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/

To become a UK citizen, the British government requires all applicants to make the following Affirmation of Allegiance:

“I (name) do solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that on becoming a British citizen, I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her Heirs and Successors, according to law.”

(Source: http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/britishcitizenship/applying/ceremony/)

There’s also a lengthy Citizenship Test to take about Life In The UK. Sample questions are:

– Where are Geordie, Cockney and Scouse dialects spoken?

– What and when are the Patron Saints’ Days of the four countries of the UK?

– What are bank holidays?

Well, they’re what we’ve just had, two previous weekends in a row. As a child, I associated bank holidays with a couple of things that always popped up on TV: James Bond films, and ‘Disney Time’, a special programme of clips from Disney movies, linked by a British presenter (Jimmy Tarbuck is the only one I can remember. There must have been others).

This most recent bank holiday weekend felt like a real life Disney film followed by a real life Bond Movie.

On the Friday, a royal Prince – William – married a non-royal girl – Kate Middleton – making her a Princess (Actually, due to those funny rules about heirs and bloodlines she was made a Duchess, but it was good enough). I can’t help thinking of the last woman to get a Royal Wedding at Westminster Abbey – Sarah Ferguson – and how she was excommunicated from this event, while her children were invited instead. It’s suggested that she had her revenge by supplying her daughters with particularly bizarre hats.

Modern ways: I don’t have a TV, but watch the service on the internet, while enjoying the real-time jokey comments from people on Twitter. I enjoy the Abbey music and the sense of history, but find myself wincing at the more jarring anachronisms.  The service includes the phrase “I pronounce you man and wife”, rather than the more up-to-date ‘husband and wife’.

After that, I go down to the Not The Royal Wedding street party in Red Lion Square, Holborn. It’s organised by the pressure group Republic, who are keen to abolish the British monarchy by campaigning through the proper democratic channels, rather than anything that might get them arrested. Actually, that seems to be easier than ever right now: anarchists in Soho Square are bundled away by the police while the wedding is going on, purely for singing “We All Live In A Fascist Regime” to the tune of ‘Yellow Submarine’. Thus rather proving their own point. The reported charges are pure Thought Crime: “on suspicion of planning a breach of the peace”.

One time-honoured tradition of Royal Weddings is the souvenir mug, and the Republic movement has their own for sale today: it bears the slogan “I’m Not a Royal Wedding Mug”. They sell out by the time I arrive. But the Republic lot are keen to point out that they wish William and Kate no ill will personally. This isn’t about heckling a couple in love’s wedding – how mean-spirited that would be – but gently raising awareness that many Britons aren’t happy with  the whole monarchy set-up. Keep the weddings, and the titles, though. Says one female organiser “I am anti-monarchy, but I still want to see the dress. I’m still a girl.”

Also at the party is a stall where one can pledge allegiance to something British other than the Queen, in a reference to the aforementioned UK Citizenship requirements. The pledges take the form of triangular bits of paper pinned to the railings of Red Lion Square – a witty take on bunting. There’s quite a few pledges to Doctor Who by children, some to London, and quite a lot to tea. I pledge my own allegiance to Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the Web, without whom these words wouldn’t have their readership, there’d be no Royal Wedding on the Internet, or Twitter, or Facebook, or so much of what the world depends on today. Bring out the bunting for British inventors, I say.

One of the organisers recognises me and takes my photo:

Then on the May Day Bank Holiday Monday, with the news of Osama Bin Laden, we got the Bond film: a villain craving world domination tracked down by the good guys in his secret lair, then meeting a violent end. It’s not reported if the soldiers who dispatched Bin Laden did so with a corny Roger Moore pun, but The Sun obliges with its front page the next morning: “BIN BAGGED”.  The news shows footage of young Americans in Times Square shouting “USA! USA!” in jubilation at the news.

English people are obviously glad to hear of a terrorist leader put ‘beyond use’ as they say now,  but cheering and shouting “ENGLAND! ENGLAND!” in the streets for any reason other than football is thought to be A Bit Much. That most English trait of all: fear of bad social etiquette. Celebrate a wedding, not a killing.

