I shouldn’t be writing this.

This is in lieu of a proper diary this week. The diary always takes me too long to write. Rather ironically, it often stops me from doing the sort of things I need to do to have something to write about. I do want to spend some time away from the desk over Christmas, and I’m sure no one can begrudge me that. Except that I’ve now ended up writing a diary entry, by way of trying to get out of writing a diary.

I shouldn’t be writing this, because I’m finding it hard enough to do the work that really can’t be avoided, being the 5000-word MA essay with its January 4th deadline. I’m also labouring under a medley of health problems (back pain, mainly, not helped by the need to spend hours at a desk) and fatigue (not helped by the codeine for said back pain making me fall asleep at the desk).

On New Year’s Day I’ll write an entry covering the past two weeks. That should keep you happy, whoever you might be.

In the meantime, here’s a new photo. It was taken by Shanthi Sivanesan on Christmas Eve 2015, in the Dean Street Townhouse, Soho, London. Every year I try to have my photo taken with a different Christmas tree in London. This one represents my gratitude to people who have been kind to me over the years, one way or another. Not least the aforementioned Ms Sivansen, who treated me to dinner and cocktails at this venue.

I look like I’m trying to hide, which seems apt given my current state of reluctance. Procrastination is hiding.

What I’m actually trying to do in the photo is get the tree, myself, and the artwork behind me all into shot, and the angle wasn’t easy. The artwork is The Anatomy of the Beast by Neal Fox. It’s a large Gillray-esque cartoon of various Soho characters alive and dead, many of which I owe something to personally. Whether it’s by remote inspiration (Quentin Crisp and Jeffrey Bernard – both in the right-hand section that you can’t see), or kindness in person (you can make out Sebastian Horsley in the top hat, and Shane MacGowan next to him). The red hatted one is George Melly, another hero, who I briefly met once (and kissed).

[You can see the full artwork at Neal Fox’s website:

http://nealfox.bigcartel.com/product/the-anatomy-of-the-beast]

I’m grateful to you too, O reader, if you’ve been coming to this website for some time. This public diary is now 18 years old. It’s been excerpted in two anthologies of mixed diaries, which contain myself alongside Pepys and the like. The anthologies are called A London Year and A Traveller’s Year, the latter book emerging earlier this year. Some people have now expressed interest in a whole book of selections from this diary. Nothing is definite about such a book yet, and I still don’t have an agent, but I’m hopeful. Eighteen years of entries – there must be a book’s worth of interesting reading in there somewhere.

So: it’s been a year of ups and downs. The downs are the ongoing health problems: a whole carousel of symptoms. According to the many doctors I’ve seen, these were – and are – seemingly caused by a combination of anxiety, depression, dyspraxia and a complete reluctance to do any physical exercise.

The ups of 2015 have been very important to me though. I finally achieved my life ambition of getting a university degree. First Class Honours, BA English, after four years at Birkbeck, University of London. I won a couple of college prizes too, including one for being ‘the most promising student in English Literature’. It’s something I never thought I’d have the stamina to do. I had a lot of support from Birkbeck’s staff and disability services, and I remain grateful to them. They sorted out the various help I was eligible for, not least with keeping my time management on track. My parents encouraged me at every step. My mother still does. Without such support I’d simply have dropped out. So, my gratitude is there too.

I officially graduated in July, and attended the gown-and-mortar-board ceremony in November. I then won a bursary to do an MA in Contemporary Literature and Culture at the same place. All being well (I’m still looking for funding for books and Tube travel), that will take me through to late 2017.

So that’s where I am now. I still have a lot of problems with my innate slowness, and with frequently feeling unwell or tired. But what has really surged into view over the last month is my battle for motivation against procrastination. I had it under control throughout the BA, but of late it really has knocked me for six.

The voice of my Procrastination Demon is simply this: ‘Why bother?’  The obvious answer, that ‘you’ll be in trouble if you don’t’, hasn’t seemed to sink in, even with 9 days till the deadline – and I’m still fiddling with a first draft of only 3200 words. There, I said it. Though I have made a diagram too. And lots of notes. Too many notes. More notes than essay.

The problem is I’ve missed lots of personal deadlines for myself, and am now into the danger zone of missing The Real Deadline. And here I am, spending precious time on a blog post which isn’t even a proper diary update. I am procrastinating by writing about procrastination.

I can lay some of the blame at social media, or rather, my weakness for spending time on social media. Twitter and Facebook can do many great things, like provide a sense of contact with friends, or rally support for petitions and funding. But they can also give the dangerous impression that no one else is doing any work either, so it’s okay for you to not work too. The world will carry on without you, because it is carrying on – look, you can watch it scrolling on forever! In real time! Why bother doing anything else?

But there’s other distractions too. I’ve just watched all of Season One of Transparent. It’s very good. You keep watching not because of the plot (there isn’t one), but because of the characters, who all seem to be hiding things about themselves, often without realising it. There’s a theme with this piece, isn’t there.

Some Christmas words of wisdom, then. These are aimed at myself as much as the world.

Do not think: ‘Why do any work when I can be binge-watching a whole series of a very good drama?’

Instead, think: ‘Treats, not distractions. I can only go on Twitter or watch the rest of Transparent as a treat, according to the time remaining, after I’ve hit my quota of work for the day. Treats, not distractions.’

Also: I take inspiration from the productivity of older writers. Lately I’ve enjoyed Alan Bennett’s latest diary for 2015 (a large chunk of prose in the London Review of Books, plus his audio reading of selected entries for their website), John Julius Norwich’s 2015 Christmas Cracker (a beautifully made annual fanzine of his favourite prose, poetry and quotations), Ronald Blythe’s 2015 collection of columns, In The Artist’s Garden (only published last week), and Diana Athill’s latest memoir, Alive Alive Oh! 

Mr Bennett is 81, and talks about using a walking stick. Viscount Norwich is 86. Dr Blythe is 93. Ms Athill, who lives in a care home near me, turned 98 this week. They’ve all put out new work this year. I am a mere 44. I have my problems, but there is really no excuse.

But what else is hidden here? All these writers spend little time on the internet. JJ Norwich seems to have a Twitter account (I’ve just spent some time searching away to find this out), but hasn’t tweeted since July. Ms Athill isn’t on Twitter, though she does use a computer (her book of letters, Instead of a Book, marks the switch in her correspondence from paper to email). Blythe and Bennett are entirely computer-free, yet seem to get by fine as professional writers in the twenty-first century. Presumably the editors they work with are happy to accept photocopies of typewritten copy, in the way everyone did pre-internet.

There was once an amusing column by Tom Hodgkinson about his giving up email in order to get more done as a writer. It ended with him saying he’d had to resort to email after all, as the editor wouldn’t accept the column in any other form.

(And now I’ve thought about a Quentin Crisp anecdote, on his dictating columns by phone, to a newspaper in the 1990s. His hand was too paralysed to type.  ‘The newspaper has a women who types faster than I can speak and she gets it all down and they send a cheque’. I have just spent some time looking this anecdote up. More time gone).

And now the machine I am typing this on tells me that I’ve hit nearly 1500 words. It was meant to be a photo and a quick Christmas message. I really, really have to stop and get onto the essay. And text a friend to say I can’t come out for drinks after all. And I’ll probably have to cancel going to a birthday gathering…

(EDITED TO ADD: I have just been told that I am very much expected at the birthday! So I will go to that, then. One night out in the whole week. A treat, not a distraction. And I’m not going out for New Year’s Eve.)

But in a way this post is comforting, because it’s a reminder that as long as I get started on the essay today, and every day between now and the 4th, I should be able to clock up a decent amount of work and get it finished on time. As long as I get started. And don’t go on Twitter. Or the rest of the internet. Or watch a very good TV drama. Or do anything else.

That’s the thing about procrastination. It’s another form of productivity.

Saturday 12th December 2015.

I watch the new film documentary Future Shock! – The Story of 2000AD, via iTunes’s streaming service. It’s paid and official, but it’s still a format I access with reluctance. I’d seek out a London cinema screening, but there doesn’t seem to be one.

