A binge of Alice In Wonderlands during the last week. First, I see the new Tim Burton take at the Muswell Hill Odeon, then off to the NFT for the 1933 talkie with Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle and WC Fields as Humpty Dumpty. This bill also includes the 1903, 8 minute long British silent adaptation by Percy Stow – with a live piano player doing the score. Finally, back to the NFT a few days later for Dreamchild, the 1985 portrait of Alice Liddell aged 80, with a script by Dennis Potter and creatures by Jim Henson.

Links between the 1903 and 2010 versions: both Percy Stow and Tim Burton insist on squeezing a dog into the proceedings, the one obvious animal that Lewis Carroll left out. Burton has a bloodhound voiced by Timothy Spall, while Stow has a nameless ‘Dog’ that Alice meets along the way, clearly the family pet muscling in. The mutt in question became a massive star in the proto-Lassie adventure ‘Rescued By Rover’, a huge international hit in 1905, and according to the BFI ‘possibly the only point in film history when British cinema unquestionably led the world.’ The Brits have always been good with dogs.

The 1903 Cheshire Cat is hilarious: a real cat – probably the family pet again – looking immensely annoyed while superimposed on a hedge, as Alice gesticulates around it by way of reaction.

I enjoy the Burton overall, though I bristle at the Carroll characters crowbarred into a regulation third-act structure, with a Big Final Battle at the end, two armies and a Tolkein-ish Jabberwock dragon voiced by Christopher Lee begging comparison with the Lord Of The Rings films. A comparison which is not going to do it favours. It’s also a sequel with a misleading title: it really should be called ‘Return To Wonderland’.

I saw a recent TV interview with Mr Burton, where he said he needed a proper story structure, as Carroll’s books are just a series of surreal encounters. Well, yes, but there is still a story: Alice is chasing the White Rabbit to find out what he’s late for, while trying to find her way out. That’s story enough. It was good enough to get generations of readers turning the page (or not checking their watch).

Whereas at the Muswell Hill Odeon I notice several children getting restless, with their mothers checking the time on their phones – that tell-tale flash of light in the stalls. All that expensive spectacle and colour, all those big names doing the voices (Barbara Windsor as a swash-buckling dormouse!), it shouldn’t sag for a second, but at times it really does. Still, the lead actress is one of the best live action Alices yet, while the actual tumble down the rabbit hole is as fresh and exciting as any – with a grand piano falling after her.

The 1933 black and white take is more faithful, conflating scenes from both the books while adding a few inspired ones: the Dodo dries off Alice from her swim in the pool of tears, by reciting ‘dry’ facts from history at her. The actors wear grotesque rubbery masks, even for the human-like characters like the Duchess. Alice is a rather bland American incarnation, something referred to in the other film I see. In Dreamchild, the 80-year-old Alice Liddell manages to secure a cut of the 1933 movie’s budget, in return for her endorsement. ‘But Alice can’t be American’, a British fan complains in the scene.

Dreamchild is more of a spin-off than an adaptation. But it certainly is one of the most emotional and thought-provoking dramas connected with the material. The Jim Henson creatures are straight out of The Dark Crystal – sinister and ambiguous. The tale of the aged Alice Liddell in 1930s New York is interspersed with flashbacks to Victorian Oxford, portraying the relationship between Ian Holm’s Lewis Carroll and the pre-pubescent Liddell, along with sequences from the books with the Jim Henson creations. And as it’s Dennis Potter, there’s lots of lovely 1930s songs, themes of ambiguity, sexuality, and the merging of memory with fantasy.

The film dares to celebrate that the books were a gift of love from a lonely bachelor to a little girl: something that was already pretty controversial in 1985. We see Alice’s mother tearing up Carroll’s letters to the child, before he gets a kind of redemption, as the 80-year-old Liddell finally accepts his feelings for what they were. We see her younger self cross over to him during a picnic on the riverbank, to give him a chaste but fond hug of thanks. It’s a powerful moment, and I wonder if it’d be harder to make such a film now.

A quotation from a Peanuts cartoon. Lucy is giving advice to Charlie Brown at her little wooden psychiatrist stall:

Lucy: Charlie Brown, life is like a deck chair on a cruise ship. Passengers open up these canvas deck chairs so they can sit in the sun. Some people place their chairs facing the rear of the ship so they can see where they’ve been. Other people face their chairs forward – they want to see where they’re going. On the cruise ship of life, which way is your deck chair facing?