Tuesday April 12^th: Ms Kirsten calls me out of the blue and takes me to lunch at Cafe Rouge, Highgate. A schoolteacher, she used to live in Crouch End, but has since relocated to Cheshunt, just north of London. She’s bought a house there and is now trying for a baby with her girlfriend, with help from a clinic. Not quite IVF, but it’s something similar, with similar initials.

Ms K misses London and is a little worried how her new neighbours will accept a lesbian, mixed-ethnicity family: Cheshunt is not quite the groovy California of the film The Kids Are All Right. I forget how easy it is for a dyed-in-the-hair Londoner such as me to take the city’s tolerance for granted. Though I know I quip about being stuffed into a Wicker Hermaphrodite the moment I step outside the M25.

***

Wednesday 13^th. A grim joke: my job advisor is losing her job. This is the NHS Working For Health service, which provides job-seeking support for people with mental health problems (in my case, depression). Like a lot of public services at the moment, the whole department is being closed down.

It’s very hard not to get enraged about this, in a country with more millionaires than ever, which can still find the money to keep one controversial foreign war going (Afghanistan) while starting a new one (Libya) without a second thought. Brent Council this week pushed through its plans to axe half its libraries. I do wonder if there’s going to be some great change coming. Perhaps not an actual revolution, but one does yearn for a shake-up of the way things are. It’s certainly hard to watch Messrs Cameron & Clegg piling on their unctuous insincerity every time they appear on television, without dreaming up scenes from the life of Robespierre.

***

Wednesday evening: Another memorable Boogaloo night. It’s the wake of John and June Parkhouse. An older gentlemen, John was the regular at the bar since it opened in 2002, and he was a regular for a long time before that, when it was known as The Shepherds.

(Note to some websites: John was a regular, not the owner of The Shepherds – I just confirmed this with the Boogaloo. I can just about remember the old owner myself, and his enormous dog).

Every evening at about half past ten, John would very quietly and very slowly walk in and take his seat at the bar, regardless of whatever loose decadence and noise was going on that night (such as Libertines secret gigs). I remember he was kind enough to sign my nomination papers when I ran for council election in 2006.

John’s wife June died two days after he did, and apparently they left behind little in the way of family or funds. But there are different kinds of family: tonight the Boogalo staff return the favour with a memorial and benefit night for John and June.

The host and DJ is Crouch End’s own Simon Pegg, who knew John  from the Shepherds days. The special guest performer is his friend Chris Martin from Coldplay, who’s come all the way from New York just for this.

Mr Martin performs a few solo acoustic numbers. One (‘Green Eyes’) has Mr Pegg on harmonica. Another is a brand new song – called ‘Wedding Bells’, I think. He also plays the Oasis number  ‘Wonderwall’, after a request from a woman in the audience. It’s not clear if she was joking or not: I rather like the idea of going to a secret gig by Mr Coldplay and asking him NOT to play a Coldplay song. But he says to her, ‘I’ll do it if you join me,’ and they sing the Oasis hit together.

Though I’ve never been a great fan of Coldplay’s music (mainly through its sheer ubiquity), Mr Martin is perfectly sweet and funny, while Mr Pegg is a rather good harmonica player. And a top DJ to boot – he spins ‘Duel’ by Propaganda along with lots of 80s pop.

I also say hello to Matt McGinn, the Coldplay roadie who’s set up an army of acoustic guitars for Mr Martin to choose from (CM makes a joke about his false modesty). I last saw Mr McGinn when he was the roadie for Kenickie, and my band Orlando toured with them.

James Walbourne’s here too, playing a set with his own group The Walbourne Bros. He’s the dazzlingly good guitarist who’s been in several Boogaloo house bands over the years, as well as the Pretenders and Edwyn Collins’s band; the latter alongside my brother.

At least one of Ant and Dec are at the gig, though no more than two.

