View from the flat a few days before Christmas.

I pass the Christmas week painlessly enough, cat and flat-sitting on my own in Crouch End. The freedom of having a whole flat to myself including a bathroom (I’ve spent most of my life sharing a shower with other bedsit tenant), plus no worries about heating bills, is reward enough. But Jen also gives me a generous Christmas present to unwrap on the day: a year’s membership to the NFT. It comes packaged with one of the BFI’s DVDs, Richard Lester’s surrealist 60s classic The Bed Sitting Room. It’s only now that I realise the apt nature of the title, given the escape from my normal dwelling.

Another present: a glider postcard from Maud Young. Also pictured is Erika Moen’s excellent autobiographical comic book, ‘Dar’, a present to myself which arrived in the same post.

My present to Jen is a copy of William Burroughs’s unlikely essay on his love of cats, The Cat Inside. It’s just been republished by Penguin:

Christmas Eve: I realise I need to buy Christmas crackers for the duck feeding ceremony in Waterlow Park the next day, as Ms Silke will be joining me.

Well, I say need… Funny how personal Christmas rituals can creep up on you. Yes, every Christmas Day I feed the ducks in Waterlow Park. And if a friend comes too, we pull crackers by the pond and put on the hats and pass around wine and mince pies right there. It’s just become the thing I do.

Me modelling the Budgens Deluxe Christmas Cracker hat. It’s essentially a hair band made from a red bin liner.

Buying Christmas crackers has to be done long before the 24th, which I discover too late. By now all the local supermarkets have sold out, except for Budgens. Which curiously has a tall stack of boxes of 12 ‘deluxe’ crackers (in so much as Budgens does ‘deluxe’) behind the counter. I see other shoppers coming away with a box each, and with big smiles. But curiously, it’s a smile of amusement, not relief.

‘They’re half price,’ says the cashier. ‘Because they’re faulty.’

‘Because they don’t make a bang?’

‘No, they bang fine. But they have all the same joke.’

This makes my Christmas. I spend the next twenty-four hours musing on the significance of this One Joke To Rule Them All. What can it be?

Noon the next day, and I pull the crackers with Silke at the duck pond.

Q. Where do snowmen go to dance?
A. To a Snowball.

Times twelve.

We then walk to Alexandra Park to feed the ducks there too, given it’s close to Crouch End. After the proper spate of snow a few days before, Christmas Day is only White in patches. The snow has vanished from the pavements and grass. But the duck ponds are still mostly frozen:

We also manage to see some proper Christmas Day snow. The tennis courts in Wood Vale have a thick layer of the white stuff, entirely untouched.

The papers today carry a photo of the man of the moment, the failed Nigerian leg-bomber who tried to blow up a US jet on Christmas Day. Though his attempt was mercifully thwarted, it’s still meant for a new range of over-the-top security measures. A full hour before landing, passengers on US flights now have to sit tight without anything on their lap: no trips to the toilet, no video or music, no newspapers, books, blankets or cushions. All thanks to young Mr Leggy.

The photo the papers are using is from seven years ago, when the unkind leg fetishist was a 16-year-old visiting London, as taken by his teacher. He stares directly at the camera with typical teenage defensiveness, while tugging at the brim of his Nike woollen hat as if to draw attention to the brand. It’s that Nike tick that gets me: the ubiquitous symbol of US corporate domination. I wonder if he’s still got the hat, whether embracing it (‘they’re enemies of Allah, but they still make nice hats.’). Or perhaps he’s inverting the Nike slogan with grim irony: ‘Just Do It’.

Everytime I have to take my shoes off in airports (never Nikes), I think about Richard Reid, the equally thwarted shoe-bomber who nonetheless achieved a petty kind of success: the introduction of those x-ray machines for shoes. Like those soap products from Lush which carry a little cartoon of the staffer who made them, I think of the machines bearing a similar cartoon of Mr Reid. Failed terrorists still get to be choreographers of new inconvenience, and so achieving a small scale victory. Somehow, it feels like those nonsensical instances at school, where teachers would adopt a kind of homeopathy approach to justice. ‘Because one child was naughty on the school trip, we’re never having that trip again. It’s his fault.’  The measure made no sense to me then, and still doesn’t now.

Similarly, seeing armed policemen at Heathrow never makes me feel safer about being there. Quite the reverse.

A Frankly Merry Christmas and a Splendid New Year to you.

