Good for Zadie Smith. She once used her Waterstones ‘An Author Recommends’ spot to highlight the works of Joe Stacco and David B with the tag ‘Graphic novels take so much time and work to make. The least we can do is read them’. Can’t really argue with that.

The Book Of Other People, which she’s edited, is a recent anthology of specially commissioned short stories from various bookish notables: Mr Eggars, Ms July, Ms Kennedy, Mr Toibin, Mr Litt, Mr Safran Foer. But she’s also included comic strip tales from Mr Ware and Mr Clowes, and a Posy Simmonds-illustrated piece by Mr Hornby.

I suspect many readers of White Teeth and more than a few literary critics who rate Ms Smith would never touch a comic book with a Booker-nominated bargepole. So I like to think her unabashed nod to comics helps to shake them up just that little bit. Perhaps it even confuses them. ‘A Whitbread Prize winner who likes comics? Does. Not. Compute.’

The only problem is, new anthologies of prose short stories also suffer from a similarly baffling across-the-board dismissal by the mainstream book buyers. It’s so strange how British readers in particular like their printed fiction to be in novel form only. Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader is either a long short story or a novella, depending on your taste in word counts, but what’s more important according to the publishing market is that it’s been packaged like a short novel. Include it in a collection, and it just wouldn’t sell so well. UK readers have this ‘thing’ about fiction anthologies, just as they do graphic novels.

I once heard a radio interview with Stephen King, where the next guest was the Booker winner DBC Pierre. They turned out to be fans of each other’s work, and it was lovely to hear these two authors from different corners of the bookshop meet and exchange compliments Romeo & Juliet-like, while those on both sides gnashed their teeth.

I understand WHY there are genres, why graphic novels aren’t filed alongside the prose fiction, why Terry Pratchett is filed away from Martin Amis. What aggrieves me is the assumption that readers are meant to stick to one thing or the other. A varied diet is healthier – literary novels can get into unimaginative and predictable ruts too. When they talk about ‘the death of the novel’, they really mean the dearth of the reader’s scope. One should go for the best of all possible worlds, as Mr Voltaire said. And indeed, Penguin have put out an edition of Candide with comic strips by Chris Ware on the cover.

It’s not the publishers or writers, it’s the UK reading market that’s the problem. Funny how bookworms can sometimes be more narrow-minded than TV or movie addicts. There can be prejudice among those who claim to eschew prejudice.

The very British hypocritical connection between liberal snobbery and fake open-mindedness never fails to astonish me. The more people boast about how free from intolerance they are, the more you realise how much they’ve deliberately shut out from their lives.

The whole point of being a writer is opening up minds and showing people new worlds, rather than keeping them in their comfort zones. Enlightenment as entertainment, and vice versa.

And so to Mike Russell on Persepolis. Mr Russell is a film journalist who transforms his interviews into comic strips. Not content with being an interviewer per se, he also manages to render the strip’s artistic style to fit the subject.

Here he is talking to director Richard Linklater about A Scanner Darkly, using that film’s unique Rotoscoping look (tracing over live action with a pen) to depict the interview in comic form.

For an interview with Jerry Seinfeld for Bee Movie, he gives the strip the same form of anecdotal, meandering, observational comedy feel typical of Seinfeld’s own trademark routines. I particularly love the detail of the officious PR lady with a clipboard, gently nudging him away from the ‘talent’, as if the journalist were nothing more than an autograph hunter.

Best of all is his conversation with Marjane Satrapi, creator of Persepolis, the comic book about a life of growing up in Iran, which is now an animated movie. Getting Ms Satrapi’s own drawing style right for his interview is impressive enough (her black and white, faux-naif manner may seem simple, but it is disarmingly difficult to mimic accurately), but I’m most impressed by Mr Russell’s noting of her chain-smoking, and the boiling down of a long interview into a series of aphorisms and insights:

‘The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.’

‘Culture and instruction are really weapons of mass construction.’

‘I was brought up on the idea that American people were the most evil in the world.’

‘The second I have a friend in one country, that country cannot be my enemy’

And a credo after my own heart:

‘If we don’t consider people as individuals, we go to hell.’

Emails:

From: Ellen and Emelie
Town / Country: Stockholm
Message:

Dear Dickon,

The youth of today are kept away from experiencing real music (such as Fosca) because of age limits to concerts. There are a few of us that got a taste of your music at Stockholms Poetry Festival and are hungry for more. So, pretty please play a concert in Sweden without an age limit? We promise to make you a gigantic sign with your face surrounded in beams of glitter and scream the lyrics to every song. Because we love you and your music and reallyreallyreally want to see you live (lots of more fangirlish comments). Much respect, admiration and unhealthy amounts of love, Emelie and Ellen xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I can’t really do much about the age limits, I’m afraid. But feel free to write to your favourite teen-friendly venues and festivals, and suggest they book Fosca. Playing the Benno festival in 2001 was my happiest gig to date.

