While reading Brenda Silver’s Virginia Woolf Icon a few months ago, one particular piece of information leapt out at me. At the time of the book’s writing – 1997 – Ms Woolf was the Number One selling postcard in the National Portrait Gallery shop. In 2012 this is no longer the case. The Woolf postcard is still holding its own in the postcards chart, but she has since been usurped from the top spot by a certain other British icon. You’ll have to wait a few paragraphs before I reveal who this is.

In the Silver book, the author theorises that images of Virginia Woolf are often used as a kind of instant shorthand for women as intellectuals, though not always positively. For example, she can be seen as a pin-up on the bedroom wall of the hapless Saffy in the TV sitcom Absolutely Fabulous. Saffy begins the series as a long-suffering, bookish student, appalled at the decadent brashness of her mother Edina. The set designer would have had to think about what sort of images Saffy might have on her wall, ones which a mainstream audience would have ‘got’ at once. Virginia Woolf it would have to be.

Significantly, the bestselling image in question is of Woolf aged 20, photographed in 1902 by George Beresford. This is the image that sells so well at the NPG shop, not just as a postcard, but as a print and a fridge magnet too.

And yet the girl in the image is not yet Virginia Woolf: both in a literal sense – she is the unmarried Adeline Virginia Stephen – and in the sense of Woolf the writer, the reason for why she’s in the Gallery. The girl in the photo has yet to write the books that would make her name. A more representative image of Woolf the writer, therefore, would be one when she was older, like the photograph that made the cover of Time Magazine in 1937, while she was alive:

So why do people prefer the Beresford photograph so, particularly when the NPG has older versions of Ms W available? Replying to my enquiry, the NPG’s Robert Carr-Archer wonders if some people buy the postcard because ‘it is a beautiful and romantic image of a young woman, whose identity is almost unimportant’. It’s certainly a beautiful image in its own right, but I think another reason might be that it represents potential and hope, and thus inspiration. Another reason might be that the pose itself is rather regal, as if she’s deliberately posing for a coin or a stamp, or indeed a fridge magnet.

I also like the way her striking sundial nose is accentuated by the profile pose, and by her softer and still-growing face. It’s surely refreshing to think that in this era of nose jobs, the most popular female face in the National Portrait Gallery for years was one with a large nose.

The changing types of female role models was also an abiding theme during the London Olympics. Many of the British team’s women triumphed in sports with something of a traditionally masculine image, such as cycling, rowing and boxing. Physical fitness was celebrated as something for women to properly aspire to, over and above facial perfection. When it came to the Closing Ceremony, some commentators therefore bemoaned that there was a section devoted to British fashion, where models like Kate Moss and Lily Cole paraded in gold dresses. This, the critics said, was something of a depressing step back for women, what with all the athletic successes. But this seemed unfair, I felt, particularly when Ms Cole has a Double First from Cambridge, and when the same ceremony featured the Spice Girls, Jessie J, Annie Lennox and Kate Bush (though not in person) – all female role models of very different musical styles.

So, anyway, on to the top selling postcards in the NPG today. Perhaps they say something about what people regard as an important portrait today.

Well, Virginia Woolf is now down to Number 4.

In at Number 3 is a 2009 painting of Princes William and Harry in uniform:

At Number Two is Twiggy by Ronald Traeger, from 1967.

And Number One is…

‘Mike’s Brother’ by Sam Walsh, from 1964. Better known as Paul McCartney:

According to the NPG, historical figures don’t get much of a look in these days. People tend to go for either the Tudors or post-1950s faces, with not much in between. Here, Virginia Woolf is an exception once again.

Mr Carr-Archer adds that the original 1902 print of Woolf is often not on display in the gallery, to help perserve it. This makes its popularity in the shop all the more interesting, I think.

Finally, despite being bumped down the list by a woman famous for her looks (Twiggy), it’s notable that Ms Woolf still beats postcards of Kate Moss and Lily Cole. By a nose.

TOP TEN POSTCARDS SOLD IN THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, JAN – DEC 2011

1. Paul McCartney
2. Twiggy
3. William & Harry (painting by N Philipps)
4. Virginia Woolf
5. Lily Cole
6. William & Harry (photo by F. Greer)
7. Kate Moss
8. Queen Elizabeth II (Warhol – Pink)
9. The Rolling Stones
10. Audrey Hepburn

(Thanks to Robert Carr-Archer at the NPG)

Today: I watch a little bit of the Olympics – the dressage final – but as curious as the sport is (horses trotting very precisely to music), I’m still uninterested in it all. Not even at a time when people who don’t usually watch sport are now in fact watching sport. And lots of it.  But my taste seems immutable: I do not like sport. Pity, really. I take no pleasure in not sharing a common taste – no tiresome contrarian I.

