Saturday 15th November 2014. I listen to an archive radio talk by Arthur Machen, about the superiority of artists who invent over those who replicate. He cites GK Chesterton on the difference between Dickens and Trollope. With Dickens, says Chesterton, the reader knows they’ll never meet his characters in real life. With Trollope, the reader never stops meeting his characters in real life. Machen concludes that Dickens was a better writer, because he added rather than reflected. He adds an anecdote about Turner:

A friendly critic once said to Turner, ‘Your pictures are undoubtedly splendid works, but I never saw such landscapes in nature as you paint.’

‘No,’ said Turner. ‘But don’t you wish you had?’

* * *

Evening: to Elton U’s house party in Ladbroke Grove. Mostly fellow Birkbeck BA English students. No particular occasion other than getting together socially. Other guests: Jasmine B, Jon S. Elton’s place is covered in books – almost every shelf of every room. I pick one up. He not only covers the margins in handwritten notes, but the inside cover pages too. Jon turns out to have had some training as a chef. He brings his own Christmas cake, and we all wolf it down.

* * *

Sunday 16th November 2014. Working on an essay on Waugh. Can’t resist bringing in a discussion on camp. I have good reason to though: Philip Core’s A-Z of camp (The Lie That Tells The Truth) gives Evelyn Waugh his own entry, plus there’s two separate entries for Brideshead Revisited. One for the novel, one for the 1981 TV series. They are filed between ‘Bowie’ and ‘Bronzino’.

* * *.

Monday 17th November 2014. I get the new Quentin Blake advent calendar from Foyles Charing Cross. Many advent calendars are reissued every year, because the dates are non-specific (eg the National Gallery’s advent calendars). But the eighty-something QB manages to put out a brand new design. This year it’s a towering, glittery snowman in the process of decoration.

* * *

A new bad habit, related to my love of eating Christmas food early: Starbucks’s eggnog flavoured lattes. I can confirm that they are overpriced sugary filth from the devil’s own armpit, and that I’ve bought about five of them in the last week. I record this purely as an act of contrition.

As it is, I’m irritated by Starbucks’s insistence on asking for a customer’s name to put on the cup, even when it’s obvious whose drink is whose. I’ve begun to work my way through an alphabet of pseudonyms each time I go to a branch: Adam, Bob, Carl, Dave, Eustace. I do this partly because people often pull a confused expression when I say ‘Dickon’, but mainly because I resent the demand full stop. The whole point of going to a franchise café is the comfort of anonymity. Still, as Ben Elton used to say, don’t blame the staff, blame the management.

* * *

Tuesday 18th November 2014. Class tonight: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Tutor: Joe Brooker. The Southern Gothic landscape drips off the page. ‘My mother is a fish’ indeed. Difficult to read without thinking one is in muddy dungarees.

* * *

Wednesday 19th November 2014. Class: Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing, set in what was then Southern Rhodesia. Tutor: Grace Halden. Fascinating how Lessing’s publisher insisted on a rape scene to be included. And that she refused, even though it was her first book.

* * *

Thursday 20th November 2014. To the Arcola Theatre in Dalston for First Love, a stage adaptation of the Samuel Beckett story. The venue is an old converted paint factory, with its history very much on display: lots of wires drooping aesthetically across exposed brickwork. I go as the guest of Hester R, fellow student on the ‘Literature 1945-1979’ course. First Love is one of our set texts.

It turns out that the production is the whole story performed as a one-man, 80 minute monologue – quite a feat of memory. That said, Hester later tells me she went to see Gatz, the full recital of The Great Gatsby on stage (about 6 hours with breaks), and that involved one actor learning the whole Fitzgerald novel. I have enough trouble remembering my door keys.

The First Love actor is bald, wiry, performs with a thick Irish accent, and wears a modern hooded top under a business suit, though the story is from the 1940s. The only set dressing is a couple of wooden benches, though these are both propped up on their sides, giving the impression they’re about to fall over at any time (again, all very Beckett). The story does involve the use of benches, and at one point the actor nearly takes one to sit on – then puts it back.

