No word from the lost property people.

In my case, my wallet was not so much ‘lost’ as ‘left’. I know exactly where it was: on the floor in front of my seat on the plane. I’m absolutely convinced it would have been found by now by the plane’s cleaners, and that the finder would hand it in rather than pocket it. I was also hoping the finder would take into account that people who travel on low cost airlines tend not to be millionaires. That they could really, really do with the money back.

Perhaps I’m part of some divine plan, where a cleaner has found themselves in dire need of extra money – the exact amount in my wallet matching the fare to visit their dying relative, say – and this is the way their prayers were answered. Perhaps they’ll see my photo on my card inside the wallet, and think the blond hair means I am a part-time Angel.

In which case, I forgive them. All part of the heavenly service. He said through gritted teeth.

It’s rather hard to shrug ‘heigh ho’ about this one. The best part of £300. All my wages earned on the trip. At a time when I’m barely earning at all. But heigh ho. Heigh ho.

***

So that aside, I had a pretty splendid trip, really.

I did the three sets okay, the musical back-up for Martina Lowden being the main reason I was there. She read a piece in Swedish, telling me it involved a fox, snow, and Love despite everything. I sat to one side and picked out slow, shimmering Robin Guthrie-type melodies in single echoey notes, using digital delay and chorus pedals, trying my best to play under and around her words rather than against her. Though I couldn’t understand her text, I could still use her tone and rhythm to respond in shades of melody.

After I got home, Martina emailed me to say ‘I’m still smiling bigger and brighter than I’ve done for weeks.’ So that made me feel happy.

For my solo set, I played ‘Storytelling Johnny’ and ‘Confused And Proud’, before host Madeleine Grive pulled me back onstage to do a third, ‘Rude Esperanto.’ Just me, my guitar and my laptop. Because the venue was a theatre with fixed seats on a steep incline, and the event a poetry festival, for the first time I could hear my vocals way above the music. Hundreds of people in the audience, and all of them silent and paying attention. Which is rather different to playing rock venues, of course.

A little later, I joined Friday Bridge to sing and play on their song ‘Pigeon’, before ending with Fosca’s ‘It’s Going To End In Tears’. Always interesting to play a dance number in a venue where people can’t stand up to dance. It meant the song became more serene, serious, glacial.

From what I could make out, the audience was a real mixture of literature fans (all ages), and hip festival goers (arty twentysomethings). The nearest London equivalent would be the ICA.

Which reminds me. In Stockholm there’s a chain of supermarkets called ICA. Didn’t go inside one, but I like to think they sell pints of milk rated by Alan Yentob as culturally influential.

The festival was a curious schedule: three separate shows in one day, from 3pm till midnight. I spent much of the Friday recovering from the hangover incurred by the party at the Governor’s palace, but I stuck around afterwards for a drink at the bar. Three parties in three days, including one at the Polish Institute on the Wednesday. Two TV interviews. One morning rehearsal. One sushi dinner with Niklas and Ylva. One meeting with the record company. And lots of being looked after by the kind organisers. Who booked me taxis on account, which I only had to sign for. Who provided backstage catering including little chocolate cubes containing different jelly flavours: orange, mint, Turkish Delight.

Who put me up at the lovely Mornington Hotel with its eat-all-you-like-and-all-you-can-think-of breakfast buffet and its unique ‘library bar’. Thousands of books – some in English – lining the walls while you eat and drink. Not just for show, either: you’re encouraged to borrow them during your stay.

My thanks to Ester, Hanna, Kristina, Anne, Johanna, Hilary, Jessica, and all at 00TAL Magazine whose names I forgot to remember.
***

I wandered about the city for a lot of my stay. Had lunch in a cafe in Stortorget, the ancient square in the Old Town, currently host to a Christmas Market. Lots of sweet-smelling market stalls. I like a town square that smells of sweets. Tried a drink called Glogg, which is a bit like mulled wine, but with a small cup of raisins and almonds on the side. I gathered from the waitress that you’re meant to add the raisins and nuts to the drink and stir it. Very nice, anyway.

I know it’s still too early for Christmas, but Stockholm is a great Christmas destination. They have your actual snow and your actual reindeer. Well, there was snow on the Wednesday.

