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!
Saturday 25th June 2016. I don’t take part in the Pride march, but it impacts on my day when I try to get to St James’s from Trafalgar Square. I stand in Lower Regent Street and watch a few of the floats go by. In Trafalgar Square, one of the traffic lights has been altered so that the little green figure is now two female sex symbols, linked together. The London mayor, Mr Khan, has given his explicit blessing to Pride. Given he’s a Muslim, and given the events in Orlando the other week, there’s an extra resonance of justification to the march.
That said, I wince when I see a float emblazoned in the logos of Barclays Bank. How funny that the recent film Pride, set in the 1980s, is as much about anti-capitalist politics as it is about gay rights. Now capitalism has a float in the march too. If corporations like Barclays truly gave a hoot about LGBT culture, they’d intervene to stop venues like Madam JoJo’s and The Black Cap disappearing. Still, asking a bank to deal with inequality rather summons up the cartoons of HM Bateman.
***
Am reading Edward St Aubyn’s series of novels about Patrick Melrose, the upper class anti-hero who goes from abused child to self-destructive addict. Whereas I gobbled up books one to four with impatience, I’m taking my time with the fifth and final book, At Last, in order to properly savour the prose. I’m sure this is common when reading a series of books in order, one after the other.
I’m attracted to ESA’s books not only by the aphoristic quips and Waugh-esque style, but by St Aubyn’s admission in interviews of his dyslexia. It explains why the novels are often quite short, yet heavily polished. The D-word doesn’t appear in the novels, but knowing about St Aubyn’s learning difficulty gives an extra dimension to his protagonist’s taste in books:
‘He liked slim books which he could slip into his overcoat pocket… What was the point of a book if you couldn’t carry it around with you as a theoretical defence against boredom?’ (Bad News, p. 48).
Never Mind and Bad News are the best of the first four, I think, due to the shocking abuse scene in the former, and the mixture of New York high and low life in the latter. Difficult to call Bad News a narcotic novel, though, as the heroin taking is secondary to Melrose’s self-hatred. It’s closer to the way that Sebastian Flyte ends up as an alcoholic in Brideshead.
***
I browse in the National Portrait Gallery shop and notice that they’ve put out a new postcard of Victoria Wood. It’s brand new, in fact, because on the back are the years of her birth and death. Given the surge of celebrity deaths this year, the NPG must be spoilt for choice.
***
I watch a DVD of The Pleasure Garden (1953), rented from Birkbeck library. This is a curious 40 minute black and white film, which Travis Elborough mentions in his book on parks. Directed by the American poet James Broughton, it’s now a time capsule of London topography and British social values. The main location is Crystal Palace Gardens, while it still had plenty of statues.
The plot is little more than a dream-like parade of amorous goings-on in the aforementioned Gardens, with a tone pitched somewhere between Luis Bunuel, Dick Lester, and the Carry On films. Hattie Jacques is a fairy godmother, using her powers to liberate courting couples from a censorious government official, played by John Le Mesurier in Victorian undertaker garb. In one scene he apprehends a trio of skimpily-dressed young people, two men and a women, for what we assume is canoodling in the long grass. The woman tells Le Mesurier that the two men are ‘together’, which prompts him to turn to a ‘special’ section of his rule book. Though the DVD is certificate U, this film must have felt pretty risqué for British viewers in 1953. Needless to say, it did well at a French film festival.
***
Sunday June 26th 2016. A quote from Iain Duncan Smith on the Andrew Marr programme, about his role in the referendum’s Leave campaign:
‘We never made any commitments. We just made a series of promises that were possibilities.’
It’s so beyond satire it hurts.
***
Tuesday, June 28th 2016. To the Barbican’s smaller screens in Beech Street for Tale of Tales, an Italian film comprising three traditional Italian fairy tales. They all take place in the same quasi-medieval world of castles and sea monsters. The cast is international (including Toby Jones, Shirley Henderson, and Salma Hayek), but the dialogue is in English. When there is any dialogue, that is. And what there is is very stilted, bordering on the badly translated. This makes it a frustrating watch, but the visuals are impressive enough. Vincent Cassell is typecast as a sex-mad king, making his entrance beneath the skirts of two women. At one point he gets up in the morning after an al fresco orgy on a beach, and knocks over a live peacock.