On the subject of common tastes, I’ve just been watching a three part TV documentary, All In The Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry. Mr Perry is shown visiting people in Britain from across the class divide, in order to portray them in a series of colourful tapestries. With the tapestries, he manages to pay homage to Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress as well as classic religious paintings, while commenting on 21st century social behaviour, sometimes affectionately, sometimes scathingly.

The programmes themselves rather offend my own taste in documentary making, however. They do that irritating magazine-like thing of having a montage of clips at the start as a kind of framing device, so nothing is ever a surprise. It’s a reminder that when an artist or expert becomes a TV presenter, unless they have a hand in the whole process and treat it like an equal artform (like, say, Jonathan Meades), they’re at the mercy of a formulaic director, one who thinks they know what people like in a documentary. Which is rather ironic when it’s meant to be discussing the nature of taste. Still, at least the series justified itself with the tapestries, by acting as a conventional advert for unconventional art.

Mr Perry has some interesting interpretations on what makes taste, and where taste comes from. He sees it as part of peer group aspiration, of wanting to belong yet also define oneself as an individual. In my case, my taste in Not Liking Sport isn’t any kind of deliberate choice at all. It’s entirely innate; I don’t like sport in the same way as I am left-handed. Some people might point to my schooldays for reasons – I was a classic swot who was good in the classroom but useless in the gym, and one whose parents also were not big followers of sport. But neither was I forced to not like it. There’s certainly no escaping being exposed to sport, particularly football.

And right now, liking sport is the best way to feel Not Alone. But while I’m pleased for the people who take pleasure from the Olympics, I still can’t join in.

Something I am following, however, is another well-publicised discussion on taste. Obligingly, the BFI’s Sight & Sound magazine has released its Best Films Ever According To Proper Critics list, which it only does every ten years. The big news is that Vertigo has toppled Citizen Kane from the #1 spot for the first time in 50 years. I enjoy reading all the ensuing articles, until I come across one particular piece in The Guardian that makes a couple of rather sweeping assumptions about the masses:

‘We’ve all used the clapping Orson Welles gif to punctuate Tumblr posts, but have you ever watched all of Citizen Kane?’

No to ever using the clapping gif, yes to watching all of the film. I suppose that makes me officially too uncommon for The Guardian.

Last Friday evening: I watch the live stream of the Olympics Opening Ceremony, while following people’s comments on Twitter – a particularly modern pastime.

I’m not a big fan of Danny Boyle’s films at all. I find them too externally-minded, rock-video-like and glossy, even garish; I think of the petrol station exploding early on in 28 Days Later for no other reason than it made the film look more attractive to the US youth market (by Mr Boyle’s admission on the DVD commentary). This is just my own taste, mind.  Mr Boyle still impresses me, the way he can take a low budget, Lottery-funded British film like Sunshine and make it look as if it cost as much as the likes of Avatar. Well, almost. He has an undeniable and unique talent for delivering visual thrills that are also value for money, and this made him the perfect choice for directing the Opening Ceremony.

Spectacle over reason is a lot less problematic for such an event. Because spectacle IS the reason. A lot of people did try to find reason in much of the proceedings, but this, I feel, was a mistake. Boyle’s own programme notes centred on the theme of building ‘Jerusalem’, after the Blake poem and song, and this is in itself a piece of culture that has often been interpreted in conflicting ways.

Using Mr Branagh to play Mr Brunel, reciting Caliban’s speech from The Tempest about ‘crying to dream again’ was also highly ambiguous. Boyle’s notes stressed the speech was used as a celebration of dreaming and of wonders per se, away from the more problematic context of their source, Caliban the deformed, vengeful slave of Prospero, who attempted to rape Miranda. But Mr Boyle took the words and the surface value of the speech and gave it his own meaning, just as he took samples from all across British culture and stitched them together into a smorgasbord of giddying, sometimes silly, yet frequently dazzling entertainment.

