Wednesday 3 August 2022. To the Wallace Collection for the exhibition Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts. On the audio guide is a new commentary by Angela Lansbury (I edit this entry after she dies in October, which must make the audio guide one of her last professional credits). There are stills and working drawings from some of the Disney cartoon films, mainly Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. These are displayed alongside examples of the eighteenth-century Rococo art that inspired them, including some elaborate Sevres vases and a number of paintings from the same period.
The Wallace is home to Fragonard’s The Swing, which is often used to define the meaning of ‘Rococo’ itself. It’s only now that I realise how Disney-esque the painting is, avant la lettre: the privileged girl’s playful abandon, the sugary colours, the sense of timeless delight. Much parodied, there was a spoof cartoon in the Times during the first Covid lockdown, with the then Chancellor Rishi Sunak on the swing, throwing pink pound notes into the air in place of the pink dress. In this exhibition there’s a video screen showing a clip from Frozen, where the sister Anna jumps up in front of the painting to mimic the pose. Next to the screen is the actual painting. While Walter Benjamin might be right about a work of art losing its ‘aura’ in an age of mass reproduction, seeing the Frozen spoof on a screen alongside the actual painting has its own thrill, if a postmodern one. But then, I’m the sort of person who buys National Gallery Covid face masks.
**
Thursday 4 August 2022. With Shanthi to Café Kick in Exmouth Market, followed by drinks in the Shakespeare’s Head, before ending up performing tipsy karaoke at a private booth in Lucky Voice, Upper Street. It’s my first time, I think, since doing karaoke in a proper Tokyo hotel room-style venue, a la Lost in Translation. This was a post-gig activity by the band Spearmint, with whom I played circa 1999 and 2000. I rather like the boast of saying one only does karaoke when in Japan.
It’s too hot for a jacket, so I’m wearing purple braces over a white shirt. David B says this makes me look like a packet of Silk Cut.
**
Sunday 7 August 2022. A recurring conversation in the media is the value of arts degrees, as opposed to studying science or business. By value, they mean the ability for arts graduates to earn large sums of money. The value of nothing and the price of everything, as someone who worked in the arts once said.
In my case, I’m certainly getting used to receiving rejection emails with the phrase: ‘due to the high volume of applications’. That really makes one feel special. It feels like there’s too many people with arts PhDs applying for too few vacancies. I believe it’s called the ‘postdocalypse’.
I’m grateful, though, that I haven’t yet been forced by the government into taking an unlovely job against my will. It’s true that one of the downsides of getting older is that the world is more likely to ignore you. But in some respects, that is one of the benefits.
**
Tuesday 9 August 2022. The Wire magazine asks me to review a book about C86, the cassette compilation of new bands put out by the NME in 1986. ‘C86’ soon came to mean a whole genre: jangly, tinny guitars, rendered in a scratchy indie rock style. On the cassette this was exemplified by bands like the Wedding Present and the Bodines. The problem with the term was that many of the other bands on the C86 tape didn’t sound that way at all. They were more arty, avant-garde and strange, more like Captain Beefheart than Orange Juice or The Smiths.
I learn from the new book that one of these artier bands, The Shrubs, was fronted by Nick Hobbs, with whom I once shared a Japanese hotel room. He managed Spearmint when I played with them, and was once impressed with me not for playing guitar but for recognising a photo on a restaurant wall of Derek Jarman’s Dungeness cottage. The implication was: what was I doing playing melodic indie pop guitar (and not very well) when I knew about Difficult Art?
This was long before Jarman became the brand he is today. Even normal people like Derek Jarman now. He’s become like Southwold, Stewart Lee, and Brutalism.
Also learned from the book: a former tambourine player with Primal Scream calls Bobby Gillespie’s autobiography a work of fiction, made to make the singer look good.
I think that’s the case with all autobiography, this diary included. There is vanity in every creative act, even when indulging in self-pity. Consciously or unconsciously, all memoirs are full of fiction, just as all novels are full of memory.
The author of the C86 book, Nige Tassell, has also written a whole book about the football transfer window, whatever that is.
**
Sunday 21 August 2022. I give a paper at an Aubrey Beardsley conference, ‘AB 150’, at St Bride’s Foundation, off Fleet Street. I enjoy the day, with the nice Beardsley aficionados, one of whom links Beardsley’s pierrot characters to costumes used by David Bowie and Harry Styles, another of whom references the film Suspiria. I reference Donald Trump, Brigid Brophy, and the film Carry on Loving. We go for drinks at the Punch Tavern, and I end up joining the Oscar Wilde Society afterwards.
**
Thursday 25 August 2022. To the Waiting Room venue, in the basement of the Three Crowns pub, Stoke Newington. I’m here to see Charley Stone play with her own band, which she calls The Actual Band. Also on the bill are Panic Pocket: very good, intriguing and original. I chat to old friends, some not seen for years: Anna Spivack, Debbie Smith and Atalanta K, Tim Baxendale, David Barnett. I share the tube journey home with Debbie and Atalanta, who mention the documentary film that they’re both in, Rebel Dykes,about the 1980s lesbian subcultures in London.
**
Friday 26 August 2022. Treated to a kind lunch at Le Sacre Coeur in Islington, by Roz Kaveney, who knows I don’t have much money at the moment. By a coincidence Roz is also in Rebel Dykes, proving that lesbian clubs of the 80s accepted trans women too. I watch the documentary itself in the evening, via the Channel 4 streaming platform. It’s exactly the sort of alternative, subcultural film that Channel 4 used to stand for, before the era of Big Brother made it into just another mainstream channel.
Rebel Dykes depicts the busy London squat scene of the 80s, before the law was changed to make squatting illegal. This was when London, like Channel 4, was a place for the displaced. Given the current cost of living crisis, I wonder if the law will have to change again, and a new age of squatting begin.
**
Sunday 28 Aug 2022. To a mini festival in Spa Fields off Exmouth Market. There’s stalls selling food and clothes and so on, and some rock bands playing on a small stage. I’m made aware of just how visibly middle-aged the audience is, perhaps because I’ve not been to a daylight gig for a while. But then, so many of the practitioners of the genre are greying too: Paul McCartney headlining Glastonbury this year at the age of 80. Rock music now feels more claimed by the older than the young.
The C86 book, which I’m clearly not finished with, reveals that even some of the fairly obscure indie groups of the 1980s have recently reformed, the members now in their late 50s or older. This is often because there’s a proliferation of small festivals who want to book them, particularly abroad. The phrase ‘has been’ is now itself a kind of has-been. If fame just means attracting an audience, even a small one, you can stay famous forever. Or at least, for as long as YouTube exists.
After the festival I go for drinks at the very pleasant Victorian pub The Peasant, in St John Street, with Travis Elborough, Alex Mayor, and Dave Callahan, who is in the C86 book, being a member of the Wolfhounds. We are thrown out of the pub at 9pm, not because we are rowdy but because it’s a Sunday.
**
Saturday 3 September 2022. Getting older myself. I spend my 51st birthday in Bexhill on Sea, having lunch in the De La Warr Pavilion, one of those places I’ve always meant to visit. I haven’t been abroad since 2009, partly due to lack of money but also because there’s a lot of places in the UK I’ve still not ticked off.
Then afternoon tea at the wonderfully crumbling Royal Victoria hotel in St Leonards-on-Sea with Kitty Fedorec. This is close to the Marine Court Art Deco apartment block, one of my dream places to live if I had the choice, the other being the Barbican. This is followed by a game of mini golf in Hastings with her Kitty’s friends. After which we go for cheese bingo in a nearby pub, which turns out not to be a joke. I’m surrounded by wry geeks and bohemians in their 30s and 40s, one of whom is carrying a bag of vinyl albums, including Edward Woodward Sings.
**
Thursday 8 Sept 2022. The Queen dies at 96. I was convinced she would beat her mother’s age of 101, given the progress of medicine. But then, unlike her mother she did have rather more to do than drink gin and watch racehorses.
I go to the Shakespeare’s Head with David Barnett and try HMQ’s reputed tipple: Dubonnet and gin. Two parts Dubonnet to 1 part gin, with a slice of lemon plus ice.HMQ, who was not much of a drinker, inherited this choice from her mother, who was. Quite a 1920s drink, in fact, also associated with Noel Coward, and a reminder that the Queen Mother was of the Bright Young Things generation. The drink itself is not unlike absinthe. Unexpectedly strong, which seems apt. I don’t have more than one.
**
Saturday 10 September 2022.Trying to get used to having a new King, without thinking of spaniels. The Prince Charles Cinema in Soho has affixed a notice to its door: ‘No, we are not changing our name.’
**
Monday 12 September 2022. To the Barbican for The Forgiven, an Evelyn Waugh-esque melodrama about decadent white people in Morocco. I’m slightly shocked to see that film has an 18 certificate, not for violence or gore or sex but for scenes of drug use, namely cocaine. There’s some footage of Tangier early on. I think I recognise the El Minzah hotel, where there might still be a photo above the bar of me and Shane MacGowan.
**
Wednesday 21 Sept 2022. I read the comic memoir Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe. Kobabe is a young American cartoonist who mentions the music of David Bowie as part of their path to coming out as non-binary. Their other cultural references include Harry Styles. Harry Styles is not David Bowie, but there certainly seems to be a gap in the current world of role models for a Bowie-esque figure, a pretty male who can combine mainstream pop music with acting and fashion and being just unmanly enough – but too strange that he can’t appear on the cover of Grazia. Mr Styles has done his best to take up that position.
Tonight I see the big new Bowie documentary, Moonage Daydream at the BFI IMAX in Waterloo, with Shanthi and Rob, bumping into Erol Alkan in the lobby beforehand.
Moonage Daydream recycles a fair amount of footage I’ve seen before, from Alan Yentob’s Cracked Actor to the Mavis Nicholson interview. Easily found on the internet, but it’s nice to see these ancient clips cleaned up and stretched across the giant IMAX screen. Mavis Nicholson died recently, the same day as the other queen. She specialised in getting the best out of unusual men: Quentin Crisp, Kenneth Williams, Tom Baker. If I had my way, the IMAX would show a whole season of her interviews. The venue would be renamed IMAVE.
After the film Shanthi takes my photo in the IMAX Exit 1 subway, where someone has scrawled on the wall ‘PANSY MOB’.
**
Friday 23 September 2022. Still on a Bowie tip, I find myself going down a Bowie / camp research rabbit-hole. In the film there’s footage of Bowie fans in the early 70s, queuing up outside one of his concerts. They chat to the camera about Bowie, saying ‘he’s so camp’, and it’s meant in a positive, even hip sense.
I find the 1972 Melody Maker Bowie interview, the one where he says he’s gay. In the article the journalist, Michael Watts, calls Bowie’s presentation ‘camp as a row of tents’. In 2006 Watts wrote about his memories of doing the interview, and wondered if he actually invented the phrase ‘camp as a row of tents’. It would be nice to think so, but I can’t resist doing the research to find out. This is what prevents me from being a regular journalist, on top of my slowness. I can’t make some sweeping claim and let it stand with no citations, no evidence.
According to Gary Simes’s exhaustive article ‘Gay Slang Lexicography’ (2005), ‘camp as a row of tents’ is at least as old as 1948, and may be Australian in its origins. Barry Humphries was using ‘camp as a row of tents’ in the 1960s, which I can believe, while the Times used the phrase in 1968, to describe the TV series The Avengers.
‘Camp’ also appears in another significant piece of Bowie journalism: Ray Coleman’s concert review for Melody Maker, 15 July 1972. There, Bowie is called ‘the undisputed king of camp rock’, combining the Velvet Underground with ‘a Danny La Rue profile’.
I wonder if young people who now look to Bowie as they look to Harry Styles would get both these references. Perhaps Todd Haynes should follow up his documentary on the Velvet Underground with one on Danny La Rue.
**
28 September 2022. So hypersensitive to language that I take against emails beginning with ‘Hi’ rather than ‘Dear’. ‘Hi’ is shrill, mercenary: a salesman who doesn’t care who you are. ‘Dear’ is an oasis of gentle.
**
30 September 2022. The last time I bought a packet of cigarettes it would have been Sobranie Cocktails. I’m delighted to be told by Kate Levey, Brigid Brophy’s daughter, that Brophy smoked them in her nursing home.
**
10 October 2022. What keeps me alive right now is my taste. One current passion is books and bookshops and indeed books about books and bookshops. I’ve read at least three such books from the latter category this year: Dennis Duncan’s Index, A History of The; Robin Ince’s Bibliomaniac,and Emma Smith’s Portable Magic. I’m also more fascinated than ever with elegance in English prose. Recently I watched a documentary about the history of the BBC and found myself drawn to a description of Winston Churchill’s manner of speaking as ‘Gibbons-esque’.
The well-honed phrase is usually best put to service in a song lyric or in a immersive narrative, style being nothing without content. But not always. Truman Capote said of Firbank that ‘all he had was style, bless him’. Sometimes it can be more than enough to just enjoy the performance of another mind.
**
Saturday 15 October 2022. Current projects: an academic chapter on Angela Carter for Bloomsbury Books, plus a novel set among studenty dandy types. I’m trying to put the camp in ‘campus novel’. One character is based on Sebastian Horsley, which seems like such an obvious thing to do. I think of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford preserving their own dandyish friends in their fiction.
**
17 October 2022. Lots of coughing about. Mum in Suffolk is now poorly with Covid for the first time, having avoided it entirely until now. Two and a half years on, though, and with the vaccines well established, one’s anxiety over the virus is a lot less acute. [Indeed, Mum goes on to recover more quickly than I did]. People are now much more worried about the cost of living, climate change, and Russia.