I was an avid reader of 2000AD comic during its first ten years, though Dad initially ordered it from the village newsagent for himself. The first issue in 1977 resurrected his 1950s comic hero, Dan Dare, and came with a free Space Frisbee. Once I was old enough to share his copy, I enjoyed the highly imaginative artwork, and the witty left-leaning satire of stories like Judge Dredd. This was all instinctive, though: I was too young to really know what left-wing meant, or indeed what satire meant. As far as I was concerned they were just entertaining and exciting tales, close in tone to my beloved Tintin and Asterix, and an anecdote to American superheroes and Star Wars. I had already filed away the latter under Things Other Boys Like (and I still do).

I remember the Judge Dredd saga that naughtily used mutant versions of Ronald McDonald and the Jolly Green Giant as villains. As a result, the comic found itself on the sticky end of legal action. Watching this film, I finally discover what sort of people were behind it such childhood pleasures. Most of the comic creators interviewed are gentle and soft-spoken gentlemen of a certain vintage. One is Alan Grant, who lived in a Suffolk village and was a friend of Dad’s for a while. I visited Mr Grant myself as a teen, and remember him lending me a book on quantum theory, In Search Of Schrodinger’s Cat.

In the film, the original editor of 2000AD, Pat Mills, comes across as a veritable force of nature. Despite his years he is still full of energy, still ranting away against authority as if it were 1977. The story goes that the comic’s publishers wanted a new sci-fi weekly to cash in on the late 70s success of Star Wars. Mills, meanwhile, wanted to give Britain’s kids action-packed adventures of rebellion and anti-fascism, but had fallen foul of the censor with his previous comic, Action. For him, science fiction was a compromise. As with much sci-fi, the comic used ideas about the future to say things about the present day.

I think it took me a while to realise that Judge Dredd was a satire on fascism. Despite this, the helmet-wearing Dredd was still a character you were meant to root for, in the same way you were meant to root for vigilante anti-heroes like Dirty Harry. I stopped reading the comic in the late 80s, when it became increasingly violent – or so I thought. This documentary points out that it was always rather gory from the start. So perhaps it was me who changed. I certainly missed out on a phase in the 1990s where 2000AD apparently became so laddish, it published adverts featuring women pulling dim expressions, with the caption, ‘2000AD. She doesn’t get it. She never will.’ The editor responsible appears in the new film, and says he now regrets those adverts.

* * *

Monday 14th December 2015.

Last session for the term with my college dyspraxia mentor, Katie W, at Senate House. I admit to her that I’ve let procrastination creep into my essay schedule, though some of it is not my fault. The freelance review took longer than I thought, because I had to revise it for that particular readership. It’s useful to remember that a review for a magazine is also a negotiation, between an opinion of the material, and an idea of what the reader wants.

I wonder what’s behind my struggling with this new essay. Possibly because it’s the first essay of the MA, so it’s all new. Another theory is it’s to do with my creeping uncertainty about whether I’m doing the right thing with the MA. Yet the moment I began, I felt a surge of relief that I hadn’t taken a year out. To have left it for over a year would have been even harder. So at least that was a right decision. And yet the reluctance this week is overwhelming.

I’m not drastically behind: just a couple of days. But I need to pick up the slack over the Xmas & New Year break. The deadline is January 4th, the word count 5000. I’ve done about 3000 words this week. It’s a mess, but a mess is still a start.

In terms of research, I have a huge pile of handwritten notes, with further piles of books on the floor, and a few JSTOR e-texts on my computer. Yet the worry remains that I’ve missed some perfect book out there. How do proper writers get over the worry that they’ve missed something? Sheer ego? No: sheer deadline.

* * *

Tuesday 15th December 2015.

I’m writing a letter back to an American reader. She asks me if I have a best friend. By which she means, someone to whom I pour out the cares of a hard day, perhaps over the phone. I tell her there is no such person. One reason is that I’m naturally aloof and detached (there might some element of dyspraxia in this mix). Another is that I’m grateful to have a range of friends and acquaintances, and I like to see as many of them as I can. That is, when I’m not feeling so aloof. But it could also be that I just don’t feel confident at making phone calls, not if it’s purely for a chat (my mother being the only exception). I prefer full presence company, or messages.

* * *

Thursday 17th December 2015.

To the Viktor Wynd Museum in Hackney, to give one more guided tour. A huge amount of people – it’s remarkable how they seek it out. Quite pleased that I can update my speech on the Mervyn Peake display, with the news that a new film of Gormenghast is in the pipeline, scripted by Neil Gaiman. Barnabas, who works behind the bar, recognises the Caravaggio painting on the cover of my TLS. He turns out to be something of a Caravaggio fan, and tells me of the masterpieces he sought out in the churches of Rome. Many of them are extremely dimly lit, even allowing for the whole chiaroscuro effect.

* * *

In the evening, I sit in the Barbican Cinema Café and write out my Christmas cards. I try to cut the list down to the people I’ve felt particularly fond of or grateful to within the last year. That great phrase that used to mark the excommunication of a friend, ‘they’re no longer on my Christmas list’ – how anachronistic that now is. Many people no longer bother with cards full stop. This may be because they count their affection in pixels, or because of the pricy postage costs, or because of the waste (though it’s not as if cards are difficult to recycle). I send cards because it makes me happy: that should be reason enough.

* * *

Friday 18th December 2015.

Petulance in the newsagent. I decide not to buy one particular magazine purely because it carries a writer who unfollowed me on Twitter.

Private Eye‘s Christmas issue has its usual ‘log rolling’ feature at the back. This is where they examine all the Books of the Year articles in British newspapers, and highlight how many of them appear to be the brazen returning of favours. Either that, or friends cosily scratching each other’s hardbacks. I always thought this overlooks how some friendships are often forged because of an admiration for a body of work. Still, I do enjoy the description of male Elena Ferrante fans, unfair as it is: ‘like sweaty chaps sneaking into the back of a zumba class for yummy mummies’.

* * *

Saturday 5th December 2015.

In Bloomsbury, I stumble upon the Boy Story exhibition by Magnus Arrevad. Very much in the tradition of Robert Mapplethorpe – a mix of queer sensuality, vulnerability, and humour. Large black and white portraits of male cabaret performers, including drag queens, singers (including Dusty Limits), and ‘boylesque’ dancers. The subjects are often caught backstage in states of undress, or half-dress. Lots of mirrors in dressing rooms, or in makeshift dressing rooms, or in toilets. In one image, a group of drag queens are discovered standing at urinals.

This is all at 5 Willoughby Street, near the British Museum.

* * *

Monday 7th December 2015.

To Birkbeck for the last class in the first term of the MA. That time already. I give a presentation on the 5000 word essay I’ve got to write over Christmas. It’s on materiality and the role of the printed book in the contemporary age. I’m especially fascinated by the reports in Paris, where copies of Hemingway’s Moveable Feast were used as funeral offerings, in street memorials to the recent attacks. It’s not just the meaning of the book itself – Hemingway’s celebration of Paris as a playground – but the fact that paper books can have this role, and e-books cannot. Like wreaths and bouquets, paper books are plant material given meaning by humans. And then they are given further meaning on top, when used symbolically like this. Books as the body, touching bodies.

* * *

Tuesday 8th December 2015.

Find myself singing ‘You Ain’t No Muslim Bruv’ to the tune of Cohen’s ‘Ain’t No Cure For Love’.

* * *

Wednesday 9th December 2015.

I am writing a review of the Sarah Records book by Michael White, Popkiss, for The Wire magazine. What stands out from that late 80s and early 90s indie scene now are the things which have vanished for good. Not the music, as that’s all on YouTube and iTunes. It’s the exchanging of letters and cassettes and fanzines – the social media of their day. A whole chapter of White’s book is devoted to the letter-writing activity of Clare Wadd and Matt Haynes, the sole staffers of the Sarah label. In addition to providing idiosyncratic typed sleeve notes to each release, being their potted memoirs or manifestos or other musings, they would send ‘surprisingly lengthy’ handwritten missives in response to mere mail order enquiries, thus bonding with their audience. In the book, Clare W says she once attempted to write a hundred letters in a day.

Also intriguing is Clare’s comment regarding one or two of the songs by Bobby Wratten, as recorded by his band The Field Mice. According to the book, these were not only autobiographical, but concerned his romantic relationship with Clare. The problem with being immortalised in song, she says, is that ‘Their truth stands, and your truth is lost’.