HI! I just saw that you’re gonna perform in my hometown Karlstad. Is it possible to meet you and buy your records directly from you, before or after the concert? I really loved your performance at the Rip It Up festival. It seems like this stuff is based on true emotions, without any “wanna be a cool pop star” attitude. I actually got inspired to use new ideas in my pop project. Cheers and hugs to all of Fosca, Patrik

We’ll definitely be bringing some CDs. To be told you’ve inspired others in their own music is always nice. Thank you. I’m looking forward to Karlstad too.

I think I USED to want to be a cool pop star. Those dreams have either faded with time, or have been knocked out of me by life’s pokes and prods. Maybe it’s just as well. I’m finally starting to dream again, albeit of other things.

Also in the Inbox: a student in Utretcht asking to interview me for a thesis on dandyism (sure), plus Gina R from the early 80s teen band Marine Girls, wanting to know if our paths had crossed sometime in the past. She’d seen me on the Web and saw we had mutual friends.

The Marine Girls was the first band of Tracey Thorn, the singer with Everything But The Girl. She and Gina formed it while still at school. They made a couple of records in the early 80s, ‘Beach Party’ and ‘Lazy Ways’, which garnered a following in the world of John Peel and the music press. For a group of teenage girls singing about love, beaches and days out, they sounded unusually sombre, arty, and jazzy, much like Tracey Thorn’s records to come, but less polished, less tutored (and thus more charming), less commercial, and with that unique girls-together edge. Kurt Cobain was a fan, and the US band Unrest recorded a version of ‘Love To Know’ in the 90s.

So although I confirmed that, no, on this occasion I’m pretty certain we haven’t met,
it’s an utter pleasure to get an email from someone whose music you’ve enjoyed for years.

Yet how strange to think I am corresponding with a teenage girl who happens to be in her forties. Turns out she was at Latitude last year, looking after teenage girls of her own, and like my parents she’s rented a place in Southwold every summer for years. So maybe she just saw me walking around in Suffolk one day.

‘Where might I know you from?’

If you think about it, a full answer would be listing every possible interaction you’ve had with the world since birth. Where to start? Where to stop? I really need to look inside that other person’s mind, find my image, and see what it’s filed under, what the taglines are.

I might be known from the bands I’ve been in, or the clubs and events I’ve DJ-d or been a regular at. Or maybe I served them when I worked in a shop? I’ve done a lot of that. In fact, I definitely served her bandmate Ms Thorn in Hampstead Our Price, 1995. Next time I saw Ms T, a few months later, I was hanging out at the aftershow of EBTG’s Shepherds Bush Empire gig, in my new capacity as a glittering music biz party boy. That backstage bar became a bit of a second home for a while.

There’s a theatre anecdote – collected, naturally, by Ned Sherrin – where some old and celebrated actor (possibly Gielgud) is introduced to a younger player at a party.

Old Actor: An actor, eh? Yes, I have seen you before. Were you at Stratford? The Royal Shakespeare Company?

Younger actor: No, I’ve never been in the RSC.

OA: The Royal Court? I’ve definitely seen you –

YA: No, I’ve never played there.

OA: Something by Chekhov in the West End?

YA: (shamefacedly) No…. I’m afraid haven’t acted in a while. The only job I’ve had for the last year is working behind the deli counter at Harrods.

OA: (triumphantly) THAT’S where I saw you! You were MARVELLOUS!

Have to admit it, I am feeling a bit lost in life. I think I need a certain amount of moving on, if not quite Getting On.

It’s been 14 years now in this room. A perfectly lovely bedsitting room, in a very lovely part of North London. And at least I don’t have to play the whole communal living game, arguing murderously over whose hummus is whose. But after 14 years in the same place, and at the same hand-to-lipbalmed-mouth level, I finally want to try living somewhere with my own bathroom. Call me greedy. So I guess this means Work.

But what do I want to be if I grow up? Whenever I look at the Recruiting section of newspapers, I feel utterly in the wrong universe.

There’s a pull-out supplement in this week’s New Statesman, comprising a round table discussion about the commissioning of public services. For me it may as well be written in Klingon. ‘Cross-sector commissioning for effective service delivery’. ‘Our experience includes the implementation of procurement and contracting models.’ ‘Consulting > Solutions > Outsourcing.’