In the Sweden Bookshop in Slottsbacken, after hours spent wandering a foreign city alone, I bought a Greta Garbo fridge magnet. Seemed like the right thing to do.
***

Popped my groggy (and Gloggy) head into the Nationalmuseum, home to Sweden’s largest art collection (and comparable with the National Gallery in London). Enjoyed an exhibition on Swedish illustrations to Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Which was particulary fitting as I’d brought Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy to read. This is her modern-day take on one of the Ovid myths: the tale of Iphis and Ianthe, a favourite of mine and very probably the first female-to-male transsexual love story.

Girl Meets Boy has a rather excellent opening line:

Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says.

When I saw Ms Smith’s book I felt a degree of envy and chagrin, as the Iphis story is the one myth I’d most like to retell myself. But I can still do my version one day.

Set in the world of Inverness bottled water corporations (‘Eau Caledonia’) and drawing on her gift for sisterly relationships (as in The Accidental), Girl Meets Boy has a sweet and dreamy atmosphere, with lots of pop culture references. I’ve complained before how one of the contributors to the Iain Sinclair anthology couldn’t get the title of Robbie Williams’s ‘Angels’ right. I was also stunned to read Colm Toibin’s review in the London Review Books of Rupert Everett’s memoirs, where he confesses to never having heard of the actor before:

‘In my head I had him slightly mixed up with Kenny Everett, who was a disc jockey during my youth…’

Ali Smith, on the other hand, gives the impression she does know who Rupert Everett is. Because she peppers Girl Meets Boy with references to Judi Dench in Notes On A Scandal, Johnny Depp in Pirates Of The Caribbean, Daniel Craig coming out of the sea in Casino Royale, and, you guessed it, Facebook. Not in a tokenistic way, but in the way that makes perfect sense when writing about people who live in the real world (and yet don’t quite), and it helps to stop the book taking itself too seriously. If you only write books for people who only read books, you’re in a danger of a kind of literary in-breeding. Authors are meant to have their eyes open to the wider world, not just to the world of books and other authors. Books are meant to be connect, not breed academic ghettos.

Anyway, Girl Meets Boy is also a little thing of gorgeousness to look at: lovely red font for the page headings and embossed title, red endpapers, simple matt white covers with a line drawing and cool Helvetica lettering. For me, this makes all the difference between buying a hardback book (which I rarely do) and borrowing it from the library. That, and it being £2 off in Waterstones.

Stansted, Saturday evening. I’ve just arrived back from Sweden, and am walking through customs when I realise something really rather inconvenient.

I’ve left my wallet on the plane.

In it is my sole bank card, my Oyster Card, some safety cash for going abroad, plus the cash I was paid by the Stockholm Poetry Festival. On top of that, there was the cash I was paid by the TV company for thoughts on dandyism and fashion, etc.

And all because RyanAir planes don’t have mesh pockets on the backs of their seats.

Well, all right, it’s my fault, I’m an absent-minded fool. But the lack of a mesh pocket was why I put my wallet on the floor and forgot about it. I had wanted to buy something to eat on the journey, so took out my wallet from my bag. But there was nowhere to put it during the flight. My hands were used up wrestling with Ali Smith (her new book Girl Meets Boy, of which more anon). I had no pockets for once: the plane was so warm, I’d taken my jacket off. So on the floor and out of mind went my wallet.

(And as it turned out, I didn’t use my wallet after all. The couple between me and the aisle said ‘no thanks’ whenever a stewardess passed by. I felt that piping up and asking for food across their glaring, Le-Carre-reading laps, would seem like contradicting them. Too much like Making A Fuss. Yes, I know. My fault entirely. I think the fact they were a couple intimidated me. I often feel intimidated when forced to sit next to a couple in public places. It feels like two versus one.)

So at the airport, having realised what I’ve done, I tell the people at the RyanAir desk. They say the plane is now locked up for the night, and that I have to contact the firm who cleans their planes, allowing at least 24 hours, in case it’s been handed in.

(Sunday evening as I write this, in Highgate. I’ve emailed and left a message with the plane cleaners. No word about my wallet yet.)

