Sunday 12th July 2015.

Reading Francesca Martinez’s memoir, What the F*** Is Normal? She writes wittily about the difficulties of not only living with cerebral palsy, but living with the way others react around her. Comedy programmes have decided against adding her to their panels, apparently because her slow, slurring way of speaking makes people ‘nervous’. To understand a voice like hers is just a question of adjusting registers, like understanding an unfamiliar accent. Her book’s main message is that if disabled people are sufficiently included in every aspect of society, ‘normal’ will be redefined as something that applies either to everyone, or to no one.

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Monday 13th July 2015.

I’m doing the Birkbeck ‘Step Up To An Arts MA’ summer course, which mainly involves downloading texts from the college website and working at home. One section about learning how to structure critical arguments includes watching a video of a Monty Python sketch – the one about paying to have an argument. Amongst all the silliness is a perfectly serious definition of an argument, as said by Michael Palin’s character: ‘an argument is a connected series of statements to establish a definite proposition’. Interesting to think that even though John Cleese went on to make proper light-hearted training films, there was an educational element to the comedy he’d already made. ‘Undergraduate humour’ is a pejorative term often thrown at the Python or Footlights style of comedy. Indeed it was once flung at Palin and Cleese in person, during the notorious TV discussion of Life of Brian. But here’s an example of Python used as postgraduate humour, whatever that may be. Comedy that’s still clever, but more elegantly thoughtful, perhaps.

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Errand for the day: picking up a box of pills in my neighbour Phil’s flat, and delivering it to a sound man’s letter box in Hornsey. He can then pass it on to Phil on tour in Europe. No need to involve the postal service. On the way I walk through Ducketts Common, near Turnpike Lane station, where grey-faced men in grey hooded tracksuits sit glumly on benches and swig from cans. Wood Green is not an unsafe part of London, but it is not a particularly happy one either. As the film Dreams of a Life shows, it’s a district where people can just die in their homes, with no one to check up on them. So this errand reminds me how glad I am that I know at least some of my neighbours, and that I can help them out.

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Tuesday 14th July 2015.

I spend some time reading in The Smithfield Café, a tiny but cheeringly old fashioned working man’s café in Long Lane, opposite the market. Tea at 60p.

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Wednesday 15th July 2015.

Ticking off another little emporium I’d always been meaning to investigate: the Huntley bar, on the corner of Gower Place and Gower Street. It’s part of the UCL student union facilities, though they seem okay with me using it (and I think my University of London membership covers it anyway). One has to walk through the modern canteen on Gower Street to get inside. Nice traditional pub décor, pumps on the counter, booths and more seats upstairs. All converted from one of the creaky Victorian houses in the area, the kind I imagine that the poet Amy Levy once lived in. Glass of wine £2.50, packet of peanuts 30p. London is not always overpriced.

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Thursday 16th July 2015.

 I decide to splash out on a new Pay As You Go mobile phone. My current one is about ten years old and starting to fall apart. It’s so old, I can’t find it listed on the phone recycling lists. Today, the O2 shop on Tottenham Court Road sells me a cute little Nokia for £9.99, though not without their valiant attempts to tempt me with something fancier. When I insist on the Nokia, they ask me, ‘Is it for a music festival?’

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Friday 17th July 2015.

To a brand new local cinema: the Everyman Muswell Hill. It’s essentially the same building as the Odeon – a listed one, I think – now bought up and given a repaint. The Everyman chain’s pricy nibbles and wine-bar décor have replaced the Odeon’s unpretentious but unlovely blue livery, along with its suspect hot dogs and sullen plastic beakers of Coke.

What’s ironic is that a chain calling itself Everyman has associations with middle class exclusivity. Some local pundit has called the Everyman’s arrival ‘the final stage in gentrification’ for Muswell Hill, though financially there’s little difference for the customer. In terms of tickets and food prices the Odeon chain really isn’t that much cheaper than the Everymans. I have to admit I prefer Everyman to the current Odeon style aesthetically. And if pressed, I do favour the arthouse. I was always more carrot cake than popcorn. In the end, though, I just go wherever there’s films.

This evening I watch the restored (1998) version of Orson Welles’s 1950s crime thriller A Touch of Evil. It’s been given a cinema re-release in the wake of the new documentary on Welles, Magician.

A Touch of Evil is one of those much-referred to classic films that I always feel I’ve seen in the past, but somehow haven’t. The film’s opening is the part that people tend to go on about: a single night-time crane shot that follows a time bomb placed in the boot of a car. As the car drives off, the camera lifts and swoops around the whole neighbourhood to follow it, as the ticking gets louder.

The story itself is pure pulp noir: all the characters are stereotypes and grotesques one way or another. Welles’s obese cop has the kind of startling pudgy make-up that doesn’t look like make-up at all.  Charlton Heston’s dark skin for his Mexican character might have made some modern audiences feel unconvinced if not uneasy, but it works fine for the film’s style. Even Janet Leigh is a grotesque of sorts: the whiter-than-white damsel in distress. Meanwhile, the actor playing the demented motel manager is so outrageously over the top, he threatens to break the film.

With its expressionistic close-ups and moody use of Mexican border locations (which makes me think of No Country For Old Men), the film is an extraordinary world spun around a standard crime plot. Just when I think it can’t get any better, Marlene Dietrich appears. Her gypsy madam role is minor, but she gets the last line. And what a line: ‘He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?’

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A life event. Today I am officially notified by Birkbeck about my degree, via their website. As of now, I have graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in English, with First Class honours.

I also received the BA English course’s John Hay Lobben Prize, which is awarded to a student who is ‘judged to have shown the greatest promise in English Literature’. This is formally announced at the graduation ceremony in November, but I’m allowed to tell the world now.

I’ve never had a degree before. I think this is my greatest feeling of achievement since hearing Fosca played on John Peel.

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Tags: a touch of evil, birkbeck, everyman muswell hill, francesca martinez, muswell hill, odeon muswell hill