Tuesday 9 May 2023. To the Ipswich Job Centre to register as ‘gainfully’ self-employed. I now have a year in which to ‘build my business’ and see if I can make enough from freelance work to live on. This means writing, reviewing, indexing, giving talks, whatever I can turn my funny little hand to. After a year of looking for conventional employment, armed with a newly minted PhD in English and Humanities, the only positions the government could offer me were prison warder or tube train cleaner. I exaggerate, but not by much. These jobs obviously need to be done, but probably not by a middle-aged disciple of Quentin Crisp.
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12 May 2023. My review of the new Sparks album is published in The Wire magazine. I’m pleased to see that the magazine is sold in the WH Smiths at Ipswich station. I’m also pleased that magazines still exist at all, and indeed that Sparks still exist at all, the Mael brothers now in their seventies.
I sit in a café by the newish Ipswich waterfront area. Close by are shiny new university buildings, a dance school, and a new archive, ‘The Fold’, which is a pleasing pun for a repository of manuscripts in a rural town.
The main part of Ipswich, alas, is more unhappy and run down. Local newspapers speak of the area as ‘no-go’. Many shops in the centre are empty and unused, even the Ancient House, which was such a pleasant bookshop when I was a teenager. The others have been turned into a surfeit of charity shops, that ominous symptom of decline. Still, there’s talk of turning these zombie spaces into new housing, which makes sense. As long as it’s housing that people can afford.
Meanwhile, bored teenage boys in black hooded tracksuits loaf on street corners, their signature smell of marijuana announcing them from a distance. Once associated with hippies and liberalism, this scent is now the stink of poverty, pack survival, and abandonment.
And yet the waterfront is full of education, trendy cafes, and creativity. Whatever went right there clearly needs to be extended to the rest of the town. Perhaps local boy turned rich singer Ed Sheeran could step in. He already sponsors the football team.
**
17 May 2023. My Substack newsletter is now up and running, with the first subject Angela Carter and the Beatles.
Ronald Firbank characters do not write weekly columns. They write, to quote The Flower Beneath the Foot, ‘hebdomadal causeries’.
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18 May 2023. My Substack subject this week is Postmodernism and Eurovision. I’m rather enjoying writing scholarly stuff for a non-scholarly readership. It’s the fun of playing to a crowd while wanting to take them somewhere new.
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19 May 2023. Andy Rourke dies, the bassist with the Smiths. What is less well known is that after the band split up he wrote the music to several of Morrissey’s solo songs, including one of my favourites, ‘Girl Least Likely To’.
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22 May 2023. Martin Amis dies. Dream casting for a drama about the Amises: Hugo Weaving as Martin, Roger Allam as Kingsley. Mum thinks Allam could also play Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters. As they say on the internet, I can’t unsee that now.
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25 May 2023. This week’s Substack: Heartstopper, Carry On Loving, and skeuomorphism. Just typing those three things in the same sentence, and knowing it’s probably not been done before, is a pleasure. Lateral thinking, which comes easily to dyspraxics like me, is a kind of superpower, like X-ray vision. One can see connections and solutions that others cannot.
Very pleased today to discover that my PhD thesis has been cited in Paul Baker’s new book, Camp! The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World. This is unexpected – I don’t know Professor Baker at all, though I’ve enjoyed his books on gay slang and Polari. This is pretty good going for a thesis that is still officially unpublished. It’s certainly a boost to my self-worth.
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27 May 2023. To Felixstowe Museum. The main town has the nice beach and gardens, as well as the Treasure Chest used bookshop, which my father loved and which is still going after forty years. The museum, on the other hand, is not in the town but next to the container port, Britain’s biggest. This necessitates an extra bus ride going south to the estuary, and the museum is only open at the weekends.
Worth the effort, though. There’s much at the museum about the history of the port, but there is also a more unexpected room dedicated to 1980s pop culture, the justification being that the museum opened in that decade. Live Aid plays on a TV in a mock-up of a living room. There’s a BBC Micro and a Betamax video recorder: items of my youth, now museum pieces. And plenty of record sleeves.
