Something of a classified advert. Fosca seek a London-based Tour Manager for their proposed gig in Madrid this September. And possibly other gigs too.

One thing I’ve learned from the Swedish tour – and ten years of foreign gigs – is that there are bands who can do the whole DIY, self-management thing when playing abroad. And there are bands that can’t, or at least would really rather they didn’t. We’re in the latter category.

Though we’ve never quite dipped into the realm of proper touring horror stories – thank goodness – Fosca have still had a certain amount of ill fortune when playing live. We’ve had illness, loss of property, tears, incapacitating tiredness, or all of the above. I’m starting to worry about what will happen in Madrid. A goring from a bull? A civil war? Melting clocks?

So I’m thinking we should really hire a third party Tour Manager for this jaunt, preferably one with a dab of sound engineering experience. Someone to take care of the nuts and bolts, and to stop the nuts from bolting.

They’d need to round up Fosca members who wander astray, help carry the heavy cases when one of us feels they are about to actually pass out, liase with the promoter and ensure that the venue can accommodate our set-up in advance (as opposed to finding out at the soundcheck that there’s not enough channels… sigh), and generally take the organisational pressure off us.

Even though it’s for one gig and less than 48 hours out of our lives, I think it would make all the difference.

The successful applicant would be paid. Really. Enquiries to the usual email address (or use the Contact Page). Please pass this on to anyone you think could help. Thank you.

Favourite joke, out of many, from Mike Leigh’s new film, ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’:

‘Bear with me…’
‘Is there?’ (looks around)

It’s Mr Leigh’s ‘Pollyanna’. But with better jokes. And you can play Spot The London Location: Finsbury Park, Crouch End, Camden and so on. Early on in the film, the protagonist is seen dancing at Koko with her friends to Pulp’s ‘Common People’, then they stagger drunkenly across the bridge near the Market, as the sun comes up. A common experience indeed. Funny that Britpop tunes are now used to soundtrack the lives of nostalgic thirty-year-olds on a girls’ night out.

Nice detail that the driving instructor complains about a Britain covered in CCTV cameras – at the very moment he turns onto Holloway Road. The street is meant to have the most security cameras in the country: one for every 35 yards.

The film’s star Sally Hawkins also shines in another new favourite thing of mine, the excellent Radio 4 sitcom, ‘Ed Reardon’s Week’:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/edreardon.shtml

It’s a kind of Nathan Barley for the over-40s, or those of us who might as well be over 40. Ms Hawkins plays the titular scribe’s literary agent, the ultra-posh Ping. Or as Reardon refers to her, part of the ‘Cheltenham Ladies’ College Diaspora’.

Nice use of the latest youth slang for her character – or at least, the bits of youth slang employed by middle-class young women. In a recent episode, Ed is commissioned to write the history of his rich friend’s cottage in the Dordogne. Turns out Ping’s family are neighbours:

Ping: My parents’ve got a house on the other side of the valley, so we’ve known each other for, like, HUNDREDS of years (snorts).

Reardon: Yes, well I think that’s a slight exaggeration.

Ping: No, really. Our families had a battle in, like, 1640 or something. We won. Yay! Get in! Our cleaner was in the Resistance too. She’s BRILLIANT value…

***

Recent activity. To Hoxton and Shoreditch three days in a row. First to the Rich Mix cinema to see ‘Lars And The Real Girl’ with Ms Shanthi. Then to be photographed around the district by Ms Phoebe Allen for her degree course. Her project is a mock fashion shoot for a magazine, and I’ve agreed to be her model. Except her camera plays up, and we have to return the next day.

In Hoxton Square on a rather cold morning: I pose next to a very realistic-looking art exhibit comprising life-size manniquins in forensic white suits and masks, posed as if they’re combing a section of the square in the manner of a crime scene. Except the fluttering tape around them isn’t labelled ‘POLICE’, but ‘THE TELL-TALE HEART’. As in the Edgar Allen Poe story.

On the bench nearby sits a shivering lady with a clipboard and one of those handheld clicker-counters used to count visitors. She tells me it’s part of a Harland Miller show at the nearby White Cube gallery, influenced by Poe.

Shoreditch life: every single cafe is full of trendily-attired students on laptops. In fact, nine times out of ten their computers are all the same model. As opposed to Henry Ford on cars (‘Any colour as long as it’s black’), in the coffee shops of Brick Lane it’s any laptop as long as it’s a black MacBook.