Some commentators judged the ceremony as subversively Left Wing (the NHS bit). Others said it was in fact a Right Wing, misty-eyed delusion for the old days (the NHS bit again). A lot of people on Twitter found a Tory MP’s negative reaction, and reacted en masse against him – to the point where his name became inextricably linked to the event, as if Mr Boyle had hired him as a performer. I think it’s very wrong to let outrage eclipse achievement, and his name has been mentioned too often already. I’d rather name people like the choreographer Akram Khan and the singer Emeli Sande, whose ‘Abide With Me’ section was my personal highlight of the show: stripped down, heartfelt, sensitive, tasteful and arty.

But that said, I still enjoyed the unabashed crowd-pleasing aspects: the Industrial Revolution’s smokestacks magically springing up from the countryside, the five glowing Olympic Rings forged, then floating, then raining down fireworks. I loved the tribute to Tim Berners-Lee, though I admit I needed the caption onscreen. Unlike a lot of USA TV stations, I know who Berners-Lee is, although I’d find it hard to place his face.

And of course, I hooted with delight at the appearance of HMQ, doing a spot of acting with a fictional character (Daniel Craig’s James Bond) before outrageously appearing to parachute into the arena. Was this fawning pro-Royal propaganda? Was it cheekily anti-Royal? Or was it just a shameless advert for this year’s new Bond film, Skyfall?

The great thing was, if you wanted to crowbar your own reading into it all, you could. And many did. But Boyle’s main intention, as far I as I could tell, was just to lay on a packed and entertaining spectacle that worked at the surface level. And what surfaces they were.

The final marks for the first year of my BA English degree have come in.

For the exam I received another mark of 69, being the highest score for an Upper Second (where 70 means a First).

After getting a string of Firsts, I can’t pretend this isn’t frustrating. I even worry – half-jokingly – that I may have hit my peak, and that I might be getting worse as a student. But no, it’s still a good mark for my first attempt at an academic exam since Margaret Thatcher was in power.

And it’s still good enough to bring my final overall mark for that particular module into the realms of a First. They don’t give you a single mark for each year of the degree: instead you receive overall marks per module.

So, of the three modules that made up the first year, I received 72, 72, and 73. All Firsts, for my first year.

These results don’t actually count towards my final degree mark – students just have to pass all three modules in order to progress onto the next year. But I’m pretty pleased with the results. I don’t find academic work at all easy, and there’s still plenty of room for improvement, such as my exam performance.

The main thing for me is that I now feel officially justified in deciding to do a university degree at this stage in life, and for choosing English literature as a subject. I always liked the idea of having an English degree. I thought I was the sort of person who you’d think had done an English degree. Now it looks like I am actually am that sort of person. So much of education is about giving you self-belief and confidence in life, and becoming yourself; on top of the acquiring of skills and knowledge.

The plan now is to try and convert this personal form of success into the kind of success the world actually cares about – using it to find appropriate paid work, the sort I can do alongside the studies. The benefits people have sent me a letter saying they are about to make me jump through various undignified hoops. It’s part of the government’s drive to get as much people as possible off benefits and into jobs – even though the jobs are thin on the ground. My only fear is being cut off from benefits altogether, perhaps by my refusing to take a job that doesn’t fit with the degree. With these results I’ve proved I actually am good at something, and I want to continue down this path. One hopes even Mr Cameron, with his talk of making people ‘realise their potential’ won’t begrudge me that.

I’ve even bought the official Birkbeck college tie to celebrate. Many of the staff and students aren’t aware that Birkbeck, a college which specialises in evening classes for mature students, has its own colours and tie. But it does, and in this Olympic climate of heavy branding and rooting for teams (and indeed, of London mayors who come from the world of the old school tie) I thought it made sense to wear it:

Thursday evening: I dodge the rain as it drenches a BBC film crew in Torrington Square. They’re filming an episode of Silent Witness, and there are signs around the square telling people to be aware that the people dressed as police officers are in fact actors.

In fact, I pass a real police officer on the other side of Senate House, and notice that as it’s raining, he’s wearing a proper Police Officer Anorak, in dark blue. The actor cops, meanwhile, have normal uniforms and use umbrellas between takes, as it’s not supposed to be raining in the story.

Suitably enough, I go to the Horse Hospital off Russell Square for the launch of a new crime novel: Cathi Unsworth’s ‘Weirdo’.

It’s set among goth teens in 1980s Norfolk, and the party’s soundtrack includes the likes of Echo & The Bunnymen’s ‘Killing Moon’: a moody, goth-compatible pop song from the 80s that goes on just that little bit too long.