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28 May 2023. Reading the news coverage over Martin Amis’s death and thinking he would have hated the phrase, ‘tributes pour in’. Such a cliché. Do tributes ever do anything else? Saunter in? Trickle in? Penetrate osmotically through a viscous membrane?
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3 June 2023. To Hadleigh for the Hidden Gardens event. A selection of the town’s private gardens are opened to the public for this one day, in aid of charity. They range from the large Tudor farmhouse at Benton End, with its synonymous irises, to small modern semi-detached back yards in the suburbs.
One garden on the High Street is inhabited by two gentlemen, Colin Platt and Frank Minns, who are, as they mention to visitors, married to each other. Just like Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, who lived together at Benton End from the 1940s to the 1970s. Except not officially married back then, of course. The High Street couple have a number of irises, in tribute not only to Benton End but to EF Benson. They’re named after characters from the Mapp and Lucia books. One is called Quaint Irene.
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9 June 2023. A linen suit turns out to be impractical for walking Suffolk footpaths. Too many brambles and thorns. One solution would be switching to tweed, but that feels like an aesthetic step too far.
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27 June 2023. I’m not inconsistent or hypocritical. I’m nuanced, multi-faceted, protean.
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7 July 2023. Most of my week has been spent writing an essay that will take five minutes to read. This must be how animators feel.
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8 July 2023. I am still keen to move to St Leonards-on-Sea, but even a room in a shared house there can now cost £850 a month to rent. Solitude has become a luxury.
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14 July 2023. I finish up the first ‘term’ of Substack letters with an End of Term Revue, picking out what I feel are the highlights. All the letters are now archived at dickonedwards.substack.com.
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18 July 2023. The prime minister is to restrict the numbers of students taking university degrees that are ‘rip-offs’ and ‘low value’. By this he means courses that tend not to guarantee a well-paid job, like those for the arts.
My earnings as a self-employed writer last month were just over £200. I prefer to think, however, that I am not so much low value as an acquired taste.
**
20 July 2023. Much talk over the two hyped Hollywood films of the summer: Barbie and Oppenheimer. Barbie for femmes, Oppenheimer for butches. Not so different, though. Barbie is about gender and toys. And so is Oppenheimer, bombs being toys for boys.
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22 July 2023. Finding myself in London at short notice, I go and see Barbie at the Curzon Soho. This is only after spending a good half hour on the internet trying to get a ticket: most of the West End cinema screenings have sold out.
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie certainly manages to have its clever pink cake and eat it. Towards the end, though, it runs out of energy and dips into a kind of cinematic hypoglycaemia. But then, I recall, so does The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Both films achieve a camp pastoral, only to lose their breath, and then their nerve. They end up grasping for a conventional sense of an ending, but by then it is entirely out of character to do so.
Barbie does manage a startling final line, though, and has much to recommend it, with the jokes, the dance routines, the design, the serious ideas on society, and Ryan Gosling being a superb Ken, if an unlikely one.
**
23 July 2023. A Sunday lunch with Ronald Firbank admirers at a house in Borough Green. Also there are Alan Hollinghurst, Richard Canning, and Jenny and Charlie Firbank. We inspect the Alvaro Guevara portrait of Ronald, which is brought in, newly cleaned. As we speculate on this painting, which may or may not be a depiction of Firbank’s flat on Jermyn Street, I realize I’m in a scene that could be in one of Mr Hollinghurst’s novels.
I get home to Suffolk to a package from the London Library. It’s their copy of Richard Blake Brown’s My Aunt in Pink (1936), which I’ve borrowed. His other titles are even harder to track down, but they sound equally camp: Miss Higgs and Her Silver Flamingo (1931), A Broth of a Boy (1934), Rococo Coffin (1936), and my favourite, Spinsters, Awake! (1937).
My Aunt in Pink turns out to be a small pink 1930s hardback, the colour all the more pleasing given it’s the Barbie weekend. What’s most striking is that the last line of the book mentions a fictional portrait by Alvaro Guevera. Just like the real Guevara I was looking at only a few hours before.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty 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!
On 17th February 2023 I moved from London to a room in my mother’s house in the village of Bildeston, Suffolk. The following diary entries cover November 2022 to the present.
