My little necessary evil – my mobile phone – is doing its utmost to sabotage life and generally vex me. It’s frequently insisting that it can’t connect to a network. In the middle of London. Thing is, I don’t know whether it’s the cheap Motorola W377 phone or the O2 Pay As You Don’t Go SIM card that’s to blame. I’m tempted to just hurl the thing into the Thames and be done with it. It does remind me how much we take these gadgets for granted. The minute they break down – that’s it, party cancelled. At least, the more impromptu type of party.

And how very 2008  I’m left with a phone that can take a photograph, or play Sudoku, but which can’t make or receive a phone call.

I would like to heartily endorse a different gadget, though. I’m writing this entry on a brand new Samsung NC10 ‘netbook’, or ‘ultra-portable’ mini-laptop. It’s like a Travel Scrabble version of a normal computer: half the size, half the weight, yet the keyboard is close to full size. Which was the ‘deal breaker’ for me: writing on a Blackberry or anything smaller is just too fiddly. Thebattery seems to lasts forever, and as is typical with these things, the hard drive is actually three times the capacity of my iBook, just because it’s been made three years later. Oh, and at half the cost – £299.

Because the iBook is just that little bit too heavy to lug around when travelling – or at least, too heavy for me – I’d had my sights on a mini-laptop for months. As soon as I can afford it, I promised myself. Of course, the day I COULD finally afford it – after my first pay cheque with the new job – the device I was after effectively obsolete.

‘But I thought the Asus Eee won all the awards for Best Little Computer Of The Year,’ I protested to the shop assistant.

‘It did,’ he replied. ‘But that was a month ago. This is the next one.’

It IS very cute, though…

***
A recent Sunday. Lawrence G’s last day before deportation. I meet him in Marine Ices, Chalk Farm, along with Talulah and David R-P. Even though it’s him that’s leaving, I come away with presents: flowers and scarves.

In the Gents toilets, what looks at first like a folded-up nappy changing table turns out to be a state of the art Dyson hand drier.  You lower your hands vertically – cautiously – into the radiator-like apparatus, then an almighty jet of air blasts any hint of wetness into another dimension.

I get back to the table and babble excitedly to Lawrence and Talulah about this sci-fi experience.

‘That’s what I love about you,’ says L. ‘Only you would get so excited about an electric hand drier.’

At which point David joins us

‘Wow!’ he says. ‘There’s this amazing hand drier in the gents…!’

***
A discovery from re-entering the world of work:

All moments are stolen moments. Work, sleep, leisure, creativity, romance, shopping, enjoying the latest developments in electronic hand driers. Even doing nothing is a stolen moment. You just realise it’s a deliberate nothing.

What’s exhausting me is not so much the work itself but the strain of learning it as I go along.  I’m still trying to take on board and remember all the various quirks and details of information that are second nature to those who’ve been here for a while. So far, I’ve been concentrating on turning up on time, remembering my entrances and exits and cues, and generally trying not to walk into the scenery.

Further across the floor is Mr D, who’s already taken me for a post-work drink. At 7am. There’s a pub in Borough Market – the Market Trader, I think it’s called -  that opens in the early morning, with last orders at 9am. We catch a bus across Tower Bridge to get there, watching the sun come up over the Thames. All the iconic London landmarks at their best, in the comely pink prism of dawn.

On the Stansted Express, a steward comes past pushing an unwieldy refreshments trolley. He has a heavy foreign accent.

‘Tea? Coffee? Morphine?’

With its dated orange hand rails and slightly faded upholstery, the Stansted service might not be a patch on its faster and more up-to-date Heathrow counterpart, but offering passengers morphine does seem a bit extreme. So I ask.

‘Yes, morphine. Blueberry morphine.’ And he produces a tray of muffins.

After which, I spend the rest of the journey musing on fruit-flavoured narcotics, and narcotic-flavoured sweets. Strawberry Heroin. Cherry Cocaine. GHB flavoured Maltesers. I think one of the reasons I’ve never become a junkie – apart from the cost and the whole going-to-jail-forever bit – is that drugs simply don’t taste as nice as, say, Galaxy Caramel bars.