**
18 October 2022. I decide to get my thesis bound, choosing the style of Firbank’s first editions. Black cloth hardback, gold lettering. A reminder to myself of what I can do, and what I’ve managed to do, and that for better or worse I’m now a creature of books.
**
20 October 2022. Liz Truss follows several months of campaigning to be prime minister with barely a month in the actual job. The political news in the UK is getting so ridiculous that I feel like having a one-person riot. It will not last long but it will be very well dressed.
**
24 October 2022. I think I’ve just about got the hang of the author-date reference system now. This is from the Angela Carter article. I don’t trust referencing software, preferring to bring as much manual labour to the task as possible. It’s probably another way that I’m too slow to do this for a living, but I’m pleased with the results.
**
28 October 2022. I admire professional writers who take their time, or at least are allowed to take their time. Alan Hollinghurst taking six years to write a new book, Donna Tartt taking ten. But I also admire writers who produce regularly but who manage to do so without using a computer. At Housman’s bookshop in Kings Cross I treat myself to Ronald Blythe’s new book Next to Nature. This is a collection of his weekly Word from Wormingford column for the Church Times, which ran from the 1990s up till his retirement in 2017 aged 95. The religious content, which I’m not so interested in, is offset with Blythe’s reflections on nature, literature, and history, which I am interested in. I’m fascinated with the circumstances behind the writing: Blythe living alone since the 1970s in a lone house up a long track in the Stour Valley countryside, yet never learning to drive. He typed up his books and journalism on a typewriter and sent the copy off by post, and kept doing so into the 2010s. With writers these days churning out words like the wind, I find a sense of slowness, of polish and pause, all the more precious.
**
Saturday 5 November 2022. The computers at Birkbeck Library respond to a user logging into the system with a pop-up message of confirmation. For ten years, I used to see: ‘Dickon Edwards: Student’. Now that I’ve moved on to be an Associate Research Fellow, which is a form of unpaid affiliation, the system labels me as ‘Dickon Edwards: Other’. I read far too much into this official designation of otherness.
Going through old clutter, I find an out of date CV. Under ‘Other Work’ there is a long list. I suppose this is part of my problem. I have done too much Other Work, and not enough Normal Work. The list includes the following.
Custodian, Kenwood House (English Heritage), 1998 to 2000. Essentially a glorified security guard, standing around in beautiful rooms full of beautiful paintings and furniture. I had to ensure visitors didn’t damage or steal anything, but I was also required to give information about the art. It meant for a crash course in Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Gainsborough, which I loved.
Shop assistant, Archway Video DVD & VHS library, Archway Road, 2004 to 2007. I actually rebuilt the shop’s website myself, using the program Dreamweaver. Free access to films, which was bliss. And the shop was 5 minutes’ walk from my bedsit in Southwood Avenue.
Guest columnist for Green Wedge, political website. One-off.
Blogger for Latitude Festival.
Gig reviewer for Drowned in Sound.
Concert guitarist with the band Spearmint. 1999-2000. Toured the UK, Sweden and Japan. Amicably sacked for inability.
Concert guitarist with Scarlet’s Well. 2004. Amicably sacked for inability after 1 gig, which suggests my guitar skills declined even further after Spearmint. Today I don’t own a guitar at all, having taken the hint.
DJ at club nights ‘The Beautiful and Damned’, at the Boogaloo, Highgate, and at my own night in Camden, ‘Against Nature’. Also DJ’d at the British Library, Latitude Festival, Last Tuesday Society, Curious Invitation, White Mischief, How Does It Feel to be Loved, and other club nights. Have since thrown out my DJ CDRs along with my guitar.
Model for the cover of the academic book Materializing Queer Desire by Elisa Glick.
Extra in the films Shaun of the Dead (zombie in shirt and tie), Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (party guest in suit and tie), and Gambit (restaurant diner in suit and tie).
Life model at art classes – somewhere near Holloway Women’s Prison.
Personal assistant, or ‘New Romantic Butler’ as one of his friends put it, to the musician Shane MacGowan, mainly for two one-off trips to Tangier, and one to New York.
Standing for election to Haringey Council, Highgate ward, as a Green Party candidate (May 2006). Wore heavy make-up.
Invited as guest of honour for an exhibition on menswear at the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands. Lent one of my suits to go on display, as an example of a modern dandy.
Invited to be sole UK performer at the 2008 Stockholm International Poetry Festival.
And these are just the things I haven’t put on my current CV.
The world of CVs expects all people to choose one thing – a ‘career’ – aged 18, and to stick to that to the grave. I’ve never been like that. I now have a BA (1st class), MA (distinction), and a PhD, and four academic prizes, on top of my varied list of experiences. And still the job market views me as, well, too ‘Other’.
I don’t know really what to do. Except to carry on looking and applying, and to carry on writing.
**
Thursday 10 November 2022. To the Vue cinema near Angel for Bros, an American mainstream romcom about gay men. There’s a reference in the film to You’ve Got Mail, but the main character is no Meg Ryan. He doesn’t stop being neurotic long enough for the audience to care about him. His love interest, the Tom Hanks figure I suppose, is physically handsome but utterly dull. But both actors play well enough, and the ‘com’ is certainly all there, if not the ‘rom’. There’s plenty of one-liners, and I find myself laughing aloud. But it’s one of those films where I come away wondering what could have been improved.
**
Saturday 12 November 2022. Wearing a linen suit due to the unseasonal warmth. If the world is ending, one might as well look one’s best for it.
Looking for a seat on a train today, I walk past a young couple. She bursts into a manic giggle. He says, ‘What da f— was that?’ Still got it.
Saturday 19 November 2022. One of the most quoted lines from Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Notes on “Camp”‘ is:
‘It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized – or at least apolitical.’
There have been many refutations of this claim ever since, often indicating the many political and subversive uses of camp, from drag queens at the Stonewall riots, to Donald Trump’s use of the Village People song ‘YMCA’ at his rallies. Sontag herself changed her mind on this position in a 1975 interview. Her own example of political camp was Mae West, arguing that she used camp as a form of feminism.
Today I watch Joe Lycett’s new stand-up show on video. He manages to blend mischief, pranks, and camp smut with a very contemporary form of social activism. His style of camp speaking is old-fashioned in the mode of Kenneth Williams, yet his material is closer to that of Michael Moore. Although Michael Moore is unlikely to refer to Lisa Scott-Lee from Steps.
If you need proof that camp can be political, Joe Lycett is it.
** 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!
I’ve left this online diary go fallow for too long, with the last update in October 2020. Some sort of explanation is warranted.
In George Orwell’s essay Why I Write (1946), he boils down his motivation for writing to four desires:
Sheer egoism. The desire to seem clever, to be talked about and remembered after death.
Until January 2022, I was working on a PhD in English and Humanities. I was paid full-time by the UK government to do this from 2019 to 2021. The PhD was my day job, and had to take priority over any other writing. Any desire to seem clever was therefore spoken for.
As for any desire to be talked about or remembered after death, that waned. With the pandemic causing a surge in online self-presentation for all, I became all too aware how much I’d failed to elevate my voice above the crowd of Instagrammers, YouTubers, Twitchers, and Tweeters, all broadcasting the scrolling minutiae of their lives to the world. It’s all diary writing of a kind.
By late 2020 I had spent twenty-three years writing the diary, posting millions of words and keeping them all online in a searchable archive. But I still couldn’t get enough donations from readers to make the diary pay. I have to accept that I’m a niche ‘content provider’ – and that’s putting it nicely.
The egoism is starting to return now, however. The PhD is finished, and I continue to exist. So I need to write.
One remaining ambition is to publish books. I’m more fascinated with printed books as objects than ever: their offline quality, their calm immersion, their freedom from pop-up adverts for Volvos.
Aesthetic enthusiasm. The desire to take pleasure from the firmness of good prose.
Orwell’s essay goes on to include his remark about prose needing to be plain and unembellished in its style. That there should be nothing between the words and the reader: ‘good prose is like a window pane’.
The thing is, some of us like a bit of stained glass from time to time.
The PhD made me so sensitive to bad writing that it put me off writing anything new myself. But that’s over now. I’m now back in the mindset where I know what I like, and want to make more of it.
Historical impulse. The desire to find out facts and to store them for the use of posterity.
I switched to Twitter and Instagram for the desire to ‘store’ the facts of my life. This was a combination of laziness and loneliness. The need for ‘Likes’ and the sense of an instant audience can be powerful. But it’s a false satisfaction. My idea of hell would be a tweet going viral. I’d hate to be famous for writing a tweet. I should return to the diary for that reason alone.
Political purpose. The desire to push the world in a certain direction.
I do believe in trying to change the world for the better, particularly in the sense of promoting imagination, literacy, difference, wit, art, and intelligence, over, say, violence, conformity, exploitation, and thuggery. This urge left me during the depths of the pandemic, when the ability to ‘push the world’ felt secondary to the need to prevent the spread of Covid. I became downright paranoid about the virus, as the following new diary entries will demonstrate.
* *
24 October 2020. I pass a loud young couple on Tottenham Court Road. They’re dressed in punkish alternative wear: black t-shirts, black jeans, Goth hair (or as they say now, Emo hair). They are singing a mantra in the faces of passers-by, to the tune of ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’: ‘You can stick your Covid tyranny up your arse’. The couple are obviously walking home from one of the regular Saturday protests by the anti-vaxxer brigade. Except that these two are young, as opposed to the more typical conspiracy theorists, who tend to be greying and Gandalf-like. With young people, all rebellion is the same and all rebellion is good.
* *
29 Oct 2020. On the tube. Everyone is meant to wear a face mask, but the last carriage of an Overground train tends to be the Noses Out zone. The lads zone. Like the back of the bus.
* *
30 Oct 2020. Eating by myself at the Plough pub near the British Museum:
* *
31 Oct 2020. Desperate for somewhere of my own to work, I am lent by Birkbeck the use of a tutor’s office. It’s on the second floor of 47 Gordon Square. The Ginger Jules café in the square provides takeaway soup. My view from the window must be more or less the same view the young Virginia Woolf would have been used to when she lived there:
* *
16 November 2020. It feels like we’re past the End Times and into the blooper reel.
* *
23 November 2020. I am interviewed via email by a writer researching the Sarah Records music scene, of the early 90s. I have to apologise to her about the scantiness of my recollections. At this point my mind is entirely dominated with the world of my thesis: the life and work of Ronald Firbank and the history of camp in fiction. I feel I’m too steeped in my present to access my own past. It’s like stopping halfway through lunch to discuss breakfast.
* *
29 November 2020. I watch the film Happiest Season, a glossy Christmas romcom aimed at the mainstream Love Actually market, but with young lesbians as the leads. I think of Derek Jarman writing in his diary in 1993 about appearing on the Channel 4 special, Camp Christmas: ‘The depths of our dislike for this family event was hardly disguised. It’s not easy for gay people to enjoy Christmas, the two don’t mix’. Perhaps the mainstream hype over Happiest Season is a sign that this is no longer the case.
* *
30 November 2020. I read an article from 1963 wherein Dennis Potter praises the very first series of Doctor Who. He calls the Tardis ‘a distinctly Marples-free machine’. It’s a topical reference to Ernest Marples, the Transport Minister at the time, who oversaw the Beeching cuts to the railways.
* *
2 December 2020. At this time of year I usually like to sit in the café next to the ice rink at Somerset House, just to enjoy the atmosphere. I never skate. This year there’s no skating. Instead the space is host to pricy transparent igloos, ‘dining pods’, for groups to hire, assuming they’re all in the same Covid ‘bubble’.
* *
7 December 2020. I go for a symptom-less Covid test at the former ULU in Malet St. There’s a row of white testing booths set up in the auditorium where they used to hold concerts. I first visited this room in 1989 or so, damaging my hearing to see groups like My Bloody Valentine and (the rather less noisy) They Might Be Giants. I feel relieved at the negative Covid result, but it does nothing to assuage the worry over how long this is going to continue.
* *
14 December 2020. It’s looking likely that there’s a second wave of the virus on the way. Mum and I call off meeting for Christmas. She says it’s the first time that she’ll be spending Christmas by herself in her whole life.
* *
19 December 2020. With my Covid paranoia sky-high, I look at ads for single flats and bedsits. Just one day looking is enough to turn one into an extreme Marxist, such is the greed on view.
* *
21 December 2020. Thanks to Bibi Lynch on Twitter I find a small bedsit in Angel, off the Liverpool Road. It’s within walking distance of Birkbeck and the British Library. A Christmas delivery.
**
24 December 2020. I move to Angel on Christmas Eve, with all the pleasing connotations of the Nativity. I unpack my library, feeling like Walter Benjamin, except with more plastic laundry bags, the zip-up kind with a plaid pattern. I buy a dozen from a pound-shop on the Kingsland Road. This is a tip from none other than Alex Kapranos, of the band Franz Ferdinand. If you have to move house on a budget, and you have no sturdy boxes, the bags are perfect.
* *
26 December 2020. Eating Roses chocolates. I find Celebrations too butch, Quality Street too post-colonial.
* *
8 January 2021. A new lockdown begins. London has been declared a ‘major incident’. In the infinite Sainsbury’s on Liverpool Road there’s still many people with no masks. Salad days for the paranoid.