The mind is just another music player stuck on Shuffle Mode. When I wake up, there’s usually some song playing in my head, entirely unbidden.

Today it was ‘Einstein-A-Go-Go’ by Landscape.

Yesterday it was the theme from ‘Champion The Wonder Horse’.

***

I’ve had my eyebrows raised by a Telegraph review of a John Barrowman concert. The journalist Michael Deacon wonders just why it is hordes of women squeal lustily at a man who’s openly gay and even works in jokes about his sexuality into the act. Mr Deacon ends the review by employing the old stand-up comedy trope, i.e. offering an observation, then positing a reverse comparison that seems unlikely, and thus funny (eg Eddie Izzard: ‘If bees make honey, do wasps make chutney?):

‘Still the women squeal their lust [at John Barrowman]. Do men wolf-whistle at kd lang gigs?’

I think it’s rather cheap to drag in Ms Lang for the sake of his ‘what’s all that about, eh?’ line of thinking. Mr Barrowman may be a gentleman’s gentleman, but he’s also known for flirting with female contestants on TV, rather like his anything-goes Captain Jack character. If anything, the knowledge he’s uninterested in any serious reciprocation makes such outpourings of affection all the more fun.

Now, despite her known membership of the Friends Of Jodie, Ms Lang’s fanbase is hardly male-excluding. For one, I recall Stuart Maconie including her ‘Ingenue’ album in his Radio 2 series on compiling the perfect record collection. And if she has plenty of male fans, I presume there must also be the requisite cheers and whistling at her shows – the very affection from men that the Telegraph critic finds so hilariously unlikely.

In fact, according to the website AskMen.com, Ms Lang is included alongside all the more feminine and heterosexual ladies of screen and stage, because she’s talented, her singing style is a seductive and sexy croon, and she’s confident inside her own skin. On top of which, her fetching ‘Female Elvis’ style of butch flirtatiousness, all dapper suits and waistcoats, is attractive across the board.

One thinks of more conventionally feminine performers – such as the actress Saffron Burrows – who have no trouble attracting swooning male fans despite their publicly-known gay relationships. So I wonder if Mr Deacon singled out Ms Lang because of her butch appearance as much as her Sapphic association.

In which case, it’s rather apt that this week also sees the passing of Joan Jackson, the inspiration for John Betjeman’s famous poem, ‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’. It’s the one where he sighs wistfully about her playing tennis with ‘the speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy.’ A wolf-whistle at a butch lady, if you like.

I’m also reminded of a few gentle male friends of mine who have a thing for ladies with a certain butchness of reputation:

‘You must meet my new girlfriend! She’s just been in prison for assault. Isn’t that fabulous?’

Though I concede that girlish boys into butch girls are less disposed to channel their affection into wolf-whistling per se. Instead, they’re far more likely to say something like, ‘Oh you fascinating creature, you! I drink from your every word!’

Thanks to Emelie H for sending me an English translation of that Swedish interview. Turns out it was me behind the ‘cute and puppy’ mention. Here’s an excerpt:

Fuzzy Dreamy Pop With Fosca

The British indie pop group Fosca has released a new record on a Swedish label.  Fria Tidningen met the band’s frontman, the writing dandy Dickon Edwards, over a glass of wine.

Emily Dean at Boyz Magazine has described the British pop band Fosca’s frontman Dickon Edwards as Andy Warhol meets Oscar Wilde meets Quentin Crisp.  It is a good description.  In Mr Edwards, both Warhol’s artistic skill, Wilde’s sarcasms and Crisp’s quick and philosophic reflections seem to be observable.

I meet Dickon Edwards at the Crystal Plaza  just before the bands gig at Landet by Telefonplan in Stockholm. He is radiating a brisk calm, where he is sitting with crossed legs reclined in an armchair, sipping white wine.  The singer, guitarist and writing dandy Edwards is dressed in a pinstriped suit today and is convinced that trainers should only be worn on the track.  Sophistication and reflection personified.

The theme of the new album is the outsider, the person outside the norms.  Edwards describes the record as “cute and puppy”.  Cute and puppylike, and with prominent guitars.

– But it is guitars without rock and sweat.  It is not heavy metal and it is not the Rolling Stones.  The guitar contributes to an organic sound.  It is fuzzy dreamy pop.