There is the small matter of how to get home on the tube without an Oyster card or money for a ticket. And I’ll have to borrow some cash from somewhere, if I’m to eat this weekend.

What does everyone else do when they’re stuck without money, and need to get home? Just start begging on the spot? With my guitar and laptop? I suppose I COULD give an impromptu gig. People might drop enough coins to get me to stop.

The most logical option is a slightly embarrassing one for the age of 36. But I AM lucky enough to know two people with a car and a spare room in nearby (ish) Suffolk, who will be happy to rescue me (as long as it’s Stansted, not Gatwick or Heathrow), and who are also the least likely to be out at a gig, pub, or getting ready for a nightclub.

Mum meets me in the car park an hour later, shrugging off the inconvenience, happy to see me. I spend a cosy evening in Suffolk (they’ve now replaced my childhood ‘graffiti’ duvet cover with something arty and tasteful), and catch the lovely two-carriage Sudbury train to London the next day. Last time I took this Adlestrop-like branch line, which passes through the village of Bures and the East Anglian Railway Museum at Chappel & Wakes Colne, it was to see R.E.M. play at Wembley Arena on the ‘Green’ tour. Late 80s. Straight from school.

While waiting for Mum at the airport, I sit on some plastic seats, surrounded by the bored and the tired of the travelling world. Airports really should be happier, prettier places. But they rarely are. They all conspire to associate flying, the very dream of humanity for aeons, with the stuff of bland drudgery, of identical shopping malls. Of overpriced coffee. Of scratchcards.

I love flying. It’s airports I have a fear of.

Tired Frenchman: Hey, cheer up. I’m waiting too. I see you have a guitar. Could you play it for a while?

Me: Can’t, sorry. It’s an electric. Needs plugging in. Sounds wrong otherwise.

(pause)

Me: Actually, even when I plug it in and play it, people say it still sounds wrong.

I don’t think he got the joke.

An attempt to take an arty photo in the hotel room mirror, after a party at the outrageously ornate Stockholm Governor’s Palace.

Hair, lips, suit. Everything else differs according to the viewer.

The Tessin Palace is rather… what’s the word? Palatial. Painted ceilings and panelled walls dating back centuries. Pricelessly beautiful clocks, portraits of bewigged nobles, antique chez lounges in every endless room. Trompe l’oeil canopies above a mini-maze in the courtyard.

‘The law requires me to live in this palace,’ Governor Per Unckel says in his speech to the Poetry Festival people. ‘It is not a law I have much difficulty complying with.’ But he says this in a genuinely abashed way rather than boastful. I rather like him.

For some arcane reason, I spend most of the dinner discussing the work of the band The Fall, plus explaining the meaning of the English phrase ‘blotting your copybook’, of all things. The idea that artists are not allowed to do anything at all once they’ve created a perfect work. The apparent pointlessness of Orson Welles’s other films, after he’d made the greatest film ever made. Paul McCartney unlikely to play a concert without some number from the band he was in over four decades ago. That Joseph Heller quote about not doing anything as good as ‘Catch 22’ (‘Yes… but neither has anyone else.’) Compare to Ray Davies:

Rude hack interviewing the Kinks frontman about a recent tour: How can you bear to crank out ‘You Really Got Me’ or ‘Waterloo Sunset’ for the millionth time?

Ray Davies: That’s like asking an actor if he ever gets tired of Shakespeare.

That’s the way to do it.

***

I speak to a local poet, Sofia Stenström, born and raised and living all her life in the city. She says this is the first time she’s been inside the historic palace. And I remember how I’ve still never been inside Buckingham Palace.

Discussed with Niklas and Ylva about how so many Swedish pop acts write and sing their songs in English. From Abba onwards. How often is the complement repaid, I ask? Which UK acts have recorded songs in Swedish?

Robyn Hitchcock did one. In addition to predicting a Swedish pop star via the spelling of his name. The Stranglers, too. Big in Sweden, they did a Swedish number. Any more? Do email in.

I’ve hereby sworn to record a new song in Swedish myself. It’s the least an English artist invited to Sweden more than a few times can do.

***

Niklas says I should have called the previous entry ‘Dickyn’.

