Mum returns from a quilting trip in Kenya (including a proper safari) and sends me a few photos.

This is a Rothschild Giraffe called Laura. Funnily enough, I visited the eponymous Walter Rothschild’s museum of stuffed animals in Tring a few weeks ago. Favourite exhibits included the elephant seal high up in the dark on top of the display cases, underlit as if he were on a stage reciting a soliloquy. Plus two fleas dressed as Mexican farmers, a gynandromorph bird – male on one side, female on the other – and a bowler hat containing a wasps’ nest. 45 minutes from Euston.

This photo isn’t a trick of perspective – Laura really is that big a girl.

Orphaned baby elephants, wearing blankets for heatstroke because they have no parent to shelter under:

And left over in the family camera from a few months ago, an example of flaneur dickonsius, grazing.  Taken by Dad at the Paddington Bear stall in Paddington Station.

(Sorry it’s taken me so long to do this entry. I wanted to get the links and credits right. This one is all-singing and all-dancing…)

Quick alert: Today is Buy Nothing Day in the UK, which I’m observing. I love how it throws up all kinds of questions, and how it dares people to prove they can go without shopping on a Saturday close to Christmas but not too close. Wish I’d posted this with a bit more notice, but anyway.

***

Friday November 20th: I DJ at the British Library in St Pancras. At 6pm, the last readers are thrown out, the reading rooms are closed, and a conference-style stage rig with shiny new PA and lights, plus ultra-professional crew,  is set up along one side of the entrance hall. On the opposite wall are trestle tables with caterers manning a bar.

The event is called Victorian Values, arranged to coincide with the Library’s current exhibition on Victorian photography. It’s co-promoted by the Ministry of Burlesque and is billed as a 19th-century themed evening of music, tableaux vivant, skits, can-can dancers, and inspired burlesque disrobing – including an opium-induced vision of a Burlesque Britannia. The MC is Des O’Connor  and the acts include Vicky Butterfly (who brings her own wooden theatre booth, hand painted with figures by Lawrence Gullo), Joe Black, Mr B The Gentleman Rhymer, and Oompah Brass, who perform covers of latter-day pop hits in the vintage brass style (tuba, french horn, trombone, trumpets), while decked out in full lederhosen. It’s a lot of fun, frankly.

The oldest recording I play is ‘I’m Following In Father’s Footsteps’ by Vesta Tilley, one of the many male impersonators of the music hall era.

Vesta Tilley

It was released in 1906 on Edison Gold Moulded Records, the world’s first record label. I found it at this website, the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project, University of California.

I love how ‘Edison Records’ first meant wax cylinders; actual discs were still some years off. The song itself was also featured in the BBC TV adaptation of Ms Waters’s Tipping The Velvet.

The newest track I play is ‘What Have You Done To Your Face?’ by Marcella & The Forget-Me-Nots, from 2009. A track so new it has yet to be released in any downloadable or physical form. It’s currently available only as a streaming track at the band’s MySpace page, or via this striking video directed by Alex De Campi, which is the way I discovered it. I didn’t realise at first that the singer & songwriter was the same Marcella from the Puppini Sisters – it’s such a different musical style. Which I guess was the whole point of her starting a separate band. Consider me first in the queue for their debut album.

Just before heading to the Library, I read this story on the BBC news site about Linn Products becoming the first hi-fi company to cease manufacture of CD players, in favour of digital streaming and downloading. It’s a milestone in the history of recorded sound, and a firm step towards the end of the CD age.

So while DJing, I think about the various formats the tracks were originally created for: wax cylinder, vinyl disc, CD, celluloid, video, MP3, online streaming, and how I’m playing them together on the same format (specially made CDRs, compiled from MP3s), in a building built for the very act of archiving. It’s the DJ as librarian.

***

This event is packed out, with people lining not just the area in front of the stage but every staircase and balcony in the entrance hall. Rows of faces look down upon the stage (at the side of which are the DJ decks), like a crowd scene in some exotic city square. Emma Jackson is there, and remarks that the audience is noticeably mixed: alongside the young-ish cabaret and burlesque fans are lots of older Ladies Who Gallery. Good, I say.  A library is the place to mix worlds.

Judging by the roars of approval – particularly for Mr B – the event is a success. I have one Lady Who Galleries approaching me afterwards. She says she was ‘pleasantly surprised’ that the British Library would put on such an evening, and affirms she had a nice time. And who, she asks, did that  song I played about the ‘coin operated boy’, the one the younger ladies present seemed to know all the words to?

Well, here’s the playlist.

MUSIC HALL
I’m playing with time zones somewhat, as music hall songs were written as late as the 1940s, but it is all in the same style.