Dickon Edwards has, in connection with the release, published a book with a selection of his lyrics, poems and diary entries.

– It contains texts that I wrote ten years ago, but also later work.  You develop, you’re a walking cemetry of the former you.  The book is a monument, a compression of everything that is me.  And as I said, you are mortal; you won’t for instance have time to travel everywhere you want to.  But with a book your words can travel around the world instead.

I also like the idea of the book (and indeed, blog) as telepathy and time-travel, albeit one-way only. I’m thinking up these words in a room in Highgate on April 15th 2008, and they then – I hope – journey into the minds of others in different places, different countries, at different times in the future. Maybe in the far future, when the Internet will run on sunshine (or if wet, rainwater).

***

Tim C suggests a theory that deliberate Quiet Carriage offenders are a kind of ‘conformist’s rebellion.’ That such people react as an after-effect of swallowing so much zeitgeist and fashion and hype – the rush to be a part of what everyone else appears to be doing and following, from giving a hoot about the minutiae of celebrities’ lives to indulging the growth of high street homogeneity, to getting the latest upgrade of the latest gadget for its own sake. Certainly true of the man on the Colchester train back, who used an i-Phone – the latest mobile of choice – to chat under a ‘No Mobiles’ sign for the best part of an hour. For conformists feeling lost and sheep-like, even gullible, tiny things like this may be a small way of saying ‘I exist. Really.’

If that’s the case, if the only way for some to make their existential mark in the world is by these petty acts of revolt, rudeness and inconsideration – litter dropping is another one – then they need to get an outside view of themselves fast. And that’s coming from ME…

Once more unto the bleach, dear follicles. Though as my hair is pretty short, I now look like Eminem with a side parting.

(Is Eminem still going? Is anyone still going? Who’s the Prime Minister again?)

Have overdone the peroxide a little, resulting in a few days’ shame with pink skin around the hairline, plus a tight, sore scalp that feels it might fall off. Must remember to spend less time under the chemical halo. It’s not as if I’m a novice.

Monday: to Wahaca, an affordable Mexican restaurant in Covent Garden. An evening meal in the company of the frankly godlike novelist Dennis Cooper, along with other visitors to his blog such as the photographer of note, Marc Vallee. I get DC to sign my copy of ‘All Ears’, his collection of non-fiction articles. One of which is an interview with Keanu Reeves, conducted just before the shooting of Point Break, plus the second Bill & Ted movie, plus My Own Private Idaho. A vintage Keanu year. The young Mr Reeves is funny and fizzy, and clearly great company – close to the ‘Ted’ character. One wishes he’d do one more comedy, after all the serious and portentous Matrix goings-on. Maybe a forty-something update: ‘Bill & Ted Get Into Endowment Mortgages’.

Mr Cooper is only in London for a couple of days, yet the Customs officers at Eurostar St Pancras (he’s an American based in Paris) gave him a hard time. Once he said he didn’t know exactly where he was staying (he was meeting a friend who would take him to a hotel), that was reason enough to install him in The Unkind Room. They grilled him about his last trip to the country a year ago (and expected him to produce the ticket for proof), then asked him to go online and prove he was who he said he was, and so on. Their parting shot was to tell him to ‘never to use Eurostar to enter the UK again’. Utterly baffling.

In other unfair Customs news, Tony O’Neill sends me his excellent interview with Sebastian Horsley for S Magazine in the US. It’s timed with the Stateside release of Mr H’s ‘Dandy In The Underworld’. After conducting the interview over the phone, Mr O’Neill goes to meet the notorious memoirist at his NYC book launch, only to discover the party’s off. It turns out US Immigration has banned Mr Horsley from entering the country, citing ‘Moral Turpitude’. They’d read the book. Still, if that sort of thing could boost any career rather than hinder it, it’s Mr Horsley’s. I’m flattered that the article also refers to me and my diary.

***

Yet another Swedish interview for Fosca is online:

http://www.stockholmsfria.nu/artikel/21327

I wonder what the bit about ‘cute and puppy’ means.

***

Greatly enjoyed this weekend’s Doctor Who, set in Pompeii. Top marks for an in-joke for Latin students: the main family in the story have their names taken from the Cambridge Latin Course. I took the course as part of my ‘O’ Level circa 1985, and it still seems to be in use today, judging by a few blog discussions. It was a series of orange booklets introducing Latin for beginners, following a Pompeii family as they go about their daily life (eg ‘Module 5 – The Baths’), until the final module when Vesuvius erupts and all the characters bite the volcanic dust. eheu! fugaces labuntur anni!