He delivers the whole piece in a state of twitchy paranoia and nervousness, often pausing as if the words are occurring to him naturally. This interpretation suits the text, but I can’t help thinking it must also come in handy for any moments where he forgets the words. No one would know.

The enduring appeal of Beckett owes something to the way he captures the universal sense of not quite coping with being in the world. Of everything and nothing. Of anywhere and nowhere. In a way, Beckett is a kind of comfort food. The great thing about nowhere is that you always know where you are.

* * *

I stay up too late to watch the result of the Rochester by-election. Why do I bother with live election TV? ‘Anything to report?’ ‘No.’  Even more depressing is that the media found something trivial to inflate into front-page significance: the Labour MP Emily Thornberry tweeting a photo of a house covered in England flags, with a white van in the drive. Her caption was simply ‘image from Rochester’. She was soon accused of anti-regional snobbery (being a London MP), and was forced to resign her place in the Shadow Cabinet. Disgrace is so very fast these days: a mere five hours from tweet to resignation. It’s one of those Thick Of It plotlines that seem unlikely to happen in real life. Until they do.

UKIP won their second seat in Rochester. Despite all the national media coverage, 50% of the electorate didn’t bother voting. The owner of the white van was one of them.

* * *

Friday 21st November 2014. To the Museum of London with Minerva M., for the Sherlock Holmes: The Man Who Never Lived exhibition. We go in the evening, for one of those late openings which include a bar and special mini-events around the galleries. Many of the big London museums do these things now – it’s all about giving people an undownloadable experience. We watch a ‘Reichenbach Fall’ sideshow in which people learn how to fall a couple of feet onto a crash mat mindfully. They first have a conversation with some sort of ‘fall instructor’, then they get up on a stage, sign their name on a whiteboard under the words ‘I Want To Fall’, then topple backwards over onto the mat, to the crowd’s applause. Some of the participants imitate Benedict Cumberbatch’s crucifixion dive from Sherlock. We also watch a suitably well-dressed demonstration of Bartitsu, Holmes’s self-defence method, and a series of very funny improvisation games, by the comedy troupe Shoot From The Hip.

The exhibition itself turns out to feature plenty of serious contextual items: rare maps, photos and paintings of 1890s London, including several Whistlers and a superb Monet. Plus an early 1800s rendering of the Reichenbach Falls by JMW Turner (he really does get everywhere). Then there’s lots of film and stage posters from the umpteen SH adaptations, and Benedict C’s actual Milford coat from Sherlock, with the red buttonhole. Conan Doyle’s original stories are given the most attention – there’s a huge lit-up mural of the Dancing Men stick figures on the outside of the museum. One wall-sized quotation is from A Study In Scarlet, where Watson makes a list of ‘Sherlock Holmes: His Limits’. They include ‘Knowledge of Literature – Nil. Philosophy – Nil. Politics – Feeble’.

I think one of the reasons for the success of the character is that from the start Doyle presented him as a brilliant man with flaws. But the flaws have to be of the right kind.

I thought of the British scientist Matt Taylor, from the news this week. He was one of the Rosetta space team who’d managed to land a robot probe on a moving comet. However, he also went on TV wearing a shirt made up of illustrations of scantily-clad women. The sort of thing that even an amateur heavy metal band might view as a bit ‘unsubtle’. In a time when science still has an image problem as a male-dominated arena, this didn’t go down at all well. Dr Taylor was forced to apologise.

I suppose the moral is: even a brilliant man’s limits must have their limits.

Saturday 25th October 2014. I come home to find a hole in my wall. The house I live in is having its brickwork repointed, and the force of the builders’ chisels has pushed a whole brick right through onto my floor. A pile of broken plaster and brick lies behind my fridge. I clear it up and inform the landlady. Thankfully there’s a fresh new brick to replace the one that crumbled through, so I’m not exposed to the elements. I sigh heavily: the repairing of the damage is something new to organise my nervous little life around.