Ella Shields – Burlington Bertie From Bow
Frank H Fox – Drop Me In Piccadilly (as suggested by Kevin Pearce, taken from his excellent blog on London songs)
Hetty King – Piccadilly (thanks to Mr Pearce again)
Gus Elen – The ‘Ouses In Between
Florrie Forde – Down At The Old Bull And Bush
Marie Lloyd – A Little Of What You Fancy Does You Good
Mark Sheridan – I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside (thanks to Ms Crimson Skye)
Vesta Tilley – I’m Following In Father’s Footsteps
Stanley Holloway – Where Did You Get That Hat (thanks to Billy Reeves)
The Andrews Sisters – Beer Barrel Polka
The Beverley Sisters – Roll Out The Barrel
Shaun Parkes – The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo. Taken from the film Marie Lloyd: Queen Of The Music Hall. Soundtrack unavailable, so I made an MP3 from the DVD.

GILBERT & SULLIVAN

Topsy-Turvy film cast – So please you sir with much regret (mp3 link). The piano rehearsal version which plays under the opening credits: just text on a black background, so the audience has to focus on the song. There is a soundtrack CD, but this track isn’t on it. Cue more DVD to MP3 recording. I love just how this song kicks off the rich, colourful world of Topsy-Turvy before we get to see any visuals. It’s just Sullivan saying, ‘One… two… TWO… two!’ then the song in its purest piano form, with impeccable harmonies by Shirley Henderson and co. Instantly we’re transported.

Topsy-Turvy soundtrack – Paris Galop from The Grand Duke (instrumental)

Linda Ronstadt – Poor Wandering One. From the 1983 film The Pirates Of Penzance. Not released on CD or DVD, so I had to teach myself how to make MP3s from YouTube. Just for this gig. I am the very model of a modern DJ.

Kevin Kline et al – With Catlike Tread. From the same film. YouTube again. Can’t beat a gang of sexy singing pirates.

The Hot Mikado stage cast – Three Little Maids. 1940s jazz style.

Frankie Howerd – The Flowers That Bloom In The Spring. From The Cool Mikado.
The Cool Mikado soundtrack – The Sun’s Hooray (instrumental). The tune of ‘The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze’ covered in a cha-cha-cha style.
The John Barry Seven – Tit Willow Twist (instrumental). Also from The Cool Mikado. Twangy guitar, Shadows style.

The Cool Mikado is a 1962 film by Michael Winner, which sets the G&S operetta in a swinging 60s pop world. It stars Frankie Howerd, Tommy Cooper, Stubby Kaye, Lionel Blair, Dennis Price, the John Barry Seven, and Mike and Bernie Winters (whose character names are ‘Mike & Bernie’). I’ve seen it on video… and it’s absolutely bloody awful. But the soundtrack, released on El Records, is a hoot.

OTHER CABARET-COMPATIBLE TUNES
Various Victorian Musical Box instrumentals – Funiculi Funicula, Behold The Lord High Executioner, Valse Des Fées. From Sublime Harmonie: recordings of rare Victorian cylinder and disc musical boxes from The Roy Mickleburgh Collection, Bristol.

Various Player Piano instrumentals – Burlington Bertie From Bow, Nellie Dean, Hold Your Hand Out Naughty Boy, The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo. From Mechanical Music Hall: Street Penny & Player Pianos, Musical Boxes & Other Victorian Automata.

Wendy Carlos – William Tell Overture from A Clockwork Orange soundtrack.
London Philharmonic Orchestra – Can-Can (Offenbach).
Moulin Rouge film cast – Spectacular Spectacular, Sparking Diamonds
Michael Nyman – Angelfish Decay
Tipping The Velvet cast – It’s Only Human Nature After All. From the closing credits. Own MP3 recorded from DVD.
The Dresden Dolls – Coin Operated Boy
Momus – Sinister Themes (thanks to Michelle Mishka)
The Divine Comedy – The Booklovers
The Tiger Lillies – The Story Of The Man Who Went Out Shooting. From the Shock Headed Peter stage soundtrack.
Marcella & The Forget-Me-Nots – What Have You Done To Your Face? DJ promo MP3, as kindly provided by the artist.
Peggy Lee – Fever
Marilyn Monroe – Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend (Swing Cats Remix)

Also procured, but not played due to time:

Scarlet’s Well – Mr Mystery’s Mother
Electrelane – Eight Steps
Shockheaded Peters – I Bloodbrother Be
King of Luxembourg – Picture Of Dorian Gray (the TV Personalities’ song, also covered by The Futureheads. This is the most effete version.)
Ciceley Courtneidge – There’s Something About A Soldier
Jessie Wallace – When I Take My Morning Promenade. From the film Marie Lloyd: Queen of the Music Hall.