(This year’s London tree: in the foyer of the 100-year-old Phoenix
Cinema, East Finchley, Christmas Eve 2009. Just before seeing the new
print of  The Red Shoes. Photo by Ms Shanthi.)

Early December: As I suspected, the BBC Short Story competition is won by my least favourite of the shortlisted five – the one about the terminally-ill son. It was beautifully written: I just think that if you’re going to write about terminal illness without adding anything new, the work needs to be as good as Alan Bennett’s ‘A Woman Of No Importance’, or Douglas Dunn’s ‘Elegies’ or Lee Hall’s ‘Spoonface Steinberg’ or James L Brooks’s ‘Terms Of Endearment’. Still, the runner-up was Sarah Maitland, which was my own second choice after Ms Alderman.

I take no pleasure in finding myself out of sync like this. I don’t care for ‘contrarian’ writers who go against the consensus for attention seeking reasons. ‘Look at me! I hate the thing everyone likes, and like the thing everyone hates.’ But neither do I enjoy finding myself in agreement with the fashions of the day – I’d feel I was doing something wrong somewhere.

Part of me likes the fact that I dislike The X Factor, for instance, because if I liked it, I would have to rebuild my character from scratch. So I’m grateful to Most People for ensuring that the one thing Most People like is utterly awful and vulgar and tasteless and crass and banal and artless and… just baffling. But I feel this instinctively, never deliberately. One person’s snobbery is another’s self-validation.

So when people on the internet organise that Rage Against The Machine single-buying campaign to thwart the X Factor winner, I find myself wanting both sides to lose, on top of just feeling very alone full stop. Rather as I am with football. I like the look of the X Factor winner – a very well-turned out young man called Joe, against the inelegant, tiresome RATM. But I have to admit the song Mr Joe was given was an unmemorable, dull, watery ballad. Whereas hearing that RATM song – with swearing intact – upsetting Nicky Campbell on Radio 5 the other morning was a rather fun radio moment. Anything for a more interesting world.

What I’d really like is to write songs for Joe myself. Or indeed, write for Will Young.  Stranger things have happened. Then again, Will Young was on that short story judging panel…

***

Am staying in Crouch End over Christmas and New Year. Cat-sitting and flat-sitting , this time for Jennifer C and Chris H. Cat in question is Vyvian, who came over from San Francisco with Jennifer some years ago. He has one of those cat passports. J can’t easily lay her hands on it, so my illusions are intact; in my head it has a little cat photo  – with unflattering cat haircut – and a series of pawprints.

Of the five North London cats I know, two of them are named after characters in 80s BBC TV comedies. Vyvian is named after one of The Young Ones, while Anna S’s cat Flashheart is from Blackadder.

***

Today, entirely randomly and because the train from the nearest station to the flat – Hornsey overground – terminates at Moorgate, I wander around the Barbican estate. I marvel at the juxtaposition of old and new architecture at every angle, particularly the ancient St Giles Church surrounded at every side by very 1980s terraces. It looks like it’s been teleported there by some cackling sci-fi villain.

In the Barbican centre someone recognises me and says hello – Francesca Beard. She’s performing a children’s show there. There’s a horrible second where I can’t remember her name – (‘How dare you, brain’, goes the internal voice), followed by a slightly uneasy few minutes as I struggle to think of what best to say on such occasions. In about 2000 I was a fan of her performance poetry (the Fosca song ‘Millionaire Of Your Own Hair’ takes its title from one of her poems) and I saw her gigs fairly often. And then – what? She didn’t stop performing. I stopped going to (and trying my hand at) performance poetry gigs, in my dipping-but-never-committing way. But I did see her at Latitude this year, so her place in my mind’s filing system isn’t as dusty as it could have been.

It’s times like this where my near-autistic inability to connect names and faces in person, coupled with my lack of basic social skills (which words to choose, and in which order? there are so many!), leaves me riven with guilt for the rest of the day.

It’s like the film ‘Memento’. I just wish I could remember fewer cult fictional films about amnesia and more things that actually matter.

About an hour later – today still, Dec 23rd -  I’m in the London Review Bookshop, and again someone behind me says, ‘Hello, Dickon.’ And as I turn to face the person – I’m such a bad actor, and so much of life is acting – I can’t help pulling the very honest but very offensive expression of panic through lack of recognition. It’s David Kitchen, who once worked for Orlando 1995-1997, setting up the band’s information service and website – this diary’s precursor – and whose flat in Kew I regularly visited and once stayed the night at. True, I’ve had no contact with him for the best part of ten years, but that’s no excuse.