***

Did another national TV interview this morning. Spoke about dandyism as decadence (cue the absinthe) and dandyism versus decadence, by way of Baudelaire’s great ecrivain-dandy quote (‘Dandyism is the last spark of heroism amidst decadence’). Considered various latter-day media definitions of decadence. From Facebook photos of drunken girls in the Daily Mail, to the New Burlesque club scene. Point me at a TV camera, and I’ll connect Tallulah Bankhead to Amy Winehouse at the drop of a post-modern trilby.

‘Are you a tragic figure?’ was one question.

Inescapably, I said. But the hours are good.

Have been getting all kinds of funny looks on the streets of Stockholm today. Just realised that, given the fresh bleaching, and lack of cutting, my hair is starting to look like Robyn’s. As in the Swedish pop star, currently doing well in the UK. Perhaps they think I’m her transvestite tribute act. At a distance. In the dark. In another world.

Thought I should do the Stockholm tourist bit properly today. Stood around dithering in a bookshop, choosing between the various guides. Rough Guide. Lonely Planet. Berlitz. Eyewitness. Eventually I left without buying any of them, because I suddenly realised I had a discount voucher for another bookshop on the other side of town.  I also realised I’d used the time I could have spent on a museum or attraction on browsing through guidebooks about which museum or attractions to see. There’s a very clumsy analogy about my life somewhere in there.

Am on the fourth floor of a rather nice hotel in Stockholm, with free WiFi.

Am fully blond once more, ready for my close up in a couple of hours’ time.

At 8am, Gatwick was crowded and noisy and too hot for a big winter coat. But the staff were nice and helpful, getting me checked in at one of those automated kiosks so I didn’t have to queue. Sterling Airlines let me carry my guitar onto the plane, pleasingly enough.

Landing in Arlanda, I’m pleased to see little scatterings of snow on the runway. And my big coat now makes sense: it’s -2 degrees C.

Am stopped going through customs – my first time – but only to be asked where I’ve come from.

‘London… and nowhere else?’

‘No.’

‘Okay. Thanks. You can go.’

I wonder why this makes all the difference? Still, my rubber glove day is postponed once more.

Another item ticked off the life To Do list: at the Arrivals gate I am met by a taxi driver carrying a sign with my name on.

Arrive at the hotel and am given an envelope containing the festival schedule, map, plus a formal invite to a buffet dinner tomorrow at the Palace of Tessin, being the Residence of the Governor of Stockholm County. Complete with coat of arms.

Am about to do my roots for Sweden. Letting my hair grow to Byronic tousles is fine, but the roots must be always be attended to. Particularly when one begins to resemble a badger who’s inexplicably been cast in a 1970s rock opera.

I’m not due to perform in Stockholm until Friday evening (Royal Dramatic Theatre, Elverket stage, Performance 2), but am been flown over tomorrow in order to attend rehearsals. Gatwick this time. Sterling Airlines. Just me and my guitar.

Three short sets to do:

1: Me and the novelist Martina Lowden. She reads her words, I back her on unobtrusive (I hope) ambient guitar. Ms L has quoted from my lyrics and blog in her novel, hence the collaboration.

2: Me solo. It’s a poetry festival, so I’m doing a couple of the wordier, poem-like Fosca songs.

3: Me and Friday Bridge. I’m guest vocalist for them once more, but this time I may also play a bit of guitar, seeing as I have mine with me, all amped to go. Niklas has emailed me the chords to an FB song. I balked at one of them, thinking it was some devilish new tonal invention. Or that I was so out of touch with the pop world, I’d even missed out on the discovery of a new chord.

Me: Um, it says ‘H’ here. What notes are in the chord of ‘H’?

Niklas: Oh, it’s the same as ‘B’. I think they changed it to B in Sweden in the mid-80s… I might be excused since I studied music theory for an old Polish teacher and he refused to call it B.

A bit of Googling reveals there used to be an ‘H’ chord in Germany (meaning ‘B’ in the UK), while ‘Bb’ was named ‘B’. Various European countries used this alternative notation for centuries, but it’s finally starting to die out. Bach used the old system to spell his name in a fugue. I do like how a simple email query can expand one’s education so. Particularly after a lifetime of thinking there was no such thing as the ‘H’ chord.

***

More education, this time re the motto on the first £1 coin.