***
Wednesday, June 29th, 2016. I go to see Martin Parr’s ‘Unseen City’ exhibition, being images documenting the ceremonies of the Square Mile. It’s in the Guildhall, one of those London galleries that the tourists never seem to know about (another is the Wallace). The permanent collection is full of 19th century masterpieces, yet I’m one of about five visitors.
Parr’s trademark style is unmistakable: hyperreal slices of British daily life, the colours turned up to the full. A lady Lord Mayor stands alone in an empty marquee, waiting to go on, weighed down by her voluminous robes and oversized hat. A golden Great Mace rests bathetically in the back seat of a taxi. I suppose the word really does have to be ‘unceremonious’. Beadles and Drapers march in their garters past a branch of Pret a Manger. The names of the ceremonies are entertaining enough: ‘Cart Marking’, ‘The Silent Ceremony’, ‘Beating the Bounds’, ‘Swan Upping’. Men in blazers stand in row boats and toast the Queen. It all still goes on.
Quite an apt exhibition to see in the wake of the EU referendum, too, given the amount of foreign newspaper cartoons about men in bowler hats doing foolish things. Bowler hats are, of course, rarely worn in the City of London these days, but as these photographs prove, there are still worn in City ceremonies.
***
Friday, July 1st, 2016. There really is no escape from the referendum. Wandering through Cartwright Gardens in Bloomsbury, I stop take a look at the statue of John Cartwright, and learn from the plaque that he was a campaigner for universal suffrage and a supporter of US independence in 1776. Then, at the foot of the statue, I notice there’s a fresh bouquet of flowers, along with a handwritten paper note. It is clearly from a Leave the EU supporter:
’23rd June 2016. Betrayed by our own representatives, we the people nevertheless voted to reclaim national sovereignty… Freedom is ours!’
***
I attend a Birkbeck end of term drinks gathering, at the Bree Louise pub near Euston station. After a few drinks, the Birkbeck table inevitably gets into an EU conversation. ‘Oh, I’m just enjoying the spectacle of it all’, I say airily, waving a hand about. The woman I’m speaking to (who I’ve not met before) is unimpressed. ‘It’s not a spectacle for ME! I’m in Labour!’
When she gets up to leave, she jabs a finger at me and says, quite sternly, ‘Join the Labour Party.’ Then she goes. I don’t say anything, but it occurs to me that the only reply is, ‘Why, are they falling apart? Oh, that’s right.’
I was being honest, though. Whether Corbyn or the Tories, it’s a spectacle all right, and one that I feel both depressed by and detached from.
***
Tuesday, July 5th, 2016. Evening: Dinner with Shanthi Sivanesan at Cozzo, Whitecross Street. It’s an unpretentious, inexpensive Italian restaurant, slightly rough at the edges, which I like. We sit out al fresco in Whitecross Street, which is narrow and virtually pedestrianised, with few cars about.
Then to the Barbican’s nuclear bunker, aka Cinema One, for Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (£5 with an NUS card on Tuesdays). Quite an apt choice, given my own current state of lassitude. Jennifer Saunders, who stars and writes the script, has admitted that she wrote it in a state of laziness. Not only did it take an age to come out, but the end result, I think it’s fair to say, has the minimum amount of ambition that could possibly be expected. The title says it all: a standard episode of the TV series Absolute Fabulous, padded out to pass as a film.
The most common plot for film versions of TV comedies has often been They Go On Holiday. So many spring to mind: Are You Being Served: The Movie,Holiday On The Buses, that Morecombe and Wise one with ‘Riviera’ in the title. The other common plots are They Run Out Of Money, and They Get Involved In A Big Crime That Moves Them To A New Location (Alan Partridge – Alpha Papa). The Ab Fab film manages to tick all these boxes: Edina and Patsy run out of money, get involved in a crime, and flee to the South of France. That really is it.
