I am told that there are still tickets available for my special ‘On Diaries’ event on the afternoon of Saturday 22^nd August, at the London Betsey Trotwood. The tickets are free, but they must be reserved in advance from poniesandhorsesbooks.com/events. There are currently twenty-five tickets left.

At the event I will sign books and answer questions, via my preferred Q&A system involving mini golf pencils and postcards. I will pass on what I hope are entertaining insights about diaries and the human condition, fiction versus non-fiction, and the problems of telling the truth. There will be guest readings from the diaries of Samuel Pepys, Virginia Woolf, Helen Garner, Derek Jarman and Alan Bennett, as well as from my own diary. I will also talk about how writing and reading diaries is good for one’s creativity, and good for one’s health.

I have told all the usual outlets but am a little worried that the event might be under-attended. Facebook and Instagram are now so cluttered with adverts and sponsored posts that it’s perfectly possible to miss out on something that you might have wanted to go to, if only you had known.

What does makes people go to events?

Yesterday evening in the UK, many people gathered to watch the solar eclipse. Here in Hastings the beach was packed. I went down to have a look.  Crowds upon crowds were there, the most I have seen on the beach since I moved here, all bathed in the strange semi-dappled light. Many were fiddling with pinhole cameras made from cereal boxes, some were using special eclipse glasses that look like 3D glasses, others were gazing intensely at their kitchen colanders. It was an atmosphere of surrealism, uniqueness, and rarity.

On the 22^nd I like to think I too can promise surrealism, uniqueness, and rarity. Rarity, because for some reason I’m not getting many bookings at the moment. I like to think this is down to what Hastings Job Centre told me about having a PhD in English and Humanities:

‘I’m afraid we don’t have much for someone with your… high end qualifications.’

(Later, in bed…)

I can certainly promise surrealism at my event, because it’s me. Yesterday, on the 323 bus, dressed in my heatwave look of a broad-brimmed hat, sunglasses and white suit, I was told by a small boy: ‘You look like Michael Jackson’.

Today, the real Michael Jackson is 0% present. The solar eclipse, for all its popularity, was only 90% present.

At my event, however, I will be 100%  present. And I too am known for being something unusual to stare at, with or without a colander.

Perhaps I should also compare my event with one of the most discussed cultural events at the present moment: the film The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan.

This film was shot entirely on 70mm IMAX, a format which in the UK can only be properly viewed, in terms of the director’s intended resolution and screen size, in three cinemas (London BFI, London Science Museum, and Manchester Printworks). Tickets for screenings of The Odyssey at those cinemas have long sold out, as one might imagine. 

My event at the Betsey Trotwood is not yet sold out. But it will, I can promise, feature my preferred resolution and size for the content. As in: me. In person. It will be like I am in the actual room with you. Because I will be.

I wonder now if having a free event risks having more people not turning up than if it was, say, £1 to get in. Some people are very strange about price and value, as Oscar Wilde did not quite say.

A case study suggests itself. Recently, one of my attempts to postpone starvation was to be paid for digitising an LGBTQ+ newspaper archive. This included the column, ‘Gay Girl About Town’, by Jane Czyzselska, which appeared in the free daily London newspaper The London Paper in the late 2000s. 

Having to leaf through old copies of this newspaper immediately brought back memories of that most baffling of historical eras, the recent past. The London Paper ran from 2006 to 2009, and had a rival, London Lite, which ran for about the same time. Both these newspapers became notorious in London, not for anything their writers said but for a psychological side-effect of what happens when people are given something to read for free. Litter.

And litter in huge amounts too. My abiding memory of  London during the late 2000s is of buses and tube trains covered in discarded newspapers by the end of the day. It was a time of giant travelling hamster cages.

There were adverts everywhere to remind people to dispose of their free newspapers properly. There were even designated recycling bins for this very purpose, paid for by the free newspaper companies (after they were forced to do so). But the problem persisted.

Newspapers that cost money, meanwhile, like the Times and Telegraph and Daily Mail, were far less likely to be dumped in this way. The theory was that the consumer had made a personal investment, and so treated their possession with more respect.

I remember once in the late 2000s I got so upset  about the free newspapers ruining a London night out that I once walked the entire length of a tube train, going through every carriage, and picking up every discarded  London Paper  and London Lite that I saw. It was a good fat armful – I could barely carry them all. Then I took them off the train at Highgate, where I lived, and dropped them into the recycling bin at the station entrance. I was probably drunk, but that’s not the point. 

All of which is an attempt  to say: please do come to my event on the 22^nd. It is free, I am afraid, but I hope that does not put you off. Besides, as with most book events there will be nice things on sale to buy (my book). After all, there is no sight more comforting to the lover of culture than a merchandise stall. Perhaps I should do Dickon Edwards colanders.

**

Also in London that weekend is a rare screening of Melt It! The Film of The Iceman, which I recommend. A fascinating account of the time when alternative British comedy could mean performance art, rather than stand-up. Sunday 23rd August, 7.30pm, The Bill Murray, N1 8NQ.

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This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains nearly thirty 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!

