Catching up with more films, and enjoying spotting how different directors handle the same themes. In this case, metamorphosis.
Inception. Seen at the Prince Charles cinema for £2.50. It’s by Christopher Nolan, and has his very recognisable style: masculine disorientation, confusing battle scenes, a Borges-esque preference for ideas over characterisation, intellectual coldness, aesthetically pretty actors in sharp suits. No sex scenes, no silliness, no mucking about. Though Tom Hardy does sneak in a little camp aside. During a siege, he suddenly produces an oversized weapon and tells Joseph Gordon-Levitt, ‘You’ve got to dream a little bigger, darling’.
One location is meant to be Mombasa, but anyone who’s been to Tangier will recognise the very Moroccan Grand Socco and medina, with a few Kenyan drapes. I’m quite pleased about this. I may not always follow what’s going on in the film, but I know now that I can spot Tangier in disguise.
What I would like to know is why Mr Nolan couldn’t just set these scenes in Tangier anyway, given the city’s association with Westerners escaping into dreams. The two main literary biographies of Tangier even allude to this in their titles: Michelle Green’s The Dream at the End of the World and Iain Finlayson’s Tangier: City Of The Dream.
Even Nolan’s special effects are in keeping with his clean, non-silly style. Tom Hardy’s character has the ability to change into other people, though while other directors would reach for CGI morphing effects or a touch of latex, Nolan chooses to cut simply to a mirror, then back again. Transformation done.
No such luck for the protagonist of District 9, which I watch on DVD while staying in Suffolk with my sci-fi loving father (February 3rd-7th). I also see Avatar while I’m there. Both films have the human lead turning into an alien: Avatar’s hero gets an instant and entirely wished-for change into a beautiful blue humanoid. District 9‘s anti-hero, meanwhile, becomes one of the film’s Lovecraftian and tentacled ‘prawns’, and does so very slowly and very reluctantly, with gooey prosthetics (fingernails coming off) added to CGI. If the aliens of one film swapped with the aliens in the other, the stories would be entirely different.
Avatar uses sci-fi to address colonialism and invasion, while District9 does it for immigration and apartheid. The military in both cases is the enemy, and there’s a lot of White Racial Guilt to read between the lines. It’s such a shame, though, that they both end with up with the standard Hollywood Final Battle between lone hero and lone villain, both with an Exo-Suit.
Finally, I see Black Swan at the Muswell Hill Odeon. I’m happy to report that Natalie Portman does not have to deal with an Exo-Suit in the finale. But conveniently for this diary entry, she does undergo a transformation into The Other which combines elements of all of the above.
She gets the revulsion of shedding fingernails from District 9, the glances of change in mirrors from Inception, and the smooth, beautiful CGI of Avatar for the final scenes of consenting change. Most impressive of all are the fluid ripplings of flesh to feather that are actually choreographed to go with the ballet music. Angela Carter would have loved it.
Black Swan is vastly enjoyable: a histrionic horror film that’s been cunningly smuggled into Oscar territory. And as I’ll always prefer dance scenes to shoot-outs, it’s my favourite of the four.
I’ve been thinking about small cinemas. In particular the one in Southwold, which I visited a couple of summers ago. It was built in the last decade with a small amount of seats, yet rendered in a beautiful 1920s picturehouse style. This gave it a strange Legoland quality, as the real old picturehouses were huge.
Looking it up now, I discover its capacity is 68. Which isn’t all that small, really. A while ago I saw the new ‘Dorian Gray’ flick at a multiplex, and the screen turned out to have the dimensions of an average living room. This was at the Empire Leicester Square, screen number 6. Number of seats: 26.
And yet, it didn’t feel cramped or claustrophobic. In fact, the proximity of strangers in such limited number meant that any would-be chatterers or wrapper rustlers were dissuaded from the off, fearing they could be glowered at (or have their shoulders tapped) so much more easily. On top of this, I’m convinced the intimacy intensified the viewing itself, as I felt closer to being an honoured house guest rather than a visitor in an uncaring public cavern.