Passages from the book remind of my own upbringing in Suffolk, and how teenagers in English villages were more likely to take to bands with strong visual looks and a sense of not quite being properly cool: Goth bands, thrash metal, prog rock, and most of all: Songs That Go On Too Long. Village teens were more like to be into Pink Floyd or The Sisters Of Mercy than The Clash or The Fall.

It might be argued that being a teenager in an English village is already doomed to a certain degree of Uncool from the start, being acutely aware that the more connected-up and hipster-type parties were always going to be London parties, or Manchester parties. Rural teens are forced to engage with acute externality, feeling as they do outside of not just children and adults but most of civilisation, so they often gravitate towards the more externally-distinctive bands. The Smiths and New Order could never have come from Diss. Cradle Of Filth and Extreme Noise Terror could never have come from Camden.

Echo & The Bunnymen were actually from Liverpool, but their fondness for long coats, long songs, big hairdos, and overwrought photoshoots in caves (oh yes!) gave them more fans in the shires than their less dressed-up urban counterparts. The Cure, meanwhile, were a group that managed to be just Goth Enough to appeal to those sort of teens, while having proper pop songs in the charts that didn’t go on too long. No DJ at a student disco in Ipswich was allowed to leave his post until he’d spun  ‘Lovecats’ at least seventeen times that night. The Cure’s late 80s album Disintegration is remarkable in that it includes big, overblown Gothic tracks like ‘Plainsong’ alongside simple pop songs like ‘Lovesong’, which could even lend itself to a 21st century soul rendition, courtesy of Adele.

Cathi Unsworth was once a rock journalist. Like Simon Price she is one of those writers who dresses more like a dandyish rock star than most actual rock stars:

I do, naturally, approve of Ms Unsworth. I’ve always warmed to writers who reflect their internal creativity by cultivating a distinctive external appearance, from Oscar Wilde to Truman Capote to even Alan Bennett (who admits somewhere that he doesn’t need to wear his glasses all the time, but they suit his face). And it’s no surprise that she was once a teenager in Great Yarmouth. Somebody has to be.

July 2012. A big month for London. Festivals and events and publicity for the Olympic Games everywhere you look. ‘2012’ logos and Union Jacks plastered on even the most tenuous of products. Posters for the West End musical Billy Elliot have been adjusted to describe it as ‘The Great British Musical’. Similarly, a revival of Joe Orton’s What The Butler Saw has a huge Union Jack as its background, playing up the Swinging Sixties feel but clearly nodding to the general pushing of Britishness this summer.

It seems that Jubilee Union Jack flags also double as Olympic flags, even though the latter event is rather more international. I find the implied message vague and wonder: if the Jubilee hadn’t coincided with the Olympics, would such bunting still be out for the Games?

The bunting found nearest to my door was for the Jubilee street party in Highgate Avenue, stretched all along the road between the street lamps. After the Jubilee weekend it was mostly taken down, which made sense. Which baffles me now, however, is that some traces of the bunting are still there now, a few sorry strings left hanging from the road signs at either end, bedraggled and drenched in the rain. Perhaps this is a sign, too: a tribute to a very British lack of wanting to let something go. Or of hoping someone else will finish a job for you.

There’s a stepladder in my hall. I might do it myself. Put the dying bunting out of its misery.

***

My sole summer booking is this Friday 6^th: I’m DJ-ing for the Last Tuesday Society’s ‘Orphanage Masked Ball’, in Adam Street. More details here.

Later this month I’m visiting my parents on their holiday in Southwold for three days. I’ve also been invited to a wedding in South London at the end of August. Oh, and I have an outpatient appointment to test for food allergies before that. That’s pretty much my Olympic Summer 2012.

Which suits me fine, really. I have a long reading list of books to take notes on for the Autumn term, and I’m not the fastest of readers as it is.

I have two university announcements still to wait for, though. On Monday 9th I find out which of the optional modules I’ve been allocated for the 2^nd year. It’ll probably be either ‘Fin De Siecle’ (Wilde, HG Wells, Dracula), or ‘Narratives Of The Body’ (connecting Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to the film Blade Runner). Either would suit me. As soon as I know, I can get on with the reading.

Most importantly, though, this month I’ll receive my mark for the exam, and have my final marks confirmed for the whole of the first year. The date of this result is officially known as ‘before the end of July’. I’m taking this to mean late July in general. Only then will I feel able to properly mark the end of my first year as a born-again student.

