Wednesday 2nd March 2016. I listen to a Radio 4 documentary in the Archive on 4 slot: Skill, Stamina and Luck. It’s an account of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks of the 80s, and of the wider history of interactive fiction before and after them.

Pure nostalgic bliss for me, as I was an avid fan of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, 1982) and the many books that followed it, all published by Puffin Books. As the documentary points out, the books sold in huge amounts at the time, often beating Roald Dahl in the children’s bestseller charts.

In 1982, aged ten, I already knew that the ‘go to page 142’ format existed, what with the Choose Your Own Adventure series and others like it. I think the first one I encountered was a picture-based game book for small children, inspired by the maze scene in Jerome’s Three Men in A Boat, titled Three Men In A Maze (by Stephen Leslie, Transworld Publishers, 1977 – I have a copy today).

The Fighting Fantasy series was the first to add a proper gaming element, though, with dice to throw, battles to win, and SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK scores to maintain, each of these crucial words always in upper case. I wasn’t so keen on the battle side (and so never graduated to a Warhammer phase), and I was useless at painting Citadel Miniatures. But I loved making annotated paper maps of the little worlds in each of the books, with notes on how to solve them – ‘walkthroughs’ these would be called now. I was so proud of my map for Steve Jackson’s House of Hell (1984) that I sold copies of it to school friends.

One specific memory is queuing up at a Puffin Show at Chelsea Town Hall, April 1985, to get a signed copy of the latest title, Ian Livingstone’s Temple of Terror. They would always be called something like that: The Alliteration of Awfulness, The Preposition of Scary Noun, The Place of Stuff. I must have been first in the signing queue (such was my ardour), because I can distinctly remember Mr Livingstone telling me that Temple of Terror was not yet published, so I was getting the very first copy sold. I don’t think Temple of Terror was one of the classic titles, but if I’m ever called upon to reveal my Secret Geek Credentials, that’s my main card.

The Radio 4 documentary also revealed that there’s been a recent book on the history of Fighting Fantasy: You Are The Hero, by Jonathan Green. Part-funded by Kickstarter, naturellement. I’ve just treated myself to a copy, and am getting all kinds of Proustian rushes. ‘If you want to eat the madeleine cake, go to 24…’

* * *

Thursday 3rd March 2016. Evening: MA class at Gordon Square. This week’s novel is Erasure by Percival Everett. Quite hard to get hold of. The last UK edition from 2004 seems to be already out of print. Rather ironic, considering it’s a satire on literary ambition. In Everett’s story, a struggling black academic, raging in frustration at the absurdities of the world, deliberately writes a lurid, stereotypical ‘ghetto’ novel. This accidentally becomes a hit, forcing him to adopt a pseudonymous ex-convict persona in order to satisfy the public’s desire for the ‘real thing’ – as in their perception of ‘real’ blackness. Quite a timely week to do this book, given the controversy over the Oscars. Plenty of arguments with no easy conclusions, other than Everett’s book is impressive, and uproariously funny at times. He certainly deserves to be better known over here.

* * *

Friday 4th March 2016. To the ICA to see Hail Caesar! It’s the new Coen brothers film: one of their lighter, quirkier comedies in the style of Burn After Reading, as opposed to the darker likes of Fargo or No Country For Old Men. This one is set in the world of early 50s Hollywood, the era captured in That’s Entertainment, when actors’ whole lives were owned by studios, when fears of Communist threats were rife, and when mainstream films were at their most colourful and escapist. There’s extended clips from loving pastiches of such films, such as Esther Williams’s aquatic ballets, or Gene Kelly’s song-and-dance routines in sailor suits, or westerns that were really excuses for rodeo stunts and singing cowboys. George Clooney spends the whole film in his Roman centurion costume, having been kidnapped from the set of the title film, a lavish Biblical epic in the vein of The Robe.

Ralph Fiennes proves, again, that he really should do more comedy, while Tilda Swinton does her ice queen bit yet again, this time as a pair of identical twins turned rival gossip journalists. The plot is all very unlikely, and it does feel that it needs a rewrite to give it more of a sense of direction. But it also feels that to do so would mean cutting out so many enjoyable set pieces. In that sense, the film is a piece of indulgence, albeit made with the suspicion that the audience will be fine with such indulgence. Because it’s done as gleefully as this. I certainly enjoyed it.

* * *

Saturday 5th March 2016. To the House of Illustration in King’s Cross, for the exhibition Comix Creatrix: 100 Women Making Comics. It’s billed as ‘the UK’s largest ever exhibition of the work of pioneering female comics artists’. The House of Illlustration’s main exhibition space comprises just three gallery rooms plus a video screening room, so expectations of ‘large’ do not initially spring to mind. But as is often the case with the HoI shows, each room is so crammed with comic art, with lots of shelves of graphic novels to pick up and browse, that the time needed to take it all in can’t be so different to a blockbuster Tate show.

The message of the exhibition is simple: women have made comics too, and there’s more female creators than one might think. But the show also posits the theory that all female creators contribute to a distinct role in culture, like Mother Earth: the ‘Creatrix’. What’s certainly true is that the show proves how women have drawn every possible genre of comics and sequential art, often with their gender kept quiet or even deliberately hidden (in that JK Rowling way of a girl’s name being thought to put off boy readers). Until today I hadn’t realised that the Victorian character Ally Sloper was co-created by a woman, Marie Duval.

Some favourites in the show: an account from the US Saturday Evening Post in 1960, describing the working day of Dalia ‘Dale’ Messick, creator of the 1940s strip Brenda Star – Reporter. ‘The hi–fi is on full blast… if the music is appropriate, she jumps up and does a rumba. In meditative periods, she chews gum with popping sound effects.’

I also enjoy the exhibits by Tove Jansson (pencils for a Moomins strip), Posy Simmonds (an original page for Tamara Drewe), a strip by Kate Beaton, and one by Laura Howell, a contributor to Viz. Ms Howell’s strip is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read in any medium: ‘Benjamin Britten and his Embittered Bitten’.

The only shortcoming is that other people seem to have finally found out about the HoI, so the rooms are much more crowded than they were at my last visit. Oh, the dilemma of wanting to tell the world about a favourite place, while hoping that not too many people actually listen to you and go there.

I once heard of a Time Out restaurant critic who said that a handful of really nice restaurants in London never made it into the magazine. The rumour went that the staff deliberately kept these heavenly places quiet, so that they could still secure a table. It’s like the way Jehovah’s Witnesses advertise a version of paradise that nevertheless only comes in a limited edition.

Thinking about it, Time Out is now like The Watchtower in another respect. Another free handout of suspicious provenance, one of the many unasked-for concoctions of staples and hope, thrust ceaselessly into the faces of commuters each evening, as they rush to catch the Tube to eternal damnation. Or Euston, as it’s currently known.

Sunday 21st February 2016. Tom’s birthday. I take him for lunch in Soho, at The Crown and Two Chairmen. Nut roast for me, fish and chips for him.  Tom’s a big Alan Partridge fan, so I’m also delighted to alert him to the new series of Mid Morning Matters, just released online (and how to view it gratis, via the ‘Now TV’ free trial). It’s pleasing that this now vintage comedy character can still be as funny as he was in the 1990s. The new series follows the classic sitcom tip of ‘less sit, more com’, where a fixed, claustrophobic location – a radio station’s studio – forces the writers to work harder at producing the jokes. Past examples of this are the Hancock episode where the characters are just sitting around at home, bored (‘Stone me, what a life’), or the similar Porridge episode (‘A Night In’). The format is even there in the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs, where the gangsters are in a café, simply bickering over trivial subjects. This set-up may be more theatre than TV or film, but can be all the better for it. I’m convinced that the full-length film Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa suffered from a need to crowbar in a cinematic, three-act story.

The new series of Mid Morning Matters still has plenty of plot; it’s just weaved into the dialogue as off-stage remarks. One detail is particularly up-to-date: at one point Partridge’s hapless co-presenter, Sidekick Simon, heads off to a job interview for a new website that ‘aggregates content’.

* * *

Monday 22nd February 2016. To the Birkbeck offices in Gordon Square for a meeting with my MA tutor, Grace H. We discuss my last essay. She advises me to take the option to submit my own question next time, rather than choose from the list. It seems I over-did the urge to say the things I wanted to say, rather than prioritise the question’s criteria. That said, I still came away with a distinction, so it’s not like I can’t tick the boxes as well.

