Saturday – afternoon tea at the Wallace Collection with the Teaists. Service is criminally slow – over an hour and a half till we see our food. ‘Trouble in the kitchen’ apparently. For mere cakes, scones and sandwiches. But they do offer us free wine by way of compensation, and let us waive the tip.

Seventeen at table – a record turn out. Those present include Jamie from the Irrepressibles, Jake, Suzi L, Helen McCookerybook (singer and Monochrome Set associate – my first meeting with her, I think), Sebastian G, Tobias, John Joseph Bibby, David Ryder-P, and Lucinda & William. We are quite a vision to the eldery Ladies Who Tearoom around us, and I’m not sure if they side with the appalled tearoom customers in that Withnail & I ‘finest wines known to humanity’ scene, or if they enjoy us. Either way, we get more than a few stares.

The occasion is Lawrence Gullo’s joint birthday and deportation back to the US, as his work visa has expired, and the retail job he has is not deemed Highly Skilled enough to allow him to stay. A sad case of affairs, and not the first ‘deportation party’ for a much-loved American friend that I’ve been to, either.

There really should be a green card system that recognises Proper Friends in number, in the same way as the points system currently used by the Home Office for determining what is a ‘skilled’ enough job. Prove you have enough UK friends living nearby, those who might as well be family members, who are willing to commit the level of support you’d expect from a spouse (seeing them regularly, rushing to hospital beds,  being by their side when needed etc) and the cumulative ‘Attachment Points’ would count towards an extended stay.

The friends in question would have to pledge their Proper Friendship under oath, and sign a binding contract subject to checks by the Ministry Of Friendship. But that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Goodness knows there’s enough of my friends whose degree of affection I’m never quite sure of. Would they stretch to donating a kidney, or are they happy to keep it at the ‘occasional friendly nod across a crowded bar’ level? It’d be handy to get these things in writing.

It would also help me when someone says ‘Hello Dickon’, and I can’t quite place who they are, or can’t quite remember their name. Which has happened at least once at the New Job.

So: I’ve just completed my first week of Proper Work, taking my place amongst the Bohemian Miners At The Coalface Of News.

How has it been? Surreal.

‘Surreal?’ says Ms D. ‘Hah! Normal work for you is surreal?’

‘REAL for me is surreal…’

It’s been tough, in fact. A shock to the system. A sobering, if salutary experience. I have to brave a packed, surly tube to Tower Hill for 0930. I sit at a computer screen. I scroll past scanned-in pages from national and local newspapers. I use the computer mouse to carefully slice up and duplicate the articles, deciding which ones should be sent to which news-hungry clients. Computers can’t yet fathom the subtleties of context, hence the need for human readers and editors. I repeat until 1345. I take 1 hour lunch. Then I carry on until 1730. With a 15 min coffee break here and there.

It really is pure work, so far. No phone use, no internet use. Not much conversation, either, as the one other nightshift trainee is as keen as me to get as much done as possible, and neither of us know how much counts as Enough.

We’re on the main office floor: umpteen long tables of chairs at screens. And as these two weeks of training are 9 – 5 and Mon – Fri, we’re sharing the room – and part of our table – with the daytime staff. They aren’t unfriendly but there’s a definite sense of separation, putting us in our place as not only mere trainees, but trainees for a completely different staff. So they talk to each other in the usual office way (the economy in crisis, Madonna’s divorce, did you see X TV programme last night, etc), but never including us. Which is fair enough, but it does make the week feel even more surreal than it already is for me.

So I accept my invisibility, and am just getting used to this, while immersing myself in the work, when out of nowhere someone comes over and says ‘Well well well, Dickon Edwards… What brings you here, prithee? How the mighty have risen…’

Or words to that effect. Not quite ‘how the mighty have risen’. That’s me.

This sort of thing has happened about four or five times. Jarring, sporadic bouts of non-invisibility in an otherwise undivided week of feeling like a ghost. Again, the overall word just has to be: surreal.

***

Thursday was the worse. Thursday I came close to tears. The work, the cold-shower shock of it, the sudden visitations from Friends Of Friends. But Friday was, in fact, fine. A normal Friday feeling, I suppose. And now it’s the weekend and it FEELS like a weekend. Bliss. Freedom. A connection with the working world, albeit a tentative one.

I suppose what I’m experiencing is a kind of jet-lag from crossing one world into another, with no halfway house.

