Sunday 15 March 2020. To the Tate Britain for the Aubrey Beardsley exhibition, principally as I suspect it will be the last chance to visit a gallery for some time. I go by myself and am careful to keep my distance in the exhibition rooms, not lingering too long in one place. There is a degree of irony risking a respiratory virus in order to see work by a man who coughed himself to death. But there is a positive lesson too, with Beardsley producing a large amount of work in a short life, all the time coping with a serious illness that he’d had from childhood. Of the works I see today, I especially like his androgynous self-portrait, ‘The Art Editor of the Yellow Book’.

The last room is on AB’s 1960s influence – the sleeve to Revolver, and a grotesque Gerald Scarfe caricature in which Beardsley has a sinewy nude female body, vagina to the fore, accompanied by a homunculus with an enormous erect penis. Even in 2020 this image is hidden behind its own pair of curtains on the gallery wall, as if it were a plaque waiting to be unveiled by a particularly permissive monarch.

A few years ago, I went to the British Library in St Pancras to consult Brigid Brophy’s Black and White, her illustrated monograph on Beardsley. The library filed the book as Restricted Material. This means you must go to a special designated desk in the Rare Books Reading Room, separated from the normal desks and close to the view of a staff member working nearby. I suspect it is unofficially known as the Naughty Desk.

*

Monday 16 March 2020. Coronavirus cases are now in their thousands. Britain is heading for the unthinkable: a state of national lockdown. I call Mum in Suffolk. Thankfully she’s in good health, and has friends and neighbours checking in on her every day, keeping their distance when they do so. We talk on the phone every day (and later, we Skype).

Arguments are circulating over the definition of ‘essential’, over what is permitted and what is not. The official advice is vague, so it’s no wonder everyone on social media has suddenly become an expert on a brand new disease.

Who is happy to admit that their work is not ‘essential’, though? Particularly in London, the city where everyone, even the lowliest entertainment blogger, thinks that what they do is of vital importance?

And oh, the constant content. The emails reminding one that everyone else is being so fabulously productive, with their new TV programmes on streaming platforms, with their podcasts and their articles and their virtual events. All of which makes it harder for me to write a word. Why add more drops to the tide? Logging on, or picking up the phone, one now goes from a world of stillness into a world of excess and noise.

I’ve found that one solution is reading more books, away from the screen. Books reset the brain into deeper thinking, forcing the mind into coping with one thing at a time. No scrolling, no live updates. A book never asks you to accept cookies. That is, unless it’s a cookbook.

Still, I know that what I write in this diary (and with the thesis, which is essentially a book) is exclusive and original in its own odd little way. It’s like Quentin Crisp’s description of the party at the end of the world: ‘that happy hubbub where everyone is speaking and no one is listening’.

*

Tuesday 17 March 2020. London’s galleries, museums, libraries, cinemas, bars and cafes are either closing today or announcing imminent closure. It’s my last day in the carrel at Senate House Library. I empty the little room and return the key.

The meaning of London has changed now. The point of London for me – and many others – is the cultural life. Things to go to. Without those, one might as well be anywhere. If so many people can work from home, where does home need to be? Perhaps when this is over there will finally be reasonable rents, to stop mass homelessness and society grinding to a halt. I idly dream of a great conversion of London’s empty offices into flats which even people like me can afford. Or perhaps that is truly thinking the unthinkable.

*

Wednesday 18 March 2020. First day of working from home in Dalston.  The house I live in is shared by myself and my landlady. With the lockdown, both of us are in the house most of the time, which makes me aware of my lodger status more acutely. A lodger shares a space, but cannot fully inhabit. As kind as my landlady is (she sometimes cooks us both dinner), I stay out of the kitchen as much as I can and try to be a minimum presence, to the point of invisibility. I never cook. I live mainly on pre-cooked cold supermarket food in lieu of the café meals I used to have: sandwiches, fruit, snack bars, instant noodles. I do all my eating in my room and stay in there most of the day, working on my PhD. Or trying to work. My days of taking the Tube or going on buses are over for some time.

‘A Lodger in Lockdown’ sounds like the title of a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett.

This is my life now. Just the bedroom, and sometimes the bathroom and the kitchen, occasionally going into the immediate neighbourhood of Dalston and Stoke Newington for shopping and exercise. It certainly could be worse. Many people are locked in with children all day, whom they now have to home-school. I do not envy them. There’s been some predictions of a baby boom, but also of a rise in divorces.

*

Thursday 19 March 2020. If children are the least at risk, and there are no schools, perhaps they can just run things. I have seen Bugsy Malone.

*

Friday 20 March 2020. The government has closed all non-essential shops, including  hairdressers. It is going to be an interesting time for hair.

Some inadvertent humour. Stonehenge has been closed, to stop people gathering at sunrise for the spring equinox. From the Guardian today comes the following quote from a frustrated druid:

‘Stuart Hannington, a druid, also stayed behind the fence, accepting it was fair to restrict access. ‘They’re closing the churches so it seems okay that they are not allowing us to get to the stones. It’s disappointing but we have to make sacrifices.’

*

Saturday 21 March 2020. Email from Paypal saying ‘we’ve noticed you’ve been particularly impacted by recent customer behaviour’. By which they mean there have been hardly any donations to my diary. If they really noticed, they’d see that this is not much of a change. Talk about rubbing it in.

One of the main reasons I prefer to work in libraries is that the house is too cold to be in all day during the winter months. I am sensitive to the cold more than most (and more than my landlady), and can’t afford to put the heating on very often. I am writing this wearing a coat indoors.

*

Monday 23 March 2020. My GP has suspended face-to-face appointments. Boris Johnson appears on TV to announce the official beginning of the UK lockdown, several days after many of us have made a start. So here we are in history. 

One of the new clichés being bandied around by journalists is the phrase ‘the new normal’. I find this doubly depressing. The repetition of the phrase indicates insincerity, while the implication is that this situation is permanent. New it might be, but this is not normal. If it were, we would not be holding out hope for a vaccine. The phrase is also a contradiction in terms: if something is new, it cannot be normal. Normality is a state of affairs that have lasted. Perhaps, like capitalism, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of PR.

*

Tuesday 24 March 2020. The government sends a text message to every UK phone: ‘You must stay at home. Protect the NHS. Save lives.’ Words chosen for their hardness, shortness, and impact, from the team who brought us ‘Get Brexit Done’. This time Britain is trying to exit a global pandemic, a sentiment which at least unites everyone.

*

Wednesday 25 March 2020. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a Windows Update. I’m spending hours wrestling with a mini-PC, bought cheaply to replace my aging and noisy desktop computer. Normally I use the PCs in university libraries. The only machines I can afford for myself are the ones that don’t work. It’s not just me: the whole situation has revealed just how many British households are without decent computers, or computers at all. Some poorer parents are home-schooling their children through their smartphones. We are being told that ‘we’re in this together’, but some are more in it than others.

*

Tonight I had been booked (unpaid) to appear at an event held by the University of London Bibliophile Society, to speak about collecting books on a gay and lesbian theme. Now, of course, it has to be done online. Thankfully the organisers are not expecting me to appear via a web-camera and some sort of software (the current preference is called Zoom), which is a relief as the cheap mini-PC has turned out to be so cheap that it can’t cope with web-chatting. As it is, I have no experience in addressing an audience through a web camera and am in no hurry to start.

Instead, the event takes place on Twitter, which I do have experience in. First, I publish my talk online as a Word file (https://uolbibliophiles.wordpress.com/2020/03/25/an-online-panel-discussion-collecting-lgbtq/).

Then I take questions on Twitter via my account there (@dickon_edwards), in tandem with the hashtag #uolbibliophiles. It’s a frustrating experience, as not only is my computer slow, but I realise I am so much slower at tweeting than most. I manage about three questions before the 30 mins of questioning is up.

I am a little unhappy about this, feeling forced into a new digital Darwinian era that favours only those who have fast computers and fast computer skills. I worry now that I have even less place in a pandemic-hit world than I did in the one before. 

Still, one positive result is that my enforced slowness makes me aware of my own sense of being out of sync with the world, and that this is something I should embrace rather then try to disguise.

The trouble with joining in is that you end up sounding like everyone else. So in this way, computer ineptitude can be a kind of dandyism. In a world of constant availability, it makes sense to play a little hard to get. I hope I can benefit from the value of rarity. The fear, though, is of being so different that no one will want to read my work at all.

Thanks to the event, I learn a new detail about my copy of the 1986 Penguin edition of Ronald Firbank’s The Flower Beneath the Foot. The book is inscribed from John Mortimer, who wrote the introduction, to a ‘Phyllis’. I am now assured by one of the event attendees, @blackwellrare, that this Phyllis is PD James, whose copy it must have been.

*

Thursday 26 March 2020. I clap out of my window, trying hard not to shout ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.’

*

I fear my hair may be heading for the Peroxide Broccoli look. Still shaving and wearing a tie every day.

*

Saturday 28 March 2020. ‘Interesting times’ can do one. Ronald Firbank’s phrase for the First World War was ‘that awful persecution’. We could start using that.

*

Monday 30 March 2020. Getting hold of e-books online has turned out to be rather more time-consuming than I thought. The irony is that print would be quicker, if only the libraries were open. On top of the social inequality, the virus has revealed an inequality in digitised books. Contrary to what Google implies, a large amount of knowledge has never been digitised full stop.

*

Tuesday 31 March 2020. I go to the Post Office on Dalston High Street. The queue extends right down the street, with people standing at 2 metre distances from each other. It takes at least 30 minutes before I get to the counter, for a transaction of ten seconds. Supermarkets are the same. I find myself resenting people who queue as couples, as they take up more space inside the shop and so make social distancing even harder. What I am really resenting, of course, is that they are couples.

*

Tuesday 2 April 2020. A current social media idiom is ‘the hill to die on’, presumably coming from military slang. It means a belief so important that the person holding the belief is willing to fight to the death for it. I suppose the hill I’m happy to die on is Aubrey Beardsley’s Under the Hill.

*

Friday 3 April 2020. I have made myself laugh by using ‘untroubled’ as an insult.

*

Saturday 4 April 2020. PhD writing. I compare Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) to the ‘category is’ aspect of drag contests. It makes sense in context, I tell myself.

*

Monday 6 April 2020. Still shaving, still putting on a tie. As Boris Johnson goes into intensive care, I write about camp in Joyce’s ‘Circe’.

*

Tuesday 7 April 2020: ‘In 1917 there was nothing that a thinking and sensitive person could do, except to remain human, if possible. And a gesture of helplessness, even of frivolity, might be the best way of doing that.’ – Orwell, Inside the Whale (1940).

*

Saturday 11 April 2020. I am just about to disagree with someone on Twitter when I stop myself. I hope that shows growth.

*

Wednesday 15 April 2020. A fly-tipper has left a bag of their rubbish outside our door. If they can be identified from it, I may track them down and play Patricia Highsmith-style games with their mind. Criminals often make the mistake of assuming I’m normal.

Later: I resist this impulse and blandly report it to the council. This time. The fly-tipping, not the Highsmithian impulses. This time.

*

Sunday 19 April 2020. The Sunday Times is now very thin, particularly the sections on travel and sport. In the travel section, what articles there are comprise memories of travelling in the past. Remember travel? A headline in the supplement on home furnishings reads: ‘Cheery Lockdown Linens.’

*

Wednesday 22 April 2020. Some personal good news. My work on the PhD has been deemed good enough to pass the mid-point ‘upgrade’. When PhD students start their course, they are registered as doing an MPhil (or more generously, a ‘MPhil/PhD’). An MPhil is a qualification halfway between an MA or MSc (ie a Master’s) and a PhD. The idea is that if your work isn’t good enough by this point you have the option of either redoing it, which takes even more time, or settling for switching to the easier MPhil. If your work is good enough, you are ‘upgraded’ to PhD student status proper. So I’m relieved and very pleased. Halfway through.

*

Thursday 23 April 2020. I have one of those days where being weird feels a crippling disadvantage. One must remember what weirdness can also be: a shield.

*

Thursday 30 April 2020. Not quite going crazy yet. But not quite not, too. Today’s slice of self pity: even prisoners can go to a library. The whole point of the bohemian rented room lifestyle is that the room is somewhere to rest one’s head, not to live in constantly. Still, even self-pity is a sign of some lust for life. Earlier today I couldn’t even be bothered to beat myself up.

*

Saturday 2 May 2020. Take strength from your own weirdness.

*

Saturday 9 May 2020. I have just discovered that Bic Orange Fine pens now come in a more comfortable ‘grip’ version. So it’s not all bad.

*

Sunday 10 May 2020. Another day in the Soft Apocalypse. Mr Johnson’s gesture of ‘drunkenly inserting the key in the Yale lock after a night out’ almost makes one yearn for the days of Mr Blair’s ‘here’s my big fish’.

*

Monday 11 May 2020. I wish I’d learned about Bentham’s theory of the Panopticon when I was at school. If only so I could tell the bullies who always sat on the back seat of the bus why they did such a thing.

*

Tuesday 12 May 2020. Am getting very little work done. It’s hard to be productive when you’re surrounded by historical events, major social change, and daily death tolls.

*

Wednesday 20 May 2020. Warm weather, and I’m finally wearing single layers, but am still feeling cold all the time. I report this to a GP, an appointment which can only be carried out on the phone. She thinks it’s more likely to be related to my lack of exercise. ‘Sitting is the new smoking’, she says. I want to say, ‘No it isn’t’. 

The problem is that no one is allowed to be ill from anything other than COVID-19. The arrogance of this virus. Other illnesses can’t get a word in edgeways. Only when you can mention the virus do you exist. Corona is the only game in town, as Karen Carpenter didn’t quite sing.

*

Thursday 21 May 2020. At 8pm I go downstairs and open the front door to clap for the NHS. Standing right in front of the house are three people, two women and a man in their 30s, eating hamburgers from polystyrene cartons, using as a shelf the wall of the house’s small yard. These unanchored face-fillers are completely unabashed by my appearance, even though I’ve suddenly materialised next to them. In fact, they join in the clapping half-heartedly, and we all stand there in silence, clapping away, resident and loitering scoffers alike.

