Photo: Royal Victoria Hotel, St Leonards-on-Sea, 28 December 2024.
Earlier this year, shortly after I had moved to St Leonards-on-Sea, I received a letter from a 21-year-old stranger – a handwritten letter, in fact. They explained (and they are indeed a they/them) that as part of their love of analogue media they had recently acquired a cassette player.
This stranger had been listening to their mother’s old tape collection. One tape particularly intrigued them: a handmade music compilation – now known as a mixtape – made by a school friend of the mother’s around 1991. This was before the stranger was born, and indeed when both the tape-maker and the mother were younger than the stranger was now.
The tracks were mostly indie guitar pop from the time: the Field Mice, the Pastels, the Pooh Sticks, the Blue Aeroplanes, McCarthy, the BMX Bandits. But the stranger’s fascination was not so much the choice of music as the wider meaning of the tape as an object. A meaning that had accumulated over time.
I have been listening to the tape on repeat for the past week, imagining you, all those years ago. Holding it in your hands, picking out the songs, listening to them, thinking of my mum as you did so.
This led to the stranger looking me up on the internet, which in turn led to them, poor thing, reading my online diaries, my Svelte Lectures series on Substack, and even my thesis.
Until recently you have only existed to me as a character in the story of my mum’s childhood.
Now I had become something else. Certainly not, I hope, a real life, three-dimensional human being. I would never live that down. I can’t really see myself as a role model, either, except perhaps as a cautionary tale. I think instead that I must have moved, in their eyes, from being a dusty young character of the anecdotal past, small ‘c’, to a living but middle-aged Character of the digital present, capital ‘C’.
I love the way you write. I hope you are going to write more.
The stranger wrote to me, and I wrote back. And now, with their mother’s blessing, I’m giving them advice on their university studies, pleased to put my PhD to some use.
In fact, now that my job with the Christopher Isherwood Foundation has ended, I’m looking once again for a source of income. Mentoring students like this might be in fact be one way forward. Another is to get back into serious writing. I have various plans for books, including one based on my diaries, one based on my thesis, and a novel. But books tend to not make much money compared to teaching, or indeed compared to Substack. So watch this space.
I used to make mixtapes all the time in the late 80s and early 90s. It’s been years since I made one. But it might be argued that this time of year, late December, is a kind of mixtape season. People offer their taste to the world in the shape of lists: their Favourite Things of the Year.
Mixtapes, lists, writing, it’s all creativity and expression. All statements of love, life, living in time. No matter how ephemeral and niche these acts might seem, one cannot rule out the possibility of their having a useful and lasting effect upon others. Even upon others not yet born.
Best to just do it, and send it out there.
*
A Mixtape for 2024:
SONGS:
Chappell Roan, ‘Good Luck, Babe!’,
Jessica Pratt, ‘Life Is’
Gigi Perez, ‘The Sailor Song’
Tess Parks, ‘California’s Dreaming’
Pet Shop Boys, ‘Loneliness’
Bruno Mars and Rosé, ‘APT.’
Claire Rousay, ‘Head’
Laurie Anderson, ‘Road to Mandalay’
Emma Anderson, ‘Taste The Air (Julia Holter Mix)’
Charley Stone, ‘Free Food’
Janis, Perez & YANIS, ‘Pharmacoliberation’
Noel, ‘Dancing is Dangerous’
Abstract Crimewave ‘The Longest Night’
Fuse ODG, ‘We Know It’s Christmas’
BOOKS (fiction):
Alan Hollinghurst, Our Evenings
Nat Reeve, Earlyfate
H. Gareth Gavin, Never Was
Khaled Alesmael, Selamlik
Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn
Iain Sinclair, Pariah Genius
Justin Torres, Blackouts
Adam Macqueen Haunted Tales
Henry Van Dyke, Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (reissue)
BOOKS (non-fiction / memoir)
Katherine Bucknell, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out
Claire Dederer, Monsters
Xiaolu Guo, My Battle of Hastings
Liam Konemann, The Appendix
Salman Rushdie, Knife
Hanif Kureishi, Shattered
Claude Cahun, Cancelled Confessions
BOOKS (poetry):
Peter Scalpello, Limbic
JP Seabright, George Parker, Jaime Lock, Not Your Orlando
Camille Ralphs, After You Were, I Am
Jen Calleja, Goblinhood (poems and essays)
FILMS / TV:
Orlando, My Political Biography
Wilding
Scala!
Poor Things
Feud: Capote Vs the Swans
** 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!
Some Christmas traditions can be personal, like a ritualistic re-watching of The Box of Delights or an unfathomable return appointment with Mr Schwarzenegger’s Jingle All the Way. For my part, I used to have my photo taken with a different Christmas tree every year for the web diary, until I lost interest.
