Kept from the diary due to either feeling too tired or too ill. Sometimes it’s as if I can only exist in one of three states:
1) asleep,
2) awake but so tired I don’t feel up to writing, instead killing the hours wandering around in a sticky-eyed state of dreamy wooziness, or
3) awake but wracked with a painful ailment that just makes me want to go back to bed and hope I’ll feel better the next day.
This latter state has been the case for much of the past six weeks. The ailment in question is the weird stomach pains which my GP thought was IBS. Have nearly run out of those IBS pills he prescribed, which don’t seem have had much effect, to be honest. Also ran out of the expensive high-strength Manuka honey, which seemed to make things easier. Either that, or I was distracted enough by its sweetness. Sometimes, a spoonful of sugar becomes the medicine’s stunt double.
Definition of healthy: the state of being sufficiently distracted from one’s unhealthiness.
As soon as I visit someone or the phone rings, I’m fine. Or I forget about it, so I might as well be fine.
I wonder if it’s something psychological, linked with anything that resembles work. I also wonder if it’s an ulcer, an infection, or a dietary allergy. Gluten or lactose, that sort of thing. Pains triggered by eating too much of something, or not enough of something.
But most of all I just think: Ouch.
***
Am staying in Claudia A’s flat in Upper Holloway once again, cat-sitting Sevig while his owner’s out of the country. Am enjoying the little upgrades from a bedsit: the extra space to pace around in, and having my own bathroom, though the hot water seems to be on the blink.
Friday: I set up my guitar and amp and compose some suitably ambient instrumentals for the Martina Lowden set in Stockholm. I have the TV on in the background, only stopping to turn up the sound for the Doctor Who sketch on Children In Need. Peter Davison and David Tennant together, an indulgence for the older fans (surely baffling for the kids), but with a poignant twist that manages to give it depth amid all the chummy frivolity of the occasion: Tennant’s Doctor is a loving admirer of his younger yet older self. Meeting one’s hero, where the hero is one’s own past self. You don’t tend to associate Children In Need sketches with philosophical musings on being. Though having said that, I suppose the now traditional sight of BBC newsreaders doing comedy dance routines could lend itself to an essay on Baudrillard.
***
Saturday – to Hampstead Heath, where I am filmed by Jenn Connor for a sort of video postcard back to her friends in California. The idea is she bumps into her friends around London and asks them about what they love about the city. I natter on about the Heath and its history as a happy accident and a place for all kinds of recreational pleasure across the class divisions, including of course gay cruising.
By way of historical context, I bring along a make-up compact. In 1918 a man was arrested on the Heath for homosexual importuning, his possession of a powder puff cited as admissable evidence for the prosecution. In fact, the court records for interwar London are full of such cosmetically-based arrests, and the Historical Journal recently published a fascinating essay on the whole subject (currently online here).
Which reminds me.
A year or so ago, I attended a Scritti Politti gig in Kilburn with Tim Chipping. By this time, Tim had become more conventionally presentable than he’d been during the blue-nailed, writing-on-faces, glitter and boa days of our band Orlando. Seeing him in minimum-risk jeans, t-shirt and trainers, I’d assumed his cosmetic days were now a thing of the past. Or so I thought.
The venue had a security guard on the door – one of those who insists on searching bags for knives, drugs, bottles of drink, cameras, recording equipment, and anything else they might like the look of. While going through Tim’s bag, the bouncer pulled out a case of foundation, studied it, and asked what it was. He even asked Tim to open the case and prove it was indeed the more legal kind of habit-forming powder.
Granted, it was make-up for correction rather than decoration; for looking healthy rather than gaudy. But make-up all the same. The bouncer’s mixed sense of suspicion was hilarious. He seemed vexed that it was no longer 1918. As for me, I was delighted that one happy echo of 1995 had yet to fade.
(A: So now you’re over 35, are you going to stop wearing make-up?
B: No! Because I’m over 35, I have to keep wearing make-up.)