* *
21 January 2021. I prefer the earlier, funnier lockdowns.
* *
25 January 2021. My review of It’s A Sin, the new TV series: It’s Alright.
* *
1 February 2021. With so many people working from home and communicating via video call software like Zoom, one question is how to present oneself onscreen. A common background is a set of bookshelves. It’s been reported that used bookshops have done well out of the pandemic, with the well-off hastily buying books in bulk, purely for this decorative purpose. To paraphrase Anthony Powell, books do furnish a Zoom.
* *
4 February 2021. I find myself increasingly irritated by memoirs, which I find, paradoxically, too fictional. William Burroughs on Paul Bowles’s memoir, Without Stopping: ‘It should have been called Without Telling’. Many memoirs are essentially the same book: ‘I once had a hard time but I’m now fine and I’m using this to build a brand’. Exceptions being The Naked Civil Servant, last line ‘I crawl towards my grave…’ Except that too built a brand. The most truthful opening line is Viv Albertine’s: ‘Anyone who writes an autobiography is either a twat or broke’.
* *
5 February 2021. Hate having to write a short biography to go with a piece of writing. What counts? The form tempts parody:
‘He divides his time between Paris and Rome. Which are his pet names for the bed and the fridge’.
‘He has been a Writer In Residence. By writing in his residence’.
* *
10 March 2021. I finish the first draft of the thesis, after three and a half years of work. Now editing. It’s far too long to be submitted, at 108 thousand words. The maximum allowed for a thesis is 100k.
* *
14 March 2021. A sticker for Twitter: ‘this machine kills nuance’.
Also, the first rule of Twitter: if something can be taken the wrong way, it will be taken the wrong way.
* *
9 April 2021. Prince Philip dies. His one entry in the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations is the ‘slitty-eyed’ comment.
* *
14 April 2021. I receive my first dose of a Covid vaccine. This takes place at the Business Design Centre in Islington, Upper Street, a huge Victorian brick building which once hosted the first Crufts. The vaccine recipients are marshalled into a series of snaking queues, outside and inside the building. We are all socially distanced, and everyone is in face coverings. There’s some live music as we wait: a young man sits in a corner playing soothing jazz improvisations on an electric guitar. Islington in a nutshell.
* *
22 April 2021. An excited email from an academic friend who has just discovered that I was in the 90s band Orlando. He is now accusing me of ‘keeping that quiet’.
* *
27 April 2021. I do hope what makes Boris J go is his wallpaper, if only for the Wildean connotations.
* *
1 May 2021. I visit Islington Council’s South Library on Essex Road, the red-brick branch where Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell were caught customising the covers of library books. Today South Library doesn’t stock any of Orton’s own books but it does use his name in its publicity for the building’s centenary. Orton is officially the most interesting thing to happen to that library. And they put him in jail.
* *
6 May 2021. I vote at Thornhill Primary School, Thornhill Road, N1, in the mayoral elections. As I make my mark in the booth with the usual stubby pencil on the usual piece of card, a teacher outside in the playground swings a hand bell to signal the next class. Both practices remain unchanged in decades.
* *
18 May 2021. Drinking in Fitzrovia means you risk overhearing film & TV people saying things like ‘the DP was a legend’.
* *
5 June 2021. On Saturdays in London, one thinks of Quentin Crisp’s remark that protest is a game any number can play. Today, walking around central London, I am collared by anti-vaxxers (aggressive), eco warriors (civil), and Free Julian Assange activists (feral).
* *
13 June 2021. Walking along Upper Street on a hot day, I am the only man in trousers rather than shorts. If nothing else, I supply punctuation.
* *
2 September 2021. Shanthi S marks my 50th birthday with a meal at Le Sacre Coeur, Theberton Street.
* *
3 September 2021. I spend my actual birthday visiting St Leonards-on-Sea and Hastings. Royal Victoria Hotel for afternoon tea. I eye the flats of Marine Court, the 1930s block that’s modelled on the Queen Mary ocean liner, with the same yearning as I do the ones in the Barbican.
* *
4 September 2021. A boozy night at Vout-o-Reenee’s in Tower Hill. Sophie Parkin makes me an impromptu birthday cake. It’s also the birthday of the fashion designer Roberta (on Instagram at @gownsbyroberta). We have a joint photo:
* *
29 September 2021. I submit the PhD thesis and start revising for the exam.
* *
20 November 2021. I start writing occasional reviews for The Wire again.
* *
7 December 2021. My PhD examination (the ‘viva voce’). Result: Pass with Minor Corrections. My examiners are Joseph Bristow and Kirsten MacLeod. I have until early January to resubmit with the corrections. The exam is via video call, but I’m at 46 Gordon Square, 1st floor, once home to the Bloomsbury Group, which pleases me immensely.
* *
24 December 2021. Christmas with Mum in Suffolk.
* *
8 January 2022. I resubmit the thesis with the corrections.
* *
19 January 2022. Officially notified by Birkbeck of my PhD award. I’m now allowed to call myself Dr Edwards.
* *
31 January 2022. Current activity: applying for grants to write an academic book based on the thesis. Going to seminars on CVs and careers. Also sending out book proposals: one for an experimental monograph-cum-memoir, one for a novel.
It turns out that getting a paid job after doing an English PhD is even harder than doing an English PhD.
* *
18 February 2022. My thesis, ‘Ronald Firbank and the Legacy of Camp Modernism’, is now online at Birkbeck’s online library. It’s available for anyone in the world to download, and for free, and is indexed by Google:
I still want to turn the thesis into a printed book, but my honour is satisfied in terms of getting the research out there. There are still thousands of words left out, though, which I need to turn into articles. A whole section on Anthony Powell, for instance.
* *
28 March 2022. I review the new Soft Cell album for the Wire, which includes their collaboration with Pet Shop Boys. The continuing creativity of both groups is inspirational when considering my own aging body and wondering what best to do with it. Sparks even more so: now in their 70s, putting out manifestly brilliant work like their 2020 album A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip.
* *
24 April 2022. A kind reader of the thesis sends me £50 out of the blue, knowing as they do the difficulties in getting paid for academic writing. It’s the three boxes to tick: getting paid to do what one is good at, getting paid to do what one enjoys, and getting paid enough to live on, modestly but autonomously. It’s the third box that’s still elusive.
* *
3 May 2022. My PhD graduation ceremony at Senate House. Mum attends, up from Suffolk. Dame Joan Bakewell, the college President, gives a speech. The ceremony has a little bit of extra business for the PhD graduates: they have to kneel on a padded wooden frame while the Master of Birkbeck puts a sash-style hood over them. The hood represents the PhD itself. Then the candidate arises, symbolically transformed into a Doctor of Philosophy. PhDs also wear soft Tudor-style caps rather than mortar boards.
This is Birkbeck’s first ceremony in person since the pandemic. No social distancing or mandatory masks. The audience of graduates and their proud relations packs out the hall on the ground floor. One change, however, is the omission of the traditional handshake with the Master. Today a nod suffices.
My diploma arrives by registered post a few days later. With that, my ten years at Birkbeck as a mature student are finally done: BA, MA, and now PhD. The ‘triple’, as it’s called.
* *
8 June 2022. I spend the weeks after graduation being the most sociable I’ve been since the pandemic began. I meet friends and go to the cinema. And then, perhaps inevitably, I get Covid. It lasts the best part of 14 days. Fever for the first four days, then it feels like a heavy cold afterwards, though with an added unfamiliar fuzziness.
* *
6 July 2022. One of my applications meets with success. Birkbeck has now conferred a new title on me: Associate Research Fellow in the School of Arts (Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing). Starting October 2022 and lasting a year. The title is an unpaid affiliation role, though I am rewarded with a staff ID card, a staff email address and full library access. In return, I’ll be expected to contribute to the department’s research activity on a light basis. It’ll be good to have a sense of belonging, and to have something to point to while I’m looking for the next thing.
* *
19 July 2022. I win Birkbeck’s Margaret Elise Harkness Fellowship Prize, for my research into Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. It’s my fourth prize at the college, following one in 2014 for my work on the Saint Etienne film Finisterre, one in 2015 for getting the highest grade in my year for the BA English course, and one in 2017 for getting the highest grade on the MA Contemporary Literature and Culture course. It’s a nice thing for my student years to go out on, not least because it comes with £2000 (though I have to wait until late August to actually receive the cash).
* *
28 July 2022. Still looking for a regular source of income. The Job Centre are about to put me on their mandatory Restart Scheme. All job adverts ask the same question: ‘can you pretend to be normal?’
Today I have an intense panic attack after hours spent clicking through an interminable application form for a university post. It asks me to provide ten supporting statements. I eventually abandon the application altogether, all enthusiasm quashed. All I want to do is to earn a living wage doing something that doesn’t hurt too much.
What keeps me going? A belief that, contrary to what the job market implies, difference is an asset, not an obstacle. That, and the conviction that my best work is still ahead of me. The Harkness prize certainly helps, too. Money isn’t everything, but it is one way of telling people what sort of work they are good at, and what sort of work they should keep doing.
** 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!
Friday 29 May 2020. We’re all in this together. Except that some of us are more in it than others. The pandemic has exposed everyone’s technological limitations; if you can’t afford super-fast broadband and a decent computer, your lockdown life is going to be rather more locked than others.
My old desktop is dying, and the cheap (£75) mini-PC I bought to replace it can barely run Microsoft Word without stalling. So I finally buy a new laptop. The price is £250, which is the most I can afford. Happily, this just about works for video meetings, a function which for many is now the difference between employment and the dole. I have to spend an arduous volume of time updating the software. One might have thought that someone who had written a diary online for twenty years would be good with computers, or at the very least interested in their workings. But I am entirely incurious. I just want the things to work. And if you’re living on a low budget, things tend to not work. Still, I can speak to Mum via video now. At the beginning of the lockdown, we spoke every day.
*
Sunday 7 June 2020. The schools remain closed. I read a Sunday Times supplement on home schooling. Here, parents are provided with ready-made lessons written by teachers. One lesson on English grammar requires the pupil to identify ‘forward adverbials’. This is aimed at 8-year-olds.
*
Thursday 11 June 2020. A day of relief. I have my PhD funding extended, to allow for the obstacles created by the pandemic. I’ll now remain a full time PhD student until October 2021. By that point I’ll be fifty and (I hope) finishing the thesis. What then? No plans, but then no one knows what the world will be like in late 2021 anyway. The grant is still only £17k a year to live on, but it’s work I enjoy. And it certainly could be worse.
*
Tuesday 13 June 2020. I ‘attend’ an online arts event: a Q & A with the film director Carol Morley. The software encourages you to have your webcam switched on throughout the event, even if you’re not asking a question. I am distracted by seeing the silent faces of the other attendees watching in their various homes. If this were a physical event it would be like letting audience members spend the occasion clambering over the seats, scrutinising each other’s’ faces and demanding them to explain their bookshelves.
*
Wednesday 14 June 2020. I watch You Don’t Nomi, an arthouse documentary about the strange afterlife of the 1990s big-budget film Showgirls. When Showgirls was released it was deemed laughably poor. Since then the film has acquired a cult following, almost on the level of Rocky Horror. It’s a good example of Sontag’s ‘naïve camp’ at play; camp by accident. That said, in this new documentary the Showgirls star and director insist that the whole thing was meant to be tongue-in-cheek from the off. I believe Gina Gershon, one of the other actors, though, when she says she played her role like a drag queen.
We now speak of ‘optics’ – how something looks, though whom to is never quite specified. Something looking ‘bad’ can result in the tainting of a brand, even the sacking of staff.
But not always. Consider our prime minister, a ‘character’ with a strong look, who cares little what people think, as long as they’re looking. This is how camp becomes a weapon. If you make a surface exaggerated enough, it becomes non-stick. Bad films are redeemed with new appeal, bad politicians keep their jobs.
*
Thursday 15 June 2020. One sign of things returning to normal is that today I get a catcall in the street. On Dalston Kingsland High Street I overhear, in my direction: ‘Exterminate! Exterminate! He looks like f–ing…’
I presume they mean Peter Capaldi’s Doctor Who. Particularly in his later episodes, with his hair grown out, looking mad and untamed. He rather anticipated the lockdown look.
*
Tuesday 20 June 2020. My local bookshop, Burley Fisher, has re-opened but cannot let customers inside. Instead they have a table across the entrance. The staff stand behind this, fetching books like a kiosk.
*
Friday 26 June 2020. To Clissold Park for tentative drinks in the park with Ms Shanthi and friends. We try to socially distance, but this turns out to be quite difficult, particularly when we stand under a tree to shelter from the English summer rain. The instinct when in company is always to move closer. After a few drinks, even more so. The fear now is that two’s company, three’s an outbreak. Fun has become a minefield of worry.
*
Wednesday 28 June 2020. People are starting to go on foreign holidays where they can. I can’t share the sentiment: the germ is abroad too. At the moment, I’ll settle for being allowed to visit other parts of London.
*
Monday 6th July 2020. The lockdown has relaxed to the point where the London Library has reopened. This is my idea of civilisation returning. I’m keen to avoid public transport as much as I can, so I begin a new routine of long walks every morning, from Dalston into the city.
In the main reading room of the LL the armchairs have gone. All the desks are carefully marked, with chairs removed at some desks, so that everyone is at least 2 metres apart. I don’t last long in this particular space, though: someone behind me starts coughing.
*
Tuesday 7th July 2020. Haircuts are allowed again. Kommy at Cuts and Bruises, 57 Stoke Newington Road, cuts mine while wearing a clear visor. I wear a mask. Somehow he pins back the straps on my mask to the collar guard, so he can cut the hair around my ears. Colouring appointments are still not available, though, so I bleach my hair myself, using a Jerome Russell ‘B-Blonde No.1’ kit. £5.