It was the same when I first tried alcohol as a teen. ‘Is this what all the fuss is about? But where’s the sweetness?’

Accordingly, my first drink of choice was cider. Even now, though I’ve grown into supping the occasional lager (in the shape of bottled beer), the appeal of real ale – ‘proper’ beer – still baffles me.

The train steward’s trolley bears a Fair Trade sticker. Like recycling, fair trade products have taken that same journey towards acceptance: via initial associations with radicalism, stopping by left-wing co-operative cafes, church groups and arts centres, before entering the mainstream consensus of being Obviously A Good Thing. My new job’s free tea and coffee facilities are Fair Trade only too. I wonder if there’ll soon be divisions and hair-splitting among what’s labelled ‘fair trade’, the way nutritional information makes even unhealthy foods sound good for you: ‘Our Fair Trade is more Fair than yours.’

When choosing an ice cream-based dessert at Marine Ices in Chalk Farm the other day, I go for banana split. Somehow, I’m convincing myself that I’m meeting one of my Five A Day portions of fruit, and that this allows the clear bad-for-you indulgence of ice cream. It’s akin to smokers who see Marlboro Lights as a dietary aid. Loopholes in contracts with oneself.

***

In the days after Barack Obama makes it as President, a few newspapers remark upon how it’s now officially okay to be nice to Americans.

Young Mr H is from Queens, NYC. We’ve been Companions for the past two weeks now. I know that’s not very long, but those weeks have made very happy indeed. I’m generally in favour of happiness. I don’t know about you.

So yes, I’ve had no trouble at all in contributing to the whole Being Nice To Americans effort. I like to think I’m doing my bit. God Bless America…

Regular employment AND a love life? As Mr Obama is so fond of saying, Yes I Can. Even me. The next step is to update the diary more regularly. Seeing as both Mr H and my employers are avid readers, it’s the least I can do.

Have completed my fortnight of training for the new job. It’s been Monday to Friday, 9-5, but no longer. Felt like opening a bottle of champagne purely to celebrate not having to get up in the morning again. I have the utmost sympathy for those who willingly endure the bodies of strangers crushing them (and worse) in a packed Tube carriage at 8am every day, year after year, from college to retirement. There’s ways around it, of course, one of which is to take up cycling (I’m not the cycling type, or I would), another is to get up even earlier – 6 ish- to avoid the crush period. I did the latter on Friday, and thus had over an hour to kill in the City before work started. Very pleasant start to the day, just sitting in an Aldgate cafe reading and thinking about life, but it did mean that by the time I got home in the evening, I was falling asleep at 9pm.

So on top of improving my speed and prowess at reading and writing to order, I’ve now learned to properly re-acquaintance myself with the sheer importance of time and energy, and the divisions one places upon them. I can now properly feel – taste – just how these resources are fixed, limited and dwindling from the moment you wake up. And that when one is the wrong side of 35 (and counting), the energies are that much more harder to sustain. Time is running out, one way or another. Everything matters. Even frivolity.

And I know just how every moment spent doing one thing – or nothing – is a moment missing out on everything else. But as opposed to getting upset about this, I’m learning more how to shrug off the stuff that should be shrugged off. How to find out more quickly what truly matters. How to crack that self-discipline whip. Is my journey on the Internet today really necessary? Could it be quicker, shorter? Could I bring efficiency to idleness – get more nothing done when I doing nothing?

I’m having to tighten my belt on daily Internet time full stop. The new job isn’t one of those where one can go online when the boss isn’t looking (the work computers block much of the Web). But each day I receive dozens of non-spam emails and Facebook invites to London events. I’m flattered to be invited at all, naturally, but obviously I have to pick and choose – and get better at it.

Before the new job, I could spend hours merrily going through them all, umming and erring, wondering which people would be a little sad if I didn’t show at their soirees, which ones wouldn’t mind my absence but would be delighted to see me there, and which ones would be utterly indifferent, they’re just kindly letting me know of something I might like to attend, if I’m free. Now the process has to be sped up and streamlined.