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21 November 2022. This week saw the comedian Joe Lycett threaten to destroy thousands of pounds of his own money unless David Beckham addressed Qatar’s poor record on gay rights. After Beckham failed to respond, Mr L instead sent the money to charity. I was glad about this. The act of destroying money carries a depressing banality. As ways of grabbing attention go, burning money is cheap.
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24 November 2022. The English department at Birkbeck is to be hit with staff cuts, enough to make the national news. University staff across the country are striking, as are many from other professions. Today I pass some striking Royal Mail workers on my walk into town today, outside the Mount Pleasant sorting office. They have one of those embroidered union banners, as beautiful as a tapestry.
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25 November 2022. I wince at the phrase ‘instant classic’. Not just because it’s a cliché, but because it’s often proven wrong with time. Today I come across the Melody Maker best albums of the year list for 1991. The critics back then rated the Wonder Stuff’s Never Loved Elvis above My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Today, Loveless is a classic, while Never Loved Elvis is rather more ephemeral and of its time. Maybe it was a hair thing.
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26 November 2022. The dry cleaners on Liverpool Road have lost one of my new shirts. They try to replace it with a shirt in the same size, but it’s a button cuff. I only wear cuff links. Worse: mine was a Charles Tyrwhitt, theirs was a Burberry. I’d rather die.
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30 November 2022. My hypocritical rule for the deployment of Christmas practices in November: I wince at the jumpers but am fine with the food.
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3 December 2022. My job rejection emails carry a double hurt. It’s not just the rejection but the lack of individualism. They’re just templates, off the peg, sent out to every unsuccessful applicant regardless. When I’m abused on the street for my appearance I’m at least having my uniqueness acknowledged.
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9 December 2022. I go to the Natural History Museum in Kensington to see one particular exhibit. There are now conversations about the role of museums in an age of information, not least the ones filled with the spoils of empire. Perhaps the way forward for the Elgin Marbles is to do what the Natural History Museum now does every Christmas with its robot Tyrannosaurus Rex. Put them in a Christmas jumper.
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10 December 2022. This time last year I defended my PhD. Panto season is the best time for the process. ‘This premise isn’t evidenced’. ‘Oh yes it is.’ ‘Oh no it isn’t.’
In fact, I now realize that my thesis has a reference to the pantomime dame Widow Twankey in it. The character pops up in Joyce’s Ulysses, in the ‘Circe’ chapter.
I take advantage of the football to go to Sainsbury’s on Liverpool Road for gin. This time a middle-aged staffer makes my day by asking me to ‘solemnly swear’ that I am over 25. Cruising’s not dead.
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11 December 2022. I buy the Christmas Radio Times. It’s now the Midnight Mass of magazine issues, attendance suddenly swelling for the one occasion in December.
Radio Times these days turns out to be an existential attempt to apprehend the infinity of streaming TV platforms. As Camus said: ‘The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ Such is the feeling when choosing between Die Hard and Love Actually.
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15 December 2022. Today is the centenary of the OED‘s earliest citation of ‘gay’ to mean ‘homosexual’. Their source is Gertrude Stein’s book Geography and Plays, published on the 15th of December 1922. This reading is debatable, but an innuendo effect is certainly there. I especially like the idea that ‘gay’ may have first appeared in print in a book by an avant-garde lesbian.
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30 December 2022. I manage to get a cheap ticket for the new play of Orlando, at the Garrick Theatre, Charing Cross. In the title role, Emma Corrin is more energetic and more camp than Tilda Swinton in the 90s film, jumping around the stage and changing their voice (Corrin is indeed a ‘they’), to suit the teenage boy Orlando, then the young man, then again for the female version. What with the drag and the wintery scenes set during the Great Frost, plus the time of year it is now, the production is a kind of modernist pantomime. It taps into the sense of intellectual fun that Woolf intended.
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31 December 2022: I stay in and watch Sooz Kempner’s live show on the Twitch platform – a very modern means of entertainment. She sings showtunes, including ‘Unworthy of Your Love’ from Sondheim’s Assassins. She also does Kate Bush’s ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ while dressed as the politician Nadine Dorries, known for championing Boris Johnson.