Jessie Wallace being the actress who plays Kat Slater in Eastenders. Was rather looking forward to playing her (rather good) version of this Marie Lloyd song, particularly alongside Momus et al. However, one of the stage acts covered the song on the night, so I thought it my duty as a Gentleman DJ to omit it. May as well upload it here:

Jessie Wallace – When I Take My Morning Promenade

I don’t think I’ve ever spent so long putting together a single DJ set. But I loved every minute of it.

Far be it for me to add to the tiresome anti-Twitter articles out there, but I have to pin at least some of the blame for my diary hiatus on the popular sky-blue social networking site. And now I know I have to wean myself off it in order to write here again.

I’m worried that Twitter’s ubiquity has meant that many bloggers and online diarists with the impulse to say something to the world have evolved – or devolved – from producing well-considered and chewed-over paragraphs rich with their own personal style, into squeezing out cramped, ephemeral if modish  ‘Tweets’ of 140 characters.

Now, Twitter is very much Where It’s At, so one can understand the attraction. One doesn’t like to feel that the party is in the other room – that Life is going on elsewhere, even on the internet. My fear is that the impulse to Tweet drains the impulse to write in any other way. Which is fine for those gifted souls who can rattle out a book-length treatise before breakfast then happily switch to chatting about The X Factor over hashtags and hash browns.

It’s because I’m ultimately concerned, as ever, with matters of style. Of becoming oneself through one’s writing. And I’m not convinced you can really do style on Twitter. Not my kind of style, anyway. It’s good for posting alerts, or emergency appeals for help (see below), or linking to entries like this (which my Twitter account does automatically).

Otherwise the most one can manage is a brief aside, a morsel from a running commentary, or an attempt to Join In, which is something I’ve never been great at in the first place. I want to say more, and read more. Yes, Twitter is like a big party. Except for me it feels like a party where there’s a competitive edge to be popular, where the more famous guests have whole armies at their command (heaven help you if you displease the gurus in question), where one can only hear half of so many conversations, where one might try to join in but is ignored, or is a bit late, where it’s all too easy to say something one regrets, or is mistaken due to the brevity of the form, or risks a joke backfiring because context is tricky in 140 characters. All of which is fine… for those for whom it’s fine. But who am I kidding? You’ll always find me in the stand-alone-blog kitchen at parties.

It got to the point where I was honing one sentence for over an hour in order to fit it into a Tweet. At which point it came home to me: I am just not an innate Twitterer. I am an unabashed wordy and rococo writer, and I like space to throw my words about. Just as I like big, sprawling cities with no centre, where the unusual can nestle and escape, rather than small towns whose core is held hostage to the less meek on a Friday night. I like blackening whole pages of A4 with fountain pen ink, full of crossings-out, at a desk or cafe table; rather than jabbing into a handheld device while standing in a queue. No, I can’t Tweet and stay stylish. Not when I have this diary. It’s one or the other. Sorry, Twitter.

***

The postal strike is over, at least until the New Year. Handwritten letters arrive once again to delight the heart, and I reply with equal joy (Proper Letters would be my entry in the current charity anthology Modern Delight – particularly airletters and aerogrammes, of which more another time). Proper Letters also serve to dilute the irritation of less personal missives like the following, received today:

Dear Mr Edwards

Your local estate agent Boorish Grasp would like to draw your attention to a garage we have been instructed to sell in [nearby] Highgate Avenue. It features an up and over door, is ideal for storage… and would comfortably house a car. The asking price is £30,000 and is leasehold.

They know my name and address, but are clearly unaware that I am currently living on £8,000 a year, courtesy of National Assistance once more.

(What happened to the book deal? My interest waned, then returned, then I lost faith in my ability to write it. Then I regained faith, only to lose interest in the project again. Then I procrastinated, and so on. But the fact I’m writing the diary means I’m writing again full stop. Today I put a Post-It note on my laptop saying ‘Do Not Open Until Something Is Finished’. It seems to have worked. I’m typing this up from a day’s longhand work.)

I do not own the bed I sleep on, let alone a car. But the letter is a reminder of the kind of neighbourhood I’m lucky to live in. I suppose I have the illusion of success and wealth by postcode alone – which estate agents go by. They skip to the music of postcode and euphemism. I must be dragging down the average income of this street. Mike Skinner of the popular chart rap combo The Streets lives around the block, as does Victoria Wood. Maybe they should do an album together, given they’ve both turned tales of awkward young love into catchy songs, musical formats aside. Maybe Victoria could have a go at the techno-style rapping, and Mike could play the piano while shrugging his shoulders a lot.