Wednesday 29^th July 2026. I have to get a spot on my leg looked at, and am sent to see an NHS specialist in a room at the Hillbrow Swimming Pool and Health Centre, deep in the suburbs of Eastbourne. The bus from Eastbourne railway station to Hillbrow zig-zags through interminable rows of houses. I feel very much closer to death by the time I get off. On the way back, I make the most of the trip by stopping off at the Towner Gallery & Cinema, with its permanent display of Eric Ravilious and Tirzah Garwood.

My friend Oskar thinks that the reason I have to go to this suburban swimming pool in a different town, rather than to some hospital in Hastings, is because the NHS is especially struggling on the coast, what with all the old people. The joke about Eastbourne is that even the shop windows are bifocal.

In fact, I now live next door to a care home. The other day they had a be-quiffed Elvis Presley impersonator performing to the residents in the garden, using a backing track. He left to the announcement on the PA that ‘Elvis has left the building’. I worried that this phrase might be construed as poor taste, given that it’s also slang for death. But no, here it was meant perfectly literally and cheerily.

I wonder if my generation will be similarly entertained in our care homes by, say, Liam Gallagher impersonators. As if elder abuse wasn’t bad enough.

Back at the health centre in the middle of nowhere, I ask the specialist if I can put my foot on her desk to steady my leg while she photographs the spot with her two-handed medical camera. ‘No,’ she says, very sharply and very, very quickly.

It’s like the time when I went to see a GP and she lectured me about my lack of exercise. She said: ‘Sitting is the new smoking’. I wanted to say: ‘No, it isn’t.’

I like the idea of saying ‘no it isn’t’ to doctors, in the style of a pantomime. Just as I like doctors saying a quick stern ‘no’ to me when I ask to put my awful foot upon their lovely desk.

*

Sunday 2^nd August 2026. I am listening to the album Our Tanks – Your Lawn!! by The False Dawns, which came out last year. I am mentioned twice in the CD artwork.

The False Dawns is a solo project by the singer-songwriter Huw Darling, of the Letchworth band The Spanish Amanda. His music is witty, bookish indiepop in the mould of acts like Momus and the King of Luxembourg.

On the album artwork, Huw is pretending to be a fictional indiepop girl duo, both of whom are called Dawn. On the sleeve, one of the Dawns describes herself as born in Japan in 1981. She names me as both her ‘Indiepop Crush’, and her ‘Fantasy Prime Minister’. The other Dawn’s choices are, respectively, Fred the Spanish Amanda Cat, and Chris Packham, the TV nature presenter, who in all seriousness probably would be many people’s choice of prime minister.

Huw sent me the CD, and enclosed a postcard describing the mention of my name on the sleeve as ‘first class toadying’ on his part. If he expects me to spread the word about the album, which is available to buy at thefalsedawns.bandcamp.com, he has another thing coming.

But perhaps the thought of me as Prime Minister is not such a fantasy. Britain has just acquired a new PM for the seventh time in a decade. This time it is Andy Burnham. My own brief stint at the slippery steering wheel can therefore only be a matter of time. In the future, everyone will be Prime Minister for fifteen minutes.

The media has desperately tried to play up the new PM’s looks into a cartoonish trademark, even though he is relatively ordinary-looking. Or at least is now. Years ago, when he first ran for the Labour leadership against Ed Miliband, cartoonists made fun of his long, wonderfully feminine eyelashes. He has since covered those up with a pair of glasses. A shame.

The cliché is that one can experiment with make-up and gender ambiguity in youth, but by middle age one has to settle down, pick a side, grow a beard, pretend to understand football, wear glasses. The current term in queer parlance is ‘twink death’, with ‘twink’ being a young, beardless, boyish man.

Despite the popularity of beards with declining twinks elsewhere, beards do still seem to have a electability problem for male politicians. The last bearded prime minister was Lord Salisbury in 1902. It is perhaps too much of a stretch to say that Jeremy Corbyn’s failure to become Prime Minister was entirely due to his beard. But the facts are there. In late 2019, the public finally had a beard on their hands. Instead they plumped, of course, for a Wodehousian overgrown boy, a clean-shaven cartoon.

Hence for their recent front cover, The Economist fought against Mr Burnham’s twink death by turning him into just a pair of thick eyebrows over a pair of spectacles.

When I bumped into an old friend after many years apart, he accused me of ‘going casual on us’. He meant that I was no longer wearing make-up, as I had done for much of the 90s and 2000s. I was now opting for glasses (or sunglasses) over contact lenses. I was hurt by this, but have since made up for it, I hope, with the hair and the suits.

In a culture of too much information, strong looks can cut through chaos. They can be a comforting landmark for the public, a fixed point, a calming handrail.

You know where you are with a strong look. You know who you are. When people shout at me in the street, or have an opinion on a new prime minister or the new film of The Odyssey, they are really defining themselves. All reviews review the reviewer.

Next gig: London, Betsey Trotwood, 22^nd August, 2.30pm.
The book Diary at the Centre of the Earth Vol 1 is available from The Waves Bookshop, Hastings, or from poniesandhorsesbooks.com.

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This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains nearly thirty 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!