***

The other trainee seems nice enough. Although he doesn’t know me, he does know the boyfriend of someone I know.

And at Lawrence’s afternoon tea party today, one of the seventeen turns out to be on the same night shift as me.

Anyone who says ‘small world’ at the Bohemian News Mine is immediately directed to the naughty step.

***

The work must be having an effect on my Ideas production, though. In addition to the Proper Friends contract system for saving much-loved Americans from deportation.

I think it’s about time one should be able to donate Testosterone.

I’m thinking of my dear female-to-male transsexual friends. They want to be physically more manly, and I hate shaving. And I don’t just shave my face. If in the future I ever want a beard, or a hairy chest, I shall just go out and buy one, frankly.

I’ve been offered a Full Time Proper Job.

Okay, that’s given you time to pick your jaw, and indeed the rest of you, up off the floor. We’ll go on.

My job title is “Reader & Editor, Night Shift”. With a private company that provides tailor-made ‘media monitoring’ services to various clients. Reading news stories on a screen, editing them to fit a morning press pack. Seven nights in row, then seven off, then back again. 10.30pm till 6.30am each night, in a large office building opposite the Tower Of London. Fairly intensive, battery farming-like work, too. (Nightingales: ‘No one here but us chickens’). No one talks or surfs the Net or goes on Facebook. No phones. Only the Work. Reading, typing. Conventional employment that’s not quite conventional.

How much am I being paid? On finding out, my first thought was similar to that moment in Big, when Tom Hanks’s boy in a man’s body gets his first pay check, and yelps out aloud like he’s won the Lottery. The co-worker at the next desk along replies miserably, ‘Yeah. They really screw you don’t they?’

Thanks to the dole, and the long-term dole top-ups one gets just by getting older (a kind of state compensation for being increasingly less pretty) I’m currently living on about £70 a week, after I’ve paid my rent. That has to pay for everything else: food, bills, Internet, phone, travel, dry cleaning, wine, going out and general London living. I’m rather hoping the post-tax wage will be a bit more than that. Lately I keep messing my dole up, overspending in the big Sweet Shop that is London, and having to borrow from friends and family, trying desperately to stop rent cheques from bouncing. Yes, I do know what it feels like to actually starve. It’s no Picnic, or even a Lion Bar. So the thought of more money coming in is very much a relief.

But then I calm down and remember there’s also that initial period of getting used to arrears payment, when you have to work and somehow survive for a month, perhaps more, before the first lot of cash finally comes through. At which point you realise you’ve been deducted Emergency Tax until the Revenue sorts it out. More hoops to jump through. Work really is too much like Hard Work.

But it might be fine. It might turn out to be more money than I thought. I might find it suits me, that I ‘perform’ well (which always has connotations of a seal getting its fish), and have my wages increased. I may even (whisper it) be able to start Saving. And then perhaps I won’t live in a bedsit forever after all. There’s only one way to find out.

(Though, yes, I know… it IS a bedsit in Highgate. It’s all relative.)

Anyway. Money, schmoney, as not nearly enough people in the news are saying right now. There’s another reason why I feel the job will be good for me. For the last year or so, I’ve had all the time in the world, yet I’ve become unproductive to the point of drying up completely. Even my diary entries have become sporadic. With no one else to prod me out of bed, I’ve tried to impose self-discipline, but the little voice in my head that constantly whispers ‘what’s the point?’ and ‘do it tomorrow’ has been winning all too frequently.

Once I have finally convinced myself life is worth getting out of bed for, I’ve found it impossible to settle my mind on doing any one thing. The mere idea that choosing one thing to do – to THINK any one thing, has made me brood on how this means every other possibility is being missed out on. Every alternate thought, every alternate sentence to write, every alternate way of spending the day, the evening, the month, the life. The harsh inevitability that whatever you do, you will miss out on a million other things. The sheer nature of being able to do anything has left me doing nothing at all.

Sounds close like madness, but it’s more a kind of mental build-up. There’s a recent Doctor Who episode where Catherine Tate’s character finds her newly-enhanced mind is starting to come terminally undone, in classic Flowers For Algernon style:

‘You know who I’d like to meet? Charlie Chaplin. I bet he’s great. Shall we, Charlie Chaplin? Charlie Chester, Charlie Brown, no he’s fiction, friction, fiction, fixing, mixing, Rickston, Brixton’. [she gasps]

Well, that’s the way my mind is all the time.