The mere idea of me having £30,000 to spend on anything, never mind a garage, still seems a universe away. When I had the night shift job earlier this year, I was on £19,000 p.a. And it seemed like the most money in the world.

In fact, in terms of what I could do, it was. My rent and normal outgoings are so low by London standards that the night shift funded mini-holidays in Tangier, Gibraltar, Sark, Bruges and New York. Always staying in hotels, too.

At a recent party, I met a forty-ish man who said wistfully, ‘Oh I’d love to have a holiday in New York… Maybe one day, when I can afford it. When the mortgage’s paid off.’ He had a full-time job – I suspect earning more than £19,000 – and a house. It was then that I realised I’d rather stay living in a rented furnished bedsit and be able to travel the world than own a whole house and not. Plus I cannot speak Mortgage.

When one reaches one’s death bed, one doesn’t want to be saying ‘At least I saved lots of money’. Or ‘At least I owned a house’. I realise I’m speaking for myself, though.

***

It’s all very well living to please oneself like this, but when bumped down to hand-to-mouth status once more, I find it very hard remembering that being unemployed is a full-time job. That one has to count every penny coming in, and going out, and keeping tabs on when they do, and that one has to hold all these things in one’s head at all times.

So a week or two ago I suddenly realised why I was finding it unusually easy not to run out of money. I had forgotten to pay the rent. For two months. I quickly needed to find £600 from scratch, or risk homelessness, a state from which I doubt I’d ever really recover.

I snapped into action – by my standards – and announced to the world (or at least, Facebook and Twitter) that I was selling off all my musical instruments and equipment. It was something I’d been meaning to do anyway, so now was the time. After 48 hours of sales and donations – the latter which I never solicited but was in no position to turn down – I had cleared the debt. Seeing friends email me anything from £5 to £100, or haggling UP the price of a dusty four-track recorder, quite overwhelmed me. It felt like the end of It’s A Wonderful Life. A thousand heartfelt thanks to everyone who bought or donated.

Mind, I realise this bail came with a condition. Can’t do it again. I’ve used up my ‘Ask The Audience’ option, my ‘Get Out Of Debt Free’ card.

***

I’m particularly delighted that my vintage synthesiser, a 1982 Roland Juno 6, went to Leo Chadbourn, aka Simon Bookish. Who will not only use it to make new music, but just the sort of music I like.

My brother Tom is the star of this rescue, offering to take away my guitars and get them fully ‘set up’ and serviced for resale, using his own Ebay account. He’s a full-time musician and speaks fluent Used Guitar far better than me. I didn’t even know my ‘Strat’ was a Japanese make, and was thus worth less than a USA one, but more than a Strat copy. That sort of thing. It’s taken me seventeen years of playing guitar to realise I’m just not a guitar person. Can’t say I didn’t give it a go.

I can write music; I just can’t play it very well. So if I do feel the need to write songs again, I can easily buy or borrow a cheap right-handed guitar. On recordings, I’ve always preferred to use proper musicians as it is: producers who are also programmers and instrumentalists. For the Fosca albums, the guitar parts were mostly played by Ian Catt, Alex Sharkey, Charley Stone, Kate Dornan, or Tom. Not only would they make fewer mistakes, but I’d get the writer’s thrill of hearing the sound in my head brought into the world via more expert hands and gaining in translation; just as playwrights delight in actors bringing flesh to their boney, tentative words.

I’m also relieved to be spared the whole Ebay selling process: the questions, the chasing for payment, the delivery. It’s too much like taking on work in order to avoid work. If Tom can’t sell the guitars, I’m tempted to just set fire to them ceremonially, like Hopey Glass does in this frame from Love & Rockets. What cathartic bliss…

One guitar – the Orlando Strat – has already gone, but my Gibson SG (the main Fosca guitar) and my Yamaha electro-acoustic are still on sale. Please tell your guitar-playing friends. Both are left-handers, which makes finding a buyer harder, but  Tom is confident there’s no need for firelighters. I’m hoping to be proved wrong about the Hopey Glass option. I do need the money.

Now, for the first time in seventeen years, I find myself coming home to a room with no musical instruments in it. My very first guitar was a 21st birthday present from Tom. So it’s fitting he should take the last guitars away. A sad day? No. A brave step into the future day. An anti-nostalgia day.

What now? I’m enjoying doing what I want with my days, though frustrated at having to say no to anything that might involve spending money, like going for a drink more than once a week. And I’m hoping I’ll find something – the abortive book, a different book, anything, which will bring in slightly more than £8,000 a year. Not too unrealistic a goal, I hope. I don’t need £30,000 for a garage. I now have even fewer possessions to put in it, after all.