Charlie Brown: I’ve never been able to get one unfolded.

I note this today because it’s on a programme about politicians being funny. Denis Healey used it in the Commons to describe John Major.

***

While wondering about my own creative direction, I find myself drawn to an article in Spin magazine. It’s about people who used to be in bands – though far more celebrated than mine – before giving up music altogether. Justine from Elastica is now an abstract painter in California, having married a university professor. Once the Queen of Britpop, she says she ‘wanted out of England’ and has no plans to return to music. ‘That’s the great thing about anonymity,’ she says. ‘You have the freedom to reinvent yourself.’ An attractive, dignified sentiment, but it has the air of regret. That music was a mistake, and she’s much better now.

It’s certainly true of her former bandmate Donna, who went from being one of those people who take heroin while making music, to just taking heroin, to getting clean, and now – an equally familiar path – finding God. She’s a trainee priest at the Ichthus Link Church. ‘I realised how selfish I’d been.’ Is making music really more selfish than being a priest, if you’re having hit albums? I wonder here about the ‘selfishness’ of band reunions, too. But then, all decisions are selfishness of a kind. Charity can be vanity, too.

Tanya Donelly of Belly (and Throwing Muses, and The Breeders) is now a postpartum doula. Which I had to look up. It’s a sort of post-birth non-medical midwife. She says she found the rock band life incompatible with being a mother. I was going to say, well, Courtney Love managed it, didn’t she? Bad example.

My favourite quote, though, is from Miki Berenyi, formerly the singer with Lush and now a copy editor at Web User Magazine:

‘My job now isn’t as fun or exciting as it was to be in a band, but on the other hand, I don’t have to worry about complete strangers approaching me and telling me I’m a c—.’

This is what’s now known as Tall Poppy Syndrome. It’s particularly associated when contrasting the UK with the US, hence Ms Justine’s solution. But in my case, I’ll always attract that sort of thing, recognition or no. Even when I’m trying my hardest to seem normal.

Last week I was taking a break between bleachings and walked around the city with cropped dark-brown hair. I was also wearing my glasses, which I thought must surely have made me even more invisible. Fat chance. Two girls on the Archway Road:

‘OY! Harry Potter!’

(Once more unto the bleach…)

A quick alert. This Saturday 20th I shall be Guest DJ at the club night How Does It Feel To Be Loved, which plays C86-type 80s indiepop (and compatible current bands like Cats On Fire and The Drums) alongside 1960s soul and girl group pop. Mr Watson who runs the club has asked me back there once a year or so for the last seven years, and I always enjoy myself thoroughly. Expect songs by McCarthy, Felt, early Prefab Sprout, The Pastels, and whatever takes my fancy at that moment.

Club Night: How Does It Feel To Be Loved?
When: Saturday March 20th, 9pm-3am. I’m DJ-ing at 10.30pm, finishing midnight.
Venue: Basement bar, The Phoenix, 37 Cavendish Square, London W1G 0PP. Behind John Lewis in Oxford Street. A short walk from Oxford Circus tube station.
Price: £4 members, £6 non members. Membership is free from www.howdoesitfeel.co.uk

***

The NME has just published a list of 20 cult musical heroes, including Dan Treacy, Richard Hell, Alex Chilton (who’s just died, sadly) and Billy Childish. Their blog asks for readers’ own choices, and among the comments someone – presumably a foreign fan – says this:

…one who might deserve attention in NME, Mojo…et al is Dickon Edwards of Fosca! Its about time NME makes a huge special about Fosca, not even Pitchfork has found out what really could be a hype with enough deep to survive the attention.

By ‘enough deep’, I’m guessing they mean lyrical depth. Very kind of them, anyway.

Realistically – not an adverb that trots convincingly from my lips – I doubt very much that the UK music press will ever write about Fosca between now and the heat-death of the universe. I think Fosca are – were – just too wrong-sounding for many. If it wasn’t the lyrics, it was my wrong voice, or the wrong musical format, or the wrong production. But then, all I hoped for was to record those songs and release them into the wild. And I did that.

Seems hypocritical to write about being arch and strange and expect large amounts of perfectly well-adjusted people to connect with that. There’s a reason why Ronald Firbank is constantly out-of-print while Saki isn’t: uncompromising archness needs to be at just the right level of uncompromising. Saki’s characters were effete and haughty and dandyish, but he wasn’t at all like that in person: he ended up in command of troops in WW1. Firbank, meanwhile, was so arch he could barely stand up. It’s okay to be weird, as long as you’re capable and functional and productive with it. That’s the part I often struggle with.

