Some things I really should plug.

Mr MacGowan has made a charity record for Haiti, featuring his friends Nick Cave, Johnny Depp, Bobby Gillespie, Chryssie Hynde, Paloma Faith and others. It’s a rather devilish version of ‘I Put A Spell On You’, and comes out on March 8th. Proceeds go to Concern, the Dublin-based humanitarian organisation which has been working in Haiti since 1994.

YouTube video of the song
Facebook group
Digital download pre-order page

***
I’ve written a piece on pseudonyms for the New Escapologist magazine, issue 3. Purchasing info at www.new-escapologist.co.uk.

It’s a superb issue, focusing on up-to-date ways of ‘escaping’ the soul-destroying aspects of modern life, without quite going entirely ‘off grid’, as they say. Editor Rob Wringham talks about how he effortlessly moved from Glasgow to Montreal, where he seems to be having an entirely nice time of things. Turns out Montreal’s cost of living is half the amount it is in Glasgow.

In fact, more than a few bohemian friends have been making the big leap abroad of late – with Berlin being a particularly popular New World for modern Impuritans.

Val G, DJ and promoter of London indie club nights like The Fanclub for some years, has just moved to Hong Kong, pretty much for good. ‘London’s dead’, she said.

Well, it’s certainly dead expensive. Tube and bus fares have gone up, for a start. Even if an event is free, getting there and back and buying a drink or two still prohibits going out much more than once a fortnight, if one is on the dole, that is. Money just keeps running out, whatever I do.

Much to my chagrin, I’ve had to sign up for a Job Centre job search programme, a mental health-based one. They want me to prepare a CV, which for me is the stuff of pure science fiction. ‘Just put down everything,’ they said.

What about the time, I muse, I was hired to be the only UK performer at the Stockholm International Poetry Festival? Or my engagement as guest of honour for an exhibition on male fashion, at a museum in The Hague? That was work I was considered qualified to do, after all – and head-hunted for it internationally. Those two invitations felt like achievements, that I was Of Use To The World, which is what a CV is meant to be about. But I rather think a typing speed of 45 words per minute (on a good day) is all that’s applicable.

And I’m trying very hard not to add ‘Works Badly As Part Of A Team’, ‘Copes Badly Under Pressure’, and ‘Isn’t Very Good With People.’

As for emigration, much as I love London, if I did suddenly get an offer of an income abroad – Stockholm, say – I’d move like a shot. But I’m not holding my breath. Trying to stay sane, sheltered and fed is at present, ambition enough.

Sometime last December. A knock at the door. It’s two members of the Jesus & Mary Chain, wanting help with some heavy lifting.

One, Phil King (JAMC bassist at their reunion gigs, including the Coachella one with Scarlett Johansson), has just moved in next door. The other, John Moore (JAMC drummer 1986-1988), hasn’t. Though Mr Moore was once meant to share a Cambridge hotel room with me, and instead decided to sleep on Rowan Pelling’s floor. I didn’t take it personally.

I give them a hand with unloading the car outside – Indie Band Removals, at your service. Am particularly impressed with one of Mr K’s possessions: a framed poster for the 70s film The Final Programme. That’s as cult as cult movies come: a Michael Moorcock adaption featuring the dandyish Jerry Cornelius.  I saw it on TV years ago, and vividly recall the ending: our hero merges with a woman during sex, then walks off into the sunset as a kind of hermaphrodite ape. As must we all.

Messrs King and Moore play together in the John Moore Rock & Roll Trio, whom I enjoy that same December evening, at the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury. The club night is called ‘You Fill Me With Inertia’, which is a Peter Cook quote from Bedazzled. More cult movies.

While I’m watching the band – and they really do perform your actual vintage rock and roll – a woman comes up to me. ‘I just wanted to tell you how cool you look. Though I know I’m drunk.’

Phil King’s been in so many bands, but one he actually fronted, The Apple Boutique, are having their ultra-rare Creation single ‘Love Resistance’ reissued this very month. Phil’s shown me his copy – a desirable little 3-inch CD. It’s highly jangly, blissful, 12-string guitar-smothered, Go Betweens-y summer pop. Video and more details here.

Recently, I bumped into Phil outside my door, as neighbours do. Though instead of attempts to borrow cups of sugar (did anyone ever do that?), our conversation tends to be like this:

Him: Hi, how are you?