* * *

Thursday 9th December 2015.

Thoughts on the meaning of hype. The new Stars Wars film has reached saturation point in its coverage. There was a week in the late 80s when all three music papers – NME, Melody Maker and Sounds – accidentally had the same band on the front cover: U2. They had just become the biggest band in the world, and so their new album, Rattle and Hum, was a big event. At the same time, each publication had to present itself as something different to the others. They had to remind people that other music was available too (I remember that the late 80s Melody Maker was always a little more Goth-friendly than the NME).

On this occasion, the urgency to jump on the U2 bandwagon was so strong, all three papers inadvertently ran with the band on the cover. To make matters worse, it was U2 in their most earnest, messianic, cowboys of rock phase. Even U2 would soon find that phase of theirs irksome. Years later I remember one of the papers remarking how that hat-trick of covers was a low point. It looked too craven, too desperate.

So that’s what the media looks like this week, with Star Wars. Trying so hard to keep up the hype, it feels insincere, a denial of polyphony.  For the last few weeks I had been half-curious about going to see the new film. Now it feels redundant. It would be like going to see a Coldplay concert. If you believe in the redistribution of wealth, then you have to apply that very same principle to the billionaires of attention. So the stunt-double analogy kicks in. Other people will go, so you don’t have to. Doubtless I’ll see the film when the fuss dies down.

I think it was Darren Hayman, the singer of Hefner, who said he deliberately put off listening to the Strokes’ debut album for years, for similar reasons. Art is more enjoyable when the gallery is less crowded.

This ties in with the Sarah Records book too. No one could call Star Wars ‘my secret world’.

* * *

Friday 4th December 2015.

To the Museum of London for the exhibition The Crime Museum Uncovered. This is a selection of exhibits from the so-called Black Museum, as in the London Metropolitan Police’s private collection of criminal memorabilia, from the 1870s to the present. The collection is really intended to educate the British police’s own officers, and has never been fully open to the public before. The Museum of London has a reputation for being educational and thoughtful, and with this show they’ve taken pains to avoid sensationalism. This is no Jack The Ripper Museum, though there are exhibits on that particular case, too (mainly posters appealing for information). The exhibition is brightly lit, and the whole thing feels historical and curious rather than ghoulish. The captions give the bare facts of the crimes: who was caught doing what, with what evidence, and what happened to them as a result.

There’s a strict ban on photography, and a sign points out that the displays on murder stop after 1975, ‘to avoid causing further distress to the victims’. There are, however, a range of exhibits connected with later events, filed under riots and terrorism. The 7/7 attacks of 2005 are represented with some empty peroxide containers found in the bombers’ car, along with reconstructions of the backpacks used. There’s a burnt laptop taken from the jeep that was rammed into Glasgow Airport in 2007. Plus a suitcase packed with nails from the foiled attempt to bomb London’s Tiger Tiger club in the same month. Going back in history, there’s displays on attacks by the IRA and the Angry Brigade. And further back, an 1884 clockwork bomb, courtesy of the Fenians. London is no stranger to terrorism.

Other exhibits are on John Christie, the Great Train Robbers, and The Krays. Ronne Kray’s record card includes the line: ‘eyebrows meet over nose’. There’s a hinged folder ladder that belonged to an 1870s cat burglar. The gun used in the 1840 assassination attempt on Queen Victoria turns out to be tiny. Some of the Victorian sentences shock, of course: one courtroom illustration is of a 22-year-old woman gets 14 months hard labour – for attempting suicide.

The most startling items for me are a set of anthropometric record cards from the 1890s. These record the basic details of each prisoner, along with a photograph. It’s these mug shots that shock: they are of an extraordinary clear quality, as if taken yesterday. On top of that, perhaps because they’re dishevelled and not looking their best, the faces do not seem Victorian either. Just people like us, trapped in a different century. Looking at them, I feel a jolt of pure time travel.

The history of the death penalty in the UK is always engrossing. There’s a business card of a prison hangman, alongside a set of used Newgate Prison nooses. Until 1868, the executions were held in public. People would rent rooms overlooking the scaffold, to get the best view.

What I knew already – but it still fascinates me – is that the death penalty was technically still in place from 1969 right up to 1998, albeit only for three particular crimes. These were: ‘treason’, ‘piracy with violence’, and ‘arson of the Sovereign’s ships’.

* * *

Saturday 28th November 2015.

I spend most of this week in the British Library reading rooms, researching the first essay for the MA. One of the books I order, a late 90s one on electronic literature, comes with a CD-ROM. This confuses some of the BL staff, and they have to ask amongst themselves to find out where such an ancient format can be accessed. The library’s internet computers tend to have no CD slots. Even microfilm is more popular as a resource.

* * *

Monday 30th November 2015.

Evening: MA class on Joe Sacco’s Footnotes In Gaza. It’s a bulky, large format graphic novel, investigating the slaughter of Palestinians during 1956. Quite a heated debate in the seminar, especially when it’s asked if Sacco is preaching to the converted, and can graphic novels work as a valid form of journalism? Funny how Sacco draws himself as more of a caricature than his interviewees: his glasses become blank goggles, even headlights during scenes of darkness. Thus he shows himself inside his own text, but not quite of it.

* * *

Tuesday 1st December 2015.

I’m reading Popkiss, the new book about Sarah Records by Michael White. I have a small walk-on role in the story, as part of the one-off project band, Shelley. Mr White files us under ‘Outliers’, where we are ‘the oddballs of the Sarah scene’. Given the niche appeal of this world, this must make us very outlying and odd indeed. Our EP is, he says generously, ‘one of the best’ releases on the label. However, I wince with guilt at the mention of our running up a large studio bill, incurred out of sheer slowness. Today, I know that this slowness is at least partly down to my dyspraxia, and I am legally entitled to extend my university exam time by 25%. Though I’m grateful for this adjustment, and for having the condition recognised, it never diminishes the feeling of guilt. I should be quicker.

* * *

Wednesday 2nd December 2015.

The Labour MP Hilary Benn makes a celebrated speech in the Commons, arguing in favour of military strikes against ISIS. I’m unconvinced as to its merits. He uses ‘evil’, which is religious rhetoric. And ‘fascist’. Which is Young Ones rhetoric.

* * *

Friday 4th December 2015.

Back to the British Library to take a look at the new Alice in Wonderland exhibition. Thankfully the huge queues seem confined to the weekend, and this afternoon I leisurely take my time around the display cases.  The first case tells the tale of Carroll’s original manuscript. It’s in the form of a handwritten notebook presented to Alice Liddell, the little girl he made up the story for. Alongside it are some of Carroll’s photographs of Ms Liddell and other girls, with his diary from the time recounting (in a very decorative, looping hand) the Oxford boat trip that hosted the tale-telling. Then there’s a letter in the 1920s, by the elderly Ms Liddell, recording her reluctant selling of the manuscript to an American collector. The sequence concludes with a typed note from 1946, representing the notebook’s present owner in a consortium with other US bibliophiles. They are returning it to the British government ‘in recognition of British resistance to Germany in the first years of the war’. I suppose one way of looking at this is to say, thank Hitler for Alice.

The bulk of the exhibition is a selection of the many subsequent Alice books and merchandise, taking in illustrators from Arthur Rackham to Ralph Steadman. There’s a series of 1930s advertising pamphlets by Guinness, plus sundry toys, puzzles and figurines all helping themselves to Carroll’s text. The copyright expired as early as 1907. Alice belongs to everyone.

Most of the book-based Alices on show have long blonde hair, thanks to Tenniel and Disney, though one or two replicate Alice Liddell’s dark bob. There’s also a ‘flapper Alice’ from the 1920s, and a Brownie Alice from the 30s, as in the junior girl guides. Some Alices are older than others: a post-war letter from Graham Greene to Mervyn Peake compliments Peake on being ‘the first person who has been able to illustrate the book satisfactorily since Tenniel’, only to add ‘your Alice is a little bit too much of a gamin.’ From 1902 there’s a political parody by Saki, The Westminster Alice. It’s a link kept evergreen this year when Tony Blair accused Jeremy Corbyn of creating a delusional ‘Alice in Wonderland world’ for Labour.