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4 January 2023. I manage to land a paid job, if a temporary one. I’m compiling the index for a new book, Jewish Women in Comics. Today I learn that academic books file the Batman character Harley Quinn under H rather than Q. The reasoning is because of the pun on ‘harlequin’: her surname is the 2nd half of a joke. James Bond, Harry Potter, and Sherlock Holmes, meanwhile, are meant to be realistic names rather than jokes, and so are filed under B, P, and H. It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t really matter, except when it does. I like the way it feels wrong to index ‘Loaf, Meat’, or indeed ‘Man, Iron’.
Certainly, the act of indexing has something of the pleasure of polishing: the final step towards perfection. If a new non-fiction book lacks an index, I tend to take against it.
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Monday 18 January 2023. Ronald Blythe has died. The one pull-quote in the Times obituary is that he had a one-night stand with Patricia Highsmith. The lesson being that if you live to 100 and have sex with a woman just once, the least you can do is make sure it’s a name worth dropping. I feel the touristic side of this unlikely liaison was more Highsmith’s, though. She moved all the way from America to Suffolk, after all. Blythe was just part of the landscape.
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20 January 2023. The housing association in Angel ask me to move out. They’re designated as a service for postgraduate students, and as my student life is finally over, I can’t really complain. I’ve been lucky to have lived there at all. Living in Zone 1 of London was always something I wanted to do, and now it’s done. Time to move on.
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23 January 2023. The effects of the pandemic are reflected in adverts for shared flats. Many of them now stipulate limits on working from home. ‘No more than 1 day per week’ says one. Home is becoming time as much as place.
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27 January 2023. Battling another job application form. One box says: ‘demonstrate your professional development’. I want to say: ‘Development is for darkrooms.’
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28 January 2023. I’m now resigned to leaving the city. 29 years is probably enough. I need to see if I’ll miss it. I spent 23 years in Zone 3 (Highgate). Then 3 years in Zone 2 (Dalston). Then 2 years in Zone 1 (Angel). In theory I should now get an internship as a Beefeater at the Tower of London. Or move out altogether.
I’m now curious about the arty seaside life, which I hear is particularly possible in St-Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex. The first thing I will do after moving there is accept that the name has two hyphens and no apostrophe.
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2 February 2023. I spend a day in St Leonards, looking at a top floor flat in Warrior Square, as well as registering at a handful of estate agents. The flat is still being renovated, and my gut instinct is to pass rather than rush into a move for the sake of it.
I’d ideally like a studio flat rather than have to share a kitchen with complete strangers. Paradoxically I can work well in libraries and cafes, but feel uneasy in kitchens of shared houses. I think it’s the way public spaces are blank slates, reset on every visit. Whereas a shared kitchen is a disputed territory.
If I have to share a house at all, I’d rather do it where all parties are predisposed to forgive each other’s border incidents. That means either moving into a monastery or living with my mother. And with monks, I’m really not keen on the hours.
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Wednesday 16 February 2023. A selfie from the public roof garden of the Post Building, New Oxford Street. My last day in London as a resident, 1994 – 2023. For now.
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Friday 17 Feb 2023. Day of the move. I travel separately from the van, which is driven by the charming and very strong Tommy, from T With A Van Removals, Sudbury. I pack a suitcase to take with myself just in case. This includes the one book I’d want to still have if my entire possessions vanished. It’s The Complete Firbank. Specifically the fat Picador paperback edition from 1988. My bible. Quentin Crisp once said that he thought Vile Bodies was the wittiest book ever written, and it’s essentially diluted Firbank.
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2nd March 2023. Living in a village while not being able to drive rather limits one’s cultural outings. There’s a good arthouse cinema in Ipswich, the King Street Cinema, but the bus from Bildeston takes a whole hour, and doesn’t do evenings.
Most of the concerts in Ipswich and Stowmarket seem to be for tribute bands. Symptoms of living where the action isn’t. You go expecting no surprises. Unless it’s a Radiohead tribute band, in which case you go expecting ‘No Surprises’.