Thankfully, it’s still funny. There’s enough slapstick and topical jokes to keep the film afloat, and Joanna Lumley as Patsy is funny whenever she’s on screen full stop. She can pull a face and improve a scene a thousandfold.
Were it down to me, I’d turn it into an original musical. There’s a scene where Saffy, the prim daughter, sings karaoke at a drag queen night in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. It’s a scene that has no justification other than being a nice record of the venue, much as The Pleasure Garden is a record of the Crystal Palace Gardens. Like Madame JoJo’s was, the RVT is one of those old-style gay clubs which is struggling to avoid the oligarchs’ bulldozer. But it also suggests that the film really wanted to be a full-blown musical.
Instead we get a multitude of celebrity cameos that do little more than prove how well-connected the producers are. The rule should be that cameos need to be as good as Marshall McLuhan’s in Annie Hall. McLuhan couldn’t act, either, but he’s there for a joke, and you don’t need to know who he is to get the joke, either.  The celebrities in AbFab are little more than attempts to distract the audience from the film’s complete lack of ambition. It’s still funny enough, when it’s those two main actors playing those two characters. They could have done more, that’s all.
***
Thursday, July 6th, 2016. Â With some of the Boogaloo extended family to the fringe-y Tristan Bates Theatre in Covent Garden. One of the Boogaloo staff, Kate Goodfellow, is in the current play there, A Year From Now. It turns out she’s also the artistic director of the company, RedBellyBlack, as well as this show’s producer, choreographer, and sound editor. She tells us afterwards that she even repaired some holes in the stage floor that were left behind by the previous company, with minutes to go until the technical rehearsal.
A Year From Now is an impressive documentary piece, which uses a similar device to one of my favourite films, The Arbor. To enhance the question ‘Where do you see yourself a year from now?’, actors lip-synch to the recorded voices of real life interviewees. Unlike The Arbor, though, there’s an element of modern dance too, with the actors constantly moving about in balletic styles as they illustrate or interpret the words they’re mouthing. This use of quotations from real life to make up an entire script is, I believe, called verbatim theatre. That said, it’s more common to have the actors performing the words with their own voices, as in the case of London Road, the musical about the Ipswich murders.
The voices on audio range from an elderly couple who are glad to still be about, to a toddler who has only just learned the concept of what a ‘year’ means – played by Kate G herself. There’s also a young-ish couple who are the parents of new born babies, to a man whose parent has just died, and to a trio of hospital patients battling or recovering from serious illnesses.
It’s also quite timely, given the present sense of uncertainty overall. A year from now there’ll be a different Prime Minister, and a different US President. Some politicians have scant ideas of what they’ll be doing next week. The referendum revealed that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove had made no plans whatsoever.
In my case, I do know what I’ll be doing a year from now. Working on a 15,000 word dissertation for an MA, to be delivered in the following September. That’s all I’ve got for now, but that’s still more than Boris.
***
Afterwards: to the Groucho Club in Dean Street. At least one of the Boogaloo party is a member of the GC, so off we go. Last time I was here, which must be about ten years ago, I’m sure it was more brightly lit, and that it felt like the public areas of a luxury hotel. Today it’s more like a private members’ club, which is what it’s meant to be. There’s friendly staff who know the members’ names, dark corners to loaf in, lots of sofas next to bookcases full of coffee-table books, art on the walls (quite a few Peter Blakes). A looser, more bohemian feel than last time. It’s as if part of the Colony Room’s spirit has moved here, with the rest of it going to Vout-o-Reenee’s in Tower Hill.
Am intrigued that the Groucho smoking area is not the pavement out front, but a kitchen yard on the first floor, hemmed between the backs of old Soho buildings. I share an Uber cab back to Highgate (‘Would you like to charge your phones?’ says the driver) and am treated to the cost. I must socialise with my neighbours more often.