The Alice I am most surprised by is a version by Salvador Dali, from the 1960s. Here the Caterpillar appears in double form, a realistic rendering next to an abstract splatter of paint. Dali’s Alice, meanwhile, is an inky stick figure with a skipping rope.

Afterwards, I visit the BL’s Alice pop-up shop. It sells all manner of Carroll-themed products – chocolates, calendars, diaries – yet frustratingly, no single postcards. I now wonder if picture postcards are finally on the decline, even as cheap souvenirs of exhibitions. For some reason, they’re more likely to be available in bulky boxes of 100 at a time (eg a series of classic covers of Penguin Books).

Thankfully there’s another gallery a short walk away that does sell postcards of Alice – the Cartoon Museum in Little Russell Street. The current exhibition features Ralph Steadman, too, this time paying tribute not to Carroll but Gillray, the satirical cartoonist of the Romantic age. Here, Gillray’s prints – in startlingly fresh condition – are juxtaposed with the many pastiche cartoons in recent years. Given the tight deadlines for newspaper cartoons, a take on Gillray is always a reliable option. The most parodied image by far is Napoleon and Pitt carving up the ‘plumb-pudding’ of the world. Here, the exhibition shows how the likes of Steve Bell and Martin Rowson have updated this basic template with Blair, Cameron et al in place of the original duo. There’s also an inspired Viz cartoon strip about a Beano-esque rivalry between Gillray and Rowlandson.

I spend the evening with Fenella Hitchcock and Vadim Kosmos in Fontaine’s, an elegant Art Deco cocktail bar which somehow exists in Stoke Newington. I down some very nicely made Brandy Alexanders and find myself discussing the film work of Doug McClure, before staggering onto the Overground train home.

* * *

Saturday 21st November 2015.

I meet Tom, Charis and their friends at the British Library, to see the new Alice In Wonderland exhibition in the lobby. Or at least, we try to see the exhibition. A huge queue for it stretches across the width of the building, doubles up at the end, and appears not to be moving. A woman at the information desk tells me that interest in the exhibition has been overwhelming, and they were taken by surprise. This is the first weekend, though, after all the press coverage, and it’s open till April. So we postpone the visit for another day. How interesting, though, that a mid-Victorian children’s book can have such a hold on a twenty-first century public, and that people will queue to see old books in glass cases.

Well, people except us. Instead, we take a look at the Alice pop-up shop – also crammed – before I show them the Spice Girls Staircase in the St Pancras hotel next door. I also point out this year’s Christmas tree in St Pancras station. It’s a tottering pile of Disney soft toys, from Mickey Mouse to the heroine of Frozen. Among them is the White Rabbit from the Disney cartoon of Alice In Wonderland, which is a neat consolation. Then we go for refreshments in Drink Shop And Do, in the Caledonian Road. I suggest this crafts-based female-friendly venue, partly because most of our group is female, but mainly because I get nervous around football fans in pubs, and it’s a Saturday afternoon. There’s a pile of board games available, and I play my first ever game of Jenga.

* * *

Monday 23rd November 2015.

MA class on The Submission, by Amy Waldman. It’s a clever novel about the politics of post-terrorism grief, where the winner of a competition to design a 9/11 memorial turns out to be a Muslim, thus triggering a range of protests. The timing of this class with the Paris attacks makes the issues all the more relevant. There was an article this week about how one of ISIS’s aims is the elimination of the ‘grey zone’, as in toleration, nuance of thought, consideration of complexity, and the peaceful co-existence of different faiths. By firmly foregrounding this theme, Ms Waldman’s book works as a good memorial in itself.

* * *

Tuesday 24th November 2015.

I am in the British Library to work on my first MA essay. I’ve not been here since May, but there are a couple of staffers in the Rare Books Reading Room who still greet me with ‘Mr Edwards!’ when I go to collect my requested items. They also add that they enjoyed seeing me in the book I Am Dandy.

The Rare Books room still has 40 desks where laptops are banned. I tend to favour these, partly to keep up my longhand writing, but also because they are rarely occupied.

* * *

Wednesday 25th November 2015.

To the private view of Quentin Blake – The Hospital Drawings, at South Kensington and Chelsea Mental Health Centre. This is a clinic next to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on Fulham Road. Mr Blake has made specially commissioned drawings for the walls of British hospitals for ten years now, and this exhibition features a selection of these works. His productivity is all the more impressive, given he is now in his eighties. Asked to provide nineteen drawings, one for each bedroom on a mental health ward, he delivered sixty. His scribbly, sketchy style is typically colourful and lively for a sequence designed for a children’s ward – images of friendly space aliens, to help children be less fearful of doctors. But the drawings for adult clinics are more restrained. There’s dots for eyes instead of his usual googly circles, and his signature messy lines are calmed through washes of pale watercolour – greys, greens, light browns and golds. There’s still plenty of silliness, though: he illustrates therapeutic activities by having elderly people sitting in trees playing cellos or feeding mad-looking birds. One sequence has older people performing circus tricks on a senior-friendly level – a tightrope walker is mere inches from the ground.

Mr Blake himself turns up tonight to open the exhibition in person. A consultant introduces him as ‘Britain’s most famous living illustrator’, which is surely true. ‘At first I worried,’ QB says in his speech, ‘that the drawings of elderly people might be in bad taste. Then I realise I’m part of the same social group as they are, so I’m allowed.’ The last time I was in the same room as him, it was at a Puffin Club Show in the early 80s. I would have been about ten. The prints and drawings in this exhibition are all for sale, in aid of the Nightingale Project, an organisation that puts art into British hospitals. Many of the works are a mere £300 each. He is an artist of the people, in many ways.

One of my favourite lesser-known Blake works is The Bed Book, where he illustrated Sylvia Plath’s poems for children. (Link to an article about it here: https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/04/04/the-bed-book-sylvia-plath-quentin-blake/)

* * *

Thursday 26th November 2015.

After last night’s free wine in the corridors of a mental health clinic, I enjoy more free drinks in an unlikely space – the London Library’s Reading Room, in St James’s Square. It’s the Members’ Christmas Party, and I chat with the likes of Travis Elborough, Andrew Martin, and various fellow Library members, some of whom turn out to be fellow Birkbeck postgraduate students too. I’ve found that my seahorse brooch is perfect for getting conversations started with strangers. I rarely go up to people I don’t know, so it’s good if they have a reason to come up to me. If only to say they like the brooch.

* * *

Friday 27th November 2015.

Afternoon: I give another tour at Wynd’s Museum of Curiosities in Mare Street, some of it filmed by a lady from Time Out.

Evening: to the East Finchley Phoenix for the film Carol, directed by Todd Haynes. His last big screen affair was the experimental Bob Dylan biography, I’m Not There. After seeing Carol I realise that both films end with a shot of Cate Blanchett looking directly at the camera. Then she was in male drag as the 60s Dylan. In Carol she’s in a more conventional female role, but still with an otherworldly air. Her character is a spellbinding New York society wife during the 1950s, who draws a young shopgirl into a romance. Like many of Mr Haynes’s films, the emphasis is on outsiders coping to be themselves in an artificial world, though this is his most accessible work yet. In fact, it’s based on Patricia Highsmith’s autobiographical novel of the same name, which was notable for reaching selling nearly a million copies in the 1950s, while daring to give its gay characters a happy ending. So it’s only right the film version is aimed at a mass audience.

Despite this, Carol still has an arthouse sensibility. Every frame of this film is ravishing and balletic in its rendering of the era, much like an Edward Hopper painting. The two leads (Rooney Mara as the younger) manage to channel the mannerisms of the films from that period, with much blowing of cigarette smoke in stylish directions. Ms Blanchett has a touch of a slowed-down Katharine Hepburn (in a dreamy reprise of her actual Hepburn in The Aviator), while Ms Mara closely resembles Audrey Hepburn, albeit a more inscrutable, guarded version. Just when it can’t get any better, Carrie Brownstein from Portlandia and Sleater-Kinney turns up.

It’s only occurred to me now that the title ‘Carol‘ is not just a reference to the Blanchett character, but a play on the Christmas setting of the story, and how this links to the gift-giving themes of the story. So the release date is well-chosen, too.