And normally I can work with it, enjoy it, be creative with it. But it needs a slap every now and then. Ideally, administered from somebody else. Hence the job.

My anxiety has also taken a turn towards physical manifestation lately. Though I’m never been a proper self-harmer, I have started to pull manically at my eyebrows when trying to concentrate, plus I’ve developed a severely itchy scalp, for which the doctor has given me both pills and a water-based steroidal balm. I didn’t know you could get pills for an itchy scalp until this week.

The skin on my arms has also become itchy: I keep checking there for insects, even fleas, but never find any. Might just be an allergy, but it does rather sound like just another anxiety outlet. My skin is crawling, and I’m crawling up the walls too. Something has to change. Hence the job. It can only be good for me.

The job will, one hopes, force me out of this rut, and sharpen up my faculties. The work is all about concentration, focus, reading speed, comprehension, English usage, grammar, deadlines. I can do those things. I can be very good at those things. I just need a bit of regular, external coercion to do them every now and then.

So I don’t really see it as just a job. I see it more as a kind of intensive, vocational college course. And I need it.

Training starts tomorrow morning, 10 am. Wish me luck.

Whenever I see an advert for a spectacles company, with a cheekboney lady in a power suit, hair up, and looking happy with her choice of eyewear to the point of madness, I now think of Sarah Palin. So that’s how pernicious the UK coverage of the US elections has become. Goodness knows what it must be like for Americans, if the British media alone is this saturated with comment and debate on Mr Obama, Mr McCain and their ‘running mates’, families, pets, and favourite choice of hunting rifle. Ignorance and lack of US nationality is no hindrance to comment, of course. And here I am joining in. Bait taken.

It seems odd to obsess so much over another country’s politics, even the US, when there’s more than enough to focus on over here. I just wish they’d concentrate more on, say, Caroline Lucas, who was recently elected Green Party leader. At least British newspaper readers can actually vote for her.

The general switch of focus from Mr O to Ms P seems less about ability to govern and more about appealing to people’s lust for a good story, with interesting characters. Ms Palin is a Good Character in this distant soap opera, so everyone perks up. On Radio 4’s News Quiz, mention of her name is given a sound effects burst from the Hallelujah Chorus, such is her gift to overseas satirists. If Mr O loses to Mr McC, or rather to Ms P, perhaps it’s because he’s just not funny enough, intentionally or otherwise. See also Boris Johnson.

***

Sunday last: afternoon tea at High Tea in Highgate, with Ms Crimson Skye, whom I first met in the Cabaret Tent at the Latitude Festival. High Tea is a new local haunt: homemade cakes, Doris Day and Cole Porter playing on the stereo, friendly young staff with a taste for old things. Right up my street in every sense. It’s popular today: there’s the sense it’s the Last Sunny Sunday of the year, so everyone is out in the cafes and parks. All the Sunday Couples, or in my case, the Couples Of Singles.

Then a drink in St John’s Tavern, Archway, now a trendy but pleasant restaurant & bar with chunky oak tables and a selection of broadsheet supplements by the beer pumps. A world away from the dingy pub in 1993 where Orlando played their early gigs.

And then to Ms Andrei’s flat in Upper Holloway for dinner and a movie. The Magic Toyshop: a rare 80s TV film of the Angela Carter novel. Adapted by the author, so it’s full of deliciously surreal, dream-like moments which a normal TV screenwriter would have cut for fear of confusing the audience. Has a creepy puppet swan and a creepier Tom Bell.

***
A Thursday past: the Boogaloo for Beautiful & Damned, with me DJ-ing there for the first time since I’d left the club night in Miss Red’s hands. Martin White and his Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra play a fantastic set (with Kate Dornan on tuba), and the bar is decked out in a Victorian Circus theme, complete with straw, bunting, an Unhelpful Fortune Teller booth, and lots of people in stick-on moustaches.

One lady is dressed up as a half-man, half-woman, with one gender on each side. I half chat her up, half-heartedly. My old neighbour and room decorator Liz also comes along and has such a nice time that she leaves a thank-you present outside my door: a little bejewelled make-up mirror, wrapped in ribbon and paper.

***

A recent Friday eve – outing to an art show with various Boogaloo associates (Nat, Red, Julia, Ms Annie S, Mr Russell, The General). Venue is a dusty Victorian house in the Kings Cross Road, formerly the shop Hats Plus. The old awning is still in place, still advertising the hat shop’s now-defunct website. Even website addresses can gather dust these days. I teach the word ‘awning’ to two Swedish women.