Such is life off Dalston Kingsland High Street. I’ve occasionally opened the door to find someone sitting on the doorstep, using it to sit and eat, or smoke and drink. Reflecting now, I realise that one should currently be more sympathetic to the eating aspect. London’s cafes and restaurants are only allowed to operate in takeaway and delivery form. The pleasure of eating out is rather compromised by not being allowed an ‘out’ in which to eat out in.

*

Saturday 23 May 2020. My first proper coffee in eight weeks. Pret a Manger in Dalston is open for takeaways. On the door is a sign requesting six customers at one time. Inside the café there are marks on the floor to ensure the customers stand apart at two metres. The counter now has a perspex screen with holes cut out at the bottom, like a bank. There is no sitting allowed inside, in line with the government rules. All those empty seats and tables, close to hand but forbidden.

I watch a documentary on the comedian Tony Slattery, who has suffered heavily from depression and alcohol addiction. One particular regret of his feels familiar: ‘Nothing gets done’. A therapist reminds him that he once gave up cocaine with no problems: ‘You’ve got form, mate’. Slattery ends the film hoping to sort himself out. The documentary’s popular reception should surely help him. Recovery is easier if you declare your goals before strangers. It’s when you keep them to yourself that they evaporate too easily.

*

Sunday 24 May 2020. The Prime Minister’s advisor, Dominic Cummings, is caught breaking the lockdown rules. A number of people, reportedly his neighbours, protest in his street as he goes to and from his home. It’s a pleasant, expensive street in Islington. If they are indeed his neighbours, perhaps some sort of Ballardian middle class riot is on the cards. It would be especially karmic for a PM with roots in the Bullingdon Club.

*

Monday 25 May 2020. The Cummings saga rolls on. There is something very British in arguing over when it is best to visit a castle.

*

Thursday 28 May 2020. Some thoughts on craft. When trying to write, and battling the usual insecurities about one’s talent, it is useful to think about craft. ‘Talent’ suggests vanity, glamour, contingency. It suggests Britain’s Got Talent, standing up on a stage, only to be told to go away. ‘Craft’, on the other hand, suggests the opposite of glamour: an invisible artisan, sitting down in a workshop, toiling away with little credit. But it also suggests humility, productivity, accomplishment: qualities essential to any work. Craft shows, talent shows off. 

There is a good reason why the phrase ‘a waste of craft’ is less common than ‘a waste of talent’. A crafted work may be deemed underwhelming, but in noting its craft there is still the recognition that new work has been contributed, time invested, labour applied,  skills drawn upon. Take the recent film of Cats. On its release last Christmas, film critics overwhelming insisted that it was terrible. Yet craft it remains: work was done, something new was made. It can still be of use, if only as an entertaining example of folly. Or just as something to pass the time that is different. And someone somewhere might disagree with the critics (the director for one, I hope).

Talent says: ‘just do it’. Craft says: ‘just make it’. Talent lives in fear of being disliked, of being ‘cancelled’. Craft shrugs its shoulders and gets on with it.

*

This online diary was begun in 1997. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or clickbait. The author is in need of financial support, however. Giving money is a way to indicate that something has value. Thank you!

Tags: aubrey beardsley, coronavirus, covid-19, craft, dalston, depression, PhD life, ronald firbank

Wednesday 14 August 2019. I renew my passport. This is not because of any panic over Brexit, but because the ten year expiry date happens to be this month. I opt for the no-fuss renewal service offered by the Post Office. Contrary to the stereotype about the British, no true Londoner likes to queue.  Queuing in London is for tourists. Real Londoners know there’s usually a less busy version of whatever one wants, whether it’s a chain of cafes, a Post Office, a bank or an ATM. One quiet Post Office is in Grays Inn Road near Chancery Lane station. It’s hidden in the basement of a branch of Ryman’s, like a secret members’ club. There’s no one else there at all when I go today, even during lunchtime. Today I present my old passport, they take my photograph with a machine at one end of the counter, and it’s all done in five minutes.

Within the week, a new passport arrives in the post. It looks the same as the old one, with the same burgundy red colour. It takes me a moment before I realise there is one difference, though. The words ‘European Union’ are missing.

Evening: Drinks and Thai food at the Hemingford Arms with Shanti S., which warrants a selfie:

**

Friday 16 August 2019. To Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, to DJ for the wedding reception of Maud Young. I play many of my old Beautiful & Damned tracks. It’s a fun return to a previous life, but as with making music I don’t have any further interest in dj-ing. Passions can wax and wane across a life. Some people are happy doing one thing all their life, and I envy them. Others are drawn to paths not yet travelled, even if it means leaving old worlds behind.

**

Saturday 17 August 2019. Some old worlds are never quite left behind, though. In Russell Square today I receive a catcall from an older man on a bike: ‘Stop dying your hair, you poof.’

I wonder if that happens to Nick Cave?

**

Sunday 18 August 2019. To the Rio for Marianne and Leonard, Nick Broomfield’s documentary about Leonard Cohen and his muse. Mr Broomfield declares an interest early on: like Cohen, he too once dated Marianne. There’s a sense of bragging here, and indeed Mr B can’t resist showing photos that show just how attractive he was in the 1960s, like Liam Gallagher with a thesaurus.

As with all Nick Broomfield documentaries, the choice of interviewees is wonderfully suspect. We get the testimonies of sacked collaborators, spurned relatives, or just some passing maniac. Still, Mr B always makes his subjectivity clear. The ‘official’ documentaries try to pretend otherwise.

**

I visit a new bookshop and café in Dalston, ‘Ripley & Lambert’. It specialises in books about film. This might seem rather niche, but then ‘niche’ is now thought to be the way forward. Magazines on prog rock are thriving, while general music ones like NME have bitten the dust. A display about women in science fiction explains the shop name: Ripley and Lambert are the two female characters in Alien.

**

Monday 26 August 2019. A stiflingly hot bank holiday. I loaf in Dalston all day, only venturing out to see Once Upon A Time in Hollywood at the Rio. Mr Tarantino is acquiring a Dickensian touch with age. There’s an idealised little girl who offers advice on acting for Leonard DiCaprio: ‘It’s the pursuit that’s meaningful’. Sadly, there’s not enough of this sort of thing, and the end of the film is the usual Tarantino bloodbath. Except that times have changed, and this sort of trashy violence – particularly against women – is now more of a problem. Or perhaps not. Perhaps this is what his fans just expect. Comfort in the familiar, however problematic. All of which makes Quentin Tarantino the Boris Johnson of cinema.

**

Wednesday 28 August 2019. Pain and Glory at the Rio, the new Almodovar. In a way, this film is just as indulgent as the Tarantino, with much idolising of the culture of old films. But Almodovar at least nods towards the universal. There’s a beautiful scene early on of women washing blankets in a country river while singing, straight out of a painting by Sorolla.

**

Thursday 29 August 2019. Seahorse at the Rio, being a documentary on a British trans man as he goes about becoming pregnant. The birth itself is in a birthing pool, making a neat extra nod to the seahorse analogy. Though the film is subtitled The Dad Who Gave Birth, the experience is not previously unrecorded. Last year saw a documentary on a different trans male pregnancy, A Deal with The Universe. And in Seahorse Mr McConnell mentions being in a Facebook group for ‘seahorse dads’, plural. The logical next film would be a portrait of such a group.

The collective noun for seahorses is a ‘herd’, which seems too commonplace for such an unconventional and ornate creature.  A better choice now, given the analogy for pregnant trans men, would surely be a ‘pride’.

**

Sunday 1 September 2019. To the Posy Simmonds exhibition at the House of Illustration. I like her cover design for the 1966 gay-themed novel The Grass Beneath The Wire by John Pollack, with two men in dinner jackets, one with his arm around the other. Her 1981 book True Love is labelled as ‘the UK’s first modern graphic novel’.

The gallery also shows Marie Neurath’s illustrations for 1950s children’s science books. One caption has a response from an 8-year-old reader: ‘They are wizard books! I can read them by myself. I don’t need help from anyone.’

A third exhibition is Quentin Blake’s latest work, direct from his studio. There’s a John Ruskin children’s story, a wordless book of his own called Mouse on a Tricycle, a collaboration with Will Self titled Moonlight Travellers, and drawings for the corridors of Sheffield Children’s Hospital. And this is just Mr Blake’s work for the first half of 2019.

**

Tuesday 3 September 2019. My 48^th birthday. I go to Rye and Camber Sands, mainly on an EF Benson tip. There is a beach café that does prosecco at eleven o’clock in the morning.

Dinner at the Mermaid Inn, then a look at Radclyffe Hall’s house.Back to Dalston in time for the launch of La JohnJoseph’s book A Generous Lover,at Burley Fisher. At 48, I am all about books and book-related places.

**

4 September 2019. I read an Observer review by Peter Conrad, which discusses Benjamin Moser’s new biography of Susan Sontag.  It seems the woman who gave the world ‘Notes on ‘Camp” wasn’t immune to moments of camp herself: ‘When, on one rare occasion, a man chivalrously supplied her with an orgasm, she complained that the sensation made her feel ‘just like everybody else”.   

The phrase ‘a man chivalrously supplied her with an orgasm’ also says something about Mr Conrad. All reviews review the reviewer.

Mr Moser’s book claims that Sontag’s partner in later life, the photographer Annie Leibovitz, treated her to limousines, first class air travel, and an apartment in Paris. As Sontag never earned very much from her books, compared to Leibovitz, her partner served as her ‘personal welfare state’. Some welfare. Mr Conrad supplies these details to suggest Sontag was a terrible role model. But I see nothing wrong with being a kept intellectual.

**

Tuesday 10 September 2019. To Stanford’s in Covent Garden for the launch of Travis Elborough’s latest, The Atlas of Vanishing Places. I chat to Daniel Rachel. Last time I met him he was telling me he was writing a book on the 1990s Cool Britannia era, Don’t Look Back in Anger. The book is now out and has had good press. Mr R tells me tonight that he wanted the subtitle to contain the phrase An Oral History, but the publishers had vetoed this wording, worried that the average reader of a book on Britpop might not know what ‘oral history’ meant.  

I wonder if this is down to the image of Britpop as anti-intellectual and laddish (or laddettish). Both Gallagher brothers still seem happy to perpetuate this image, like the cool boys at school who belittled the geeks. When Brett Anderson of Suede received rave reviews for his memoir recently, the reviews had overtones of surprise. The implication was that, as he was a rock star from the 1990s, it was a miracle he could string a sentence together at all.

**

Monday 9 September 2019. A useful retort: ‘I’m afraid I don’t have the budget for any more unpaid work’.

**

Thursday 12 September 2019. To Kings Place to be in the audience for a recording of the podcast, Girls on Film. The film critic Anna Smith presents three guests – all women – discussing the latest releases. Two are actors, Ingrid Oliver and Tuppence Middleton, the other is the BFI’s Director of Festivals, Tricia Tuttle.

The rise of podcasts against mainstream radio hit a tipping point for me when a young guest on Radio 4’s A Good Read recently called the programme ‘this podcast’ – and was not corrected.

Drinking in the Kings Place glass-plated bar afterwards, looking over the canal and Granary Square. This shiny redevelopment, all plate glass and escalators, seems popular and utopian, if still finding its feet.

 **

Tuesday 17 September 2019. All work is acting work. The trick is not to be miscast.

**

Thursday 19 Sept 2019. I meet Shanthi at a cocktail bar in Islington, only to realise that drinks start at £9 – and that’s just for a glass of house wine. There has to be a word for the trick of trying to keep a straight face when such prices are communicated, and indeed for a staffer communicating them with their air of complete normalcy.

**

Friday 20 Sept 2019. From today I’m being paid the Living Wage (17k) to do a PhD. Less money than the office job I had ten years ago (which was 19k, in 2009), but my gratitude for not being forced to do unsuitable work more than makes up for it.

**

Monday 23 Sept 2019. I read an article about a young Instagram ‘influencer’, Caroline Calloway, and the world of pursuing internet fame for its own sake. This is new and yet not new. I’m reading about the Bright Young Things of the 1920s: pretty people whose lives and relationships were documented in the press without them appearing to actually do anything. So perhaps social media has just made that kind of lifestyle more democratic. Today, a 1920s figure like Stephen Tennant would have to maintain an Instagram account. Or rather, as seems to be the case with ‘influencers’, he’d have staff to ghost-write his posts for him.

**

Wednesday 25 Sept 2019. I read Olivia Laing’s Crudo. The use of Kathy Acker reminds me how Acker has become hip all over again. I think of KA’s line ‘Dear Susan Sontag, please can you make me famous?’, the most honest statement in the history of literature.

**

Wednesday 25 September 2019. Tonight, my seahorse brooch is described as ‘very Lady Hale’.

**

Saturday 5 October 2019: Checking in on Twitter after a gap one feels besieged by the sheer infinitude of the lives of others. All I can add in response is that I too am alive. Still.

**

Tuesday 8 Oct 2019. One of the delights of library books is encountering the traces of previous readers. In a London Library copy of Ronald Firbank’s Five Novels, from 1949, I recently found a ticket for Carmen at the New York Met opera house, dated October 2014. Today I’m reading a book from 1927, Movements in Modern English Poetry and Prose by Sherard Vines, which has an early assessment of Firbank. A slip of paper falls out. It is a handwritten note from the London Library to an anonymous reader, informing them that a couple of books they ordered are unavailable.

This would normally be dull, but the note is dated 20 April 1954. I can’t help scrutinising the handwriting of the librarian – a beautiful looping hand in fountain pen ink, and wondering about the lives of the reader and the staffer, and if this disposable note has now outlived them. I look up the unavailable books it mentions. Time and Place by Lyde and Garnett, a 1930s geography book which was ‘not possessed by the Library’, and A Myth of Shakespeare by Charles Williams – one of the Inklings – which in 1954 was ‘missing from the Library shelves’. I look both up in the Library’s catalogue. The Library never did acquire Time and Place, but the Wilkins is back in stock.