‘An ornament and a safeguard’ would be a better translation! It refers to the milling on the edge of the coin, which was designed to stop people clipping bits off coins when they were actually made of gold and silver
– Laurence Hughes

Aha. Makes slightly more sense than ‘a treasure and a safeguard’.

***

Tomorrow, after I’ve settled in at the Stockholm hotel, I’m going to be interviewed by Swedish Public Service TV. They want my thoughts on Decadence & Dandyism in relation to fashion. Hmmm, I said. Okay. It turns out they also want me to film myself. Never done that before. Deep breath.

Meanwhile a Dutch national broadsheet has sent me a fairly serious email interview for an article on modern dandies. I’ve taken far too long doing the answers, treating it like a school exam paper, as if they’ve asked ‘examine and discuss’ or ‘show your work.’ And then I delete it all and start again. This is what often happens when I’m left to my own devices. I can get a bit lost in my own head, and am not sure where to stop.

With the interviewer present (or on the phone), I can be kept on track, or made to explain further when an answer hasn’t quite satisfied. Or convinced. Either way, I just sit there and talk and enjoy it. (and we’re back with Tom Sawyer once more. One secret of happiness: make your job feel like it’s not work).

When I’m asked by an interviewer to come up with something by myself, as in these latest two requests, I have to stop and think more consciously about what’s expected. Have I properly understood the brief, or barked up the wrong dandy tree entirely? No,  mustn’t think like that. Just do my best and hope for the best. Try not to overdo it or show off. And enjoy it.

Because I’m not complaining. These are requests from professional journalists for national media. And this is what I’m meant to be doing. So I must… show my work.

A long letter from Tom Stoppard. Sadly, not to me personally: his signature is printed on. It’s to the members of the London Library, of which he’s the honorary President, correcting some misconceptions about the subscription increase. One wouldn’t think this would be of interest to non-members, but it turns out there’s been some ‘misleading press coverage’. By which he means a piece in the Spectator and letters to the Times Literary Supplement.

He regrets that 34 members of the Library have instantly resigned, while a further 100 have written to say they’re considering leaving come the next renewal, but hopes the letter will persuade them to come back.

Sir Tom apologies for not being at the AGM:

I had a play opening in New York, which entails the duty of attending the previews and finding fault with anything except the script.

But the sackcloth stops there, and he signs off as a firm supporter of the decision:

To be a member of the greatest independent open-stack lending library in the land for just over a pound a day is not an offer for which we need apologise.

***

Wednesday: to the Bank of England Museum with David Barnett. It’s one of those many London museums and galleries that I’ve always meant to get around to. Highlights include the notched sticks used as receipts for the Bank’s first deposits in the 17th century, lots of Gillray and Cruickshank cartoons, and the real gold brick which visitors can handle, albeit through a hole in two perspex boxes.

I can’t even pick the brick up, but David – who is skinnier than me – has no problem. This spurs me on somewhat, and two more tries later I just about manage to turn the thing over. It’s not as light as it seems in films like The Lavender Hill Mob and The Italian Job.

Some facts learned from the museum:

– early bank notes were so easy to forge, the death penalty was extended to include counterfeiters. An example of how punishments can be set not to fit the crime, but to cover the shortcomings of crime prevention.

– the spindle on the which the metal strip is added to banknotes is called a Dandy Roll.

– the ‘folding green’ £1 note became blue during WWII, due to fears of enemy forgery

– I really miss the £1 note of my youth, the nice little green one with Isaac Newton, replaced by the £1 coin in the mid 80s. ‘Decus et tutamen’ said the usurping £1 coin along its side – ‘a treasure and a safeguard’. Handy for my O-Level in Latin at the time.

I also remember the first time I saw a £20 note as a child. It was a thing of real beauty: blue and red, with Shakespeare on the back against a scene from Romeo and Juliet, all in exquisitely detailed thin and tiny lines.

To my childish eyes, it seemed not just an impossible amount of money, but helped instill the notion that Shakespeare was an ultimate role model. I knew that the £50 had Christopher Wren, but the amount of £50 and the whole world of architecture seemed an impossible, even frightening level of responsibility. Shakespeare – and £20 – was a more possible ideal.