I chat to another regular about my decision to do a degree at Birkbeck College. He tells me that before it was The Shepherds, The Boogaloo was originally known as… The Birkbeck Tavern. All these years I’ve been going to the pub, and I only find that out now. Maybe it’s a sign…

I’ve officially confirmed which degree course I’m going to do. BA English, at Birkbeck University, starting this October. Four years, part-time, evening classes, and I still have to find paid work to support myself while I’m doing it.

***

Monday March 28^th: I’m interviewed at Birkbeck for my other choice, BA Creative Writing. One of the interviewers is Jonathan Kemp, author of London Triptych. I’m offered a place on that too, so it’s down to me to make the big decision. After closer studying of the courses, it turns out English has the option of taking some creative writing-type modules, so in typical cake-and-eat-it approach, that’s what I go for. These are both incredibly popular courses, and after much rejection by the world of work lately, it feels so gratifying to find acceptance in the world of academe, twice over.

The Birkbeck building is at 43 Gordon Square, so I’ll be poring over the works of Ms Woolf close to where she actually lived.  The houses have been knocked together and are now something of a warren of classrooms and corridors. If you get lost there, as I did, you can find yourself in an underground cinema (home to Birkbeck’s film course) or a secret pocket-sized cafe.

***

Sunday April 10^th: To an elegantly crumbling room at 33 Portland Place, now recognisable as the location for Geoffrey Rush’s consulting chambers in The King’s Speech. A few weeks ago, at one of the Last Tuesday Society’s balls, I bumped into Rachel Garley, partner of the late Sebastian Horsley. She said she wanted to give me one of Mr Horsley’s suits. I was honoured, and agreed.

So here I am in the King’s Speech room, with a long mirror, a rail of clothes and a dozen other gentlemen standing around in their socks and pants – other suit recipients – trying on the accoutrements of the deceased dandy. I know one of the others, Clayton Littlewood, whose book of modern Soho anecdotes, Dirty White Boy, featured Sebastian H on the cover.

In my case, Ms Garley has picked out an ensemble specially for me: a silver velvet 3-piece with pink lining, plus a large-collared white shirt and a fat pink tie. There’s a photograph of Mr H wearing it in his Guardian obituary.

Ms Garley’s plan is to have a big dinner at the Ivy in Mr H’s memory, with all the men wearing his suits and all the women ‘dressed up the way he liked them’ (stylish with decolletages to the fore, I think). But this will be in the autumn, as it’s getting too warm for velvet suits. Well, for other men anyway.

While this suit-giving (I refuse to say ‘gifting’) ceremony is going on, we’re told the jacuzzi room in the floor below is being used to shoot a porn film. It’s exactly what Mr Horsley would have wanted.

I wear the suit straight to a party that evening: a food & drink do for Dedalus Books in Camberwell. There’s a connection: Sebastian Horsley wrote an unkind foreword to Dedalus’s Decadent Handbook. I recall that he still turned up to the book’s launch party, though.

At the party, the suit is anecdotal gold. Or more precisely, anecdotal silver. People ask me about the suit – and who can blame them – so I get to tell the tale. And if they’ve not heard of Sebastian Horsley, I tell the tale of him too. I’m worried about going full Ancient Mariner, though, with so much to say about such a man, and such a life. How to know when to stop?

I suppose I could just say, ‘It was a gift from a deceased dandy’ and leave it at that. But if they do leave it at that, I rather think I’m at the wrong party.

***

Meanwhile, the Scottish Ballet are mounting an interesting new production of Alice In Wonderland. Their Humpty Dumpty is based on Leigh Bowery, while the Mad Hatter is inspired by Sebastian H. From a piece in the Herald Scotland:

The Hatter who’s on stage in the Alice ballet owes his eye-catching appearance to the late Sebastian Horsley, the self-styled Soho dandy who died last year. ‘Horsley was a tremendous peacock, wonderfully eccentric, full of flair,’ says [designer Antony] McDonald with undisguised relish. ‘There are so few genuine eccentrics around these days.’

Their costume designs are here.

In fact, I mention the Scottish Ballet show to Rachel and the others while I’m at the suit ceremony.

Rachel: I didn’t know that. How did you hear about it?

