Wednesday 29th 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 have bifocals.
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.
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Sunday 2nd 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, 22nd 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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