* * *

I leaf through the London Evening Standard. As it’s a free newspaper, I take pains to save waste and only read it after it has been discarded by someone else, usually onto the seat of a Tube carriage. A few years ago, when the ES cost 50p and had to compete with two free papers, it ran a poster campaign depicting a carriage covered with copies of its rivals. ‘No one throws away the Standard‘, the poster boasted, making the connection between litter and financial worth. Today the Standard is free, and people indeed throw it away. The poster turned out to be the advertising equivalent of Neville Chamberlain’s ‘Peace For Our Time’ speech. It’s the same lesson: never make hasty claims about pieces of paper.

* * *

Tonight’s ES carries a decent interview with Sian Berry, the Green candidate for next year’s mayoral election. She turns out to be the only candidate who lives in a rented studio flat, being one room with an en-suite bathroom. I suspect that this fact alone could swing things in her favour. There may be more to London’s problems than the property crisis, but (to misquote The Smiths) not much more. Other problems – crime, poverty, the closing of small businesses, the overcrowding of transport networks – all link to the failure to do something about property prices. This week sees the closure of yet another Soho landmark, the Stockpot café in Old Compton Street.

Another property story in the paper has an element of schadenfreude, though. In Barnes, a multi-million-pound Georgian townhouse has collapsed ‘like a deck of cards’, while undergoing construction work. It had been in the process of having its basement enlarged; a fashionable move among London’s wealthy. It always seems to be the basement, and always to accommodate a range of further luxuries, in this case, ‘a cinema, gym, and wine room’.  As if there was a shortage of such things on their doorstep.

Flipping through the Standard, one gets an impression that Londoners either live in overpriced rented rooms, or that they own vast mansions which must nevertheless be remodelled, with much disruption to the neighbours, in order to be even bigger. The abiding question with all of this is: what is a city for?

* * *

Saturday 14th November 2015.

Last night, after seeing The Lady In The Van at the East Finchley Phoenix, I couldn’t resist getting straight on the tube to Camden Town in order to look at the other star of the film: Number 23 Gloucester Crescent, NW1. The fake blue plaque for Miss Shepherd that appears in the film’s finale has gone. In Alan Bennett’s 2014 diaries (now published in a tie-in book about the film), he hopes the prop plaque would be left up, ‘as it may enhance the value of the property’. Mr B has since moved out for good, and on this night when a film about the house is opening in cinemas across the country, Number 23 is subdued, dark and silent.

I touch the spot on the gate post where Maggie Smith spills her yellow paint – now cleaned up – and walk back. The house is on the corner of Inverness Street, with the Good Mixer pub about thirty seconds’ walk away. About four years after Miss Shepherd’s death in 1989, the pub became the favourite drinking den of London’s Britpop bands. Given the lady in the van was so opposed to the ‘din’ of neighbours’ children playing their recorders, it’s hard to think how she’d have copied with the guitarist from Blur.

(Indeed, there’s a new film out about that era of London too – Kill Your Friends.)

One triumph of The Lady In The Van is that it captures the way English people can wrap themselves into complex emotional knots of awkwardness, guilt, etiquette and embarrassment, when it comes to helping the homeless. In one scene, Roger Allam’s character begrudgingly opens a jam jar for Miss Shepherd, while taking care to see no one in the street is looking. It’s Englishness in a nutshell.

* * *

Sunday 15th November 2015.

On Twitter, the Sky News presenter Kay Burley reports on the aftermath of the Paris attacks. Among her postings is a photograph of an elderly Labrador, sitting in a Paris street, simply looking at the camera. Ms Burley adds the caption ‘Sadness in his eyes’. This photo is soon roundly criticised, mocked and parodied by countless Twitterers. At the very least, the question is raised as to whether anthropomorphic judgements of canine emotion are quite the priority for frontline reportage.

It’s a moment that now feels like a regular stage in the breaking down of tragedy. First, there is the initial shock of the news. Then there is a dominant wave of concern and sympathy. But after that – two days in or so – one section of the crowd begins to overdo their public sentiment. And another section of the crowd, eager to cheer itself up, begins to wince and smirk.

In 1997, with the death of Princess Diana, there were huge amounts of floral tributes left at the gates of Kensington Palace. Among these were a fair number of children’s toys. Not just soft toy animals, but Star Wars figurines. I distinctly remember going to the gates myself and seeing a dangling Stormtrooper doll. Presumably the toys were to do with children wanting to give up a favourite possession, but it all seemed very odd. A few years later, Stewart Lee performed a whole routine mocking such tributes, imagining grown adults rushing out to buy stuffed ET dolls. ‘It’s what she would have wanted.’

Come July 2005, with the London bombs, the mocking of anthropomorphic tributes became an internet sport. There was a spate of ‘crying bulldog’ photos posted on LiveJournal with the caption ‘London Hurts’. Initially these were perfectly sincere. But soon the parodies popped up, each bulldog and each badly Photoshopped teardrop getting more and more silly.

The point is that this form of mockery is never really malicious. No one really begrudges anyone’s feelings. Not even the feelings of dog-loving Sky News reporters. It’s all humans being human, expressing themselves healthily and without violence, and so evoking the anti-terrorist spirit at its purest. Indeed, the magazine Charlie Hebdo responded to this week’s events with a cover of a man drinking champagne, while riddled with bullet holes. To some, appalling taste; to others, defiantly funny, perhaps even touching. When it comes to what is and isn’t an appropriate response, vive le difference.

* * *

Tuesday 17th November 2015.

To the Curzon Bloomsbury for the film Steve Jobs, about Mr Apple. It’s one of those films from the sub-genre of Overtly Blunt Titles, along with Twister, We Bought A Zoo, and of course, Snakes On A Plane. (‘What’s it about?’ ‘Well…’). The tale has already been told – there was an Ashton Kutcher biopic two years ago. But this time it’s told with bolder artistic strokes, perhaps in an attempt to evoke the aesthetic obsessions of the man. Danny Boyle directs, being Mr Spectacle, and Aaron Sorkin provides the script, being Mr Dialogue For Ambitious Americans. The film is play-like, with three distinct acts, each one taking place at the launches of Mr Jobs’s pretty machines.

There’s a fascinating 1960s clip of Arthur C Clarke used right at the beginning, where he predicts the rise of domestic computers. Then we’re straight into Mr Fassbender as the 1984 Jobs, shouting at people to get the Macintosh launched without a hitch. Various figures from his life turn up in the corridors and dressing rooms, in the Sorkin-esque walking-and-talking way. It’s a unique stylistic conceit, yet at times it still hits the same notes as any corny biopic (like Jobs pointing at a cassette Walkman and saying there should be a way of carrying around hundreds of songs). But Mr Sorkin gets away with it with his sheer speed of ideas.

The only problem, perhaps indicated by the film’s lack of success in the US, is that despite all the talent involved, Steve Jobs’s real life is still not that interesting. A clever man makes some pretty machines and makes a lot of money very early on. He’s a bit of an ‘asshole’ to others, but hey, he gave us the pretty machines, so that’s okay. At first there is a slightly interesting problem with his daughter, but it’s more or less sorted out by the middle act. His ‘worst night of his life’ is when he is sacked from Apple for not making quite as many millions as planned. When one character tells him ‘You’re gonna get killed!’, this really means: ‘your new computer won’t sell all that much’. It’s not exactly Saving Private Ryan.

Mr J ends up quoting Dylan, wearing roll-neck Beatles jumpers and round John Lennon glasses. Perhaps that’s the problem. A computer star is not a rock star. ‘I’m poorly made’, he says towards the end. This is not the admission of a flawed hero, but the admission that he’s not the hero after all. The star quality is all in the machines, and not in the man.

Saturday 7th November 2015.

To the Goya exhibition at the National Gallery. Purely portraits of Spanish nobility, plus a few self-portraits. His subjects display unusually informal expressions for the late 1700s and early 1800s: cagey, jokey, rougish, sensual. The fleshy-faced young Goya looks not unlike the comedian Matt Berry, particularly in the portrait where he wears a top hat customised with burning candles around the rim, to provide more light on the canvas. His vanity is shameless: one duchess points to the words ‘Only Goya’ in the sand by her feet.

A small delight: the Moomins Shop in Covent Garden sells Moomin-branded glasses cleaning cloths.