Me: I have a Google Search alert. It sends me an email whenever Sebastian’s name turns up in a newspaper.

Rachel: Oh yes. He had one of those, too.

Friday: I pop into Gay’s The Word bookshop on Marchmont Street. Not only is it still going after Borders and Books Etc have toppled (and going for some decades now), but there’s a healthy amount of customers inside browsing away.

Despite owning a Kindle – because I own a Kindle – I still love to purchase nicely-designed paper books to vary my reading life. Independent bookshops are obviously the place to do it. Today I pick up three books for a tenner: Truman Capote’s Children on Their Birthdays, Carson McCullers’s Wunderkind, and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. The first two are from Penguin’s Mini Modern Classics range, 50 titles celebrating 50 years of their Modern Classics; very cute ultra-pocket-sized grey paperbacks at £3 each. The Baldwin edition is from the Penguin Great Loves range: A-sized pocket paperbacks with a little logo of two penguins about to snog. Perfect examples of the way paper publishing should be going: beautiful & compact and lighter than a Kindle, so even fans of e-books will be smitten. If Apple made paperbacks, this is what they’d look like.

A-sized paperbacks were what Penguin started with in the first place: those classic stripey covers in orange or purple from the 30s and 40s, the design available now on mugs and tea towels and pencil cases, but not for any new fiction. It’s the size I care about. The standard Penguin paperback size for new novels is like most UK paperbacks: B-format, a bit too big for pocket-sized.

Yet this seems to be a uniquely British taste. At the branch of Foyles in St Pancras, they have a range of French language bestsellers, including your Dan Browns and Stieg Larssons. But they’re all A-sized pocket paperbacks. So why do British readers like their paperbacks to be bigger than the French?

I’m guessing it’s a kind of snobbery. The A-format is looked down upon as more trashy (and wrongly so, to my mind). It seems reserved purely for mass-market genre titles, eg those Terry Pratchett paperbacks with the cartoony covers. Or quality reissues of much, much older material, like the Penguin Great Loves, Great Ideas and Mini Modern Classics. Literary and new and on paper cannot be portable, apparently. They tend to be either C-sized paperbacks (even bigger) or cumbersome hardbacks. The newly published Mark Twain autobiography is a hardback of wrist-snapping height and breadth. I’m keen to read it, but I’m not butch enough to lift it up in the shop. Thankfully, there’s a Kindle version. So that’s one point scored for e-books right there: they’re perfect for bigger books.

This also shows up the increasingly anachronistic practise of ‘two tier’ publishing in the UK: a hardback first, then a B-format paperback edition a year later. I’ve read an interesting article suggesting that Radiohead’s album ‘business model’ (I do hate that phrase) should make publishers sit up and take notice. The band releases albums as cheap digital MP3 versions alongside more expensive boxed CD and double vinyl formats. So the collector’s urge to own something pretty on their shelves is sated separately from the basic urge to consume the art itself, and (crucially) at the same time. E-books, thankfully, are now being released alongside the hardbacks, so that’s what weak-wristed portability fans like myself go for. But this leaves booksellers missing out. Bookshops can’t sell e-books, but they can sell paperbacks. And I like the paper experience too, if it’s light and compact. Not just me, either: I-Phones and the success of Penguin’s aforementioned reissue ranges are proof that an awful lot of people want things to be small & cute, whether paper or digital.

So maybe this era of e-books and bookshops struggling to survive will force paperbacks to come out at the same time as hardbacks AND be small & pretty. In which case, speed the day.

I have something of a recurring headache, which I think is part of a sinus-y head cold, but that’s still no excuse for going for days without writing. If I’m going to start a degree in the Autumn, I have to nip this particular bad habit in the bud, or else it’ll be a waste of everyone’s time.