But the great thing is this: the job I’m doing actually trains me how to better manage the stuff I do in my own time. It’s all about having to assess information and make decisions, and do it again, and do it quicker, just like one does in life anyway. My typing speed has perked up, my writing errors have decreased, and I’m getting more done across the board. Previously, a trip to the shops to replenish my shower gel could somehow take up my entire day.

It does mean I’m now one of those people who break into volleys of phrases like ‘Sorry, have to go, have to Get On, you know, work, busy, things to do, not on a School Night, must dash.’ But the guilt of not replying to emails, not going to events I’ve been invited to, has lifted like a veil. People understand Work.

I still make sure I read everything I’m sent. It’s just replying that’s harder. Sometimes I get emails from people in need – whom I don’t know – asking me to pass on contacts, details, names of others I do know. I feel both uneasy about complying, and uneasy about not helping the person who’s taking the time to write in, but have to choose the latter. There’s very good reasons I don’t tend to give too much away in the diary, such as names of real people or companies. It’s not so much avoidance of libel as trying to be gentlemanly.

Plus not quite telling the whole tale is good storytelling (one hopes) and keeps readers turning the page. Or scrolling down. Coming back for more, anyway.

(That’s one reason why those new ‘e-readers’ are never going to replace paper books, I think. ‘A real page-turner’ doesn’t have quite the same resonance as ‘a real content-scroller’ or ‘a real button-clicker’.)

Looking at the previous entry, I’m now wondering if I’ve used the phrase ‘fetchingly epicene’ before.

Actually, I’m wondering if anyone has used the phrase ‘fetchingly epicene’ before? On the Internet, at any rate. If so, I may have to marry them. 

(goes to Google… deep breath…)

It’s pathetic of me, I know. But as I go to bed – with no fetchingly epicene bedfellow in sight – it’s things like this that help my day feel, well, vaguely worthwhile. Just about. In lieu of anything else. 

Still, if you can’t add new phrases to the world – ones that spring accidentally, unbidden, directly and unselfconsciously from the heart – what else is writing for? 

***

Here’s a nice photo of myself and the Teaists at the Wallace Collection last Saturday. Courtesy of Helen McCookerybook.

Left to right: Tallulah, Tobias, DE. I appear to be posing for the side of a coin.

Second and final week of training at the new job. I’m enjoying the discipline of having to properly take in the world’s press every day, rather than just reading the stories that interest me. I feel like a kind of flaneur sans loisir: a detached but attentive observer, strolling through the day’s boulevards of Fact.

According to the BBC News site, Marxism is back in fashion thanks to the ‘credit crunch’ (a phrase that I promise to never, ever use again).

Amid all this talk of collapsing economic souffles and self-raising unemployment, it seems fitting I’ve managed to suddenly get myself a job, at this time, and in the City too. Fitting also that I’m commuting to Bank on the rush hour Tube, hemmed in by men and women of the fiscal cloth, while I listen to one of my favourite ever bands, McCarthy, on my iPod.

Sample McCarthy song titles:

‘And Tomorrow The Stock Exchange Will Be The Human Race’

‘Use A Bank I’d Rather Die’

‘The Home Secretary Briefs The Forces Of Law And Order’.

‘Can The Haves Use Their Brains?’

‘The Drinking Song Of The Merchant Bankers’

(The iPod’s an obsolete model – but then, aren’t they all, a split-sigh after you’ve left the shop. Cue an HM Bateman cartoon set at Apple Headquarters – ‘The iPod Development Engineer Who Said “If It Ain’t Broken, Don’t Fix It”‘.)

McCarthy were a UK indie group from the late 80s, who married charming & jangly 12-string guitar tunes with viciously satirical Marxist lyrics, often with a dash of roleplay and irony.

I pretty much adore everything they did, but have plumped for offering you this, Dear Reader:  ‘I Worked Myself Up From Nothing’, from their final album ‘Banking, Violence & The Inner Life Today’. The sentiment might be sardonic (an Orwellian take on self-help), but the sheer loveliness of the melody has the very effect that eludes the narrator. A kind of ‘let them eat cake and have it’: 

The track features Laetitia Sadier on Nico-esque extra vocals, perfectly complementing Malcolm Eden’s fetchingly epicene trill. Much as I love Stereolab, the band Mlle Sadier and McCarthy guitarist Tim Gane formed the year after this was recorded, I can’t help wishing they’d stuck with this line-up just that little bit longer. 