Me: Okay. I’m writing a piece for a fanzine about Felt & Denim.

Him: So am I. Probably the same fanzine.

(It is)

Me: I’m talking about how my band Orlando once covered a rare Denim song at a gig, ‘I Will Cry At Christmas’. It was on the Denim demo, and sounds suspiciously like a left over Felt number.

Him: Oh yes, I remember Lawrence coming into rehearsal with that one.

Which I think is called being trumped.

For the piece I was writing, I watched the video of Felt’s classic Primitive Painters on YouTube. It’s only now that I realise that the one who isn’t the singer is my next door neighbour.

All of which is of no real interest, except when playing Six Degrees Of Dickon Edwards.

[Medical note: First day on a new SSRI prescription. Citalopram. 20mg daily.]

I’m writing this in a brand new bespoke cashmere suit. Wool & cashmere, to be precise, but the cashmere’s definitely there. Just as Alan Partridge shouted ‘Cashback!’ as an exclamation of success, I hereby nominate a dandy variation: ‘Cashmere!’

The suit is by Charlie Collingwood, a young tailor who’s just set up his own business in London, Henry Herbert.  ‘It’d be nice if you could say something in your blog. Assuming you like the suit, that is.’

Can’t argue with that. Turns out that if you Google ‘London’ and ‘tailors’ and ‘suits’ – or something like that – you get my diary pretty high up in the results. Though I’m hardly going to turn this into a full-on review blog, it’s nice to occasionally be of some use to doers and makers I approve of.

(By the way, Googling me today reveals I apparently co-wrote an article on John Mortimer in the Independent. It says so on IMDB. A few more clicks, and it turns out I was in fact quoted by the newspaper in a ‘what the blogs say’ piece on his death.)

So: my new cashmere suit. Charlie first measured me up in his Savile Row office then let me choose the fabric from a selection of swatch books, along with the lining. I felt I needed a ‘dinner party and premieres’ number in black, and hadn’t had cashmere before, so I went for that, along with the usual bespoke tailor’s options: choosing the shape of pockets, number of buttons on the jacket and cuffs, type of vent at the back of the jacket, turn-ups on the trousers or not, and so on.

A few weeks after that he called me in so I could try on the ‘baste’. This is the draft version of the suit, with dotted white lines around the stitching as seen in umpteen old movies. Not all modern tailors do the baste process, so I was rather delighted by this bit in itself. Another six weeks or so later, the suit arrived in a bespoke cardboard box, illustrated with dozens of silhouettes of vintage-looking besuited men in various poses: hailing taxis, reading newspapers, but also typing at a laptop. And above all, getting the vintage feel just right: stylish, timeless, versatile.

Charlie’s two key selling points, his friendliness aside, are his use of entirely British-sourced materials, along with the fact that he delivers them via scooter, in true Quadrophenia Mod style.

There’s a feature on him in the Evening Standard here.

Henry Herbert Tailors have a website at www.henryherbert.com, with a Twitter account here.

I’ve been wearing the suit for a few weeks now. It’s a work of beauty. I’d ask strangers to stroke me and feel the cashmere-iness of it, if such a request didn’t risk misinterpretation.

Hooray for Henry Herbert. May their scooters go forth and beautify.

A few days into the New Year: with Dad to Somerset House Ice Rink. A favourite spot at this time of year, though we always go as spectators in the cafe, never as skaters.

We also drop into the Norman Parkinson exhibition, A Very British Glamour. Stunning photos of ladies from vintage fashion mags. But Parkinson also had a thing for combining beauty with humour, often putting his models in unexpected poses and locations.

In one early 50s shot, his wife and muse Wanda, looking immaculate in a cashmere twin-set, sits in a rural working man’s pub, seemingly playing shove ha’penny with a flat-capped old regular. An unlikely story.

Another, The Young Look In The Theatre (1953), depicts a gaggle of up and coming stage actresses of the day. I love all the different types of outfits, hinting at what the actresses think of their own real life personae. Some casual, some up-to-the-minute fashionable, some timeless and classic, some girlish, some noble, some vampish, some womanly, some motherly.

(Clicking on the photo takes you to a much larger version on the Christie’s website, with a click-and-zoom facility)

The exhibition doesn’t list who’s who, frustratingly. So I get on the Net and find out for myself.

