick film of old, where people nearly speak to each other, but not quite.
A lot of interaction among the English is a series of awkward grunts anyway. The most common sound in public buildings and on Tube trains is not ‘excuse me’, or ‘morning!’ but ‘oop!’, whenever a collision of bodies is avoided. Not the plural-sounding ‘oops’, as The Beano would have it. No, adding that final ‘s’ is an effort too far. It is the singular: ‘oop’. The Universal Oop, the true sound of British society.
One reason I chose to see this film, given it is mostly aimed at small children, was that I’d spent the previous week studying American Psycho and The Atrocity Exhibition. After that, I badly needed to see a film in which nothing remotely unpleasant happens to anyone.
It’s fair to say that Shaun the Sheep is not the work of Bret Easton Ellis. Having said that, it does have little references to Breaking Bad and Silence of the Lambs, somewhat unexpectedly. Actually, the film has a better claim to the title Silence of the Lambs full stop: it literally has lambs being silent.
Another reason for going was that the Barbican was screening it at 8.30pm on a school night. Not only at that time – that would be silly – but the fact there was a grown-up-friendly time slot indicated that I wouldn’t be the only adult there. As it turned out, all the audience were adults. Pensioners, young couples, groups of friends, and no children in sight.
For some reason I imagine the couples in the audience being fans of Belle and Sebastian. I once watched that band in the 90s, all the time standing behind a young woman who was wearing a Shaun the Sheep backpack. Indeed, the new film makes a reference to those popular backpacks too – it’s a very clever and very, dare I say it, metatextual detail.
Like many Aardman films, the animation is cosy yet state-of-the-art, the story is fast and silly, and there’s a constant parade of reliably tried-and-tested jokes alongside some inspired and even outrageous ones. Just the idea of a cockerel distracted by its iPhone is enough to win me over. Pure fun.
* * *
Wednesday 11th February 2015. I read an article by Eva Wiseman on the use of ‘quirky’ as a pejorative and patronising term. I think one problem is that the word literally contains ‘irk’. The same thing has happened to ‘winsome’, because it contains ‘wince’.
* * *
I receive the Gatsby essay back. Grade: 78. Highest one of the final year so far, higher than any marks in my first two years, and my thirteenth First in a row. Very pleased, as my marks before then had taken something of a dip. Less than three months to go.
* * *
Thursday 12th February 2015. Meet with Mum in Primrose Hill, Â then we go to Leighton House in Kensington for A Victorian Obsession, an exhibition of rarely displayed nineteenth-century paintings. Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s huge and decadent Roses of Heliogabalus gets a sensory chamber all to itself, where a Jo Malone scent of roses is pumped into the air.
Afterwards: a short bus ride to the Natural History Museum, for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition. The gallery is darkened, with each photograph backlit on glass. So many startling images: some microscopic, some dangerous, some disturbing. Favourite photo: a flock of lime green parakeets flying over a London cemetery at dusk.
I use the newly expanded ticket hall at Tottenham Court Road tube station. Gone are the Paolozzi murals over the escalator arches. The new parts of the station are a mass of white tiled walls, high ceilings and wide corridors, unusually free of adverts (so far), and punctuated only with black Northern Line markings. New spaciousness also means new soullessness, but then it’s still unfinished: the Central Line sections are not open for another ten months. The Crossrail section, meanwhile, is still years away, and remains the reason why that corner of Soho is still at the mercy of a tangle of building sites. Something lost, something gained: the eternal London tale.
* * *
Friday 13th February 2015. With Heather Malone to the Jacksons Lane Community Centre, two blocks away from my room. The JLCC seems much the same as ever – an entirely unfranchised café, friendly staff, and a proper theatre space with raked seating. We are there to see Psychodermabrasion, a solo stage show by Matthew Floyd Jones. I’ve seen him before in the cabaret duo Frisky & Mannish, but this is rather different: an unusual musical-cum-monologue made up of film projections, multi-layered backing tracks, and live performance, on the theme of how anxiety over skin conditions can affect relationships. This show has some input from Dickie Beau, and it shares DB’s style of a live performer as a kind of reactive pawn amid carefully-sequenced recordings.  Matthew FJ spends much of the show zipped up in two layers of skin suits, hiding his face. This works powerfully enough, but once the inevitable unveiling happens, the show doesn’t quite move onto another level, and it feels like it should. Still, there’s lots of originality: Dear John letters sung in a barber shop quartet style, skin suits revealed on a rack, smartphone messages presented as the voice of a nagging, amorphous God. Somewhat ironically, for a show that comments on the ubiquity of smartphones, someone in the row ahead of me is checking their email while they show is going on, as if the real life performance in front of them was just another website to flick through.
It’s good to see Heather M in person, whom I’ve not seen for years. She was in danger of becoming one of those friends whose life I only knew at one digital remove. Too easily, people one knows can become passing clouds on social media, suggesting a paraphrasing of Gatsby:
So we tap on, swipes against the current, scrolling back ceaselessly into the past…
When I meet up with friends now, it seems all the more important to hug them, or shake their hand. Not just out of affection, but as a shoring against the digital.