My most expensive item used to be the Gibson SG, bought new in 1997 for £1000. Now? Bespoke suits. Which for this Dickon Edwards, is as it should be.

Quick announcement. Dedalus Books is once more applying for funding. They’re going to use their petition from last year as evidence of support, so please sign it now if you didn’t do so last time: http://is.gd/44qPb

***

Sat 11th Oct: With Anna Spivack to see the new play of Prick Up Your Ears. It’s based directly on the Orton diaries and John Lahr’s biography rather than the Alan Bennett 80s film. Matt Lucas as Kenneth Halliwell and Gwen Taylor as the landlady and neighbour.

Gwen Taylor for me will always be her characters in The Rutles: manager Leggy Mountbatten’s mother (‘He hated their music. But he liked their trousers’) and Chastity, the nazi-uniform-wearing Yoko Ono figure (‘a simple German girl whose father had invented World War Two’)

Despite allocating over an hour to get into town via the 91 bus, we end up gridlocked in Bloomsbury and have to race through crowded Soho, arriving at the Comedy Theatre in Panton Street just in time for curtain up.

We needn’t have bothered. The ushers and box office staff are standing outside, telling people the performance is cancelled and handing out details of how to get refunds. Matt Lucas is still out of the show due to his ex-husband’s suicide, which we were prepared for, but his understudy is off sick too. The understudy doesn’t have an understudy, so the play’s off.

We have a couple of drinks at 23 Romilly Street (where many of the old Colony Room regulars now go), before repairing for a bottle of wine at Anna’s flat in Archway rather than hit any clubs or further bars. One of the few ways I’m growing up, I suppose.  More restaurants and quiet dinner parties,  fewer loud clubs and gigs.

So sad about Matt Lucas’s ex-husband killing himself like that. I can understand Mr L pulling out of any play, let alone one about a doomed gay relationship where the non-famous one commits suicide. The tabloids have responded with predictable drool, flagging the word ‘husband’ in the headlines with smug inverted commas. One 21st century twist: the suicide note posted on Facebook.

***

Three weeks since varicose vein surgery. The bruises have faded okay, but am concerned about residual patches of numbness above my ankle. According to the literature, these could fade in 2 weeks, or 2 months, or 2 years, or in some cases not at all. I suppose given the choice between recurring pain (which prompted me asking for the optional operation), and permanent numbness, I’ll settle for the latter.  But I’d rather the numbness would go. And soon, please. Prodding the space above my ankle, I think of cold rubber. The type lining car doors. And the stuff used to make those thin mats in school gyms.

Other diary wishes: I really want the ability to write a decent amount every day, (as opposed to a habit for Olympic procrastination) but also the ability to just write and read faster. When I finally sit down and do it, I take far too long. I envy those people who speed through 800 page books in single sittings. I want to be one of those. I don’t mind having to do umpteen drafts – as long as they’re fast drafts.

***

Current madness: a fixation with the creaking and popping noises made by the casing of my fridge expanding and contracting when the motor is off. A bedsit hazard: I have to sleep and work in the same room. The fridge is only 2 years old. Did it always make those noises? Were the noises always that loud and frequent and distracting? Is it just me?

Other news: am back in therapy. Friday mornings, NHS so no fee, 90 minute sessions for six months. Have mixed feelings about whether I need them. But they were offered (after a year on the waiting list), and I’m clearly in need of something.

To the ICA to see Spearmint play a special gig: a 10th anniversary performance of their album ‘A Week Away’. It’s the record they were promoting when they employed me as guitarist in 1999.

They send me a nicely written (if fairly formal) invite and put me on the guest list. Given I was sacked from the band, I briefly wonder if turning up would make me look like a cuckolded booby. But then I recognise such thoughts as childish vanity of the worst kind. The grown-up option is to be thankful for the invite and to turn up graciously. It’s childish to make an appearance when one hasn‘t been invited, or to deliberately refuse when one has. And besides, I’ve already been to two weddings of former exes this year.

(Since writing this, I’ve remembered that I saw Spearmint a couple of years ago anyway, when they played with Scarlet’s Well at the 100 Club. Both bands had hired and fired me as a guitarist in the past. It felt like attending a festival dedicated to my failure as a musician. But I’m glad I went. I joined both bands because I was a fan, and I remain a fan.)

Surgical symmetry: I have a vivid memory from the Spearmint days of rehearsing while recovering from an operation on my left leg. I can see a rehearsal room in Acton, me strumming away while sitting down, the boyish Spearmint bassist (and later guitarist) James Parsons reminding me to stop crossing my legs as per doctor’s orders.