‘You have it in you / though there are holes in your shoes’

Actually, there IS genuinely a hole in my shoe, too. I’d fixed it a few weeks ago with Super Glue, but today’s rain made short work of said adhesive’s fabled ‘super’ powers. I need new shoes. Hence, yet again, the job.

[Buy two sublime albums’ worth of McCarthy, via official download, from Cherry Red Records.]

Saturday – afternoon tea at the Wallace Collection with the Teaists. Service is criminally slow – over an hour and a half till we see our food. ‘Trouble in the kitchen’ apparently. For mere cakes, scones and sandwiches. But they do offer us free wine by way of compensation, and let us waive the tip.

Seventeen at table – a record turn out. Those present include Jamie from the Irrepressibles, Jake, Suzi L, Helen McCookerybook (singer and Monochrome Set associate – my first meeting with her, I think), Sebastian G, Tobias, John Joseph Bibby, David Ryder-P, and Lucinda & William. We are quite a vision to the eldery Ladies Who Tearoom around us, and I’m not sure if they side with the appalled tearoom customers in that Withnail & I ‘finest wines known to humanity’ scene, or if they enjoy us. Either way, we get more than a few stares.

The occasion is Lawrence Gullo’s joint birthday and deportation back to the US, as his work visa has expired, and the retail job he has is not deemed Highly Skilled enough to allow him to stay. A sad case of affairs, and not the first ‘deportation party’ for a much-loved American friend that I’ve been to, either.

There really should be a green card system that recognises Proper Friends in number, in the same way as the points system currently used by the Home Office for determining what is a ‘skilled’ enough job. Prove you have enough UK friends living nearby, those who might as well be family members, who are willing to commit the level of support you’d expect from a spouse (seeing them regularly, rushing to hospital beds,  being by their side when needed etc) and the cumulative ‘Attachment Points’ would count towards an extended stay.

The friends in question would have to pledge their Proper Friendship under oath, and sign a binding contract subject to checks by the Ministry Of Friendship. But that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Goodness knows there’s enough of my friends whose degree of affection I’m never quite sure of. Would they stretch to donating a kidney, or are they happy to keep it at the ‘occasional friendly nod across a crowded bar’ level? It’d be handy to get these things in writing.

It would also help me when someone says ‘Hello Dickon’, and I can’t quite place who they are, or can’t quite remember their name. Which has happened at least once at the New Job.

So: I’ve just completed my first week of Proper Work, taking my place amongst the Bohemian Miners At The Coalface Of News.

How has it been? Surreal.

‘Surreal?’ says Ms D. ‘Hah! Normal work for you is surreal?’

‘REAL for me is surreal…’

It’s been tough, in fact. A shock to the system. A sobering, if salutary experience. I have to brave a packed, surly tube to Tower Hill for 0930. I sit at a computer screen. I scroll past scanned-in pages from national and local newspapers. I use the computer mouse to carefully slice up and duplicate the articles, deciding which ones should be sent to which news-hungry clients. Computers can’t yet fathom the subtleties of context, hence the need for human readers and editors. I repeat until 1345. I take 1 hour lunch. Then I carry on until 1730. With a 15 min coffee break here and there.

It really is pure work, so far. No phone use, no internet use. Not much conversation, either, as the one other nightshift trainee is as keen as me to get as much done as possible, and neither of us know how much counts as Enough.

We’re on the main office floor: umpteen long tables of chairs at screens. And as these two weeks of training are 9 – 5 and Mon – Fri, we’re sharing the room – and part of our table – with the daytime staff. They aren’t unfriendly but there’s a definite sense of separation, putting us in our place as not only mere trainees, but trainees for a completely different staff. So they talk to each other in the usual office way (the economy in crisis, Madonna’s divorce, did you see X TV programme last night, etc), but never including us. Which is fair enough, but it does make the week feel even more surreal than it already is for me.