That Saturday eve – I Dj at the Magic Theatre event, at the Art Deco Bloomsbury Ballroom. Venue is outrageously plush and ornate, and I enjoy Ms Crimson Skye’s burlesque turn on the stage. She sings the Patsy Cline song ‘Crazy’ in a Texan drawl, while stripping from a Hannibal Lecter grill mask and straitjacket, her arms tied behind her back.  There’s also a Dexy’s-esque band with a full brass section, who cover the 80s song ‘Hey You, The Rocksteady Crew’.

Late in the evening, with much wine consumed, two men dressed as what looks like giant pincushions take part in an impromptu Flouncing Competition, on the dance floor. They each spin on their plimsolls and storm off in a camp huff to the nearest exit, their huge costumes bobbing around them. I am definitely enjoying myself.

Bit of a gap in my diary, but I’m back now. So what have I been up to?

I’ve just written the phrase, ‘days of wine and poses’ by way of a response and as a title for the entry. Then I realised it’s the Wrong Kind Of Pun. Puns can make you sound like a matey fake-everyman playing to an imagined gallery (the literary equivalent of a corny wink). I am not that kind of writer. At least, I like to think I’m not.

If I’m worrying about a pun, it’s probably a sign I should take it out. Rewrite it. Fiddle with it. Try reversing it. Poses And Wine? Sounds too much like a Cliff Richard song. Poseur With Wine? Too hard on myself. Pose With Wine could be the title of a painting, like Figure With Meat by Francis Bacon.

You see, these are the things that bubble around my brain on this rather chilly day in September.

Last week: I am pulling off a Pose With Wine at Mr Bacon’s old drinking and posing hole, The Colony Room in Soho. I am there with Clayton Littlewood, having first met for coffee at Bar Italia, then dinner at Stockpot. Pure Soho stuff.

Clayton used to live in a basement flat under Old Compton Street, which fascinates me. He could hear the prostitutes upstairs plying their trade. He says it was always noisy, unsurprisingly, and almost impossible to get any sleep at night. But that the mornings made up for it: Soho at 7am has this incredible atmosphere. The quiet after the storm, sobriety kicking in, people with proper jobs starting to get up and go to work. Streets caught naked, clear of teeming crowds. Small children go to school here too,  not always something you associate with Soho (just been watching this video about Soho Parish School). A sense of recovery, of the sun getting its own back on decadent humans, of pores getting a chance to breath.

We visit the Colony Room in Dean Street at a critical point in its 60-year history. A party of regulars, including Salena Godden, have just been to the private view of a much-feared auction, where some of the Colony’s art is being sold. Michael Wojas, the manager, plans to move the club out of its Dean Street premises, in order to save it from escalating rents. To this end, he’s selling off the artwork on the club walls, including a 1950s mural by Michael Andrews. Some club members have protested, both about the move and the art sale. There was even a story in Private Eye about it all. (Interview with Mr W here)

I initially lent my name to the rebel members’ ‘Save The Colony’ campaign, but have now changed my stance to a neutral onlooker, having understood more of Mr W’s point of view. It won’t be the same away from 41 Dean Street, but then it wasn’t the same after the smoking ban, anyway. I hope it continues in new premises, as long as it’s still in Soho.

[Update after the auction: The good news is that the Michael Andrews mural sold at a good price, according to the Independent, to ‘a representative of the Andrews estate… in the hope it can be placed in a museum.’]

Clayton L tells me it’s about time I pitched a non-fiction book to agents and publishers. ‘The Manesake Diaries’. ‘Boy With A Too Many Track Mind.’ ‘Secret Diary Of A Fallen Boy.’ The secret being there’s no sex in it whatsoever.

I could focus on the ‘modern dandy’ episodes, the music biz and DJ adventures, my veteran blogger status, the unlikely Shane MacG capers, and the general Being Dickon Edwards philosophy. Whether such a volume would draw a decent book-buying crowd or not, I don’t know. Only one way to find out. All I have to do is… work hard at it. Ah. The W word. Okay.

***

RIP Paul Newman, giving the newspapers a good excuse to print huge close ups of those famous eyes. Far nicer to see those in the corner shop, first thing on a Sunday, than anything more to do with banking or the ‘credit crunch’. The latter phrase being as tiresomely over-bandied about in the press as the word Facebook was last year. ‘Tortoise Breeding & How The Credit Crunch Will Affect It’, that sort of thing.