Ten years later, the ailment returns (varicose veins, same leg, different vein, apparently quite common), and on Sept 18th 2009 at UCLH in Euston I have the operation all over again. A decade ago it was ‘stripping’ out the useless vein under the knife, leaving me in a Tubigrip bandage for weeks. This time it’s a combination of ‘laser ablation and multiple stab avulsions’, still requiring the dreaded general anaesthetic, but without the bandage. I just have to suffer dissolvable stitches and a surgical stocking worn for 3 weeks.

(Naturally, the day after I have it done, I read on the BBC News site that a different London NHS hospital does a while-you-wait, 15 minute, non-anaesthetic, all-laser version of the operation. The latest surgery, the latest Ipod, all weapons in the conspiracy of feeling eternally out of date whatever one does.)

So I attend this tenth anniversary gig while wearing a tenth-anniversary medical stocking – a shade of camel tan labelled on the box as ‘Mexico’. Given I already favour the sort of silk scarves worn by old ladies, it’s all grist to the camp fogey mill.

Musing on ageing at gigs like this is inevitable, particularly as the album in question dwells on death (dedicated to their first bassist, who died before it came out) wasting time (‘A Third Of My Life’ proving particularly poignant), and of artists and bands who never quite made it (‘Sweeping The Nation’).

After years of being quite tousled and curly, James P has had his hair cut to match his photo on the album sleeve a decade ago – ‘a Hoxton fin’ as it was. And he really does look exactly the same.  Singer Shirley Lee is still skinny as a rake (shaking his enviable hips in ‘A Trip Into Space’). The gig also has a school reunion feel about it, with people I’ve not seen for ten years saying hello. Naturally they ask what I’m doing now. And I look at my shoes and try to think what the answer is.

Another old problem of mine recurs tonight. My body clock’s out of whack and I decide to go to bed during the afternoon rather than turn up at the gig with wilting eyelids. The alarm fails and I’m woken at 8pm by Charlie M. She’s in the ICA waiting for me, I’m still in bed in Highgate. A speedy dress and a Tube ride later, Ms M is very forgiving. But I’m mortified and angry at myself. I’ve spent too much of my life not just sleeping, but sleeping at all the wrong times. I’m hoping this diary entry, the first after yet another hiatus, will finally signify getting back on track. With everything.

Where’d you learn to kiss that way?
I don’t know from where that came
I won’t talk about it no more

‘Dickon Edwards’ is bad Swahili for ‘Connector Of Many Worlds’. Well, all right, it isn’t. But I do like it when little bits of worlds come together.

At the Upstate New York wedding, one of Fyodor and Kevin’s shared in-jokes was to express cartoon desire by bending their knees and rubbing their upper legs, while emitting a ‘Phwoar!’ sound at each other. This was a reference to Vic Reeves on the TV panel game Shooting Stars, invariably made to the pretty female contestant seated on his right (and he’s still doing it in the new series). That this very British, very surreally British TV reference should travel across the Atlantic and take root in the banter of a young Russian emigre AND his Ecuadorian Brooklyn school friend surprised and delighted me no end.

One wedding guest I was overjoyed to meet was Ms Patricia Charbonneau. She is a Crossover Cult Icon, having played Cay in the 1985 movie Desert Hearts, something of a cult classic, not least for students of queer cinema.  It was one of the first films with a lesbian theme which didn’t get bogged down with hand-wringing self-pity, or the inevitable tragic death of one or more of the deviants involved, implying otherness equals doom (archetypes which persist in the more recent yet comparatively old-fashioned Boys Don’t Cry and Brokeback Mountain).

No, Ms Charbonneau’s character represented the heart-stopping joy of romance as escape, lesbianism or no; how love can be a gateway to further adventures – enhanced when they’re adventures together. A happy ending, in other words. Sorry if that’s too much of a ‘spoiler’. The film has been out for nearly 25 years.

(‘He comes back to life after three days on the cross.’ ‘Oh, you’ve ruined it for me now!’)

The film also inspired the 1990 Field Mice song, ‘So Said Kay’. Often regarded as one of the best songs by the cult British indie group, and indeed by any band on the cult British indie label Sarah Records. The opening line became the title of the main Field Mice anthology, Where’d You Learn To Kiss That Way?

Ms Charbonneau is the aunt of Lawrence, one of the grooms. When I heard who she was – a couple of years ago when I was getting to know Lawrence in London – I got him to send her a CD of the Field Mice song. She’d not heard it before. All muses should be made aware of the works they inspire. I was happy to act as Muse Connector Incarnate.

For the wedding, she wore a dress once worn by Joan Crawford, taken from the MGM lot. It just gets better.