Saturday 16 June. I DJ at the Last Tuesday Society shop at 11 Mare Street. The event is to mark the opening of an exhibition of Sebastian Horsley’s art, though there’s also quite a few exhibits which count as posthumous relics of his life, as in the medieval saint sense. One is his Filofax appointments diary, open at the week in which he died in 2010, now mounted in a box as if it were just as much a considered artwork as his huge paintings of crosses and sunflowers. It is art as souvenirs of a life. Which is one way of describing all art.

I wear his silver velvet suit, the one that his girlfriend Rachel Garley picked out for me. Rachel is there herself, as is Ms Manko and Jason Atomic – people I knew from my Kash Point days. A few people say hello who read my blog, which is always nice. Particularly when they buy me drinks. Someone says the suit makes me look like… (wait for it)…  ‘David Bowie during the Serious Moonlight tour’.

***

Monday 18 June:  one of the buttons on The Sebastian Shirt has broken, its plastic clasp split. So today I look for a replacement. In his book (and in the Tim Fountain stage play), Sebastian quips about needing covered buttons because ‘there’s nothing so rude as an uncovered button’.

It is only now that I realise just what the phrase ‘covered button’ truly means. It means that not only has the shirt been handmade, but the buttons have been handmade too, covered with the same material as the shirt. I don’t think I can cut a piece off the shirt to do this – that feels rather wrong. It is, after all, made by Turnball and Asser, shirtmakers to The Prince Of Wales.

So, seeking a replacement, I take the broken button to John Lewis. They’re not much use, as they deal only in the uncovered sort.  Then to The Button Queen shop in Marylebone Lane. They are very nice but they send me away to hunt down a ribbon of matching material first. This feels too much like hard work. I like errands to be self-contained and finite, not to give birth to further errands with no end in sight.

Taylors Buttons in Cleveland Street saves the day. The business has been going for over 100 years, and the lady who runs it, Maureen Rose, has herself owned the shop for 60 years.

Ms Rose suspects correctly that I want the problem solved with zero further effort on my part. She finds some white material in a bag and makes me a replacement button on the spot. It takes her about two minutes, and she charges me £1.

News story about Maureen Rose here.

***

Evening: to the Wheatsheaf pub in Fitzrovia, for a book event hosted by the Sohemian Society. Cathi Unsworth talks to Laura Del-Rivo about her wonderful 1961 novel of bohemian Soho life, The Furnished Room. Ms Del-Rivo describes the sense of needing to find other bohemians in her youth vividly – the sheer relief at discovering the shared houses and bars where there were people like her. These days all one needs to find people as strange as oneself is just to go on the Internet; back then, you had to move house.

Afterwards I chat with Travis Elborough in the alleyway outside. Suddenly a taxi drives through – Ms Del-Rivo and the rest of us have to stand aside – and out gets Ben Goldacre, who is a kind of Cult Author of today. He happens to be on his way to something nearby, but stops for a quick chat. It’s all Very London – different worlds of writers, different interests, but always colliding.

Another Very London moment is when I arrive before the talk and join Travis as he chats to a blond woman. I’d assumed she was some friend of his. In fact he’d arrived by himself, and has known her about five minutes; it’s just that the atmosphere is of such unabashed and open friendliness, the kind people might associate more with New York. Halfway through the event, she is sitting with us when, without a word, she gets up and leaves and is never seen again.

A line from The Furnished Room (paraphrasing), which seems Very London, 50s and now:

‘But what exactly are you looking for?’

‘Something to look for.’

***

The Furnished Room has just been republished by Five Leaves, available here. Highly recommended.

I love this photo of Laura Del-Rivo, taken by Ida Kar in the early 60s:

Some unrecorded recent activity.

27 May: I attend the BAFTA TV awards at the Royal Festival Hall. Ms Sarah D has tickets to the public gallery, and I’m curious, so I go.

The public ticket holders get to walk the red carpet on the way in, though in this instance the carpet is a red, white and blue jigsaw pattern, which as someone points out looks the opening credits to Dad’s Army after a bad drug trip. The public attendees are asked to arrive before the proper guests, and then are kept upstairs in a kind of apartheid section. There’s a separate balcony bar and stewards preventing you from going downstairs into the main stalls area, in case – shock horror – you dare to speak to the scriptwriter of The Fades. Don’t touch the TV people!

