Another photo from the Kim Cunningham shoot:

May 2011. Pond Square, Highgate.
Credit: www.kimcunningham.co.uk

Golders Green in the heat. Tempted to go without my jacket, but here – even at 30 degrees C – one sees the district’s famous community of orthodox Jewish men still in their full ensembles: black suits, hats, even coats. I find myself sharing their unspoken message. To strip down would be a let down. Dandyism is a kind of faith, too.

(Actually, as this day goes on I notice a few pious gentlemen just wearing waistcoats, or besuited but with shirts unbuttoned or untucked. But there’s still one or two in coats.)

Today on Golders Green Road: I see my first kosher ice cream van. Back among the Highgate heathens tomorrow, though.

***

Not much luck with attempts to secure employment. Am collecting rejection emails. One kind friend even pulled strings to get me an interview – customer service at PRS – and I went along and did my best with but no success. I didn’t really want the job as such, though,  just the money, and I suspect that showed in the interview. Feigning enthusiasm for wage slavery isn’t so easy after one reaches a certain age. Questions about what one is actually living for take over. Not in the teenage angst sense, but in the life lived sense. Justified world-weariness. Or rather, world-of-work-weariness.

I’m now past worrying about it, though. At the age of nearly 40 one’s priorities naturally regroup, and things like happiness and mental health count more than ever. The alibi “well at least I’m young, I’ll go onto something better”  has long since expired.

This reluctance is not through wanting a life of pure selfish hedonism, mind. I instinctively feel the need to be of use to this world, just not doing something where I feel disastrously… miscast. I’m hoping something will turn up soon.

In the meantime, something I very much do want to do is to finally get a degree. To see if I’m of use in that respect at least – proving that I have a brain after all (unemployment makes one feel so… thick), and making a contribution to the world of academe. My BA in English Lit at Birkbeck starts in October, and I’m now starting to read text books and set texts for the first time since school.

Quite intrigued that the course includes a seminar on the St Etienne film, Finisterre, as part of a module about London-themed literature and films. Other set texts for Autumn include Oliver Twist, Mrs Dalloway, Jekyll & Hyde, and Ian McEwan’s Saturday.

Today I’ve been reading something very much not on the course list: Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. Partly because I’m trying to increase my reading speed for the degree and thought a proven page-turner would help (I zoomed through 300 pages of it today), but also because the English course has a module on the whole nature of reading, and I thought it might help to get my own opinion on the biggest selling novel of the past 12 years, rather than just join in with the literary consensus that it’s badly-written dross.

I was hoping it would turn out to be unabashed trashy pleasure, if only to not side with the literary sneerers, but I came away yearning for two crucial elements: charm and fun. The Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie books are equally non-literary, but they have heaps of charming characters and deeply enjoyable puzzles to solve. The Da Vinci Code is curiously unsatisfying. It’s not that awful – Brown flatters the reader with lots of short chapters ending in cliff hangers, and there’s a few impressive plot twists and intriguing theories – but the hero Robert Langford is no Poirot or Holmes or Bond. He’s just no fun.

As for other current bestsellers, I’m aware Lee Child’s thrillers have a Bond-style hero – Jack Reacher – that readers want to be, or be with, or be in bed with. That makes sense. Brown’s Langford, on the other hand, is barely there as a character. Someone who cracks cyphers shouldn’t be a cypher.

I’m currently kitten-sitting in Golders Green, on and off for the next couple of weeks while the owners are abroad. Here’s a photo of the feline in question. Breed: Birman. Name: Piccadilly. Born in March.

In the hope of teaching him autonomous amusement, I’ve set him up with a couple of cardboard boxes from the local supermarket. But his favourite toy seems to be me. He has yet to learn that my trousers are not built for his teeth & claws. The owners have given me a water spray with which to teach him such boundaries, but it seems to have little effect. Either he’s one of those cats who like water, or he’s a bit of a masochist when it comes to suit-trouser love. ‘Yea, though the water jets may come, I will battle on to embrace my true beloved, The Trousers.’

I’ve been meaning to upload photos of myself from a session by Kim Cunningham. Here’s one. Taken May 2011 in Pond Square, Highgate:

Photographer credit: Kim Cunningham. www.kimcunningham.co.uk

This week: to the Everyman Baker Street cinema to see Bridesmaids. Produced by Judd Apatow, written by its star Kristen Wiig, and touted in the press as a rare mainstream comedy ‘chick flick’ that appeals to both genders. Which essentially means there’s a lot of broad slapstick and bad taste humour. Like Mr Apatow’s Knocked Up, however, it suffers from an unwieldy duration and insistence on pushing the jokes aside to end with some very traditional Hollywood moralising. I really wanted the touch of unpredictable anarchy of, say, Muriel’s Wedding or Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion. Still, the jokes are good enough, particularly the scenes of one-upmanship by Ms Wiig and her more glamourous, richer rival.