Still, in a city one is always at the mercy of builders, one way or another. Particularly around the Crossrail works in Soho. In the land of the upgrade, the fluorescent tabarded man is king.

* * *

Sunday 26th October 2014. Reading Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Radical American Gothic, with black comedy thrown in. Its short chapters and shifting voices would still be pretty experimental now. ‘My mother is a fish’ indeed.

* * *

Tuesday 28th October 2014. The class at Birkbeck tonight is on The Great Gatsby. The optician’s spectacle-shaped billboard in the Valley of Ashes reminds me how I can feel disturbed by abandoned adverts. There’s a few window-sized ones for HMV in an alley near the Piccadilly Trocadero. Arrows direct people to that particular branch, or rather to the space where it used to be. The HMV shop itself has been closed for some time now, yet these adverts remain. Like the floating spectacles in Gatsby, I imagine them outlasting everything around them in an apocalyptic wasteland. A future society then forms around these sacred images, their arrows of promise and hope taking on new meaning. The Followers Of The Small Dog And Gramophone.

Abandoned adverts do seem worse than stopped clocks. It’s the horror of unexpected stasis where one takes change for granted.

I’m similarly spooked out in Piccadilly Station nearby, where there’s a bank of empty alcoves labelled ‘Public Telephones’. More signs pointing to nothing. And yet, opposite the alcoves is an element of stasis that I do like: ‘The World Time Today’ clock. Installed in the 1920s, it’s still there and still working, with its strip of timezones moving endlessly across a now anachronistic map of the world. ‘Queen Maud Land’ in Antarctica is highlighted as a major territory. So now this clock has outlasted the station’s public telephones. It’s like it’s won a very long staring contest.

* * *

Wednesday 29th October 2014. Birkbeck class at Gordon Square: Beckett’s Four Novellas. I’m initially taken aback by the language, given the text dates from the 1940s – particularly the point where the readers are called c***s (‘Oh Mr Beckett! You do know how to woo an audience!’). But then I realise Beckett first published them in French, and only in Paris too. English editions didn’t emerge until the late 1960s. From Wilde’s exile right up to Lady Chatterley, not counting wartime, Paris was the place to be really free.

* * *

Thursday 30th October 2014. I’m in the British Library, bumping into Birkbeck tutors, researching for an essay on Hemingway. Today I come across a volume of the Fitzgerald / Hemingway annual that reproduces Scott and Zelda’s marriage certificate. I read about how Gertrude Stein returned a draft of Hemingway’s story ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ with the comment ‘remarks are not literature’. He’d originally ended the tale with a self-reflexive discussion on writing per se, in a style that might today be called metafictional. But Stein’s feedback led to him cutting the section out. Instead it became one of Hemingway’s first great examples of his signature style: an apparently simple tale of activity, yet laced with symbolism and deeper implications. But really, Ms Stein: ‘remarks are not literature’ indeed. So much for Borges.

Brigid Brophy is not at all keen on Hemingway. In her essay collection Baroque-‘n- Roll is a scathing parody: ‘He pretended that tormenting and killing animals who are no threat to you was a brave and somehow a mystic thing to do.’ In case it isn’t clear whether this applies to his fishing stories, the book also has a 1980s piece where she champions the C.A.A. – the Campaign for the Abolition of Angling.