Friday – visit Mum and Dad in Suffolk. I take the train from Liverpool Street to Colchester. The trains are now run by National Express, as in the coach company. Seems odd getting on a National Express train, but the previous owners were worse, going by the snooty and slightly pretentious name of ‘One Railways’.

Wonder if that Divine Comedy song, ‘National Express’ is thus rendered anachronistic. Taking a National Express now means getting a train too, at least in East Anglia.

I always choose the designated Quiet Zone on trains. This is one of those recent developments that hints at a whole side of 2008 UK mores, desires and lifestyles. It’s a chapter in the history of personal space in public places, and the changes in what people expect.

Firstly there’s the idea that a default train carriage is one that’s brimming with noise and cacophony. That noise is the norm, while quietness is unusual. Just as there were once areas where it would be assumed you would either smoke, or not mind people smoking next to you, whether in trains, buses, cinemas and so on.

Then comes in the designated ‘Non’ area, the single non-smoking carriage, the rule that smokers on buses have to go upstairs. Then the Non-area becomes the norm, from all of trains to all of pubs.

Two Beatles images leap into my mind at this point. One is from 1968, where the mustachioed band are sitting in cinema seats, watching Yellow Submarine at its premiere. What’s most noticeable is that they are all smoking. Smoking in a cinema. The other is the lyric from ‘A Day In The Life’, where the narrator catches a bus, then says ‘found my way upstairs and had a smoke.’ Both ideas seem unthinkable now.

Well, except on a few occasions when I’ve been witness to people on buses and trains taking their chances and lighting up, and I’ve been the only other passenger. These bold offenders tend to be groups of giggling young men who assume – rightly – that I’m not likely to come over and ask them to desist. In these recent examples, the smoke in question is always spliff smoke.

Hypocrite that I am, although I’ve smoked (both types of leaf) and have indeed been loud in public, I think I do slightly resent being at the mercy of nearby strangers, when they’re indulging in the things I’m going without, when their smoke – and their noise – carries over into my space. I suppose what one really wants is private booths on all forms of public transport: little sci-fi bubbles. Different sizes, for the times one is travelling in company, and the times one is alone.

I do wonder who started the idea of the Quiet Carriage, whether there was a series of complaints, a campaign, or dedicated lobbying (perhaps by the Noise Abatement Society), or if it was a consensus decision reached by the relevant committee at the top of the company, which is usually the way change happens.

When I talk about Quiet Carriages to Mum later that day, she says that it’s always worked fine for her. In her experience, the QCs have indeed been silent to an extreme level, where things like someone rustling a newspaper are curiously amplified by comparison.

I’ve had no such luck. Every time I’ve been in a Quiet Carriage, there’s been as much noise as I’ve been used to in normal carriages. If anything, they’ve been noisier. I’m starting to think it’s a conspiracy.

On the train to Colchester: two groups of small girls being perfectly normal, but in the wrong carriage for it. They are running about, whining, crying, playing beeping handheld computer games. Their mothers are frequently telling them off, even one saying ‘this is the Quiet Carriage – shh!’. So, one wonders, why doesn’t she take them to a non-Quiet carriage? It’s not as if it’s a packed train – there are plenty of empty seats in the other carriages.

Coming back to London: again, plenty of seats in all carriages. I go for the Quiet Zone once more. A man comes in, sits directly under one of the many window signs depicting a mobile phone with a ‘Non’ slash through it, and proceeds to make a loud series of calls throughout the journey. I should add that he is drinking from a can of lager. It’s one thing to tell off someone for transgressing a rule based on consideration for one’s fellow man, it’s another when the possibility of them reacting drunkenly – and maybe violently – has been introduced to the mix.

Again, lager or no, it is not going to be me who goes over and tells him off.

Getting into a Quiet Carriage a few months ago – three other passengers there. They are ALL talking away on mobile phones. And once again, there’s plenty of seats in the Noisy Carriages. I start to wonder if there’s a kind of reverse psychology in action: an ‘I dare you’ aspect to the signs. Or if they all think they’re being perfectly quiet on their mobiles: speaking a lot lower than usual, at least according to their own Index Of Noise. It’s other people who are noisy, not them. Their idea of noise is different to mine. And so I’m forced to wonder if my idea of noise is the unacceptable thing here. That – as ever – it’s me that’s the odd one out.