*
Wednesday 8 July 2020. The pandemic has meant there’s more bicycles about, along with e-scooters, those powered standing platforms that are suddenly everywhere. The e-scooters manage to look unsafe on both the road and the pavement. I’ve seen a dad take his small daughter to school on one, the child holding onto his legs as he swerves around cars. I suppose that’s an example of risk assessment: avoiding death by virus, at the risk of death by traffic accident.
Each to their own, I suppose, though I resent the way this new trend also endangers pedestrians. Quite often now I find myself close to being hit by an e-scooter or a bicycle going at full speed, even though I am just walking on the pavement.
*
Thursday 9 July 2020. Am sitting in outdoor cafes more often, a new favourite being the one in Red Lion Square Gardens.
The virus has brought out the city in spots. London is covered in circular stickers on the pavement, marking the limits of two metres, or a one-way route, or both.
At the junction of Clerkenwell Road and Grays Inn Road: a sticker on a post: ‘MASKS ARE BAD FOR YOU’.
*
Saturday 11 July 2020. To Vout-o-Reenee’s in Tower Hill for a private view of Sophie Parkin’s paintings. All painted by her during the lockdown. This is my one big social evening out of the summer, though there’s still only a handful of people here, all invited and registered. I enjoy myself, but as with many of my occasional social occasions during the pandemic, I spend subsequent days worrying in case I’ve done something irresponsible.
*
Wednesday 15 July 2020. Much conversation online about the meaning of statues. Something about the invisible nature of a virus has heightened the awareness of more visible cruelties. Statues of slave traders are being pulled down by protesters, most sensationally with the Edward Colston statue in Bristol.
Toppling statues activates their meaning. It blows off the dust. Only then does the ‘valuable history lesson’ that their defenders point to take place. The Colston statue certainly failed to enter my consciousness until now, and I lived in Bristol for three years.
I’m intrigued by the date of the statue: late 1800s, a whole century and a half after his death. So it represents not just Restoration prosperity but also late Victorian anxiety over the end of Empire. And now, the toppling says something about the anxieties of 2020.
*
Friday 17 July 2020. Tickets are released for the reopening of the British Library. Predictably the servers crash at once. It’s Glastonbury for researchers.
*
Saturday 25 July 2020. First time back at the British Library. We’re allocated a specific desk in the reading rooms, but it’s only for three hours maximum per week. And we have to wear a mask.
I manage to stop my glasses fogging up after much initial frustration. What I don’t do is wear a mask with my nose poking out, which many people do as a compromise. Half-arsed faces.
*
Tuesday 28 July 2020. Thinking of Hilary Mantel’s new essay collection Mantel Pieces, I’m now wondering if Shooting an Elephant should have been called Orwell and Good. Against Interpretation could have been Sontag, Bloody Sontag.
*
Thursday 30 July 2020. Something the film director Whit Stillman shares with Angela Carter: they both put seminars on Ronald Firbank in their work (Stillman’s film Damsels in Distress; Carter’s radio play A Self-Made Man).
*
Friday 31 July 2020. Working from home isn’t easy for a lodger. My rented bedroom is not designed to be a full-time office for months on end. Thankfully, Birkbeck have allocated an empty classroom on the Torrington Square campus, in Bloomsbury, to myself and two other full-time PhD students. This will last until the college library reopens in October.
I’m usually the only one in the empty classroom; the security guards have to unlock the room for me specially. There’re so few people in the building, it’s like The Shining. One of the security guards says they’ve had to remove the occasional homeless person from the classrooms.
*
Thursday 6 Aug 2020. At the Museum of London. Some of the displays are still closed off, as they’re in alcoves where socially distancing is impossible. Instead there are barriers with signs saying ‘Please view from here’. With bleak irony, these include the ones on the Black Death.
*
Saturday 8 August 2020. To Enfield to house-sit for Shanthi S. ‘It’s like The Detectorists around here’.
*
Tuesday 18 August 2020. From a documentary on Philip Glass, I learn that the composer has an Allen Ginsberg quotation taped to his piano, by way of motivation. It’s from Memory Gardens (1969):
‘Well, while I’m here, I’ll do the work – And what’s the Work?
To ease the pain of living.
Everything else, drunken dumbshow.’
*
Weds 19 August 2020. First trip out of London since March, to see Mum. We choose to meet for lunch in Manningtree, a halfway point between Mum and London. I’m still too nervous about going much further out of the city. We eat outdoors in the garden of the restaurant Lucca. As per the advice, we sit at an angle rather than directly facing each other, and we don’t hug or touch.
*
Monday 24 August 2020. The more likely the end of the world, the more I shave and put on a tie.
*
Saturday 29 August 2020. Hurtling towards the age of 49. I ponder the increasing evidence in my face and consider damage limitation. And yet, I don’t want to be one of those men who grow a beard out of sheer resentment at not dying young.
I’m uneasy that I’m still a very odd person. On the plus side, it’s such a comfort.
*
As part of my PhD, I’m consulting the British Library’s archive of Angela Carter’s papers: her unpublished letters, manuscripts and notebooks. I recognise much of the material Edmund Gordon included in his biography The Invention of Angela Carter. One example is the phrase she uses when ending a letter to her partner Mark, written while she was away in America. ‘Please miss me’.
*
Tuesday 1 Sept 2020. To the Rio cinema for Tenet with Jon S. I give up trying to make sense of the premise and just enjoy the nice suits.
*
Thursday 3 Sept 2020. My 49th birthday. I take a solo day trip on the train to Brighton. Quite a lot of people about, albeit with signs advising social distancing, including on the pier. Prosecco dinner in the Palm Court on the pier. I sit in various cafes and bars, including the ‘Loading’ gaming bar on the beachfront. I don’t join in with any of the computer games or board games. I just look on with my glass of wine, a little confused as to how I ended up here or where I’m going next. But happy to still be around.
*
Saturday 5 September 2020. At the British Library, I find a note by Angela Carter in one of her journals from the 1980s, all the more amusing given she was once a Booker Prize judge: ‘The Owl of Minerva as a title – from “The Owl of Minerva flies at dusk”- Hegel. It’s got a nice, solid, Booker-Prizeish ring to it.’
*
8 September 2020. Life in 2020: seeing an unknown number on the phone and immediately worrying that it’s Track and Trace (it was a wrong number).
*
13 September 2020. A favourite quote, usually attributed to Doris Lessing: ‘Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.’ I’ve seen this quote many times, and though I like the sentiment I can’t find any proof that Lessing said these actual words.
‘Do it now’ risks giving Lessing’s name the quality of a Nike ad. Though perhaps that’s the ultimate goal for a writer anyway.
*
Friday 18 September 2020. To Bildeston in Suffolk for dinner at the Crown pub with Mum. This is my third trip out of London since March, and my first to the village I grew up in since last Christmas. We eat outdoors: it’s warm and pleasant. Mum is now making online videos for her classes on quilt-making. She has over two hundred subscribers.
*
Sunday 27 Sept 2020. Reading The Young and Evil, which is so rare I have to refer to a copy at archive.org. Some authors are claiming that archive.org breaches copyright to the point of piracy. They have no idea what a lifeline it’s been to students during the pandemic. I think of the remark made (I think) by Tim Berners-Lee around the time of Napster, with people downloading music. ‘Make it easy for people to do the right thing’.
It’s also like the 1980s campaign, ‘Home Taping Kills Music’. Home taping did the reverse: new generations of people, unable to afford records, were inspired to make music of their own. Why are these lessons never learned?
*
Friday 2 Oct 2020. The National Gallery does Titian face coverings. I wonder what kind of person would buy such a thing. Then I realise it’s me, and buy one.
Branded masks are the way forward now. Bands who do t-shirts need to get into masks. If this was 1990, the Inspiral Carpets would be known for selling more masks than records.
*
Tuesday 6 Oct 2020. Dinner with Shanthi S in Pizza Express, Upper Street, Islington. The place is close to empty. Many of the other branches of PE in London have closed temporarily or for good. She takes a couple of photos, giving me the air of an Edward Hopper painting.
*
Friday 9 Oct 2020. From my bedroom I attend the first online lecture of the new academic year. The lecturer supplies a video recording, seven days in advance, complete with slides and subtitles. Then on the evening itself we can put questions to her live. The lack of being in the same room is a drawback, but being able to pause a lecture and revisit different points is a great help to retaining the information. Something is lost, but something is gained.
*
Tuesday 13 Oct 2020. Mr Johnson announces a ‘three tier’ system for new restrictions, as the coronavirus cases are rising once again. New metaphors take the stage. What might happen now is a short return to lockdown, or a ‘circuit breaker’. What depresses now is the feeling of being trapped in time as much as place. A sense of these things never ending.
*
Thursday 22 October 2020. To the Dalston Rio to see Saint Maud, an arty British horror film. The film is atmospheric and confident, if small in scale. It plays throughout with the question of whether supernatural events are really happening, or whether they’re all in the mind of the protagonist. There’s a good use of an off-season Scarborough, its beach and hills. The lead actor, Morfydd Clark, couldn’t be more different from the last role I saw her in, the dog-wielding Dora in David Copperfield.
The Rio cinema has managed to stay open into the second wave of the pandemic, and tonight there’s a healthy amount of audience, all socially distanced and masked, our temperatures checked on the way in. The nearest rival, Hackney Picturehouse, has closed along with the rest of the Picturehouse and Cineworld chains. The blame has gone on the big studios for postponing the noisier, big-budget titles, such as the new James Bond. This is a time of quieter films, for quieter streets.
** 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!
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.
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!
4 January 2020. My talk ‘Notes on Camp 2019’ has been published at the Birkbeck website: http://www.ccl.bbk.ac.uk/notes-on-camp-2019. Somehow I relate Ronald Firbank to Killing Eve.
**
6
January 2020. I read Mr Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder by John
Waters, as bought at Ripley and Lambert, the new film bookshop in Dalston.
Waters: ‘You need two people to think
your work is good – yourself and somebody else (not your mother). Once you have
a following, no matter how limited, your career can be born.’
**
7
January 2020. With Jon S to see Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker at the Tottenham Court Road Odeon.
This is a half-hearted and essentially forgettable work. Star Wars is surely an exhausted franchise by now. The scent of
desperation is palpable: trying to make something new yet not too new, and trying
too hard to please the fans, who are never happy anyway. Stevie Smith once
replied to a fan, ‘You liked my book and want more of the same? Read it again.’
The Odeon’s idea of a
‘small’ popcorn is a giant overpriced bucket of the stuff. That this sort of
thing still goes on at cinemas is baffling. To prefer arthouse cinemas might
seem snobbish, but the present management at Odeon seem utterly uninterested in
such things as beauty and reason.
**
9
January2020.
Woolf’s diary for the 20th of February 1930, on wasting time, which
now seems to predict social media. ‘This fiddling and drifting and not impressing oneself upon anything –
this always refraining and fingering and cutting things up into little jokes
and facetiousness – that’s what’s so annihilating.’
**
14
January 2020. To the Glory pub in Lower Dalston, also
known as Haggerston, for an evening of work in progress variety acts. I’m there
for ‘Velvet Webb’, the drag character of Ivan Kirby. She’s wonderful, like Victoria
Wood’s Kitty mixed with Elizabeth Taylor in Boom.
Drag is very popular now, a good thing, as it lends itself to such a wide range
of creativity. At the heart of this trend is the feeling that all is camp now
anyway – we only have to look to the politicians. In a time of too much
imagery, people with noisy, exaggerated appearances cut through. We are living
through a time of Populist Camp.
**
18
January 2020. I read Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James, and find myself coming across
lines that Dad once quoted to me in delight, decades ago: ‘We scored no goals.
Count them – none.’ There’s an unexpected reference to Firbank, as the sort of
name dropped by pretentious students: ‘As they worked, Cameron and Spencer kept
up an exchanged of allusive wit that I found at once daunting and exhilarating.
Spencer called something Firbankian. Who, what or where was Firbankian?’
Later on, the student James
educates himself on these figures, and puts on a stage show. Against a modern
jazz soundtrack, he takes to the stage and improvises ‘monologues in which such
names as Ford Madox Ford and Ronald Firbank figured prominently. The audience
stormed the exits.’
**
23
January 2020. Looking around on the Tottenham Court Road
today, 80% of the men have the same look. A beard and a beanie hat. If nothing
else, I like to think I supply punctuation.
**
25
January 2020. My income as a fully funded PhD student
is £17,000 a year, which though appreciated does not go very far. Many PhDs do paid
work alongside their research, usually teaching. For my part, I am relying more
and more on donations to the diary, my only asset.
Money is the way we
indicate value. If you think a work has value, and the creator is asking for
donations, the right thing to do is donate.
**
28
January 2020. The phrase “limp-wristed lullabies” suddenly
surfaces in my memory. It’s from a 1990s Huggy Bear record sleeve, I think. It certainly
sums up my present interests.
**
30
January 2020. A Ronald Firbank field trip. To Borough
Green with three fellow Firbank enthusiasts: Richard Canning, Alan Hollinghurst
and John Byrne (not the Scottish writer). We have dinner at the home of Jenny
Firbank, widow of Digory Firbank, grandson of Ronald’s uncle (Charles Herbert
Firbank). Also present is her son Charlie, which makes him the great-great-grandson
of Ronald’s grandfather, old Joseph Firbank, the Victorian railway builder. Joseph
is the other family member in the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography. The entry for Ronald was written by Alan
Hollinghurst. I mention this at dinner. ‘Thanks for that’, says Charlie. ‘I
think I was paid £25,’ says Mr H.