A matinee screening, with about ten people in the audience. Normally this would be quite a nice way to see a film – on the big screen in a proper cinema, with as few other people as possible to risk distractions. In fact, Bridesmaids is one of those films that does need a packed room of people. Otherwise one risks what happened with me – laughing aloud by myself in a room of strangers. For comedy films, one needs to laugh along with others.

For this reason, I rarely go to live comedy shows by myself. Stage & cinema comedy is unfinished without a crowd of friends and partners.

I know I really shouldn’t leave these alerts so late, but here we go anyway.

I’m giving another mini-lecture at the Camden School Of Enlightenment tomorrow. It’s about modern cliches – which is in itself a cliched thing to talk about. There’s plenty of stocking-filler type books out there on the subject, and ranting articles in the press by self-appointed arbiters of good writing. Some cliches are used to engender superiority (A corporate crook: “I was disappointed in the police for catching me… I felt their action was inappropriate”). But identifying cliches also risks a certain vanity on my part (Reader’s voice: “Why stop now?”).

So I’ll try to focus on my own taste and (one hopes) provide fresher musings on why a gentle usage of cliches can in fact be a good thing.

Details:

Date: Tuesday July 12th 2011
Time: Doors 7.30pm. Acts start 8pm. I’m on at about 9.40pm – 10pm.
Where:  Upstairs at The Camden Head, 100 Camden High Street, London NW1 0LU.
Cost: Free.
More info at: http://www.csofe.co.uk/

***

The issue of the New Escapologist with my article on Bohemian Bedsit living is still available. It’s issue #5 and also contains Alain de Botton, Reggie C. King, Neil Scott and many others. It’s more like a literary periodical than a magazine: no ads, proper spine.

You can get it from the online store at: http://newescapologist.co.uk

Am looking after a kitten in a Golders Green house for one night. The owners are a US couple, a detail borne out by one notable omission in the kitchen. There is no electric kettle. Just a coffee machine.

Neither person is a tea drinker. When visitors have asked for a cup they use the microwave oven to boil a cupful of water. Asking around the modern hive mind that is Twitter and Facebook, I learn that this substitute method is quite common for US households entertaining British guests.

In fact, I now know that in the US electric kettles are a distinctly rare kitchen appliance. Stove top kettles are a more likely choice for the mere 4 per cent of Americans who drink tea. One reason is the difference in mains voltage – 120v in the US, compared to the UK’s 240v – doubling the boiling time for electric kettles in the States. But there’s the whole ritualistic connotations of boiling an electric kettle that the US doesn’t have: it’s what you’re meant to do during a TV advertising break (fewer of those in the UK per hour of TV, making it more of a big deal). It’s something you can easily set up in a room without a cooker: offices, student rooms, hotel rooms.

Suddenly fascinated by this subject, I chat to people online and find that one US store, Target, does stock affordable electric kettles on their website, though they’re not always in the physical shops.

From a Brit who lived in LA: “After months of no joy at even Target I finally bought a new one in a Persian market on the westside of LA. Ridiculous.”

From a Brit in Arizona: “Been here 4 yrs and only spotted electric kettles within the last six months, at Target. In Arizona you make ‘Sun Tea’, teabags in water and leave it outside to brew.”

Target’s item description has one sentence that would never appear on a UK listing:

“- Boils faster than a microwave”

And by way of a counterpart appliance, I had this from an American in the UK:

“It took me nearly a decade to find a reasonably-priced decent waffle iron in Britain, which is standard kit in any US kitchen shop.”

But for me the most defining aspect of the electric kettle is its importance during one of the most stressful and defining experiences in life: moving house.

As one Brit reminds me:

“When you hire boxes from a moving company, the ‘how to pack’ instructions tell you to leave the kettle till last.”

And from another Brit:

“That’s exactly how it is: electric kettle packed last, and first item to be plugged-in. That first cup makes it feel you’ve arrived.”

Thanks to everyone on Twitter and Facebook for the enlightenment. Quotes from Stuart Nathan, Sophie Heawood, Caroline Corbett, @eighths, @cybermango.

Weds 15^th: to the Last Tuesday Society shop for a talk by Philip Hoare on Decadence. Specifically Decadence as personified by Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward and Stephen Tennant. Maud Allan gets a look-in too, as part of the ‘Cult Of Wilde’ in the early twentieth century, when Wilde’s name and work were synonymous with deviancy. Public arbiters of moral decency used him as a warning, while those into anything naughty used him as a beacon or a code.