When I got back to London, I attended a party in Peckham, hosted by two ladies married to each other, Ms Lesley and Ms Caroline. When I mentioned I’d met Patricia Charbonneau, they rubbed their legs at each other and said ‘Phwoar!’

Ms Lesley went on to say she once took her former husband, another Mr Edwards in fact, to the cinema to see Desert Hearts when it came out. More than once. ‘I was hoping he’d get the message…’

How many connections do you want, Dear Reader?

I kissed her, of course. And doesn’t my garland look like a string of lights?

She reached in and placed a string of lights
Around this heart of mine

Link: The Field Mice – So Said Kay

Link: Desert Hearts – Trailer

Catching up with the diary after a break is always like starting a car on a winter morning. Photos are like pulling out the choke.

I don’t know about you (that would be strange), but I find it helps to ensure one’s tour guides in New York are amongst the most beautiful and stylish gentlemen the city has to offer.

Sunday August 23rd. Mr Tobi Haberstroh, at home with the works of art at the Chelsea (9th floor staircase):

Wednesday August 25th. Mr Cator Sparks, Dandy of Harlem. Showtime at the, oh, you know:

Thursday August 27th. Mr Kevin Tobar, Ecuador’s Master Of  Tongues. Sharing hair-of-the-dog cocktails at a pavement cafe in the East Village:

Right, off to the library to do some Proper Writing.

Am staying with Lawrence Gullo and his partner Fyodor at their home in Newburgh, upstate New York. Occasion: their wedding this Saturday Aug 22nd. They’re actually getting legally married in the state of Vermont next month, but this is the ceremony and reception for friends.

Arrive at Newark airport Thursday evening, having travelled with fellow wedding guest David Ryder-Prangley. Spend most of the journey working on a poem to read out at the reception.

Am reminded that poetry is by far the easiest medium to do badly. I do six drafts longhand, then run it by the happy couple on Saturday morning for approval, just in case they’d rather I plumped for the Shakespeare or Whitman I’d brought by way of back-up (Sonnet 116, and ‘We Two Boys Together Clinging’). My own effort is, after all, a little personal and political, linking respect for transgenderism with Ovid’s myth of Iphis.

A Newburgh water tower, as seen on Friday when out with Lawrence and Fyodor shopping for the wedding:

The weather is absolutely sweltering, even plantation-like. Crickets outside my window sound like serenading eletric razors; the sheer volume of the creatures calls for earplugs at night. It’s not a constant, even sound, either: some crickets get nearer and louder from time to time, with all varieties of whirring and buzzing imaginable.

Tepid rain showers punctuate the days. Lawrence’s house is full of electric fans on full-pelt. Drinking water constantly is par for the course. When I get out of Lawrence’s car to walk to a local diner for breakfast – the car being a  hybrid-fuel Prius with perfect air-conditioning, my glasses steam up.

Inside the diner (more perfect fridge-like air conditioning), I have pancakes with syrup, and am attended by a waitress who walks among the tables with a top-up jug asking, ‘Coffee, hon?’ Just like in the movies. The diner has an amazing mural:

More guests arrive at the house for Friday evening, when there’s something of an alternative batchelor party (for both grooms). Various turns include burlesque – an Aussie lady morris dancer who disrobes levels of vintage costume made by her seamstress girlfriend  – and a beautiful be-wigged Brooklyn drag queen. One turn is a hilarious lecture on How To Dance Goth.

On Saturday morning, the marriage ceremony takes place in the nearby park. The grooms declare their vows:

Then they join their hands and present them for binding by the guests. Each guest adds a ribbon to the union:

And I get to wear a garland of frangipani. I smell wonderful, frankly (photo taken by Eileen, Lawrence’s mother):

Monday: meet Dad as he returns from the Caption convention in Oxford. Because his train gets into Paddington, I do what all Londoners should do at that station when meeting out-of-towners. I show him the statue of Paddington Bear. Along with the character’s merchandise stall, covered in books, soft toys and toddler-sized duffel coats.

We go to the Cartoon Museum in Bloomsbury, only to discover it’s closed on Mondays. I get a sense of deja vu from this time last year, when I was in New York and traipsed across most of Central Park in order to visit the Met. It was a Monday, and the Met – despite being the size of a football stadium – was closed that day.

I’m off to New York again this Thursday coming, for seven days. This time, I’ll ensure my museum stints avoid the first day of the working week.

***

In Gosh Comics, I pick up Issue 5 of Pride & Prejudice. It’s not a parody or homage but an entirely straight – and beautifully drawn – comic strip adaptation of the Jane Austen book. What really delights me is that it’s published by Marvel as a proper serialised A5 colour comic, and that it’s displayed alongside the latest issue of Spider-Man, X-Men, the Hulk and so on. So a novel that famously enticed readers despite a lack of any real heroes or villains is now translated into the one medium most accustomed to them. The Austen effect still triumphs: the staff at Gosh tell me it’s been flying off the shelf.