So I accept my invisibility, and am just getting used to this, while immersing myself in the work, when out of nowhere someone comes over and says ‘Well well well, Dickon Edwards… What brings you here, prithee? How the mighty have risen…’

Or words to that effect. Not quite ‘how the mighty have risen’. That’s me.

This sort of thing has happened about four or five times. Jarring, sporadic bouts of non-invisibility in an otherwise undivided week of feeling like a ghost. Again, the overall word just has to be: surreal.

***

Thursday was the worse. Thursday I came close to tears. The work, the cold-shower shock of it, the sudden visitations from Friends Of Friends. But Friday was, in fact, fine. A normal Friday feeling, I suppose. And now it’s the weekend and it FEELS like a weekend. Bliss. Freedom. A connection with the working world, albeit a tentative one.

I suppose what I’m experiencing is a kind of jet-lag from crossing one world into another, with no halfway house.

***

The other trainee seems nice enough. Although he doesn’t know me, he does know the boyfriend of someone I know.

And at Lawrence’s afternoon tea party today, one of the seventeen turns out to be on the same night shift as me.

Anyone who says ‘small world’ at the Bohemian News Mine is immediately directed to the naughty step.

***

The work must be having an effect on my Ideas production, though. In addition to the Proper Friends contract system for saving much-loved Americans from deportation.

I think it’s about time one should be able to donate Testosterone.

I’m thinking of my dear female-to-male transsexual friends. They want to be physically more manly, and I hate shaving. And I don’t just shave my face. If in the future I ever want a beard, or a hairy chest, I shall just go out and buy one, frankly.

I’ve been offered a Full Time Proper Job.

Okay, that’s given you time to pick your jaw, and indeed the rest of you, up off the floor. We’ll go on.

My job title is “Reader & Editor, Night Shift”. With a private company that provides tailor-made ‘media monitoring’ services to various clients. Reading news stories on a screen, editing them to fit a morning press pack. Seven nights in row, then seven off, then back again. 10.30pm till 6.30am each night, in a large office building opposite the Tower Of London. Fairly intensive, battery farming-like work, too. (Nightingales: ‘No one here but us chickens’). No one talks or surfs the Net or goes on Facebook. No phones. Only the Work. Reading, typing. Conventional employment that’s not quite conventional.

How much am I being paid? On finding out, my first thought was similar to that moment in Big, when Tom Hanks’s boy in a man’s body gets his first pay check, and yelps out aloud like he’s won the Lottery. The co-worker at the next desk along replies miserably, ‘Yeah. They really screw you don’t they?’

Thanks to the dole, and the long-term dole top-ups one gets just by getting older (a kind of state compensation for being increasingly less pretty) I’m currently living on about £70 a week, after I’ve paid my rent. That has to pay for everything else: food, bills, Internet, phone, travel, dry cleaning, wine, going out and general London living. I’m rather hoping the post-tax wage will be a bit more than that. Lately I keep messing my dole up, overspending in the big Sweet Shop that is London, and having to borrow from friends and family, trying desperately to stop rent cheques from bouncing. Yes, I do know what it feels like to actually starve. It’s no Picnic, or even a Lion Bar. So the thought of more money coming in is very much a relief.

But then I calm down and remember there’s also that initial period of getting used to arrears payment, when you have to work and somehow survive for a month, perhaps more, before the first lot of cash finally comes through. At which point you realise you’ve been deducted Emergency Tax until the Revenue sorts it out. More hoops to jump through. Work really is too much like Hard Work.

But it might be fine. It might turn out to be more money than I thought. I might find it suits me, that I ‘perform’ well (which always has connotations of a seal getting its fish), and have my wages increased. I may even (whisper it) be able to start Saving. And then perhaps I won’t live in a bedsit forever after all. There’s only one way to find out.

(Though, yes, I know… it IS a bedsit in Highgate. It’s all relative.)

Anyway. Money, schmoney, as not nearly enough people in the news are saying right now. There’s another reason why I feel the job will be good for me. For the last year or so, I’ve had all the time in the world, yet I’ve become unproductive to the point of drying up completely. Even my diary entries have become sporadic. With no one else to prod me out of bed, I’ve tried to impose self-discipline, but the little voice in my head that constantly whispers ‘what’s the point?’ and ‘do it tomorrow’ has been winning all too frequently.