Mr Hoare points out how Wilde’s appearance changed from being fairly deviant itself – long hair and stockings – to short hair and conventional suits when he was actually getting up to the deviant activities. The other change was that he had become known for making art as much as being a work of art. Coward had his outré appearance too: the dressing gown and cigarette holder. But he’d become famous as a writer first. The image was a way of branding his work; a trademark, sealing it and enhancing it. Stephen Tennant, however, was someone who was famous in the 1920s for looking striking but failed to do much he could point to. When he got older and lost his looks, he tried to become a novelist but failed to even finish his debut attempt, Lascar. Mr Hoare says Tennant rewrote it so many times, it’s impossible to put together a version for publication.

The talk is sold out, and I wonder how many are here for Tennant per se. Certainly Hoare is the main Tennant expert, being the author of the only biography, Serious Pleasures. It’s been out of print for the best part of twenty years, so people who’ve read it are now a kind of cult themselves: enthusiasts of lesser known camp figures. John Waters and David Walliams are fans of the book.

In his slideshow, Mr H shows an image that’s not in the biography: a still from a 1928 home movie. Tennant is dressed as a blind beggar boy, languishing by a river in rags and white face make-up. Somewhere between Narcissus and Ophelia, he looks shockingly beautiful yet otherworldly, like a character from a film by Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, or Derek Jarman. What’s particularly unexpected is that the camera is held by Oswald Mosley. If only he’d stuck to making films.

Earlier today: to the NPG to catch the Ida Kar exhibition. Kar photographed Stephen Tennant several times, one of the 1960s pictures making it into the Hoare book. None are on display at the NPG, which is a shame as it’s subtitled ‘Bohemian Photographer’. If anyone was good at just being bohemian more than anything else, it was Tennant.

Still, I enjoy looking at the umpteen proper writers and artists she snapped, from Stanley Spencer sitting under his umbrella (indoors) to a teenage Sylvia Sims, looking like the sort of girls that go to the LTS balls. Vintage yet curiously 21^st century.

There’s also a portrait of Laura Del Rivo in the early 60s, who I don’t know much about. Alert eyes, unkempt bob hairdo, wearing what looks like a smock and smoking a cigarette. Actually, she looks a little like Patti Smith, except ten years earlier and British. She wrote ‘The Furnished Room’, a novel set in the bedsits of Bohemian London, so I really should get hold of it.

Just as Beaton’s image of Tennant in the black mackintosh inspired Philip Hoare to find out more, I come away from this portrait keen to read Ms Del Rivo’s book. Like all art, and like concerts, a good portrait should leave the onlooker wanting more.

*title suggested by Dad

Primrose Hill has lots of fashionable looking young men wandering about with guitar cases. I wonder if they’re the latest modern rock stars, or just those who think they’re the latest modern rock stars. Being  entirely out of touch with matters Rock these days, New Rock Fame is wasted on me.

The neighbours are nice enough, though, one beautiful young couple (more unrecognised famous types?) helping Dad when he gets lost. They call up a street map on their iPhone. Dad’s never seen an iPhone before. ‘He was stroking his phone!’ he says later.

We talk about the strange social license to collar people with unfamiliar gadgets  (not many iPhones in Dad’s village). An example is those cigarette substitute devices that exhale water vapour and are allowed in bars. There must be a point where the number of times the user has to explain the gadget to strangers becomes so tiresome that they either give up nicotine for good – which is the point of the thing – or it backfires and they return to real cigarettes, anything rather than be an accidental attention seeker.

This is the burden of the Early Adopter. I get it myself when I use my Kindle on the Tube, sometimes to the point where I wish I’d brought a normal book so I could be left alone. On top of which, ads for the Kindle are all over the Tube itself, so one feels like an unpaid advertiser, as well as an unpaid beta tester.

***

The British Library Cafe used to be a Best Kept Secret for meeting one’s friends or just killing time: affordable refreshments, free internet, power points for laptops & phones, free jugs of water, proper air conditioning, nice clean loos, no piped music, excellent exhibitions nearby, and until recently, lots of free tables. There’s now the sense of a secret slightly over-shared. And with that, that curious mix of happiness for others, yet slight selfish sadness for oneself. At least when one can’t get a table.

Since they brought in free Wi-Fi, the cafe is so crowded that there are posters asking people to not take up a bigger table than they need. They also hint (very nicely) that table occupiers really should buy something from the cafe too. During busy periods it feels fair enough: it’s about fairness for the customers rather than mean-spiritedness by the management. If you buy a meal in a cafe, it seems only fair that you have your own table at which to eat it. The BL’s armies of all-day laptop loafers just need to bear this in mind, that’s all.