RIP also Bryan Morrison, music biz manager and publisher, whose clients included Wham, Pink Floyd, and very nearly, Orlando. We went to his office for a single meeting, during our mid 90s hustling days of being The Next Big Hubristic Thing. Mr M turned out to be the proper personification of a rock ‘n’ roll  impresario: cigar in hand, which he used to make a point, gold discs on the office wall, 1960s anecdotes about The Pretty Things. As we walked in, he pointed at me and said, ‘LOVE the look!’

Further to the previous entry, the BBC, Guardian and other UK news sites did get around to mentioning David Foster Wallace’s suicide after all, albeit a full day after this diary did. I feel the same way I did when returning from the Haringey Council elections in 2006 and publishing the full results to the diary, only to find that I was ahead of the council’s own website by several hours. And even then they got the numbers slightly wrong: I had to email them their own correct results.

Despite appearances, my feeling in both cases is not the smugness of the amateur reporter scooping the professionals, or the grumbling of one of those armchair experts who seem to write with one finger endlessly wagging till the grave (‘and another thing…!’).

No, it’s more the vague annoyance at being annoyed per se, when there’s far more deserving matters to give a hoot about.

***

Diary catch-up. In bits.

Friday Sept 12th: Fosca’s trip to Madrid for a one-off gig.

Highgate, early hours. The taxi is due to collect me at 5.30am, and as usual I can’t get a wink of sleep beforehand. All I can think about is the entirely possible horror of the doorbell ringing while I’m in bed, with me having slept through the alarm. Add this worry to the excitement and nervousness of the trip, and it seems pointless going to bed at all. But I still give it a go, lying there in the dark, utterly awake until the alarm goes, feeling foolish.

Our taxi driver is slightly played by Ray Winstone. I think it’s fair to say this, because the first thing he tells me as I emerge from the house is:

‘Blimey – you look like Thomas Dolby.’

I groggily attempt a smile – well, a smirk – and shove my suitcase in the boot. I can see Charley inside the car, trying hard not to laugh.

‘I guess you get people telling you that all the time, eh?’

‘Well… I often have people saying who I remind them of…’

‘Nah. It’s DEFINITELY Thomas Dolby. Definitely.’

And he says this is if it’s the most reasonable and useful thing in the world. Off we go.

Back in Highgate, to read the shocking news that David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, has hanged himself.

Zero coverage on the BBC, or even the Guardian. I know he’s an American author and it’s a Sunday, but even so. Come on BBC, if you can report today that Kazakhstan has bought the rights to The Vicar of Dibley, you can flipping well manage a sentence or two to mark Mr Wallace’s passing. He’s hardly obscure.

Just as well I subscribe to 3AM:

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/dfw-rip/

Thursday eve: To the Bullet Bar in Kentish Town Road, to see the band The New Royal Family, comprising Charley Stone, David Barnett, Jen Denitto and Rob Whose-Surname-Is-Unknown-To-Me. It’s Rob’s 30th birthday. He’s wearing a floppy blond wig and handing out free toy plastic dinosaurs. I’m not sure why (perhaps the answer is ‘why not?’). They’re enjoyable and fun and more like rock stars than many of those who do it for a living, frankly.  They also do a pretty faithful cover of Adam Ant’s ‘Young Parisians’, which is as old as Rob – from 1978.

The band on before them are outrageously loud and tuneless and depress the hell out of me when I enter the venue. I wonder if I’m Too Old, or they’re just Too Loud, or both. Thankfully the Bullet is one of those bars who’ve had to sprout a ‘beer garden’ from nowhere (really a back yard), in order to retain their smoking clientele. This way, not only can people sit down and have a cigarette with their drink, but they can actually hold a conversation without having to shout in each other’s ears over a loud band (or a loud jukebox, or loud football on TV). You can’t smoke AND listen to the bands, of course, but it’s a small price to pay for the ‘quiet carriage’ of the garden, in my book.

I read recently that outdoor music festivals are now more popular and lucrative than ever. So I wonder if the smoking ban is at least part of that equation, too.

Among others, I chat to Vicki Churchill, Seaneen M, Anna S, Alex S, and Rhoda B. Charley wasn’t sure if she could get me on the guest list, but as it turns out the gentleman on the door knows me anyway, and simply waves me inside on sight alone. I suppose I’m an Old Face On The Scene to some. And I recall that Fosca played the Bullet Bar in its previous incarnation as The Verge.