We’re here to see one of
Jenny’s possessions, the rare Alvaro Guevara painting of Ronald from 1919, in
which he is shown sitting in his flat at 48 Jermyn Street. Firbank described it
at the time as ‘a perfectly brutal little study’ of himself ‘huddled up in a
black suit by a jar of Orchids, in a décor suggestive of Opium – or (even)
worse!’ Jenny also has a wonderful print by Jean Carzou: a spiky masked female harlequin,
in silhouette.
I am given a present by Charlie
F. It’s a paperback of Michael Moorcock’s Lives
and Times of Jerry Cornelius (1976; repr. London: Grafton, 1987). Charlie
thought I’d like it for the following quote: ‘Things had come to a pretty pass
when the work of Firbank was ignored in favour of his imitator Waugh whose
prose, diffuse in comparison with that of his master, was thought to represent
the best of English style.’
**
31
January 2020. Brexit fireworks in some parts of the
country, but not in Dalston.
**
Tuesday
4 February 2020. I see the new David Copperfield film at Islington Vue, directed by Armando Iannucci.
Colourful, energetic, blowing the dust off the source material. A deliberately
multi-racial cast, too, seeing if Dickens can take the same treatment as
Shakespeare. I hope there’s more like it.
**
4
February 2020. When buying a cinema ticket online, I am
told: ‘Simply show this email on your phone’. It’s now the assumption that
everyone has a smartphone, that ‘apps’ are as essential as shoes. When I go to
meet my mother off a train at Liverpool Street, I find out that there’s no
longer an arrivals board, showing which train arrives at which platform. I ask
a staffer, who gives me the information by looking at his smartphone. ‘We
assume people have phones these days’.
Even Alan Hollinghurst
has a smartphone, as I discovered on the Firbank trip. I finally give in and
buy an iPhone on the web, albeit a £99 refurbished SE model from four years
ago. Modern life, here I come.
**
6
February 2020. I submit my PhD Upgrade document. This is
the halfway point of the thesis, when a sample of 25,000 words has to be given
to the university to be assessed. If it’s good enough, I am ‘upgraded’. If it’s
not, I may have to do the PhD equivalent of being kept down a year. Here’s
hoping.
**
7
February 2020. I abandon Clive James’s follow-ups to Unreliable Memoirs, tiring of his
renaming of real people. An Australian feminist writer who was at Cambridge
with him in the 60s is called ‘Romaine Rand’. This coy approach to memoir irritates
me. If you’re going to change the names of real people, you may as well write
an autobiographical novel. Memoir in this form has a dryness to it: a sense of not wanting to get one’s hands dirty. I
realise that I’m doing some of that with this diary, but diaries make up for it
with a heightened sense of immediacy, coupled with liberation from the necessities
of longer forms. Diaries combine the snapshot with the lucky dip. No need to
crowbar the material into a beginning, middle, and end. Just dip in.
**
8
February 2020. Keen to read more new novels, I finish Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid. The book
has been hyped as ‘the new Sally Rooney’, but it’s much wryer than Rooney,
which I like. Final line: ‘And some days, Emira would carry the dread that if
Briar [the child she sat for] struggled to find herself, she’d probably just
hire someone to do it for her.’ On going to the mall: ‘Santa Claus made an
appearance at the aquarium to say hello and talk about recycling.’
**
9 February 2020.
‘I KILL YOU’ shouts the teenage boy at me. This has just taken place at Euston
tube station in the evening, by the ticket barriers. I was about to go through
when I noticed the boy and a couple of his friends, all clad in black hooded
tops and tracksuit trousers, are dodging the fare by squeezing behind other
travellers as they walk through the automatic gates. Rather than let them use
me in this manner, I back away from the barrier and watch them react. One of the
boys is clearly the leader – this alone is interesting. He’s got through okay,
but his friend who was hoping to wedge himself behind me has now been frustrated.
From the other side of the barriers the leader looks back and gestures at his
friend, indicating me as if to say: ‘use that guy, go through after him’. The friend
shrugs in panic: ‘he won’t go through’. No one else is about. The friend gives
up and vaults physically over the barrier – something I definitely did not do in my youth. By now the leader is
staring directly at me. I stare back – a Paddington Bear stare. It is here that
he shouts his death threat and runs off down the escalator with the others.
Why
did I act this way? There’s some hypocrisy, as I did the same fare-dodging
trick once or twice myself when I was his age. Today, I think one of my
instincts is to play neither the whistleblower nor the accomplice, but the
spanner in the works (the queer, in every sense). It’s the same instinct that once
made me reply to a scam caller on the telephone with the words, ‘What are you
wearing?’ Mainly, though, I sensed these boys were, unlike me at that age, not
just fare-dodgers but alpha males, even illegal ones. Lads of violence. And given
the death threat, I was right. Had he looked
like me at that age I may have been more complicit. An unkind reader might
suspect that, given the bad English of ‘I KILL YOU’, I was reacting against
their revealed non-British status, but I’m not against that at all. It’s just
the thuggery. Well, that and the bad dress sense.
I
still feel some guilt over this, but none at all in the fact that I’ve never
threatened violence, at least not pre-emptively. My core instinct is to
challenge the assumptions of such lads that the world is theirs, and show how other
ways of being are available too. I suppose that’s as close as I come to a
credo.
As
it is, I’ve been wished dead before. Usually by music critics.
**
23 February 2020.
I’m currently typing up handwritten notes I made five years ago. Some of them I
have no memory of writing. This is a form of communing with the dead. Every PhD
hits a point where you start to research your own past self, the one whose idea
it was.
**
27 February 2020.
Re Orlando.To stop time, camp it up. One definition of camp modernism might
be: ‘what if modernism but too much’.
**
28 February 2020.
The coronavirus has meant that everyone must now wash their hands more
regularly. This is hard on Default Man. Throughout my adult span, every time I have
used a gents toilet, even a university one, I have seen a man walking straight
from a urinal or a cubicle to the exit. Today, things are different. All it
took was the realisation that the act can be a swagger. Men are now washing
their hands in earnest, albeit with a lot of ostentation and noise. And
possibly a sea shanty.
*
1 March 2020.
I am such a natural self-isolator that
the only words spoken to me in person today have been ‘are you using this
seat?’
A
table of Young People in this pub, saying ‘the hill to die on’ too loud.
*
Waldemar Januszczak in the Sunday Times today: ‘No amount of crossing your fingers and hoping will ever turn Leonora Carrington into a good painter […] She is always naff.’ It’s good when critics say this sort of thing, as it means you can confidently ignore everything else they will ever write.
**
2 March 2020.
Britain has 39 cases of the new coronavirus, and Boris J has said it’s likely to
become a serious problem in the coming weeks. All the Boots branches I visit
today are out of hand sanitizing gel. It’s thought that some people have bought
them in large amounts, not to stockpile for themselves but to resell for
profit. It’s interesting what reactions the situation is bringing out in
people: the best and the worst. As for me, I am panic-buying old editions of
Ronald Firbank.
**
7 March 2020.
‘Two patients who tested positive for coronavirus have sadly died’. The word ‘sadly’
should, one would have thought, be implicit. Clearly not. This jarring little
adverb, an added insult to the bad news, must now be supplied. A linguistic lubricant,
lest the system behind it appear cruel. What will survive of us is not love,
but PR.
**
9 March 2020.
Finish Swimming in the Dark (2020) by
Tomasz Jedrowsky. A gay romance among graduates, set in Poland during the early
80s. The dedication is moving alone: ‘To Laurent, my home’. Some beautiful
prose: ‘The shame inside me melted like a mint on my tongue.’ The underrated power
of gay books is touched upon, specifically Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, banned in Poland at the time. ‘Here was a book
that seemed to have been written for me. It healed some of my agony and my
pain, simply by existing.’ I’m irritated, though, by a party scene in which
‘Heart of Glass’ by Blondie plays. ‘Blondie’ is referred to as the singer,
rather than the band. No excuse for that, not even communism.
**
10 March 2020. I see Portrait of a Lady on Fire at the Rio. Another historical gay romance, this time among women during the late 18th century, in a crumbling coastal château. The film dares to be slow and quiet, and lets the lingering gazes really linger. It’s a film about looking, particularly women looking at women, as opposed to Orlando, in which the gazing is queer but androgynous. Men are close to absent. The only line in this film said by a man is ‘Good morning’.
**
11 March 2020.
The UK now has over 400 cases, with 6 deaths, and it’s thought there’ll be much
more. Assuming the virus will be defeated, it’s likely there will be more in
its wake, unless humans change their crowded, globe-trotting ways. Looking for
a silver lining, I wonder if air travel will become occasional and special
again, even glamorous, rather than constant and humdrum. When I was at primary
school, before the days of budget airlines, a nine-year-old classmate gave a talk
about being on a plane; it was that unusual. I wasn’t aware that schools now took
whole classes on Alpine skiing trips
until the current news.
**
13 March 2020. The
coronavirus has become a pandemic. The government has moved from ‘contain’ to
‘delay’. Birkbeck has cancelled its face-to-face classes. The library remains
open today, though, as does Senate House Library, where I write in my rented
carrel. This is a small lockable one-person study room, so I like to think this
is self-isolating enough. Nevertheless, I’ve made sure that if I suddenly have
to work from home, there’s nothing exclusive in the carrel that I need.
The
challenge is to write about the virus without infecting the reader with cliché.
Disease itself is of limited interest, unless you’re in medicine. Say something
else, say something different.
**
All
is Decameron cosplay now. One theme of the Decameron is the need to tell stories
at a time of plague. Anecdotes, useful advice, fake news are all shared
narratives, told within a frame story. The same tradition includes the Panchantra and the Canterbury Tales. A frame structure suggests a bandage effect; a
need for containing and healing. There’s also a sense of infinite stories
within the frame, like the 1001 Nights
tales, told to stay an execution. Even a sci-fi blockbuster like Inception touches on this: Mr Leo and Mr
Cillian have their traumas healed through dreams framed within dreams. And now
we retweet to connect and heal, whether through anecdotes, observations, or
jokes. As Ms Didion put it, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. But
when we really feel in danger, we frame stories.
We go deep.
The
phrase ‘doing the rounds’ applies to jokes, observations, and anecdotes as much
as diseases, hence ‘going viral’. Social media may be new, responding to
plagues with storytelling is not.
Today
(noon on Friday 13th March) I do not have one of the two key
symptoms, a cough or a fever, at least not yet. Though I do have a dry throat
and a flushed sensation that I’ve had before, one which doesn’t show up as a high
temperature. What I think I have today is not a dose of the virus, but a dose
of high anxiety.
**
Evening:
to the National Portrait Gallery for the exhibition Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things. I decide it would be okay to go
as long as I avoid crowds. I go during the NPG’s Friday late night slot, after
the day-trippers from the regions have gone home. There’s only a few people in
each room, and I keep my distance.
The
walls, on the other hand, are crowded with beautiful ghosts. All the 1920s
glamour and parties one can imagine. Lots of silver walls, glitter and shininess,
all in Beaton’s exquisite black and white, plus a few paintings by Rex Whistler
and the like. All the gang’s here. A young Evelyn Waugh cradling his pint of
Guinness. Stephen Tennant lying down in profile as Prince Charming, first seen
for me on the cover of an El Records sleeve. Today I own some of Tennant’s manuscripts.
There is a mention of Firbank in Beaton’s description of Sacheverell Sitwell: ‘He held forth, in the deepest coke-crackle voice, on such diverse subjects as the castrati, Offenbach, Norman wreaths, Ingres or Ronald Firbank’, while smoking Turkish cigarettes in ‘boyish, unformed hands’. Lots of 1920s cosplay. A young Beaton dresses up as King Cnut, sitting on a throne on a beach, close to the waves. His gesture to the sea is not the usual raised palm in ‘stop!’ mode, but a wagging finger. ‘Now, now, you naughty waves….’
A
Beaton quote: ‘When I photographed Steven Runciman wearing his black hair in a
fringe with a budgerigar poised on his ringed finger, looking obliquely into
the camera in the manner of the Italian primitives, I knew I had not lived in
vain.’ All this English camp was a response to the trauma of the First World
War, just as the camp of Weimar Berlin responded to the Nazis. Camp often seems
frivolous, even inappropriate, to others. But to some, camp is survival.
**
Saturday 14 March 2020. In the carrel. The lobby for the main Senate House building now has a large red sign saying ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19)’, followed by a status message. Yesterday this read ‘Business as usual’. Today it says: ‘Large events postponed. Avoid handshaking. Social distancing encouraged.’
Quentin
Crisp once said: ‘There is danger in numbers’. So now we have a new definition
for dandyism: self-distancing with style.
**
Sunday 15 March 2020. One joke doing the rounds, along with the virus, is about men having to talk to their wives for the first time, because of the cancellation of football matches. I am so grateful for being weird sometimes.
After looking at Twitter for a while today, exposing myself to so much news, hearsay, speculation, and terror, I make myself physically ill from information alone. Social distancing must include social media. Not isolation, not dependency, just moderation.
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 clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!
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 48th 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.
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!
This year’s Christmas tree is from the foyer of the Museum of London, on the Barbican estate. The MoL is one of my favourite places in the city, ever since I first went there in the early 80s on a school trip from Suffolk. We combined the museum with a look at the brand new Barbican Centre next door. My classmates, who would have been about twelve, soon discovered that if you rubbed your shoes a few times on the Barbican’s fuzzy carpeted staircases, and then used your finger to touch a metal bannister, or better still the face of a fellow child, you could produce a large and slightly painful spark of static. This design fault, much like the Wobbly Bridge opposite the Tate Modern, has since been fixed by those in charge, but I suspect it lives on in the memories of bored children.