* * *

Tuesday 23rd February 2016. Finishing my review of Eternal Troubadour, the new biography of Tiny Tim, for The Wire. One thing I cut for space is a reference to Bowie being called ‘the undisputed king of camp rock’ by Melody Maker in 1972, a term that ‘glam rock’ seems to have usurped. Six years earlier, the Red Bird offshoot label Blue Cat Records labelled a Tiny Tim single with the words ‘The Camp Rock Sound’.

Another favourite detail is the wording for a mid-60s poster, advertising a late-night bill that Tiny shared with Lenny Bruce: ‘Lenny Bruce Speaks For Money. Tiny Tim Sings For Love’.

Interesting to think of some novelty records as entryism. One-off curios to many, gateway drugs to some. As well as Tiny Tim’s ‘Tip-Toe Thru’ The Tulips With Me’ there’s Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’. Ms Anderson is a productive performance artist, successful across the decades, yet for a certain generation of pop fans she’s just a quirky one-hit singer. The phrase ‘best known for’ demands the taking up of one specific perspective. It can sometimes be an unfair one.

* * *

Thursday 25th February 2016. Evening: MA class at Birkbeck. This week it’s Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. I bring in Andrew O’Hagan’s review from the London Review of Books, which manages to praise Franzen’s novel while calling some of its stylistic elements ‘show-offy’, with others ‘pure millennial bullshit’. I suppose that’s one way of being balanced.

Afterwards myself, the tutor Joe Brooker, and some of the students go to the IOE student union bar for a quick drink; a much-needed bout of socialising for me. I order a small pizza and offer it around. One of the students, Serena, is Italian. ‘You do know this isn’t very good pizza, don’t you,’ she says. I reply that I hardly expect a student union bar to offer the height of gourmet food, and I’m just hungry.

Serena then suggests some Italian-approved places where one can definitely get decent pizzas. There’s the chain Franco Manca,  Il Piccolo Diavolo in Crouch Hill, and – her favourite of all – Rossella in Kentish Town.

* * *

Saturday 27th February 2016. To a third-floor flat in a pleasant part of Bethnal Green, for the latest attempt at relieving my back pain. This time, it’s an offer from Ms Maud Young to use her bathtub, so I can try out soaking in Epsom salts. My own place only has access to a shower. I think the last time I had a bath must have been in a hotel, which would have been at least five years ago. Afterwards I top up this rare experience with another suggestion: some spray-on magnesium oil, which stings.

Two books lie by the cistern in this shared flat: Douglas Adams’s and John Lloyd’s Meaning of Liff, and Mythologies by Roland Barthes. Toilet books are an interesting genre, though probably not one I can study at postgraduate level. The Barthes is, of course, not a typical toilet book, though it does serve the function of being something one can dip into at random. Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, with its structure of random fragments, might be a similar recommendation for the more bookish lavatory.

The Meaning of Liff is a classic toilet book, though. With its dictionary-like observations on wry commonplace predicaments, it’s like a form of stand-up comedy, albeit one read sitting down. When it was first published in the 80s, it seemed just another jokey and disposable tome firmly aimed at the ‘Humour’ section of bookshops. A book to be filed alongside the Sloane Ranger’s Handbook, the Wicked Willy books, 101 Uses For A Dead Cat, and anything by Nigel Rees. Yet The Meaning of Liff has long survived the usual expiry date for such books. Perhaps the respect for Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide books helps.

I mention this because today I’m also perusing a brand new toilet book, Get in the Sea! It’s the spin-off of a popular Twitter account by the very sweary Andy Dawson (aka Mr Profanity Swan), in which the objectionable aspects of modern life are instructed to go and away, well, just get in the sea. It’s the ‘get in’ which makes it unique. The words seem an unexpectedly careful, even gentle approach to what is otherwise an angry expression of disgust. A touch of the King Canute too, which keeps the tone of the book jokey and self-deprecating, rather than actually nasty.

Predictably, some of these fashionable irritations I agree with (chuggers, poverty porn TV, Jeremy Clarkson), and some I don’t (online petitions, cereal cafes, and Benedict Cumberbatch, though I do like the idea that Cumberbatch is thought to have ‘a face like an anagram’). In one case I find myself to be someone who must get in the sea too, as I am one of the ‘people who don’t like sport’.

Despite its status as a toilet book of the moment, Get in the Sea! might be valuable in decades to come as a slice of 2016 attitudes, just as The Sloane Ranger’s Handbook must now be useful for studying the 1980s. It’s another form of How We Used To Live. And indeed, how we used to swear.

Saturday 13th February 2016. To the British Library for the exhibition West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song. I allow an hour but it’s still not enough. This is something I forget is often the case with the big BL shows. The gallery numbers only a few rooms yet it’s always crammed full of intriguing displays, virtually all of them demanding careful consideration. As the staff usher the visitors out at 5pm, I glance in frustration at the items I have to miss, feeling somehow punished. It’s the last week of the show, too.

What I do see are craved Adinkra stamps from Ghana, used to hand-print symbols on fabric. One stamp is a star-like symbol, meant to ward off jealousy. The full translation is: ‘Someone’s wish is to see my doom’. All that in a star.

I’m also fascinated by a letter from Laurence Sterne to his friend Ignatius Sancho, the former slave turned London writer and composer. In 1766, while Tristram Shandy was published in serial form to huge acclaim, Sancho asked Sterne if he’d consider writing something to raise awareness of slavery. Sterne replied that, by a ‘strange coincidence’, the chapter of Shandy he’d just finished included ‘a tender tale of the sorrows of a friendless poor negro-girl.’

The novelist went on to affirm his solidarity: ‘If I can weave the Tale I have wrote into the Work I’m [about]— ’tis at the service of the afflicted—and a much greater matter; for in serious truth, it casts a sad Shade upon the World, that so great a part of it, are and have been so long bound in chains of darkness & in Chains of Misery.’

When Sterne’s correspondence was published in 1775, it aided the anti-slavery campaign and made Sancho a literary celebrity. When he died, he was the first African to receive an obituary in the British press.

* * *

Sunday 14th February 2016. Valentine’s day. I enjoy an animated GIF of an elderly William Burroughs talking to Alan Ginsberg.

Ginsberg: Do you want to be loved?

Burroughs: Oh… (lugubrious pause) Not really…

I think I’ve seen the full clip in a documentary. Burroughs goes on to add, ‘By my cats, perhaps.’ I don’t believe his not wanting to be loved, but it’s a good answer.

I also learn that February 14th 2016 is the ‘inception’ day in Blade Runner for Pris, the blonde ‘basic pleasure model’ android. As played so wonderfully by Darryl Hannah. I like to think of myself as a ‘basic pleasure model’ too.

Evening: I watch the Film BAFTAs, hosted by Stephen Fry, now pretty much the British Oscars. The Revenant triumphs, with Leo DiCaprio taking Best Actor. A mistake, in my view. His character is barely a character at all. He’s more of a generic everyman that a couple of unkind things happen to. First an unkind bear, then an unkind Tom Hardy. As far I remember, most of his performance consists of grunting, wincing and looking pained. I get enough of that on the Northern Line.

* * *

Monday 15th February 2016. Modern priorities. The big news story on the electronic board at St Pancras is that Stephen Fry has left Twitter.

Apparently, his quip at the BAFTAs about the Best Costume Design winner looking like a ‘bag lady’ produced something of an angry reaction from people on Twitter. For Mr Fry it was the last straw, and he closed down his account.

I sympathise, having just re-read Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, now reissued with an extra chapter about the book’s reception. Essentially Ronson received Twitter attacks himself, for daring to call for empathy for people like Justine Sacco. Sacco was an American PR woman who posted a joke on Twitter, intended to mock ignorance over AIDS in Africa. Instead, it lost all context (context being the first casualty of social media). By itself, the tweet ended up looking like a straightforward racist joke. Thousands of people on Twitter roasted her alive. She was sacked from her job and spent a year rebuilding her reputation. Ronson’s book about showing compassion for such cases has now been seen by some – incredibly – as a defence of white privilege. Those who attacked Ms Sacco regard her as deserving of being ‘called out’. The trouble is, as the book puts it, ‘the snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche’.

