Friday 23rd May 2014. The results of the local elections are in. My ward’s three seats (Highgate ward, in Haringey) all went to the Lib Dems, just as they’ve done for decades.  But it’s a more impressive feat this time, given the party’s current lack of popularity nationally. A post-election map of Haringey usually has a block of red to the east (for Labour, where the wards are poorer, such as Tottenham), with a block of yellow to the west (for the Liberals, where the wards are wealthier, such as Crouch End and Highgate).

Today the block of red is still in place, but the block of yellow is covered in grey. The western wards’ council seats have been split between different parties. Only one ward has remained yellow: my own Highgate.

So low is the Lib Dems’ popularity nationally that their leader, the aspartame-like Mr Clegg, is fighting off calls to resign. But around my street, they could set fire to kittens. They’d still get on the council.

(That said, in the 2012 mayoral election, my ward chose the Tories’ Boris Johnson over the Lib Dems’ Brian Paddick. The unconvincing Mr Paddick must have been a loyalty too far.)

Am more pleased by the result a few blocks away, in the other Highgate ward; the bit of Highgate that falls under the boundary of Camden Council. Camden’s only Green Party seat is there, now retained by Sian Berry. The three Lib Dem candidates all came last. It’s a very London feeling: the reverse of anything only a few streets away.

* * *

I’m walking through the reception of Birkbeck’s School of Arts, Gordon Square, when one of the porters calls out, ‘Thanks for the mention in your diary!’ This is Bernie, who retrieved my lost sheet of essay notes the other week. ‘I don’t know where you find the time to write it,’ he adds. I blurt out something about it being a hobby. Like indoor rock climbing, only more strenuous.

* * *

Saturday 24th May 2014. I’m reading All She Wanted (1996) by Aphrodite Jones, lent to me by Becky Boston. It’s a ‘true crime’ book about the Brandon Teena case, the story which was then turned into the Hilary Swank film, Boys Don’t Cry. According to Ms Jones, there’s no evidence that the name ‘Brandon Teena’ was properly adopted by Brandon himself, despite its usage in the film, and in Ms Swank’s Oscar acceptance speech, and indeed on Wikipedia today.

What is definite is that at the time of his murder, Brandon was living as just that, ‘Brandon’. He tried to avoid referring to the ‘Teena’ on his official ID whenever possible, sometimes pronouncing it as the more male-sounding ‘Tenna’, but only when questioned. So my feeling now is that it might be more respectful to refer to him as ‘T.R. Brandon’, or as the one-word name of ‘Brandon’, a la Morrissey. Still, ‘Brandon Teena’ at least signifies maleness, and that’s the main thing.

* * *

Sunday 25th May 2014. I stay up and watch the European Parliament election results come in. The UK map turns UKIP purple. It’s the first national election for about a century where the triumphant party is neither Conservative nor Labour. This is meant to signify an ‘earthquake’ in British politics, but in fact 65% of the electorate didn’t use their vote at all. It’s a landslide for indifference.

In order to feel less depressed, I tell myself the purple bits on the election maps are really a victory for Barney The Purple Dinosaur. The children’s TV character, who just wants to hug everyone.

Still, the Greens have added a third MEP to their two. The Lib Dems, meanwhile, only just hang onto to one.

* * *

Tuesday 27th May 2014. To the ICA to see the film Exhibition (£3). The screening is packed. This is rather apt, as it’s such an ICA-compatible film that it even has a scene set in the ICA cinema. In a dream sequence, Ms Albertine is seen attending a Q&A there, in which she is both onstage being interviewed, and in the audience watching herself. If there’s an award for Most Arthouse Film Moment In An Arthouse Film, that has to be a strong contender.

Exhibition, as the name suggests, is an arthouse film about actual artists and their actual house. The musician Viv Albertine plays a Cindy Sherman type, all performance and props and use of her body, while Liam Gillick (an artist in real life) plays her live-in partner, who does something unfathomable involving computers. Tom Hiddleston also pops up briefly as an estate agent, in a film that couldn’t be further from The Avengers and the Thor films if it tried.