On the occasions I’ve reviewed films, I’ve had to go to press screenings in compact rooms, often in Soho. But despite the similar cosiness, the atmosphere there isn’t the same at all. You are in the company of professionals who are watching the film as part of their job, not because they want to escape into stories and visit other worlds in the dark. You can sense the taint of obligation in the air. Enforced fun is never the same as the fun you do for, well, fun.
No, to truly enjoy a film it must be in a room made for the purpose, amongst strangers who have paid to be there. And I’m starting to wonder if small cinemas are better than large ones.
Now, I do hate it when articles justify themselves with tenuous links to the news, such as the Cher movie about burlesque generating columns along the lines of ‘Is Burlesque Empowering Or Not, Or What, Or Whither?’ Or, in the run-up to the release of ‘Black Swan’, articles in the press every single day along the lines of ‘I Too Was In The Same Room As Some Ballet Once’.
But by sheer coincidence – honest – a tiny cinema HAS just been in the news. Nottingham’s Screen Room, which seats 21 and claims to be the smallest cinema in the world (never mind the UK), has just closed its doors. What hasn’t been made clear is where that title rests now. Â I was interested in a list of fun-sized London cinemas myself, but couldn’t find one. So I’ve done the research myself.
Although I’m not counting multiplex screens, I’m guessing the 26 seats of Empire 6, Leicester Square must be a contender for the smallest in the West End. Trouble is, multiplexes tend to sell tickets per film rather than per screen, and move the titles around the screens to match demand. You often don’t know what screen you’re getting until you choose the film and time.
I’m also not counting screening rooms in hotels, film clubs in non-cinema venues, private hire places or the Abcat Cine Club in King’s Cross. This being a 20-seat sex cinema that the Cinema Treasures website insists on listing as a ‘classic movie theatre’. I do, however, understand that it shows heterosexual adult films for men to have gay sex to, and that despite the arrival of the internet, it’s still going. Â I suppose there’s a lesson there about niche marketing.
With those exceptions noted, here’s a list of the capital’s single-screen cinemas with a capacity of under 100, as of February 2011.
LONDON’S SMALLEST CINEMAS
1. The Exhibit, Balham. 24 seats.
2. The Aubin, Shoreditch. 45 seats.
3. Shortwave, Bermondsey. 52 seats.
4. David Lean Clock Tower, Croydon. 68 seats. (Update: This may be closing.)
5. Lexi, Kensal Rise. 77 seats.
6. Electric Cinema, Notting Hill. 98 seats.
Most of these are fairly new, and I’m looking forward to trying them out. I wonder if the coming of digital projectors means that more lounge-sized independent cinemas like these are going to pop up. I do hope so.
The smallest screen in a multi-screen arthouse cinema is probably the NFT’s Studio, with 38 seats. Followed by the ICA’s Screen 2, at 45 seats.
Both screens at the Everyman Baker St are unusually small: one at 85 seats, the other at 77.
As for current contenders for the smallest cinema in Britain, there’s the Blue Walnut Cafe in Torquay (23 seats), Minicine in Leeds (26 seats), and the aforementioned Exhibit in Balham. Out of those, only the Exhibit regularly screens new-ish releases.
This morning: to the office of the Ugly models agency in Edgware Road, to see if they think I’m right for their books. Ugly specialises in providing people with ‘strong looks’ for TV, film and advertising, and over the years various friends have suggested I at least attempt to register with them.
They’re seeing dozens of people, so many that I have to queue in the corridor outside. Their registration form asks if the client would object to being in adverts for alcohol, cigarettes or furs. I didn’t think ads for cigarettes and new fur coats were even allowed these days, and wonder where they still go on.
When it’s my turn I have my photo taken and am briefly interviewed on video. Then I’m told in classic fashion not to call them, they’ll call me, once they decide. And they only call if they decide it’s a yes.
They also give me a copy of their latest directory. It’s fascinating: a swatch book of human set dressing. Need a 50-something white guy to convincingly run a newspaper kiosk? There’s one pictured doing just that. Need a barrel-chested Asian man who has his own police uniform? Take your pick.