That said, I have my more useful moments. I’m the dandy handyman, as Mr Ant never sang. The other day I unblocked the communal shower’s nozzles from a build-up of limescale, saving my landlady from calling in a plumber.

I used a long, jewelled cravat pin.

Whenever anyone lets me have a play on their iPhone or Blackberry or similar handheld do-everything gadget, I find myself searching for excuses not to like it. ‘My fingers are too large – it’s too fiddly’, I say. Or ‘It’s too expensive – I’d only lose it or have it stolen.’

The real reason is that I fear I’d never put the thing down once I bought it. I do have a mobile phone, deliberately chosen for its cheapness and ugliness. So I find myself switching it off most of the time, and I often leave it at home altogether when I go out. Which rather defeats the object of a mobile phone, but if the alternative is to be one of those people who never put their phone away at all – and I fear I would be – then it’s for the best.

Actually, I realise it’s increasingly strange in the city to NOT have one’s phone to hand all the time. So I’m hoping I can just work this omission into my image of a fogeyish weirdo not entirely in phase with the world.

I do have a vade mecum, though: a pocket notebook and pen (either a traditional-sized Moleskine or a passport-sized Moleskine Cahier, depending on the jacket). In fact, the other night I was standing in the audience at a cabaret event, jotting down notes, when an audience member pounced on me. What was I writing, he demanded to know. And who was I, anyway?

Had I been using a phone to take photos or record video, or to update Twitter or Facebook, I’m convinced his interest would not have been piqued. Tapping at a shiny, glowing gadget in public is now an invisible act. Writing discreetly in a paper notebook, meanwhile, is more likely to attract attention by the laws of scarcity value. Though admittedly I often draw the attention of strangers anyway, and the notebook may well have been an excuse.

Today Harper Collins announced they’re publishing Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall as an application for the iPhone, bundling it with video interviews of the author by way of extras. My initial reaction was to wonder how many people actually read whole novels on a mobile phone. Then again, I had similar doubts ten years ago when MP3s started to appear, and I was convinced that listening to music through a computer would never catch on.

But that was before the era of the iPod. Portability is everything. iPhones, Kindles and iPads are thin and light, and until now Wolf Hall was only available in hardback – one the size of a house brick.

(Actually, I can remember when mobile phones were like house bricks, too.)

The author Christopher Fowler wrote in his blog recently that he hoped the e-book revolution would see publishers catering for people who still prefer paper books, but who don’t have the kind of biceps for carrying fat doorstoppers as we saunter about town. He suggests they put out cheap paperback editions at the same time as the hardback, as small and as slim as production can manage (maybe Gideon Bible-thin paper). He cited a limited edition of Susanna Clarke’s epic Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, published in one edition as a set of three thinner, more portable paperbacks, reminiscent of those Victorian multi-volume novels. Count me in.

Until then, I have to admit being attracted to ebooks purely out of lack of butchness.

Sunday: with Ms Silke to the NFT, now rebranded as the ‘BFI Southbank’. Though all the signs around Waterloo and the South Bank still point to the National Film Theatre. We see ‘To Be Or Not To Be’, the original 1942 version with Carole Lombard and Jack Benny. Pleased to discover that many jokes I’d assumed were added by Mel Brooks in his 80s remake are in fact in the original, like Hitler saying ‘Heil myself.’ It’s one thing to make jokes about Nazis in Poland, quite another to do so while it was all still going on – and when it looked like they were winning. The opening sequence – a lone Hitler suddenly appearing on the streets of Warsaw in early 1939, stopping traffic and getting shocked stares from the crowd, while underscored by a wry newsreel narration – is just wonderful.

Afterwards to the ICA bar for Stephen Harwood’s birthday cocktails, repairing after that to the Retro Bar in the Strand. Both unchanged for years, though the ICA is in trouble. There’s news afoot of debts, redundancies, threats of closure and general angry finger-pointing at ICA boss Ekow Eshun. Were it down to me, I’d appeal to the Queen and Prince Charles about the rules stopping the ICA putting up adverts, or indeed any indication there’s something going on at all, on the building exterior on the Mall (close to Buckingham Palace). Many passers-by aren’t even aware they’re walking past a famous arts centre. A friendly, classy redesign of the ICA’s logo and all its advertising is equally overdue – the kind which rejuvenated the Barbican a few years ago.