This is what seems to have happened with Stephen Fry. Lots of people thinking that, because he’s in a position of privilege, he needs to be held to account for his public remarks. The problem is, Twitter can turn well-intentioned criticism into an out-of-control, disproportionate firestorm of raw hatred. People are not to blame: it’s really the fault of the medium. A virtual reality founded on a frustration of space – 140 characters at a time – can only engender a distortion of meaning. If I were firestormed with angry messages, I’d close my account too. Life’s too short.

* * *

Thursday 18th February 2016

Evening: seminar at Birkbeck on Jonathan Lethem’s inspired novel Motherless Brooklyn, about a detective with Tourette’s syndrome. We discuss it in relation to Sontag’s book Illness as a Metaphor. One essay on the Lethem book suggests Ian McEwan’s Saturday as an example of how not to do illness as a metaphor. McEwan’s hoodlum, Baxter, has a convenient neurological condition that screams ‘metaphor for violence!’ to the reader. Lethem’s protagonist, meanwhile, is a more fleshed-out character who is fully aware where his personality ends and his condition begins.

More interesting, though, is Lethem’s referencing of pop single remixes, such as the extended 12′ version of Prince’s ‘Kiss’. His Tourette’s hero, Lionel Essrog, hears the extra minutes of the Prince remix as ‘a four minute catastrophe of chopping, grunting, hissing and slapping sounds… apparently designed as a private message of confirmation to my delighted Tourette’s brain… The nearest thing in art to my condition’. It’s like a healing version of American Psycho.

* * *

Saturday 20th February 2016. The back pain persists. I go to a flat in King’s Cross to take up Ms Dorcas Pelling’s offer of massage therapy. This turns out to be a combination of reflexology, Swedish massage, deep tissue, and trigger point. Dorcas adds her voice to the conclusion of the osteopaths: muscular rather than spinal. Forty-four years of knotted tension. As I write this, I’m still very sore from the treatment. The pain of removing pain.

Sunday 7th February 2016. Days in a chilly city, feeling the nervous hints of climate change. Lots of freezing winter rain, but still no snow. Some confused-looking daffodils poke their heads up by the front of the house.

Mum forwards me a clipping from Country Life (issue dated 6 January 2016), as spotted by Cousin Jim. I’m mentioned in a feature by Matthew Dennison, about diaries. I’m the example of an online diarist, as opposed to a blogger. It’s flattering company to be in: not the other diarists (Woolf, Pepys et al), but the magazine. Going by the adverts, the Country Life readership consists of people who buy and sell English country houses, or who come from English country houses, or those who are just wistfully attracted to that world. I may be far from that world financially, but a part of me is drawn to it aesthetically, in my Vita Sackville-West, Brideshead-loving way. Every article ends with a little silhouette of a peacock.

The article suggests that diaries differ from blogs through the latter’s ‘anticipation of an audience, and in some instances, a commercial intent’. I’d agree with this. Diaries, even public ones, are about stepping out of the world to record an individual’s experience. ‘Blog’, meanwhile, in its original definition, is short for ‘weblog’: a log of things on the web. Early blogs discussed and shared web links. It was all about the linking. Soon the term ‘blogosphere’ appeared, and blogs were seen as units within a new internet community, a textual form of society. When comment boxes appeared in the early 2000s, these took the social aspect further. At this point I tried to join in; one of my misguided attempts to belong. I converted this diary from the raw HTML text it had been, and moved it onto the fun and shiny LiveJournal platform. People could comment on my entries, and did. I felt Part of the Gang. I was a blogger.

But I soon disliked the way comments became an expected part of the reading experience.  Of course people should be free to discuss an entry, but did it have to be in the same place? For better or worse, my style doesn’t work as part of an interactive experience. It’s too stand-offish, too aloof, too wary. In this sense, I suppose I am more of a traditional diarist rather than a blogger. I try to write to step out of the noise, not to join in.

* * *

Monday 8th February 2016.

I’m reading Eternal Troubadour, an extensive new biography of Tiny Tim, the dandyish American ukulele-playing singer, whose single ‘Tip-toe Thru’ The Tulips With Me’ became a huge novelty hit in 1968. I can’t help peppering the margins with exclamation marks: such are the unexpected anecdotes and revelations. Given the wealth of recent discussion about Bowie, it’s fascinating to note that Tiny Tim was often described as ‘camp rock’, a term that was soon applied to Bowie. I’m surprised to discover that the phrase ‘glam rock’ rarely appears in a magazine special on 1972: The Year In Rock, as culled from the archives of NME and Melody Maker. Presumably it came later. In 1972, artists like Bowie, Lou Reed and Alice Cooper are all questioned about the nature of ‘camp’ in their performances. The implication is that they may not ‘mean it’ when they perform – an accusation that Bowie is happy to confirm with his Ziggy Stardust persona.

Tiny Tim, however, did indeed ‘mean it’. He couldn’t help it: he was the same offstage as well as on. According to the book, his widow thinks he had a touch of autism. This made him difficult to work with yet endearingly honest. He had long hair before the Beatles, wore make-up before Bowie, and possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of American popular song, from wax cylinders onwards. A man of childlike gestures, dandyish affectations, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, and some startling ideas about career moves, such as his late 70s attempt to appear in a porn film.

The book also states that David Bowie was ‘in the crowd’ for a Tiny Tim appearance at the London Palladium, 30th November 1969. This is a slight error: Bowie was actually on the same bill. There’s photos of them on the web standing in the same line after the show, waiting to shake hands with Princess Margaret. In one, Tiny is showing the Princess his shopping bag, which he carried everywhere, even on stage.

More camp connections: Bowie and Tiny Tim both covered Biff Rose’s ‘Fill Your Heart’, and both duetted with Bing Crosby on TV. Crosby to Tiny: ‘Boy, you could throw a Labrador through that vibrato of yours.’

* * *

Tuesday 9th February 2016.

To Printspace in Kingsland Road, a printing shop with its own gallery. It’s hosting a photography exhibition: Lost In Music, a huge collection of images from four decades of club culture, across the whole spectrum of music. I recognise some of the faces from my own past, at London clubs like Nag Nag Nag, Kash Point and Trash. Senay S has been to it the week before, and tells me I’m in it too, as seen at Trash in the early 2000s. So naturally I make the pilgrimage. But by the time I visit, the display with me in has been moved for reasons of space. There’s a lesson here about vanity, and about the past never hanging around long enough. Still, Senay took a photo when she went:

From www.lostinmusic.online/ (thanks to Senay Sargut)

* * *

Wednesday 10th February 2016.

I meet Mum at the British Library, after which we go for drinks at the Victorian Gothic bar next door, the Gilbert Scott. Mum has just been featured in her own magazine special, a supplement that comes with the current issue of Today’s Quilter. ‘Lynne Edwards MBE: 40 Years of Fabric, Quilts and Classes!’

* * *

Friday 12th February 2016. First essay back from the MA course: 73, which is a Distinction. Interesting that MA grades aren’t Firsts, Seconds or Thirds but Distinction (70 or above), Merit (60-69) or Pass (50-59). Same numbers, different names.

It’s the best mark I could have hoped for. A good start, but with room for improvement. The tutor feedback says I need to work more on engaging with theoretical works. I also seem to have (again) cut things out which I thought could be taken as read. I killed the wrong darlings. Must remember that it’s better to bash the reader over the head several times with one point, than it is to tease with a whole range. Variety is not necessarily the spice of essays.

Sunday 24th January 2016.

I am on something of a Gore Vidal tip, after watching Best of Enemies for the third time. Am delighted to find there’s another documentary on Netflix, United States of Amnesia, entirely about Mr Vidal’s life. I don’t always agree with his relentless cynicism – he even finds something negative to say about the election of Obama. But his wit and style is a delight. Vidal’s utterations on chat shows contain epigrams worthy of Wilde:

TV interviewer (on Vidal’s running for a Democrat candidacy in 1982): Did you like that experience? All the hand shaking?

Gore Vidal: Oh yes. I love that. I like crowds. I have depths of insincerity as yet unplumbed.

* * *

Sitting in the Barbican Cinema Café this evening, I am recognised from the I Am Dandy book. This time it’s by one of the other dandies within its pages: the pristinely moustachioed Johnny Vercoutre, there to see The Revenant (‘It’s very Boys’ Own,’ I tell him).