Top row (upside down, the old wag): Norman Parkinson himself.

Middle row (on the bars, left to right): Virginia McKenna, Elizabeth Henson, Patricia McCarron, Josephine Griffin.

Bottom row (standing, left to right): Hazel Penwarden, Zena Walker, Yvonne Furneaux, Jill Bennett, Patricia Owens, Ruth Trouncer.

I also love one Vogue portrait of Enid Boutling, model and wife of the film director Roy. Captioned ‘Impertinence (1950)‘, she’s wearing a dandyish suit with a cropped hair, a stand-offish glare, and – shock horror – is smoking a cigarette without a holder. Regarded as very daring at the time, at least for Vogue.

Another favourite is of Audrey Hepburn with a baby donkey. Parkinson clearly punning on the ‘what an adorable creature’ response.

Am back in the Highgate bedsit after three weeks flat-sitting in Crouch End. No more cat to look after me.

Somewhat taken aback by the contrast in heating. In the flat, there was a boiler and radiators and the knowledge that I didn’t have to pay the heating bill. Back here I have just my little electric fan heater for the room. Which used to be fine, except that Highgate, like most of the UK, is currently in the grip of a proper winter spell. I sit here at my desk still wearing my winter coat, with the fan heater on full right by my toes, and still I shiver. During the night I don two old t-shirts plus my old jogging bottoms (noting that it’s about time I bought some pyjamas), position the heater right by the bed, and still I’m freezing.

Tonight, then: blankets. And I’ve just bought some M&S pyjamas – first time since my teens. I chose the ones that looked the most like hand-me-downs from a Matthew Bourne ballet. I can’t be bothered working out if pyjamas on grown men are stylish or not. They are on me, and that’s an end to it.

***

During the day I spend as much time in heated public buildings as possible. Library, cafes, shops. Quite the opposite of being ‘snowed in’: the snow helps to get me out of bed (7am) and out of the house. Highgate like Crouch End still looks like Narnia, the snow crunching pleasingly underfoot, but central London is utterly, hilariously devoid of the stuff. A sense of the capital saying to the snow ‘Don’t you know who I AM? Don’t you DARE fall on me. I’m a Very Important City Centre.’

***

In the London Library toilets, one member walks straight from the cubicles back into the library without washing his hands. This is something that many men do which utterly appalls me. If he’d been a recognizable author, like more than a few LL members, I’d instinctively feel like naming him here and urging the world to boycott his books. But then I remember about WH Auden and his peeing in the sink (as brought up in the new Alan Bennett play). Not an excuse, but a reminder to trust the art, never the artist. Particularly the piss artist. Readers of my own work might like to note that I always wash my hands after visiting the lavatory. Whatever you think of it, it has been written by properly cleansed hands.

***

Packing away the Christmas decorations, I notice that 2009’s Christmas seems to have brought me more Christmas cards than I’ve had for years: 30 to 40 of them. In this digital world, it feels even more special. I know I go on about my love of getting proper handwritten letters and cards, but actually getting them is something else. Thank you, all those responsible. One favourite is from the band The Real Tuesday Weld. It contains a little 3-inch CD EP of the band. I’d forgotten how lovely 3-inch CDs were. Favourite track: ‘Plastic Please’, featuring the Puppini Sisters. It’s a fanbase mailout, but singer Stephen has handwritten a greeting to me: ‘To Dickon. Keep Dreaming.’ Which makes all the difference.

***

I see in the New Year by DJ-ing at White Mischief at the Proud Cabaret venue off Fenchurch Street. Lots of gorgeous dressed-up people, and fantastic live acts, particularly Frisky & Mannish, plus The Correspondents, who do a real 1910-meets-2010 techno rap set, merging cravats and waistcoats with what looks like skinny emo leggings. My own highlight is helping to locate a burlesque Judy Garland’s detachable plait. That says it all.

View from the flat a few days before Christmas.

I pass the Christmas week painlessly enough, cat and flat-sitting on my own in Crouch End. The freedom of having a whole flat to myself including a bathroom (I’ve spent most of my life sharing a shower with other bedsit tenant), plus no worries about heating bills, is reward enough. But Jen also gives me a generous Christmas present to unwrap on the day: a year’s membership to the NFT. It comes packaged with one of the BFI’s DVDs, Richard Lester’s surrealist 60s classic The Bed Sitting Room. It’s only now that I realise the apt nature of the title, given the escape from my normal dwelling.