In fact, on both journeys this week, when the ticket collector passes through, he doesn’t do anything about the noisy passengers himself. And on that Norwich journey with the cannabis-smoking boys, the collector passed directly through the cloud of their pungent smoke. Maybe he was their friend. I’m in no position to start playing the role of the Everyman.

What if on these occasions I’m the only one who minds? It would be wrong to expect others to fit in with my world. I have to fit in with theirs. I keep quiet, I promise not to start fights, and the world agrees not to kill me. That’s the whole Dickon Edwards deal.

So the etiquette of the Quiet Zone is based not on the wishes of the conductor, but on the wishes of the least tolerant passenger: one who is also capable of challenging an offender. And I would never like to be thought of as the least tolerant / most telling-off-capable person in the room.

I envisage the challenged person retorting ‘But I’m not being noisy! This isn’t noisy! This is consideration!’

And then they ask everyone else in the carriage:

‘Hey! Do YOU think I’m being noisy? Do YOU? What about you?’

And whether through sincere agreement, or just English embarrassment, they all take the side of the noisy phone user rather than mine. After all, I’m the weird one. I hardly use phones at all, in fact. I’m a creature of email.

Then – as my nightmare spirals – a conductor comes in, asks about the commotion, and I am pointed to. ‘That’s the troublemaker!’ Then all the passengers rise as one, form a mob, grab me, lift me above their heads, carry me to the door, and hurl me from the moving train, cheering.

It is me that is the strange one. So it is me that must never speak up.

So I sit and simmer and sigh while Mr Lager brays away on his i-Git Phone beneath the No Mobiles sign, hoping someone else in the carriage will play the part of the Outraged Common Sense Everyman for me. Because I cannot.

(I’m also secretly hoping there will be a bit of a conflict if he is challenged. Maybe even a fight. In which case I’ll get a ringside seat…)

But no one challenges him, and he natters away till the train pulls in at Liverpool Street. In fact, he continues chattering loudly on the platform – he seems to be in more of a monologue than a conversation. I find myself lengthening my stride to the point of running, desperate to get away from him. As I scramble to put my ticket into the barrier and make for the Tube, I can still hear him, behind me, walking and talking. I wonder if he ever stopped?

I suppose all I am saying is Give Intolerance A Chance.

It’s an update of the old joke – ‘I can’t stand intolerant people… Except when I want there to be one.’

Promised photos, mostly from Sweden two weeks ago. Credits: Charley Stone, David Hill, DE.

A break from the bleach:

Line-up of Fosca for the Swedish tour, March 2008 (Charley Stone, DE, Rachel Stevenson):

Lund poster:

Rachel and Ylva (Friday Bridge singer) and a reference to Truman Capote in ‘Murder By Death’ (or if wet, Fawlty Towers):

Rachel models the Fosca t-shirt:

Charley’s self-portrait:

I think I’m better at being in photos than taking them:

Recording ‘The Man I’m Not Today’ / ‘My Diogenes Heart’ in Karlstad:

Throwing a snowball in Stockholm, circa midnight:

TV acoustic session:

Always dress appropriately when writing lyrics (using a hotel pen from the Stockholm Crystal Plaza, and a London Library notebook):

Youtube video footage:

Stockholm:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw-YvBKAlNE

Gothenburg – note crowd frenzy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEAE5Co2saE

Gothenburg – acoustic instore:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIR_Fd-69mM

More photos at Charley’s blog (click on ‘Pictorial Evidence’):

http://charleston.livejournal.com/235769.html

Am feeling a world away from the slump of the last few days and the illness of the week before. After the sensation of being knocked to the bottom of life’s staircase one time too many, then seeing the stairs shift and transform into a sheer slide – as escalators do in common nightmares – something has clicked or cleared. The stairs are no longer terrifying, and the idea of lightly picking my own funny way up them (and at my own speed) seems natural once more.

I put this recovery partly down to publishing my own unseemly wails in the diary: a selfish unburdening which was purely a last resort and which I will do my utmost never to repeat. Public admission of depression for me – once I’m on the other side of it – now seems embarrassing and tedious. That I might sound like a typical depressive – or a typical anything – appalls me so much, the recovery is accelerated a thousandfold. I have effectively shamed, bored and embarrassed myself out of my own predicament. Or at least that’s how I prefer to see it.