I’ve written an article about the history of the Bohemian Bedsit for the New Escapologist Magazine, issue #5. Did lots of Proper Research, so hopefully readers will come away All The Better. It can be purchased at http://newescapologist.co.uk/shop/

I’ve also been invited to give a 15 minute talk at The Camden School Of Enlightenment on May 10^th. My contribution is called A Field Guide To Fetishes. I’ll be discussing the strange and wonderful words given to lesser-known naughty inclinations, such as tripsolagnia, the sensation of arousal from having one’s hair shampooed. The event is free. More information at http://www.csofe.co.uk/

Money! I am contacted out of the blue by someone who does ‘SEO’ advert placing. As in Search Engine Optimisation. It’s a phrase that currently crops up all the time in job ads: the skill of getting a company’s website ranking high in Google searches. My diary has a certain value in the SEO stakes purely by lasting so long. If you start a blog in 1997, by 2011 there’ll be so many links to it scattered around the Web, your Google ranking will be high by default. It’s one reason why searching on Google for ‘Dickon’ will get this diary first, ahead of anything to do with The Secret Garden or that Dickon out of the Tindersticks who does music for Oscar-nominated films. Like some grizzled prospector of the Wild West, I sit here on top of my SEO gold mine, awaiting offers.

First up this month is an offer from a business card company. They want me to add the phrase ‘business card’ to one of my more popular diary entries, and link this ‘search term’ to their website forever. In return, they pay me twice my weekly rent.  I do it. As it is, I use the company already, so no moral dilemmas there. It’s hardly Iggy Pop and his irksome car insurance puppet.

If you’re reading this and can help me exploit this accidental asset, please do get in touch.  I rather like the idea of this diary finally earning me a living.

***

Today: I sit in a St Pancras cafe and write a letter on headed notepaper snaffled from the Oxford And Cambridge Club. It has an unmarked entrance on Pall Mall, and is where my kind friend Minerva Miller took me for lunch last Friday. Such a beautiful place. No mobile phones allowed, high ceilings, ornate lounges and dining rooms, billiard rooms, squash courts, plush sofas everywhere, phones with which to order a gin and tonic, newspapers and magazines, green baize tables, chess boards, and library rooms with high-backed armchairs to fall asleep in. One room is decked out in more feminine decor: champagne gold & emerald green, alongside rooms in the more traditional gentlemen’s  club colours, burgundy and brown, the rooms of scenes from Yes Minister.

***

Last Thursday night, March 17th: I look after the house and hound of Linda Seward. The house is in Primrose Hill, stuffed with books and art and no TV, while the dog is Rhum, a 15-year-old Border Terrier who’s a little hard of hearing. Rhum is pictured here by Ms Seward:

Saturday 19th March: I meet up with La John Joseph, who has a new pop persona, Alexander. We visit the Robert Mapplethope exhibition, as curated by the Scissor Sisters, then walk through Soho to have tea at Fernandez & Wells in Beak Street. JJ and his bright red raincoat get him stopped twice to have his picture taken by those ‘street style’ photographers that lurk on every Soho corner. They’re not interested in me. I wonder if I’m starting to look more normal.

***

Also today: I stop off at the Boogaloo and meet Mr Jupiter John, who says kind things about my diary, buys me drinks and gives me cash to become a Diary Angel. At the bar I meet Ms Kate McGann, actress and cousin of those various McGann acting brothers. She’s just appeared on the TV dating show Take Me Out. The same edition included Ms Marysia Kay, actress and actual witch, who starred in a pop video for my website host Rhodri Marsden, which I also popped up in. I say all this to point out what a connection-fest the Boogaloo is.

Elizabeth Taylor dies. I dig out my CD of Elizabeth Taylor In London (played in the Boogaloo when I DJ’d there). It’s the soundtrack to her 1963 American TV special, where she’s filmed swanning around the capital’s landmarks in various Dior ensembles, all to a swooning John Barry score. Occasionally she stops to recite London texts, chosen herself. They include Wordsworth’s Westminster Bridge, Queen Elizabeth I’s  Speech to the Troops at Tilbury, and Churchill’s VE speech to the crowds in May 1945:

You have been attacked by a monstrous enemy but you never flinched or wavered. No one ever asked for peace because London was suffering. London, like a great rhinoceros, a great hippopotamus saying ‘Let them do their worst. London can take it.’

London could take anything.