Another present: a glider postcard from Maud Young. Also pictured is Erika Moen’s excellent autobiographical comic book, ‘Dar’, a present to myself which arrived in the same post.

My present to Jen is a copy of William Burroughs’s unlikely essay on his love of cats, The Cat Inside. It’s just been republished by Penguin:

Christmas Eve: I realise I need to buy Christmas crackers for the duck feeding ceremony in Waterlow Park the next day, as Ms Silke will be joining me.

Well, I say need… Funny how personal Christmas rituals can creep up on you. Yes, every Christmas Day I feed the ducks in Waterlow Park. And if a friend comes too, we pull crackers by the pond and put on the hats and pass around wine and mince pies right there. It’s just become the thing I do.

Me modelling the Budgens Deluxe Christmas Cracker hat. It’s essentially a hair band made from a red bin liner.

Buying Christmas crackers has to be done long before the 24th, which I discover too late. By now all the local supermarkets have sold out, except for Budgens. Which curiously has a tall stack of boxes of 12 ‘deluxe’ crackers (in so much as Budgens does ‘deluxe’) behind the counter. I see other shoppers coming away with a box each, and with big smiles. But curiously, it’s a smile of amusement, not relief.

‘They’re half price,’ says the cashier. ‘Because they’re faulty.’

‘Because they don’t make a bang?’

‘No, they bang fine. But they have all the same joke.’

This makes my Christmas. I spend the next twenty-four hours musing on the significance of this One Joke To Rule Them All. What can it be?

Noon the next day, and I pull the crackers with Silke at the duck pond.

Q. Where do snowmen go to dance?
A. To a Snowball.

Times twelve.

We then walk to Alexandra Park to feed the ducks there too, given it’s close to Crouch End. After the proper spate of snow a few days before, Christmas Day is only White in patches. The snow has vanished from the pavements and grass. But the duck ponds are still mostly frozen:

We also manage to see some proper Christmas Day snow. The tennis courts in Wood Vale have a thick layer of the white stuff, entirely untouched.

The papers today carry a photo of the man of the moment, the failed Nigerian leg-bomber who tried to blow up a US jet on Christmas Day. Though his attempt was mercifully thwarted, it’s still meant for a new range of over-the-top security measures. A full hour before landing, passengers on US flights now have to sit tight without anything on their lap: no trips to the toilet, no video or music, no newspapers, books, blankets or cushions. All thanks to young Mr Leggy.

The photo the papers are using is from seven years ago, when the unkind leg fetishist was a 16-year-old visiting London, as taken by his teacher. He stares directly at the camera with typical teenage defensiveness, while tugging at the brim of his Nike woollen hat as if to draw attention to the brand. It’s that Nike tick that gets me: the ubiquitous symbol of US corporate domination. I wonder if he’s still got the hat, whether embracing it (‘they’re enemies of Allah, but they still make nice hats.’). Or perhaps he’s inverting the Nike slogan with grim irony: ‘Just Do It’.

Everytime I have to take my shoes off in airports (never Nikes), I think about Richard Reid, the equally thwarted shoe-bomber who nonetheless achieved a petty kind of success: the introduction of those x-ray machines for shoes. Like those soap products from Lush which carry a little cartoon of the staffer who made them, I think of the machines bearing a similar cartoon of Mr Reid. Failed terrorists still get to be choreographers of new inconvenience, and so achieving a small scale victory. Somehow, it feels like those nonsensical instances at school, where teachers would adopt a kind of homeopathy approach to justice. ‘Because one child was naughty on the school trip, we’re never having that trip again. It’s his fault.’  The measure made no sense to me then, and still doesn’t now.

Similarly, seeing armed policemen at Heathrow never makes me feel safer about being there. Quite the reverse.

A Frankly Merry Christmas and a Splendid New Year to you.

(This year’s London tree: in the foyer of the 100-year-old Phoenix
Cinema, East Finchley, Christmas Eve 2009. Just before seeing the new
print of  The Red Shoes. Photo by Ms Shanthi.)