Actually, many of them already seem happy to sit on the floor and use the power points meant for vacuum cleaners.

Dad and I come here today straight after visiting another great London Secret – St John’s Lodge Gardens in Regent’s Park. Unofficially known as London’s own secret garden (and intended for quiet meditation), it has just one entrance, tucked away off the Inner Circle so that the people who go there don’t do so by passing through. They either know about first, which is good, or they’re lost, which is better.

Today, on a sunny early June afternoon , there are just two other visitors in the whole garden. One of the statues is for someone ‘Who Shared This Garden’s Secret”. Not shared too much just yet.  I want to tell everyone I know about this garden. And not tell them, too.

Bumped into a Diary Angel today in Camden, so was instantly shamed into updating the diary.

Am housesitting in a family house in Primrose Hill, with Dad staying here for a few days too (the owner is a friend of Mum’s).

Primrose Hill is such a world away from the district next door, Camden. From the market clutter, filth and ubiquitous tattooed teens sucking fried noodles from trays, to pretty Victorian terraces, sparse traffic, low noise, spotless pavements, even spotless pigeons. Not always a happy history, though: around the block in Fitzroy Road is the flat where Sylvia Plath gassed herself. Today I found out that English Heritage wanted to put a blue plaque there, but her daughter Frieda had it moved to her previous flat in Chalcot Square, where she wrote The Bell Jar. Rightfully so, I think. Death may be more of a story than art, but it’s less of an achievement; despite what she says in ‘Lady Lazarus’.

Dad & I spent this afternoon in the new science fiction exhibition at the British Library, Out Of This World. Certainly kept him happy. For my part, I’m always fascinated with original manuscripts on display, including Ron Grainer’s pencilled score for the Doctor Who theme tune, a page from the longhand draft of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (for a while it was considered something of a spoiler to label the novel as science fiction – I presume no longer), and one for Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights (his handwriting is like a school teacher’s, which makes sense). Also:  a Steampunk K9, a suggestion that the first time machine in fiction may not have been HG Wells’s, and a quiz about spot-on predictions in novels; Asimov’s pocket calculator being the most spooky. The main literary forecaster of the Internet still seems to be EM Forster in The Machine Stops.

First of two days spent in the surreal business of being a movie extra. The film in question is Gambit, starring Colin Firth, Cameron Diaz and Alan Rickman. It’s a remake of the 1966 Michael Caine crime caper, though every film buff I speak to is only dimly aware of the original. Few seem to have actually seen it (I make a mental note to rent the DVD).

Being an extra is hardly the world’s most difficult job: mostly sitting around, catching up on reading, chatting or flirting with one’s colleagues, and sleeping. You also get fed, and (I’m hoping) paid. Today’s call time is 5am, tomorrow’s is 4am, so everyone grabs naps when they can. In one section of today’s location -an ornate, high class restaurant – crowds of spare extras are dozing, heads on each other’s shoulders. As the men are all dressed in suave suits, it’s like a scene from Inception.

So I pretend to be having an expensive evening meal at 7 in the morning (red grape juice for wine, some food real, some plastic), while the proper actors perform their dialogue somewhere behind the back of my neck, to the left. And again. And again with different lighting. And again with different lenses. And again with the cameras set up on the other side.

At one point the director asks us to be a little more animated. So myself and the man opposite on my table start to have a heated (yet entirely muted) debate about the life cycle of lobsters, using increasingly florid hand gestures. We are not then asked to be less animated, so I presume it was okay.

Tomorrow’s alarm set for 2am.

Saturday May 21^st: I manage to honour three invitations in one evening. First: Sam Carpenter’s birthday drinks at The Constitution pub in Camden (7.30pm-8.15pm), then Charley Stone’s birthday concert at the Silver Bullet venue in Finsbury Park (8.45-9.30pm), before heading to the Phoenix in the West End to be guest DJ at How Does It Feel To Be Loved, where I stay till it ends (10.15pm till 3am).

Afterwards: I walk all the way from Oxford Circus to Archway. Nearly 4 miles. Partly because I need the exercise, partly because I’m drunk, but also because I like to avoid night buses whenever possible. I feel utterly safe walking the streets of Central and North London in the dead of night. It’s night buses that can be an ordeal.

Ms Stone’s night  is ‘Charlapalooza’, featuring performances from the Keith TOTP All-Stars, the Deptford Beach Babes and the Abba Stripes, all of whom she plays guitar for.  Her present from David Barnett is a huge poster of her own Rock Family Tree, linking all the bands she’s played in over the years. Fosca is one of them.