The daffodils are out, spring is in the air and there’s a spring in my step.

My self-esteem has just taken the largest boost it’s had in a long while. I’ve just been accepted for the BA English course at Birkbeck University. Bloomsbury campus, evening classes only, four years, starting in October.

Some friends have said there was never any doubt I’d get the offer, which is very kind of them. But as my formal education stopped at the age of 17 when I abandoned my A-levels, I was worried that Birkbeck would insist I take those again first, or do a Certificate of Higher Education. Thankfully my various doings with words over the years have been enough to convince the tutor who interviewed me today, in a sunny office in Gordon Square. I’m officially capable of doing a Proper Degree.

I’m now waiting to hear back regarding my other choice, BA Creative Writing. If CW accepts me as well, I have to decide between the two subjects. Creative Writing might be better in helping me get novels and scripts written and improved, but English would give me an all-round expertise in everything from Chaucer to Hanif Kureishi, closing the gaps in my knowledge and improving my writing. I think I’ll have to speak to the tutors and ask them how the courses differ in more detail, before I make my choice.

However, if CW doesn’t have me in the first place – creative writing courses are notoriously popular – well, it’s all… academic.

Either way, I’m doing a degree. It feels so good to be accepted and believed in by a university, after a lot of recent rejection from the World Of Work and feeling the weight of my past failures. My 40th birthday is a few weeks before the term starts in October. For the first time, I’m actually looking forward to it.

Lots of moaning to myself lately.

A request from the singer-songwriter Lettie. Would I like to play guitar and sing for her at a gig in a few weeks’ time? I tentatively agree. Last night: she comes to the Boogaloo, buys me drinks and lends me an acoustic guitar.

This morning I try playing the thing. It’s the first time there’s been an instrument in my home since I sold them all 18 months ago. I think it’s also the first time I’ve picked up a guitar since the last Fosca gig in Sweden, Spring 2009.

I’d like to say my fingers fall easily onto the guitar and it feels like coming home. Not a bit of it. The strings cut into my fingers and it hurts and I’m not sure I feel like a guitarist any more. But then, I’ve always found acoustic guitars so much harder to play than electrics. I decide to try again later.

*

This week I upload my CV onto a job-matching website. It returns just one vacancy. Street fundraiser. Also known as ‘charity mugger’ or ‘chugger’. ‘Do you want to develop your interpersonal skills?’ says the ad. By which they mean, do you want to annoy innocent passers-by and risk being punched fully in the face? I sympathise with the people who do this job, but it doesn’t change my moral opposition to it.

A couple of friends say I should just take any job going. But I can’t do what I can’t do. It’s like asking a man with vertigo to clean the windows of a skyscraper. He could do it, but he wouldn’t last and he wouldn’t be at all happy.

Not that I’m happy being on the dole. As soon as I think I’m managing, something comes along like a dental check-up bill –even at the NHS level – and I have to cancel all going out for the next fortnight.

Here’s hoping something comes along soon.

On top of this I’m angry at my shoes. New smart flaneur-ing boots, a present from my parents, who were appalled that I couldn’t afford to replace my disintegrating old pair. Although they fitted okay in the shop, they’re still pinching my feet painfully after ten days of wear. I’ve tried using a softening spray (£7, more pain) but the pinching persists.  Trouble is, I don’t think you’re allowed to exchange shoes once they’ve clearly been worn  – that’s the Catch-22 of footwear.

The temperature has dropped close to freezing and I can’t afford to heat the room all day. So this morning I wander outside, shivering and feet-hurting and guitar-resenting and penniless and feeling utterly sorry for myself. If in doubt, go for a walk.

In Highgate Village, I bump into Brian David Stevens, the photographer whom I last spoke to at the Felt book launch. He invites me to a private view this afternoon in London Bridge. It’s free and sounds interesting, but I can’t even afford the return bus fare.

Then I think, stuff it, I’ll just walk. It’s all downhill, and I have all the time in the world. So I do it. Six miles, from Highgate to Archway, down the full length of Holloway Road to Highbury Corner, through Islington to Old Street, down to Moorgate and Bank and across the river. Proper flaneur stuff. It warms me up, it’s good exercise, it might help to make the boots stop pinching, and by the end of it I think I’m a kind of New Romantic Iain Sinclair.