Apart from the ICA scene, the main location is the couple’s modernist-style Kensington home, one with sliding panel walls, plate glass windows and polished wooden floors, the kind that forces visitors to take their shoes off on entering. For the most part, the film is the house: a minimal story in minimalist architecture. The soundtrack delights in ambient noises – footsteps on floors, doors opening and closing somewhere out of view, making the house into a speaking character.

The irony about Ms Albertine’s character is that her art may be about exhibiting her body, but she herself is withdrawn and non-communicative. Before the film begins, there’s a trailer for a documentary about Kathleen Hanna, the American punk singer. The trailer is stuffed full of women’s noise and women’s voices. Viv Albertine is a punk rock woman too, being the guitarist in The Slits. Yet you’d never know it from her performance in Exhibition. A noted woman of noise, steeped so entirely in silence.

* * *

Wednesday 28th May 2014. I sit in the Barbican centre, reading. Opposite me is a group of young students playing about, possibly drama students on a trip. More girls than boys. They must be over twenty years younger than me, but I recognise certain types that existed when I was their age, and which presumably will always exist. There’s the class clown – stealing girls’ bags and running around with them (‘Kevin!’). After that he sits down and plays that slapping game with one of the girls. It’s the game with the hands pressed together as if in prayer, daring the other to move first (what was that? did I ever do it?). Another girl is doing kung-fu kicks in the air. Two more slide down the bannisters.

Then there’s the class Casanova, a confident boy with perfect stubble who seems to be holding a girl on each knee. And the class Ophelia, a hippyish girl who sits on the ground far too quickly – despite the filthy carpet  and the perfectly good spare seats. There’s also a butch girl in a black t-shirt and Trilby hat, marching about purposefully with a hand-rolled cigarette in her lips, looking for somewhere to smoke.

Then I notice them staring at me staring at them, and I move. To use their slang, observational diarists are the worst.

* * *

I am invited by Shanthi S to the Genesis cinema in Whitechapel, there to see Fading Gigolo. The cinema is so cheap – £3.50 for a new mainstream film on Mondays and Wednesdays. So we use the money saved to have an equally cheap meal at a Chinese restaurant, a few doors along the Mile End Road. Shanthi brings her friend Rosie, who runs a vintage clothes stall. She loved Under The Skin, not least because, like Scarlett Johansson, she too is a woman who drives a large van around. Full of vintage clothes, rather than naked Scotsmen, though.

Fading Gigolo is written and directed by John Turturro, who stars in it alongside Woody Allen. The story is very unlikely – Mr Turturro is an escort for various glamorous women – and it doesn’t quite hold its funny bits together with its more serious bits – Vanessa Paradis as a widow, whose depression is healed by Mr Turtorro. But the funny bits are very funny indeed, most of them given to Mr Allen.

* * *

Thursday 29th May 2014. To the Birkbeck student bar in Torrington Square, for end-of-year drinks with some fellow students: Elton, Finola, Ralph, Tim, Kerensa. The bar’s on the fourth floor, and we go outside onto the open-air terrace. Though the sun’s out, we have to use several piles of napkins to mop up the rainwater from the chairs. I seem to be the only English student present to not have done the Milton module, which the others all rave about. Three years as a literature student, and I still am no closer to feeling well-read. Always more to read. Always more to feel behind about.

* * *

Friday 30th May 2014. I finish reading Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. The passages on drink and hangovers are superb, as are the sudden fantasies of violence against those who irritate. But it’s not quite the comedic experience I was hoping for. Perhaps because I have little sympathy with a teacher who hates teaching – I feel more for the students whom he lets down. And yet I’m keen to read more Amis, for the prose style and the wit, if not for the cruel characters.

I also want to know more about Michel, Professor Welch’s effeminate writer son with ‘long pale hair’, who only appears right at the end. In the introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition, David Lodge comes close to apologising for Amis’s treatment of women, saying the character of Margaret would effectively have her own story told by the next generation of female authors. But I want to read Michel Welch’s story too.

Saturday 17th May 2014. Hot and sticky in London. The British Library café is still very busy: lots of students testing each other on their revision. I’m polishing my final essay for the year, adding a few more secondary references, checking the whole essay ticks the right boxes, and then just re-reading it for grammar and general flow. I’m forcing myself to do six drafts this time, one draft per day. Whatever the mark is, at least I know I’ve put the hours in. It wasn’t so long ago that I left essays until the night before the deadline. That’s simply unthinkable now.