Moving into the year 2020 invites reflections on the decade just gone. I spent most of it returning to education at Birkbeck, University of London. The original plan was to just get a degree, mainly out of sheer curiosity, as I’d never taken one at the traditional age. When I found out I was good at the subject, being English literature, and indeed was good enough to be awarded grants to pay the fees, I stayed on to do an MA, and then a PhD. I ended 2019 as the recipient of a full maintenance grant, something that I thought only happened to other people – the success rate is one in five.
The stipend is set at the Living Wage, which may not be many people’s idea of material success in one’s 40s: I still have to live in a rented room in a shared house. But to be paid a full-time income for something I enjoy is something that I’ve not had since the mid-90s, when I had a major label record deal. I am grateful. In 2020, I hope to pay this good fortune forward: to produce work of use to others, to pass on advice and give talks, and, above all, to show that if a weirdo like me can find a role in the current world, anything really is possible. Here’s to Weirdo Visibility.
And
yes, I am in the process of updating my
diary.
** 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!
Monday
24 June 2019. Working slowly on the third chapter of the
thesis. It is currently like walking in mud. To stretch the analogy further,
one fears either becoming stuck for good or that one’s shoes will come off,
leaving our hero looking foolish. Well, why stop now?
This evening I go to
the Birkbeck arts department in Gordon Square and attend my Graduate Monitoring
Interview for the second year of the PhD. This is an annual check-up with a
tutor who is not your supervisor. You can discuss any problems that may have
emerged over the past school year, which includes any difficulties with one’s supervisors.
Supervisors often get a
bad press, the stereotype often being that they have flings with their students.
Even the hip Netflix series Russian Doll continues
this rather tired tradition. I’ve never heard of any such goings-on at Birkbeck,
though perhaps the less traditional set-up of evening classes and mature
students makes that possibility less likely. In real life, the student’s concern
is not so much that a supervisor might be too hands-on, but that they’re not
hands-on enough. One hears horror stories of supervisors failing to reply to
emails for months on end, or of them being too busy for even the briefest
meeting, or of them forgetting that their students even exist. In this respect,
I have been lucky, as so far mine have been perfectly responsive. The problems I
have had are entirely my own fault: wobbles of doubt, worries over my
abilities, bouts of procrastination.
So that’s what we
discuss tonight. The tutor I have for this meeting, Dr Owen, suggests a useful
motto: ‘write ugly words first’. Don’t worry about the quality of the first
draft. Just hit the word count. Only afterwards, during the editing stage, are you
allowed to turn it into The Great Gatsby.
This may be an obvious lesson, but I still have problems learning it.
**
Thursday
27 June 2019. I give a tour of Birkbeck for my
friend Sonja T and her daughter Daisy. Daisy is about 18, and is keen to do a
degree. She’s apprehensive of the competitive side of being among her own
generation, so the mixed-age aspect of Birkbeck appeals. Indeed, the class
discussions are much more interesting as a result: glimpses of different domestic
situations, of people with different daytime jobs, of people who’ve already had
long lives and are now topping up their intellect, and of younger people who can
be surprising with their choices of favourite texts. Brideshead Revisited was one such book on my BA course: despite its
snobbishness and sentimentality, the younger students, including girls of
ethnic and religious minorities, could not get enough of it. It was the
character of Sebastian Flyte they liked: for all his wealth and privilege he is
still a troubled young person, struggling with sexuality, family and faith. No
shortage of that in the world, whatever the background.
I also remain a fan of the 1980s TV adaptation, the influence of which could be seen in an episode of Killing Eve recently. When Villanelle turns up in Oxford, she dresses in what she imagines is an Oxford boy look: light shirt, brown slacks and a cream tie, with a cricket jumper knotted over her shoulders. According to the costume designer, this was a deliberate nod to Anthony Andrews as Sebastian in the TV Brideshead.
**
Friday 28 June 2019: I have a rule on not going to any festivals unless I am invited to appear. It rubs in my own sense of failure otherwise.
**
Saturday 29 June 2019. I read Bret Easton Ellis’s White, his new collection of essays. I’d been enjoying his podcasts, with his soft-spoken monologues railing against the world. So I was interested to see how he would render them into prose. Sadly the result on the page is a shapeless rant lacking any sense of cohesion. It doesn’t help when he admits a tendency to go on Twitter in the middle of the night fuelled by ‘a mixture of insomnia and tequila’. That says it all. To update Capote, that’s not writing, that’s tweeting.
Still, there’s something in his theory that the hyper 1980s world of his novel American Psycho has come to pass on today’s social media, with the valorising of ‘likes’ and dislikes’ and the posting of photographs of one’s restaurant meals.
**
The Women’s Football World Cup has becoming immensely popular this year. I don’t know much about football, but I like Megan Rapinoe’s hair.
**
Saturday 6 July 2019. I see Yesterday at the Everyman cinema in King’s Cross. This turns out to be in the rather soulless new buildings to the north of the Granary Square development. The film has a bizarre premise about a struggling singer-songwriter waking up in a world where the Beatles never existed, except in his memory. So he goes about becoming a pop star by passing off their songs as his own. Unlike Groundhog Day, the magical conceit isn’t properly connected to the love story, so the latter feels added to pad out the film. However, the lead actor Himesh Patel’s rendition of ‘In My Life’ – simple and sincere – quite takes me by surprise, and I’m in floods of tears when he does it.
**
Sunday 7 July 2019. The day after Pride, Holborn tube platform is covered in little silver gas canisters, as well as the discarded box they came in. This reveals that the objects are manufactured as ‘cream chargers’, intended to go in dispensers of whipped cream. Not here, though. The gas, nitrous oxide, can be sniffed (once decanted into a balloon) to produce a legal high. But not a harmless one: there’s reports of the things causing permanent nerve damage, breathing problems, and even death from asphyxiation. I’m more grumpy about the litter aspect. Knock yourself out, just be tidy when you do it.
Nitrous oxide is better known as laughing gas. With the clown-like Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, the idea of his Britain being one where the drug of choice is laughing gas might read as a corny political metaphor. That’s the trouble with reality. It’s so badly written.
**
Monday 8 July 2019. Going in through the barriers at Dalston Junction tube station, a woman going the other way calls out my name. This turns out to be Suzy Woods, with whom I was at Great Cornard Upper School, Suffolk in 1989, last seen briefly at a Spearmint gig in Brighton circa 1999. Suzy has two hulking teenage boys in tow. ‘These are my sons’.
**
Tuesday
9 July 2019. The strangest catcall in my life – which
for me is saying something. An grey-haired, red-faced man passing me in Covent
Garden today: ‘You’re not in France, you’re in Britain!’. I am wearing my usual
cream linen suit and tie. Still, à chacun
son goût.
It’s since occurred to
me that he might be one of the slightly crazed pro-Brexit protestors that are
currently a common sight in central London, often walking to or from the
protests at Downing Street and Parliament. The Pro-Brexit lot are usually found
installed next to an equally passionate group of anti-Brexit protestors, kept
apart by a few bored-looking police officers. I think of Quentin Crisp’s quote from
the late 1970s: ‘protest has become a game any number can play’. I also keep
thinking of that phrase in Decline and
Fall, used for the Bullingdon Club: ‘confused roaring’. That rather sums up what’s going on in Britain
now: a huge amount of confused roaring.
**
Weds
10 July 2019. Last week of summer term, and my last
supervisory meeting of the academic year. I’ve agreed to crank out at least 1000
words a week from July 22 onwards, after a proper break.
**
Friday
12 July. To the Rio for The
Dead Don’t Die, Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy. It’s entertaining at first,
but when the characters start making comments about being in a film, my
patience evaporates. Blazing Saddles or
Airplane might be able to do such a
thing, but this film isn’t in the same league. It’s one big indulgent shrug.
Not awful, just inert (there’s a comment for the poster).
**
Saturday 13 July 2019. Another auteur horror film at the Rio: Midsommar. Unlike The Dead Don’t Die, the aesthetic in this case cares about its viewers. It slowly pulls one into a hyper-sunny world, about a sinister pagan community in rural Sweden. As the film goes on, the flowers pulsate with CGI irises, and the film’s own colours become as bleached as the linen frocks. There’s an upsetting moment of two of violence, which has a couple of people at the Rio walking out (I’ve heard some have even fainted), and which is arguably unnecessary. A further criticism is that the debt to The Wicker Man prevents the film from being entirely original. But Midsommar’s confidence in its own vision is spellbinding. After it’s over I have to take time to adjust to the normal world, as I did with The Neon Demon. This is the highest compliment one can pay: a film that can shift reality.
**
Sunday
14 July 2019. I read Fabulosa! by Paul Baker, a new book on Polari, the historical gay slang.
Baker’s other two books on the subject came out a while ago; I’ve read those
too. One is an academic linguistic study, the other a straightforward
dictionary, beefed up with more general gay slang. I was once going to write a
book on the subject myself. One of the reasons I didn’t is that, as Baker
proved, there’s not quite enough on the topic to fill a whole book on its own.
Polari makes for a good magazine article, or a few pages in a book on gay history,
but that’s about it. Where it does come in handy is when it’s used as a way in
to the wider story of homosexual social life during times of criminalisation. This
is what Baker focuses on with this new book, adding his own life story into the
mix.
I’m especially
fascinated by a section on a late 1990s debate in the pages of Boyz, the free magazine in gay bars (in
which I once appeared, though not as one of the nude pin-ups). In this debate,
the magazine polled its readers for their views on reviving Polari, and by
extension on camp in general. There’s evidence for an anti-camp attitude among
gay men from at least as early as the 1930s; it’s also in Angus Wilson’s novels
of the 1950s, with the rise of straight-acting ‘golden spivs’, not unlike the Kray
twins. In the 1990s the surge in interest in indie rock gave rise to gay indie
nights in London like Popstarz and Club V. One consequence was letters to Boyz like those in Baker’s book, which railed
against gay men for listening to Kylie Minogue.
Why does camp persist now? Why are there TV programmes about drag queens in 2019? My answer would be because there’s still a sense of rules about what ‘normal’ looks like. A rainbow flag on a town hall may say ‘we are fine with LGBT people’, but by implication it also says ‘LGBT people are not the “we”’. Camp responds to the idea that there’s still a ‘normal’, and has fun in the process. As Judith Butler puts it, camp is ‘working the trap’. The only thing that would really make camp die out would be a world in which everyone was exactly the same.
**.
Monday
15 July. To the Rio for a third horror film with an arty
aesthetic. This time, In Fabric. I
find Peter Strickland’s faux-1970s stylings impressive, but am not convinced
they sustain a whole film. As with The
Dead Don’t Die,there’s a
detached indifference that tests one’s patience. I’m glad these films exist and
get made – they are, after all, art rather than commerce – but I prefer Midsommar’s more immersive approach.
**
Weds
17 July 2019. Trying to calm myself with the thought of Boris PM with the phrase
‘interesting times’. Either that or the end of Planet of the Apes.
**
Thursday 18 July 2019. Vita & Virginia at the Empire Haymarket. Mrs Woolf is played by the towering Elizabeth Debicki. I’m reminded of the line in Alan Bennett’s play Forty Years On about Woolf being proud of winning the Evening Standard Award for the Tallest Woman Writer of 1927, ‘an award she took by a neck from Elizabeth Bowen’.
Also today: the Kiss My Genders exhibition at the
Hayward. Lots of portraits of gender-bending figures, some of which, like
Luciano Castelli’s androgyne in sparkling gold, seem very up-to-date, but turn
out to be from the 1970s.
Friday 19 July 2019. To Knole mansion on a whim, inspired by seeing the house in Vita & Virginia the day before. This takes a mere 23 mins on the train from London Bridge to Sevenoaks, in Kent. Then one has to walk (or get a taxi) from the north of Sevenoaks, through the town, to get to Knole on the southern side. The rooftop views are startling: straight out of Orlando, with the deer in the grounds and the countryside going back for miles all around. The gatehouse has been converted into a sub-museum of its own, recreating the 1920s rooms of Eddy Sackville-West, the gay cousin who inherited Knole in place of Vita, even though she grew up as a child there. As Orlando satirises, she was disinherited purely by being female. A letter from Vita is quoted on a panel, on what she thought Eddy had done to Knole: ‘It made me cross; it was all so decadent, theatrical, and cheap. And Eddy himself mincing in black velvet. I don’t object to homosexuality, but I do hate decadence.’ It takes me a minute to realise that Vita, no stranger to same-sex love herself, used the word ‘homosexuality’ to mean men only.
There are signs in the grounds at Knole asking visitors people not to pet the fawns, ‘as this confuses their mothers’. I’d have thought mothers being confused by their offspring was an occupational hazard. Particularly in the case of the sort of people who lived at Knole.
The café at the house
is so busy that I walk back into Sevenoaks to get something to eat (fish and
chips at the Chequers pub, the staff kind and charming).
**
I read Normal People
by Sally Rooney, the biggest-selling literary novel of the moment. There’s a
story in the news that the most played song on UK radio since 2000 is ‘Chasing
Cars’ by Snow Patrol. Normal People
is the literary equivalent. It’s tasteful, competent, well-crafted, and
able to appeal to a huge amount of people. It seems designed not to put anyone
off. And that rather puts me off.
The main idea of this novel – checking in with an
everyman-ish couple over a period of years – rather recalls One Day by David Nicholls, another
massive-seller, except with the quotation marks taken out. There’s no spikiness
or oddness. For me, it’s too… normal.