There’s the expected models that Ugly is associated with: people with faces riddled with piercings and tattoos, toothless old men who can ‘gurn’ their face into a fleshy funnel. What surprises me is that they also represent more conventional-looking models. Many of them are downright ordinary. Just deliberately ordinary, I suppose. Ordinary and proud. Â Ordinary for hire.
Afternoon: to the planetarium at Greenwich Observatory. I’d been thinking about the old 1950s one in Baker Street, now defunct, and wanted to see this successor. It’s now the city’s only public planetarium, and is brand new – built in 2007.
The Observatory is in today’s news, too. It’s about to start charging an entry fee, in order to cope with overcrowding. Today there’s the usual gaggle of foreign schoolchildren outside, posing for photos as they straddle the Meridian line. But inside the planetarium there are barely ten visitors. Maybe because it’s tucked around the corner of the Observatory itself, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, it’s a shame.
The show I catch, ‘We Are Astronomers’, is a dazzling and uplifting celebration of the subject, from Galileo to Hubble, to the Large Hadron Collider and the yet-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope, all with cutting edge animation and a narration from David Tennant. There’s even a real live astronomer introducing the show and taking questions afterwards. More people should know about it.
I take the Thames Clipper back into town: any excuse to enjoy the only part of London’s public transport network where you can legitimately order a gin and tonic.
There’s now a new sight from the river since I last took the boat – The Shard skyscraper, at London Bridge. Finally, a 21st century building that’s not obsessed with glass and transparent walls. Blocky yet arty, The Shard has a touch of Jacob Epstein about it, or something out of Metropolis.
***
In the Royal Observatory gift shop, you can buy Meridian ponchos.
One of the casting agencies emails me an application form in the Microsoft Word format. I usually open such things with the program Open Office, as I resent the assumption that one always has to buy expensive, world-dominating software like Word, so I try to use free alternatives like OO. Only thing is, Open Office mangles the application form. Lines are broken up, boxes are a mess, and lumps of text go strolling to different parts of the document where they frankly have no business to be.
I try another free alternative, Google Docs. This time the form looks perfect in the web browser, but when I print it out, some parts are missing. I go online and beg friends for help. They suggest Microsoft’s free alternative, Word Viewer, which I take time to download and install. But I still end up with formatting errors.
So I solve the matter by walking to the internet cafe in Archway Road. There, logging on to my mail and printing out the form using the cafe’s copy of Word 2007 takes mere minutes, as opposed the hours I wasted fiddling with the other programs.
Later, I actually realise I could have used the Word Viewer program after all: I just needed to download a separate ‘compatibility pack’ and install that. Oh, and I had to open up Internet Explorer and check for Microsoft Updates for the program too. And so it goes on. Upgrade, install, upgrade, install.
All of which reminds me how limited my patience is with computers, despite my reputation as a veteran blogger. What particularly vexes me is the constant need to keep up with owning and upgrading the right software and gadgets to properly interact with society.
There’s a comedian who has a routine about moving to London and being annoyed at the constant appearance of cranes, road works and building sites. ‘When will London be FINISHED?’ she wails.
That’s exactly how I feel about computers and software. And it reminds me how much I love paper books – the invention that requires no upgrade. Books never need compatibility patches or the right region player, or power or recharging. They just work.
I speak as no Luddite, however. I’ve had a Kindle e-book reader for several months now. It’s wonderful for reading when travelling, and I love the ability to resize fonts and check words in the built-in dictionary. But it can’t be signed by an author and can’t exist without being charged up (if only once a month). It also lacks the stand-alone nature of books, as well as their freedom from accidental file deletion and their irreplaceable aesthetic pleasure. Â E-books won’t replace books just as paperbacks never replaced hardbacks. But computers will always frustrate. At least, they will with me.
In the morning I speak to the very helpful Consumer Credit Counselling Service. They advise me what best to do with a punishing overdraft when living on the dole: how to open a new account with a different bank, manage all my ingoings and outgoings away from the debt, and how to ask Lloyds very nicely if they can waive their charges, in return for a sensible-looking payment plan.