Getting out the dandy book at home, I see he’s on page 238. I’m on page 42, looking rather otherworldly in my chalk white suit. There’s whiteness around me too: the picture was taken in a snow-covered Parkland Walk, here in Highgate. Being a Douglas Adams fan, I can’t help feeling pleased by my page number’s association with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Here, 42 means the answer to life, the universe, and Highgate dandyism.

Which Hitchhiker’s character do I most resemble? I admit to having Marvin the Paranoid Android moments. I recently caught myself grumbling about my inability to turn a high IQ (well, 141) into a decent income, before realising that this was all too close to Marvin’s catchphrase: ‘Here I am, brain the size of a planet…’ Mustn’t be a Marvin. He moans about his health too: ‘And me with this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side.’

Of course, Marvin’s saving grace is that his depression manifests as a form of amiability, much like Eeyore’s does in Winnie the Pooh. Huggable depressives. In the film version of Hitchhiker’s, Marvin’s voice was perfectly cast in the form of Alan Rickman, who died the other day. He was an actor I was lucky enough to see on stage in the 80s, at the Barbican in fact. Back then he played another great huggable depressive – Jacques in As You Like It.  I don’t know if a recording exists of Mr Rickman doing the ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech, but given his voice was so memorable, it’s easy to imagine it.

There’s a further Rickman connection here: one of his best films, Truly Madly Deeply, is set in Highgate. In one scene Juliet Stevenson walks out of Highgate Tube station, very close to where the I Am Dandy photo was taken.

* * *

Monday 25th January 2016.

Am finally exhausted with reading commentary pieces on David Bowie. The more original and personal pieces aside, the bandwagon is rather showing its wheels, often adding little more than affirming Bowie’s obvious worth. In some cases, the facts are not even checked (the BBC website seems to think Bowie acted in the film Cat People, instead of providing the theme song). What I’m not exhausted with is the man himself: the actual music and concert footage. I rewatch the superb BBC documentary, Five Years. Rick Wakeman is amusing about his piano part on Life on Mars, which he recreates on a keyboard for the cameras. He demonstrates the cleverness of the key changes, while admitting having not played it for decades. ‘It’s a joy to perform.’ He pauses. ‘I must go home and learn it properly.’

Shanthi S points out to me how Bowie in drag (as seen in the ‘Boys Keep Swinging’ vid) rather resembles Billie Whitelaw, she of Samuel Beckett fame. Indeed, it’s a shame Bowie never acted in a Beckett play himself: he’d have been perfect.

* * *

Thursday 28th January 2016.

MA class tonight: Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour. An environmentally-themed novel, with lots of detail about working class farm life in the Appalachians. Some Hardy-esque elements: strong female characters with Biblical names, dreaming of affairs amid the sheep-shearing. Less Hardy-like are the references to the internet and Google, though the protagonist is too poor to have her own computer, despite being a twenty-something American in 2010. There’s a wry scene in which an environmental campaigner suggests the heroine cuts down on her carbon footprint by taking fewer flights. She and her husband have yet to travel outside of the state. It’s a neat illustration of media solipsism – the way one forgets how plenty of people in the US (and indeed the UK) still have none of the technological convenience enjoyed by the majority.

I look up the latest figures for adults without internet access. It’s 11% in the UK (6 million people), 15% in the US (47 million). It’s one reason why public libraries are still essential, with their free internet terminals.

Sometimes, though, such utterly offline lives might be enviable. I watch a programme tonight on internet abuse, ‘Troll Hunters’. Various recipients of malicious Twitter messages are shown tracking down their antagonists, then confronting them in person. What’s unexpected is the way one 40-something working-class man – his face blurred – is utterly unrepentant about his behaviour. He even claims a kind of moral defence. The people he attacks, he says, like the former MP Louise Mensch, are far more powerful than he is, so they need taking down a peg or two. ‘It’s all about destroying authority… The world owes me. If they block me, I move onto someone else.’

Certainly the programme touches on one unassailable truth about the appeal of trolling. It’s about wanting to feel powerful.

* * *

Friday 29th January 2016.

Another phone call from someone claiming to be from ‘the technical department of Windows’. They want to provide remote access to my computer so they can deal with ‘hacking’. Apart from anything else, the people behind these obvious scams don’t seem to realise that Windows is a product, not a company. This one hangs up at the slightest challenge.

Sunday 10th January 2016.

Sometime during the late 90s, when Orlando were on tour. A catcall from a schoolchild, in my direction: ‘Is that… David Bowie?’

(Answer: Sort of…)

Today, David Bowie dies.

I was going to start this week’s diary with an explanation of a term I used last week – ‘queer’. One reader asked what exactly I meant by this, given it’s such a slippery term. ‘Do you mean gay?’ Well, yes and no.

‘Queer’ used to be a pejorative insult for gay people, from the early 20th century up to the 1980s. Then it started to be reclaimed by gay rights activists as a positive term, particularly as a more defiant and politicised form of identity.

Today, though, I have to admit it’s more complicated. I tend to use it to mean a look or attitude that plays with conventions of gender and sexuality, but also with an anti-authoritarian air. I forget, though, that some people (particularly young people) now identify with ‘queer’ as a separate identity away from gay, hence the use of ‘Q’ in the community acronym of ‘LGBTQI’ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex).

In academia, there’s also queer studies and queer theory. These tend to denote a certain troubling of conventions in society by non-heterosexual activity, a scrutinising of what ‘normal’ means – ‘to queer’ as a verb. ‘Queer’ in this sense is a spanner in the works, a critique, a pointing at the core from the margins. It is the moment in The Wizard of Oz where the man behind the curtain is paid attention to.

All this has a direct connection to David Bowie. He is a good example of someone who was not necessarily gay but who definitely could be read as a queer icon. His lasting relationships may have been with women, and he was more or less content with his gender, but he very much put out and amplified queer signals in his work, and these were of incalculable importance. To those looking out for such signals, they were nothing less than a lifeline. Whether it was the dress he wore on the cover of The Man Who Sold The World, his use of androgynous make-up and homoerotic poses in his Ziggy Stardust phase, or his dragging up in the Boys Keep Swinging video, Bowie was queer enough.

He could be explicit about the q-word in his lyrics, too. There’s the following line from his 1993 single ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’, written for the BBC TV adaptation of the Hanif Kureishi novel. I’ve only now realised that it also nods to the Lou Reed song ‘Vicious’:

Screaming along in South London / Vicious but ready to learn / Sometimes I fear that the whole world is queer / Sometimes but always in vain

* * *

This week, the wealth of coverage of Bowie’s death provoked a couple of grumpy letters in the press. Complaining about an excess of Bowie articles in the Independent, one reader wrote, ‘Anybody under 40 probably didn’t know who he was’. Another saw little value in ‘pages of nostalgic outpourings about musicians… I suggest your editors stop trying to relive their youth.’

I find this fascinating, partly as a study of sheer solipsism, but also as a gauge of the way culture and celebrity are subjective. To whom does Bowie’s death matter, and can this be turned into a proportionate amount of news coverage? What have people heard of? What do people care about? To quote ‘Hello Spaceboy’, ‘it’s confusing these days…‘

Certainly, the disgruntled letters are disproved by the content of the articles. True, there’s been lots of greying nostalgia (which I have no problem with), but there’s also been tributes by young musicians and artists too. Among those who cite him as an influence are La Roux, Grimes, Janelle Monae, Florence Welch, and Desiree Akhavan, the thirty-year-old director of Appropriate Behaviour, my favourite film of last year. She says, ‘I listen to ‘Modern Love’ at least once a day. It happens to contain the secret to successful filmmaking: ‘It’s not really work / It’s just the power to charm.”

As it is, I don’t think the media coverage has been excessive at all. At least, not compared to the last Royal Baby.

Besides, music connects directly to the emotions. So when a popular musician dies, there’s obviously going to be lots of emotional expression. Why is that hard to understand?

As for my own favourite Bowie songs, there’s the aforementioned ‘Buddha of Suburbia’, released at a time when he was considered to be artistically treading water. I remember it sounded then, as it does now, as vintage Bowie, pure and simple.

I adore Hunky Dory, particularly ‘Changes’, and ‘Queen Bitch’. I love his Plastic Soul phase, especially ‘Young Americans’. From his 80s commercial pop phase, I’m fond of ‘Modern Love’ and ‘Absolute Beginners’. I love the way the former is used in the 2012 film Frances Ha, while Greta Gerwig is running through New York (itself an homage to the 80s film Mauvais Sang).