I still get nervous on the occasions I handle £50 notes today, and try to get them changed or banked or spent as quickly as possible, before I’m robbed or accused of being a forger. And I know I could never be an architect. Well, if I DID, I’d be the one who made the Millennium Bridge wobbly, making things that have to be ‘corrected’ before they’re allowed near real people.

I wonder if the children of today look at the current top notes – with Adam Smith on the £20 and John Houblon on the £50, and think about becoming economists or bankers respectively.

***

In the evening, I head to Chelsea for Xavior Roide’s Quentin Crisp Walk, for which I’m a kind of consultant. Well, I help him with the addresses and nuggets of interesting detail. There’s six of us – Xavior in lipstick and vintage spiv hat, resembling not Mr Crisp but one of his friends in the Black Cat cafe in the 1930s.

The rain absolutely drenches us to the bone, but we press on. 129 Beaufort Street is still there: the bedsit where Crisp lived from 1940 to his departure for New York in 1981. It’s currently for sale, and I’m tempted to phone up and ask how much. Probably more than an art school life model of today can afford, I’ll bet.

Some of the residents in the adjacent flats emerge and have to squeeze past our party. What must they think of this group of men in lipstick and funny hair, taking photos on their doorstep? An awkward moment, but they don’t say anything. Shame, as I was all ready to point out the history of their building for them.

Eight years ago this evening, I want to tell them, Mr Crisp died. And your building is where he spent most of his life in London, where he wrote The Naked Civil Servant, where he had (for once) enjoyable sex, thanks to the influx of American GIs: ‘Never in the history of sex was so much offered to so many by so few’. And in the 1971 documentary (also on the Naked Civil Servant DVD), he is interviewed at length in the bedsit, yet to be famous, talking about waiting for death at the age of 63. ‘It can’t be long now.’ He died in 1999, pushing 91.

‘They don’t look very Quentin-compatible, do they?’ whispers Xavior as the current residents of Quentin’s old address glower at us as we stand aside. But of course, they’re hardly likely to be flamboyant bohemians. Synthetic jackets, jeans, minimum risk clothes. Economists and bankers, maybe. It IS Chelsea.

Taking in ‘Darkest Pimlico’, where Denis Pratt first dyed his hair and name (the name ‘Quentin Crisp’ a suggestion by his friends), we end up in Old Compton Street, standing outside Swanks Menswear at No. 72, formerly the Black Cat cafe.

***

My own appearance on the walk is free of make-up, purely through lack of time. But I like to think the late Mr Crisp might be interested to know that earlier in the day, I was jostled by Holloway youths for the way I look (ie having dyed blond hair, pretty much), and had ‘Batty Boy!’ shouted at me. A 2007 tribute of a kind.

This was while walking down to the bus stop with David B, at about 1pm. We found ourselves in a quiet side street where the only other pedestrians were a handful of shouting teenage boys, walking towards us. Possibly school boys on their lunchbreak. No way of avoiding passing them. David and I continued chatting, though by this point I was just thinking, ‘Please don’t prove to be stereotypes.’

But of course, most teenagers can’t help being stereotypes of one sort or another. Geeks, Ravers, Punks, Emos, Nerds, Swots, Goths, Chavs, Hoodies. Rebel against your elders, but conform to your peers. The phase of feeling cheated in life, the safety of childhood gone, the cold world of work beckoning, the confusion of choices. No wonder some feel the need to react with aggression or violence.

Except I get this treatment from some so-called adults too. And it’s not because they’re in a gang. I’ve had a lone youth glower at me in the street and hiss ‘Batty Boy!’ as well. And this was in expensive yet liberal Highgate.

At the moment of passing, one of the Holloway number is shoved against me by one of his friends, like a game of Hoodie Dominoes. The old schoolboy trick to scatter blame: troublemakers yet cowards.

‘Oy, watch where the f— you’re going, blondie!’

But they’re walking away at this point, so I’m clearly safe from any proper harm. And one of them shouts ‘Batty Boy!’

I feel like turning and blowing them a kiss. But I can see how that might backfire.

Still, it seemed fitting for a day of celebrating Quentin Crisp.