A sample sentence:

‘If you deliver healthcare to somebody…’

Yep, got that.

‘…and they see it as something over which they have no control or have no engagement with…’

Yes, still understanding that. Just about.

‘…there will be a disconnect between the two ends.’

Pardon? This isn’t even a written piece: it’s a transcription of a discussion. That there are so many people in Real Life who regularly speak like this makes me feel like I really am from a different planet.

But I realise it’s me that’s the weird one. I feel a disconnect between my two ends. My reality consultancy has been well and truly outsourced. I need a procurement of ‘solutions’ in my own life. Barman! Can I procure a double Solutions and tonic?

So I guess it’s pointless applying for conventional jobs. At 36, with zero money and next to zero normal career experience, I’ve not so much hit Rock Bottom as hit Rock Sideways. I’ve joked haughtily before that my CV has one sentence on it: ‘Don’t you know who I am?’

But when it comes to things like ‘experience’, what can you say about the experience of being interviewed as a Blogging Dandy by newspapers in Holland and Sweden? Of being known as Shane MacGowan’s New Romantic Butler (not entirely true, but there’s no Black Sobranie smoke without fire)?

I could try pitching a Dickon-style column to selected publications. But if they want an Everyman-ish take on life, they’ve had it with me. I can’t do the Everyman. Those columnists who play to the gallery: how all men are like this, all women are like that, and how politician X or party Y is being typically foolish / wise (delete as applicable); that really isn’t me.

And those columnists who write in a permanent Everyman shrug, what’s all that about, eh?

It’s true I’ve slightly but irrevocably slipped out of the Real World. I suppose this is both my failing and my strength, and is presumably why several thousand people I don’t know are reading this diary.

So I remain optimistic for what happens next. Even the out-of-place can find their place.

What with the death of Heath Ledger followed by the passing of Jeremy Beadle, I’m sure hilarious wags around the country will say something like ‘from one evil Joker to another’.

But I wonder how many will say that Jeremy Beadle introduced them to Virginia Woolf?

Before he appeared on shows like Game For A Laugh and Beadle’s About, before he became ‘Jeremy Beadle’, I was rather a fan of his. Because in the early 80s he presented children’s teatime programmes like Eureka, April Fool and The Deceivers. These were quirky little BBC non-fiction entertainments, with a touch of the educational, showing how the safety pin was invented, or relating the history of imposters and hoaxers through the ages.

Mr Beadle would do the main narration and explanations to camera, then there’d be an acting out of the story in elaborate sketch form, via period costume and appropriately decked-out studio sets. I remember the actors included Madeline Smith, the doll-like Hammer Horror beauty, and Sylvester McCoy, the future Doctor Who. No studio audience, no on location hidden cameras.

So Jeremy Beadle was once the early 80s equivalent of Stephen Fry on QI, or Robert Newman on his recent programme The History Of The World Backwards. Or Ben Schott of Schott’s Miscellany. He represented the quirkier side of learning.

Though the genre of trivia is thought to be self-serving and unedifying in itself (often equated with the pub bore or list-compiling geek) it’s not always pointed out how it can sometimes be a shoe-in for autodidacts, piquing curiosity and encouraging further reading. Which I’m a firm believer in – the ‘rubbing off’ principle of learning. Demonstrating the history of the safety-pin might spark a lifetime’s interest in that particular process of science, or that particular historical period.

The one sketch I most remember was Mr Beadle’s retelling of the story of the HMS Dreadnought hoax in 1910. He mentioned one of the participants was the young Virginia Woolf. I would have been about eleven at the time, and had never heard of the novelist until now. I came away from Mr B’s history of hoaxes wanting to consult my parents’ bookshelves. By the time I was thirteen, I had read Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Orlando. All thanks to Jeremy Beadle.

I also remember the first edition of Game For A Laugh, and how my childhood heart sank to see this hero of quirky children’s TV turn into a tacky presenter of hidden camera pranks on the adult public. I could see how retelling the HMS Dreadnought hoax could lead to similar elaborate set-ups of his own, but fooling the Armed Forces in 1910 is a world away from convincing some hapless present-day wife that there were aliens in her garden, all to get The Look On Her Face on camera. I knew it was a step down, replacing the quiet joy of historical trivia with cruelty and belittlement. People with proper jobs could now be made to look like idiots for the sake of TV entertainment, with Mr Beadle at the helm. And the concept of televised petty schadenfreude wasn’t even original – Candid Camera had been doing it for years in the US.