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26 March 2023. I’m neutral about the upcoming coronation, though being a slight postal geek I take an interest in the redesign of the stamps. They have Charles’s silhouette now, though he has no crown. It’s like vicars who are uneasy about mentioning God, in case it puts people off.
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31 March 2023. Another job application. ‘Please list your core attributes’ Me: An antipathy to the phrase ‘core attributes’ for a start.
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3 April 2023. I apply for a research job, but although I’m told I have an ‘impressive’ CV, it still goes to someone else.
Freelance writing seems to be my only way forward, with the hope that enough readers will want my particular perspective. I can’t compete with writers who might as well be anyone.
In my favour, I am at least AI-proof. Artificial intelligence programs are now thought to be sophisticated enough to imitate any writing style. But in my case, so much of my style is influenced by books so obscure that they’ve never been digitized.
What’s also different with me, I hope, is my recent academic training. I know a lot more about stuff, and I know a lot more about which stuff is known. If Hunter S Thompson can call himself a ‘doctor’ out of narcotic cool, I can surely do so likewise as Dr Dickon Edwards. And besides, I like the alliteration of the ‘D’ sounds.
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6 April 2023. Easter in a Suffolk village. A mobile library calls once every four weeks, for half an hour; I make sure I use it. The post box in the square has been ‘yarnbombed’. It sports an unsolicited woollen cap of crocheted chicks and lambs, put there in the dead of night by a guerrilla knitter. There are real lambs in the field on the south of the village, by the Hadleigh road.
**
25 April 2023.
With Mum to Dollops Wood, Polstead. Despite growing up in Suffolk I don’t think I’ve explored one of the county’s bluebell woods until now. Encountered in person, the colour is breath-taking. Afterwards we find the little Polstead community shop on the village green and have tea and cake outside. There is no one about. The shop has a post office section: a tiny self-contained glass booth in one corner, like an amusement machine on a seaside pier. In Bildeston’s only shop the post office section is just one end of the same counter.
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29 April 2023. The Hadleigh Morrison’s supermarket sells a small number of books. Mostly popular crime and romance titles, but today they have Douglas Stuart’s literary novel Young Mungo in paperback, with its cover photo of two sweaty young men passionately kissing. I buy it not so much for its cheapness (£5.50) as for a kind of voting. To buy it is saying ‘more of this sort of thing at Morrison’s, please’.
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1 May 2023. The order of service for the coronation will include a request to the public to pledge allegiance to the King. Some people are up in arms about this, but it is clearly meant only as an option. Or to put it in the language of tinned peas, it is a serving suggestion. With the emphasis on the serving.
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Thursday 4 May 2023.
Wanting to put my PhD to good use in the community, I’ve started a Substack newsletter. It’s aimed at being a kind of travel-sized lecture series, explaining connections across the arts to a general public, typically involving camp, dandyism, and otherness. It’s called Letter from a Dyspraxic Dandy. I am bursting with ideas for it, buoyed with the freedom but also mindful of keeping it concise.
What I need now is enough subscribers to sign up, with the hope that enough of them will deem it worth paying for (£5 a month, £30 a year).
Saturday 6 May 2023. I watch the Coronation with Mum. She was a child when she saw the last one. Or at least when she saw part of it. She remembers being given a jigsaw puzzle to do in the next room. Her mother called her in to catch the actual crowning.
The crowds in the streets have their smartphones out, but inside the Abbey all is offline. Charles swears his oaths while touching a new red-bound leather bible – which he also kisses. He uses a fountain pen to sign the oaths. Not Face ID, but not a quill either. The texts for Archbishop Welby to read are printed on little white cue cards, held discreetly in his line of sight by the other priests. No iPads.
The ancient age of the throne is highlighted, but so too is the gold anointing spoon, which is to me is pure Monty Python. There is nothing that is not funny about the word ‘spoon’. The BBC commentator refers to it at one point as ‘the humble spoon’, which nearly has me in hysterics. The implication is that in normal circumstances a spoon is a complete diva. The boastful spoon. The full of itself spoon. The takes too long in front of the mirror before hitting the town spoon. Perhaps one argument for keeping the monarchy is moments like this.
** This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty 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!