What also helped was meeting Ms S in Islington, and going to the cinema (Vue) to see ’27 Dresses’. An unabased fluffy romantic comedy – a genre which, it’s easy to forget, evolved directly from the Restoration ‘comedies of manners’ – with just enough quips, social observation and ripostes to justify its stay: it’s exactly what the doctor ordered. Sometimes one wants a film or book or piece of music to take oneself somewhere new, sometimes one wants to be told ‘me too’, and other times it’s a slight variation on an familiar journey that the soul requires. I’m an unabashed admirer of Richard Curtis’s films for the same reason. Though when I confessed this to Ms Stone in Sweden, she replied, ‘That’s because you ARE Hugh Grant.’

I have photos to upload. A selection of Sweden, plus my short brown hair. Tomorrow, then.

This morning: I’m hungover, have spent money I wish I hadn’t, and last night I nearly burst into tears on the tube home. It probably wasn’t a good idea to go out after all.

***

After the Adam Green gig, Ms S wants to go to a nearby pub. Which is fine, except that en route she bumps into a couple of her friends, and they come with us. Then at the pub, after sitting in silence while Ms S and her friends talk – with each other rather than me – and I attempt to smile amiably, a third friend of hers appears out of the blue and sits down at our table.

At which I point I suddenly get up and run out of the pub without saying goodbye.

Make a slight mess of that, in fact. I bolt for the door only to find it’s bolted, and have to try the next one along. There’s always a comedy edge to my tragedy. Which is the way I like it.

Sheltering in the doorway of Woolworths on Camden High Street, I send Ms S a hasty apology by text. ‘I’m so sorry for running out like that. I’m not feeling too sociable around strangers right now.’

Her reply: ‘That’s okay. They thought it was something they said!’

***
All I could really cope with – and wanted last night – was a one-to-one chat with a friend. Not to have to do the group sociable bit. Apart from anything else, it was one of those pubs where the jukebox music is too loud to be able to join in on conversations between two other people. So I just sat there morosely and tried to pretend I could hear what they were talking about. And I felt like the most excluded person in the world. Didn’t help when one of her friends tried to make conversation with me:

‘And what do you do?’

Which as you can imagine, is exactly the wrong question to ask me right now. And another reason not to talk to people I don’t know, in case they ask me this.

It’s such a silly question anyway. Few people like to talk about their jobs at social gatherings, even if they have jobs. I once made the mistake of asking this at a party years ago, searching for a conversation opener at an awkward moment. The lady in question snorted, ‘I refuse to be defined by what I have to do for a living!’ and stormed away. That’s one way of doing it.

I should have just not gone out at all. Or made it clear that I’m only capable of one-to-one company, and certainly can’t cope with introductions to a group of strangers. Not right now. Ah well.

It also didn’t help that this was the fourth bar we went to in three hours, including Koko. ‘Merry’ would be quite the wrong term. ‘Alcohol-enhanced malaise’ is closer.

The pub in which we agreed to meet before the gig turned out to be dominated by a TV football game. We repaired to another down the road, only to find the same problem. When you’re feeling excluded from much of the human race, and you don’t care for football, it’s really not a good idea to go to any pub with a sports screen. Which is most pubs. Large amounts of men suddenly shouting when you’re at a fragile and sensitive moment in your conversation doesn’t do wonders for one’s mental well-being. London is meant to be a city of choice, of possibilities, of diversity. But not when you want a drink with a friend and there’s a big match on.

***

At the guestlist booth for Koko, I noticed Geoff Travis was briefly next to me. Adam Green is on Rough Trade, his label. Mr Travis once signed my old band. I don’t know if he recognised me, because I currently don’t look like me. I’ve had my blond hair cut off, leaving a thick ‘Action Man’ style crop of mousy brown. I intend to re-bleach it shortly, but fancied a night out looking unlike myself. The links between depression and cutting one’s hair off are all too obvious, I know, but in this case it was pure coincidence. I’m just giving my hair a mini-break.