Though I’ve never tried to explicitly resemble him aesthetically, I know there’s a subconscious influence at work. I bleach my hair. I have a dandyish, Modern Weirdo look. Ergo, I owe a debt to Bowie.

It’s also important to remember he wasn’t perfect. Despite some of the more messianic pronouncements this week, Bowie was never a sacred cow. His late 80s albums and Tin Machine records (late 80s to early 90s) were given an extremely hard time by the critics. Bowie survived as long as he did by being a first-rate manipulator of as much information as possible – as evidenced in the way he kept his illness secret. He couldn’t stop the bad reviews, but I noticed how he played down his flops in the authorised V&A David Bowie Is… show.

Something else, then: he welcomed and encouraged praise. He liked being a star, and took himself seriously as one. What’s commendable is that this is a more honest trait than the false modesty which society usually requires (Oscar Wilde was another expert, Lady Gaga is a current example). Make no mistake: most people who make art do want praise from as many people as possible. It’s not selling out or vain, it’s basic self-validation.

What isn’t in question is his cultural influence. If the message of the Beatles was ‘all you need is love’, Bowie’s was ‘all you need is curiosity’. Another line from ‘Modern Love’ springs to mind: ‘But I try…’

He tried so many different styles and looks and genres and personae, and kept trying. Why did he do all the acting roles too (some of which, again, were better than others)? Why is he there at the beginning of The Snowman, introducing a children’s cartoon? Because he liked to try things. He tried. That’s inspiring in itself. I rather liked him.

* * *

Monday 11th January 2016.

I’m reading Lorrie Moore’s A Gate At The Stairs (2009). It’s a witty post 9/11 tale of Midwest America. Some favourite lines:

‘Death would come to me – I knew this from reading British poetry’.

‘Having no dog in the race doesn’t keep people from having extremely large cats’.

* * *

Thursday 14th January 2016.

MA class tonight, on The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I’m intrigued that it’s dedicated to the son McCarthy had at the age of 65, and so comes with an older parent’s fear of not being able to see their offspring reach adult life. The Road is so relentlessly bleak and grim that I can’t say I enjoy it, though I do admire it.

* * *

Friday 15th January 2016.

To the Maritime Museum in Greenwich for the exhibition Samuel Pepys – Plague, Fire, Revolution. The one exhibit it doesn’t have is Pepys’s actual diary, due to his will forbidding it from leaving his old Cambridge college. But what is does have is a richness of everything else from the era: animated presentations of the Great Fire, excerpts from the diary on touchscreens, Charles 1st’s ornate gloves from the day of his execution, a pair of green glass spectacles Pepys wore when he thought the diary was making him blind (it wasn’t), and the shorthand codebook he used to encrypt his writing. When a Victorian scholar came to decode the diaries for the first time, he spent years trying to work out the code from scratch. It’s hard to imagine how he must have felt when he finally noticed the codebook was there too, just inches away on a different shelf.

Something I have in common with Pepys, and indeed Joe Orton and Kenneth Williams: not only diarists of London, but of spells in Tangier too.

* * *

Afterwards, dinner with my brother Tom and friends. We try the new Jamie Oliver restaurant in Nelson Road. Quite pleasant, food agreeable. The restaurant has the feel of a converted warehouse: spacious, high-ceilings, exposed brickwork, plenty of room. Perhaps a little too spacious for midwinter, though, and many of the diners keep their coats on.

Modern eating. My veggie burger arrives on a wooden chopping board, with the chips in a small tin pail.

Tom’s friend E teaches photography to schoolchildren in East London. ‘It’s hard to get them to do any work. We’re trying to get the examination board to accept selfies.’ This is not meant as a joke.

Taking selfies and using social media is a form of work, though: the work one must do in order to keep one’s friends. The problem for teens is when the need to fit in eclipses the need to do well at school. The technology involved may be new, but the dilemma is eternal.

Monday 21st December 2015.

Mum comes up to London for the day, and we do our own metropolitan version of the family get-together. First: to Somerset House Ice Rink, now a favourite symbol of Christmas in twenty-first-century London, as immortalised in the opening of Love Actually. Unfortunately today it rains like mad, and the ice rink is waterlogged. But this doesn’t stop the skaters, and they carry on gliding through the puddles.

We stick around at Somerset House to have a look at the current exhibitions. I’m delighted to see there’s a Tintin show, Tintin – Herge’s Masterpiece. Every inch of the gallery walls and windows are covered in Tintin illustrations. There are detailed scale models of scenes from the books, including a dolls’ house of Marlinspike Hall.

Then to the Courtauld next door, for Soaring Flight – Peter Lanyon’s Gliding Paintings, and Bridget Riley – Learning From Seurat. I always wonder how Ms Riley managed to create her 60s works without getting dizzy. A mere five minutes of her op-art canvases unsteadies my sense of reality. Though admittedly, that doesn’t take much.

We revisit some of the Courtauld’s permanent collection too. Paintings as old friends, world-famous masterpieces, right here by the ice rink. The Van Gogh self-portrait, Manet’s barmaid, Modigliani’s nude, Monet and Cezanne’s landscapes, Degas’s dancers.

Lunch in the top floor café of Foyle’s in Charing Cross Road, then a spot of book browsing, moving onto in Waterstone’s in Trafalgar Square. We’re impressed by their Book of the Year, The Fox and the Star by Coralie Bickford-Smith. It’s a beautiful children’s picture book, printed in blue cloth hardback on thick, high quality paper. Ms Bickford-Smith is a book designer by profession – her work can be seen in the Penguin English Classics range. Hers is an ornate and symmetrical  style that nods to William Morris’s woodcut designs for the Kelmscott Press, but also to Jan PieÅ„kowski’s more recent silhouettes. With The Fox and The Star Ms Bickford-Smith not only writes the original story, but illustrates, designs and typesets the finished object as well. Even the credits for the font and the paper stock have a touch of the exotic: ‘set in Agfa Wile 12pt/15pt, printed on Munken Pure Rough’.

Waterstones are also making a small point here about the current role of print books in a digital age. 2015 saw them withdraw Kindles from their shops, while the sales of print books rose for the first time since the rise of ebooks. Significantly, although The Fox and the Star has clearly been produced using the latest digital design and publishing programs, the end product is entirely physical; there is no ebook edition. In this sense, print is the ultimate upgrade of digital. The page is a screen that finally stops moving, and the viewer can finally relax.

Ms Bickford-Smith’s story is a simple fable for small children, about a young fox coping with the loss of his friend, the Star. But it lends itself to wider readings of grief and personal bereavement, particularly when one learns that the author was inspired by the loss of her mother at an early age.

Mum treats me to a copy. Later, I peruse the pages at home. My own reading of the tale is inevitably bound up with thoughts of Dad, and I get a little weepy.

By 4pm on this Shortest Day, it’s completely dark. We take a busy Clipper boat up the Thames to Greenwich, taking in the lights of the city. Then a further ride, this time on the Emirates Air Line cable car link, which spans the Thames from the O2 Dome in Greenwich to the Royal Victoria Dock in Newham. It turns out to be easy to just turn up and get a whole car to yourself. No queues; in fact, barely anyone on the thing at all. The moment when the car first ascends from the terminus and soars high above the water is the most heartstopping one. It swings a little in the wind, which is unnerving, but only a little.

We take the DLR and tube to Liverpool Street, where I see Mum off on the train to Suffolk.

* * *

Thursday 24th December 2015.

Adventures in youth slang. In a branch of Pret today, a young man at the table next to me says his companion, ‘I find that so jokes‘. As in funny. I knew about this usage from the internet, but thought it was confined to the enclaves of cyberspace. This is the first time I’ve heard it said aloud. But it’s still yet to appear on Gardener’s Question Time, I think.

I attempt to see a film in the evening with Shanthi S, but we’re thwarted by her news website employers, who force her to work late. She has to work on Christmas Day as well, via her computer at home. The news must not rest.

All the cinemas in London seem to shut down completely on Xmas Eve after 6pm, but we have a pleasant time with cocktails and food at the Dean Street Townhouse in Soho (see previous entry).

Shanthi reminds me how in New York it’s common for people to go to the cinema on Christmas Day, often combining it with Chinese food. There’s nothing like that in London. Many pubs, restaurants and convenience stores are open, but certainly no cinemas. The transport system still shuts down completely on December 25th – the only day in the year when it does. Even in 2015, London is essentially a Christian city.