Once I have finally convinced myself life is worth getting out of bed for, I’ve found it impossible to settle my mind on doing any one thing. The mere idea that choosing one thing to do – to THINK any one thing, has made me brood on how this means every other possibility is being missed out on. Every alternate thought, every alternate sentence to write, every alternate way of spending the day, the evening, the month, the life. The harsh inevitability that whatever you do, you will miss out on a million other things. The sheer nature of being able to do anything has left me doing nothing at all.

Sounds close like madness, but it’s more a kind of mental build-up. There’s a recent Doctor Who episode where Catherine Tate’s character finds her newly-enhanced mind is starting to come terminally undone, in classic Flowers For Algernon style:

‘You know who I’d like to meet? Charlie Chaplin. I bet he’s great. Shall we, Charlie Chaplin? Charlie Chester, Charlie Brown, no he’s fiction, friction, fiction, fixing, mixing, Rickston, Brixton’. [she gasps]

Well, that’s the way my mind is all the time.

And normally I can work with it, enjoy it, be creative with it. But it needs a slap every now and then. Ideally, administered from somebody else. Hence the job.

My anxiety has also taken a turn towards physical manifestation lately. Though I’m never been a proper self-harmer, I have started to pull manically at my eyebrows when trying to concentrate, plus I’ve developed a severely itchy scalp, for which the doctor has given me both pills and a water-based steroidal balm. I didn’t know you could get pills for an itchy scalp until this week.

The skin on my arms has also become itchy: I keep checking there for insects, even fleas, but never find any. Might just be an allergy, but it does rather sound like just another anxiety outlet. My skin is crawling, and I’m crawling up the walls too. Something has to change. Hence the job. It can only be good for me.

The job will, one hopes, force me out of this rut, and sharpen up my faculties. The work is all about concentration, focus, reading speed, comprehension, English usage, grammar, deadlines. I can do those things. I can be very good at those things. I just need a bit of regular, external coercion to do them every now and then.

So I don’t really see it as just a job. I see it more as a kind of intensive, vocational college course. And I need it.

Training starts tomorrow morning, 10 am. Wish me luck.

Whenever I see an advert for a spectacles company, with a cheekboney lady in a power suit, hair up, and looking happy with her choice of eyewear to the point of madness, I now think of Sarah Palin. So that’s how pernicious the UK coverage of the US elections has become. Goodness knows what it must be like for Americans, if the British media alone is this saturated with comment and debate on Mr Obama, Mr McCain and their ‘running mates’, families, pets, and favourite choice of hunting rifle. Ignorance and lack of US nationality is no hindrance to comment, of course. And here I am joining in. Bait taken.

It seems odd to obsess so much over another country’s politics, even the US, when there’s more than enough to focus on over here. I just wish they’d concentrate more on, say, Caroline Lucas, who was recently elected Green Party leader. At least British newspaper readers can actually vote for her.

The general switch of focus from Mr O to Ms P seems less about ability to govern and more about appealing to people’s lust for a good story, with interesting characters. Ms Palin is a Good Character in this distant soap opera, so everyone perks up. On Radio 4’s News Quiz, mention of her name is given a sound effects burst from the Hallelujah Chorus, such is her gift to overseas satirists. If Mr O loses to Mr McC, or rather to Ms P, perhaps it’s because he’s just not funny enough, intentionally or otherwise. See also Boris Johnson.

***

Sunday last: afternoon tea at High Tea in Highgate, with Ms Crimson Skye, whom I first met in the Cabaret Tent at the Latitude Festival. High Tea is a new local haunt: homemade cakes, Doris Day and Cole Porter playing on the stereo, friendly young staff with a taste for old things. Right up my street in every sense. It’s popular today: there’s the sense it’s the Last Sunny Sunday of the year, so everyone is out in the cafes and parks. All the Sunday Couples, or in my case, the Couples Of Singles.