But even famous names are not necessarily famous faces. On getting his award for writing and directing This Is England ’88, Shane Meadows makes a semi-jokey comment that no one asked for his autograph on the red carpet.  It’s funny how the BAFTAs mix this British take on Oscars glamour, celebrating the celebrated, with giving the actual awards to non-famous creative types. People in the public gallery shout and scream when Sherlock‘s  Benedict Cumberbatch comes on with Doctor Who’s Matt Smith (to present the head writer of both shows, Steven Moffat, with a special award), but otherwise most of the awards are for less well known programmes like Appropriate Adult, Random, Borgen and The Fades. Then there’s awards for harrowing documentaries (like the Terry Pratchett euthanasia report), followed by ones for mindless drivel like Celebrity Juice, which baffingly beats Sherlock to the You Tube Audience Award. Still, that’s the variety of television. What makes it worthwhile is seeing what makes the televised version and what doesn’t.  Terry Pratchett and Stewart Lee in particular have their speeches cut down, and one wonders who decides such things, and what their rules are.

They give you special BAFTA chocolates, in the shape of the trophy:

photo by Paul @bitoclass on Twitter

***

Weekend of June 2nd: more celebrations where some people are marked out as intrinsically better than others: the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Four days of it: Saturday to Tuesday. On the one rain-free day I attend a street party across the road in Highgate Avenue, and meet some of my neighbours for the first time since I moved here. Which was eighteen years ago. The street is closed off, there’s trestle tables with drinks (I do my bit and add a bottle of wine) and there’s the ubiquitous Union Jack bunting dangling from street lamps. Small girls play hopscotch in the road, which is covered with chalk scribbles. It all looks very 1950s, till one reads some of the words the children write on the tarmac: ‘RIHANNA‘.

On the flotilla day there’s lots of people on the tube in soggy ponchos and Union Jack bowler hats, looking drenched yet perfectly happy. Some of my more republican friends find the Jubilee nauseating and in bad taste (particularly in a recession), and some even move out of the city till it’s all over. In my fence-sitting way, I inwardly support the republicans’ point, but I also recognise that plenty of people like the Jubilee events. I find myself enjoying the spectacle of the flotilla of boats (particularly the bit with the War Horse puppet on the National Theatre roof), and I love the  fireworks show at the end of the big pop concert (writing that, I sound like I’m the Queen’s age myself. I might as well be).

Where do I draw the line? I suppose it’s at the moment where someone at the street party asks me – very nicely – if I’d like a little Union Jack tattoo put on the side of my face.

No. Thank you, but no. I suppose that’s the limit of my tolerance for anything. Facial decoration.

Quick notice for UK readers.

If you think the UK law should be changed to allow gay couples to marry, please say so in the consultation at Out4marriage.com.

It’s essentially a questionnaire that takes about two minutes to click through. But the government will use the results, so it’s important.

What interests me in particular is that the current Home Secretary, the right wing Theresa May, is one of the pro-gay marriage campaigners. In the past she voted against equalising the ages of consent for gay people, and also voted against the repealing of the anti-gay Clause 28. But people change, and times change. There’s much about the current lot in power that worries me but this is at least one commendable state of affairs.

***

‘What a disgraceful lapse! Nothing added to my disquisition, and life allowed to waste like a tap left running. Eleven days unrecorded.’ – Virginia Woolf, from her diaries.

This appropriate quote managed to pop up in two very different books I’ve been reading: Alexandra Harris’s short biography of Ms Woolf, and Alison Bechdel’s comic book memoir Are You My Mother? 

Since my exam on May 22nd, which ended my first year as a born-again student, I’ve found myself wanting to get more books read. It’s the Deathbed Regrets test again: I imagine myself suddenly on my deathbed and think ‘if life ended now, what would I most regret not having done?’.

I never think, ‘I wish I’d read more newspapers and magazines.’

I never think, ‘I wish I’d spent more time on Twitter and Facebook.’

And I never think, ‘I wish I’d read more comments left underneath articles on the Internet.’

All of which I fear I’ve been doing too much of over the past year or so. What I do think is, ‘I wish I’d read more books’.  Particularly with the English Lit degree; it seems hypocritical to spend time reading ephemeral stuff online that I could have used on a book.  And I’m not convinced I even enjoy being on Twitter for very long or that I’m good at it. So I’ve been setting myself a goal of reading at least 150 pages of a book a day. For a dyspraxic reader like myself, that’s achievable. It might also help to increase my reading speed.