Then my parents phone and bail me out.
I hadn’t asked them for help – they’d read yesterday’s blog. Although I take no pleasure in accepting their long-suffering generosity like this, particularly at the age when I really, really should be able to manage on my own, I accept, am impossibly grateful, and am viscerally aware of how lucky I am to have them. And I intend, of course, to pay them back.
I’m worried now that this could sound like I use a public blog to tell my parents what I can’t tell them in private. But that’s not true. I don’t know what I’m doing a lot of the time full stop. The diary is a way of cattle-prodding my general… flailing into order, controlling myself, coming to terms with things I’m trying to avoid, and using the Web as a witness.
I think I said as much in the BBC1 documentary on blogging. One reason why I took to blogging before the term was even invented was because it seemed to fit the way my mind works. Or rather, doesn’t work. I don’t write to say something. I write to find out what I have to say.
Anyway, it’s such a sobering, mind-clearing, clean slate feeling to see my balance, little as it is, without the minus sign forever in front. This time for good. Overdraft cancelled.
***
Dad has just scanned and uploaded his comic book project, Captain Biplane, to the Web. A true labour of love, he’s worked on it since the 1960s, off and on. It can be found at: http://www.mml.co.uk/cb/
***
Some cultural adventures of late. In order to see more films on the big screen, I’ve become a member of the Prince Charles cinema near Leicester Square. The cheapskate Londoner’s first port of call for films. Matinee screenings are a mere £1.50.
Last Saturday: I see Richard Herring’s latest solo comedy show, ‘Christ On A Bike’, at the theatre next to the Prince Charles. He pulls apart the inconsistencies and downright silliness in the text of the Bible to great effect, but I think the highlights are when he blends the fixed script with brand new, topical material – namely the case of the Christian B&B owners who refused to admit a gay couple.
Four films seen in the last month, all four touching on ways to tell the truth. In reverse order of merit:
CATFISH
Documentary (or so it seems) about a New York photographer who has a long-distance relationship with a woman, entirely via Facebook and phone calls. When he works out he’s being hoaxed, he decides to turn up on her doorstep, unannounced, and find out what’s going on. It’s an interesting internet-based twist on 84 Charing Cross Road, with much to say about they way people are using the Net to live their lives – or to live fantasy lives. The only thing is, I can’t quite believe much of the film itself isn’t staged reconstruction, if not downright fiction. Something a bit fishy about Catfish.
THE SOCIAL NETWORK
A dramatisation of the creation of Facebook itself, with a lot of license. Even though Mr West Wing peppers the script with quips and retorts throughout, rarely does one get an iota of depth and empathy from this parade of awful and sexist little college boys, jabbering constantly about how to get rich from computers. As much as I like witty American screenplays, I like my slick banter mixed with a little sadness (Holly Hunter in Broadcast News), or madness (Peter Finch in Network). The pursuit of money alone just isn’t interesting enough. Still, Jesse Eisenberg’s lead performance is incredible – all autistic monotone and shifty eyes, never letting his defences slip until the final frame.
THE KING’S SPEECH
Pretty much a perfect film. Unlike The Social Network, the script is taut and engaging but allows for plenty of emotion and doesn’t draw attention to itself. With delicious irony, at my screening the projector’s audio breaks down. The sound effects and background music are fine – it is just the dialogue that is inaudible. So I hop on a bus for five minutes and catch the film all over again at another cinema – a very London thing to do. In the gents afterwards, I chat about the film with a man who says he taught the director Tom Hooper, at Highgate School, and is so proud of him now. A perfect footnote for a film about the power of teaching.
THE ARBOR
A stunning work of art that deserves every award in the book. On the surface it’s a documentary about the unhappy life of the 1980s playwright Andrea Dunbar. It follows how she failed to leave the Bradford council estate that both inspired her and held her back, and what became of her children after she died at the age of 29. It mixes scenes from her plays with archive TV footage, fictional framing devices, dramatisation and art installation. Actors lip-sync to the voices of real people being interviewed, and their perspectives differ from person to person, reminding you that documentaries aren’t really so different from dramatisations after all – it’s all versions of the truth. Where the Arbor goes further is not just the unique style, but the unflinching yet unjudgemental examination of its subject, from the personal to the political. Age-old questions are asked with searing freshness: how much of a person is determined by their upbringing and how much by choice? Is the past an excuse? Is a neglectful mother a wicked one? How intrusive should society be?