Then a drink in St John’s Tavern, Archway, now a trendy but pleasant restaurant & bar with chunky oak tables and a selection of broadsheet supplements by the beer pumps. A world away from the dingy pub in 1993 where Orlando played their early gigs.

And then to Ms Andrei’s flat in Upper Holloway for dinner and a movie. The Magic Toyshop: a rare 80s TV film of the Angela Carter novel. Adapted by the author, so it’s full of deliciously surreal, dream-like moments which a normal TV screenwriter would have cut for fear of confusing the audience. Has a creepy puppet swan and a creepier Tom Bell.

***
A Thursday past: the Boogaloo for Beautiful & Damned, with me DJ-ing there for the first time since I’d left the club night in Miss Red’s hands. Martin White and his Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra play a fantastic set (with Kate Dornan on tuba), and the bar is decked out in a Victorian Circus theme, complete with straw, bunting, an Unhelpful Fortune Teller booth, and lots of people in stick-on moustaches.

One lady is dressed up as a half-man, half-woman, with one gender on each side. I half chat her up, half-heartedly. My old neighbour and room decorator Liz also comes along and has such a nice time that she leaves a thank-you present outside my door: a little bejewelled make-up mirror, wrapped in ribbon and paper.

***

A recent Friday eve – outing to an art show with various Boogaloo associates (Nat, Red, Julia, Ms Annie S, Mr Russell, The General). Venue is a dusty Victorian house in the Kings Cross Road, formerly the shop Hats Plus. The old awning is still in place, still advertising the hat shop’s now-defunct website. Even website addresses can gather dust these days. I teach the word ‘awning’ to two Swedish women.

That Saturday eve – I Dj at the Magic Theatre event, at the Art Deco Bloomsbury Ballroom. Venue is outrageously plush and ornate, and I enjoy Ms Crimson Skye’s burlesque turn on the stage. She sings the Patsy Cline song ‘Crazy’ in a Texan drawl, while stripping from a Hannibal Lecter grill mask and straitjacket, her arms tied behind her back.  There’s also a Dexy’s-esque band with a full brass section, who cover the 80s song ‘Hey You, The Rocksteady Crew’.

Late in the evening, with much wine consumed, two men dressed as what looks like giant pincushions take part in an impromptu Flouncing Competition, on the dance floor. They each spin on their plimsolls and storm off in a camp huff to the nearest exit, their huge costumes bobbing around them. I am definitely enjoying myself.

Bit of a gap in my diary, but I’m back now. So what have I been up to?

I’ve just written the phrase, ‘days of wine and poses’ by way of a response and as a title for the entry. Then I realised it’s the Wrong Kind Of Pun. Puns can make you sound like a matey fake-everyman playing to an imagined gallery (the literary equivalent of a corny wink). I am not that kind of writer. At least, I like to think I’m not.

If I’m worrying about a pun, it’s probably a sign I should take it out. Rewrite it. Fiddle with it. Try reversing it. Poses And Wine? Sounds too much like a Cliff Richard song. Poseur With Wine? Too hard on myself. Pose With Wine could be the title of a painting, like Figure With Meat by Francis Bacon.

You see, these are the things that bubble around my brain on this rather chilly day in September.

Last week: I am pulling off a Pose With Wine at Mr Bacon’s old drinking and posing hole, The Colony Room in Soho. I am there with Clayton Littlewood, having first met for coffee at Bar Italia, then dinner at Stockpot. Pure Soho stuff.

Clayton used to live in a basement flat under Old Compton Street, which fascinates me. He could hear the prostitutes upstairs plying their trade. He says it was always noisy, unsurprisingly, and almost impossible to get any sleep at night. But that the mornings made up for it: Soho at 7am has this incredible atmosphere. The quiet after the storm, sobriety kicking in, people with proper jobs starting to get up and go to work. Streets caught naked, clear of teeming crowds. Small children go to school here too,  not always something you associate with Soho (just been watching this video about Soho Parish School). A sense of recovery, of the sun getting its own back on decadent humans, of pores getting a chance to breath.