Mr Travis has been good enough to grant permission for use of the Orlando lyrics in The Portable Dickon Edwards, and I’ve since sent him a copy of the book along with the new Fosca CD. So if I did broach a conversation with him, we’d have to talk about what he thought of the Fosca record. Which I’m guessing he doesn’t care for. Maybe’s he’s not heard it. Maybe he has heard it and likes it, but is too busy right now, what with being in Adam Green Label Manager mode. Regardless, I was in no state to say hello.

Ms S pointed out one tall, long-haired man standing at the Koko bar. It was Chris Gentry from the band Menswear. Or so she said. He was unrecognisable from the cute boyish guitarist I remember from those mid-90s days of Britpop hubris. Again, I felt surround by ghosts, the past, that I was returning to somewhere I’d left: it felt like an uneasy school reunion.

***

On stage, Adam Green does his best. It’s a sold-out gig, and I wonder how many people here are proper Adam Green solo fans. The sweet duet at the end of the film Juno, ‘Anyone Else But You’, is by Mr Green’s old band The Moldy Peaches, from 2001. He doesn’t do this song tonight, or any of the other better known Moldy Peaches numbers, but I wonder if he feels the pressure to do so, given the ubiquitous success of the film.

Instead he does his unkind song about the pop singer Jessica Simpson. I wonder if Jessica Simpson has been tempted to respond in kind? Maybe her reply could go something like this, written and sung in the Moldy Peaches ‘anti-folk’ style:

Adam Green, Oh Adam Green
You do indie rock songs that are slightly obscene…
Your backing band’s tight, your singing voice’s awesome
Yet people only want you and Kimya Dawson
To get back together, at least till, you know,
Until they’ve worn out their DVDs of ‘Juno’

Only joking, Mr Green. You were fine. I liked your skinny t-shirt with fringed white tresses.

(argh)

(…)

(argh)

(…)

(sigh)

(…)

(oh god)

(oh no)

(argh)

(…)

Say something, Mr Edwards. Go on.

This is always the trouble when going for a while without writing. I spiral into myself and become addicted to nothing. Even the things I normally do for fun seem like the hardest work imaginable. I can’t concentrate on following a TV show for more than a few minutes, let alone read a book. I feel like whole receptors have been switched off, and all that’s left to feel is dull annoyances and irritations. Noises off. And on top of which is the usual voice: ‘Why bother? What’s the point?’

Daily routine lately:

3pm: Wake up. Realise how late it is. Couldn’t sleep last night. Except, of course, I could – fell asleep circa 5AM.

Sigh heavily. Wonder what to do. Listen to sounds in the street. Listen to neighbours wandering about the building. My room is right next door to the shared toilet in the hallway. So every day I hear the rattle of the toilet door handle, the toilet door opening and closing, the pull-string light going on, the extractor fan kicking into life. Then: the toilet flushing, the door handle rattle, the stiff door opening, the neighbour going to their room, the neighbour’s door slamming shut. Repeat ad infinitum.

This has pretty much been my life most days: lying in bed, listening to the above. Listening to doors opening and closing.

***

You know, I’m sitting here and all I can think of writing is ‘Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.’ I can’t think straight. I don’t know what to do. Well, I do know what I want to do. Right now, I want to throw things, and howl, and cry.

***

I know I should really keep this more self-pitying fare for longhand notebooks when it comes to ‘writing out’ one’s depression. But I don’t like to go for too long without publishing an entry, and this stuff is all I can currently muster. So as this is really a placeholder against no entry at all, Dear Reader, I ask your forgiveness and forbearance. Hopefully it won’t last.

***

Tonight I’m off to a gig, because a friend needs company and she chose me. I wish we could just do the company bit without the gig. But between staying home and feeling annoyed and depressed, and going out and feeling annoyed and depressed, at least the latter might be more likely to shake me out of the doldrums. The concert in question is Adam Green at Koko. I have no opinion about Mr Green one way or another, which I’m sure he’ll be interested to hear. In fact, I’ve seen him before. He just came on stage, played a few songs, and went off again. Where’s the entertainment value in that?

I’m not ENTIRELY joking. Nothing to do with the music or acts in question at all. It’s just that right now I feel like one of those mums or dads who might tap their feet to a song on the radio, but would never in a million years go out to a ‘gig’. I feel more like 86 than 36. Would you ask an 86-year-old along to a rock gig? Yes, I would like to meet my friends. No, I don’t want to go to a gig to do so.