From Beadle’s About to Dead Ringers to ‘happy slapping’, bringing cameras into the equation turns the playful side of pranks into the realms of cheap sniggering, bullying and depressing voyeurism. The 1910 newspaper photos of the Dreadnought incident, with Ms Woolf in blackface and drag, may have been the direct precedent of Beadle’s About, but the lack of TV gave it a certain style.

Horace de Vere Cole was indeed the Beadle of his day, but without the element of playing to a mass audience in their sitting rooms, history has filed him as a lovable eccentric. Once TV was invented, the prank had fallen from grace, and Jeremy Beadle became famous for being hated.

It’s true Cole was hated too, but the stakes for elaborate pranks were somewhat higher. After the Dreadnought affair was revealed, the Navy had Mr Cole ceremonially caned. Those were the days.

Shopping for basic toiletries – deodorants, shower gel, razors – I tend avoid anything labelled ‘For Men’. I’ve never felt manly in my life. At least, not manly in the Gillette sense.

I could never grow a beard. I wouldn’t know where to start.

[Have made myself laugh out aloud at that line. How shaming.]

To be found in possession of any canister decked out in those appointed colours of maleness (dark blue, silver, black) would make me feel at best disastrously miscast, at worse a fraud. I am not at home to Mr Lynx.

So I have to look for their more androgynously labelled counterparts. And if those aren’t immediately available, I buy the ladies’ products. Not really a big deal, as I’ve been purchasing hair bleach kits with photos of women on the front for nearly twenty years. The only true Women Only contents are the little polythene gloves. My hands are regrettably male in size, if not in hirsuteness. I resort to marigold rubber gloves instead.

Even the Body Shop has let me down. Their range of gentlemen’s products used to be called Mostly Men. I liked that. I feel not entirely a man. Just mostly. But now that range has been renamed to, you guessed it, For Men.

One of these days I shall get around to starting my own toiletries company, making a range of affordable emollients and underarm razors, for the slightly less manly gentleman. Suggested names for this brand: Dorian. Sebastian. Not Gatsby, though. Japan already has that. Take a look at this marvellous TV ad for Gatsby Hair Bleach. Will there ever be a British equivalent?

Though I have been regularly described as camp and flamboyant, I would say it’s only in comparison with the man in the street. Assuming the man in the street is Dennis Waterman circa 1978.

For a while, however, my own literal man in the street was indeed less manly. A young drag queen lived a few doors down from me and I knew him from the shinier, polysexual dress-up clubs like Kash Point.

One day, he phoned me up asking me to come over and change his light bulb. Not a euphemism – he knew how to negotiate the darkened streets of Highgate in high heels and a mini-skirt, but not how to change a standard light bulb. So he called me over, and I taught him the difference between a Bayonet Cap and an Edison Screw. (And then I told him about types of light bulb, yes, yes, all right.)

This was the manliest time I’ve felt in my life. I can also wire a three pin plug. But don’t tell anyone.

Last week I was contacted by a journalist. She was writing a piece on ‘the lives and loves of transmen’, ie female to male transsexuals, and wanted to interview me on the subject.

I presumed this was because I’ve written about the trans experience in Fosca songs, and have fallen in love with, befriended or dated a few persons who’ve happened to be trans. Though I would never go into personal details (I don’t kiss and tell, I’m too fond of kissing), I’m happy to help raise awareness about transgender jargon, etiquette, bust a few prejudices and generally do my bit for the differently-bodied cause.

The journalist wanted a few photos of me for the piece, which I duly sent. Then she wanted to hear some Fosca, and I sorted that out too.

And then her next email said, ‘Can I just clarify you’re trans?’

Ah.

I told her no, I wasn’t, not me personally. I’m merely a less manly biological male. But thank you for the compliment.

And that was the end of that. In that solipsistic way some journalists can get, she didn’t reply, not even to say sorry for the misunderstanding.

I suppose what I’m saying is, I wish she’d been more of a gentleman.

Friday evening: I’m at a jolly club called Don’t Stop Moving, above Canal 125, a bar on the Caledonian Road. Charley Stone is DJ-ing, and has asked me along.

The club is decorated with sweets and pop biographies lying on windowsills (one on Steps with a typically cagey interview with ‘H’, then closeted), and there’s pages from Smash Hits magazine on the walls. Interestingly, the issues tend to be from the early 90s, presumably reflecting the generation of the club’s organisers. Younger than me, but old enough to remember Cathy Dennis in her pop star phase. ‘Cathy’s Guide To Norwich!’ Pre-Alan Partridge, too.