The subject matter, though off-screen and spoken about rather than shown, is so harrowing I can’t recommend The Arbor to everyone. But it’s one of those films that you’re desperate to show to others the moment the credits roll.
Am somewhat struggling with getting myself into a routine and finding work. Or as they call it now, ‘sustainable employment’.
A few thoughts on the matter:
I am not interested in job competitition. I believe in filling gaps, not treading on others’ toes.
Better to focus on one’s uniqueness.
Look upon applications as adding a new dish to a menu, however cluttered. You may not be to their taste, or you may be exactly what they want.
***
One advert asking for freelance reviewers now looks likely to be some kind of scam, possibly where one’s details are used for junk mail. Still, it got me to put together a portfolio of clippings and a CV anyway.
The constant motto of the optimist: ‘Ah well, it’s a lesson learned.’ I just feel I’d like to start earning alongside all the learning, if that’s okay with the world.
Forgotten just how much I’d done over the years: a cover feature for Rock ‘n’ Reel magazine, a column in Select Magazine (the magazine folded before it was printed, but I was still paid), and quite a few full page review columns in Plan B, of films and exotic CD reissues.
***
To make my life just that little bit less lovely, Lloyds TSB has introduced a monthly £5 ‘usage fee’ for their agreed overdrafts. That’s on top of the £15-£20 monthly interest I’m already paying them for the privilege of being in the red. I’m on the dole, so paying off an overdraft isn’t possible until I get a regular wage again.
Stupid thing is, I paid off the overdraft when I last had a job, eighteen months ago. I was in the black. And it felt… unnatural to me. Just as cancelling my dole would have felt unnatural. Over the years, both dole & overdraft had muted from being fiscal crutches to actually becoming a part of me. An addiction, of a sort. Like heroin, just less cool and more pathetic. Even more pathetic.
But there’s another reason. Part of my depression manifests itself as a constant self-hating, self-harming voice telling me that I’ll always be like this. That it is my place to be on the dole and in the red from here to the grave. Now, I know this is not true. But it is something I have to struggle with every day, and it’s something that keeps holding me back. Living alone doesn’t help. But right now, just writing this diary entry means today is a success.
I read recently how Andrea Dunbar, the tragic Bradford playwright and subject of the film The Arbor, was taken to court by the dole office: she hadn’t declared her royalties from the film Rita, Sue & Bob Too. I can’t help thinking the same thing applied – a fear of change, even a change for the better. I also think it was why Quentin Crisp never moved out of his rooming house in New York, even though he had the best part of a million dollars in savings.
A phone call to Lloyds reveals the new £5 fee replaces their unauthorised fees for going over agreed limits, which I’m careful to avoid anyway. So effectively it’s a punishment for being good.
Amusingly, the staffer on the phone got quite annoyed with me when I made this point. ‘So it’s all about you, is it?’
Similarly, I was actually told off on Twitter by a financial journalist, for quipping that bailed-out bonus-scoffing bank executives weren’t even good at their job, de facto. Good luck to him if he’s going around Twitter attacking everyone who shares the sentiment.
This kind of unexpected defensiveness – for bankers, footballers and Government alike  – is very much in the news. There’s just been a debate on BBC4 on the ethics of pay, in which the footballer Wayne Rooney’s salary (£10.2million) was compared to that of a care worker (£12,000).
‘Well, he is worth it,’ said a young woman in the audience. ‘He runs about more than a care worker.’
Still, I have to face my own part in my penury. I could have avoided having an overdraft, depression or no.
And just as the Government and I agree that once I start earning the first thing I need to do is cancel my dole, the bank and I know that I need to cancel the overdraft as soon as I clear it.