**

Tuesday 15 October 2019. The Booker Prize is awarded jointly. One book is Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale,which has had a huge amount of publicity already, including midnight bookshop openings with actors dressed as Handmaids. The other is Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, which hasn’t. If you can’t decide between two books in a prize set up to raise the profile of literary fiction, why not give it to the book that hasn’t already had its profile already massively raised? There’s something of the spirit of the times in this decision: a misplaced sense of righteousness, and with a terror of divisiveness.

**

Wednesday 16 October 2019. On a Sontag tip again, this time because of an excellent essay by Johanna Hedva on the White Review website. A quote by Sontag connects with my own thoughts:  ‘I wanted every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive’.

**

Saturday 19 October 2019. Finish reading Firbank’s New Rythum (sic), his unfinished novel set in New York. There’s a couple of superb set pieces, such as the strawberry-picking tea party held in a ballroom, and the arrival at the city harbour of a huge nude male statue. I wonder if the latter inspired the end of Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw, Orton being a Firbank admirer. There was talk lately of a new statue to Orton in his home town of Leicester. He’d have like that to be nude, too, but with his socks on.

**

Sunday 20 October 2019. I listen to two long interviews with Chris Morris, on the Adam Buxton podcast. The latest Morris project is a feature film, The Day Shall Come, which I’ve just seen at the Rio. The film is in a similar vein to Four Lions: a conventional comedy drama, scripted and directed by Morris, and based on his research into real life incidents. Morris himself doesn’t perform in the film, and I come away missing his greatest asset, the one which made On The Hour so distinctive: his voice.

 **

Wednesday 28 October 2019. To the Tim Walker exhibition at the V&A, which ticks so many of my boxes: Tilda Swinton as Edith Sitwell (who turns out to be a relative of hers), Aubrey Beardsley, Angela Carter, Lord of the Flies, fashion, glamour, camp. In the exhibition shop, there’s a display of Mr Walker’s favourite books. These include The Swimming-Pool Library and Tintin in Tibet. And inevitably, Orlando.

**

Tuesday 29 October 2019. To Homerston Hospital for surgery. This is a septoplasty (with ‘reduction of turbinates’) to correct a deviated septum. The procedure is to address the nasal breathing problems I’ve been having for some years. I go under general anaesthetic. All is well, though I have to spend the next 14 days at home to minimise the risk of infection. My landlady K is my designated escort, in that she collects me from the hospital and checks up on me during the first 24 hours. It’s a level of concern for a tenant that is difficult to imagine from many landlords.

**

Thursday 31 October 2019. Halloween. It’s only today that I notice the first name of Kenneth Williams’s vampiric character in Carry On Screaming is Orlando.

**

Saturday 9 November 2019. Irritations over redundant adjectives. A book review in the Sunday Times refers to ‘a little novella’.

**

Sunday 10 November 2019. Less Boris Johnson, more BS Johnson.

**

Sunday 17 November 2019. I read about the rise of gender reveal parties, and wonder if fans of Judith Butler hold gender congeal parties.

**

Sunday 24 November 2019. Today’s disproportionate irritation: Eve Sedgwick making the common error of thinking the song ‘Over the Rainbow’ is called ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ (Epistemology of the Closet, p. 144).

**

Sunday 1December 2019. I’ve turned my PhD thesis into an online Advent calendar. Every day in December I post an image on Instagram and Twitter, relating to camp modernism. Some of these ‘windows’ are writers like Gertrude Stein. Others are illustrations like Alan Cumming in Cabaret, to represent Christopher Isherwood. The resulting Camp Modernism Advent Calendar bears the hashtag #CaMoAdCal.

Link: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/camoadcal/

**

Thursday 12 December 2019. I cast my vote in the constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington. The polling station is Colvestone Primary School, near Ridley Road market. I’ve voted here twice before for council elections, with barely anyone about. This time there’s a long queue that snakes out into the playground, some forty people strong, even at 7.30am. I put my X next to Diane Abbott, for Labour. It’s not without some guilt as I’d rather vote Green, but removing the Conservatives has never been more important. The local result is that Ms Abbott is re-elected, while the Greens increase their vote, no thanks to me.

As I walk away I am so convinced of the unsuitability of Mr Johnson and the nobility of Mr Corbyn that I feel even long-standing Tory voters will not bring themselves to vote Tory now. Only masochists.

**

Friday 13 December 2019. Masochism triumphs.

The subsequent days see constant post-mortems. I have to admit that I was ignorant of Mr Corbyn’s complete lack of appeal to voters outside of cities. My mother, who lives in the English countryside, is utterly unsurprised by the result. Whereas I am not immune to social media bubbles, little illusory worlds in which everyone appears to share the same opinion as you.

It seems incredible that between these two men Mr J appealed to more people than Mr C. Between Johnson’s Wodehousian blather and Corbyn’s inflexible sternness, it was the former that offered more space to more people. I thought that the public might at least give Corbyn a tentative go at the steering wheel, what with a decade of the Tories and several disastrous months of Johnson. But no: better the devil you know.

The overnight TV election coverage does not help. All the presenters and pundits seem unlikely to know what it’s like to, say, live in a rented room over the last five years. Channel 4’s programme is billed as an ‘alternative’ election night, but the pundits are equally comfortable and well-off, including Rachel Johnson, sister of Boris. In the 1980s Channel 4 was synonymous with proper ideas of the alternative: seasons of foreign films, a simulcast of Derek Jarman’s Blue with Radio 3, the Dennis Potter ‘Seeing the Blossom’ interview. Today, ‘alternative’ just means a different member of the Johnson family.

**

Tuesday 24 December 2019. I’m so easily tired that even the idea of fun exhausts me. Whenever I see an event is sold out, I feel the warm glow of a lucky escape.

**

Wednesday 25 December 2019. Christmas at Bildeston in Suffolk, visiting Mum, including a visit to Dad’s memorial in the village graveyard. Mum finds an old photo of myself where I’m slouching on the sofa in the living room, the cards on the wall dating the image to a Christmas past. I think it’s from 1989, so I would be 18. My hair is my natural brown, but I can tell it’s from my phase of slightly lightening  it with Sun-In spray – my gateway drug to full peroxide. I’m also wearing a black polo-neck jumper, a look I took to during my stage management trainee phase, first as an intern at the Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich (1989-1990), and then formally at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School (1990-1992). I now think I just wanted a job that allowed me to wear black polo-neck jumpers. By 1992 I had lost interest in the jumpers, and indeed in stage management. But working on productions of Company and Side By Side By Sondheim made me realise that I did want to be a writer of thoughtful and quotable phrases, beginning with lyrics for songs. I still use ‘Move On’ from Sunday In The Park With George as inspiration. There is also the pleasing irony of not moving on from listening to ‘Move On’.

**

Thursday 26 December 2019. I make the mistake of looking at Twitter over Christmas. Such relentless anger. It’s one thing to disagree about something, quite another to devote large amounts of passion arguing with people who have no intention of changing their mind, at least not on Twitter. Less energy on what one dislikes or finds offensive, more on what one likes and finds beautiful.

**

Tuesday 31 December 2019. The cover of the late Alasdair Gray’s Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)has as good a New Year’s resolution as any: ‘Work as if you were living in the early days of a better nation’.

**
This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!

Tags: bildeston, camoadcal, camp modernism, camp modernism advent calendar, catcalls, dalston, dalston rio, DJ gigs, DJ-ing, elections, maud young, mum, nick broomfield, ripley and lambert, ronald firbank, septoplasty, Shanthi Sivanesan, Susan Sontag, The London Library

I find a couple of old photos of myself online, and rather like them. One (at poor resolution) is of myself singing back-up with Fosca’s Kate Dornan, while onstage with Bid’s group Scarlet’s Well, sometime in the mid-2000s. The venue is the Spitz in Spitalfields Market, London, now no longer there.

The other is from 2008, in my old room at Highgate. It’s taken by Jamie McLeod, capturing me in bedsit dandy mode. I rarely smoke cigarettes today.

Tuesday 5^th February 2019. To the British Library to appear as part of a panel discussion hosted by Travis Elborough, Diaries – Lives and Times. The other guests are Simon Garfield, Virginia Ironside and Anita Sethi. The five of us are seated on a stage in an auditorium, in a separate building which, despite being physically part of the same gently utopian mass as the British Library itself, is accessed via a separate entrance in the courtyard. This event is accompanied by a live transcription on a screen, much like one has these days on TV news channels. Inevitably, ‘diary’ appears on the screen at least once as ‘diarrhoea’.

Mr G discusses his fat book of mid-century diaries, A Notable Woman. Ms Ironside’s anecdotes about Robert Maxwell at the Daily Mirror are pleasingly vicious: she says he used to enjoy firing staff in front of visitors, while giving tours of the Mirror offices. I like the title of one of her books about growing old: No! I Don’t Want To Join A Bookclub.

For my part, I mention that it’s the centenary of a cult diary, Journal of a Disappointed Man by the ailing WNP Barbellion. I also find myself demonstrating how diaries tend to leave things unsaid between the lines, sometimes unconsciously, and use my own as an example. A jokey entry from 1999 about Star Wars: The Phantom Menace is now, I can see, an allusion to a boyfriend I was seeing at the time, who was a fan of the films. Back then, I remarked how there was a minor character in the film called Yarael Poof, and how I found that childishly amusing. And clearly I still do.

Afterwards for drinks at a pleasant pub nearby, the Skinners Arms, recommended by the British Library staff. I invite along Max, a young fan of my work, such as it is, who’s come up to London specifically to see me. They’re non-binary, even wearing a badge which states their pronouns as ‘they/them’. Since discovering me, they’ve sought out the Orlando and Fosca records, some of which were made before Max was born.

Being on a stage again after so long, and indeed being able to inspire young people again, rather buoys my sense of usefulness. My concern now is that I am still billed as a musician, even though I’ve not made music for ten years, being these days more interested in books and prose. Clearly I need to hurry up and get some books out of my own.

**

Wednesday 6 February 2019. I’m working on a new revision of my PhD funding proposal, allowed as I am to do so for a third and final time, after been turned down in 2017 and 2018.

Meanwhile I receive a rejection email from a conference in Princeton. The euphemism is ‘we are unable to find room for your paper’. I think I’d prefer ‘we didn’t care for it’, or even ‘it’s rubbish’; that would at least be more honest. There is no feedback attached to refusals from conferences, so exactly what I’ve done wrong, or not well enough, I’ll never know.

Still, as my supervisors remind me, I have a ready-made abstract to use for another time. And so, licking my bruises, I stagger on. I’m beginning to understand why so many academics throw in the towel and get proper jobs.

**

A useful note to all tutors and editors, from bitter experience. When giving feedback in which you tell the writer or student they ‘need to say more about X’, always follow with ‘you can afford to say LESS about Y’. Otherwise, you’ve plunged them into the terror of fathoming which bits can be cut to make room within the word count, at the risk of making the piece more skeletal rather than concise. No one wants that.

‘Kill your darlings’ is only a useful tip if it is clear which bits are the surplus darlings in question. For the writer, it’s often not clear. Better to offer Hobson’s choice rather than Sophie’s.

**

Saturday 9 February 2019. I do my first bit of peer reviewing, for my fellow PhD-er Katie S’s journal. This is for an essay by a non-English speaking student on the American activist and poet Wendy Trevino. The essay in question ticks the right boxes for the journal in terms of content, but the writer’s command of English grammar needs a fair amount of improvement. My problem is that my idea of good style is probably a step too far for many editors: I want all English prose to read like The Great Gatsby, even if it’s just the instructions for a microwave meal. But I also believe a certain amount of non-Englishness in the voice needs to be preserved, by way of national identity – which is the subject of the essay, after all. It’s not an easy task. Thankfully in this case I’m reviewing rather than editing, and am limited to making recommendations rather than hacking away with a red pen. I also end up buying the Trevino book, Cruel Fiction, so that’s surely a good thing on the part of the essay.

**

To the Barbican to see the film Can You Ever Forgive Me. Much has been made of Richard E Grant’s fine supporting performance, for which he was nominated for an Oscar; the lead performance by Melissa McCarthy is equally good. But I’m further delighted by a cameo by Justin Vivian Bond, whom I once saw in the cabaret duo Kiki and Herb. Good to see the British comedy actress Dolly Wells, too, as a lonely book dealer. Her American accent is so perfect that it takes me a while to recognise her. 

**

15^th February 2019. One effect of my late flowering education is to find myself using a pen to edit the articles in magazines.

**

23^rd February 2019. To the British Library’s hidden auditorium again, this time to be in the audience. It’s an event to celebrate 40 years of the nearby bookshop Gay’s the Word. There’s a lot of lavender-coloured party balloons in the bar, a colour I prefer to the more typical rainbow flag; I agree with Hannah Gadsby that the latter is aesthetically ‘a bit busy’. Purple (and lavender, and mauve, and violet) is a more historical queer colour, dating back to the 1890s, which were sometimes called the Mauve Decade. Then there’s Firbank and his love of the colour, writing his novels in purple ink, and Brigid Brophy doing the same by way of tribute in the 1970s, the better to write her big mad book on Firbank, Prancing Novelist. Leila Kassir keeps me company, and points out how Uncle Monty in Withnail and I uses the colour as part of his antiquated gay lexicon: ‘He’s so mauve, we don’t know what he’s planning’.

Much of the event is, understandably, about gay books and gay writers. Neil McKenna recommends Angus Wilson’s No Laughing Matter, proving that Wilson is not quite as forgotten as I’d thought. The evening ends with readings by poets, including Richard Scott, whose collection Soho is, as they say, right up my street.

**

26^th February 2019. I submit my application for funding. This time round the money has rather been dangled in front of me. Whereas previously I was simply told by email that I’d been declined, this time there’s a series of panels one has to please: first one for the Birkbeck English department, then one for the department’s parent ‘school’, being the School of Arts, then one for Birkbeck college overall. Now I’m up against about 170 other students from the London and South-East area, all of us competing for 56 scholarships.

I was given two further chances to revise my proposal, according to feedback from a couple of the panels. It feels like being nominated for an Oscar, then told you have to shoot parts of the film again, in order to give your performance more of a chance at winning.