Another rule I’ve set myself is ‘one book at a time’ – no double-booking. I know many people read several books at once, but in my case it just leads to books not being finished.

I’m also trying to balance set texts for next year’s course with books for pleasure, mixing prose with comic books, fiction with non-fiction, favourite authors with unfamiliar ones, and classics with brand new releases. And it really works: the variety makes all the difference.

So since May 22nd, here’s what I’ve read, in order, with links to my reviews on the GoodReads website (a kind of non-Amazon global book group, which if nothing else helps to remind you what you’ve read).

Goodbye To Soho by Clayton Littlewood (memoir)
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams (novel)
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (novel)
Virginia Woolf by Alexandra Harris (biography)
Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel (comic book memoir)
The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes (novel)

The sun has been white-hot; perfect weather for hiding in air-conditioned cinemas. Though, as I found out, this is something of a minority view.

Saw Avengers Assemble at the Muswell Hill Odeon. First screening of the afternoon, and I was the only person there. The film is enjoyable enough, though I felt rather acutely that it wasn’t made for the likes of me. I have a low tolerance level for big glossy fight scenes and battles, and was rather hoping the choice of director, Joss Whedon, would mean such scenes would be broken up with lots of snappy quips and self-aware banter; that was really what I went to see the film for. I’m a big fan of his work in the Buffy and Angel TV series, and enjoyed Serenity, his last film as a director.

As it turns out, though, the Avengers film does rather expect the viewer to be less of a Whedon fan and more of a Marvel fan, and particularly a fan of the recent Marvel films like Iron Man, Captain America and Thor, none of which I’ve seen. However, Tom Hiddleston as the villain Loki is particularly Whedonesque: arch in a fun way,  hammy but in a knowing way. It seems slightly unfair that a team of superheroes has to fight a single supervillain, as it means the screen time for each hero is necessarily reduced, while Loki gets to do scenes throughout. Though it’s no spoiler to say that the goodies beat the baddie, in terms of attention the baddie ultimately triumphs.

Then the next day to see Barbaric Genius at the Odeon Panton Street. First screening of the day, but this time there was another sunshine-dodger in the cinema. And I enjoyed Barbaric Genius about twice as much as Avengers Assemble too: it’s rather more my sort of thing. A low-budget,  feature-length Irish-made documentary, it tells the story of John Healy, a London-born Irishman who survives an abusive childhood and years of sleeping rough in London to become – unexpectedly – a chess champion and then an acclaimed author. His late 80s memoir The Grass Arena is hailed by some critics as one of the greatest autobiographies full stop. But then the rags-to-riches story goes into reverse. He falls out with the publishers (Faber), they force his book out of print and – the film alleges – he becomes blacklisted by the London literary establishment. He writes other books, but no publisher will touch them.

One theory is that, despite his writing talent, Healy’s background and class prevents him from properly connecting with the city’s very middle class literary world. But although the film is very much on Healy’s side, it doesn’t let him off the hook. In the film, he mocks the cut-glass tones of the woman who phoned him to say he’d won the JR Ackerley Prize for Autobiography.  A publishing chief who doesn’t come across well is contrasted with a perfectly kind woman at Faber who liked him as a person – even when he was making threats of violence – and tried to protect him. A young man at Penguin also comes out well: in 2008 he reads The Grass Arena, and gets it republished as a Penguin Classic. The point is made that a good book deserves to be read, and once an author has proved their worth, their unpublished work should at least be given a chance.

Seems strange to note, but the technical quality of Barbaric Genius is actually superior to Avengers Assemble, at least in terms of the screenings I attend. The Avengers flick is in 3D, and I’m frequently irritated by bits of fuzziness and out-of-focusness that appear on the screen, presumably some sort of 3D side-effect. Perhaps it’s the Odeon Muswell Hill’s fault, or it’s to do with having to wear my own glasses underneath the 3D specs. Either way, it affects my enjoyment of the film, and I make a mental note to seek out 2D screenings next time. The novelty of 21st century 3D films has well and truly worn off. Not only does 3D add little to the filmgoing experience, but in cases like this it makes the experience worse.

That said, I’m looking forward to seeing the new Great Gatsby 3D, because it’s just the sort of film that one expects to not be made that way.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past… INTO YOUR FACE!”