* * *

Friday 25th December 2015.

Christmas Day, spent in Highgate. Rainy, windy, cold and overcast. I phone Mum for a chat in the morning, then brave the rain to walk up to Waterlow Park, for my traditional feeding of the ducks.

The rest of the day is spent in my room, hacking away at the essay, while swigging from a large bottle of Baileys. My Christmas lunch is a microwaved carton of ‘White Christmas’ soup from the New Covent Garden Soup Co. Plus Quorn cocktail sausages. And lashings of back pain (currently seeing a GP, trying treatments).

Still, I’m grateful not to be one of the thousands in Northern England affected by devastating floods. I think about how we’re now getting close to 2019, the year that Blade Runner is meant to be set in. A film in which the future means constant heavy rain.

* * *

Saturday 26th December 2015.

I upload a diary entry that was meant to be a few words, apologising for not writing a diary entry. It ends up ballooning into 1500 words.

Evening: to the Curzon Soho, a cinema that proudly advertises itself in its window posters as a ‘Force Free Zone’. Its three screens are showing a diverse programme of films, none of which are the new Star Wars. There’s Carol, Grandma, the Peggy Guggenheim documentary, The Lobster (still), and Ice and the Sky. I plump for Grandma, a low-key indie road movie in the vein of Little Miss Sunshine and The Daytrippers.

Grandma stars Lily Tomlin as a grumpy lesbian poet (in her first leading role since 1988’s Big Business with Bette Midler!). She drives her pregnant granddaughter around various locations in order to raise the money for an abortion. It’s a simple conceit, but full of wit, poignancy and thoughtful characterisation; with jokes that rely on the audience knowing who Simone De Beauvoir is.

* * *

Monday 28th December 2015.

Evening: To Vout-O-Reenee’s for Atalanta Kernick’s birthday drinks. Lots of queer, dapper ladies, and women from the 90s London music scene. I chat to the writer Ngaire-Ruth, Debbie Smith (AK’s partner), Harris (one of the Drakes, a performance group of besuited butch women), and also to Ms Shir from Israel (which she refers to as ‘the land of blood and honey’). Plus Alex, the (straight male) drummer from the band Nightnurse. He’s now in Department S, of ‘Is Vic There’ fame. I discover that he also pops up in Shaun of the Dead, as a zombie on a daytime TV talk show. Indulge myself with the bar’s ‘Dunkin Donut’ cocktail: milk, cacao, Kahlua.

* * *

Thursday 31st December 2015.

New Year’s Eve. I stay in by myself. Again, by choice. Again, to work on the essay. I discover the true sound of NYE in residential city streets: the constant revving of pizza delivery mopeds.

In the essay, I suddenly find myself using the word ‘ekphrastically’. At which point it’s midnight, so I take a break, open the Prosecco, and watch the fireworks at the London Eye, via the internet. Far better than being surrounded by drunken people who don’t know what they’re doing. Here’s to choice, difference, and 2016.

* * *

Sunday 3rd January 2016.

I finish the essay – with a fifth draft – and deliver it online. Celebrate by watching the new Sherlock film, the Victorian one, which is superb. Also enjoy Charlie Brooker’s 2015 Wipe, his satirical review of the year. It ends on a pessimistic note, but I take comfort from the knowledge that Mr Brooker’s style of ‘loner grumpiness’ is now a necessary fabrication. It’s quite funny that he has to keep up the image of the angry, lonely outsider shouting at the TV from his sofa, when these days he is married and has children, and indeed a successful TV career. I worry, though, about my own grumpiness. I’m heading into a new year, still without any sense of a ‘career’, still very much feeling like a outsider. And yet Ms Shanthi said to me this week, when I was apparently acting in a bar like I owned the place, ‘You’re more like Hugh Grant than you think!’

* * *

Tuesday 4th January 2016.

To the ICA cinema to see Joy, the new David O. Russell film, starring Jennifer Lawrence. As was the case with Mr Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, it also has Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro, and the same mix of quirky plot details with straightforward realism. The quirky plot in this instance being the tale of a young woman who invents a self-rinsing mop. There’s a little of Frank Capra’s ‘American inspiration’ style in this particular mix, though, and thanks to Ms Lawrence being so utterly likeable, it all works. Indeed, I come out of the cinema with a real sense of warmth. It’s also a nice companion to Carol, being another Christmas tale of a woman finding out who she really is.

* * *

Thursday 7th January 2016.

First class of the MA’s spring term. I’m now on a module that’s specifically about contemporary US fiction. This week we study Paradise (1997) by Toni Morrison. It uses elements of mystery and magical realism, much like Beloved, but with a much larger cast of characters. As a result, the reader has to do a fair amount of work just to work out what’s going on – the narrative can switch perspectives and even historical eras, halfway through a sentence.

* * *

Friday 8th January 2016.

I finish reading Diana Athill’s Alive Alive Oh! Some new words: she calls Highgate ‘a bosky place’ (leafy, wooded). As a child she wore ‘jemimas’ – overshoes of waterproofed felt. ‘Galoshes were considered sissy, whereas jemimas, although they looked much more old-womanish, were perfectly acceptable on manly feet’.

Also, she expresses the unexpected luxury of having to use a wheelchair, especially when visiting art exhibitions. ‘The crowd falls away on either side like the Red Sea, and there you are, lounging in front of the painting of your choice in perfect comfort’.

On life advice at 98: ‘Avoid romanticism and abhor possessiveness’. And on her innate sense of not wanting to be a mother: ‘I remember thinking when looking at a small baby, ‘I’d much rather pick up a puppy.”

* * *

I look back over the previous year’s diaries. I think I saw more films than ever – it must be close to a hundred. In which case, here’s some Favourite Things of 2015. I recommend them all.

FILMS OF 2015 (FICTION):

1. Appropriate Behaviour
2. Birdman
3. Carol
4. The Falling
5. Inside Out
6. The Lady In The Van
7. London Road
8. Mistress America
9. White Bird In A Blizzard
10. The Lobster

FILMS (DOCUMENTARIES):

1. Best of Enemies (Gore Vidal)
2. Do I Sound Gay? (campness as identity)
3. Beyond Clueless (US high school films)
4. My Secret World (Sarah Records)
5. Regarding Susan Sontag

NOVELS:

1. St Aubyn – Lost For Words
2. DeLillo – White Noise
3. Carter – Passion of New Eve
4. Abrams & Dorst – S
5. Hamid – Reluctant Fundamentalist

Saturday 12th December 2015.

I watch the new film documentary Future Shock! – The Story of 2000AD, via iTunes’s streaming service. It’s paid and official, but it’s still a format I access with reluctance. I’d seek out a London cinema screening, but there doesn’t seem to be one.

I was an avid reader of 2000AD comic during its first ten years, though Dad initially ordered it from the village newsagent for himself. The first issue in 1977 resurrected his 1950s comic hero, Dan Dare, and came with a free Space Frisbee. Once I was old enough to share his copy, I enjoyed the highly imaginative artwork, and the witty left-leaning satire of stories like Judge Dredd. This was all instinctive, though: I was too young to really know what left-wing meant, or indeed what satire meant. As far as I was concerned they were just entertaining and exciting tales, close in tone to my beloved Tintin and Asterix, and an anecdote to American superheroes and Star Wars. I had already filed away the latter under Things Other Boys Like (and I still do).

I remember the Judge Dredd saga that naughtily used mutant versions of Ronald McDonald and the Jolly Green Giant as villains. As a result, the comic found itself on the sticky end of legal action. Watching this film, I finally discover what sort of people were behind it such childhood pleasures. Most of the comic creators interviewed are gentle and soft-spoken gentlemen of a certain vintage. One is Alan Grant, who lived in a Suffolk village and was a friend of Dad’s for a while. I visited Mr Grant myself as a teen, and remember him lending me a book on quantum theory, In Search Of Schrodinger’s Cat.

In the film, the original editor of 2000AD, Pat Mills, comes across as a veritable force of nature. Despite his years he is still full of energy, still ranting away against authority as if it were 1977. The story goes that the comic’s publishers wanted a new sci-fi weekly to cash in on the late 70s success of Star Wars. Mills, meanwhile, wanted to give Britain’s kids action-packed adventures of rebellion and anti-fascism, but had fallen foul of the censor with his previous comic, Action. For him, science fiction was a compromise. As with much sci-fi, the comic used ideas about the future to say things about the present day.

