Scraps of lost days, notes, general tidying up.

I keep starting and stopping new entries. Better I set down short entries than none at all.

(And then I end up writing a long entry)

I think I badly need to get into the swing of writing. And indeed, in the swim of writing.

The last weeks have seen me spiral inside my head somewhat. I have an addictive personality, in the sense that I get fixated upon one mode, then find it hard to do anything but be in that mode. So if I do nothing, I become addicted to doing nothing. If I’m feeling ill or tired, I become stuck in an ill or tired mode – even if I’m perfectly rested, fed, and healthy. So the only way to really break out of these little spirals is to get into a roll of doing the things I actually want to do. Or there’s the danger of becoming addicted to frustration, addicted to regret, addicted to a pause.

Saturday – a spot of fun, acting for a DIY pop vid. The band in question is The New Royal Family, and singer David Barnett wants me to play a butler spying through a keyhole, in reference to the video for Adam Ant’s Goody Two Shoes. I turn up in my own make-up and bow tie, and I overact a bit, which is putting it nicely. But compared to the butler from Goody Two Shoes (which we consult via YouTube on a laptop – a very 2007 reference activity), I’m the height of subtlety.

I recall a connection from a few months ago, when I attend a small convention for Hammer Horror films in Kensington. There’s a group of Hammer screen sirens signing photos: Madeleine Smith, Ingrid Pitt, Caroline Munro. Next to stills of her roles in Dracula AD 1972 and Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter, Ms Munro is signing pictures of herself from the Goody Two Shoes video. She’s the lady that Mr Ant is seen canoodling with, while the butler spies away.

After the video shoot, off to another cult signing event: the English fantasy author Neil Gaiman at Forbidden Planet. He’s promoting the paperback of Fragile Things, his latest anthology of short stories. I was rather hoping he’d be doing a reading, as he has a truly lovely speaking voice: calm, measured, wry, friendly. From his interviews and audiobooks he sounds rather like a dreamier Douglas Adams. And indeed, dreams are a major theme of Mr G’s work. But I’d gotten my wires crossed: this is purely a signing. Ah well.

After some thought, I decide it’d still be nice to meet Mr G if only for a few seconds, and I was planning to buy Fragile Things anyway. So I stand around, in a backstreet off Shaftesbury Avenue, with a long queue of fans in the Friday rain. Some have queued up for over an hour, and I have a ghastly feeling that after a non-stop signing session of 90 minutes (90 minutes!), there are still a good number of rain-soaked Gaiman-o-philes who have to be turned away.

I’ve only started getting into Mr Gaiman’s work, enjoying his earlier prose collection, Smoke & Mirrors, alongside The Sandman comic saga, which I’m working my way through for the first time. Like Sondheim or Nick Cave, I get the sensation that he has such a cult following it can seem hard to know where to begin for a newcomer. Or even if you’re allowed to be a newcomer – cult followings take on the appearance of private clubs. For me, it helps that he writes ‘normal’ books as well as comics. Mention comics at all at a mainstream literary gathering, and darts pause in mid-flight. I love the works of Alan Moore and Peter Bagge and the Hernandez Brothers, but the whole stigma of the medium colours everything on both sides: you have to get defensive when addressing the mainstream, you have to know everything when addressing the cognoscenti.

It seems outrageously odd to like some comics. To like some Doctor Who. But this suits me fine. I’ve never been one for polarity. And being the odd one out even among gatherings of the odd ones out is another speciality of mine. But this has meant that I’ve sometimes found it hard to discover artists and authors with delineated cult followings. I feel like I have to follow – and be judged – by some sort of club rules.

DE: Yes, I rather like this writer’s work.

The Fans: But do you like him in all the right ways? And have you read everything they’ve done? Sit down, there’s going to be a test.

Neil Gaiman is the biggest Neil on the Internet. If you Google his first name, you get his online journal. Like me, he started his blog earlier than most, which is one reason for the high Google ranking. But being a successful author with a huge internet fanbase probably has something to do with it too. And it’s somewhat less impressive to be the biggest Dickon than the biggest Neil.

I mention this at the signing as he writes my name and draws a shattered heart on the flyleaf. He replies that it’s a subject brought up by his friend, the satirical songwriter Mitch Benn. Mr Benn is the Third Biggest Mitch on Google. The other two are a deceased American comedian and a hurricane.

Mr Benn manages to write two new topical songs per week on Radio 4’s Now Show, in diverse musical styles too. Like Mr Gaiman, he manages to be prolific and tirelessly charming to strangers, as I found out when I met him in the kitchen of a Shepherds Bush party a few years ago. Truly commendable qualities. I’m rather fed up with being non-productive and grumpy.

As for Mr Gaiman’s work, I remember seeing copies of The Sandman comic when it originally came out in the late 80s. I was shown them by a cool Oxford boy in his bedroom. Or was it a cool Oxford girl? I can picture the event in my mind, the bedroom, the comics, but not the face or even the gender of the person showing them to me. Maybe it was an Oxford androgyne into comics. I’ve known one or two.

Aptly enough, the Sandman chapter I’m on introduces a character called Desire, a rather New Romantic-looking androgynous personification in a suit. Rather up my cul-de-sac.

Which reminds me. At Beautiful & Damned the other night, one of the Boogaloo regulars approaches me:

“Dickon, there’s this androgynous person in make-up and a suit sitting at the bar. I think it must be one of yours.”