So what’s really going on here? It can’t be unrelated to my mixed feelings about my own band, Fosca, and indeed about what I’m meant to be doing with my life from this point on. I’ve had offers for Fosca to play Leeds and Bristol. We’ve also been asked to play Madrid. I haven’t agreed to any yet, still feeling exhausted from Sweden (after a mere 4 gigs!) and uncertain about Fosca as a whole, at least as a gigging entity. I’m still not sure if that ‘unusual venue’ London gig is happening or not, because I’m waiting to hear back from a few people. I don’t know. It’s all so… (gestures feebly in the air).

What is certain is that I’m in dire need of a change. A break. Something. People talk about ‘turning their life around’. I think others in my position would just get out of London for a week or so and take a holiday to get their thoughts together about their life. Well, I just can’t afford that. And anyway, I’d still be bringing ME along with me.

Having no money and still living in the same bedsit after 14 years is rather getting to me as well. So I have tried to get a job, out of risible optimism. One friend piped up with details of a library assistant position, where everyone is a bit bohemian, implying I’d fit straight in. I also asked another friend about their office shift work which seems to also favour those who live a little at an angle to the world.

Well, I filled out the form for the former, and didn’t even get a response. And my shift-y friend didn’t reply to my email when I asked if I’d be suitable. Which I’ve presumed to be a polite way of saying ‘Dickon, much as I like you, I really don’t think I could bear to have you around at my place of work.’ Can’t say I really blame them. Again, my own gut feeling was that it’d be a bad idea anyway.

Problem is, my gut feeling is that doing anything AT ALL is a bad idea.

I suspect the library people just Googled me, as employers are apparently wont to do these days, found this diary and made their decision at once.

I mean, who would employ me? On this diary, I’ve publicly admitted to being:

– irresponsible
– cowardly
– weak
– naive
– arrogant
– tardy
– generally late with finishing things
– unreliable
– poor at working as part of a team
– given to falling ill
– prone to depression and panic attacks
– clumsy, with a curious poltergeist-like history of breaking things and destroying databases
– generally inept
– unable to grasp the basics about much of the real world
– reclusive
– stand-offish
– insular
– odd

Roll up, employers…!

So I’m officially too dysfunctional even for those jobs which employ bohemians. I would like to say I took some comfort from this confirmation of my so-called otherness. But in fact I was more aware of being doomed to loneliness and penury and hopelessness till the grave. The result was a lot of breaking down in tears and wailing and feeling like ending it all. But not just yet – it’s be silly to commit suicide before – oh – the current series of Doctor Who ends.

It’s my becoming acutely aware of the dichotomy between my ‘functional bohemian’ friends – people who can get and hold down jobs – and my own towering sense of unemployable dysfunction that’s really pushed me off the rails lately. So much of my waking life lately has been spent, well, weeping with despair, frankly. And you know, I don’t like feeling unhappy all the time. I don’t know about you.

***

‘Oh God…!’

I sighed this out aloud at a complete stranger yesterday. While walking around Highgate avenues in the dark, circa 9pm, trying to get away from myself. Passed a pool of street light and sighed ‘OH GOD!’ out aloud, thinking I was alone. At which moment (of course), someone passed by, appearing from nowhere. Wonder what they thought.

Oh dear. I wish I knew what best to do about All This. This whole… Being Alive business. This whole Coping business. This whole Enjoying Myself business.

***

I mean, I know it’s so wrong to feel like this, particularly when I still have a perfectly lovely and enviable life compared to real suffering and real destitution. I know I should give CBT therapy a go. But right now I barely have the energy to sift through the ever-mounting piles of untackled clutter and correspondance on the floor, to find the relevant letters about the local therapy services. And of course, there’s still all the clutter boxes, stuffed with untidy unfinished business going back years, eating away at my mental well-being just by existing. Some of it is pure ephemera: magazines I didn’t read then and still haven’t read now.

It’s taking me an incredible effort to even write this entry, let alone start sifting through my ancient clutter. I wish I could… I wish it would all be done for me. That’s the main emotion I’m feeling right now: utter excoriating dependency and a yearning to pass my life into the hands of someone else, for someone else to take charge. Ever the guest, never the host.

***

But even if I’m absolutely dreading going to Koko tonight, I know I still enjoy music. Here’s a song I absolutely adore right now. Rose Melberg’s ‘Each New Day’. The recorded version I have is backed with an echoey piano, but this live guitar version on YouTube is just as good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPIpPuy29Qs