I’d also redo the bar and corridors to give it a more cosy, ornate salon and club feel: red walls, drapes, Greek columns, ferns, mirrors, artists’ tiles, plush chairs and sofas. An ICA to out-Palace the Palace. I’ve been a guest of Buck House myself, and much as I was grateful for my mother’s MBE, I did think HMQ’s place could have done with a bar. So that’s my ‘vision’ for the ICA, if Mr Yentob is reading (again). Make it the New Palace Of Glittering Art (With Special Offers On Cocktails).

***

Ms Silke has a Joe Orton-style montage of photos and clippings on her wall. Favourite actors, rock stars and writers are mixed in with her friends and relations. She’s put a photo of me between Lord Alfred Douglas, Richey Manic and Lassie.

Some things I really should plug.

Mr MacGowan has made a charity record for Haiti, featuring his friends Nick Cave, Johnny Depp, Bobby Gillespie, Chryssie Hynde, Paloma Faith and others. It’s a rather devilish version of ‘I Put A Spell On You’, and comes out on March 8th. Proceeds go to Concern, the Dublin-based humanitarian organisation which has been working in Haiti since 1994.

YouTube video of the song
Facebook group
Digital download pre-order page

***
I’ve written a piece on pseudonyms for the New Escapologist magazine, issue 3. Purchasing info at www.new-escapologist.co.uk.

It’s a superb issue, focusing on up-to-date ways of ‘escaping’ the soul-destroying aspects of modern life, without quite going entirely ‘off grid’, as they say. Editor Rob Wringham talks about how he effortlessly moved from Glasgow to Montreal, where he seems to be having an entirely nice time of things. Turns out Montreal’s cost of living is half the amount it is in Glasgow.

In fact, more than a few bohemian friends have been making the big leap abroad of late – with Berlin being a particularly popular New World for modern Impuritans.

Val G, DJ and promoter of London indie club nights like The Fanclub for some years, has just moved to Hong Kong, pretty much for good. ‘London’s dead’, she said.

Well, it’s certainly dead expensive. Tube and bus fares have gone up, for a start. Even if an event is free, getting there and back and buying a drink or two still prohibits going out much more than once a fortnight, if one is on the dole, that is. Money just keeps running out, whatever I do.

Much to my chagrin, I’ve had to sign up for a Job Centre job search programme, a mental health-based one. They want me to prepare a CV, which for me is the stuff of pure science fiction. ‘Just put down everything,’ they said.

What about the time, I muse, I was hired to be the only UK performer at the Stockholm International Poetry Festival? Or my engagement as guest of honour for an exhibition on male fashion, at a museum in The Hague? That was work I was considered qualified to do, after all – and head-hunted for it internationally. Those two invitations felt like achievements, that I was Of Use To The World, which is what a CV is meant to be about. But I rather think a typing speed of 45 words per minute (on a good day) is all that’s applicable.

And I’m trying very hard not to add ‘Works Badly As Part Of A Team’, ‘Copes Badly Under Pressure’, and ‘Isn’t Very Good With People.’

As for emigration, much as I love London, if I did suddenly get an offer of an income abroad – Stockholm, say – I’d move like a shot. But I’m not holding my breath. Trying to stay sane, sheltered and fed is at present, ambition enough.

Sometime last December. A knock at the door. It’s two members of the Jesus & Mary Chain, wanting help with some heavy lifting.

One, Phil King (JAMC bassist at their reunion gigs, including the Coachella one with Scarlett Johansson), has just moved in next door. The other, John Moore (JAMC drummer 1986-1988), hasn’t. Though Mr Moore was once meant to share a Cambridge hotel room with me, and instead decided to sleep on Rowan Pelling’s floor. I didn’t take it personally.

I give them a hand with unloading the car outside – Indie Band Removals, at your service. Am particularly impressed with one of Mr K’s possessions: a framed poster for the 70s film The Final Programme. That’s as cult as cult movies come: a Michael Moorcock adaption featuring the dandyish Jerry Cornelius.  I saw it on TV years ago, and vividly recall the ending: our hero merges with a woman during sex, then walks off into the sunset as a kind of hermaphrodite ape. As must we all.

Messrs King and Moore play together in the John Moore Rock & Roll Trio, whom I enjoy that same December evening, at the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury. The club night is called ‘You Fill Me With Inertia’, which is a Peter Cook quote from Bedazzled. More cult movies.