We visit the Colony Room in Dean Street at a critical point in its 60-year history. A party of regulars, including Salena Godden, have just been to the private view of a much-feared auction, where some of the Colony’s art is being sold. Michael Wojas, the manager, plans to move the club out of its Dean Street premises, in order to save it from escalating rents. To this end, he’s selling off the artwork on the club walls, including a 1950s mural by Michael Andrews. Some club members have protested, both about the move and the art sale. There was even a story in Private Eye about it all. (Interview with Mr W here)

I initially lent my name to the rebel members’ ‘Save The Colony’ campaign, but have now changed my stance to a neutral onlooker, having understood more of Mr W’s point of view. It won’t be the same away from 41 Dean Street, but then it wasn’t the same after the smoking ban, anyway. I hope it continues in new premises, as long as it’s still in Soho.

[Update after the auction: The good news is that the Michael Andrews mural sold at a good price, according to the Independent, to ‘a representative of the Andrews estate… in the hope it can be placed in a museum.’]

Clayton L tells me it’s about time I pitched a non-fiction book to agents and publishers. ‘The Manesake Diaries’. ‘Boy With A Too Many Track Mind.’ ‘Secret Diary Of A Fallen Boy.’ The secret being there’s no sex in it whatsoever.

I could focus on the ‘modern dandy’ episodes, the music biz and DJ adventures, my veteran blogger status, the unlikely Shane MacG capers, and the general Being Dickon Edwards philosophy. Whether such a volume would draw a decent book-buying crowd or not, I don’t know. Only one way to find out. All I have to do is… work hard at it. Ah. The W word. Okay.

***

RIP Paul Newman, giving the newspapers a good excuse to print huge close ups of those famous eyes. Far nicer to see those in the corner shop, first thing on a Sunday, than anything more to do with banking or the ‘credit crunch’. The latter phrase being as tiresomely over-bandied about in the press as the word Facebook was last year. ‘Tortoise Breeding & How The Credit Crunch Will Affect It’, that sort of thing.

RIP also Bryan Morrison, music biz manager and publisher, whose clients included Wham, Pink Floyd, and very nearly, Orlando. We went to his office for a single meeting, during our mid 90s hustling days of being The Next Big Hubristic Thing. Mr M turned out to be the proper personification of a rock ‘n’ roll  impresario: cigar in hand, which he used to make a point, gold discs on the office wall, 1960s anecdotes about The Pretty Things. As we walked in, he pointed at me and said, ‘LOVE the look!’

Further to the previous entry, the BBC, Guardian and other UK news sites did get around to mentioning David Foster Wallace’s suicide after all, albeit a full day after this diary did. I feel the same way I did when returning from the Haringey Council elections in 2006 and publishing the full results to the diary, only to find that I was ahead of the council’s own website by several hours. And even then they got the numbers slightly wrong: I had to email them their own correct results.

Despite appearances, my feeling in both cases is not the smugness of the amateur reporter scooping the professionals, or the grumbling of one of those armchair experts who seem to write with one finger endlessly wagging till the grave (‘and another thing…!’).

No, it’s more the vague annoyance at being annoyed per se, when there’s far more deserving matters to give a hoot about.

***

Diary catch-up. In bits.

Friday Sept 12th: Fosca’s trip to Madrid for a one-off gig.

Highgate, early hours. The taxi is due to collect me at 5.30am, and as usual I can’t get a wink of sleep beforehand. All I can think about is the entirely possible horror of the doorbell ringing while I’m in bed, with me having slept through the alarm. Add this worry to the excitement and nervousness of the trip, and it seems pointless going to bed at all. But I still give it a go, lying there in the dark, utterly awake until the alarm goes, feeling foolish.

Our taxi driver is slightly played by Ray Winstone. I think it’s fair to say this, because the first thing he tells me as I emerge from the house is:

‘Blimey – you look like Thomas Dolby.’

I groggily attempt a smile – well, a smirk – and shove my suitcase in the boot. I can see Charley inside the car, trying hard not to laugh.

‘I guess you get people telling you that all the time, eh?’

‘Well… I often have people saying who I remind them of…’

‘Nah. It’s DEFINITELY Thomas Dolby. Definitely.’

And he says this is if it’s the most reasonable and useful thing in the world. Off we go.