The good thing about all this is that rather than sit and stew in my own anger, it’s spurred me into making three new applications for work today. This time as a TV & film extra. I’ve sent off photos to The Casting Network, Guys & Dolls, and Ugly.
If it were offered, I’d even appear in an advert for a bank. And that would be me told.
My 2011 gets off to a shaky, wary sort of start, to which this late entry pays witness. Still, I’m feeling more hopeful about life than I have done in months. One simple physical act is doing wonders – I air my room every morning. On top of the instant rush of fresh air, there’s the pleasing symbolism of opening a window at the start of a new day. Works better for me than tablets, anyway.
December 30th and 31st: I DJ for the Last Tuesday Society once again. With typical LTS perversity, the event on the 30th under the arches at London Bridge is about ten times the size of the one on New Year’s Eve, with nude people painted gold languishing on banqueting tables, chocolate fountains, orchestras and so on. The latter is a relatively modest do in a restaurant in Bishopsgate. I see in the New Year with LTS types David Piper, Wynd & Suzette. Empty bottles of Bollinger litter the all-night tube home.
I am paid in art: framed drawings by Stephen Tennant. Very lovely and Cocteau-esque they are too. Little pieces of the Bright Young Things on my wall. I look at them and think of the things the hand that drew them did – all those parties, Tennant living the life that inspired characters in Waugh and Mitford. One drawing is on Wilsford Manor notepaper, as in the tastefully crumbling mansion in Salisbury where Tennant spent his later years, mostly in bed. From your mansion to my bedsit, dear Stephen. I’ll look after them.
On January 1st I cope with a tiresome cliche of an hangover by walking all the way from Highgate to Soho, via Regent’s Park. A gin and tonic in the Coach & Horses and I feel so much better. Memo to self: Â hair of the dog works so much better than any attempt to ‘detox’. The pub has just opened when I get there, so while I sit at the bar and sip it’s just me and the ghost of Jeffrey Bernard, there on New Year’s Day 2011, in the middle of the metropolis, silent and serene. But not sober.
My resolution for the year is one I’m sure the Government, the world and I will all be happy with. I resolve to do my utmost to get off the dole and earn a living, this time from freelance work.
Now, I’m all too aware what a ludicrously competitive area this is, and how hard it is to make a living. So I promise to really, properly work at it. Writing arts articles, doing reviews of films & music, delivering talks, popping up on radio & TV – all things I have been paid for before, after all. I’ll also seek out this kind of work abroad. I keep being told by strangers around the world how I’ve featured in their college essay on flaneurs, dandies, diarists, London eccentrics and so on. And kind Proper Writers have pointed me to websites where magazines in lonely English-speaking corners of the earth are paying £100 a time for half-decent articles and reviews. That would suit me to a tee. I can’t do the Everyman style of writing (all those ‘we’s and ‘you’s bandied about like I’m an example of an average, in-touch human being) and have no wish to. But I can do the opposite thing rather well. The Not So Everyman. I just need to find the right place for it. The right place for being professionally out of place. I know I’m fairly good at stringing together connections from diverse worlds, and I always strive to come up with something vaguely original, rather than duplicating what people can get elsewhere.
All I need to earn to get off the dole is £175 weekly. I’m going to contact at least one editor a day until I get somewhere.
Every year I try to have my photo taken in front of a Christmas tree somewhere in London, for use as an e-card to the world. This one’s outside St Pancras Grand restaurant, in St Pancras station. Taken around 3pm on December 24th 2010, by my friend Ms Silke.
I couldn’t manage a smile which didn’t turn out too smirky, too smug or too camp, as in punchably camp rather than adorably camp. So I went with a mad stare instead.
Now, what does my stare look like? A terror of the future (this is my last Christmas in my 30s)? A defiant out-staring of the future, basilisk-like? Or a Jimmy Wales tactic? In banner adverts over at Wikipedia, Wiki-boss Mr Wales has been staring the world into donating money for the site.
Well, that wasn’t my intention with the photo but if it works I should really do one of my occasional rattlings of the DE tip jar. I’m currently living on less than the full dole due to my surreal/hilarious/unhappy experience with the DWP earlier this year, and I’m now having trouble affording even a hair cut, as you can see. Plus I need the encouragement to write here more often.