While I’m watching the band – and they really do perform your actual vintage rock and roll – a woman comes up to me. ‘I just wanted to tell you how cool you look. Though I know I’m drunk.’

Phil King’s been in so many bands, but one he actually fronted, The Apple Boutique, are having their ultra-rare Creation single ‘Love Resistance’ reissued this very month. Phil’s shown me his copy – a desirable little 3-inch CD. It’s highly jangly, blissful, 12-string guitar-smothered, Go Betweens-y summer pop. Video and more details here.

Recently, I bumped into Phil outside my door, as neighbours do. Though instead of attempts to borrow cups of sugar (did anyone ever do that?), our conversation tends to be like this:

Him: Hi, how are you?

Me: Okay. I’m writing a piece for a fanzine about Felt & Denim.

Him: So am I. Probably the same fanzine.

(It is)

Me: I’m talking about how my band Orlando once covered a rare Denim song at a gig, ‘I Will Cry At Christmas’. It was on the Denim demo, and sounds suspiciously like a left over Felt number.

Him: Oh yes, I remember Lawrence coming into rehearsal with that one.

Which I think is called being trumped.

For the piece I was writing, I watched the video of Felt’s classic Primitive Painters on YouTube. It’s only now that I realise that the one who isn’t the singer is my next door neighbour.

All of which is of no real interest, except when playing Six Degrees Of Dickon Edwards.

[Medical note: First day on a new SSRI prescription. Citalopram. 20mg daily.]

I’m writing this in a brand new bespoke cashmere suit. Wool & cashmere, to be precise, but the cashmere’s definitely there. Just as Alan Partridge shouted ‘Cashback!’ as an exclamation of success, I hereby nominate a dandy variation: ‘Cashmere!’

The suit is by Charlie Collingwood, a young tailor who’s just set up his own business in London, Henry Herbert.  ‘It’d be nice if you could say something in your blog. Assuming you like the suit, that is.’

Can’t argue with that. Turns out that if you Google ‘London’ and ‘tailors’ and ‘suits’ – or something like that – you get my diary pretty high up in the results. Though I’m hardly going to turn this into a full-on review blog, it’s nice to occasionally be of some use to doers and makers I approve of.

(By the way, Googling me today reveals I apparently co-wrote an article on John Mortimer in the Independent. It says so on IMDB. A few more clicks, and it turns out I was in fact quoted by the newspaper in a ‘what the blogs say’ piece on his death.)

So: my new cashmere suit. Charlie first measured me up in his Savile Row office then let me choose the fabric from a selection of swatch books, along with the lining. I felt I needed a ‘dinner party and premieres’ number in black, and hadn’t had cashmere before, so I went for that, along with the usual bespoke tailor’s options: choosing the shape of pockets, number of buttons on the jacket and cuffs, type of vent at the back of the jacket, turn-ups on the trousers or not, and so on.

A few weeks after that he called me in so I could try on the ‘baste’. This is the draft version of the suit, with dotted white lines around the stitching as seen in umpteen old movies. Not all modern tailors do the baste process, so I was rather delighted by this bit in itself. Another six weeks or so later, the suit arrived in a bespoke cardboard box, illustrated with dozens of silhouettes of vintage-looking besuited men in various poses: hailing taxis, reading newspapers, but also typing at a laptop. And above all, getting the vintage feel just right: stylish, timeless, versatile.

Charlie’s two key selling points, his friendliness aside, are his use of entirely British-sourced materials, along with the fact that he delivers them via scooter, in true Quadrophenia Mod style.

There’s a feature on him in the Evening Standard here.

Henry Herbert Tailors have a website at www.henryherbert.com, with a Twitter account here.

I’ve been wearing the suit for a few weeks now. It’s a work of beauty. I’d ask strangers to stroke me and feel the cashmere-iness of it, if such a request didn’t risk misinterpretation.

Hooray for Henry Herbert. May their scooters go forth and beautify.

A few days into the New Year: with Dad to Somerset House Ice Rink. A favourite spot at this time of year, though we always go as spectators in the cafe, never as skaters.

We also drop into the Norman Parkinson exhibition, A Very British Glamour. Stunning photos of ladies from vintage fashion mags. But Parkinson also had a thing for combining beauty with humour, often putting his models in unexpected poses and locations.

In one early 50s shot, his wife and muse Wanda, looking immaculate in a cashmere twin-set, sits in a rural working man’s pub, seemingly playing shove ha’penny with a flat-capped old regular. An unlikely story.