It’s a kind of Smash Hits interregnum period: after the 80s, the magazine’s real heyday, but just before Take That hit their imperial stream of hits. From about 1993-1995, Smash Hits was effectively a Take That fan mag, with both group and magazine enjoying a symbiotic relationship, keeping the other one successful. After Robbie Williams’s departure, and a logical but curiously unsuccessful flirtation with the Britpop era (I was told that the worst selling issue was the one with the Bluetones on the cover), Smash Hits eventually turned into just another one of those teen mags, always packaged in a plastic bag with some free gift. It’s never a good sign when the words are not enough.

So the pages adorning this Kings Cross wall, being slightly off-vintage, hold a certain poignancy. They are from my post-teen period; a time where although I still loved pop music, it was no longer being made for me. Here’s a 90s interview with The Primitives, going for a comeback years after ‘Crash’ (quick glance at Wikipedia: this was for their single ‘You Are The Way’ – in at No 58, 1991).

Here’s Rob ‘Mary Whitehouse Experience’ Newman reviewing the singles. He favours St Etienne’s ‘Avenue’. Here’s Betty Boo with her second album. The Farm answering questions from the Biscuit Tin. Shampoo doing the same.

By a nice coincidence, I’d just been writing about Smash Hits in the introduction to my own lyrics collection. The magazine was my first exposure to the concept of publishing pop lyrics on their own: it was one of the many Smash Hits trademarks. Except they weren’t lyrics. They were ‘Songwords’.

These would be the words to all the chart hits of the moment, presented in colourful and attractive little boxes alongside the interviews and competitions. Readers were encouraged not just to learn and sing the verses and choruses of Wham, Culture Club and so on, but to actively cut out and affix the lyrics on their bedroom wall or school book, just like the posters. Words could be teenage pin-ups, too.

I was in Smash Hits a couple of times myself, in little photo features on Orlando circa 1996. The band may have failed, but little things on my life’s To Do list still managed to get ticked off. Get my band interviewed in Smash Hits – tick. Get played by John Peel – tick. Though that was the indie Fosca rather than the pop Orlando (did he play Shelley too?). Little flames of achievement, raging against the failures.

In fact, I’d nearly go as far as feeling sorry for the trendy new bands of today. That however successful they may get, they will never know what it’s like to be in Smash Hits, or to be played by John Peel, or both. But of course, such ancient benchmarks must be utterly meaningless to a 19-year-old now.

I wonder what the equivalent ambitions are today? Being played by Alex Zane? Appearing in the Observer Music Monthly? Having your lyrics on one of those non-specific online lyrics directories? Do today’s schoolchildren still adorn their bedrooms with the lyrics to their favourite songs, via print outs from the Net?

It’s very hard not to fall into the Grumpy Old Man cliché of saying it’s not the same. But really, it’s not the same.

At the club, I meet Andy Roberts’s daughter Sophie, first time since his funeral. She’s 19 now. I should have asked her what she made of it all. She’d have been about three when Rob Newman was reviewing the singles. I guess you’d have to call Rob Newman the Russell Brand of 1991.

Of the music played, Deacon Blue’s ‘Real Gone Kid’ is an unexpected pleasure. I very nearly said, a Guilty Pleasure. It’s the one where the singers make train noises.

Then one of the DJs plays Bucks Fizz’s ‘Making Your Mind Up’, which is surely from a time before her time, and I wonder how she became acquainted with it. There’s all kinds of questions I want to ask, but the music is at shouting-in-ear volume, and the fact I now mind about these things, when previously I didn’t, speaks, well, volumes.

Maybe it’s just as well. People are here to dance, not to discuss what it all means in connection with where they are on their own life paths. I think that may be my trouble. That and being so much older than those who now feel old.

An Orlando fan I’ve not seen for years, Ms S, chats to me at length. She tells me how she feels old these days (in her 20s), how she doesn’t go to gigs as much as she used to, except for the bands of her youth, like the Manics and Morrissey. It’s rather odd when people a whole ten years or so younger than you say they’re feeling old. It also reminds me why so many bands are suddenly reforming to play tours, from the Spice Girls to My Bloody Valentine. Never mind music. People want their youth back, or if they’re too young, they want the youth of their elders, the bands they missed out on. They will pay handsomely – plus booking fee – for the privilege. It’s music as Botox.

On the tube home, I pass a young man who points me out to his girlfriend.

‘Rhydian!’ he says. Third time, now. Dear God, please let my life be more than this. And soon. It’s all getting so old.