***
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This is in lieu of a proper diary this week. The diary always takes me too long to write. Rather ironically, it often stops me from doing the sort of things I need to do to have something to write about. I do want to spend some time away from the desk over Christmas, and I’m sure no one can begrudge me that. Except that I’ve now ended up writing a diary entry, by way of trying to get out of writing a diary.
I shouldn’t be writing this, because I’m finding it hard enough to do the work that really can’t be avoided, being the 5000-word MA essay with its January 4th deadline. I’m also labouring under a medley of health problems (back pain, mainly, not helped by the need to spend hours at a desk) and fatigue (not helped by the codeine for said back pain making me fall asleep at the desk).
On New Year’s Day I’ll write an entry covering the past two weeks. That should keep you happy, whoever you might be.
In the meantime, here’s a new photo. It was taken by Shanthi Sivanesan on Christmas Eve 2015, in the Dean Street Townhouse, Soho, London. Every year I try to have my photo taken with a different Christmas tree in London. This one represents my gratitude to people who have been kind to me over the years, one way or another. Not least the aforementioned Ms Sivansen, who treated me to dinner and cocktails at this venue.
I look like I’m trying to hide, which seems apt given my current state of reluctance. Procrastination is hiding.
What I’m actually trying to do in the photo is get the tree, myself, and the artwork behind me all into shot, and the angle wasn’t easy. The artwork is The Anatomy of the Beast by Neal Fox. It’s a large Gillray-esque cartoon of various Soho characters alive and dead, many of which I owe something to personally. Whether it’s by remote inspiration (Quentin Crisp and Jeffrey Bernard – both in the right-hand section that you can’t see), or kindness in person (you can make out Sebastian Horsley in the top hat, and Shane MacGowan next to him). The red hatted one is George Melly, another hero, who I briefly met once (and kissed).
[You can see the full artwork at Neal Fox’s website:
I’m grateful to you too, O reader, if you’ve been coming to this website for some time. This public diary is now 18 years old. It’s been excerpted in two anthologies of mixed diaries, which contain myself alongside Pepys and the like. The anthologies are called A London Year and A Traveller’s Year, the latter book emerging earlier this year. Some people have now expressed interest in a whole book of selections from this diary. Nothing is definite about such a book yet, and I still don’t have an agent, but I’m hopeful. Eighteen years of entries – there must be a book’s worth of interesting reading in there somewhere.
So: it’s been a year of ups and downs. The downs are the ongoing health problems: a whole carousel of symptoms. According to the many doctors I’ve seen, these were – and are – seemingly caused by a combination of anxiety, depression, dyspraxia and a complete reluctance to do any physical exercise.
The ups of 2015 have been very important to me though. I finally achieved my life ambition of getting a university degree. First Class Honours, BA English, after four years at Birkbeck, University of London. I won a couple of college prizes too, including one for being ‘the most promising student in English Literature’. It’s something I never thought I’d have the stamina to do. I had a lot of support from Birkbeck’s staff and disability services, and I remain grateful to them. They sorted out the various help I was eligible for, not least with keeping my time management on track. My parents encouraged me at every step. My mother still does. Without such support I’d simply have dropped out. So, my gratitude is there too.
I officially graduated in July, and attended the gown-and-mortar-board ceremony in November. I then won a bursary to do an MA in Contemporary Literature and Culture at the same place. All being well (I’m still looking for funding for books and Tube travel), that will take me through to late 2017.
So that’s where I am now. I still have a lot of problems with my innate slowness, and with frequently feeling unwell or tired. But what has really surged into view over the last month is my battle for motivation against procrastination. I had it under control throughout the BA, but of late it really has knocked me for six.
The voice of my Procrastination Demon is simply this: ‘Why bother?’  The obvious answer, that ‘you’ll be in trouble if you don’t’, hasn’t seemed to sink in, even with 9 days till the deadline – and I’m still fiddling with a first draft of only 3200 words. There, I said it. Though I have made a diagram too. And lots of notes. Too many notes. More notes than essay.