* * *

Sunday 18th May 2014. The Boogaloo bar now has a little den in the back yard, decked out entirely with references to the Tony Scott / Quentin Tarantino film True Romance. It’s called ‘Alabama’s’.

* * *

Tuesday 20th May 2014. To the Barbican to see the The Two Faces of January. A mere £5 for students on Tuesdays. It’s my first visit to the centre’s new Cinema Café building in Beech Street, two blocks away from the main Barbican complex. The venue consists of two cinema screens (officially the Barbican’s Cinema 2 and 3) and a large, not-too-trendy café. There’s plush high-backed chairs and sofas, and lots of tables for laptop users. And indeed, for exam revision groups, of which there’s several in evidence today: young people huddled over textbooks and ring binders.

It’s warm weather, and I watch The Two Faces Of January in Cinema 2 while wearing my cream linen suit, now getting somewhat threadbare and needing replacing. As it happens, the main character in the film, played by Viggo Mortensen, wears exactly the sort of suit I’m after. I miss whole sections of the plot due to staring at the suits. But that’s as good a reason for seeing a film as any.

It’s a very old fashioned film: a Patricia Highsmith adaptation, set in 1962 across Athens, Crete and Istanbul. The usual Highsmith elements are present and correct: morally dodgy men in sunny locations, arguments that quickly turn into violence, crime as a kind of filler for holes in masculinity, and subtexts of male-on-male obsession. The only 21st century thing about it is the warning of adult themes on the BBFC certification card, which precedes the film:

12A: Contains infrequent strong language, moderate violence & scenes of smoking.

* * *

Wednesday 21st May 2014. I finish and deliver the essay, thus ending my college work for the third year. The courses I chose for this year were all essay based, with no exams whatsoever. I don’t miss exams in the slightest, but I do miss the sense of a dramatic finale that they can create.

At Birkbeck, all essays have to be delivered electronically, via a link on the college’s website. But most of the tutors still ask for a paper copy as well. The student must print one out and take it to a special post box, being a slot in the reception of the Gordon Square building. And this is the case for today’s final essay. So I do get a little sense of an ending after all – it’s the moment when my fingers let go of the envelope when I drop it into the post box. Gone. Done. Third year over.

I now have no deadlines hanging over me for the first time since December last year, and won’t have to think about new ones until October this year. So I’m looking upon the next week or so as a proper holiday. Albeit on a budget. I have no money to travel, so it has to be a holiday in my own bedsit, punctuated with the cheaper pleasures of London. This suits me fine, though. Free time can be luxury enough.

* * *

In the evening: I attend a free Birkbeck event at Waterstones bookshop, Gower Street. It’s a talk with Travis Elborough about his various non-fiction books, including A London Year. The host is Joe Brooker, one of the head tutors on my English programme. He comments how A London Year might be best read by using the index in the back to choose different themes, rather than reading it linearly from start to finish. Though he doesn’t use the term, to me this makes A London Year a good illustration of the city as hypertext. Hypertext is now woven into so many day-to-day lives that it’s easy to forget about its usage as a metaphor. It’s the navigation of a large mass of material by cutting a path through the layers, pushing through the text via a lateral dimension.

On the Web, the hypertext element is the choice of one’s own reading path by clicking on links. Likewise A London Year, when read via choices made in the index, and likewise London itself. You have to take your own forked path through the many worlds and layers of the city, in both space and in time. Piercing the palimpsest.

Perhaps my own generation might think of hypertext theory in relation to those Choose Your Own Adventure books of the 1980s. You didn’t read them from start to finish; you chose links to different sections, and so produced your own text. What, after all, is the appeal of London but as a giant game of Choose Your Own Adventure?

***

Thursday 22nd May 2014. Heavy rain and thunderstorms. Possibly because it’s World Goth Day and Morrissey’s birthday.

I go to Jackson’s Lane Community Centre to vote. Two elections this time. One is for the European Parliament, one for local councils. I am the only one in the polling station. On the internet and in the news it feels like everyone is interested in politics. When you actually go to vote, it feels like no one is.