I’m listening to a friend’s mix tape of new-ish music, and one track I really enjoy is ‘Busy Doing Nothing’ by Love Is All. I Google them and discover they’re from Gothenburg. In fact, they used to be the band Girlfrendo, whose records I bought and loved while they were going. Love Is All is a world away from that unabashed twee / C86-inspired incarnation: they’re now very much of the CSS / Franz Ferdinand school: muscular and rhythmic. I know so many bands sound like that at the moment (with that slurping disco um-CHUH um-CHUH beat, as ubiquitous now as the ‘Funky Drummer’ style was in 1989), but they do it better than most:

Love Is All – Busy Doing Nothing (Video)

The hired Fosca-mobile is coming to pick me up at 5.30am. Then it’s off to Gatwick, and Madrid.

A Fosca London gig announcement. Oh yes!

It’s the much-threatened Fosca Farewell show. Saturday December 13th at Feeling Gloomy, Bar Academy, Islington. Stage times to come.

The line-up will a five-piece, three-guitar and two synths (plus laptop) assault: Rachel S, Kate D, Tom E, Charley S and myself.

***

Two DJ gigs of mine, at somewhat shorter notice.

I’m DJ-ing on Sat Sept 20th, at a plush dress-up event called The Magic Theatre. This takes place in an Art Deco ballroom in Bloomsbury. Here’s what their website says about the dress code:

“Ladies: The perfect place for all you Cinderellas and Style Queens, Pink Princesses and Leggy Latex Babes… Audrey Hepburns and Barbarellas, TV’s, Saucy Secretaries and Rock Chicks…Whether you’re a Goth Girl, Dowager, French Maid or Precocious Teen Queen, Marie Antoinette, or Marilyn Monroe, the Magic Theatre is YOUR stage. Gentlemen: Retro Glamour, Uniforms, Lounge Lizards, Gentlemen of the Cloth, Fauns, B-Movie Stars, Prince Charmings, Pirates and Dandies of all kinds…Arise, Sir Galahad, kneel before Zod, come out, come out you Peter Pans, Dick Turpins and Darcys…”

I’ll be doing two DJ sets between 8.30pm and 11.30pm. Ticket details at www.magic-theatre.co.uk.

***

I’m also putting in a brief DJ appearance at The Beautiful & Damned on Thursday 18th, at The Boogaloo (near Highgate Tube). Martin White & The Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra will also be playing. The B&D isn’t ‘my’ club any more, as I’m forever correcting people, but it’s still going strong under the auspices of Miss Red and The Boogaloo team. They’ve reinvented it into a kind of cabaret / club night / music hall booth affair. It’s great to see unwitting Highgate pub goers wander in off the street, and wonder just what weird, time-hopping universe they’ve stepped into. Part Red Room in ‘Twin Peaks’, part Sapphire & Steel…

***
Back to the diary.

Wednesday evening: to Trash Palace in Wardour Street, for a club night called ‘Polari’. It includes Jamie McLeod’s exhibition of modern dandies, which in turn includes me. Always nice to swan into a club to see a large framed photograph of oneself on the wall. The club also supplies free quiche.

On this occasion, special guest Sebastian Horsley takes the mic, and prowls and provokes and reads from his book, to a packed and appreciative crowd. Including his mother. He’s in his red sequined suit and brandishes a matching sequined bottle of vodka. Well, a sequined bottle cosy.

I say hello to David Benson, Anne Pigalle, Jason Atomic and Ms Ruta, and meet Clayton Littlewood, author of the ‘Soho Stories’ column in the London Paper. The window by his writing desk (or rather,  laptop perch) looked out from the clothes shop he worked at, Dirty White Boy in Old Compton Street. A particularly good spot in London to watch people and gather (or imagine) stories: Soho media types, the famous, the homeless, the vicious queens, the prostitutes, the tourists, the tramps, the old survivors, the new blood. He’s put together a book version: ‘Dirty White Boy: Tales Of Soho’, which I’m rather looking foward to.

More details at his MySpace page, with excerpts, readings and so on: www.myspace.com/dwbsoho

After Polari, Mr Benson takes myself, Mr H, Mr L and his friend Ms Lois for dinner at one of the Chinese restaurants in Gerrard Street. Sebastian invites me to an orgy on Friday. I politely decline. I’ll be busy playing indiepop songs in Madrid. Many of which are about, well, not going to orgies.

