To L’Escargot on Greek Street for a Christmas dinner with the Teaists. The Teaists being an assortment of bohemian types who meet in the city’s expensive but stylish dining parlours (The Wolseley, The Savoy, The Waldorf etc), even when some of their number are living on the dole.
One definition of style is to dress well on little money, while those who are swimming in riches dress like they’re on a minimum wage. The Teaists are often the most stylishly dressed people in the room, while fashion dictates that the richer you are, the poorer you’re meant to look. Prince Charles hasn’t worn his coronet since his investiture, though (I’ve just checked) he’s allowed to wear it whenever he wants. I’d wear my coronet on the 134 bus.
Style is spending your last crumb of Income Support on a charity shop waistcoat, rather than food. The food will come anyway. You hope (rather than beg) some kind soul will offer to treat you, in return for the currency of interesting and unusual company (which is what the Fosca song ‘The Millionaire Of Your Own Hair’ is about).
Even though the Teaists spend money like any other customers, they still manage to solicit the odd steely gaze from waiters. Gazes that say ‘What are you doing here?’ and ‘This is a respectable establishment.’ Sometimes there’s bemused smirks, other times it’s expressions of sheer terror, akin to the pensioners in the tea room scene from Withnail & I. Maybe it’s because the Teaists are of a unusual mixed-generational range (at all points between 20 to 40); maybe it’s the odd haircuts, or the vintage mix-and-match clothes; maybe it’s just the whole atmosphere of Otherness.
I realise this is starting to sound like the lyrics to a Suede song, though I’d never say the Teaists were ‘trash’. More like harmless if gently exotic variations to the decor. The scenic route.
Present for this Christmas outing (champagne, wine, three courses, snails) is Lawrence, Xavior, Hazel, Tallulah, Mathieu and Suzy. Tallulah is a young lady I associate with glamorous clubs like Kash Point and Stay Beautiful, and a strong contender for the ever-discussed notion of the female dandy. She asks me if I’m aware of a band called Blueboy. Of course I am: Blueboy were on Sarah Records, I was a big fan, I was close to the singer for a while (who died earlier this year), and they were the first band I ever supported (Orlando, Camden Monarch, April 1993). They later appeared on Shinkansen Records, as did Fosca.
Turns out that young Tallulah is currently dating the Blueboy guitarist, Paul.
Now, this at first seems such a ‘small world’ collision of my past and present lives, it reinforces the notion that behind my back, all the people I’ve ever known are getting off with each other.
But it makes more sense when I’m told they met as fans of The Chap magazine. Blueboy were a link between two unique and distinctive indie labels of the late 80s / early 90s period: the pastoral, pristine ‘twee pop’ of Sarah Records and the dandy-compatible, elegant and jazz-tinged El Records. From El Records, it’s a short step to The Chap, and thence to the dandy side of the dressing up spectrum, and so to the sort of clubs Tallulah goes to.
Arrogantly, I used to think I was the one person linking so many scenes, capable of shifting from the world of Momus to the world of Shane Macgowan, from Doctor Who fans to Beau Brummel fans, from the Field Mice to Romo, from the jumpers and jeans of the Belle and Sebastian ‘cutie’ types to the flamboyant costumes of London’s polygendered peacocks.
But then someone shouts ‘Oy! Rhydian!’ at me on the street, and I’m reminded that, no, I’m really not at the centre of the universe after all. (Rhydian being a bleach-haired singer on TV’s X-Factor).
Oh, and those pretty black-clad boys I met at the Shane MacGowan party turned out to be in the band The Horrors, whom I have approved of aesthetically in the past. I just couldn’t recognise them in person.
The one I spoke to said his name was Rhys. I went up and complimented him on looking fantastic, completely oblivious that he was in a popular band of the moment. Just as well I didn’t suggest he should be in a group. But I feel slightly smug that I thought he looked like he was in a band. Too many people in bands dress down, as if they’re hoping no one will notice they’re on a stage.
I wonder if the drummer of (say) Blur gets recognised like this? ‘I just wanted to say… I really love your look.’
***
Also at the Teaist dinner, Hazel gives everyone presents of books – lovely old Penguin editions. Mine are Henry James’s The Europeans and DH Lawrence’s The White Peacock.
She raves about Ted Hughes’s Collected Letters, which she’s just been reading. In the Telegraph, Sam Leith suggests that, thanks to email, such volumes are on the way out:
Hughes being, realistically, of the last generation that wrote letters consistently enough and well enough for it to be worthwhile or even possible to collect them into a book. I reckon in two decades’ time the Collected Letters will have ceased to exist as a literary object. But cheer up. No doubt something good will come along to replace it.
Well… there is the ‘blook’. The book based on a popular blog. Not quite the same thing, though.
Thing is, even though I’ve written plenty of paper letters in the past, and kept the other person’s correspondence, I’ve never kept copies of the outgoing letters. That’s what you were meant to do if you had any interest in the art of letters at all: put carbon sheets between the pages, make copies, keep the replies, and file it all carefully away. Seems a world away now. I wonder if those carbon sheets are even still available.
Emails, however, automatically keep both sides of the exchange preserved, and take up no room whatsoever (one CDR can hold a lifetime’s output of text). It’s just that few write emails in the style of the old letters.
Except when it’s a commission. The Swedish mag 00TAL has asked Martina Lowden and myself to discuss diary writing and fiction via email. The plan is to publish the emails in a future issue.