* * *

In the evening I go to the Muswell Hill Odeon for The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-Time, one of the National Theatre’s ‘Live’ screenings. It’s my first time to such an event. For the last few years, the NT has teamed up with cinemas to screen live broadcasts of their plays at the South Bank. Or in this case, a synchronised repeat screening of a past live broadcast. It’s an inspired solution for those who like theatre but can’t make it to the NT, as there’s the theatrical sense of a shared, one-off experience to the screenings. It’s not quite like being in a theatre, but neither is it a normal trip to the cinema.

In this case, the recording of the Curious Incident play is from 2012, during its original setting at the NT’s Cottesloe space. The audience are arranged on tiers, looking down onto a stage in the round.  The play uses a lot of choreography aimed at a vertical view, to such a degree that at times it’s like a scaled-down Busby Berkeley film. The stage is marked out in tiny squares like a maths exercise book, and there are so many intricate projections and lighting effects – not to mention live animals – that the technical rehearsal must have gone on for days. The recreation of the A Level Maths question from the end of the novel is quite brilliant – a seamless blend of acting, direction, animation and sheer nerve. Mum has gone to one of the screenings in Suffolk, so we discuss it over the phone afterwards.

* * *

Late night: I watch a little of the election coverage on TV. Some election-speak: ‘No overall control’. It’s one of those phrases which I feel is somehow criticising me personally. Like ‘approval needed’ at the supermarket.

Friday 9th May 2014. This week’s work: drafting the final essay for the third year. For me it’s the most difficult part of the process, the writing from scratch. Once it moves into the editing and polishing side of things I’m far more confident.

When I edit, it’s like the text has been supplied by someone else – the Dickon Edwards of a few days before. This Dickon used to get upset when Dickon The Ruthless Editor butchered his work, cutting whole paragraphs and moving them around. But now he accepts that his raw creativity must look its best for the reader. Perhaps in my case editing is like putting an awkward body into a nice suit. With a bibliography as a pocket square handkerchief.

I’ve tried to bring this latest essay right up to date by discussing The Grand Budapest Hotel. Wes Anderson’s film uses a triple frame device about authors. The effect lends credibility to the surreal tale which takes up most of the film. It’s the storyteller as authority figure, which goes back to the Canterbury Tales, the Arabian Nights and the Indian Panchatantra before that.

One theory why the ancient love of stories-within-stories went out of fashion is the Renaissance’s focus upon the individual, as a unified, separate whole. What’s changed now is that people are encouraged to see themselves as splinters of a community again, albeit the virtual community of the internet. Instead of nested narratives we have networked narratives. One especially sees this on Twitter, where the urge to ‘retweet’ takes us right back to sharing tales around the campfire. Except that the campfire is now the size of the world.

* * *

To the basement of the Atlantis Bookshop, in Museum Street, for a private view. The exhibition is Stephen Harwood’s ‘Visions of England’. The paintings are landscapes in vivid and fiery oils. What’s unusual is that Harwood has not visited the places himself. Instead, they are recreations of stills taken entirely from the films of Derek Jarman, particularly The Garden (1990) and A Journey To Avebury (1971). Mr Harwood makes the connection between the Neolithic standing stones of Wiltshire and Jarman’s driftwood posts, punctuating his shingle garden at Dungeness.

The Atlantis Bookshop specialises in the occult. A poster announces that its next event is the launch of a pack of Tarot cards based on the stories of Sherlock Holmes. Fan fiction, just as Harwood’s paintings are Jarman fan fiction. But then, fan fiction is an occult practice in itself: the alchemy of transforming old magic into something new.

* * *

Saturday 10th May 2014. To the National Portrait Gallery with Mum, for the exhibition David Bailey: Stardust. The photographer as party animal. It’s a huge exhibition that takes up the entire ground floor of the NPG. Many of the photographs are blown up to beyond life-size. The one that sums Mr Bailey up is a portrait of him with Salvador Dali. Dali too liked being around celebrity and glamour as much as he did making art, but then party-going is an important art form too, if it’s the right party.