The exhibition in London Bridge is called Civil Unrest, featuring photos from the recent London protests. The venue is the Depot, where I’ve DJ-d in the past. A series of cavernous black warehouse spaces underneath the arches of London Bridge station. The photos are blown-up prints pasted around the dark walls in suitably gritty fashion. There’s crowd control barriers, piles of rubbish in corners and it’s all very ‘themed’. The staffer on the door is dressed in full riot squad gear, complete with shield, while the free drinks – brandy punch – are served in tin campsite mugs. I say hello to Marc Vallee, another of the photographers.

On the way back, I stop off at Bunhill Fields to look at William Blake’s grave. There’s a pile of people’s tributes on top of the stone: mostly pennies and cents, a few seashells and stones, some earrings. And more unexpectedly, an FM radio attachment for an iPod.

Last Tuesday: I make the pilgrimage to Balham. Although it’s my first visit, I share some DNA with the area: it’s the birthplace of my paternal grandfather. I’m there to visit The Exhibit, London’s smallest cinema. There are just 24 seats, comprising 12 highly comfortable sofas on raked steps. Ideally one needs to bring a friend, or risk sharing a sofa with a stranger.

The tickets are only £5, and they include a free bowl of popcorn. The Exhibit has a regular programme of second-run films not yet out on DVD (I see Made In Dagenham), and there’s a proper lit-up marquee sign above the entrance, making it feel more like a cinema, less like a screening room.

Made In Dagenham is a colourful dramatisation of the late 1960s women’s strike at the Ford motor factory. It’s an important history lesson, but the film keeps the politics balanced with plenty of humour and pathos. Miranda Richardson is particularly good as Barbara Castle.

What with this and The King’s Speech and The Social Network however, I find myself bristling at the inevitable captions at the end, telling you how important the events you’ve just seen are, and what the real people did next. They never tell you which bits have been invented for the sake of the story. I’ve found out myself that Sally Hawkins’s heroine in Made In Dagenham and Zuckerberg’s pivotal girlfriend in The Social Network are completely made up. This week I find myself yearning to see something entirely possible, but entirely fictional. No historical events, no science fiction or ballerinas turning into swans. Just for once.

So this Monday I go to the Prince Charles cinema (£1.50) to see – what else – Another Year, the latest Mike Leigh. It depicts a contented couple who live in suburban London and tend to their allotment, when they’re not tending to their various unhappy friends and relatives. Immaculate acting, particularly from Martin Savage as the bitter and violent Carl. He only has a couple of scenes late into the film, but it’s a part better realised than many leads. A world away from the camp scriptwriter he played in Ricky Gervais’s Extras.

Though it’s an ensemble piece, the film’s most memorable role is Lesley Manville’s Mary: selfish, complaining, frequently drunk, dominating the conversations. A typical Mike Leigh woman, though a very believable one. Like many of his films, I think enjoying Another Year depends on whether you’d enjoy meeting the characters in your own life. I preferred Happy Go Lucky and Career Girls for this reason. When the maternal Ruth Sheen finally mutters ‘Mary’s a bloody nuisance,’ I have to agree.

Another Year couldn’t be more different to the last film I saw at the Prince Charles, Inception. Inception is heavy on ideas but thin on characterisation, while Another Year is ALL characterisation and next to no story. And yet both films are engrossing and original and succeed according to their own rules. It goes to show that having a ‘three act’ plot arc or well-realised characters is only important where it’s important.

I say this because I’ve just applied to do a BA degree course in Creative Writing, at Birkbeck. If I’m accepted, it means two evenings a week from October onwards. As I’ve not taken a degree or student loan before, it seems I’m eligible for full state funding.

I’ve never had a university degree before, and after much pondering I’ve found out that I’d like to have one. Or at least, see if I can get one. Can only do me good. I still need an actual job, but this is a step in the right direction.