* * *

Sunday 8th November 2015.

The large Waterstones student-friendly bookshop in Gower Street has booted out the rather cramped Costa café in the basement, and installed an airy new in-house café of its own, on the ground floor. Better still, the café is called Dillons, in memory of the bookshop that occupied the building in the 80s and 90s (which I can just about remember). Dillons is also nicely immortalised in the first page of Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, as Nick Guest gazes at a window display, soon after the 1983 election.  

* * *

Wednesday 11th November 2015.

Evening: with Ms Shanthi to the Leicester Square Odeon, to see Legend. This is the new film about the Kray Twins, both played here by Tom Hardy. For Reggie he plays up his beauty, all quiff and pouts and open jackets – possibly the best looking Mr H has ever been. The more psychotic Ronnie is from Hardy’s repertoire of grotesques (like Bane and Bronson): horn rim glasses, slicked down hair, hunching, growling, grunting. The film’s highlights are when the traits are swapped between the brothers: when Ronnie is suddenly gentle, and Reggie is suddenly unstable. The special effect of the dual roles threatens to upstage the film at times, making it more of a gimmick (one thinks of those Eddie Murphy films where he insists on playing six characters). There’s also a few scenes where the film is trying very hard to be a British Scorsese – a Goodfellas or Casino – with its tracking shots of gangster bars as the main characters walk around the room, chatting with everyone they meet. But Hardy is riveting enough.

Shanthi also takes me to an old-fashioned Soho bar, which I think I’ve never been to before. It’s the New Evaristo Club, or ‘Trisha’s’, at 57 Greek Street. Private members’, apparently, but tonight the staff seem to be okay with our just swanning in politely and buying glasses of wine (£4 each). The club is the longest-running in Soho, now that the Colony has gone. It is steeped in 1950s character, with dim green lighting, round café tables with tablecloths, and old photos on the wall of Sinatra and Italian boxers. Three trendy young men with beards and backpacks come in, take one look at the décor, and promptly walk out again. It is too Old London for them.

Shanthi takes a photo:

Something rare for London happens: the barmaid comes over and tops up our glasses for free. ‘Shame to waste the bottle,’ she says. I need to come back.

* * *

iPhones with shattered screens are the new ripped jeans.

* * *

Friday 13th November 2015.

To the East Finchley Phoenix for The Lady in the Van, the film adaptation of Alan Bennett’s memoir. It’s fair to say the film is pure, distilled Bennett. It’s directed by Nick Hytner, AB’s main stage collaborator since the 90s, and it’s also something of a History Boys cast reunion, with all eight ‘boys’ and all three teachers from the original stage production (not counting the late Richard Griffiths) popping up in little roles. Plus it brings together Maggie Smith, reprising her performance as the titular lady from the 90s stage version, with Alex Jennings’s take on Bennett himself, a role he’d performed in the play Cocktail Sticks. But the World Of Bennett preservation goes further, as the story’s location – his former home in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town – is shot in situ. His old house is played by his old house. And there’s even a glimpse of Jennings as Bennett as the character Graham in A Chip in the Sugar, one of the Talking Heads monologues. At one point, Roger Allam’s cynical neighbour says that the monologue is really ‘all about him, as usual’, and so it proves with this new film. Despite the subject ostensibly being Miss Shepherd, the eccentric elderly woman who lived in Bennett’s front yard for fifteen years, the film is ultimately more about Bennett scrutinising his own life and work together. As soon as it’s clear that Mr Jennings is surreally playing two Alan Bennetts – the writer and the man – the film becomes more Brechtian than realistic, and the use of the History Boys cast works more as a reference than an indulgence.

While watching, I realised that, what with Legend I’d accidentally gone to see two films this week where both were set in late twentieth-century London, both were based on true stories, and both featured a lead actor playing dual roles. But whereas Tom Hardy’s doubling as the Krays has to work as if they’re played by real twins, Jennings’s two Alan Bennetts serve as a reminder that the film is a playful fantasy based on truth. Dame Maggie’s superb performance then works against this fantasy, putting the handbrake on Bennett’s constant flow of quips, aphorisms and literary quotations. When Miss Shepherd moves her van into the yard for the first time, she puts on the handbrake with such force that it becomes like Excaliber in Arthur’s stone, unable to be moved by any other hand. Years later, the vehicle has to be lifted out via a crane. This is a nice touch of symbolism, given the way Miss Shepherd becomes a fixture in Bennett’s life, to the point where he feels almost married to her.

* * *

Both The Lady in the Van and Legend are romances of the city. They celebrate London as a place to form an identity. But this quality is not, of course, exclusive. As I type up this week’s diary, news comes through of the sickening attacks in Paris. The people who have died were civilians in concert halls and theatres, people using Paris to just be themselves. I take some comfort from the Fred Rogers quote about reacting to distressing events: ‘look for the helpers’.

* * *

Saturday 31st October 2015. 

Halloween. A lone young man is at Barbican Tube platform, staring glumly at the screen of his phone. It’s a typical sight for 2015, except he is dressed as the Incredible Hulk.

* * *

Wednesday 4th November 2015.

(photo by Mum)

My graduation ceremony, for my BA in English from Birkbeck, University of London. Mum and my brother Tom attend.

For a while I wasn’t sure whether I’d attend. Graduation ceremonies are entirely optional to graduates. The diploma certificate is sent out whether one attends the ceremony or not.

Early on in the four-year course, I was umm-ing and err-ing about attending my ceremony. Then Dad became too ill to travel, and Mum had to look after him. A further reason to decline presented itself when I was walking past the LSE, and saw a group of young students standing outside in their gowns. They reminded me how graduation is mainly associated with students in their early twenties; the ones who get those inspiring ‘commencement’ addresses (though some time after writing this I found out such speeches are mainly an American tradition). These ceremonies are as much a rite of passage as they are benchmarks of achievement.  Watching these pert young students in their gowns, I felt a bit too ‘commenced’ in the tooth to join them.  No, a ceremony wasn’t for me.

And then Dad died. And time passed. And the ceremony came around. Mum wanted to go – assuming I did. This time I had to admit I was curious. I felt an anxiety of the era: that looking at a computer screen to get one’s results, or receiving them in the post, isn’t a proper memory. This is why people dress up at Halloween more than ever, or go to festivals more than ever, or go to dressed-up graduation ceremonies, or have big weddings. They crave a life beyond screens. This means going to a special place, wearing special clothes, performing a symbolic act. So I said yes.

Graduating in public isn’t cheap. It’s £45 to hire the gown, including the mortar board and hood. Then there’s the guest tickets for relatives and friends at £33 each. Still, this does include wine, buffet food (both of which are quite decent) and Birkbeck Alumni mugs. Thankfully, I discovered that the pricey portrait services can be waived. I’m not keen on a formal portrait as it is, and in my dark mind I can’t help associating those images with tabloid reports of murder. ‘HAPPIER TIMES… Mildred on her graduation day. The inquest continues.’ 

Students can also get a photo taken for free at Birkbeck’s publicity stall. This was all I wanted by way of an image, really. Proof.

(from Birkbeck’s official Facebook page)

For the ceremony itself, Birbeck borrows a venue from one of its Bloomsbury campus neighbours: Logan Hall, in the Institute of Education, Bedford Way, off Russell Square. The architecture is pure 1970s Brutalism – lots of wide, unsilly lobbies that now have a vintage feel. It’s a close stylistic relative of the Barbican Centre. I especially like the little ‘airlock’ rooms that funnel out from the Logan Hall doorways.

The ceremony begins with a procession onto the stage by the gaudily-gowned ‘platform party’, which includes the Master, Professor David Latchman, the ceremonial President, Baroness Joan Bakewell, and the School of Arts Executive Dean, Professor Hilary Fraser. There’s also a few tutors, including Fleur Rothschild, who taught me how to fix my recurring essay problems. And there’s a gentleman in white gloves who carries a ceremonial mace.

The actual graduation performance is a simple but symbolic act of ‘going forth’. As Professor Fraser announces each name, the student comes up to one side of the stage, walks across  to shake hands with the Master and the President, then returns to their seat via the opposite side. No mention of First Class, or Second Class – all graduates are equal. However, if the student has won a prize for an ‘outstanding achievement’ during their studies, this is the one time it’s publicly announced. Today I had my name read out as the joint winner of the John Hay Lobban Prize, ‘for a student who is judged to have shown the greatest promise in English Literature’, and as the winner of the Stephen Thomson Prize, for my work on the Writing London module.