(And it’s only now that I realise that the flat I’m staying in is owned by one of David K’s London circle of friends from that time, Chris H. He edited the first Belle & Sebastian videos, while David worked for B&S in websitey ways. I wish I could have mentioned this connection to David today, rather than grasping for things to say and apologising for not remembering his name.)

What confuses me is that in my mind I know exactly who David K is and what he looks like. It’s when I’m presented with him in the flesh, unexpected, out of the blue, and after a ten year gap, that my mind can’t cope. If I was told that I’d be meeting David K in the LRB today, I’d have no problem recognising him at once. And yet, I still feel that it’s my fault, that I’m a terrible, selfish, self-centred person, and the encounter upsets me for the rest of the day. I only hope he doesn’t mind as much as I do.

Even when I can connect names and faces, a surprise chat with friends from the past can never be easy. ‘What are you up to?’ ‘Something not involving you.’

One fear of mine is that when I die, there’ll be a test.

I envy Doctor Who. At least he gets played by a different actor every time a chapter of his life passes. I have enough of a struggle learning the script for my current role, never mind roles gone by.

And again the thought is, is it just me?  Is this a medical condition, a syndrome, a kind of dyslexia? A younger man’s Alzheimer’s? It certainly feels like it.

I love a good award shortlist, particularly if I’m familiar with the nominees in question. Trouble is, the Oscars are usually about new films that haven’t hit the UK yet, while the Booker is about new hardback novels, which I rarely buy. One could try a library, but once the list is announced there’s usually a long queue of borrowers with precisely the same idea.

The BBC National Short Story Award is much more do-able, however. This year the five stories up for the prize are available in audio form as a free podcast, plus there’s an affordable anthology in the shops. So one can easily gauge one’s own opinion on the stories in time for the announcement  on Monday.

I guess this is my way of getting  X Factor type thrills. Short Story Idol.

So here’s my own ranking, in suspense-attempting reverse order.

5. The Not-Dead and the Saved by Kate Clanchy
A portrait of a mother’s relationship with her son, who battles cancer throughout his life. It’s beautifully written and skillfully compresses its novel-like material in a similar way to Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain. And yet it feels a little too concise, with the son shortchanged of character, never mind shortchanged of life. It also sounds heartless to say this, but I think it’s the least original of the five tales. It veers dangerously close to the  ‘little epiphany’ style, that much-derided short story equivalent of the ‘Hampstead adultery novel’.  That’s the trouble with death: it’s been done to death.

4. Hitting Trees With Sticks by Jane Rogers
A first-person study of an old lady with borderline Alzheimer’s. So we get an unreliable narrator, and then some. Manages to inject enough humour, but I rank this fourth because it feels more like a dramatic monologue than a short story. Favourite part:

The post has come while I was out. There’s a reminder from the optician, and a letter from the council. Of course, the optician’s is right opposite the council offices, so you’d expect that really.

3. Exchange Rates by Lionel Shriver
Or how a man’s relationship with money defines his relationship with his father, and with the world. Very up-to-date, with lots of detail about the changing pound to dollar rate, the UK property ladder, and the things Americans find most expensive over here (everything except marmalade and breakfast cereal, apparently). It has a very Roald Dahl-esque ending along the old ‘be careful what you wish for’ lines, though I’m also reminded of Dorothy Parker’s tales of urban pettiness among 1920s New York society.

2. Moss Witch by Sara Maitland
A botanist encounters an ancient witch somewhere in darkest Scotland. Excellent, original blend of hard science (specifically moss science), fantasy, folklore and flower-lore (or rather, moss-lore). Memorable images, a proper story feel, and Ms Maitland’s unique style of magical realism.

1. Other People’s Gods by Naomi Alderman
A respectable Jewish family in Hendon starts to worship a small pink statue of Ganesh the Elephant God, until the local rabbi intervenes. A story with jokes, satire, memorable imagery, witty asides, charm, and a plot steeped in puckish nerve. Despite the seemingly light nature of the tale, it touches on issues of faith and blasphemy, and keeps the reader guessing how it’s all going to pan out. Pleasantly old-fashioned and classic in feel, despite the reference to a Wii Tennis game.

So I’m rooting for Ms Alderman to win on Monday, with Ms Maitland second.