I want to stop and ask him, why Rhydian? Why not Max Headroom, as I had from a man on the Holloway Road a few years ago? It’s exactly the same hair. It’s them, not me. Except it is me.

The club was great, the music was great, the people were great: Ed, Alex S, Davina, Sarah PV, Charley, Ella G. I think my predicament might be that, contrary to the name of the club night, I have indeed stopped moving. I need to get on with whatever I’m meant to be doing next.

My hair’s catcalls help me keep time. If it’s Rhydian, it must be early 2008. Maybe it’ll be someone else next year.

I’ll be your pop culture mirror. Or rather, my hair will be. It’s about time my hair got its own BBC4 series.

Friday evening. Walking down Highgate Avenue towards Archway Road, I hear someone shouting at the very top of their lungs. A male voice, possibly having some terrible domestic argument. I get to the junction and it turns out the shouting is coming from the phone box by Highgate Tube station. Are there two people in there?

The door to the box opens, and the shouting man is revealed to be alone, doing his screaming down the phone. Sometimes he is half out of the door, stretching the phone cable to breaking point, sometimes he is back inside.

As he is constantly ramming the phone back onto the hook, then picking it up again and resuming his screaming without dialling, I revise my initial notion that this is one half of a genuine argument. He is screaming at no one.

‘AND YOU WILL DIE IN A TERRIBLE EXPLOSION!’ The voice is so loud that, in the moments when he opens the booth door, it can be heard a block away.

He’s in his twenties: white skin, long brown hair, beard, carrier bag, casual clothes. He seems very clean, scrubbed and not scruffy at all, at least, not in the stereotypical crazy tramp or ‘alkie’ manner. More scruffy in the trendy, works-in-TV way.

In fact, he bears more than a passing resemblance to Justin Lee Collins, the bearded comedian and Channel 4 TV presenter. Given this sort of surreal incident could be something from a prank programme like Balls Of Steel, I wouldn’t rule out this possibility at all.

He finally exits the phone booth and walks to the pedestrian crossing. I am standing on the other side, facing him, waiting to cross. And naturally I am absolutely terrified. Half-past eight on a Friday evening, barely two minutes after leaving my front door, and already I want to go home. There is no getting away from this: I am going to have to pass by a madman.

I brace myself as the lights change.

He walks past in silence. I begin to sigh in relief.

Then I leap out of my skin.

Behind me, at the top of his lungs, he turns and bellows at me:

‘OR TAKE IT!’

At least, I’m pretty sure that what he says. A bizarre fragment of a sentence.

And then he continues walking away, up Jacksons Lane. I now suspect he’s an outpatient of the local mental health institute. Or an inmate that’s been let out for a while, as part of what is now called Care In The Community. The hospital in question is unfortunately located close to Suicide Bridge. Every now and then, the traffic is stopped, the police are called, and another inmate is talked down.

Thinking it’s all some TV prank, as I did here, is often my default reaction to anything unlikely in my life. I look for the hidden cameras. Just as I did when auditioning at the ICA for a living art exhibition a couple of years ago. With the hiring of actors to initiate philosophical discussions with visitors, put them standing around in empty gallery rooms, and then call this his art, I came away utterly convinced the artist – Tino Sehgal – was an actor himself, and that the whole exhibition was a TV parody of Turner Prize-style conceptual fare.

He’s since gone on to to set up similar shows around the world. Maybe he still IS an actor, and it’ll take a full lifetime for his jolly wheeze to be rumbled, like the Cottingley Fairies. Actually, if a conceptual artist dressed up his actors as Edwardian fairies, that’d be both pretty to look at AND a comment on faith and the art of believing things. You could call the installation ‘Religion’, ho ho. Not bear suits, though. Been done.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a career where confidence is the sole dividing line between genuine and fake. Goodness knows the service industries are full of fake positions: jobs that don’t seem to do anything. Some of my friends with well-paid, jet-set day jobs in high finance have told me their baffling, jargon-filled positions in ‘consultancy sourcing solutions’ mainly consist of being paid huge amounts of money for sitting in an office all day doing impersonations of work. Acting, essentially. Imitation Of Work.

Every four months or so, they tell me, they hastily put together some sort of presentation, so they can renew these blissful circumstances for a bit longer. Just like being a student again, except with a salary and a luxury flat. What is a job interview if not a confidence trick? A game with winners and losers, like any other.

But there is real work to be done somewhere along the line, of course. In which case, the hoax element can work the other way:

BBC friend: I’m doing three people’s work at the moment. Two jobs in my department haven’t been filled. So I’m doing their jobs as well as mine, all at once.