Learned today: PHD grads (who shared the ceremony) have to kneel on a Special PHD Cushion, so they can be anointed with a Special Hood.

Also learned: Birkbeck graduation colours can trigger pangs for Liquorice Allsorts.

There’s no honorary degrees or commencement speeches, but Baroness Bakewell’s speech does include advice. She mentions the current hot topic in academia  – whether Germaine Greer should be allowed to speak at university events, in the light of her unkind thoughts on transgender people. While not judging Professor G’s words, or indeed the petition to stop her speaking, the Baroness suggests that today’s graduates be mindful of both the content of their public statements and the proportion of their public responses. My own thoughts lean to a third party – the way the media stir up heated reactions as a kind of spectator sport.

At the wine reception afterwards, I chat to fellow graduates: Hester, Colin, Kim, Keith.

Keith: Would it be corny if we did that thing where we throw our mortar boards in the air?

Me: Yes.

Keith: Let’s do it.

Me: Okay.

(photo by Mum)

After this photo is taken,  we retrieve up our hired mortar boards from the dry and clean Brutalist floor. Only unthinking graduates would throw up their hats outside, with the mud and wet pavements.

I then realise the hat I have is in the wrong size. There follows a sheepish amount of label checking and hat swapping. It’s a scene that must follow every photo of group hat-throwing.

Afterwards, to an Edwards family dinner at Smollensky’s restaurant in Canary Wharf, where cousin Jonathan had his wedding reception. Mum opens the curtain that looks out onto Reuters Plaza, then closes it again when it exposes our table to the huge dot matrix sign on the building opposite, which displays Reuters news headlines in a constantly moving, ticker-tape fashion. ‘We don’t want to have our dessert serenaded by the latest on ISIS, do we.’

* * *

Thursday 5th November 2015. 

To Dulwich Picture Gallery with Mum, for the big MC Escher show. Even though it’s a wet Thursday lunchtime, and the gallery’s slightly out of the way for most tourists, the exhibition is packed. At times I feel in danger of becoming one of Escher’s animal tessellations, my body precisely filling the space between two other visitors.

The show is billed as ‘The Amazing World of MC Escher‘, which is a telling indication of his critical reputation. The title rather consolidates his image as a circus showman, a maker of absorbing posters for maths classrooms and dentists’ surgeries, rather than what this exhibition reveals him to be: a fine surrealist artist in the vein of Leonora Carrington. One early woodcut is a simple, charming rendition of a white cat, from 1919. The cat was a gift from his landlady. I’m reminded of my own late landlady, Mrs Wilson. For 20 years she gave each tenant boxes of chocolates at Christmas. Sometimes at Easter too.

Random kindnesses. The zip-pull on my shoulder bag falls off. I go into Ryman’s on Regent Street and ask if they sell something I could use as a replacement – a luggage keyring, perhaps. The assistant says, ‘Let me try something.’ He takes a large paper clip from a drawer, carefully bends it into shape and fixes it onto my bag. It works perfectly. No charge.

Saturday 24th October 2015.

Ed Sheeran is one of the biggest rock stars of the moment, yet he seems to evince no traits of ego or megalomania whatsoever. There doesn’t seem to be a single photo of him in existence where he doesn’t look like a competition winner.

* * *

I give another tour of the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities. Some of the visitors have come for the Sebastian Horsley ‘Dandies Corner’ display, to my delight, as that’s where I feel the most knowledgeable. There’s now a single lipstick smear on the glass of the Horsley case, in the fashion of the lipstick marks on the Oscar Wilde tomb.

Sunday 25th October 2015.

Modern language. A phrase being bandied by some disability campaigners is ‘inspiration porn”. This denotes the packaging of a personal struggle, such as in a TV programme, primarily to tug at the heartstrings, rather than raise awareness. It follows on from ‘poverty porn’, to describe shows like Benefits Street. There’ll be ‘sex porn’ next.

* * *

I read the latest Ian McEwan novel, The Children Act. Like Saturday, I wince at the author’s love of privileged protagonists with central London homes and top professional jobs – a High Court female judge in this case – and the main young character seems impossibly idealised. But his prose style still impresses: a clear and controlled flow which completely draws the reader in.

Meanwhile, Mr McEwan’s chum Martin Amis is in the Sunday Times, penning an attack on Jeremy Corbyn. The piece is meant to be scathing, but Amis uses imagery that inadvertently appeals. Because of his ‘incurious domesticity’, he says, Corbyn is like a ‘marmalade cat’. It’s like the time in the 90s when John Major said Labour and taxes went together like ‘strawberries and cream’. The negative sentiment is eclipsed by an entirely pleasant image.

* * *

Monday 26th October 2015.

MA class at Birkbeck, on Atwood’s The Year of the Flood. Lecture by Hallvard Haug. The novel’s suitability becomes evident in the seminar: the more we discuss it, the more we realise it covers a rich variety of contemporary themes. Environmentalism, fundamentalism, feminism, globalisation, trauma, literary genres – it’s all there. A good, all-purpose novel.

* * *

Tuesday 27th October 2015.

Some unexpected praise this week. One is my inclusion in a list of ‘Top 5 pop lyricists of all time’, by La JohnJoseph, at the Dandy Dicks website. It’s a site that features erotica, though the article in question is clean enough: https://dandydicks.com/blog-entry/lyricism. ‘Dickon Edwards – ‘The only man living with any real right to call himself both a flaneur and a dandy’.

I also receive a lengthy email from a young man in Baltimore, who only stumbled on the blog this year: ‘Thank you for existing – You have restored my faith in so many things’.

Plus a handwritten letter from a reader on a Scottish island, who took comfort from my entry about my father. When her own mother died, she dug it out of the archives to re-read.

I’m grateful for these responses. Too often it can feel like no one’s reading, and too often I wonder if I should continue.

* * *

Wednesday 28th October 2015.

A visit to the Foundling Museum, in Brunswick Square. The museum tells the story of the Founding Hospital, which cared for abandoned children and orphans. Though it turns out that the story is more complicated than I’d thought. By the mid-19th century, the demand for admittance was so high that the Hospital had to implement a ‘petition’ system, where the mother had to prove she had been ‘seduced’, which often meant raped, or ‘abandoned’. The idea of single parent families was so shameful that many women give up their children to institutions like the FH, rather than raise them on their own. There’s a temporary exhibition, The Fallen Woman, which focuses on these women’s stories, while the permanent collection portrays the children. A sound installation by Steve Lewinson features the mothers’ petitions read out by actresses like Maxine Peake and Ruth Jones.

I really like the café’s mural, Superman Was A Foundling by Lemn Sissay. The walls are covered in statements about the foundling status of so many characters from popular culture. From Harry Potter to Snow White to Wolverine to Sophie Fevvers, as in the heroine of Angela Carter’s Nights At The Circus. Two characters are illustrated by logos between the café windows: the ‘S’ symbol of Superman, and a dragon tattoo, for Lisbeth Salander.

* * *

Thursday 29th October 2015.

I meet Ms Atalanta for a drink in the Marlborough Arms, in Bloomsbury. The pub is a favourite with students from the nearby colleges. Many students in Halloween fancy dress tonight, two days before the 31st. A party of young men are in animal ‘onesies’, while a group of girls are dressed as characters from Scooby Doo, with one as the titular dog. The pub décor is somewhat schizophrenic in its festive theme: there’s Christmas presents and a Santa Claus cut-out in one corner (with a sign, ‘Book Now For Christmas Dinner’), alongside Halloween pumpkins, skeletons and cobwebs.

We walk to King’s Cross and decide on another drink while waiting for Ms A’s train. Really, thought, it’s an excuse for me to show her The Parcel Yard pub at one end of the revamped station. This in is the former King’s Cross postal sorting office. There’s stripped wooden floors, white-painted dividing walls, old railway signs that manage to be tasteful rather than twee, and an interior covered courtyard with potted trees. Plenty of alcoves and small rooms in which to feel safe – this way, no single loutish party can dominate the whole bar. The pub is right by the Harry Potter embedded trolley, yet it doesn’t feel too tourist-heavy, or even too commuter-heavy.