Okay, so Elizabethan Serenade was by Ronald Binge, not Eric Coates. I got my British Light Music composers in a twist. Mr Coates did the themes from ‘The Dambusters’ and ‘Desert Island Discs’. Mr Binge did ‘Elizabethan Serenade’ and ‘Sailing By’. Right, got that.

***

There’s a photo of me on Page 96 of the current Time Out, as one of the exhibits in Jamie McLeod’s exhibition on Modern Dandies. The pic’s also in my website Gallery, though Firefox does that washed-out thing to the colours which I don’t understand:

http://dickonedwards.co.uk/jamie-mcleod/

***

Have just been trying to write about my birthday, only to go into a 2000 word rant / ramble about the nature of adult birthdays, the guilt trips, the obligations, the switch from paper cards to Facebook greetings, how I equate them with New Year’s Eve in that there’s no way I can’t feel anything but uneasy about them. I also have learned that if you DO want a gathering of friends around you, you HAVE to organise the gathering well in advance, and tell EVERYONE in EVERY possible way. A successful birthday is, like most types of success, just a question of hustling and PR.

I’ve found that the best thing for me to do is to stop moping about at home, go out to someone else’s social event (there’s always SOMETHING on), casually mention it’s my birthday, then find that the friends I’m with will kindly buy me a few drinks, or even take me for an impromptu meal round the corner.

‘So how are you?’

‘Well, today’s my birthday.’

‘Really! I didn’t know. So what are you doing for it?’

‘Well, this, now.’

‘Oh. Well, would you like a drink?’

But – oh – some people do birthdays better than others. I’ll stop that rant right here in the interests of positive thinking.

***

I’m just having an ARGH time of things lately. Forgive me. Writing’s not coming, or if it does, it’s all complaints and whining and cynicism and general self-pity. ARGH, and indeed, ARGH, frankly.

As proof you never know who’s reading, and that one must be careful in a public diary when naming times and places as well as names, I’ve received an email from a chap from the band Red Atlas, regarding my previous grumpy entry. They want to know if it was them I was referring to as The Most Awful Band In The History Of Humanity, playing too loudly in the rehearsal room next door:

I too was rehearsing at Audio Underground on Monday in the uncoveted 7-10pm spot. I’m hoping that the aforementioned Most Awful Band In Humanity next door were the fifty strong thrash rockers who peppered the evening with chirrupping “rock and roll”s and squawling twin guitar salvos – with the doors open yet! – and not our own resolutely British Pop Stuff.

Oh yes, it was definitely a thrash rock outfit. Or perhaps they called themselves ‘Sludge Metal’, a term I saw in a ‘Drummer Wanted’ ad on the studio noticeboard. Charming description: I’ll take two!

But I was more bemoaning the seemingly eternal rule of rehearsal room life: that the band next door will always be (a) too loud despite soundproofing, and (b) play the most unlovely sound in the world.

That said, it’s funny how even a sound you might quite like to hear leaking out through the walls – say, ‘Elizabethan Serenade’ by Eric Coates – is unfailingly rendered unpleasant by the process. Loud music from next door is just always unwelcome, regardless.

Actually, my upstairs neighbour plays loud 1920s Ivor Novello-type records, but as the recordings from that era all have zero ‘bass end’, the sound hardly makes it through the ceiling at all. Very considerate of him.

On the bus home last night, a Young Person was playing some loud music from their phone’s speaker – a recent common annoyance which I persuade myself to not mind by remembering the cassette-playing ‘Ghetto Blasters’ of the 80s. They were far, far worse. From the 90s till about two years ago, there was a gap between the ghetto blasters going out of fashion (with the switch to CDs) and the new phone variety coming in. So there’s been a whole generation of youths who actually didn’t play loud music on public transport, purely because there wasn’t a desirable gadget around at the time with which to do so. Portable CD players were just too mumsy, I suppose: one associates them with aerobics classes.

The phone music in this case was modern hip-hop, rather than ‘Elizabethan Serenade’ or Ivor Novello, disappointingly enough. Actually, I have heard Morrissey songs blaring out from an open topped sports car on the Archway Road, which I suppose is about halfway there.

Here’s ‘Elizabethan Serenade’ on YouTube. Whenever there’s a gang of angry bears at my door, demanding they come in and eat my face while delivering a credit card bill, it’s a perfect piece of music to reach for:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbLNigDZai8

There. All better.