Me: That’s terrible. Shouldn’t you ask for more money? Or tell your bosses to hurry up and fill the vacant positions?

Friend: Oh no. I love having too much work. I’ve never been happier.

See also the people who fill their days off with decorations and DIY, rising at 6 am on a Sunday to paint the spare room, or drill holes in the wall, for no reason whatsover. Some are genetically disposed to hard work. Others to doing absolutely nothing. It all balances out. It’s really just a question of getting paid for whatever it is you’re disposed to do. Or not do. Or appear to do. Perhaps you can get a wage for screaming in a phone box. Submit it for an art prize, stare out the world with confidence, and get paid that way.

Me? Well, I know now that writing is the only thing that makes sense to me. Publishing it to be read as soon as possible (i.e. online) doubly so. It’s why I became an accidental blogger in 1997, before the word was coined. It quietens my mind. It stops me from going insane. It helps me work out who I am. Like standing at the edge of a swimming pool, the only hard part is getting started, getting wet. Once I sit down and get on with it, I’m utterly happy. I’m in the swim.

Such an idiot. I’ve just dissembled my iBook keyboard to clean under the keys. And now I’ve put all the keys back, but two or three are looking askew and sticking when I press them, including Backspace, which I use all the time.

Either I’ve not done it properly, or I’ve damaged the keys’ mechanism by not really knowing what I’m doing. I think I may have to take the laptop to a Mac repair shop, and pay through the nose as it’s out of guarantee. Oh well. I can just about type for the time being. We’ll see how much I mind about the sticking bits.

And all because I wanted to clean underneath the keys. Why do I do such things? Ah yes, an innate tendency to fiddle and tinker when left alone with buttons to push.

Note to the world: never leave me in charge of a nuclear submarine.

***
Have been enjoying the Radio 4 dramatisation of We Need To Talk About Kevin, the Lionel Shriver novel. Quite why it’s been held up as an argument for childlessness, a look at what makes some schoolboys into violent killers, and a discussion on the taboo of mothers who instinctively wish their children were dead, is beyond me. The novel is pure Gothic horror. Gothic defined not as wearing lots of black, but in the 19th century definition, when events pile up to a grotesque – if delicious – stretching of credulity, to the point of downright surrealism. Gothic as in Things Getting A Bit Much.

You may as well cite The Omen or Rosemary’s Baby as reasons for not having children.

Woman: Dad, I’m afraid I shall never give you grandchildren.
Dad: Why?
Woman: Because they might turn out to be the Antichrist.
Dad: Fair enough.

First of all, you can tell at once that Ms Shriver is unaware of popular English comedy. Mention a sulky teenage boy called Kevin, and I find it hard to avoid the image of Harry Enfield snorting in a backwards baseball cap.

Then there’s the imagery, some of which is close to actual demonic possession. At the age of six, Kevin is still wearing nappies – out of spite! He convinces a little girl at playgroup, whose skin is covered in chronic eczema, to finally give into temptation and scratch away. The book describes her discovered in the bathroom, standing in a kind of rapture of blood, while Kevin grins smugly at her side. It’s straight out of Clive Barker – horror as masochism, pleasure through pain.

And true to all great horror stories, there’s the bits which are like taking a shortcut through a graveyard at night. Given Kevin is clearly dangerous to others (he goes on to blind his own sister), do his parents enlist some kind of child psychiatrist? Or send him to a special school? No, they send him to a normal school, and give him his own crossbow and archery range in their huge garden, as it seems to keep him happy. Guess what happens next.

Ms Shriver’s book is a horror novel that’s been successfully marketed to those who would never read horror novels. Just as The Time-Traveller’s Wife is science fiction for those who would never read science fiction. It’s a sign – I hope – of a return to the time before genre fiction, where books were either well-written or badly-written. I think of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, two other literary classics with Gothic tendencies. Where the Gothic bits are just part and parcel of being female. Well, for some females.

Notes On A Scandal, too. In the film version, what is Judi Dench’s character if not Gothic?

Though as played by Dame Judi, she is of course, Poignantly Gothic.

Pausing between sifting through the many boxes of clutter in my Highgate room. I’m looking for any lyrics or essays which might be worth including in The Portable Dickon Edwards.

Making steady progress, bumping into paper ghosts as usual. Found the clippings of Simon Price’s Fosca reviews in the Independent newspaper, in 2002. He reviews one gig and the second Fosca album. Although not keen on my singing voice – to put it mildly – he does say nice things about the lyrics.