* * *

Friday 30th October 2015.

To the Tottenham Court Road Odeon with Jon S, to see Spectre, the new James Bond film. I miss the jokier, almost Carry On-like aspect of the Bond films in the past. In one of the Roger Moore films, there’s a moment following a punch-up in an exotic den, where a belly dancer bemoans the loss of a diamond. ‘I’ve lost my charm!’ she wails. ‘Not from where I’m standing,’ says Moore, straightening his tie.

This sort of thing was attempted more recently with the Piers Brosnan films – where strained innuendos were exchanged with the likes of Madonna – but the tiredness of the style was showing. It made perfect sense to move on to a more gritty, realistic approach, with a suitably serious actor in charge. So enter Mr Craig. This means that the violence that would have been read as jokey in the old days (such as Sean Connery and the laser beam) is now made all too believable and unpleasant – one scene in Spectre with Craig strapped to a chair is particularly wince-inducing. I also feel Lea Seydoux’s character here, though nicely acted, is a touch too youthful for the forty-something Craig. Far more interesting are his earlier romantic scenes with Monica Bellucci, who is not only closer to his age, but has more chemistry. Otherwise, the action set-pieces are breathtaking without being banal, the globe-trotting locations dazzle, and the tailoring of the menswear is immaculate. All the male characters, even the absolute thugs, somehow manage to stop off between punch-ups to collect a fresh new ensemble, clean and pressed. The Bond world may be less jokey, but it is still steeped in wish-fulfilment.

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Saturday 17th October 2015.

I watch a new Ted Hughes documentary made by the BBC, Stronger Than Death. Unusually for a TV documentary, there’s no celebrity presenters trampling their own uncalled-for views all over the material. Instead the film lets the poems, the archive footage and the interviewees do all the talking. There’s still omissions and bias, of course: Jonathan Bate appears, and it’s clearly timed to coincide with his major new Hughes biography.

Despite having 90 minutes to play with Hughes’s life, a lot of time is given to the shadow of Sylvia Plath. There’s a recital of a US feminist’s poem which openly dreams of Hughes’s murder, as revenge for Plath’s suicide. This is at the expense of even mentioning The Iron Man or Meet My Folks (both of which delighted me as a child). Hughes’s widow Carol is also noticeably absent – perhaps because she’s appeared in the news headlines lately, complaining about ‘damaging and offensive claims’ in Mr Bate’s book. Instead, one of TH’s extra-marital flings speaks about the poem she apparently inspired, with clear pride.

It’s tempting to say a lot of this is unfairly intrusive or even gossipy, but as Simon Armitage says early on in the film, Ted Hughes is one literary figure where the biography really is essential when considering the work. For my own part, I find myself reaching for my copy of Emma Tennant’s memoir Burnt Diaries, to look up her own contributions to the Tales of Ted. There’s much about Ms Tennant’s own affair with the poet in the 70s, but most memorably for me is the anecdote about his encounter with a mentally ill poet. This man had stalked Hughes for months and had even threatened him with a knife. Finally confronted by the man on a London street, Hughes shoves him into the passenger seat of his car, binds him with the seatbelt, and grabs a sheet of plain A4 paper from his satchel. Then he gets out his penknife, shouts, ‘Look at this!’ to the stalker, and slices the paper diagonally in two.

According to Ms Tennant, who witnessed all this from the back seat of the car, the stalker sat there looking at the paper, ‘as if a living creature had been sacrificed before his eyes – or his soul had been cut in two.’ He was then let out of the car and shambled off into the city. ‘He won’t trouble us again,’ said Hughes.

Bate’s new biography includes this story, and adds that the stalker in question may have been Henry Fainlight, troubled brother of Ruth, though he thinks the anecdote is ‘probably exaggerated in order to dramatise Ted’s quasi-occult powers.’ But Hughes was steeped in ideas of mythology himself, and what else is gossip but a form of mythology? From Leda and the Swan to Kim Kardashian, it’s all tale-telling of a kind.

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Wednesday 21st October 2015.

To the Tate Britain for the big Barbara Hepworth exhibition, Sculpture for a Modern World. It’s labelled as the first major Hepworth show for nearly 50 years. Perhaps the long gap is because people are used to Ms Hepworth’s work being part of the landscape – literally, given her association with outdoors art. This large-scale indoor exhibition brings out the ambient, calming side of her sculptures: a world of humane and peaceful geometry. One room recreates a 1960s outdoor installation in the Netherlands, the Rietveld Pavilion. The pavilion’s concrete walls have been transplanted inside the Tate’s galleries, to show Hepworth’s works in the intended context, though without the grass and sky. I see more visitors sitting and sketching the exhibits than usual. Perhaps there’s something about Hepworth’s sculptures that particularly invites sketching. Carving away at the paper, joining in.

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Thursday 22nd October 2015.

I’m reading Margaret Atwood’s The Year of The Flood. A satisfying sequel to Oryx and Crake, focussing on two women caught up in a post-apocalyptic world, where a ‘waterless flood’ – a global pandemic plague – has destroyed most of humanity. A pull-quote for the cover praises the novel for being ‘as pacy as a thriller’. This is a very telling statement on the way genre is viewed by the British literary scene: it implies that literary novels aren’t meant to be pacy, and thrillers aren’t meant to be read. But it’s also accurate for The Year of the Flood: the book uses short chapters, cliffhangers, parallel viewpoints, and flashbacks. All are devices of thrillers. I wolf through its 500 pages in three days.

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Friday 23rd October 2015.

To the ICA cinema for The Lobster. A surreal black comedy, in the Absurdist tradition – shades of Ionesco and Bunuel. It’s by a Greek writer and director, but is filmed in English, and has an impressive cross-European cast (including Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Ben Whishaw, Olivia Colman, Lea Seydoux). The dialogue has a stilted, almost robotic feel, as if translated by a computer program, but this is clearly part of the whole deadpan aesthetic. The plot concerns an alternative world where single people are forced to find a compatible partner in a month, while imprisoned in a rural hotel. If they fail, they are surgically transformed into an animal of their choice. Mr Farrell escapes one such hotel, only to find that the woods-dwelling ‘loners’ he joins have brutal rules of their own. It’s a very strange film indeed, but like the best Absurdist plays, the comedy balances out the alienation.

Then to Vout-o-Reenee’s to prop up the bar with Debbie Smith. I also bump into Hazel Barkworth, a friend I’ve not seen for years. We discuss how we’ve solidified our own looks – my blond hair and suits, her bob hair and black dresses. ‘Be your own cosplay’ is our decree. (cosplay being short for ‘costume play’, the practice of dressing up as a genre character).

Tonight the venue is hosting the launch of two new poetry pamphlets (I think ‘chapbooks’ is the proper term). Both are published by Annexe Magazine: Susie Campbell’s The Frock Enquiry and JT Welsch’s The Ruin. The former uses historical research into the plight of early 20th century British female workers, a kind of Suffragette in poetry form. Mr Welsch’s work is inspired by a visit to the ruined ancient temples of Tunisia, and makes some nice comments about the way Star Wars fans now make a similarly holy pilgrimage to this area, due to the landscape’s role as a Star Wars location. Certainly, the latest Star Wars sequel is generating anticipation on a level of religious rapture, and it’s not even out for another two months.

I also take a look at the latest exhibition in the venue’s Stash Gallery, Wilma Johnson’s Cat Amongst The Dogs. Ms Johnson lost her life’s work of paintings in a house fire last June, so this show represents something of a rebirth of her creative spirit. Some forty or fifty canvasses are here – not bad for four months. The theme is a playful and colourful celebration of film icons and pets, with a touch of the mythic about both. There’s also a little of a Pop Art Frida Kahlo in the mix. There’s Garbos and Hepburns and Taylors amongst marmalade cats and borzois. Perhaps proving the point about the British love of pets, about half the paintings have already been sold – and the cat paintings are going more than the dog paintings. Tonight, I chat to the artist and discover that she’s staying at her mother’s house in Highgate, which turns out to be the house opposite mine. We share an obvious cab home.

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