(rattles tip jar)
Thank you. And now, the e-card.
.
Here’s what Christmas Day 2010 looked like in Waterlow Park, London N6.
Officially it wasn’t a White Christmas, as there hadn’t been any fresh snow falling. But the snow from earlier in the week was still very much laying round and, if you will, about. Waterlow Park’s duck pond was completely frozen over, for the first time (I think) in my umpteen years of playing Santa to the waterfowl. The mallards and coots had gone, but a few moorhens were strutting about nervously on the ice. They seemed happy enough to gorge on my Proper Non-Bread Duck Food Pellets.
My friend Ms Silke, who also was spending Christmas alone in N6, brought a flask of mulled wine and some stollen cake, and we spent an entirely lovely Christmas Day lunchtime on a nearby bench.
I’d told my parents a while ago that I was looking for a letter opener, ideally vintage. This Christmas, they gave me a rather unique one as a present. It had previously belonged to my Aunt Renee, and is entirely handmade, seemingly from a piece of scrap metal welded to a large army bullet, with a British royal crest stamped on the handle.
On the blade is engraved ‘Loos. Le 25 Septembre 1915’.
The letter opener came with a WW1 medal. ‘The Great War For Civilisation 1914-1919.’ On the milled edge it says: ‘2 Lieut. L.W. Strugnell, RAF’. Mum thinks he was a friend of the family rather than an ancestor.
I’ll be putting the letter opener into active service once more.
(P.S. Re the iPhone box in the last photo. I’m flatsitting for a friend, and the box is hers. I’ve still yet to own an iPhone or iPad. I was, however, given a Kindle, which I love and which I really should write about soon.)
Thursday December 2nd 2010. London and much of the UK is currently covered in snow.  I wake up today shivering and cursing my ability to throw off heavy blankets in my sleep. Not to mention my bedsit’s lack of central heating. I have an oil-filled radiator plus a small fan heater, both of which plug into the mains, guzzling up £1 coins in the meter at a frightening rate. Still, I feel more at home in a cold Victorian bedsit in London than I would in a well-heated modern house anywhere else in England, such is my dyed-in-the-hair metropolitan blood. And I can use the heating of libraries, galleries and cafes in the daytime.
I’m convinced there’s only two ways I’d be permitted to live in any settlement outside the M25: either like the Christopher Lee character in ‘The Wicker Man’ – the eccentric yet powerful lord of the manor – or as the first sacrifice the second the crops fail. Actually, the locals probably wouldn’t wait for that.
When I visited a bookshop in St Ives last September, the woman on the till warned me – within seconds of entering and presumably with no awareness of The League Of Gentlemen – Â ‘We mainly stock books for locals. Not so much for Londoners.’ I hadn’t uttered a word.
But then, as proof of my innate London-ness, one of the things I first noticed when in St Ives was that there wasn’t a single drycleaners. Plenty of art shops and art galleries, but the moment one gets a blob of acrylic on one’s cravat, it’s off to Penzance with you.
***
Yesterday morning: I surprise myself by getting up at 5am for a spot of voluntary work. I am collecting for the international HIV charity Mildmay, as my bit for World AIDS Day. I stand with a bucket and tray of red ribbons by the ticket barriers in London Bridge station, from 7am to 10.30am. Without a break, too, though that was my choice.
I also choose to never shout at passers-by, hoping my status is clear from my bucket – and the unflattering t-shirt they give me (the things I do for charity). Partly because I’m not the shouting sort, but mainly because I think people might be grateful NOT to have a street fundraiser barking at them or impeding their path on their entirely blameless journey. I can’t do ‘fun runs’, I can’t shout or collar pedestrians, but I can do is what I once did at school for charity – a sponsored silence (a sly way of keeping children quiet in class, I now realise).
So I just stand there with my bucket, careful to be visible while keeping out of people’s way, not speaking unless I’m spoken to, and armed only with a hopeful smile. It seems to work: by the time I knock off, my bucket is satisfyingly heavy with coins, and more than a few notes too.