Early December: As I suspected, the BBC Short Story competition is won by my least favourite of the shortlisted five – the one about the terminally-ill son. It was beautifully written: I just think that if you’re going to write about terminal illness without adding anything new, the work needs to be as good as Alan Bennett’s ‘A Woman Of No Importance’, or Douglas Dunn’s ‘Elegies’ or Lee Hall’s ‘Spoonface Steinberg’ or James L Brooks’s ‘Terms Of Endearment’. Still, the runner-up was Sarah Maitland, which was my own second choice after Ms Alderman.

I take no pleasure in finding myself out of sync like this. I don’t care for ‘contrarian’ writers who go against the consensus for attention seeking reasons. ‘Look at me! I hate the thing everyone likes, and like the thing everyone hates.’ But neither do I enjoy finding myself in agreement with the fashions of the day – I’d feel I was doing something wrong somewhere.

Part of me likes the fact that I dislike The X Factor, for instance, because if I liked it, I would have to rebuild my character from scratch. So I’m grateful to Most People for ensuring that the one thing Most People like is utterly awful and vulgar and tasteless and crass and banal and artless and… just baffling. But I feel this instinctively, never deliberately. One person’s snobbery is another’s self-validation.

So when people on the internet organise that Rage Against The Machine single-buying campaign to thwart the X Factor winner, I find myself wanting both sides to lose, on top of just feeling very alone full stop. Rather as I am with football. I like the look of the X Factor winner – a very well-turned out young man called Joe, against the inelegant, tiresome RATM. But I have to admit the song Mr Joe was given was an unmemorable, dull, watery ballad. Whereas hearing that RATM song – with swearing intact – upsetting Nicky Campbell on Radio 5 the other morning was a rather fun radio moment. Anything for a more interesting world.

What I’d really like is to write songs for Joe myself. Or indeed, write for Will Young.  Stranger things have happened. Then again, Will Young was on that short story judging panel…

***

Am staying in Crouch End over Christmas and New Year. Cat-sitting and flat-sitting , this time for Jennifer C and Chris H. Cat in question is Vyvian, who came over from San Francisco with Jennifer some years ago. He has one of those cat passports. J can’t easily lay her hands on it, so my illusions are intact; in my head it has a little cat photo  – with unflattering cat haircut – and a series of pawprints.

Of the five North London cats I know, two of them are named after characters in 80s BBC TV comedies. Vyvian is named after one of The Young Ones, while Anna S’s cat Flashheart is from Blackadder.

***

Today, entirely randomly and because the train from the nearest station to the flat – Hornsey overground – terminates at Moorgate, I wander around the Barbican estate. I marvel at the juxtaposition of old and new architecture at every angle, particularly the ancient St Giles Church surrounded at every side by very 1980s terraces. It looks like it’s been teleported there by some cackling sci-fi villain.

In the Barbican centre someone recognises me and says hello – Francesca Beard. She’s performing a children’s show there. There’s a horrible second where I can’t remember her name – (‘How dare you, brain’, goes the internal voice), followed by a slightly uneasy few minutes as I struggle to think of what best to say on such occasions. In about 2000 I was a fan of her performance poetry (the Fosca song ‘Millionaire Of Your Own Hair’ takes its title from one of her poems) and I saw her gigs fairly often. And then – what? She didn’t stop performing. I stopped going to (and trying my hand at) performance poetry gigs, in my dipping-but-never-committing way. But I did see her at Latitude this year, so her place in my mind’s filing system isn’t as dusty as it could have been.

It’s times like this where my near-autistic inability to connect names and faces in person, coupled with my lack of basic social skills (which words to choose, and in which order? there are so many!), leaves me riven with guilt for the rest of the day.

It’s like the film ‘Memento’. I just wish I could remember fewer cult fictional films about amnesia and more things that actually matter.

About an hour later – today still, Dec 23rd -  I’m in the London Review Bookshop, and again someone behind me says, ‘Hello, Dickon.’ And as I turn to face the person – I’m such a bad actor, and so much of life is acting – I can’t help pulling the very honest but very offensive expression of panic through lack of recognition. It’s David Kitchen, who once worked for Orlando 1995-1997, setting up the band’s information service and website – this diary’s precursor – and whose flat in Kew I regularly visited and once stayed the night at. True, I’ve had no contact with him for the best part of ten years, but that’s no excuse.