What I find difficult is that this process is less about the work as it is about selling the work. It’s really PR, marketing, pitching. These are things I’ve always resented doing, despite my reputed vanity. It’s the same as a job interview, or writing a CV, arrogantly providing the answer to the question, ‘Why do you think you’re great?’ Deep down, I don’t think anyone should give me anything at all.

Still, I can’t pretend that being funded would not alter my mindset for the better. I hear back in late April.

**

28^th February 2019. To Hackney’s Earth venue, two blocks away from my rented room in Dalston, off Stoke Newington High Street. Earth is a brand new arts venue, though the building is a former 1930s cinema, The Savoy, which became an ABC in the 1960s. I like the sense of layers of history, especially as the street outside cuts through in time to the first century AD. The Romans built the road to link London to York; the Saxons named it Earninga Straete – ‘Ermine Street’. Every day I step out onto this road and have a clear view south into the City, with the Gherkin in the distance.

All of which seems apt for the electronic recording artiste Gazelle Twin, given her demonic stage costume as part English jester, part football hooligan, with a red stocking mask, red and white tunic and tights, and a white baseball cap. ‘What is century is this?’ she sings in the opening track of Pastoral, her 2018 album about Englishness after Brexit. She performs that album tonight, and only that album, never breaking character. I realise that her look evokes the costumes of Leigh Bowery, particularly when he was in the ballet I am Curious Orange. Indeed, that ballet’s accompanying album by the Fall, I Am Kurious Oranj, has a track called ‘Jerusalem’, as does Pastoral. Mark E Smith left a gap in British music when he died; for me, Pastoral helps to fill it. 

**

Friday 1^st March 2019. With Mum in town. We visit the ‘Unclaimed’ exhibition at the Barbican – an inspired look at aging and elders in Britain, presented as a lost property office. It’s now thought that half the current population could reach the age of a hundred. As Quentin Crisp put it when talking about being in his sixties, ‘medical science is so unkind’. Culture will have to change quite drastically: there’s now protests about literary awards which favour the young. ‘Emerging writers’ is preferred, instead of ‘young writers’.

**

Tuesday 5th March 2019. Read an excellent article in The Guardian by Emily Beater on dyspraxic students. Much of it rings true with me, especially having to read a sentence several times before the meaning sinks in, and how this affects self-confidence and career aspiration. It is still hard to convince people that dyspraxics are suitable for higher education, but the evidence proves that they can succeed and even win awards, if diagnosed and supported.   

**

Thursday 7^th March 2019. A long stint in the Keynes Library at Gordon Square, starting with an in-department conference of papers by my fellow students, then finishing with a lecture by the visiting academic Zara Dinnen, on ‘userness’ in narratives. Her examples are, rather refreshingly, the plotlines of Batgirl comics. In a gritty 1990s incarnation, Batgirl became a wheelchair-bound computer hacker. More recently she was ‘rebooted’ as hip and wisecracking, with a memorable cover image of her taking a selfie, in full costume, in the mirror of a crowded women’s toilet. There’s so much that can be said about this single image: satire, gender, society, the gaze in comics and so on.

One of the students discusses her experience of organising a conference. When looking to hire guest speakers, she found something of a gender pay gap. All the male lecturers she approached quoted their usual fixed fee, even though they were aware this was a low-budget, student-run event. Whereas the female lecturers responded along the lines of, ‘How much can you afford?’ ‘Can you pay the Living Wage?’

**

Sunday 10^th March 2019. A note to myself: Be more fearless. Be more tender. Be more kind.

This reminder is obvious, even glib. Yet without it a whole host of petty irritations and cruelties creep in to make a nest of the day.

**

Tuesday 12 March 2019. Ms May’s Brexit deal is kicked out of Parliament by 149 votes. I’ve definitely been rejected 149 times. Can I be Prime Minister?

**

Wednesday 13^th March 2019. To the Burley Fisher Bookshop for a talk by Isabel Waidner and Joanna Walsh. The world of contemporary experimental fiction, including autofiction, fascinates me more than ever, and these writers are among those producing the best of it today.

**

Thursday 14^th March 2019. To the Stratford East Picturehouse, right next to the Stratford East Theatre Royal, with its floating Joan Littlewood statue. I see a screening of two documentaries on an LGBT theme. Poshida (2015) is about the compromised lives of gay and trans people in Pakistan, and mixes a style of mainstream news reportage with a cinematic aesthetic. There’s a lot of questions asked in its short length, alongside beautiful imagery of the Faisal Mosque and the Margalla Hills in Islamabad. The director is Faizan Fiaz, who is British-Pakistani and now trans-masculine, and who once played bass in my band Fosca. According to Faizan in the Q&A afterwards, all of the interviewees have stuck with their Muslim faith.

The other film, DES!RE (2017), is a black and white ‘jazz meditation’ on butch and trans-masculine people in Britain, directed by the dapper Campbell X. I spot Derek Jarman’s Dungeness cottage used as a backdrop at one point: a reminder that Jarman’s tradition of queer DIY filmmaking is still continuing and still needed.

The Q&A is more of a community gathering than a film discussion. Many of the audience speak up to thank the directors for simply making them feel seen. Indeed, the English translation of Poshida is ‘hidden’. These are still lives that are different from the default, and so still tend to be less acknowledged. As Campbell X says tonight, these films say: ‘We were here. They can’t erase us’.

**

Tuesday 19^th March. Blame the systems, not the humans.

**

21^st March 2019. ‘We can’t be ordinary now because there isn’t the time.’  – Angela Carter, ‘Fools Are My Theme’, from her essay collection Shaking a Leg.

**

Friday 22 March 2019. Something of a crisis. After spending a large amount of time and energy writing a review of Music & Camp, a new book of academic essays, the editor at the magazine isn’t happy and wants me to rewrite it. And this is meant to be my specialist subject.

After much agonising, I tell the editor I’d rather ‘spike’ the piece instead, as in cancel it altogether. They’re sympathetic, and fill the space in the magazine okay without me. The world continues to turn. In the streets around me people are marching with blue pro-EU flag, in the hope of revoking the Brexit process. Perhaps some of that same spirit has leaked into my thoughts over my article.

After a series of setbacks in recent months, this one completely derails me. I sink into a fug of depression, questioning my ability to do anything much at all. The depression is ontological rather than existential. There’s never any risk of self-harming, because when it happens it feels like there is no self to harm in the first place. It is more of a paralysis state: a complete alienation from human systems, including the systems of reading and writing.

I think one problem is that when one is immersed in a subject at a PhD level, it can be difficult to shift between that mode and the more detached ‘general readership’ mode for journalism. This is clearly a separate skill that needs learning, but I’m already struggling how to write a PhD as it is.

I wonder if I am simply not cut out to write journalism. Or, more likely, not cut out to do both the PhD and journalism at this stage. It feels schizophrenic, even fraudulent. Which one is the ‘real’ me? I don’t do impressions.

With both types of writing, I resent the second-guessing aspect, that scent of desperation always between the lines: ‘Please let me fit in with other PhDs / other journalists!’. But I’m really aware that I don’t easily fit in anywhere.

I’d been heading for this moment for some time. Every task, including this diary, has felt more and more difficult, and my working speed has become slower and slower. I have a fantasy of putting the universe on pause so I can just get my breath back.

What to do? I remind myself of my achievements in recent years: 1st class BA, distinction MA, three prizes. This is not vanity, this is trying not to crumple into a heap.

**

Monday 25^th March 2019. To the BFI Southbank for one of the special events in Flare, the London LGBT film festival. Trans Creative at the Movies is a panel discussion comprising clips from films. The five people on the panel, all of whom identify as transgender, each pick a film which spoke to their trans-ness when they were growing up, or, as in the case of Faizan Fiaz, when they were reflecting on their identity more recently. Faizan’s choice is a Bollywood film from 2013, Ram-Leela, seen when they were looking at Bollywood films for the first time. Despite being Anglo-Pakistani, or possibly because, Faizan was uninterested in Bollywood while growing up.

The clip in question is a colourful dance number in a city street, led by Ranveer Singh, a muscular beauty in that pumped-up Love Island fashion. Faizan points out how it’s the dozens of male dancers around Singh who are more interesting, with their rather more achievable-looking torsos.

Of the other panellists, Jamie Hale’s choice is on a similar theme of men among men, Lawrence of Arabia. Zorian Clayton chooses Big, Kate O’Donnell chooses Gypsy, and La John Joseph goes for Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce.

I’ve now realised that, with the revelation that Quentin Crisp explicitly declared himself as transgender in his last months, The Naked Civil Servant can now technically be classified as a trans-related film. And indeed, the 1992 film of Orlando can now be said to have a trans actor in its cast. 

**

Wednesday 27th March 2019. I glance at the Brexit mess in the news. It feels as if the nation is in one massive BDSM relationship where no one can remember the safe-word.

**

Friday 29^th March 2019. Brexit protestors of either stripe are currently a daily sight on the streets of London. On the Mall I walk past a man brandishing a mass-produced pro-Brexit banner: ‘NO DEAL? NO PROBLEM!’. Underneath this in smaller letters are the words ‘Brexit means Brexit’. He’s white, in his sixties, with a Panama hat, blazer and a striped tie. If it wasn’t for the banner, I’d have said he was on his way back from watching cricket.

**

To the BFI Southbank for another screening in the Flare festival. United We Fan is a documentary about the fans who organise campaigns when their favourite TV series is cancelled. The oldest examples here are the Star Trek Trimbles, a married couple, now in their eighties. They’re credited with a letter-writing campaign which led to the original Star Trek returning for a third series.

The film then moves to the 1980s pressure group, Viewers For Quality Television, which campaigned not only to save a number of programmes from cancellation, such as Cagney and Lacey, but became a kind of index of well-made programmes. This was a time when TV was still thought to be a low quality, disposable medium de facto. The film brings us up to date with a young lesbian supporter of the recent series Person of Interest, which had a same-sex relationship among its storylines. When the series returned thanks to her online campaigning, however, one of the gay characters was killed off. Thankfully, this fan didn’t take after Kathy Bates in Misery, whose response was to imprison and torture the writer in question. Nevertheless, the hurt felt by fans when this is happens is real enough. The Person of Interest fan responded by dropping her support of the show altogether. It was soon cancelled for good.

All of which begs questions not just about the changing role of the fan, from consumer to consultant, but also the role of the writer, from trying to gain an audience, to trying to keep them satisfied. The Person of Interest creator protests, quite reasonably, that a gay character can’t not be killed off just because they’re gay and have gay fans. A story has to go somewhere; that’s what makes it a story. What some fans want is really a static loop. I think of the Stevie Smith poem ‘To An American Publisher’:

You say I must write another book? But I’ve just written this one.
You liked it so much that’s the reason? Read it again then.

But of course, fans already do this. They re-watch or re-read their favourites again and again, and still it’s not enough. It’s there in Sherlock Holmes, killed off halfway through the stories by Conan Doyle, then brought back by popular demand. It’s the same with music fans, with reunion tours, jukebox musicals, tribute bands, and now the Queen film Bohemian Rhapsody, a manifestly bad film that exists to make fans of the music happy. Re-playing the original songs a thousand times is still not enough. Fans want more, as long as it’s more of the same.

I’ve just found myself watching all of the first series of Russian Doll again. Do I want a second series? Hard to say.

**

Sunday 31^st March 2019. To the Rio with Jennifer H for Out of Blue, the new Carol Morley film. It’s steeped in woozy originality, secretive and strange. I feel I need to see it again to appreciate it. It’s one of those.

**

Wednesday 3^rd April 2019. With Jon S to the Odeon Tottenham Court Road for Us, a horror-thriller by the man behind Get Out.There is a theme about America and oppressed selves, personified by sinister doppelgangers in red boiler suits. It’s tempting to ask questions about the logic of the plot, which, like the end of Get Out, dips jarringly into realism after what seems to be a lot of allegory.

There’s a final twist which forces the audience to rethink the meaning of everything that’s gone before. I’m not sure that’s fair on the audience, or indeed fair on the rest of Us. By that point the film has already delivered a rich parade of symbolism, striking visuals, thrills, terrors, and ideas. A plot twist undermines those achievements, as it forces the audience to make one reading only. Whereas an inscrutable film like Out of Blue may make demands on its viewers, but the bond of trust is never in question.

If Us becomes a classic, it will be because of everything in the film except the twist ending. The same, after all, became true about Citizen Kane.

**
This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!

**

Tags: bfi flare, birkbeck, Brexit, British Library, campbell x, carol morley, dalston, des!re, faizan fiaz, gazelle twin, jamie mcleod, jennifer hodgson, jon sossums, late junction, out of blue, poshida, quentin crisp, scarlet's well, travis elborough, united we fan

I apologise for leaving such a hiatus with the diary. The cause can be ascribed to the usual cocktail of moods: two parts anhedonia to one part general resentment. Lately the majority of my waking hours have been occupied with puzzling, if not to say brooding, over the more unpromising aspects of my situation: aged forty-six, single, living in a rented room, on a PhD course but not teaching (yet), so no wage, no savings, and generally feeling unattached to the world. Actually, I should just be honest and stop that list at ‘aged forty-six’: that’s really the problem. What is a forty-six-year-old? Hard to tell. I don’t think I’m a typical one. At least, I hope not. Best not succumb to the off-the-peg malaise of the midlife crisis. It is better to love one’s own unique version of inhumanity than try to belong to The Commonplace Depression Club.

Here is Mrs Woolf in her diary of 23 July 1927, reporting on her brother-in-law Clive Bell’s midlife whine:

‘My dear Virginia,’ [says Mr Bell], ‘life is over. There’s no good denying it. We’re 45. I’m bored, I’m bored, I’m unspeakably bored. I know my own reactions. I know what I’m going to say. I’m not interested in a thing. Pictures bore me. I take up a book and put it down. No one’s interested in what I think any more.’

A couple of days later, Bell is rather more cheerful. He is boasting about dating a twenty-something actress (his marriage is very much an ‘open’ one). The phrase ‘midlife crisis’ wasn’t around in the 1920s, but the clichés were clearly already in place. Woolf’s thoughts on this episode sum it up: ‘It is all so silly, shallow, and selfish’.