* * *

Friday 31st October 2014. To the East Finchley Phoenix for the new Mike Leigh film, Mr Turner. Timothy Spall’s Turner is mesmerising: bestial, even porcine. He growls and grunts and (in one particularly emotional scene) howls his way across the screen, through landscape after landlady. I think of Charles Laughton’s Rembrandt. Spall is up there with him, filling out the film as much as he does the man. I’m an enormous admirer of Mr Leigh’s last nineteenth-century film, the Gilbert & Sullivan biopic, Topsy-Turvy. Mr Turner is much sparser, quieter and more tragic, but it’s the same loose and naturalistic approach to period drama. This is still very rare – a more conventional film like the recent Effie Gray suffers by comparison, particularly as it depicts some of the same people (Ruskin, Ruskin’s parents, and Effie herself all pop up in Mr Turner). In the Leigh film the dialogue is actually allowed to breathe. People pause, or say nothing at all, or sound hesitant when they do speak. Despite the attention to historical syntax, the words still sound like they’ve risen spontaneously from thought – ie, the way people speak normally. And in the case of Spall’s Turner, words are often served better by grunts.

Two and a half hours long, yet it never bores once. A completely immersive and fully realised world. Most evocative of all are the scenes at Margate harbour – the detail is so vivid that one can almost smell the piles of rotting fish. No need for 3D there.

It’s Halloween, and the Phoenix cinema café is selling toffee apples. People take them in to eat while watching Mr Turner. At the time I think this is a suitably Victorian England foodstuff for the screening. But afterwards I look them up to discover they were in fact invented in twentieth-century America. Originally called ‘candy apples’.

‘Candy’, to mean sweets, is one Americanism that is still resisted in the UK, but otherwise Halloween seems bigger than ever. In St Pancras today I see a woman sitting behind an information desk, dressed in a full witch costume. Her leaflets about railway engineering works are weighed down with a small plastic pumpkin.

Saturday 16th August 2014. My reading matter this week includes Samuel Beckett’s short stories from the 1940s, such as ‘The Expelled’ and ‘The End’. They’re all about lonely layabouts trudging the streets in existential woe. I come away wanting to look at pictures of kittens.

* * *

Currently struggling with two mundane but time-consuming problems: the procurement of new shoes and new glasses. I record these non-experiences in the hope of exorcising their hold on me.

I put off these sort of purchases as long as I can. Partly out of poverty, but also because I know purchases of need rarely satisfy me, compared to purchases of luxury (such as alcohol, cinema tickets or books).

In the cases of the glasses, the nice optician at Boots Muswell Hill tested my sight and told me it had changed slightly. She gave me a new prescription. Then it emerged that (a) they cannot put new lenses into my current frames, and (b) Boots no longer make my current frames.

I tried on the free NHS frames they had, but couldn’t find any I liked. Then I tried some of the priced ones I can just about afford (ie under £100) and settled for a pair I thought were okay. Black rimmed, Boots own brand, a bit big and cartoonish. I was aiming for Vintage Michael Caine, rather than Current Gok Wan. £95, from a half price offer.

But this mundanity expands, sucking up hours. It takes me two visits to decide on this new pair, then a third visit for collecting them after the lenses are in. And then a few days after that, I decide I don’t like the specs so much after all. They feel heavy and clunky and goggle-like. Is it the newness? A resentment of change? Or is it that I just wanted to get out of the opticians as fast as possible, knowing I had to choose something? On top of this, I’m now unconvinced my eyesight has changed – my old pair seem to correct my vison well enough.

I can barely speak for sighing. I stand on a train platform on St Pancras, holding both the old and the new pairs, switching between the two while testing my sight on the train information signs. I must look mad.

* * *

And then, later in the week, I have a similar frustration with new shoes. I try to go for years without buying a new pair. My current everyday black shoes now have holes in the top. Seconds of rain leave both feet drenched. The cobblers in Muswell Hill have told me to throw them out, but I haven’t. I can’t, yet.

I go to Clarks in Oxford Street and spend a good hour trying on sand-coloured shoes to go with my linen suits. One pair seem right: Clarks Classics, suede Jinks, priced £75. Fine, done, happy. Yet a few days later I’m in pain. The suede creases when I walk, cutting into my left foot at the base of my big toe. I’m close to limping.