***

Walking along Royal College Street today, I pass a couple of elderly Irish men sitting outside a pub. As I approach, one calls out at me.

‘Walk straight!’

And then, after I’ve passed by:

‘Can I shag you?’

In the evening I recount this to Ms L, who works behind the bar at the Boogaloo. I do so hoping she’ll be amused. In fact, she takes a physical step back and stares at me, unnerved.

I’m reminded of Ms D telling me about someone she met recently.

‘This person asked me, “Do you know Dickon Edwards? I’m his nemesis.” And they weren’t smiling.’

I found this incredibly funny. But Ms D was appalled, verging on upset.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone’s nemesis before,’ she said. ‘I wondered if I should call the police.’

(‘Are you Jesus?’ I had at Latitude from two young men in the woods, when I was walking around in my white suit. ‘I forgive you,’ I shouted back.)

I suppose I do attract a certain… oddness from some people – as opposed to odd people per se  – from time to time. But they soon tire of me: I’m too busy stalking myself inside my own head, trying to nail my thoughts down, preoccupied with controlling my own madness, never mind anyone else’s.  There’s always an angle, a tilt, which part of me is at and which the rest is not; and it’s never by the same degree for more than a moment. So this predicament is a two-way barrier, for better or worse. I’ve said it before, but one ambition of mine is to have a syndrome named after me.

To act weirdly around an already weird person isn’t stalking, after all: it’s tautology.

Charlotte Mew’s favourite joke, as quoted by Penelope Fitzgerald in an old copy of the London Review of Books:

A hearse driver runs over a man and kills him. A passer-by shouts, ‘Greedy!’

Ms Mew was also known as Lotti. I hadn’t realised until now the connection between the two names: Lotti being short for Charlotte. Similarly, when DJ-ing at the club Decline & Fall, one of the organisers, Beth, told me she now prefers to be called Lily. I thought this was a full name change until she pointed out that both are derivatives of Elizabeth. What with Betty, Bess, Liz and so on, it’s a pretty good value name. Dickon comes from Richard, but that surprises some people too.

The way to settle this, when people unhelpfully say ‘Oh I don’t mind, call me any of my fifteen nicknames’, is to find out people’s Coma Name. As in the name paramedics need to know when trying to bring round an unconscious patient. They haven’t got time to try all the permutations (‘Mr Edwards?’ Dick? Rick? Ricardo?’)  – they need to know the one most likely to break through in those crucial ebbing moments. Dickon is very much my Coma Name, even though Richard is on my passport. I should really attach a note there, in case I pass out while alone in a foreign land. No Richard to resuscitate here.

***

The first page of the longhand draft of Angela Carter’s Nights At The Circus is on display in the British Library’s permanent ‘Treasures’ exhibition. It’s the final item in a long chronological line-up of literary artefacts, which take in Lewis Carroll’s original notebook of Alice In Wonderland, the one he gave Alice Liddell. Out of all the works on display, Ms Carter has by far the neatest handwriting: ‘clear, upright and not quite flowing’, as Susannah Clapp put it on Radio 3 recently. She was presenting a series about Author’s Postcards. I love Radio 3.

On publication in 1984, Nights At The Circus failed to win the Booker, or to even make the shortlist. Now it’s rubbing shoulders with the Magna Carta and the First Folio.

Also on display, temporarily, are a couple of letters from 1933, as part of the library’s Codex Sinaiticus Bible show. They illustrate the UK Government’s public subscription campaign to raise £100,000, in order to buy the ancient Bible from the Soviets. One letter is from a 7-year-old boy in Durham, enclosing 2/6. ‘Dear Director of the British Museum…’ The other accompanies a postal order for six shillings, from an unemployed miner in Tonypandy, Rhondda. The miner adds, in beautiful handwriting: ‘The destiny of our own Nation is certainly safe because of the place it gives to the word of God.’

These days it’d be all PayPal and online donations. I miss the world of letters. Emails in museum cases seems unlikely: there’s no such thing as The Original Email. Hearing about the late John Hughes becoming a pen pal with one of his fans in the 80s was the final straw for me. Getting messages via the Internet is not the same. So this past week I’ve written at least one Proper Letter a day, to friends and family. I feel better for it. The physical acts: the pen or pencil pushed across the paper, the folding, the stamp, the posting. It’s anchoring me to the world just that little bit more.

Douglas Adams once said at the Dawn of the Internet Age that he preferred email to letters because it was cheaper, faster, and involved less licking.

I like the licking.