I think it took me a while to realise that Judge Dredd was a satire on fascism. Despite this, the helmet-wearing Dredd was still a character you were meant to root for, in the same way you were meant to root for vigilante anti-heroes like Dirty Harry. I stopped reading the comic in the late 80s, when it became increasingly violent – or so I thought. This documentary points out that it was always rather gory from the start. So perhaps it was me who changed. I certainly missed out on a phase in the 1990s where 2000AD apparently became so laddish, it published adverts featuring women pulling dim expressions, with the caption, ‘2000AD. She doesn’t get it. She never will.’ The editor responsible appears in the new film, and says he now regrets those adverts.

* * *

Monday 14th December 2015.

Last session for the term with my college dyspraxia mentor, Katie W, at Senate House. I admit to her that I’ve let procrastination creep into my essay schedule, though some of it is not my fault. The freelance review took longer than I thought, because I had to revise it for that particular readership. It’s useful to remember that a review for a magazine is also a negotiation, between an opinion of the material, and an idea of what the reader wants.

I wonder what’s behind my struggling with this new essay. Possibly because it’s the first essay of the MA, so it’s all new. Another theory is it’s to do with my creeping uncertainty about whether I’m doing the right thing with the MA. Yet the moment I began, I felt a surge of relief that I hadn’t taken a year out. To have left it for over a year would have been even harder. So at least that was a right decision. And yet the reluctance this week is overwhelming.

I’m not drastically behind: just a couple of days. But I need to pick up the slack over the Xmas & New Year break. The deadline is January 4th, the word count 5000. I’ve done about 3000 words this week. It’s a mess, but a mess is still a start.

In terms of research, I have a huge pile of handwritten notes, with further piles of books on the floor, and a few JSTOR e-texts on my computer. Yet the worry remains that I’ve missed some perfect book out there. How do proper writers get over the worry that they’ve missed something? Sheer ego? No: sheer deadline.

* * *

Tuesday 15th December 2015.

I’m writing a letter back to an American reader. She asks me if I have a best friend. By which she means, someone to whom I pour out the cares of a hard day, perhaps over the phone. I tell her there is no such person. One reason is that I’m naturally aloof and detached (there might some element of dyspraxia in this mix). Another is that I’m grateful to have a range of friends and acquaintances, and I like to see as many of them as I can. That is, when I’m not feeling so aloof. But it could also be that I just don’t feel confident at making phone calls, not if it’s purely for a chat (my mother being the only exception). I prefer full presence company, or messages.

* * *

Thursday 17th December 2015.

To the Viktor Wynd Museum in Hackney, to give one more guided tour. A huge amount of people – it’s remarkable how they seek it out. Quite pleased that I can update my speech on the Mervyn Peake display, with the news that a new film of Gormenghast is in the pipeline, scripted by Neil Gaiman. Barnabas, who works behind the bar, recognises the Caravaggio painting on the cover of my TLS. He turns out to be something of a Caravaggio fan, and tells me of the masterpieces he sought out in the churches of Rome. Many of them are extremely dimly lit, even allowing for the whole chiaroscuro effect.

* * *

In the evening, I sit in the Barbican Cinema Café and write out my Christmas cards. I try to cut the list down to the people I’ve felt particularly fond of or grateful to within the last year. That great phrase that used to mark the excommunication of a friend, ‘they’re no longer on my Christmas list’ – how anachronistic that now is. Many people no longer bother with cards full stop. This may be because they count their affection in pixels, or because of the pricy postage costs, or because of the waste (though it’s not as if cards are difficult to recycle). I send cards because it makes me happy: that should be reason enough.

* * *

Friday 18th December 2015.

Petulance in the newsagent. I decide not to buy one particular magazine purely because it carries a writer who unfollowed me on Twitter.

Private Eye‘s Christmas issue has its usual ‘log rolling’ feature at the back. This is where they examine all the Books of the Year articles in British newspapers, and highlight how many of them appear to be the brazen returning of favours. Either that, or friends cosily scratching each other’s hardbacks. I always thought this overlooks how some friendships are often forged because of an admiration for a body of work. Still, I do enjoy the description of male Elena Ferrante fans, unfair as it is: ‘like sweaty chaps sneaking into the back of a zumba class for yummy mummies’.

* * *

Saturday 5th December 2015.

In Bloomsbury, I stumble upon the Boy Story exhibition by Magnus Arrevad. Very much in the tradition of Robert Mapplethorpe – a mix of queer sensuality, vulnerability, and humour. Large black and white portraits of male cabaret performers, including drag queens, singers (including Dusty Limits), and ‘boylesque’ dancers. The subjects are often caught backstage in states of undress, or half-dress. Lots of mirrors in dressing rooms, or in makeshift dressing rooms, or in toilets. In one image, a group of drag queens are discovered standing at urinals.

This is all at 5 Willoughby Street, near the British Museum.

* * *

Monday 7th December 2015.

To Birkbeck for the last class in the first term of the MA. That time already. I give a presentation on the 5000 word essay I’ve got to write over Christmas. It’s on materiality and the role of the printed book in the contemporary age. I’m especially fascinated by the reports in Paris, where copies of Hemingway’s Moveable Feast were used as funeral offerings, in street memorials to the recent attacks. It’s not just the meaning of the book itself – Hemingway’s celebration of Paris as a playground – but the fact that paper books can have this role, and e-books cannot. Like wreaths and bouquets, paper books are plant material given meaning by humans. And then they are given further meaning on top, when used symbolically like this. Books as the body, touching bodies.

* * *

Tuesday 8th December 2015.

Find myself singing ‘You Ain’t No Muslim Bruv’ to the tune of Cohen’s ‘Ain’t No Cure For Love’.

* * *

Wednesday 9th December 2015.

I am writing a review of the Sarah Records book by Michael White, Popkiss, for The Wire magazine. What stands out from that late 80s and early 90s indie scene now are the things which have vanished for good. Not the music, as that’s all on YouTube and iTunes. It’s the exchanging of letters and cassettes and fanzines – the social media of their day. A whole chapter of White’s book is devoted to the letter-writing activity of Clare Wadd and Matt Haynes, the sole staffers of the Sarah label. In addition to providing idiosyncratic typed sleeve notes to each release, being their potted memoirs or manifestos or other musings, they would send ‘surprisingly lengthy’ handwritten missives in response to mere mail order enquiries, thus bonding with their audience. In the book, Clare W says she once attempted to write a hundred letters in a day.

Also intriguing is Clare’s comment regarding one or two of the songs by Bobby Wratten, as recorded by his band The Field Mice. According to the book, these were not only autobiographical, but concerned his romantic relationship with Clare. The problem with being immortalised in song, she says, is that ‘Their truth stands, and your truth is lost’.

* * *

Thursday 9th December 2015.

Thoughts on the meaning of hype. The new Stars Wars film has reached saturation point in its coverage. There was a week in the late 80s when all three music papers – NME, Melody Maker and Sounds – accidentally had the same band on the front cover: U2. They had just become the biggest band in the world, and so their new album, Rattle and Hum, was a big event. At the same time, each publication had to present itself as something different to the others. They had to remind people that other music was available too (I remember that the late 80s Melody Maker was always a little more Goth-friendly than the NME).

On this occasion, the urgency to jump on the U2 bandwagon was so strong, all three papers inadvertently ran with the band on the cover. To make matters worse, it was U2 in their most earnest, messianic, cowboys of rock phase. Even U2 would soon find that phase of theirs irksome. Years later I remember one of the papers remarking how that hat-trick of covers was a low point. It looked too craven, too desperate.

So that’s what the media looks like this week, with Star Wars. Trying so hard to keep up the hype, it feels insincere, a denial of polyphony.  For the last few weeks I had been half-curious about going to see the new film. Now it feels redundant. It would be like going to see a Coldplay concert. If you believe in the redistribution of wealth, then you have to apply that very same principle to the billionaires of attention. So the stunt-double analogy kicks in. Other people will go, so you don’t have to. Doubtless I’ll see the film when the fuss dies down.

I think it was Darren Hayman, the singer of Hefner, who said he deliberately put off listening to the Strokes’ debut album for years, for similar reasons. Art is more enjoyable when the gallery is less crowded.