The Clarks receipt says ‘full refund if unworn’. By this point, I have dragged the shoes through a mile of London grime. I spend hours trying to solve the dilemma with Scholls padded plasters, stuck on the painful areas of my foot. That in turn means time has to be spent at Boots St Pancras, peering at their complex range of foot-based products. I go back to stock up on more when I realise the pads come off in the shower. And so it goes on. Incredibly, the world turns.

I worry that I’ll never find a single pair of comfortable yet affordable shoes. And then I worry that it’s my feet that are the problem; that they’ve become vertically misshapen with age, and that this pain is just another petty ache one has to get used to. Or: perhaps I’m walking wrongly. I’ve caught myself staring at how others walk on the street (evidence of more madness). I see other people tilting their feet at a much higher angle than I do. Maybe that’s it. Have I forgotten how to walk properly? I wouldn’t put it past me.

(At this point I fear I am turning into a Samuel Beckett character. You are what you read.)

So this is what dominates my life this week, to my utter shame. The resentment of simple self-maintenance that fails to be simple. I try to dwell on more important things, but my shoes have rather gone to my head. The only response I take away from reading the news is, ‘I bet Barack Obama’s shoes fit him okay.’

Another thought. Perhaps Imelda Marcos wasn’t so greedy after all, with her palace of infinite shoes. Perhaps she just couldn’t get it right.

* * *

Sunday 18th August 2014. I’m reading Ronald Blythe’s diaries, as collected in Under A Broad Sky (Canterbury Press, 2013). He says this on the student protests of 2011:

‘It is sad to grow old and to have never rioted.’ He’s about 90.

* * *

Monday 19th August 2014. Penguin’s annotated edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four includes a letter from Evelyn Waugh to Orwell, criticising the novel in a respectful, friendly way. Waugh’s main reservation is ‘the disappearance of the Church’ in Orwell’s vision. He means Catholicism, but he implies that religion as a whole is ‘inextinguishable’ – a word that directly recalls the ending of Brideshead Revisited.

The edition also reprints Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, next to a reader’s report by the publishers, Secker & Warburg, about Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the former, Orwell lists his rules for how to write clearly, which have been much quoted ever since (‘If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out’). In the latter, the publisher notes ‘It is a typical Orwellism that Julia falls asleep while Winston reads part of [O’Brien’s book] to her. Women aren’t intelligent in Orwell’s world’. And that’s from his own publisher! The lesson seems to be: feel free to take Orwell’s advice on how to write, but bear in mind that he wasn’t perfect either.

* * *

Tuesday 20th August 2014. I realise my ongoing shoe discomfort is not rare. Today I’m in Humanities One of the British Library Reading Rooms, studying Larkin’s The Less Deceived. The woman at the desk next to me has taken her shoes and socks off. One bare foot rests on her other knee, in a kind of bookish yoga position.

* * *

Wednesday 21st August 2014. To the Phoenix for The Congress. It’s a giddy, strange film that mixes live action with psychedelic animation. The actress Robin Wright plays a version of herself. The story starts out as a satire on the state of Hollywood, but then shifts into full-on science fiction. It’s often hard to keep up with what’s going on: only twenty minutes after I leave the cinema do I fully understand what happens at the end. The critics have been polarised, with some using the term ‘Yellow Submarine-esque’ as an insult. In which case, count me on the side of those who would take it as a compliment. I admit The Congress is not a perfect film, but there’s so much imagination and originality on show – and so many sights no one has seen before. It goes into the Top Five of my favourite films this year, along with The Grand Budapest Hotel, Only Lovers Left Alive, The Punk Singer, and Frank.

* * *

Friday 22nd August 2014. At home all day. Reading, writing, failing to write, filling out paperwork for the final college year, idly social media-ing. I leave the house just once, at about 6pm, to go to Sainsbury’s on Archway Rd. Barely a minute’s walk, and a passer-by says to me: ‘love the suit!’ The only words I hear in person all day. Well, if I must have a single comment from the world.

I suppose I really do put on a suit and tie just to buy a pint of milk. Didn’t even realise it.