There’s also a magazine cover which puts the young Bailey next to Cecil Beaton, with quotes by each one upon the other. To his credit, Bailey is thoughtful and accurate about Beaton’s talent. Beaton just uses Bailey to talk about himself. ‘The best thing about you is that you remind me of me.’

* * *

Monday 12th May 2014.  I have a phone landline in my home, but like a lot of people I mainly use it for access to the internet. If I do make the mistake of answering the phone, it’s nearly always a sales team. I realise there are services to prevent these calls, but I’ve tried them all. I still get the calls.

The person on the other end always begins their onslaught with ‘how are you today?’ It is the most depressing phrase in the English language. Not ‘how are you’, which a friend might say, but ‘how are you today‘. Only the cold world of commerce adds the ‘today’.

I used to reply to this with ‘Well, Dear Heart, the ‘how’ that I am today is considerably less happy, now that I’ve realised your sole interest in me is for my money, and not, as I was hoping, for the beauty of my eyes.’ But now I just hang up and put on the answering machine.

* * *

Tuesday 13th May 2014. To the Barbican cinema to see the film Frank. It’s my first visit to the cinema (now retitled Cinema One), though I’ve been going to the Barbican centre since a school trip in 1983. Back then, the Barbican’s brass banisters produced a loud crackle of static under one’s hands, something which provided endless pleasure for us children. We were really there to learn about the changing face of London, coupling this visit with one to the Museum of London next door. But the lesson which most remained was that statically charged banisters are a lot of fun. The banisters are now long gone. Or perhaps, long properly earthed.

The cinema screen is on floor Minus Two, on a level beneath the underground car park. As it was opened in the early 80s it makes me think of nuclear bunkers, Protect and Survive, and Threads. I wonder if it was ever on a list of places in which to take refuge during a nuclear attack. It wouldn’t be so bad, stuck down there as the bombs fell. A capacity of 280, a bar and an ice cream kiosk.

The film Frank turns out to be highly enjoyable and inventive, though the ending is incredibly sad. It’s the tale of a young Englishman – based on Jon Ronson, who co-wrote the script – who joins an eccentric American rock band, where the lead singer, Frank, constantly wears a huge papier-mâché head. There’s lots of ingenious uses of Twitter and You Tube – it’s possibly the first film that successfully depicts online life in that way. The young Englishman is played by the likeable ginger boy from About Time, while the man inside the fake head is Mr Fassbender, who has a track record of playing troubled yet charismatic men – he was Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre. The intrigue of the film is, as the ginger boy says, to work out ‘what goes on inside that head, inside that head’.

At the end, the film announces that it was inspired by the cult comedy-rock star Frank Sidebottom. It should add, ‘but only a little’. As Mr Ronson’s accompanying book Frank explains, there’s also aspects that draw on the story of Daniel Johnston. And there’s bits of Captain Beefheart and The Shaggs in there, too.

The film’s Frank is, like Johnston, a child-like Texan with mental health problems. Sidebottom, on the other hand, was a fictional character from the Manchester suburb of Timperley, played by a man who may have been devoted to his art, but who certainly didn’t live with the head always on. And Sidebottom was as much defined by his nasal Mancunian accent as he was the head.

In 1991 I witnessed Chris Sievey performing Frank Sidebottom for Marc Radcliffe’s BBC Manchester radio show. The head was nowhere in sight. Instead, there was just a brown-haired, ordinary-looking man in his thirties, speaking in a radio studio, albeit with a clip on his nose.

As it is, the real Frank Sidebottom has already appeared in a film. In Filth, James McAvoy watches an old Sidebottom TV show, then impersonates the voice for a phone prank.

* * *

Thursday 15th May 2014. I’m in the café of John Lewis, with its views across rooftops. As I wait to pay for my pot of tea, a man in a suit comes over to the cashier from the table area. He complains that none of the available tables have been cleared of their dirty cups. Moments later, he comes over again, this time asking for a wet cloth with which to clean a coffee stain on his shirt. He adds that this was their fault, as it was caused (somehow) by his trying to move the dirty plates while he was still holding his own tray. Shortly after that he comes over again, this time because his food isn’t hot enough. I look around. There are plenty of empty tables, with no dirty cups on them.