The problem is I’ve missed lots of personal deadlines for myself, and am now into the danger zone of missing The Real Deadline. And here I am, spending precious time on a blog post which isn’t even a proper diary update. I am procrastinating by writing about procrastination.
I can lay some of the blame at social media, or rather, my weakness for spending time on social media. Twitter and Facebook can do many great things, like provide a sense of contact with friends, or rally support for petitions and funding. But they can also give the dangerous impression that no one else is doing any work either, so it’s okay for you to not work too. The world will carry on without you, because it is carrying on – look, you can watch it scrolling on forever! In real time! Why bother doing anything else?
But there’s other distractions too. I’ve just watched all of Season One of Transparent. It’s very good. You keep watching not because of the plot (there isn’t one), but because of the characters, who all seem to be hiding things about themselves, often without realising it. There’s a theme with this piece, isn’t there.
Some Christmas words of wisdom, then. These are aimed at myself as much as the world.
Do not think: ‘Why do any work when I can be binge-watching a whole series of a very good drama?’
Instead, think: ‘Treats, not distractions. I can only go on Twitter or watch the rest of Transparent as a treat, according to the time remaining, after I’ve hit my quota of work for the day. Treats, not distractions.’
Also: I take inspiration from the productivity of older writers. Lately I’ve enjoyed Alan Bennett’s latest diary for 2015 (a large chunk of prose in the London Review of Books, plus his audio reading of selected entries for their website), John Julius Norwich’s 2015 Christmas Cracker (a beautifully made annual fanzine of his favourite prose, poetry and quotations), Ronald Blythe’s 2015 collection of columns, In The Artist’s Garden (only published last week), and Diana Athill’s latest memoir, Alive Alive Oh!Â
Mr Bennett is 81, and talks about using a walking stick. Viscount Norwich is 86. Dr Blythe is 93. Ms Athill, who lives in a care home near me, turned 98 this week. They’ve all put out new work this year. I am a mere 44. I have my problems, but there is really no excuse.
But what else is hidden here? All these writers spend little time on the internet. JJ Norwich seems to have a Twitter account (I’ve just spent some time searching away to find this out), but hasn’t tweeted since July. Ms Athill isn’t on Twitter, though she does use a computer (her book of letters, Instead of a Book, marks the switch in her correspondence from paper to email). Blythe and Bennett are entirely computer-free, yet seem to get by fine as professional writers in the twenty-first century. Presumably the editors they work with are happy to accept photocopies of typewritten copy, in the way everyone did pre-internet.
There was once an amusing column by Tom Hodgkinson about his giving up email in order to get more done as a writer. It ended with him saying he’d had to resort to email after all, as the editor wouldn’t accept the column in any other form.
(And now I’ve thought about a Quentin Crisp anecdote, on his dictating columns by phone, to a newspaper in the 1990s. His hand was too paralysed to type.  ‘The newspaper has a women who types faster than I can speak and she gets it all down and they send a cheque’. I have just spent some time looking this anecdote up. More time gone).
And now the machine I am typing this on tells me that I’ve hit nearly 1500 words. It was meant to be a photo and a quick Christmas message. I really, really have to stop and get onto the essay. And text a friend to say I can’t come out for drinks after all. And I’ll probably have to cancel going to a birthday gathering…
(EDITED TO ADD: I have just been told that I am very much expected at the birthday! So I will go to that, then. One night out in the whole week. A treat, not a distraction. And I’m not going out for New Year’s Eve.)
But in a way this post is comforting, because it’s a reminder that as long as I get started on the essay today, and every day between now and the 4th, I should be able to clock up a decent amount of work and get it finished on time. As long as I get started. And don’t go on Twitter. Or the rest of the internet. Or watch a very good TV drama. Or do anything else.
That’s the thing about procrastination. It’s another form of productivity.