This year finds me posing by a tree once more. I’m in the market square of Bildeston, Suffolk, where I’m currently living. In fact, I was less interested in the tree than in another tradition visible in the square: a crocheted cap on the post box, featuring an elaborate Christmas cottage. This is an example of ‘yarnbombing’, the anonymous art of local knitters, typically to brighten up post boxes for a short time. This year they have covered the square’s traffic bollards as well, with woollen caps in the shape of Christmas puddings. I love this kind of thing, as it means I can talk about Christmas camp.
One of my books of the year was Paul Baker’s Camp: The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World (2023), and not just because it cites my PhD thesis. As calendar festivals go, Christmas, Baker argues, is more camp than, say, Halloween. While Halloween is rich in parodic frivolity, Christmas has the extra symptoms of incongruous excess, failed sincerity, and sheer bad taste.
Christmas camp can sometimes be put to serious use, though. According to Baker’s book, when the Stonewall riot took place in New York in 1968, those involved taunted the police by forming a line of high-kicking, synchronised dancing in the style of the all-girl dance troupe the Rockettes. The Rockettes are one of New York’s own Christmas traditions, having put on the same festive show at Radio City Music Hall since the 1930s. Transplanted to the Stonewall riot, this camp style of dancing, with its anachronistic, overtly feminized ‘kick line’, became a defensive weapon that particularly suited gay identity.
Camp can do good as an aesthetic too. By playing with notions of exaggeration, it offers a sense of spontaneous distance from the normal world. It’s that psychological space that can offer somewhere to escape, or to belong. Camp is not for everyone, but it remains a tool in the universal human toolbox of how to cope.
When yarnbombing happens in an English village, there is also the suggestion of English cosiness being camped up. Popular films like The Holiday indulge in visions of Tudor-framed English cottages in the snow, while the book charts and TV schedules are full of ‘cosy crime’ mysteries set in English villages, from Agatha Christie to the bestsellers of Richard Osman.
This is obviously unabashed escapism. One of the more poetic writers of the English countryside, Ronald Blythe, who died this year, was careful to depict Suffolk as a place of struggle and poverty as much as beauty. This endures; in Duke Street, a few yards from Bildeston Market Square, is a tub for donations to the local food bank.
But I’m fine with cosiness as an art form. Truman Capote’s story A Christmas Memory is cosy enough to have been adapted as a TV movie by the Hallmark Channel, though the 1966 version with his own narration is the one to seek out. It’s about unconventional yet vulnerable people living in rural isolation. Capote manages to keep any excess of emotion – the same sense of spontaneous excess that sentimentality shares with camp – this side of poignant.
Whether cosy, camp, or otherwise, the lesson of yarnbombing is to channel time and energy into not just making new art – or content as it’s now called – but putting it out into the world. One never knows if others might take delight or comfort from your efforts, so do it anyway. This year has seen new music from the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, so age and even death is no excuse.
With this in mind, I wish you safety, health and happiness in 2024. Onwards!
** 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!
This year’s Christmas tree is from the foyer of the Museum of London, on the Barbican estate. The MoL is one of my favourite places in the city, ever since I first went there in the early 80s on a school trip from Suffolk. We combined the museum with a look at the brand new Barbican Centre next door. My classmates, who would have been about twelve, soon discovered that if you rubbed your shoes a few times on the Barbican’s fuzzy carpeted staircases, and then used your finger to touch a metal bannister, or better still the face of a fellow child, you could produce a large and slightly painful spark of static. This design fault, much like the Wobbly Bridge opposite the Tate Modern, has since been fixed by those in charge, but I suspect it lives on in the memories of bored children.
Moving into the year 2020 invites reflections on the decade just gone. I spent most of it returning to education at Birkbeck, University of London. The original plan was to just get a degree, mainly out of sheer curiosity, as I’d never taken one at the traditional age. When I found out I was good at the subject, being English literature, and indeed was good enough to be awarded grants to pay the fees, I stayed on to do an MA, and then a PhD. I ended 2019 as the recipient of a full maintenance grant, something that I thought only happened to other people – the success rate is one in five.
The stipend is set at the Living Wage, which may not be many people’s idea of material success in one’s 40s: I still have to live in a rented room in a shared house. But to be paid a full-time income for something I enjoy is something that I’ve not had since the mid-90s, when I had a major label record deal. I am grateful. In 2020, I hope to pay this good fortune forward: to produce work of use to others, to pass on advice and give talks, and, above all, to show that if a weirdo like me can find a role in the current world, anything really is possible. Here’s to Weirdo Visibility.