Also at the gig are other London Rock Women of note: Charlotte Hatherley (Ash, Client, solo), Debbie Smith (Echobelly, Curve) Deb Googe  (My Bloody Valentine),and  Jen Denitto: once of Linus, now drumming for the Monochrome Set.  Jen D says I’m directly responsible for her being in the MS, via singer Bid’s other band, Scarlet’s Well.

I get a vicarious thrill hearing of friends’ gig-going and gig-playing, as if they’re carrying on with All That so that I don’t have to any more.  From the reports of the Suede shows this week, to news of my brother Tom, who’s currently touring as guitarist for Adam Ant.  I don’t envy his guitarist success (never feeling like a proper guitarist myself), but I do envy his earning a living from doing something he loves, and travelling too. Particularly Paris. The last time I was in Paris was a Fosca gig in 2001 – a marvellous floating venue in the Seine. I have a real urge to go again. Here’s hoping a reason to do so presents itself. Or better still, the money to go there presents itself.

Still not much luck in finding a regular source of income. Offers of work from kind friends keep falling through, from paid blogging to film reviews. I’ve pitched articles to the Guardian without even getting a reply, which makes me feel some random self-deluded lunatic. Maybe I am. But at least I’m a well-dressed random, self-deluded lunatic.

***

Last Wednesday I was invited to Treadwell’s Bookshop, now in a new location off Tottenham Court Road. The event was the reading of an academic paper by Dr Stephen Alexander, titled ‘Elements Of Gothic Queerness in The Picture of Dorian Gray.’ Stimulating stuff, reminding me just how rich Wilde’s novel is. You can link it to so much these days: the tragedy of a young man who doesn’t age pops up in Twilight and the new Doctor Who, for instance. Dr Alexander focussed on the theme of coveting yet resenting objects for their static nature: something that certainly connects with today’s obsession with worshipping the latest version of a must-have gadget. In fact, posters for the original iPad showed Dorian Gray as an example of an e-book to read on it. I’d love to know what made them choose it.

Not only was I delighted to be invited, but it turned out Dr Alexander – whom I didn’t know until now – actually dedicated his paper to me, after my appearance in Eliza Glick’s book Materializing Queer Desire.

I’ve never had an academic paper dedicated to me before. It’s so flattering. And it helps to remind me that I might not be the complete  waste of space the Job Centre insists I am.

Problem is, they’ll say, one can’t earn a living from being a muse.

Well, unless you’re in Muse.

My DJ set at HDIF:

1. Stereolab: Peng 33 (Peel session version
2. Carole King: I Feel The Earth Move
3. The Shangri-Las: Give Him A Great Big Kiss
4. Chairmen Of The Board: Give Me Just A Little More Time
5. The Wake: Carbrain
6. The Chills: Heavenly Pop Hit
7. The Siddeleys: You Get What You Deserve
8. Dressy Bessy: If You Should Try To Kiss Her
9. Camera Obscura: French Navy
10. The Smiths: Ask
11. Spearmint: Sweeping The Nation
12. The Pastels: Coming Through
13. Le Tigre: Hot Topic
14. Prince: Raspberry Beret
15. The Supremes:  Stoned Love
16. Ride: Twisterella
17. Stereolab: French Disko
18. Blueboy: Imipramine
19. Sister Sledge: Thinking Of You
20. Nancy Sinatra: These Boots Are Made For Walking
21. April March: Chick Habit
22. Shirley Bassey: Spinning Wheel
23. Gloria Jones: Tainted Love
24. Mel Torme: Coming Home Baby
25. Dexys: Plan B
26. Orange Juice: Blueboy
27. Blondie: Rapture (a tribute to the real Rapture in the news)
28. Felt: Sunlight Bathed The Golden Glow
29. The Cure: Boys Don’t Cry
30. Style Council: Speak Like A Child
31. Labelle: Lady Marmalade

I’m guest DJ-ing tonight (Saturday May 21st) at How Does It Feel To Be Loved.

It will be at:

The Phoenix
37 Cavendish Square
London
W1G 0PP

Nearest tube: Oxford Circus.

Runs 9pm-3am. My set is 10.30pm to midnight.

Entry: £4 members, £6 non members. Membership is free if you register (quickly!) at

http://www.howdoesitfeel.co.uk/membership.html

I shall be playing 80s indiepop, 60s girl groups, and everything that vaguely fits. Including Blueboy, who were recently the subject of a rather good piece at the London Review Of Books blog here:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/05/10/stephen-burt/young-and-quite-pretty/