Best get on with things: make things, write things, support the worthy works of others, boycott Amazon (easier to do once one reads about their working conditions), and don’t drop litter. Suicide, like pollution, is just an extreme version of litter-dropping: unfair on those who have to do the clearing up.

**

Friday 8^th December 2017. I borrow a first edition of Robert McAlmon’s story collection from 1925, Distinguished Air – Grim Fairy Tales. Only 115 copies; they mostly went to McAlmon’s friends in Paris, including James Joyce and Ezra Pound.  McAlmon is meant to have typed up the last fifty pages of the manuscript of Ulysses.

The ‘fairy tales’ of the subtitle is a pun: these are fictionalised reports of expat gay life in Berlin. Full of gay & drug slang, including ‘queer’, ‘camp’, ‘coked up to the eyeballs’, and ‘gay’ in the homosexual sense. Perhaps even more interesting is ‘One More to Set Her Up’, which appeared in McAlmon’s 1923 collection A Companion Volume. There, ‘camp’ is used to described the flamboyant behaviour of a heavy-drinking heterosexual woman, albeit one who hangs out with gay men.

***

Tuesday 12 December 2017. Sending Christmas cards. I still enjoy doing this, but suspect that many of the recipients do not care either way. That old insult – ‘they’re no longer on my Christmas list’ – is now an anachronism.

***

Thursday 14 December 2017. I read ‘Cat Person’, a short story published in the New Yorker which has gone ‘viral’ on social media. It’s a contemporary tale: a young US student dates an older man, then breaks off the relationship after an awkward night in bed. The twist is how quickly the jilted man’s feelings turn from heartbroken to hostile via his texts to her, though there’s also an implication that the medium of text messaging itself plays a part. The rise in instant communication means that not getting a reply has a more intense meaning.

I heard from a Birkbeck creative writing tutor that the rise of mobile phones has made contemporary plots more difficult, hence the surge in historical fiction. But modern technology has plenty of scope for plots of its own, just different sorts of plot. An angry character used to require huge amounts of justification. Now all it takes is to have them glance at Twitter.

**

Friday 15^th December 2017. To Leeds University for my first giving of a ‘paper’ at an academic conference. The event is ‘New Work in Modernist Studies 2017’, as organised by BAMS, the British Association of Modernist Studies. It’s essentially a gathering of PhD students whose theses involve modernist themes, and each paper is meant to be a ten-minute ‘research position’. I’m on at 10am as part of a panel titled ‘Queering the Modern’. The other papers on offer during the day include Djuna Barnes and Eimear McBride. The exception is the ‘keynote’ speaker Hope Wolf, who gives an excellent ‘plenary’ lecture on her Sussex Modernism exhibition, which I saw. Plus there’s a panel on jobs in academia. The overall message of which is that it’s very hard to get one.

I’m still getting used to the language of conferences. ‘Plenary’ means a kind of summary of the day’s proceedings, while ‘keynote’ means the main speaker of the day – often a person of some accomplishment. I think of the ‘note’ in ‘keynote’ as a pound note, because a keynote speaker is often the only contributor to actually get paid.

I like how Leeds University has a proper ivory tower on its campus – the Parkinson building. The School of English is a nice mirror of Birkbeck’s School of Arts: a row of Victorian terraced houses, knocked through.

I speak in the Alumni Room. On the walls are framed photos of notable former students. One is Richard Hoggart, he of The Uses of Literacy. This is quite expected. Another is Chris Pine, the young American actor who plays Captain Kirk in the recent Star Trek films. This is less expected. It seems Mr Pine was once on some Gatsby-like exchange programme. I wonder if he can do the accent.

**

I devise a new acronym that I find myself using when taking notes in lectures. NYLM. Pronounced ‘nilm’. It stands for No, You’ve Lost Me.

The term can be used as both an adjective and a verb. To wit:

‘What did you think of that lecture?’

‘A bit NYLM in places.’

‘I know what you mean. I started to NYLM-out myself towards the end.’

I stay overnight at the Avenue Hotel in the Harehills district. A mistake. The tiny room may be a mere £25 a night, but the walls are paper thin. A late-night Christmas party is in full swing in the rooms around me. It is Trial By Endless Shouting In Northern Accents. I get little sleep.

**

Saturday 16^th December 2017. I spend a day wandering around Leeds, including drinks with Kate H from Derby, whom I met at the conference. She shows me the cosy little Henry Moore Research Library, next to the Leeds Art Gallery. We are the only ones there. It’s open to all, but no one seems to know it’s there.

**

Saturday 23^rd December 2017. To the ICA to see The Florida Project, an arthouse drama about poverty-stricken children and single mothers who live in pastel-coloured ‘slum’ motels. One of the pleasures of going to the cinema is witnessing the response of strangers. As the closing credits roll, one of my fellow patrons laughs his head off in derision and offers a vocal critique to the room: ‘What f—ing rubbish!’

Another patron down the front, an elderly man with his wife, turns around and addresses this unkind giggler: ‘Why are you laughing? It’s a tragedy!’ He is furious. For one exciting moment it looks like there’s going to a be a shouting match over the merits of the film. The older man’s wife is placatory, however: ‘Look,’ she tells him in the kind of half-whispered tone that hints at a history of similar interventions, ‘different people respond in different ways. No need to get upset.’ As we’re leaving, she asks some of the other cinemagoers what they thought, in the hope of recruiting support for her husband.

She doesn’t get to me, but I’m irritatingly half-and-half on this one. The Florida Project definitely lays on some sentimental manipulation with a trowel, with much dwelling on real tears shed by real children. But then Dickens went for this effect, and so did those Depression-era American movies which are clearly an influence, films where sooty-faced, cap-wearing urchins get up to No Good in New York slums. Whether The Florida Project oversteps its mark is really down to the onlooker’s taste. In fact, tonight’s elderly defendant shares the majority view of the critics, so I hope he discovers this and takes solace. It is the loud scoffer who is in the minority. But I can see both sides: the script has moral problems, but visually, with its rich sense of life in the environs of Disney World, the film is memorable and original.

**

25^th December 2017. Christmas with Mum in Suffolk, just the two of us.

**

26^th December 2017. Boxing Day sees us visit my cousin Olivia at her farmhouse in Layer Marney, Essex. It’s a contemporary note that Olivia is not a farmer but a TV producer. Though she does keep chickens. No one discusses Brexit at the dinner table.

We took a look at the nearby church and the Tudor gatehouse. The church porch has a list of the local electoral roll on a clipboard. Endless dog-walkers.

**

Friday 5th January 2018. To the Barbican with Shanthi to see Brad’s Status. Ben Stiller plays a self-regarding middle class man having a midlife crisis, again. Michael Sheen is very funny as a schoolmate who’s become a Boris Johnson-type figure: barely competent at the top jobs he’s managed to blag, yet his talent at maintaining a popular media profile means that he’ll always get away with murder. When people say ‘nothing succeeds like success’, they really mean nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

Much is made of the fact that having a house in Sacramento, CA is apparently a sign of social failure. To many British people, having a house in even the dullest part of California would be a success. Partly because of the sunshine, but mostly because even a modest house in America seems exotic, not to say more spacious, to someone in a crumbling semi in Guildford. There’s a good reason why the phrase ‘The American Dream’ is in Western cultural parlance, while ‘The English Dream’ is not. The English Dream is just to make it to the end of the day without being too socially embarrassed.

Brad’s Status has its moments. There’s a scene in which the Ben Stiller character is waiting in an airport for his flight. He looks around at the other men slumped on the benches around him, and mourns at the state of being a fifty-ish man per se: greying boys betrayed by their bodies, defeated blokes, tortoise-like wrecks of humanity taking solace in grizzled beards and puffy anoraks. It’s a sentiment out of Philip Larkin.

**

Thursday 11^th January 2018. The transcript of my MA arrives in the post. I can now officially say I have a postgraduate degree from Birkbeck, University of London, being a Master of Arts in Contemporary Literature and Culture, classified with distinction (the MA equivalent of first class). The ceremony is in April.

**

Monday 15^th January 2018. To the Rio for Molly’s Game. Usual Aaron Sorkin fare: characters spouting snappy quips at each other. The father, played by Kevin Costner, has a big speech to his offspring at the end. It looks clumsy and formulaic compared to the father’s speech in Call Me By Your Name. Indeed, I thought at first that Molly was hallucinating when she bumped into her father in this scene: it feels that contrived. Still, I like the Sorkin dialogue, which is what one expects, and gets.

**

Tuesday 16^th January 2018. My first visit to the National Archives in Kew. A modernist building right by Kew Gardens, which has its own moat. The security is even more diligent than that of the British Library: pencils only, but you’re not allowed to bring your own pencil sharpener.

**

Monday 22^nd January 2018. With Shanthi S and Rose B to the Rio for Three Billboards Outside Epping, Missouri. Not up there with the director’s earlier work In Bruges, but the same mix of brutal black comedy, intriguing plot twists, and sudden shocks of violence. The film is essentially idiosyncratic and of its own world, yet it touches on the current feeling of anger over clear cases of injustice. In London, a group of Grenfell Tower activists have hired three vans with electronic screens: ’71 dead’, ‘And still no arrests?’, ‘How come?’.

**

Wednesday 24^th January 2018. Mark E Smith dies. I have a vivid memory of decorating the family Christmas tree in December 1988, to the sound of my first Fall album, I Am Kurious Oranj – bought on cassette, probably from Andy’s Records in Ipswich. This was before I started immersing myself more fully in the world of indie music. I had been intrigued by the band’s connection with the Michael Clark ballet at the Edinburgh Festival that year. ‘Festival Ballet Entryism’ – a Fall title in waiting.

I was also fond of the 1991 album Shift-Work, with the unexpectedly Prince-like song ‘Rose’. Side Two is titled ‘Notebooks Out, Plagiarists’.  Mr Smith really was a complete one-off. The world is duller without him.

**

Thursday 25^th January 2018. The first anniversary of Tom’s death. His partner Charis holds a gathering at The Star on Hackney Downs, close to where she’s recording with her band, The Curse of Lono. Ewan Bruce also there. Bus back to Dalston with Charis’s drummer friend Billie.

**

Studying literature for six years has made me rather intolerant of clunky prose. The Guardian today runs a news story about Mark E Smith’s death. It is so badly written I start to feel faint. The sub-headline reads: ‘Famously fractious frontman had been suffering from ill health throughout 2017’. The opening paragraphs then include these two sentences, back to back:

Smith famously once said: ‘If it’s me and yer granny on bongos, it’s The Fall.’ He was a famously prolific musician…

Repetition aside, ‘famously’ should be avoided full stop.  Even the Guardian‘s style guide asks its writers to decline from using the term. ‘Famous’ is also frowned upon. They point out, rather reasonably:

If something’s famous, you don’t need to tell people; if you need to tell people something’s famous, it isn’t.

Worse still is the assumption that the reader shares the same incurious position. For a man as consistently original as Mr Smith, it seems all the more irksome to mark his death with stale writing.

Another irksome journalistic phrase: ‘The greatest author you’ve never heard of.’ Says who? Everyone’s not heard of someone.

**

Saturday 27^th January 2018. To the ICA for a screening of the Armenian arthouse film The Colour of Pomegranates (1969). The screening sells out, and there’s a huge queue to get in. On a Saturday afternoon too. Some people like to go to football matches, and some like to go to a cinema to watch an Armenian art film that’s been available on DVD for years. An encouraging sight for those who worry about attracting an audience. Be as experimental as you like: the good will out.

**

Friday 2^nd February 2018. To the Curzon Soho to see The Post. Entertaining enough, in that self-consciously ‘vintage’ way that Spielberg now goes in for. Nixon may as well be a CGI monster. Tom Hanks is refreshingly cast against type, swearing and bullying. The critics have overpraised it, proving that one way of securing good reviews is to portray journalists as heroes. Perhaps for balance it should be seen on a double bill with highlights from the Leveson Inquiry.

**

Saturday 10th February 2018. To Senate House Library to see the exhibition Queer Between The Covers. This is the exhibition that’s related to the conference I’m appearing at in March. The library is displaying a fascinating range of books on the theme of queerness in history, going back to a 1710 account of the Mollies Club. There’s the lyrics to a broadside about the Boulton and Park case in 1871 (the cross-dressing Londoners, whose letters contained the earliest known written appearance of ‘camp’). One grumbles about the saturation of news coverage today, but at least one doesn’t have to endure a strained ditty written about every single event.

In the 1980s section there’s a copy of the book Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin (1987). This is the progressive children’s book about a little girl living with two dads. It’s thought to be one of the books that triggered Clause 28, the clumsy Tory law which banned anything that could be construed as ‘promoting’ homosexuality.

What I didn’t realise until today was that (a) the book was originally Danish, which explains a lot, frankly, and (b) it’s entirely told in photographs. While one can’t have sympathy for the reactionaries behind the clause, there is something problematic about using a photographic format for telling stories to small children. I find myself wondering why books for that age range tend to have drawings in the first place. There’s something about the pre-pubescent mind that favours cartoons and drawn illustrations rather than photographs and live-action films. If in doubt, use drawings of talking bears in aprons.

Photographic narratives, on the other hand, suggest the harsher, more teenage emotions of voyeurism, romantic angst, the loss of solipsism, and the cold cruelty of reality itself (‘reality is so unfair!’). It was no wonder that the photo-story became a popular form for teenage magazines like My Guy. I know I’m obsessed with style over content, but I wonder if Jenny Lives With Eric and Martin would have caused the same fuss had it been drawn by, say, Quentin Blake, rather than told in photos.

Presumably in 1980s Denmark the book was thought as groovy and worthy in that relaxed Scandinavian way. To Tory councillors in Britain, at the height of the AIDS panic, it must have looked like a crime scene.

Today, most people in Britain are relaxed about gay parenting, though, paradoxically, they’re more uneasy about the use of children in photographs full stop.

**

Wednesday 14 February 2018. I finish revising my application for one of the in-house PhD scholarships offered by Birkbeck’s School of Arts, and send it off via email. Here’s hoping.