And
yes, I am in the process of updating my
diary.
** 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!
Every Christmas I take a photograph of myself in front of a different Christmas tree. This one is the foyer of the Rio cinema, Dalston, 31st December 2017, at about 12.30pm. Thanks to the Rio staff.Â
This time last year I wrote about the notion of control. This was partly in relation to the way 2016 had been framed as a year of constant celebrity deaths, with the sense of a cultural landscape winking out into darkness, star by star, faster than the speed of grief. There was also that year’s voting results: it’s hard to think of President Trump and Brexit and not feel that one’s own sense of control was under threat. In London, the editorship of the main local newspaper, the EveningStandard, was given to George Osborne, a politician with little of the necessary experience for running a newspaper, but lots of the right friends.Â
Among the deceased of 2016 was the writer Anita Brookner. She once said that she wrote ‘to control rather than be controlled’. Writing (and I include blogging) is therefore one way to feel less overwhelmed by events, if nothing else. So that was the spirit in which I began 2017. Trying to believe that life is more than just being at the mercy of events.
It was just as well. AÂ few weeks into January, my younger brother Tom died, very suddenly and very unexpectedly. AÂ few months on, I was evicted from my home of 23 years.
But although I felt very much at the mercy of events, I was reminded that I was not alone. Tom’s death was made easier by the generous donations to his memorial fund, for which I remain utterly grateful. After getting the eviction news, I found a new rented room quite quickly: a bohemian friend turned landlady got in touch. Further kind friends helped me move in. I have to remember it could have been worse. I didn’t have to get into debt sorting out the many bills relating to Tom’s death, or go through a period of sleeping on floors while looking for a new home. Homelessness is a constant fear of mine: I know I’m the sort of person, mentally speaking, that homelessness happens to. I’ve always hoped that an unusual mind, ideally, might lend itself to producing Exclusive Content, and that I might make a living from such content. But the flipside is that eccentricity risks becoming a quick route to the sleeping bag on the pavement. So although I felt at the mercy of events in some ways, I felt blessed in others.
I’ve since heard that the Highgate house has been turned back into a single 6-bedroom property, on sale for £2.4 million. Meanwhile I now rent a furnished room in Dalston. Dalston might as well be New York, given the contrast with leafy, safe, monolithic N6 (monolithic in the sense of being not very diverse, as well as having actual stone monoliths in its famous cemetery). One might say Dalston is out of control too, in the sense of being hard to pin down. The district is currently thought hip and trendy for some, yet too gentrified for others, given the rise of its first luxury flats. In local news it would seem not gentrified enough: the summer saw a riot in Kingsland High Street, albeit a very short and contained one. For me Dalston has an uncertain, out of phase, off-the-map feeling, with no single kind of person in charge (yet). And I like that. I think of Burroughs’s idealised Tangier: a busy interzone of all human life, where madness is just a matter of taste. My fears as to looking too unusual were allayed when I saw an effeminate young man walking out of Dalston Junction station wearing glitter make-up, high heels, a floaty dress, and not much else. On a December night too. I think he was just on his way to buy a pint of milk.
So I feel I’ve moved from one London, to a site of Londons, plural. Having the Rio cinema on my doorstep was reason alone to move in: all those other worlds. And the cinema has just installed a second screen. My New Year’s Resolution is to see as many new releases there as possible.
The bulk of my 2017 was spent finishing my postgraduate MA at Birkbeck, namely a course in Contemporary Literature and Culture. That I finished it at all was a quiet miracle. There was a point where I was considering putting off the summer dissertation until the following year, such was my difficulty with things. Several of my fellow students on the BA had done this, dropping out for reasons of ill health, whether mental or physical, but coming back to finish their studies later.
My epiphany of the year was suddenly finding the hidden energy and drive to finish the 16,000 word dissertation on time, even though I’d applied for a 2 week ‘mitigating circumstances’ extension (the mitigation being the usual mix of dyspraxic slowness and depression). I put this partly down to seeing a weekly mental health mentor, as provided by Birkbeck’s disability office, but also down to my joining a ‘study buddies’ group of fellow students. We would meet up and compare accounts of our progress, and generally egg each other on. It turned out that despite all my claims to being an outsider, a light application of community can even sort me out. Not only did I finish on time, I managed to achieve an overall distinction and get the MA course’s ‘student of the year’ prize. By which point I had started a PhD. I may (still) lack money, but I ended a year of loss gaining something after all. All down to the help of others.
I’m wary of making any hopes for the year – though I am trying for a full-time paid PhD scholarship in February. That would obviously be a nice thing to win. Otherwise, I just hope for the unplanned events of life to not be quite so seismic. But if they are, I have proof I can take them on.