**
Tuesday
23 July 2019. Boris Johnson becomes Prime Minister. Reality
has officially eaten itself. It seems that there is no amount of gaffes,
ineptitude and misconduct that can stop him. In giving up his journalism to be
PM, Mr J has had to take a substantial pay cut. That says it all.
Perhaps Brexit really is the last gasp of the old ways. The photos of Boris meeting the Queen show him absolutely in his element – though according to the Sunday Times even the Queen has apparently voiced her concerns. Still, in a culture of ‘confused roaring’, of laughing gas canisters, of a babyish obsession with colourful characters, who else is there?
**
Thursday
25 July 2019. A ludicrously hot day in London: 37
degrees. I decide against braving the tube, and instead work at home, followed
by seeing Varda By Agnes in the
air-conditioned Rio basement. Still feel so lucky to have a cinema on my
doorstep.
**
Saturday
27 July 2019. Only
You at the Rio. A low budget British drama about a couple’s relationship, and
how they try for a baby against the odds. Despite the gritty realism, I can
only see the couple as a couple of actors. Still, the IVF injections seem real
enough – and very unpleasant. I really had no idea that women put themselves
through such ordeals. In the educational respect, at least, the film is a
success.
**
Wednesdays 31 July 2019. I finally get around to reading Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936). Quite a wry introduction by Jeanette Winterson, saying that the book is now mainly read by students. What really interests me is the story of TS Eliot, Dylan Thomas and others championing the book while trying to play down its camper, gayer aspects. This was not so much out of homophobia as the desire to get Nightwood taken as seriously as The Waste Land. Which is where my research comes in: campness as thought to be incompatible with serious art, because of the element of humour. Or rather, queer humour, and so the wrong kind.
**
Thursday 1 August 2019. A book event at Burley Fisher Books: Savannah Knoop, Lee Relvas, Linda Stupart and Isabel Waidner. There’s a volatile, disruptive, older woman in the audience with a loud voice and wild, staring eyes, whom I’d seen shouting at passers-by on the Kingsland Road earlier. I assume she hasn’t come for a free literary event so much as just wandered into the bookshop off the street. But perhaps I am wrong. At the event she’s given the benefit of the doubt by the staff, and is provided with a seat, albeit with much ‘shush!’-ing when she occasionally shouts over a speaker. Linda S sits down to talk with the woman afterwards, which makes me feel guilty for tending to avoid such people pre-emptively, fearing as I do sudden violence. I suppose I also think, ‘one of us has to be mentally stable here, and it sure as hell isn’t going to be me’.
Roz K, Jonathan N, Laura B also here. Savannah Knoop reads a piece on their experiences in a gym. With their non-binary pronouns and self-designed clothes, a mixture of Dickensian rags, Alice skirts, and lycra, Knoop is a good example of a gender-neutral dandy.
**
Saturday 3 August 2019. To the Rio for a screening of JT Leroy, the dramatization of Girl Boy Girl, Savannah Knoop’s memoir. There’s a nice parallel here with Vita & Virginia. Both films have scenes in which a woman writer gets a camera and takes photos of a (rather wary) androgynous friend, in order to represent a fictional character. Just as Virginia Woolf used Vita Sackville-West as Orlando, Laura Albert used Savannah Knoop as JT LeRoy. In JT LeRoy, though, Savannah hints at the more exploitative aspects of the arrangement, yet still tries to be sympathetic to Ms Albert’s need for artistic ventriloquism.
By way of balance, I also watch The Cult of JT Leroy on Amazon Video, a more investigative documentary in which Laura Albert is called everything from ‘predatory’ to ‘ill’ to ‘evil’ to ‘genius’. What with Author, the documentary that presents Albert’s own take, it’s fascinating that there’s now at least three films telling exactly the same story from different sides. One can imagine a Borges-like situation in which every possible real life narrative, however mundane, is turned into an infinite number of documentaries and dramatisations, each one edited to represent every possible take. There is no such thing as the truth, only a forking path.
**
Monday 5 August 2019. I read an interview in the Guardian with Noel Gallagher. Typically the focus is less on music as it is on celebrity gossip, as in his broken relationship with his brother Liam. He calls Liam’s solo music ‘unsophisticated music for unsophisticated people’. This is probably fair, but in the same interview he admits to never having heard of gender fluidity: ‘What’s that? I know what gender I am – Mancunian’. It’s probably too much to expect Noel Gallagher to be au courant with the theories of Judith Butler, but if he thinks himself to be more ‘sophisticated’ than his brother, a little more curiosity about the world is surely in order. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a good (and short) introduction to the subject of gender fluidity, and one which other rock stars have manage to endorse, namely Kim Gordon and Carrie Brownstein. So there’s no excuse. I used to enjoy Mr Gallagher’s music, and indeed his interviews, but now I worry when I see intelligent people making jokes about being ignorant. If the legacy of Britpop means laddish incuriosity as something to aspire to, then speed its death.
Still, this all says rather more about me than Noel G. I’m less curious these days about rock music and more curious about books, so that’s a kind of ignorance on my part. I feel I have to be epicene to be believed.
**
Thursday 8 August 2019. Today I find myself delving into the Terry Pratchett archive at Senate House Library, by way of a diversion from my own research. I’m working in the library anyway, and stumble upon the Pratchett items as part of the integrated catalogue. One item intrigues me, so I call it up to take a look. It’s a printed manual for a 1991 computer training course, ‘Introduction to Word For Windows 3.1’. The manual uses licensed extracts from Good Omens, the 1990 fantasy novel written by Pratchett with Neil Gaiman (and lately adapted for TV).
In the manual, the extracts are presented as raw text with which to teach the correction of typos, play with fonts and paragraph breaks, and so on. Quite why the manual used a copyrighted novel rather than one from the public domain (like Dickens), I don’t know. But the screenshots of pre-Web computer programs fascinates me: so inelegant in their two-colour blockiness. And those floppy disks and diskettes to save the files upon: cutting-edge materials then, now obsolete and difficult to access. This 1991 manual, however, printed on paper, has long outlived the software it was designed to serve. Such manuals are maps of lost worlds.
**
Friday
9 August 2019. A cat-call from three crisp-munching
teen boys as I turn a corner in Bloomsbury: ‘Look at THIS c—.’ It could have
been worse.
Once again, I think to
myself: ‘Still got it!’ (to be sung to the tune of Louis Armstrong’s ‘What A
Wonderful World’).
**
At Birkbeck’s main building in Torrington Square, one of the men’s toilets has been refurbished and renamed on the door as ‘gender neutral’. Inside, the urinals have gone. The four stalls now have walls and doors running from ceiling to floor. Inside each stall is a bin for sanitary towels, plus an advert for Birkbeck’s counselling service aimed specifically at men. According to the advert, some men might feel that they cannot easily talk about their mental health problems, because they might be told to ‘man up’ and ‘grow a pair’, in the parlance of today. Recently, someone got out a marker pen and scrawled over one of these adverts with the words ‘MAN THE F— UP’.
I wonder if this commentator realises that the phrase they used already appears on the advert underneath, thus justifying its existence in the first place. And what course is this graffiti writer doing, anyway? An MA in self-defeating irony? I wish I could meet this person, if only to tell them that if being unkind and unintelligent is their idea of manliness, then they need to man the f— down.
** 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!
Thursday
11th April.
Some happy news. I am waiting for a train en route to a book event in Peckham
(Isabel Waidner talking with Jennifer Hodgson) when I check my emails. I may
have resisted the heroin lure of the smartphone but I do enjoy the methadone
substitute of an iPod Touch, which can access wireless internet.
One email is from CHASE, the government
organisation to whom I’d applied for PhD funding a couple of months ago. Before
opening the mail I pause and brace myself for rejection. This application was,
after all, my third and final attempt. The rules forbid any more.
This time, though, I am told I was successful.
From October the government will pay me the
minimum wage in order to work on my thesis full-time. There is also the likelihood
of additional expenses for research trips.
This is a significant event for me, mentally as much as financially. It is
the first time in twenty years that I’ve bagged a full time job that I want to
do, as opposed to not mind too much. The last time was when I had a major label
record deal in the mid 1990s. Now I will
be paid to read and write what I want to read and write. My project has been
deemed, by a group of professionals who do not know me personally, to be of use
to the real world.
I can confidently pre-empt accusations
of boastfulness over this by indicating the money: a minimum wage in one’s late
forties, even for doing something agreeable, is no popular index of success. My
accommodation still cannot advance beyond the level of the rented room. But
perhaps this new stipend, once it kicks in from October, will give me the focus
and energy to undertake more paid work, such as journalism and talks. More things
now seem possible. I have work to do, and works
to do.
**
Friday
12 April 2019. A
visit to the British Library imbues one with the feeling that everyone is a
student, a writer or a researcher, and no other life exists. The public areas
are so crowded, even just the benches around the walls. A young man with a laptop
hovers by me when he notices I’m preparing to get up and leave, so he can grab
my space. This is paradise of a kind. By which I mean it’s too popular and
there’s hardly any room.
Meanwhile, a brand new UCL student building
has opened nearby in Gordon Street, next to the Bloomsbury Theatre, with 1000 desks.
I think of the TV documentary from the 1970s in which Kenneth Williams laments
the rise of university buildings in the Bloomsbury area. Perhaps this would
upset him even more. It cheers me, though, as I like the way Bloomsbury manages
to be a university campus without the campus, lacking the detachment one feels
with the more obvious universities, from Oxford to UEA. There may be an ivory tower – Senate House
Library – but it’s as much a part of the city as its next-door neighbour, the
British Museum. For Birkbeck students, this aspect is particularly appropriate.
Mature students have spent some time in the wider world already. To study on a
more isolated campus might be like moving into a dormitory: fine for the young,
but awkward for a forty-seven-year-old.
One now hears the word ‘campus’ used for
the headquarters of tech companies like Google. It’s a kind of university envy
by corporations, who even dub their training set-ups as ‘academies’. While this
is reasonable for a youthful workforce, one wonders if older workers, if any
are allowed at Google, are required to act like students too. In which case, in
my funny child-like way, perhaps I am more a sign of the times that I thought.
Google has meant that everyone is a
student researcher now. Even student researchers. And yet the majority of
writers still look so ordinary and non-descript. Given the way I look I have a
vested interest in this aspect, obviously; a literally vested interest.
**
Sunday
14 April 2019.
To the sun-kissed paintings of Sorolla at the National Gallery, then the Nitty
Gritty club night at the Constitution in Camden (with Debbie Smith DJ-ing),
which is also my landlady K’s birthday bash. My previous unease at group events
is now diminished: if nothing else, the funding means I can answer the dreaded
question ‘and what do you do?’
**
Tuesday
16 April 2019.
A news story in the Times: ‘Hundreds
of students with the worst A levels are going on to get first-class degrees
each year, fuelling fears of grade inflation at universities’. One explanation
which escapes the Times is the
concept of change. Birkbeck responds on Twitter in this spirit: ‘We make admissions
based on students’ future potential, not just their past attainment.’
I add my voice to confirm this, summarising
my last decade in a single tweet: ‘Birkbeck admitted me for a BA despite my
lack of A-Levels (had a crisis at 17). Got the BA, stayed on for an MA, now
doing a fully-funded PhD, all at Birkbeck. Still no A levels.’
A little later Joan Bakewell quotes my
tweet, adding: ‘As Birkbeck’s President I’m proud of the chances we give people
and congratulate Dickon on his success’.
I’m not sure of the correct way to
address the Baroness, though I find an article where she likes people to call
her by her first name. So I tweet back: ‘Thanks Joan!’
**
Friday
19 April 2019.
Rather aptly, I spend the morning of Good Friday in an act of self-sacrifice. I’m
using the sink in the bathroom when a pool of water creeps onto my toes from the
cupboard below the sink. I crouch down to open the cupboard doors and immediately
identify the source of this impromptu Nile: one of the joints in the sink ‘s outlet
pipe is leaking, so it’s probably a blockage. As my landlady is away, and I
don’t fancy calling out a professional on a bank holiday weekend (the only time
when these things happen), I decide to have a go at tackling the issue myself. I
unscrew the u-bend section of the pipe, take it out, and then clean it out in
the bath using the shower hose. Lumps of awfulness emerge to a satisfying
relish: dark compounds of hair, mini-fatbergs and what the characters in Withnail and I would describe simply as
‘matter’. I replace the pipe and use a plunger on the sink for good measure.
This fixes the problem.
My joy over this comes not so much from
the feeling of making things better as it does from the relief that I haven’t
made things worse.
**
Monday
29 April 2019.
I submit my revised Chapter Two to my supervisors.
**
Thursday
2 May 2019.
To the Curzon cinema in Aldgate to meet Shanthi S. The area is highly
gentrified: clean and pristine new blocks of flats, probably hugely expensive,
and with the usual feeling that no one actually lives here. We miss the film
but end up having a pleasant evening at local bars like The Pride Of Spitalfields
off Brick Lane, one of those older pubs which still manage to exist. The pub’s
cat, Lenny, comes to sit next to me. Shanthi takes a photo, which I tentatively
share on my Instagram account.
**
Friday
3 May 2019.
I read Jenny Turner’s article in the LRB on
the Mark Fisher anthology, K-Punk.At one point she suddenly pulls off a haughty
flourish regarding Fisher’s favourite music: ‘I’ve always made a point of not
being impressed by Joy Division or New Order’. It’s the choice of words, rather
than simply ‘I’ve never liked’. Indeed, much as I admire Mark Fisher and Joy
Division myself, neither were much at home to camp. Though they did deal in a
certain type of masculine sentiment, which Ms Turner appreciates.