(And it’s only now that I realise that the flat I’m staying in is owned by one of David K’s London circle of friends from that time, Chris H. He edited the first Belle & Sebastian videos, while David worked for B&S in websitey ways. I wish I could have mentioned this connection to David today, rather than grasping for things to say and apologising for not remembering his name.)

What confuses me is that in my mind I know exactly who David K is and what he looks like. It’s when I’m presented with him in the flesh, unexpected, out of the blue, and after a ten year gap, that my mind can’t cope. If I was told that I’d be meeting David K in the LRB today, I’d have no problem recognising him at once. And yet, I still feel that it’s my fault, that I’m a terrible, selfish, self-centred person, and the encounter upsets me for the rest of the day. I only hope he doesn’t mind as much as I do.

Even when I can connect names and faces, a surprise chat with friends from the past can never be easy. ‘What are you up to?’ ‘Something not involving you.’

One fear of mine is that when I die, there’ll be a test.

I envy Doctor Who. At least he gets played by a different actor every time a chapter of his life passes. I have enough of a struggle learning the script for my current role, never mind roles gone by.

And again the thought is, is it just me?  Is this a medical condition, a syndrome, a kind of dyslexia? A younger man’s Alzheimer’s? It certainly feels like it.

I love a good award shortlist, particularly if I’m familiar with the nominees in question. Trouble is, the Oscars are usually about new films that haven’t hit the UK yet, while the Booker is about new hardback novels, which I rarely buy. One could try a library, but once the list is announced there’s usually a long queue of borrowers with precisely the same idea.

The BBC National Short Story Award is much more do-able, however. This year the five stories up for the prize are available in audio form as a free podcast, plus there’s an affordable anthology in the shops. So one can easily gauge one’s own opinion on the stories in time for the announcement  on Monday.

I guess this is my way of getting  X Factor type thrills. Short Story Idol.

So here’s my own ranking, in suspense-attempting reverse order.

5. The Not-Dead and the Saved by Kate Clanchy
A portrait of a mother’s relationship with her son, who battles cancer throughout his life. It’s beautifully written and skillfully compresses its novel-like material in a similar way to Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain. And yet it feels a little too concise, with the son shortchanged of character, never mind shortchanged of life. It also sounds heartless to say this, but I think it’s the least original of the five tales. It veers dangerously close to the  ‘little epiphany’ style, that much-derided short story equivalent of the ‘Hampstead adultery novel’.  That’s the trouble with death: it’s been done to death.

4. Hitting Trees With Sticks by Jane Rogers
A first-person study of an old lady with borderline Alzheimer’s. So we get an unreliable narrator, and then some. Manages to inject enough humour, but I rank this fourth because it feels more like a dramatic monologue than a short story. Favourite part:

The post has come while I was out. There’s a reminder from the optician, and a letter from the council. Of course, the optician’s is right opposite the council offices, so you’d expect that really.

3. Exchange Rates by Lionel Shriver
Or how a man’s relationship with money defines his relationship with his father, and with the world. Very up-to-date, with lots of detail about the changing pound to dollar rate, the UK property ladder, and the things Americans find most expensive over here (everything except marmalade and breakfast cereal, apparently). It has a very Roald Dahl-esque ending along the old ‘be careful what you wish for’ lines, though I’m also reminded of Dorothy Parker’s tales of urban pettiness among 1920s New York society.

2. Moss Witch by Sara Maitland
A botanist encounters an ancient witch somewhere in darkest Scotland. Excellent, original blend of hard science (specifically moss science), fantasy, folklore and flower-lore (or rather, moss-lore). Memorable images, a proper story feel, and Ms Maitland’s unique style of magical realism.

1. Other People’s Gods by Naomi Alderman
A respectable Jewish family in Hendon starts to worship a small pink statue of Ganesh the Elephant God, until the local rabbi intervenes. A story with jokes, satire, memorable imagery, witty asides, charm, and a plot steeped in puckish nerve. Despite the seemingly light nature of the tale, it touches on issues of faith and blasphemy, and keeps the reader guessing how it’s all going to pan out. Pleasantly old-fashioned and classic in feel, despite the reference to a Wii Tennis game.

So I’m rooting for Ms Alderman to win on Monday, with Ms Maitland second.