There is a moment when I wonder if he is acting for a hidden camera prank, so great is his umbrage. Or that he is doing it as part of a ‘social experiment’, which is really just a prank with a good lawyer.

When I used to watch those Jeremy Beadle TV shows, I envied the reactions of the people who were duped. Not their reactions as the prank was going on, but their reactions afterwards, the expressions of relief when all was revealed. I wondered if some people reacted more like me. Their confusion might turn not to relief but to even more confusion.

‘You don’t understand, Jeremy. I have a slippery enough grasp on reality as it is.’

Friday 2nd May 2014. This week’s work: researching the final essay of the academic year, due in on May 22nd. Today I realise that I’ve lost one of my pages of notes – a fairly important one with my bibliography. I do the dutiful trying to remember where I had it last, and after much straining to peer inside my mind’s fuzzier corners I recall dropping it on the floor of the café in Birkbeck’s School of Arts, in Gordon Square. The terrible thing is, I also recall thinking ‘well, I’ll pick that up in a minute, before I go’, and then completely forgetting to do so. But thankfully I now remember that I forgot.

I phone the man on reception at Birkbeck, who immediately goes over to speak to the café staff next door. They locate the messy-looking piece of paper, and it’s waiting for me at reception the next day. At no point do they give the impression that I’m being a scatter-brained pest, nor do they even ask who I am to make such demands. They just help. It’s moments like this that defy the impression of London life as unfriendly.  It also makes me want to make more of an effort to spot other people’s lost property, and take the best action that will lead to its reunion with its owner. One snowy day, I too will know what it’s like to pick up a lost mitten and spear it on a nearby railing.

* * *

Saturday 3rd May 2014. I get a letter from the GP regarding the results of my blood test. The very sight of the letter chills my heart, because it automatically means something is up. If a blood test gets the all clear, they don’t bother to write – you just phone a week later to check.

So I’m relieved to find that the cause of my recent lack of energy seems to be minor and easily treatable. It is the fault of my inadvertent vampire lifestyle, hiding in libraries all day. I have been getting so little sunlight that I now have a Vitamin D deficiency. So I officially, medically, do not get out enough. They’ve given me some turbo-charged vitamin supplements, ones that the pharmacy has to specially order, and I look forward to those taking effect. I’m certainly not the type to hit the beach.

I also think this means I can be officially referred to as a Goth.

* * *

I impulsively try out a quiet café in Whitcombe Street. It’s called Bubbobar and specialises in  ‘bubble tea’. This is a Taiwanese creation where the ‘bubbles’ are not carbonated but little balls of tapioca, which one sucks up through a straw and chews. There’s a magazine article pinned to the wall about how such cafes are a fashionable new trend in London. I am the only person there.

* * *

To the Odeon Panton Street to see We Are The Best!, or to give it its original Swedish title, Vi är bäst!  It’s by Lukas Moodysson, and like his earlier work Together (which I saw with Dad), it has a completely naturalistic, organic feel. It’s truly hard to believe the characters on screen aren’t those people in real life. We Are The Best! is set in Stockholm in 1982, and depicts two tomboyish schoolgirls who form a punk rock band, though at 12 years old they are barely much bigger than their instruments. They’re later joined by a shy blonde girl who’s only a year or two older, but who towers above them like a Nordic amazon. This is very much something I remember from when I was that age. Not the Nordic amazons, but the feeling that when you’re 12, a 14 year old might as well be an adult. The film is a little slight in plot, but it’s sweet and funny and as lovable as the characters. The big, indestructible grin of Klara, the little girl with the mohawk, stays with me long after the credits.

There’s an advert before the film that campaigns against movie piracy, with John Hurt ominously narrating images of cinemas turning into windswept, dusty ruins. ‘Imagine an experience shared… lost forever’. If cinemas do shut down due to lack of use, the blame should not be left purely at the foot of piracy. When I buy a small, unpleasant cup of diet Pepsi, dispensed from the tap, the Odeon charges me £2.95. No one will miss that, not even John Hurt.

* * *

Tuesday 6th May 2014.  Signs of the times. The begger outside The Ritz has a sign which adds ‘and British’ to the usual ‘Hungry and homeless’.