My credo, if I have one at all, is that art
can be witty, and wit can be art. Hence my interest in camp modernism, which
goes back to naming my first band in 1992 after Woolf’s Orlando. In the same way, I never thought it incompatible to be a
fan of the band the Field Mice, along with Sondheim musicals, the Smiths, Stock
Aitken Waterman and Take That, all at once without any tiresome claims to
irony. With unlikely intersections comes new space, and new freedom.
**
Tuesday
7 May 2019:
To the Odeon Tottenham Court Road with Jon S to see Avengers: Endgame. I go mainly because the previous Avengers film ended on a cliffhanger,
and I’m admittedly curious to see how the superheroes cheat death. The answer is
they cheat.
On the way out, the other cinemagoers are
discussing which of the preceding films they managed to see: ‘I missed Iron Man 2 but I did see Thor 6: Hard Rock Café.’ This is the triumph
of the series: to blend a brand with a mythos, while allowing each film to make
sense on its own terms. More or less. It will be interesting to see if
superhero films continue to dominate cinemas; this is surely their peak moment.
**
This week sees the Met Gala in New York,
as in the glitzy launch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition.
This year’s theme is camp, with reference to the Sontag essay, hence my interest
from afar. The BBC News site initially refers to the author of ‘Notes on Camp’
as ‘photographer Susan Sontag’. The coverage of the Gala is nearly eclipsed by
the hyperbolic coverage of the Royal Baby, which itself is a camp moment.
Many of the looks on the red carpet,
such as Harry Styles’s lacey catsuit, would not look out of place on the
mid-1990s Romo scene. Or indeed, at Kash Point in the mid 2000s. Vogue magazine
has called Mr Styles ‘the King of Camp’. This is debatable, though does have a
certain Caravaggio-esque look to him.
**
Weds
8 May 2019.
To the ICA for their Kathy Acker exhibition. Some of the late Acker’s books are
on display in glass cabinets, including her copy of – what else? – Woolf’s Orlando. Was Kathy Acker camp? She had
her moments, such as the poem that goes ‘Dear Susan Sontag, Please Can You Make
Me Famous?’
**
Thursday
9 May 2019.
I like to think zookeepers regularly say to each other ‘we need to talk about
the elephant in the room’, and that the joke never gets old.
**
Saturday
11 May 2019. Much
of the news is now based on journalists simply scouring Twitter and helping
themselves to other people’s words. It’s now quite common to see people sacked
from their jobs for something they idly typed on Twitter years ago. The format
lends itself so easily to the removal of context, that it is perilous to use it
for anything other than the blandest of statements. The First Law of Twitter: if a tweet can be taken the
wrong way, it will be.
**
Sunday
12 May 2019.To the Rio for Cleo From 5 To 7 (1961), directed by Agnes Varda. I’d never seen it
before; it’s mesmerising. Though it’s not shot in one take, as the more recent Victoria was in Madrid, there’s a
magical sense of real time unfolding in a city, and that this is a liberating
idea rather than a limitation. There’s currently a vogue for nature writing,
and for narratives of going to the countryside to be healed, but despite
sharing my name with the boy in The
Secret Garden I’m rather on the side of finding answers in the city.
**
Saturday
18th May 2019. I’m walking along a street in Hoxton. As I pass a
man mutters ‘freak’ at me. I used to get upset about this, but my reaction now
can only be: ‘Still got it!’
**
Tuesday
21 May 2019.
There really should be some sort of HGV test for backpack wearers. Despite the ability
of human beings to access whole centuries of culture from a small flat oblong, many
of them still need to carry yet more stuff on their back as well. Twice today
on crowded tube carriages I am nearly hit in the face with the things, their
owners oblivious. A backpack wearer is a long vehicle, but it’s hard to get to
their face to tell them. Would Truman Capote wear a backpack in the city? No. There’s
no excuse.
**
To Waterstones Gower Street for a book
event. The subject is ostensibly Woolf’s Orlando,
but the focus is really on Paul Takes The
Form of A Mortal Girl, a new novel by the American writer Andrea Lawlor,
which I’ve just enjoyed. Paul is set
in the indie band culture of America in the early 1990s, and features a
shapeshifting queer protagonist who makes his own music fanzine. The publishers
have sent out copies of the book with a promotional fake fanzine, Polydoris Perversity. I’ve managed to
get hold of one. The publishers have done their homework (presumably with the
author in consultation): the fanzine looks entirely authentic to me. I remember
buying and making such zines myself. It’s A5 sized, photocopied and stapled,
and features text that’s been cut and pasted, in the days when the phrase meant
real scissors and real paste (or at least Pritt Stick). At the back of the zine
there’s a tracklisting of a home-made compilation tape – ‘mixtape’ was always a
purely American term. Anachronistically, there’s a Spotify code for the
playlist. It works, too.
Lawlor is the same age as me, and I get
a nostalgic thrill from this book, despite the American setting. It works as a
vivid document of gay social history, along the same lines as Tales of The City and Alan Hollinghurst’s
novels. Indeed, Lawlor’s Paul and
Hollinghurst’s Sparsholt Affair both
reference Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’ as a gay song. And as with
Hollinghurst, Lawlor is fond of gay sex scenes, though there’s plenty of
lesbian sex too, thanks to Paul’s ability to change sex at will. On top of the Orlando references there’s a touch of Brideshead Revisited,when a soft toy is named Aloysius. ‘Of
course it is’ says another character, Robin, another androgyne, who in turn is based
on the Russian princess in Orlando.
What Lawlor gets most of all, though, is
the importance of iconography to identity:
‘Paul
remembered seeing a picture of Patti Smith for the first time, that flash of
recognition when he first came across the Mapplethorpe postcard at the gay
bookstore in Binghamton, thinking that’s what he looked like on the inside,
taping that postcard up in every room he’d lived in since.’ (p. 121)
**
Wednesday 22 May 2019. Another book event, this time at Burley Fisher in Haggerston. This is the launch of the Andrew Gallix anthology We’ll Never Have Paris. It’s so packed that I have to leave early just to be able to breathe. The Andrew Lawlor event was similarly popular, with an extra row of chairs added at the last minute.
This week also sees me fail to get into
a couple of other book events, because they both sell out in advance. I wonder
if something is going on. The way forward for writers, as with bands, would
seem to be more live events, and more festivals.
**
Thursday 23 May 2019. The EU elections. I go to my local polling station,
Colvestone Primary School near Ridley Road, and vote Green. Labour win in my
borough, Hackney, while most of the country chooses Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
Interesting times.
**
Friday 24 May 2019. I cram in three exhibitions: Beasts of London at the Museum of London, in which a plague
bacterium is voiced by Brian Blessed. Then with Mum to Mary Quant at the V&A, in which I learn that Ms Quant’s fashion
line was genuinely affordable by all. Then on to Manga at the British Museum in the evening. The manga show reveals
the influence of Alice in Wonderland,
which I didn’t know about, and selects three titles for its gay section: Poem of Wind & Trees (the men very feminine
looking), My Brother’s Husband (the
men very muscular and hairy), and What Did You Eat Yesterday, an
unexpected tale of an middle-aged gay couple’s domestic life (the men very
ordinary). There’s also a section on cosplay and conventions, with a set of
garments for visitors to try on. I don’t join in, believing as I do that
dandyism is already cosplay; the cosplay of the self.
**
Friday
31 May 2019. I
read Jarett Kobek’s Only Americans Burn
In Hell, an entertaining
satirical novel which uses a lot of what’s now called autofiction, and manages
to be very funny too. Very Tristram
Shandy, in fact, with its mad, skittish digressions.Mr Kobek often apologises to the reader for being unable to write
a particular scene, and makes a perfectly good point as to why: ‘I’m burnt out.
Donald J Trump was elected to the Presidency of the United States! So there’s
really no point. Stop hoping that books will save you.’
On corporate
celebrations of diversity, he writes: ‘Native American women had a
statistically better chance of being caricatured in a Google Doodle than they
did of being hired into a leadership position at Google’
Steve
Jobs, meanwhile, is glossed as ‘a psychopath who enslaved Chinese children and
made them build electronic devices which allowed American liberals to write
treatises on human rights’.
**
Saturday 1 June 2019. To
the Tate Modern for the Dorothea Tanning show. Her first painting in her Late
Surrealism style, from the 1940s, is a Dali-esque self-portrait amid infinite
doors and strange creatures. It is titled Birthday,
such was her sense of new life through art. But the exhibition reveals two
further ‘births’. In the 1950s she changes to a more abstract technique, more Pollock
than Dali. And then there’s a third style of soft sculptures run off her sewing
machine. The centrepiece is an installation of a hotel room, where the
furniture is turning into such sculptures, while further shapes burst through
the wallpaper.
Tanning worked until her death at 101. I
think of Leonora Carrington’s similarly long life, and while talking to Mum on
the phone I wonder if there’s a connection between surrealism and longevity.
Mum suggests that it might be because such women had to be tough in the first
place to tout their art in such a male field.
**
Monday
3 June 2019.
I see Booksmart at the Rio, a high
school comedy about two bookish teenage girls having a late try at being party
animals. It’s uproariously funny. There’s a couple of boy characters – drama queens
in every sense – who threaten to steal the film from the girls.
**
Thursday
13 June 2019.
I help to organise a student conference at Birkbeck, Work in Progress. The staff had picked me, along with three other 2nd
years (Katie Stone, Matt Martin, Helena Esser), because they knew I had
experience of organising club nights. In the weeks leading up to the event, the
process soaks up a lot of time, and there’s some hitches with people cancelling,
but it’s mostly a smooth running affair. Katie Stone live-tweets a lot of the day,
using the hashtag ‘#bbkwip’.
We host twelve speakers in all,
including our keynote speaker Anthony Joseph, who discusses his novel Kitch, about the Trinidad calypso singer
Lord Kitchener. I do some tech supervising, chair one of the panels, and chair
the plenary summing-up session, which I learn is pronounced ‘plee-nary’, and
not ‘plenn-ary’. My main mission is just to keep the event running to its
schedule, with echoes of the joke about Mussolini.
**
Monday
17th June 2019. To the Rio with Shanthi to see Gloria Bell (£5). A subtle and nuanced
tale of ageing people going on dates. Very little really happens, but at a time
of shrillness and noise, quiet films can be a tonic. Julianne Moore’s character
has to struggle with two pairs of glasses. This is a detail I recognise in my
own life now, finding as I do that fiddling with specs is still preferable to
working with varifocals.
I’ve also discovered that increased
myopia helps stage fright, or anxiety about public speaking. All I have to do
is take my distance glasses off, and the audience disappears. I believe Dusty
Springfield used the same technique.
**
Tuesday
18 June 2019.
I watch the last episode of Years and
Years, the highlight of which is a speech by the grandmother about people
buying into the more ridiculous type of politician: ‘I didn’t see all the clowns
and monsters heading our way. Tumbling over each other, grinning. Dear God what
a carnival.’
By coincidence, this piece of fiction is broadcast after a live debate between the five candidates for the next Prime Minister, all sitting on stools like some grotesque five-part harmony boy band. The favourite is Boris Johnson, now trying his best to be quiet and sensible. Close on his heels is the bland Jeremy Hunt, who has a record of forgetting things, from his wife’s nationality to his ownership of seven luxury flats. If Hunt wins, it will be because people want to forget about Boris Johnson. Rory Stewart seems the most reasonable of this gaggle, and seems to realise that if he is to succeed he needs to play up his clownishness. Which in fact, tonight he does, suddenly taking off his tie and slouching in his seat, his gauntness making him look like a character from Mervyn Peake. To borrow Sontag’s phrase about camp, we are in an age of Instant Character.
**
Thursday
20th June 2019. To Sudbury to meet Mum. Sudbury seems mostly
unchanged from my teen years, though Great Cornard Upper School (where I spent
1985 to 1989) has been renamed Thomas Gainsborough School. When I was there
there was no uniform, just a dress code favouring plain grey shirts and
jumpers. This was deemed to be progressive and modern at the time. Not any
more. Today in Sudbury I see pupils of TGS wearing a full traditional uniform: blazer,
striped tie and even a crest, which must have been invented yesterday. I wonder
at this paradox, a twenty-first century school choosing a style that seemed out
of date in the 1980s. Perhaps one can blame Harry
Potter.
Naming buildings simply after the area
they are in is no longer enough. One thinks of Liverpool’s Speke Airport becoming
John Lennon Airport. It seems difficult to imagine that Mr Lennon needs the
extra publicity, so omnipresent are the Beatles. That said, Mum has told me of
a child who asked who Paul McCartney was. ‘He’s a bit like Ed Sheeran’.
The painter Thomas Gainsborough already has a prominent statue in Sudbury marketplace, and there’s also the nearby Gainsborough House gallery, which we visit today. Now he has a large school too. Even the local train line, which I take today from Liverpool Street, changing at Marks Tey, is labelled the Gainsborough Line. My fellow Sudbury alumni really need to hurry up and produce some masterpieces, if only so the town has more names to choose from.
** 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!
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 5th 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.
**
15th
February 2019. One effect of my late flowering
education is to find myself using a pen to edit the articles in magazines.
**
23rd
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.
**
26th
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.
**
28th 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 1st
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 7th
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 10th
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 13th
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 14th
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 19th
March. Blame the
systems, not the humans.
**
21st 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 25th
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 29th
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 31st
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 3rd
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!