This ties in with the Sarah Records book too. No one could call Star Wars ‘my secret world’.

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Friday 4th December 2015.

To the Museum of London for the exhibition The Crime Museum Uncovered. This is a selection of exhibits from the so-called Black Museum, as in the London Metropolitan Police’s private collection of criminal memorabilia, from the 1870s to the present. The collection is really intended to educate the British police’s own officers, and has never been fully open to the public before. The Museum of London has a reputation for being educational and thoughtful, and with this show they’ve taken pains to avoid sensationalism. This is no Jack The Ripper Museum, though there are exhibits on that particular case, too (mainly posters appealing for information). The exhibition is brightly lit, and the whole thing feels historical and curious rather than ghoulish. The captions give the bare facts of the crimes: who was caught doing what, with what evidence, and what happened to them as a result.

There’s a strict ban on photography, and a sign points out that the displays on murder stop after 1975, ‘to avoid causing further distress to the victims’. There are, however, a range of exhibits connected with later events, filed under riots and terrorism. The 7/7 attacks of 2005 are represented with some empty peroxide containers found in the bombers’ car, along with reconstructions of the backpacks used. There’s a burnt laptop taken from the jeep that was rammed into Glasgow Airport in 2007. Plus a suitcase packed with nails from the foiled attempt to bomb London’s Tiger Tiger club in the same month. Going back in history, there’s displays on attacks by the IRA and the Angry Brigade. And further back, an 1884 clockwork bomb, courtesy of the Fenians. London is no stranger to terrorism.

Other exhibits are on John Christie, the Great Train Robbers, and The Krays. Ronne Kray’s record card includes the line: ‘eyebrows meet over nose’. There’s a hinged folder ladder that belonged to an 1870s cat burglar. The gun used in the 1840 assassination attempt on Queen Victoria turns out to be tiny. Some of the Victorian sentences shock, of course: one courtroom illustration is of a 22-year-old woman gets 14 months hard labour – for attempting suicide.

The most startling items for me are a set of anthropometric record cards from the 1890s. These record the basic details of each prisoner, along with a photograph. It’s these mug shots that shock: they are of an extraordinary clear quality, as if taken yesterday. On top of that, perhaps because they’re dishevelled and not looking their best, the faces do not seem Victorian either. Just people like us, trapped in a different century. Looking at them, I feel a jolt of pure time travel.

The history of the death penalty in the UK is always engrossing. There’s a business card of a prison hangman, alongside a set of used Newgate Prison nooses. Until 1868, the executions were held in public. People would rent rooms overlooking the scaffold, to get the best view.

What I knew already – but it still fascinates me – is that the death penalty was technically still in place from 1969 right up to 1998, albeit only for three particular crimes. These were: ‘treason’, ‘piracy with violence’, and ‘arson of the Sovereign’s ships’.

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Saturday 28th November 2015.

I spend most of this week in the British Library reading rooms, researching the first essay for the MA. One of the books I order, a late 90s one on electronic literature, comes with a CD-ROM. This confuses some of the BL staff, and they have to ask amongst themselves to find out where such an ancient format can be accessed. The library’s internet computers tend to have no CD slots. Even microfilm is more popular as a resource.

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Monday 30th November 2015.

Evening: MA class on Joe Sacco’s Footnotes In Gaza. It’s a bulky, large format graphic novel, investigating the slaughter of Palestinians during 1956. Quite a heated debate in the seminar, especially when it’s asked if Sacco is preaching to the converted, and can graphic novels work as a valid form of journalism? Funny how Sacco draws himself as more of a caricature than his interviewees: his glasses become blank goggles, even headlights during scenes of darkness. Thus he shows himself inside his own text, but not quite of it.

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Tuesday 1st December 2015.

I’m reading Popkiss, the new book about Sarah Records by Michael White. I have a small walk-on role in the story, as part of the one-off project band, Shelley. Mr White files us under ‘Outliers’, where we are ‘the oddballs of the Sarah scene’. Given the niche appeal of this world, this must make us very outlying and odd indeed. Our EP is, he says generously, ‘one of the best’ releases on the label. However, I wince with guilt at the mention of our running up a large studio bill, incurred out of sheer slowness. Today, I know that this slowness is at least partly down to my dyspraxia, and I am legally entitled to extend my university exam time by 25%. Though I’m grateful for this adjustment, and for having the condition recognised, it never diminishes the feeling of guilt. I should be quicker.

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Wednesday 2nd December 2015.

The Labour MP Hilary Benn makes a celebrated speech in the Commons, arguing in favour of military strikes against ISIS. I’m unconvinced as to its merits. He uses ‘evil’, which is religious rhetoric. And ‘fascist’. Which is Young Ones rhetoric.

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Friday 4th December 2015.

Back to the British Library to take a look at the new Alice in Wonderland exhibition. Thankfully the huge queues seem confined to the weekend, and this afternoon I leisurely take my time around the display cases.  The first case tells the tale of Carroll’s original manuscript. It’s in the form of a handwritten notebook presented to Alice Liddell, the little girl he made up the story for. Alongside it are some of Carroll’s photographs of Ms Liddell and other girls, with his diary from the time recounting (in a very decorative, looping hand) the Oxford boat trip that hosted the tale-telling. Then there’s a letter in the 1920s, by the elderly Ms Liddell, recording her reluctant selling of the manuscript to an American collector. The sequence concludes with a typed note from 1946, representing the notebook’s present owner in a consortium with other US bibliophiles. They are returning it to the British government ‘in recognition of British resistance to Germany in the first years of the war’. I suppose one way of looking at this is to say, thank Hitler for Alice.

The bulk of the exhibition is a selection of the many subsequent Alice books and merchandise, taking in illustrators from Arthur Rackham to Ralph Steadman. There’s a series of 1930s advertising pamphlets by Guinness, plus sundry toys, puzzles and figurines all helping themselves to Carroll’s text. The copyright expired as early as 1907. Alice belongs to everyone.

Most of the book-based Alices on show have long blonde hair, thanks to Tenniel and Disney, though one or two replicate Alice Liddell’s dark bob. There’s also a ‘flapper Alice’ from the 1920s, and a Brownie Alice from the 30s, as in the junior girl guides. Some Alices are older than others: a post-war letter from Graham Greene to Mervyn Peake compliments Peake on being ‘the first person who has been able to illustrate the book satisfactorily since Tenniel’, only to add ‘your Alice is a little bit too much of a gamin.’ From 1902 there’s a political parody by Saki, The Westminster Alice. It’s a link kept evergreen this year when Tony Blair accused Jeremy Corbyn of creating a delusional ‘Alice in Wonderland world’ for Labour.

The Alice I am most surprised by is a version by Salvador Dali, from the 1960s. Here the Caterpillar appears in double form, a realistic rendering next to an abstract splatter of paint. Dali’s Alice, meanwhile, is an inky stick figure with a skipping rope.

Afterwards, I visit the BL’s Alice pop-up shop. It sells all manner of Carroll-themed products – chocolates, calendars, diaries – yet frustratingly, no single postcards. I now wonder if picture postcards are finally on the decline, even as cheap souvenirs of exhibitions. For some reason, they’re more likely to be available in bulky boxes of 100 at a time (eg a series of classic covers of Penguin Books).

Thankfully there’s another gallery a short walk away that does sell postcards of Alice – the Cartoon Museum in Little Russell Street. The current exhibition features Ralph Steadman, too, this time paying tribute not to Carroll but Gillray, the satirical cartoonist of the Romantic age. Here, Gillray’s prints – in startlingly fresh condition – are juxtaposed with the many pastiche cartoons in recent years. Given the tight deadlines for newspaper cartoons, a take on Gillray is always a reliable option. The most parodied image by far is Napoleon and Pitt carving up the ‘plumb-pudding’ of the world. Here, the exhibition shows how the likes of Steve Bell and Martin Rowson have updated this basic template with Blair, Cameron et al in place of the original duo. There’s also an inspired Viz cartoon strip about a Beano-esque rivalry between Gillray and Rowlandson.

I spend the evening with Fenella Hitchcock and Vadim Kosmos in Fontaine’s, an elegant Art Deco cocktail bar which somehow exists in Stoke Newington. I down some very nicely made Brandy Alexanders and find myself discussing the film work of Doug McClure, before staggering onto the Overground train home.

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