Meanwhile, the Big Issue seller on Jermyn Street is chatting on a mobile phone. He’s not the first I’ve seen do this, either. Mobile phones, once thought in the late 1980s to be a luxury and even a status symbol, are now a lifeline to many. The anti-poverty campaigner and cookery writer, Jack Monroe, has written about how near-starvation led her to sell many of her possessions, but not her phone. In fact, she used the latter to write a blog about her situation, which led directly to her new career.

This evening I go to the ICA and see a new film that reflects the idea of living through phones: Locke. It’s effectively a one-man play, and very nearly a radio play at that. It entirely consists of Tom Hardy in a car during one single evening, making calls. The audience hears the voices of those he speaks to, but the camera never cuts away to show them.

The script is by Steven Knight, whose Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises I found admirable, yet frustrating. Mr Knight tends to write about lives in Britain that don’t get much of a look-in: immigrant workers, victims of foreign gangsters, and in this case a Welsh foreman of a building site. The problem is that Mr Knight tends to surround his well-written and well-researched characters with two-dimensional, unrealistic ones. Every film of his has moments that made me want to shout ‘oh come off it!’ at the cinema screen. Locke is no exception: there are things said in this film that just wouldn’t take place over a phone call. And though the format is original, the story resembles any number of Friday night plays on Radio 4. Still, I come away from the cinema knowing more about concrete and road closures than I did going in.

* * *

Thursday 8th May 2014. My two final classes of the third year at Birkbeck. Last class for Fin De Siecle (on the poetry of Amy Levy and Arthur Symons), and last class for 21st Century Fiction, which is just a short meeting about the essay. And that’s it for those courses. I won’t have any more classes until my fourth and final year begins in October. From now till May 22nd it’s all about the 21st Century essay, which I’m doing on Tokyo Cancelled and Inception.

What fascinates me about Inception is the way it manages to be successful popcorn entertainment – making over 800 million dollars world wide – while inspiring academic studies as well. There’s already been two books of essays: Inception and Philosophy: Because It’s Never Just a Dream and Inception and Philosophy: Ideas to Die For. Today I read an essay called ‘Narrative Metalepsis as Diegetic Concept in Christopher Nolan’s Inception’.

There’s an interview with Nolan where a critic points out his film’s resemblance to Last Year at Marienbad, the dreamy 1960s arthouse classic. Nolan agrees but adds – rather brilliantly – ‘but we have way more explosions’.

Saturday 26th April 2014. I’m re-reading Joe Orton’s diaries. When I was a teenager, I read them for the sex. Now, I read them for the comments on Evelyn Waugh. All books are mirrors.

* * *

Monday 28th April 2014. The last class of the Romantic Age course is rather subdued. One of the final year students who shared the same classes as me, Rajal Patel, died suddenly over the Easter break, after suffering a pulmonary embolism. I never socialised with her, but we often chatted before and after the sessions. She was friendly and enthusiastic and was clearly very good at her studies. She was weeks away from graduation, and can’t have been much older than me.

* * *

I fail to get to a cinema this week, but instead watch a fairly new film on my home PC: About Time. Despite being written and directed by Richard Curtis, it’s not quite his standard good-hearted romcom with posh English people swearing (though it does have that). Towards the end it becomes a fairly serious fable about the reality of death, and indeed the helplessness of getting older. Its basic message may be an obvious one – enjoy life and your loved ones while you can – but it’s sincere about it, and it’s enough to make me cry through the credits.

* * *

Wednesday 30th April 2014.

The GP sends me off to the Whittington Hospital for routine blood tests. On the ground floor is a newsagent’s, where I buy a small bottle of apple juice. At the till the shop assistant waves his hand over a pile of sweets arranged on the counter – tubes of Mentos, Polos and so on. ‘Any three for a pound?’.

This sort of thing is quite common in branches of WH Smith, where your transaction is similarly impeded by an unrequested offer of Haribos or Toblerones. But I tend to resent it, being a wary, ditzy and distracted sort of a person, who finds life confusing enough without these extra little interrogations. I’ve even reacted badly to nice surprises.

Impulse buying is fair enough, when shops position sweets and cheap goods right by the till, hoping people will be tempted. But forcing shoppers to say no to further things, when they clearly just want to pay for what they’ve selected, seems the height of bad manners.