This is my second annual attempt. Last year I was told of the outcome in early April. I was unsuccessful in winning one of the 12 scholarships, though they said I had made it down to the ‘the final 15’. I was offered a fees-only grant instead, which I accepted. This time, I have an MA, and a prize, from the same place that’s awarding the scholarships. I’m currently writing two papers for conferences (both unpaid). This surely has to be good for my chances.

The full scholarship pays a wage as well as the fees. It’s just £16k, but that’s more than many freelance writers manage to earn.  To be finally paid a sustainable wage at the age of forty-six, for doing a form of work I have been told I am objectively good at, and which I enjoy, would mark a huge turning point in my life. Well, we’ll see.

**

Thursday 15 February 2018. No sooner do I submit my application for funding than I come across something I wish I’d included. In Zadie Smith’s new book of essays, Feel Free, there’s a piece (pp. 181-86) on the artist Mark Bradford’s Niagara (2005). This is a video work consisting of a single shot of a young black man walking away from the camera along a tough-looking LA street. Dressed in a tatty vest and bright yellow shorts, the man sways his hips and arms in an ostentatious, self-possessed manner as he moves further into the distance. Mr Bradford’s title is a deliberate reference to the 1953 film Niagara, in which Marilyn Monroe walks away from the camera during a similarly long shot, the swaying movement of her hips being the intended focus.

Zadie Smith’s essay argues that the walk in the Mark Bradford video is an example of camp as ‘the nuclear option of the disenfranchised’. She alludes to the tradition of the slave’s shim-sham dance (or the shimmy), which she calls ‘as camp as any movement on earth’. I later find out that Mr Bradford is himself black and gay, which further contextualises the video.

Best of all is Ms Smith’s definition of camp in this respect: ‘being seen in all your glory, and within the terms of your own self-conception’. Camp is ‘doing more than is necessary with less than you need’ (p. 181). It springs from a lack, an exclusion, a margin.

**

Monday 20^th February 2018. I read Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, her memoir of becoming a very modern kind of mother. Her partner, Harry Dodge, grew up as female but now lives as a masculine non-binary person, as opposed to  transgender: ‘I’m not going anywhere’, he says.

It’s one of those books that’s been so talked about in certain quarters that reading it feels like joining the moshpit at a carefully-curated music festival. My edition’s cover has quotes from Kim Gordon and Carrie Brownstein, their names qualified not as musicians but as writers of memoirs themselves. A different edition has a quote from Emma ‘Harry Potter’ Watson on the cover. Publishing is getting more and more like this: before one gets to the text, one is acutely aware of being targeted by the cover blurbs. It’s the effect of algorithms.

The book’s title is based on the Ship of Theseus paradox, which questions if something remains the same when it has its constituent elements replaced. This too has different generational resonances. Maggie Nelson’s references reveal her to be a serious, forty-ish American academic with an interest in queer identity. So there’s lots of nods to Barthes, Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick. When I think about the Argo paradox I think about JJ Abrams’s book S, but also Trigger’s broom in Only Fools and Horses. Talking to a younger British person about this, she says she’s never heard of Only Fools and Horses but does think of the Sugababes, the 2000s pop group whose members were substituted one by one.  So I come away from the Maggie Nelson book thinking it needs more Sugababes and more Del Boy. Perhaps that’s a book I should write.

**

Wednesday 21st February 2018. Tom’s birthday, the second since his death. I keep thinking of the Michael Rosen poem about not wanting people to say if he’s mourning too much or too little.

**

Friday 23^rd February 2018. The university union is on strike over pension cuts, and Birkbeck is affected. Some PhD classes have been cancelled as a result. The main library in Torrington Square is open today, but as there’s a fairly persuasive picket line outside, I feel the decent option is to study elsewhere. I look through the glass at a number of students who crossed the picket and wonder at their motivations. Was their need to use the library really that paramount? Are they grudgeful of being denied services they paid for with their fees? Or are they foreign students who feel that morality only applies at home (also known as the Las Vegas effect)? Hard to tell. French students in particular can’t possibly plead ignorance of the concept of strikes.

It’s freezing cold. Outside SOAS the strikers are warming themselves around a proper iron brazier, full of blazing coals. It’s like something out of a documentary on the Miners’ Strike. Certainly, the 1980s’ sense of a nation rigidly divided feels like it’s back. Lots of money swilling around, yet it’s hogged by a small amount of people at the top, who then talk about ‘necessary cuts’.

**

I listen to an interview with the comedian Diane Morgan, as part of Adam Buxton’s podcast. She’s very funny, and quite refreshing with some of her opinions: not seeing the appeal of having children, and not finding the private life of Woody Allen an obstacle to enjoying his films.

Podcasts are now everywhere: I keep seeing people I know getting involved with new ones. They’re often based around interviews or talks. Spoken word content is public domain, thus sidestepping the question of musical royalties. Though it does also mean that a lot of non-BBC podcasts use ugly library music as a theme tune.

Unlike printed interviews, podcasts do away with the arduous transcription process: one just gives the raw audio to the audience. The only problem is, of course, that a huge amount of them are full of people talking over each other, or rambling for too long. Another recent development is the need to have little adverts at the beginning. Russell Brand, who is currently a student at SOAS, now does a serious, academic-level discussion show which is slightly undermined by his having to advertise a condom company at the start.

The term is now out of date, too. ‘Pods’, being iPods, are now on the way out; ‘phonecasts’ would be more accurate.

**

Tuesday 27^th February 2018. I’m reading Friends of Promise (1989) by Michael Shelden. It’s the story of Cyril Connelly’s literary magazine Horizon, which ran through the 1940s and featured pretty much all the notable British writers and artists of the day. Waugh’s The Loved One first appeared in its pages. In 1941 a fundraising notice appeared called ‘Begging Bowl’, inspired by the truly desperate situation of one of the writers – Dylan Thomas. Readers were asked to help by sending in extra money to the writers they especially liked:

‘If you particularly enjoy anything in Horizon, send the author a tip. Not more than One Hundred Pounds: that would be bad for his character. Not less than Half-a-Crown: that would be bad for yours. Horizon authors are in our judgement underpaid. By sending them gratuities the readers are forming themselves into a new patron class’ (Shelden p. 81).

It proves that today’s internet donation services, like Patreon, are nothing new.

**

Wednesday 28^th February 2018. Heavy snow hits London, strikes are still hitting Birkbeck, but the London Library remains open and cosy.

Ms K the landlady teaches me to turn a dial on the house boiler to a setting that will prevent the pipes from freezing. The setting is a little icon of a snowflake. These days ‘snowflake’ has become slang, defined in the OED as ‘an overly sensitive or easily offended person, or one who believes they are entitled to special treatment on account of their supposedly unique characteristics’. It is hard not to feel that even the central heating is judging me.

Dalston High Street has a modest layer of snow, though the east side of the street, which gets the sun, has already melted dry. Each of the letters in the sign for the Rio Cinema is individually snow-capped. It’s like the logo on the Christmas editions of The Beano.

**

Saturday 3^rd March 2018. The rest of the country is still suffering from the weather, with tales of commuters trapped overnight in trains. On Dalston High Street, the snow has melted, but there’s now an unappealing patina of mud-brown slush. One now longs for rain, though just enough to clean the pavements.

**

Begging Bowl. If you enjoy this ad-free diary and its twenty years of archives, please help support it with a donation to the Diary Fund. Not too much: that would be bad for my character. Thank you.

Tags: birkbeck, brad's status, camp, dalston, depression, MA Contemporary Literature and Culture, molly's game, podcasts, snow, weather, zadie smith

Every Christmas I take a photograph of myself in front of a different Christmas tree. This one is the foyer of the Rio cinema, Dalston, 31st December 2017, at about 12.30pm. Thanks to the Rio staff. 

This time last year I wrote about the notion of control. This was partly in relation to the way 2016 had been framed as a year of constant celebrity deaths, with the sense of a cultural landscape winking out into darkness, star by star, faster than the speed of grief. There was also that year’s voting results: it’s hard to think of President Trump and Brexit and not feel that one’s own sense of control was under threat. In London, the editorship of the main local newspaper, the Evening Standard, was given to George Osborne, a politician with little of the necessary experience for running a newspaper, but lots of the right friends. 

Among the deceased of 2016 was the writer Anita Brookner. She once said that she wrote ‘to control rather than be controlled’. Writing (and I include blogging) is therefore one way to feel less overwhelmed by events, if nothing else. So that was the spirit in which I began 2017. Trying to believe that life is more than just being at the mercy of events.

It was just as well. A few weeks into January, my younger brother Tom died, very suddenly and very unexpectedly. A few months on, I was evicted from my home of 23 years.

But although I felt very much at the mercy of events, I was reminded that I was not alone. Tom’s death was made easier by the generous donations to his memorial fund, for which I remain utterly grateful. After getting the eviction news, I found a new rented room quite quickly: a bohemian friend turned landlady got in touch. Further kind friends helped me move in. I have to remember it could have been worse. I didn’t have to get into debt sorting out the many bills relating to Tom’s death, or go through a period of sleeping on floors while looking for a new home. Homelessness is a constant fear of mine: I know I’m the sort of person, mentally speaking, that homelessness happens to. I’ve always hoped that an unusual mind, ideally, might lend itself to producing Exclusive Content, and that I might make a living from such content. But the flipside is that eccentricity risks becoming a quick route to the sleeping bag on the pavement. So although I felt at the mercy of events in some ways, I felt blessed in others.

I’ve since heard that the Highgate house has been turned back into a single 6-bedroom property, on sale for £2.4 million. Meanwhile I now rent a furnished room in Dalston. Dalston might as well be New York, given the contrast with leafy, safe, monolithic N6 (monolithic in the sense of being not very diverse, as well as having actual stone monoliths in its famous cemetery). One might say Dalston is out of control too, in the sense of being hard to pin down. The district is currently thought hip and trendy for some, yet too gentrified for others, given the rise of its first luxury flats. In local news it would seem not gentrified enough: the summer saw a riot in Kingsland High Street, albeit a very short and contained one. For me Dalston has an uncertain, out of phase, off-the-map feeling, with no single kind of person in charge (yet). And I like that. I think of Burroughs’s idealised Tangier: a busy interzone of all human life, where madness is just a matter of taste. My fears as to looking too unusual were allayed when I saw an effeminate young man walking out of Dalston Junction station wearing glitter make-up, high heels, a floaty dress, and not much else. On a December night too. I think he was just on his way to buy a pint of milk.

So I feel I’ve moved from one London, to a site of Londons, plural. Having the Rio cinema on my doorstep was reason alone to move in: all those other worlds. And the cinema has just installed a second screen. My New Year’s Resolution is to see as many new releases there as possible.

The bulk of my 2017 was spent finishing my postgraduate MA at Birkbeck, namely a course in Contemporary Literature and Culture. That I finished it at all was a quiet miracle. There was a point where I was considering putting off the summer dissertation until the following year, such was my difficulty with things. Several of my fellow students on the BA had done this, dropping out for reasons of ill health, whether mental or physical, but coming back to finish their studies later.

My epiphany of the year was suddenly finding the hidden energy and drive to finish the 16,000 word dissertation on time, even though I’d applied for a 2 week ‘mitigating circumstances’ extension (the mitigation being the usual mix of dyspraxic slowness and depression). I put this partly down to seeing a weekly mental health mentor, as provided by Birkbeck’s disability office, but also down to my joining a ‘study buddies’ group of fellow students. We would meet up and compare accounts of our progress, and generally egg each other on. It turned out that despite all my claims to being an outsider, a light application of community can even sort me out. Not only did I finish on time, I managed to achieve an overall distinction and get the MA course’s ‘student of the year’ prize. By which point I had started a PhD. I may (still) lack money, but I ended a year of loss gaining something after all. All down to the help of others.

I’m wary of making any hopes for the year – though I am trying for a full-time paid PhD scholarship in February. That would obviously be a nice thing to win. Otherwise, I just hope for the unplanned events of life to not be quite so seismic.  But if they are, I have proof I can take them on.

Tags: dalston, New Year's message

Thursday 10 August 2017. Tobi H visits from New York, friends Kyle and Caroline in tow, and we have a heady night out at the Ku bar in Soho. Tobi stays the night. A rare spike in the otherwise sparse history of my love life. At least, since the Tories got in.

**

Friday 11 Aug 2017.  To the Rio for a screening of 1991: The Year Punk Broke, accompanied by Kath G, Shanthi and Paul. A live band goes on first: Skinny Girl Diet. Two young women, guitar and drums only. Lights up throughout, audience all seated. This might diminish the rock gig effect, but it does show off the Rio’s Art Deco architecture.

I still enjoy much of the music from the film: the pre-Britpop wave of American grunge bands all signing to major labels. Hence the title, implying that the footage represents a version of the punk spirit ‘breaking’ into the mainstream. It’s mostly footage of Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth, and Nirvana touring European festivals in the summer of the year in question, just before the release of Nevermind. Thurston Moore’s larking about to the camera turns him from ice-cool poet to brattish irritant. At one point he lets the camera film him using and flushing a backstage toilet: a dangerous taunt for critics. Well, ‘Teenage Riot’ still astonishes. The other three of Sonic Youth come out better: the drummer is a virtuoso in any genre.

Kim Gordon has the same invulnerable charisma as Stevie Nicks, then as now. To be worshipped so much for so long takes a large amount of nerve, so it helps to be American. As ever, there’s an element of timing, of a vacancy being filled. Role models, like ideas, depend on the right historical moment. The Stone Roses saw that their generation needed a Beatles, and filled the vacancy out of sheer arrogance. They got away with worse than murder: they got away with laziness. And still the worship came, because the need for new gods is too powerful. On the canal down the road, a gallery sells prints of Stone Roses photographs for £720 each.

In the 1991 film, Babes in Toyland sound like the noisiest group on earth. That was the ‘punk’ aspect of the music: certain noise settings on guitar pedals, sonic distortion as the creation of new space. And Nirvana: then on the cusp of global domination, the footage now imbued with inevitable gravitas. The young man in pain, the noise of fame and suicide still in the future, now helplessly distorting the past.