It’s not yet clear if the new album will be getting any kind of UK distribution. The label will do their best, that’s for sure. They said they were turned down by one indie distributor, who refused to touch any band with no clear UK press profile. He’s never heard of Fosca, so no deal. Rather depressing, and says something about the supposed solidarity of the UK indie scene in 2008. So maybe I should get this Independent review to them. Might make all the difference.

But – oh… My heart sinks when the whole hustling element has to come into it. The pitching, the self-justifying, the pleading for reviews. For a so-called narcissist, it might seem odd that I absolutely hate having to tell the world just why they should bother with me and my work. I was only too happy to do this in the early days of Orlando and Fosca, but ten years later, I feel rather uneasy about jumping through those particular hoops once again. But ah well, I’ll do what I can.

So what do I want for this album? Just that people can get hold of it, really. It’ll be on iTunes and available as a CD (plus book!) from the label, at the very least. I’ll play this March tour in Sweden, maybe do one last London gig, and take it from there.

I appreciate the way industry people work, though. It’s all very well saying ‘my music should sell itself’, but of course that’s not the way it works. You need to speak fluent Spin and Pitch and Label and Angle. Get a Received Opinion, a snappy pitch-phrase which is just right, and it makes all the difference. And then people might listen to the music. If there’s the time.

Maybe in my case I’d better not go with ‘The New Amy Winehouse’.

Though she does appear to have stolen my bottle of peroxide.

A couple of emails have asked me how to reserve copies of the Fosca album, the edition that comes with the book. I’ll keep people posted when I know myself.

One mail praises the idea:

Compared with all the bands who put out “limited edition with bonus DVDs” which get watched once and then promptly forgotten, the idea of an actual book is a fantastic one, and very unique. More bands (who are at least worth reading) should stick their lyrics in single releases as well as albums. I was reading an interview with an American artist called Atlas Sound, and his label has a general policy of not printing the lyrics at all, because they are too embarrassingly personal – “like having a close-up of your zit on the inside of your album cover”… I was just curious, given that you are such an erudite individual, and one who invests a lot of time and effort into his words (and words in general), what you make of this practice?

That’s rather interesting. I think there will always be new artists who see their words as important as the melodies. Joanna Newsom is one. But for the most part, it does seem that bands are currently more equated than ever with a tabloid-compatible social life. You’re meant to write songs purely in order to date celebrities. Which is all very nice, but it’s not the reason I wanted to do it. There’s also far more emphasis on the singing rather than the song, thanks to the whole X Factor effect. Plenty of TV shows looking for new talent to sing in musicals, but none to write them. No sign yet of a ‘Lyricist Idol’.

I’m a fan of lyric books. You can get enormous ones for Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart, and there’s been similar volumes published for Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Suzanne Vega, Talking Heads, Shane MacGowan, Momus and Nick Cave. Oh, and two Dory Previn lyric books, mixed in with her poems and memoirs. It’s something of a niche interest: you have to be fan of the artist first, then a fan of reading their lyrics away from the music. So these collections tend to go out of print fairly quickly.

I’ve been agonising over how best to punctuate my own lyrics on the page. Have decided on taking Joni Mitchell’s cue: present them like poems, capitalise every first letter of each line, but take out full stops and commas at the end. Then there’s choosing whether to go for single inverted commas for reported speech, or double, or both according to a rule. It’s all taking me a lot longer than I thought. Have found a couple of previously unused lyrics, though, which haven’t made me squirm in embarrassment. So those can go in.

More from the mail:

Yours is one of the only blogs I bother to read with any regularity, and certainly one of about two non-mp3/music-related ones that holds my interest… On reading your last entry, I was wondering…if it’s so easy to publish the Orlando lyrics, does that not mean that (albeit with a few more complications) you could acquire the rights to the songs themselves and have them reissued on But Is It Art? Records, in the same way that Shampoo have done with their debut recently?

Didn’t know that about Shampoo. Well, as you say, there’s more complications, what with Warners owning the recordings, and their giving Orlando an awfully large advance for the album, only to recoup next to nothing in its sales. Shampoo managed to sell a few records first time round, and are less likely to have left a debt at the label. That tends to make a difference.

I’m aware albums can become lost legends, that death is a good career move, that nostalgia plays a part, but even so. Ultimately, it really shouldn’t be me that instigates an Orlando reissue. It should be someone else, who’s convinced there’s a genuine interest out there.

All I can suggest is that you write to a label that regularly puts out licensed reissues, such as Cherry Red and its many offshoots (eg Rev-Ola), and mention it to them.

I’d better get on with this book.