And in a hospital, where you might be reeling from a diagnosis of diabetes, the sudden waving of sweets in your face surely can’t make your day.

* * *

Thursday 1st May 2014.

Last proper class for the 21st Century Fiction course. We discuss Lara by Bernadine Evaristo. It’s a family saga about mixed race identity, told in verse.

Race, or rather racism, is as big an issue as ever this week. One news story today is about the TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson having to apologise for using the n-word, while another is the debate over whether UKIP is a racist political party, or merely one that attracts people who say racist things (the latter is certainly true). It reminds me of the way Boris Johnson was accused of racist comments just before he was elected London Mayor – something about ‘piccaninnies with watermelon smiles’. It still didn’t stop over a million Londoners voting for him.

The UKIP leader Nigel Farage has been appearing on Have I Got News For You, just like Boris J did, happy to laugh along with all the jokes made at his expense.  It’s proof that public ridicule can be turned to one’s advantage, as long as it makes you look lovably flawed. It’ll be interesting to see how that affects the May 22nd elections. I’ll be voting Green as usual. I admire Russell Brand and sympathise with his idea of non-voting as a protest but while the Greens are still an option, I have to disagree.

* * *

Towards the end of Lara, the main character talks about ‘Great Britain with the ‘Great’ Tippexed out’, in the sense of how tiny it is on the world map, as well as how it’s getting over its imperial past.

But what’s also been ‘Tippexed out’ from a lot of adult lives is Tippex itself, the white correction fluid used to paint out mistakes on paper (I think it’s also called White Out in the US). It’s now more of a classroom product, at least while schoolchildren still have to use exercise books. For adults who write, though, Tippex has gone the way of manual typewriters. One problem was that painting over something was not the same as erasure, and the product invariably left unpleasant white lumps on the page. Or, as the student next to me says today, ‘it made your work look like it was covered in bird droppings’.

* * *

After the class, I walk through Gordon Square to get to Euston as usual. Tonight, though, there’s some sort of commotion in the middle of the road, around the north-east section of the square. I stop on the pavement and watch. There’s a crowd of a dozen or so young people standing in the road with flags and banners, surrounding a large, important-looking black car. They are chanting and singing at whoever’s inside. ‘Happy May Day To You, Happy May Day To You.’

Standing around them are students and tutors who, like me, are on their way home and have stopped to ask what’s going on. It’s half past seven in the evening, but being May, it’s broad daylight. This gives the protest a slightly surreal, even cheery feel. The square is quiet: the rush hour traffic has died down, and the road is quite wide, so the protesters are not even getting in the way of other cars. And there’s no police about – yet. The only person who is having an unhappy time here is the one in the car. The vehicle has been effectively ‘kettled’ by the protesters, as in hemmed in by bodies, and it’s not going anywhere until they move.

‘It’s David Willetts!’ shouts a passing Birkbeck tutor to me, grinning. And it all makes sense.

Mr Willetts is the current Minister for Universities and Science. Two years ago he oversaw the rise in student fees from £3,000 per year to a staggering £9,000. More recently, he cut the DSA grants which helped students with disabilities or learning difficulties. It’s fair to say he’s not very popular around universities.

My curiosity sated, I carry on walking home.  Later I learn that – as expected – a police squad soon arrives to drag the students away from the car, allowing Mr Willetts to drive off and resume his unkind life in peace.

Two pleasing things about this event. After so many instances of protesters being kettled by the authorities, it’s heartening to see it the other way around. What made it unlike a police kettle, sadly, was the short duration.

The other pleasing thing is that it’s reminiscent of a scene from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. While Clarissa Dalloway is shopping in Bond Street, a mysterious chauffeur-driven car breaks down outside, causing the pedestrians to gather and speculate about the passenger. They think it’s either a politician or someone from the royal family.

What’s even better is that this real life version happened in Gordon Square, once home to Woolf. And today Gordon Square is full of classrooms where people indeed study Mrs Dalloway (along with Orlando, and A Room Of One’s Own and To The Lighthouse). Or at least, they do so until their funding is kettled away by Mr Willetts.