Another, The Young Look In The Theatre (1953), depicts a gaggle of up and coming stage actresses of the day. I love all the different types of outfits, hinting at what the actresses think of their own real life personae. Some casual, some up-to-the-minute fashionable, some timeless and classic, some girlish, some noble, some vampish, some womanly, some motherly.

(Clicking on the photo takes you to a much larger version on the Christie’s website, with a click-and-zoom facility)

The exhibition doesn’t list who’s who, frustratingly. So I get on the Net and find out for myself.

Top row (upside down, the old wag): Norman Parkinson himself.

Middle row (on the bars, left to right): Virginia McKenna, Elizabeth Henson, Patricia McCarron, Josephine Griffin.

Bottom row (standing, left to right): Hazel Penwarden, Zena Walker, Yvonne Furneaux, Jill Bennett, Patricia Owens, Ruth Trouncer.

I also love one Vogue portrait of Enid Boutling, model and wife of the film director Roy. Captioned ‘Impertinence (1950)‘, she’s wearing a dandyish suit with a cropped hair, a stand-offish glare, and – shock horror – is smoking a cigarette without a holder. Regarded as very daring at the time, at least for Vogue.

Another favourite is of Audrey Hepburn with a baby donkey. Parkinson clearly punning on the ‘what an adorable creature’ response.

Am back in the Highgate bedsit after three weeks flat-sitting in Crouch End. No more cat to look after me.

Somewhat taken aback by the contrast in heating. In the flat, there was a boiler and radiators and the knowledge that I didn’t have to pay the heating bill. Back here I have just my little electric fan heater for the room. Which used to be fine, except that Highgate, like most of the UK, is currently in the grip of a proper winter spell. I sit here at my desk still wearing my winter coat, with the fan heater on full right by my toes, and still I shiver. During the night I don two old t-shirts plus my old jogging bottoms (noting that it’s about time I bought some pyjamas), position the heater right by the bed, and still I’m freezing.

Tonight, then: blankets. And I’ve just bought some M&S pyjamas – first time since my teens. I chose the ones that looked the most like hand-me-downs from a Matthew Bourne ballet. I can’t be bothered working out if pyjamas on grown men are stylish or not. They are on me, and that’s an end to it.

***

During the day I spend as much time in heated public buildings as possible. Library, cafes, shops. Quite the opposite of being ‘snowed in’: the snow helps to get me out of bed (7am) and out of the house. Highgate like Crouch End still looks like Narnia, the snow crunching pleasingly underfoot, but central London is utterly, hilariously devoid of the stuff. A sense of the capital saying to the snow ‘Don’t you know who I AM? Don’t you DARE fall on me. I’m a Very Important City Centre.’

***

In the London Library toilets, one member walks straight from the cubicles back into the library without washing his hands. This is something that many men do which utterly appalls me. If he’d been a recognizable author, like more than a few LL members, I’d instinctively feel like naming him here and urging the world to boycott his books. But then I remember about WH Auden and his peeing in the sink (as brought up in the new Alan Bennett play). Not an excuse, but a reminder to trust the art, never the artist. Particularly the piss artist. Readers of my own work might like to note that I always wash my hands after visiting the lavatory. Whatever you think of it, it has been written by properly cleansed hands.

***

Packing away the Christmas decorations, I notice that 2009’s Christmas seems to have brought me more Christmas cards than I’ve had for years: 30 to 40 of them. In this digital world, it feels even more special. I know I go on about my love of getting proper handwritten letters and cards, but actually getting them is something else. Thank you, all those responsible. One favourite is from the band The Real Tuesday Weld. It contains a little 3-inch CD EP of the band. I’d forgotten how lovely 3-inch CDs were. Favourite track: ‘Plastic Please’, featuring the Puppini Sisters. It’s a fanbase mailout, but singer Stephen has handwritten a greeting to me: ‘To Dickon. Keep Dreaming.’ Which makes all the difference.

***

I see in the New Year by DJ-ing at White Mischief at the Proud Cabaret venue off Fenchurch Street. Lots of gorgeous dressed-up people, and fantastic live acts, particularly Frisky & Mannish, plus The Correspondents, who do a real 1910-meets-2010 techno rap set, merging cravats and waistcoats with what looks like skinny emo leggings. My own highlight is helping to locate a burlesque Judy Garland’s detachable plait. That says it all.