**

Saturday 12 Aug 2017. With Tobi and co once more, this time to the club night Pink Glove. It’s walking distance for me: the Victoria pub off Dalston Lane. Named after the Pulp song, it’s a gay indie night where the bulk of the music is vintage alternative: 80s and 90s. I have to explain who Pulp are – or were – to my American friends. Were they the wrong kind of British, compared to Oasis, or just too arch? No Doubt’s ‘Just A Girl’ comes on, and I remember it as the theme from Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. This in turn points out how these kind of club nights are school reunions of a kind for me too. I worry about wallowing in the past: how soon is now? And yes, they play that too.

Perhaps when I’m finally satisfied with the present I’ll be fine about the past.

I part company with the Younger Americans and walk alone up Kingsland Road. Saturday night, 3AM. Little silver canisters all over the pavement, beneath the rising tower of the luxury flats at Dalston Kingsland station. The canisters are to do with drugs, though legal. Today’s drug of choice is nitrous oxide. Laughing gas. How else to react to the times?

Two drunk women sidestep into my path. Here we go.

‘We just want to say… You really look like… Will Ferrell.’

Well it’s preferable to ‘Oi, Donald Trump!’ heard on the escalator at Euston a few weeks ago.

Then they let me pass. I go home.

**

Thursday 17 Aug 2017: I see The Big Sick at the Rio. Terrible title, but an excellent comedy about the culture clash. Though it has that Judd Apatow trait of going on too long. Also an indication of the mainstream American knowledge of Pakistani culture, or the lack of it: it’s as if all those 80s British films – My Beautiful Laundrette and so on – never happened. Is America thirty years behind in the cultural awareness stakes? Don’t answer that. The film has a very good joke about 9/11 which probably had to wait till 2017 to be allowed in. Not too soon any more, not now.

**

Struggling with the dissertation for the MA (Contemporary Literature and Culture, Birkbeck). 15,000 words, titled ‘Music and Belonging in Alan Hollinghurst’. It’s exactly the sort of thing I’m interested in, except that I’ve never written 15,000 words about anything before.

The other three students in my summer ‘Study Buddies’ group are doing class in contemporary Indian novels, female villains in X-Men comics, and the environmental anxieties behind Godzilla films.

I have a complete lack of motivation at this point. The question keeps coming: is this really the best thing I should be doing with my summer, with my time, with my life, at this age? So hard to know. Right now I have a feeling of being utterly out of the swim of society. Though that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Society and I exist in mutual suspicion.

Not earning an income is unavoidably troubling, though. People in their forties are meant to have a fair amount of spending money – almost by way of compensation. I see friends going on foreign trips to festivals and big concerts and West End plays, and I admit I’m envious. But this is to make the mistake of comparing myself with others. I soon remember how ill-suited I am to so many normal jobs, and how I wouldn’t last. What am I suited to, now, today? Writing, editing, research, and (hopefully) lecturing. I’ve now clocked up six years studying English literature at graduate and post-graduate levels, and on top of all that I have my long experience of life in the real world before. That has to count for something. But – oh, one’s moods are all over the place.

**

Wednesday 30th August 2017. Saturation coverage of the twentieth anniversary of Diana’s death. As notable deaths from the summer of 1997 go, I’m thinking more about William Burroughs and Jeffrey Bernard. Princesses for the wrong kind of people.

The blameless subject of my dissertation, Alan Hollinghurst, puts out a new novel only every 6 or 7 years. The latest one, The Sparsholt  Affair is due out later this year, three weeks after my dissertation deadline. Happily, today I acquire an advance proof courtesy of a kind person at Pan MacMillan. If nothing else, the dissertation will be right up to date.

**

Thursday 31st August 2017. Richard Smith dies. In the 90s he was the main British music critic to specialise in gay perspectives, albeit with a provocative agenda. Cheeky, bitchy, and sometimes downright cruel, he was nevertheless kind to my own bands. Orlando and Fosca had rave reviews from him in Gay Times.

Mr Smith’s review of the first Fosca album was entirely made up of quotes from the lyrics sheet. I suppose I could have invoiced him. But I suspect he thought I’d be amused or flattered or both. He was quite right.

RS was one of those few journalists whose work you could actually identify without consulting the byline. Today, despite all the emphasis on ‘building your brand’, so many journalists strive to be exactly the same as each other. That dreaded contemporary acronym, FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out – is really a version of TOSO – Terrified of Standing Out. What I suppose I’m saying is that I think most journalists are a bunch of TOSOs.

***

Saturday 1st September 2017. A better day: I finish another chapter of the dissertation.

**

Saturday 2^nd September. Mum visits, and I show her around my new stomping ground. We start off with the trendy Café Route in the core of the current gentrification, Dalston Square. This is followed by the Curve Garden, Café Oto and the Arcola Theatre – all part of the New Dalston spirit – and then we hit the Babel intensity of Kingsland High Street. Here, Old Dalston bumps along with the new:  multi-cultural, multi-income, multi-desperation, multi-sanity. In such streets is the true flavour of the metropolis, where everyone, even the mad, seems aglow with purpose.

Then north on the bus to Stoke Newington, with its more Richard Curtis-sy style of London. We see the beautiful fallow deer in Clissold Park, and the umpteen trendy cafes in Church Street, including one whose name is the chemical formula for caffeine. Then back south to the canal in Haggerston, where we walk along to the towpath to Islington.

I’m audibly aware of the presence of rich people who sit drinking wine on many of the boats, Eton accents broadcasting across the canal. But then one feels that about London full stop: the danger of it becoming a playground for the rich. Thankfully, people are starting to ask questions about what London is actually for, so one remains optimistic. The Arcola Theatre has Pay What You Can days for its plays.

**

Sunday 3^rd September 2017. My 46^th birthday. Ms G my landlady says ‘Happy birthday!’ in the hallway. Well, I have to spend another day in the library. Have to. I battle stomach pains (seeing doctors about this) and wrestle not very happily with the dissertation.

**

Monday 4th September 2017. Finish Chapter 1 and write 1000 new words for Chapter 4.

Thoughts on books as objects. I’m shopping for a new mp3 player, and become increasingly bad tempered with the dominance and cost of Apple products. I settle for a SanDisk Clip Jam, only to find out that it cannot play the audiobooks I bought off iTunes. It’s the sort of thing that makes me want to spend the equivalent sum on print books. Books are cheap, calming, offline machines. And they actually belong to you after you’ve bought them. If a house is a machine for living in, a book is a machine for living.

**

Tuesday 5 September 2017. To Barberette in Hackney Downs to have my roots done. It’s a gender-neutral, bohemian-friendly, affordable hairdresser’s. Pictures on the wall of David Bowie in the 70s and Agyness Deyn in the 2000s. I ask for a bleached ‘do that somehow looks contemporary but without a ‘fade’, the current name for shaving the sides. Style, not fashion.

Today I somehow manage to have my hair bleached and cut and still find time to write over 1000 words on the dissertation. I think this is called ‘putting a spurt on’.

***

Wednesday 6th September 2017. An unexpected present from Liz at the London Library, who’s leaving: Woolf’s Writer’s Diary, the beautiful Persephone edition. Lots of words in there about persisting when the spirit sags, of course.

Evening: a Study Buddies meeting, with fellow Birkbeck MA students Craig, Jassy and Hafsa. I’ve found that this really helps. Our first meetings were simply ‘Shut Up and Write’ sessions: an enforced two hours of silent writing in exam conditions, broken into four 25-minute bursts. For the last fortnight, we meet up and pass around chapters of our work, adding proofreading and presentational suggestions, while being careful not to cross over into the realms of collusion (of which there’s strict rules). Most of it is about getting the wording of references and footnotes right.

The sessions have really helped alleviate the sense of being cut adrift. In my case, it triggers a healthy burst of productivity. In short, it gives me a kick up the bum. I suppose it’s why people still go to offices to work. Procrastination is site-specific.

**

Saturday 9^th September 2017. Finish reading The Sparsholt Affair, just in time for the dissertation.

**

Monday 11 Sept 2017. Finish the cuts on Draft 1. Straight onto Draft 2. Write the abstract and the acknowledgements.

Each draft takes a lot less time than the one before. I make dramatic cuts to Draft 1 to fit the word count, and then by Draft 4 it’s really just pedantic polishing. That’s the hope, anyway.

Tuesday 12th Sept 2017. Finish Draft 2. I note the term ‘androcentric’ for Hollinghurst’s novels (used by my supervisor Joe B). It means male-focused, but in a more aesthetic and less pejorative way than ‘phallocentric’. The latter tends to have overtones of masculine repression. ‘Androcentric’ is also perfect for describing Christopher Nolan’s films.

Wednesday 13th Sept 2017. Finish Draft 3. Evening: drinks with the three Study Buddies at the College Arms, Store Street, Bloomsbury. They’ve all finished and delivered their dissertations. I’ve been granted the option of a two week extension, because of my dyslexia. Except that my competitive urge has now kicked in, and I want to prove I can make the normal deadline after all. That, and the fact that I could really do with a break before the PhD starts in early October.

**

Thursday 14 September 2017. I work like mad. Finish Draft 4.

**

Friday 15th September 2017. Up at 5am to maximise working time. Finish Draft 5, and hand in the MA dissertation on time by noon. So I make the proper deadline after all. One copy is uploaded electronically, then I have to print out two copies using the college printers, get them bound at Ryman’s, and post them into the big slot in the wall at Birkbeck’s School of Arts reception, 43 Gordon Square. All done. I’ll receive the grade for the whole MA around early December.

After sending the thing off, I now realise I should have included Debbie Smith and Atalanta Kernick in the acknowledgements. It was their 45th birthday present to me, the Carl Wilson book Let’s Talk About Love, that inspired the whole theme of the dissertation.

**

Saturday 23 September 2017. To Brighton for the weekend. An impulsive treat for myself, aimed at creating something vaguely in the way of a holiday. I’m trying to mark the small gap of time between the end of my MA (15 September) and the start of my PhD (5 Oct).  Too poor to go abroad (haven’t done so in 8 years), but I always like Brighton.

There’s a visible increase in rough sleepers on the pavement, especially around the station. But then it’s the same in London. Inequality has never had it so good.

I stay at the decrepit and shambling Royal Albion Hotel. This is partly because I prefer a Shining-esque labyrinthine hotel to a B&B or a boutique one, but mostly because every other large hotel in Brighton is booked up, thanks to the Labour conference. Large hotels, to paraphrase F Scott Fitzgerald on parties, are so intimate. At small hotels there isn’t any privacy.

Evening: attend Simon Price’s 50^th birthday party, held across two floors at the Latest bar in Brighton’s Manchester Street. I chat to Taylor Parkes, Seaneen, Emma and Adrian, and Toby Amies (whose film The Man Whose Mind Exploded I absolutely love ). Simon P tells me how he still regards the Orlando album, Passive Soul, as a classic.

Withstand the less welcome attentions of drunk people I don’t really know, though one of them says:

‘I’ve just got to say who you remind me of’

‘Go on then.’

‘David Sylvian’.

‘Oh, that’s a comparison I actually quite like.’

It’s the second 50^th birthday party I’ve been to, and I notice a common feature of such events. There’s a projected slideshow on the wall of photos from the host’s past. I’d previously thought such projections were only for funerals. But I suppose it’s a use of photography to defy death, or possibly to help prevent early-onset Alzheimer’s.

Mr Price puts on a good party: a free vegan buffet, two floors for dancing or chatting. I drink too much red wine (ruining my throat for two days), talk rubbish, and stay too late. Taylor P shows me a photo of his son, who like all ten-year-old boys looks a bit like the left-wing commentator Owen Jones.

Lots of Eighties pop music plays on the dancefloor, just as it did when I first met Simon P in the 90s. The Eighties haven’t aged a bit.

**

Sunday 24 September 2017. I walk around the seafront in my black suit (slightly too cold for the white one), bumping into Seaneen again – this time with her child. Huge banners on the centre next to the Grand: ‘FOR THE MANY’.

One new sight on the beach is the ‘i360’ tower, a heavily-branded attempt by British Airways to duplicate the success of the London Eye. Instead of a wheel of transparent pods, it’s a single oval capsule that goes up and down a central cylinder for no very good reason. A Space Needle and Thread, as it were. It’s right by the wreck of the old West Pier. As I pass I see that the ride is offering 10% off for Labour delegates. There’s also a wicker basket champagne stall on the way in. A comment suggests itself about champagne socialism and looking down on people, but I’m too hungover to make it.

***

Wednesday 27th September 2017. Evening: to the Prince Charles Cinema with Tim Chipping for Oxide Ghosts, a film of out-takes of the 1997 Chris Morris TV series, Brass Eye. It’s made and presented in person by the Brass Eye director, Michael Cumming. Cumming turns out to be a boyish, rather Terry Gilliam-like maverick, slouching in baseball cap and ripped shirt sleeves.

Although the Prince Charles is packed with cult comedy fans, Cumming is clearly a fan of Brass Eye himself. He delights in Morris’s unique similes and malapropisms, quoting them constantly and calling his explanation of references in the credits as ‘trainspotting’ on his part. There’s even some footage of Cumming unlocking dusty crates of his own VHS tapes, as if chancing upon the Ark of the Covenant.

This is something that Tim and I discuss before the screening when talking about our own records. How proud are you allowed to be of your own work? There’s the common response of saying that you haven’t looked at your work for decades, but there’s some vanity in this too, of course. Humility can be a brand-building strategy – ‘he’s just like us!’ Self-mythologizing, meanwhile, can be more honest. A form of un-false modesty. But it doesn’t matter anyway, because the art has the last word, while the humans and their vanities come and go. The blooper sections are droll enough, but it’s the cut sections of whole ideas that make Oxide Ghosts worthwhile. ‘Just give us more to see’, sings Dot in Sunday in the Park With George. 

Chris Morris is still as careful to control his work as ever, and has only given his blessing to this film on the understanding that it’s not to be made available in any other format. I understand that this is partly for rights reasons – always a nightmare – but it’s also to make the event a bit more special. To see the film, you have to attend one of Mr Cumming’s cinema screenings or nothing.