Saturday November 20th.
To the Cruciform building in Gower Street for London’s Transgender Day Of Remembrance service. The main part of which is a reading of the names of people killed in transphobic attacks over the last twelve months. The list goes on and on and takes a good twenty minutes or so: most of them trans women from Brazil and Mexico. Roz Kaveney reads an excellent poem, and there’s three musical performances. The showtune-belting Mzz Kimberley sings ‘I’m A Tranny’ to the tune of Peggy Lee’s ‘I’m A Woman.’
There’s an interesting contrast between the other two singers: both are trans men (ie born female). Naechane Valentino sings soul-pop and says that since starting to take testosterone, he’s finding it harder to stay in key with his backing tracks. I hope he can get them transposed, pun not intended (which really means one enjoys the accidental pun and so leaves it in).
CN Lester, however, is a classical singer who has chosen to eschew testosterone in order to retain their trained mezzo-soprano voice. I think of the way choir boys’ careers end the moment their voice drops, while boy singers in pop music can carry on, like Michael Jackson. At the service, CN sings a heart-stopping version of Nina Simone’s ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free’.
Two lessons in language learned from this day. One is that the slang term ‘tranny’ is increasingly considered offensive to trans people. Unless you are trans yourself using it in the spirit of reclamation – like Mzz Kimberley – it’s best avoided.
The other is that some trans people do not always – as I’d assumed – use the pronouns of the gender they identify as. Instead, they’d rather be described by the proposed genderless pronouns ‘zie’, ‘hir’ and ‘s/he’, or failing that, ‘they’. CN Lester is one.
Trouble is, mainstream English hasn’t yet evolved to accommodate such words, though I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. There are a few genderless titles, like ‘doctor’ (and indeed CN Lester, being a PHD student, will soon be able to use it). But throwing ‘hir’ into a mainstream text without explanation can’t yet be done.
I’d love to be the kind of writer that helps to kick-start such changes, but here’s another problem – my own identity as a writer. I am a few steps behind the mainstream, being as I am fogeyish and fusty and arch, still using ‘lady’ when I should use ‘woman’, or ‘actress’ rather than ‘female actor’. This usage is part of my character, like my suit-wearing. And character is context.
I just hope that people realise this and do not mistake me for a default mainstream writer. Otherwise it’ll be like the time when I was asked by the hip literary venue The Book Club to take off my jacket and tie. It was clearly a policy aimed to keeping out City workers looking for a drink, but they didn’t realise that my suits are part of my dandyish look, my identity. I wondered if other suit-loving writers, say Tom Wolfe or Mark Twain, ever had the same problem. ‘Come back when you’ve got some skinny jeans on, Mr Twain!’
So, just as I cannot carry off jeans and trainers, I feel unable to join in with some popular changes in English usage. I’ve written before about my inability to use the word ‘shit’ to mean ‘stuff’ or ‘things’. That’s my hipster line drawn in the sand, right there. But I’m starting to feel like the only Englishman alive who doesn’t use it.
Three recent cases in point.
Paul Chambers, the ‘Twitter Joke Trial’ man, used it in the Tweet that saw him arrested: ‘You’ve got a week to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!’
Secondly, the video footage from the student protest at Millbank the other week. After the now-infamous fire extinguisher is seen dropped from the roof onto the police below, the protestors on the ground voice their disapproval instantly, by chanting to their colleagues on the roof, ‘STOP THROWING SHIT! STOP THROWING SHIT!’
Thirdly, David Cameron used the phrase ‘shit happens’ in a dinner speech last week, for the Spectator magazine.
All of which puts me in my increasingly old-fashioned place. When it comes to gender, politics and sexuality, I like to think I’m fairly progressive. But when it comes to language, I am more conservative than the chief Conservative.
I have a female friend who addresses everyone with the word ‘dude’. She’s British, and about 30. I once batted the term back at her in conversation, tongue very much in cheek, knowing full well how it’d sound on my lips. She nearly fell off her chair laughing.