I’m reminded how Kate Bush declined to release a video recording of her Hammersmith comeback concerts after all. Both cases become protests against the assumption that live events are just YouTube content in waiting. But there’s some irony in this, given Oxide Ghosts’ reliance on archives. And indeed, here I am, mediating my memory of the evening in a public diary. That tension between wanting to record everything, and knowing that there will be always be distortion in doing so.

***

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Tags: 1991 The Year Punk Broke, alan hollinghurst, angst, birkbeck, birthdays, brighton, catcalls, dalston, dalston rio, Dissertation, ma, MA Contemporary Literature and Culture, manesake list, Nirvana, Sonic Youth, stone roses, Studying, The Sparsholt Affair, Tobi Haberstroh

Friday 14 July 2017. I’m clearing out boxes of old clutter, in preparation for moving house. Today I go through a folder of old song drafts and unused lyrics. One idea for an album title, from 2002 is ‘The Ladybird Book of Resentment’.

***

Saturday 15 July 2017. The big move. I still have two boxes of clutter to go through, but time has run out. So the boxes have to come with me, to be tackled some other day.

At 10am Ms J arrives with her white van, which has a tendency to stall. ‘You have to give it twenty minutes, then it’ll be okay’.

There are more slapstick antics when we’re loading the van and Ms J somehow receives a cut on the hand (no good turn goes unpunished). As it turns out, she carries plasters with her at all times: she works with the Girl Guides.

A single van load covers my twenty-three years of possessions – though that’s after I’d spent the week paring them down. We trundle cautiously along the full length of the Holloway Road, then it’s Eastward Ho, turning left into the Balls Pond Road. Soon after this, we turn left again into the Dalston and Stoke Newington borderlands. My new street is partly in N16, partly in E8. At the end, the satnav demands a turning that makes no sense. So I take enormous delight in ignoring it.

My new landlady Ms K comes out to help unload, as does Ms Shanthi. So I move in with the aid of three women: the Three Graces of Removals. My new room comes with an antique bureau, which suits me perfectly.

Shortly after I’m unpacked I walk out onto Kingsland High Street for the first time. It’s a warm Saturday evening, about 8pm. I’m wearing my linen suit trousers with braces and no jacket. A dressed-up group of men and woman in their thirties pass me, probably on their way to a bar or a restaurant. One of the women grabs one of my braces as she passes, and pings it. This is the full extent of the encounter. She says nothing by way of annotation, not even to her friends. I’m left slightly shocked and confused.

I wonder if this means my appearance is already too much for Dalston, mere hours after I move in. But then, walking south and passing Dalston Kingsland Overground station, I see the sort of person the area is meant to be notorious for. He is a tall man with floppy greying hair, glasses, and a beard. In his hair are two pink ribbon bows. I wonder if the braces-pinging woman would grab at those. Perhaps not: he has the confidence of the 2017 hipster about him.

Still, I get another kind of welcome. I look in at Dalston Superstore, the gay bar which doubles as a café during the day. It currently has a fascinating exhibition of qay London history. There’s party invites going back to 1920, private letters, and a photo of Quentin Crisp.

***

Sunday 16 July. To Café Oto for a talk by Val Wilmer, the veteran music writer and photographer, notably of black American jazz musicians. I bump into various Wire Magazine types, including Frances May Morgan.

***

Friday 21 July 2017. The first of what will surely be many trips to the Rio cinema, given it’s on my doorstep. I go with Shanthi to see The Beguiled, a Civil War drama starring Nicole Kidman. Colin Farrell is forced to stay at a girls-only boarding school. It’s no surprise that this situation doesn’t turn out well. Sophia Coppola maintains her usual unearthly atmosphere, though very much with a Female Gaze in evidence, more so than The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. We also have a meal at The Stone Cave nearby, a quirky Turkish restaurant which really does look like a cave (fibreglass, I’m told).

***

A quote from Hunter S Thompson: ‘Everybody is looking for someone who can stand up in the wind. It is lonely standing up and crowded lying down.’ (from Proud Highway, 1994).

***

Friday 28 July 2017. To the Rio to see Christopher Nolan’s new film, Dunkirk, with Ewan B. I find it hard to persuade any female friends to join me, their reason being a dislike of Mr Nolan’s style. This is reasonable enough. His films do tend to be overtly interested in the struggles of men in harsh, often paranoid situations. Women, if there are any, exist at the mercy of said men. A war film by Nolan promises to be even more male-heavy. And so it proves: the only line uttered by a woman in Dunkirk is ‘Cup of tea, love?’

Nolan’s aesthetic tends to also be one of architectural tidiness. The most recent cinematic depiction of the Dunkirk evacuation was Atonement, with its five-minute shot gliding around a cluttered and muddy beach, teeming with soldiers, horses being executed, bonfires, bandstands and seaside rides. Messy, in a word. In Nolan’s Dunkirk, even the chaos is tidy. Soldiers queue up in nice lines along vanishing points, or collapse to the ground in perfect choreography. Kafka at the ballet.

We emerge to a real-life mess of conflict: the aftermath of a small riot on Kingsland Road. Like a Nolan film, the riot seems to have been contained along the long straight line of the high street (one of the straightest roads in London – possibly Roman). It’s all over when we come out of the cinema, so I have to read local news reports to find out what happened.

The death of Rashan Charles, a young black man who died in police custody, led to a protest outside the off-licence where he was arrested. Some of the protestors then blockaded the whole road with bins, cones and mattresses. When the police arrived, bottles and fireworks were thrown. The officers later returned with heavier reinforcements: helicopters, dogs, horses, armoured riot squads, dozens of vans. The blockade was pushed further north– like a World War rout – where it seems the protestors were bested; though not before several shop windows and cash machines were smashed. Only one person was arrested.

Though virtually ignored by the national media, the skirmish was enough for some emporia to lock their customers inside with them while it was going on (I refuse to write ‘while it was kicking off’). One patron of Dalston Superstore said that seeing the goings-on from the inside of a gay bar was like watching The Line of Duty soundtracked by Abba.

***

Having lived here for three weeks, I know that Dalston is not quite the overtly bohemian paradise its present reputation would have one believe, but it’s also not the multicultural, inner city locale it used to be either. It’s more like a multiverse, a patchwork of different worlds. All of London is like that, but Dalston has a more concentrated version.

Thinking how the 2011 summer riots spread from an incident similar to Rashan Charles’s death, I wonder what’s changed. Perhaps the patchwork quality of Dalston works as a kind of protection: no single world can take over for very long (except the world of the police). Or perhaps it’s now hard for a riot to spread in an era of constant distraction. Even anarchy needs a sense of focus. Or perhaps, as some people have said, tempers were doused by the heavy rain the next day.

***

Wednesday 9 Aug 2017. I take a break from my dissertation and meet Mum for afternoon tea at the Academicians’ Room, in the Royal Academy. We’re the guests of Minna M. I like how the Club has its own entrance, to the right of the main RA doors in the Piccadilly courtyard. It’s the Brideshead Revisited phrase, following on from The Secret Garden and Alice in Wonderland: ‘that low door in the wall’. The V&A Member’s Room is hidden behind a wall of mirrors.

The British Library in St Pancras has opened its own plush Members’ bar (a bar in a library!).  Private members’ clubs seem to be more popular than ever, possibly thanks to Soho House. I wonder if the rise of non-places, like franchise cafes and transport plazas, makes people yearn for places steeped in uniqueness. There’s so much emphasis on the identity of humans, while the identity of places is often overlooked.  And yet the two are connected. Being a member of a place is a declaration of identity. I used to acquire my own identity from being a fan of bands. Now I get it from being a fan of places.

***

Thursday 10 Aug 2017. Notes on language. Saying ‘you get to’ do something, rather than ‘you can’, is becoming widespread. In the news today, a young American woman describes her battle to stop a corporation running some sort of pipeline through her neighbourhood. She says, ‘This isn’t a protest you get to come home from’.

I wonder why she says ‘get to’. ‘Get to’ has more overtones of permission than ‘can’, but specifically it’s a child’s permission. ‘On Friday I get to stay up late’. ‘If you don’t do your homework, you don’t get to watch TV’. There’s an aura of youthful irony about the usage, but also the implication that all adults are now permanent children, with the real ‘parents’ being systems, institutions, networks. There may also be a touch of gaming language, along the lines of using ‘it’s all kicking off’ to describe a riot. See also ‘achievement unlocked’ and ‘goals’.

Outside Senate House Library today, an angry woman bellows into her mobile: ‘You don’t get to tell me off for eavesdropping!’

With some irony, I realise that my writing this event down is itself a form of eavesdropping. But then, in an age when people are so used to consuming the intimacies of others, from social media to loud private phone calls made in otherwise silent public spaces, the meaning of eavesdropping has rather changed. Now, whether one likes it or not, one ‘gets to’ be an eavesdropper.

Tags: dalston, dalston rio, Dalston superstore, moving house

Monday 29 May 2017. After the self-pity of before, two pieces of good news. My MA essay on horror fiction came back with a distinction mark. The last assessment is the big dissertation, due in September. From the weighting system, I’ve worked out that in order to get a distinction for the whole MA, the dissertation needs to come in at a minimum of 62. So I shouldn’t need to sweat over things too much, in theory. The mark for the horror essay was especially gratifying as it came from Professor Roger Luckhurst, author of introductions for the Oxford Classics editions of Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde and HP Lovecraft: Classic Stories.

The other big news is that I have found and committed to a new rented room. It’s in a Victorian house in Dalston, close to the Rio cinema. The nearest tube is Dalston Kingsland, on the Overground line. The landlady is a friend and fellow Birkbeck graduate. She approached me directly when she heard of my forthcoming eviction, and offered me the room. So that’s one less thing to worry about. I’ll move in mid-July, which will give me time to bevel down 23 years of possessions into a nomadic minimum.

Dalston is a rather different environment to Highgate: more youthful and urban, less of a privileged bubble. I was going to say less leafy too, but I’ve just found out about the Dalston Eastern Curve Garden, a piece of disused railway line turned into a public garden. It will mean a new life of sorts, frequenting places like the Rio, Dalston Superstore, Café Oto, the Arcola Theatre, and the Burley Fisher bookshop.

The Arcola’s current production is Richard III, the only Shakespeare play with a mention of a Dickon. I took that to be an encouraging sign. Though what really swung it was the closeness to the Rio. It’s only now that I’ve realised how much I’ve always wanted to have an Art Deco cinema on my doorstep. And Dalston has that very London sense of crossing borders in time, the old constantly overlaid with the new.

***

John Ruskin’s diary for 8^th October 1880: ‘No time for anything here but pleasant walks and lessons’. Most of my days have been like that recently. Sitting in libraries, working on the dissertation. The British Library has the best air conditioning. When the temperature soars, as it has of late, that’s where I tend to work. Or lurk.

***

Earlier activity:

Wednesday 24 May 2017. With Jon S to the Hampstead Everyman for Alien: Covenant. A spin-off of a spin-off, following on from Prometheus, which in turn was a prequel to Alien. I think. I started to stop caring towards the end, things becoming so formulaic that I didn’t even notice how they got rid of the new alien that one is meant to give a hoot about in the last fifteen minutes. It doesn’t help that the creatures’ CGI-ness somehow becomes more obvious when relayed on a spaceship monitor. At that point it looks like a harmless video game character, not the dripping, gooey creations of the 70s and 80s films that had to be built from latex and servo-motors. In the past special effects had to hide the rubber. Now they have to hide the pixels.

Still, up to this point the film is entertaining enough. Michael Fassbinder is always worth watching, and here he meets his ideal date – himself. ‘I know wheat’ is an actual line of dialogue, as is ‘I’ll do the fingering’. And there’s good news for those who think science-fiction films need more scenes of recorder lessons.

Katherine Waterston is the Tough Woman Lead this time (one remembers that Ridley Scott was also behind Thelma and Louise and G.I. Jane). Though here Ms Waterston’s short bob hairdo and permanently mournful expression make her character more child-like and sensitive-looking, which is to the film’s credit. She looks like she’d be better off playing bass in a late 80s indie band, rather than battling monsters with mouths like Rexel office staplers.

***

Thursday 25 May 2017. To Somerset House (specifically the East Wing’s Indigo Rooms), for the private view of Dear Diary: A Celebration of Diaries and Their Digital Descendants. I’d agreed to let the curators use an extract from my diary for a digital screen on the way in. The idea is a different entry from someone’s diary is shown on the screen each day. What I didn’t expect was to see my diary acknowledged more substantially, in a large timeline on a wall. The timeline tells the history of diaries from the invention of writing to the current state of the internet, with the Terminator-like rise of ‘the internet of things’. Along the way there’s Pepys, Anne Frank, and in 1997 the first entry in my own diary. The implication is that mine is thought to be the longest-running of its kind. The earliest web diary is by Carolyn L Burke, who kept hers from 1995 to 2002. She wrote in raw HTML code, as did I at first. Black letters on white.

The bulk of the exhibition manages to address the appeal of paper versus digital, but the print diaries work better emotionally. I feel a shudder when I see the artist Keith Vaughan’s diary is here. It’s a large ledger, opened to the final entry, which records his suicide in the 1970s. Judging by his handwriting, which gets more illegible by the letter, he was writing the entry as the pills took effect:

’65 was long enough for me. It wasn’t a complete failure. I did some good work…’

Then the letters shrink to a scrawl, and stop. The upside is knowing that he was right about the ‘good work’. Twelve of his paintings are in the Tate’s collection. One of them is currently on display in the Tate Britain’s Queer British Art show.

***

Sunday 28 May 2017. To the Odeon Covent Garden for Colossal with Ms Shanthi. Anne Hathaway finds her alcoholic antics in a small American town are connected with the appearance of a giant Godzilla-like monster, which is causing havoc on the other side of the world. There’s a serious message here about the effects of heavy drinking, though viewers might be put off by the lurches in tone, from social realist comedy-drama to a Transformers-like sci-fi thriller, and back again. An odd film, but I admire its nerve. It’s a little like Being John Malkovitch in that respect; difficult to imagine it was allowed to be made it all.

***

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Tags: alien: covenant, birkbeck, colossal, dalston, dalston rio, dear diary, diaries, diary, eviction, highgate, homelessness, roger luckhurst