***

Still royally fed up with this mysterious stomach ache. Have seen the GP, and have had blood taken for yet another test. This time, they think, it might be a food allergy. I’ve been asked to keep a Food Diary, noting everything I eat and drink. Which is pretty depressing.

Food is either boring or embarrassing. What’s good for you (vegetables) is boring to write down, what’s bad for you (chocolate) is embarrassing to admit to.

Am now on a diet not just without meat and fish, but also without caffeine or gluten, in case it helps. No let-up in the pain yet, but of course I want an instant improvement, rather than after two or three weeks. I have visions of Julianne Moore at the end of the film Safe, allergic to absolutely everything.

Veteran TV producer Verity Lambert has died at 71. She helped to give the world one particular British TV hero.

He’s a favourite of mine: unusual, long-lasting, famed for his outlandish appearance, his sense of stylish outsidership, and his non-violent response to encountering evil wherever he goes. And he celebrates an anniversary this week.

I mean of course… Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant.

Mr Crisp died 8 years ago on Wednesday. The DVD of the Naked Civil Servant – the single most influential film on my life – includes a commentary from Ms Lambert, who executively produced the film for Thames TV in 1975, after it had been turned down by everyone else.

Without her I wouldn’t be the man I’m not today. Thank you, Verity.

(Oh, and thanks for that Doctor Who programme, 44 years old today. I rather like that, too.)

I rent out the BBC series Jekyll on DVD. It’s a perfect example in how to keep the viewer gripped for six one-hour episodes, so much so that I have to watch all the episodes together in one evening, going to bed at about 3am. I salute the makers for holding one’s attention so, particularly in these days of so many alternatives fighting for slices of people’s leisure time.

I would equate Jekyll with the 80s series Edge Of Darkness – which I also watched in one six-hour VHS session at the time, utterly gripped. One is left yearning to see what happens next, to the point of chemical addiction. Except when Edge Of Darkness went out, there was just the three other channels, and no Web.

Ten years before that, it was a case of ‘what’s on the other side’. A recent documentary on Abigail’s Party puts its cult success into context. The Mike Leigh play went out at a time when ‘the other side’ was on strike, so there was literally nothing else to watch that evening. Likewise The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp putting his entire celebrity down to the biopic of his life going out against the news on a dull weekday evening.

It’s the eighth anniversary of Mr Crisp’s death tomorrow. Xavior Roide is organising a walking tour of his London haunts and abodes, including the Chelsea bedsit which he famously failed to ever clean. ‘After the first four years, the dirt doesn’t get any worse’ still the one line people tend to quote, assuming they know of him at all. He lived in the same bedsit for forty-one years. By which point he quipped that the cockroaches had applied to the council to be rehoused.

‘If it had been released as a proper movie’, he said about The Naked Civil Servant, ‘the only people paying to see it would have been gay men. Oh, and liberals wishing to be seen going into and coming out of the cinema.’

Jekyll‘s basic story isn’t quite enough to fill six hours, but writer Steven Moffat always manages to add rather than dilute: the window-dressing approach to TV writing. But where slick USA genre shows like Heroes can sometimes take themselves too seriously, forgetting that a dull character with super powers is still dull, Moffat knows that unexpected moments of comedy are as gripping as unexpected developments of plot. If they’re done well.

In one episode of Jekyll, a stock thriller character – a random soldier ordered to shoot Mr Hyde – is suddenly given a whole backstory in remarkable, unexpected flashbacks. We learn why this normally anonymous mercenary loves the now dated Crazy Frog ringtone, how he was hired via a blank cheque (literally), how he was trained to be a ruthless, unthinking machine, and why he’s been kept aside purely for the task of killing Mr Hyde for some time. We then cut back to the present scene, where Hyde quickly throws the soldier off a rooftop, and he’s never mentioned again. It’s so unexpected, and so brazen, that the viewer can only be left glued to the screen, wondering what could possibly happen next.

***
Other favourite British TV, more of the moment: the new series of The Mighty Boosh. A kind of cute surrealism, a la Vivian Stanshall: baffling to some, charming to others. A scene where Noel Fielding is selling wares to a queue of trendy youths, all decked out – like Mr Fielding himself – in cartoonishly dyed hairdos, painted faces, neck scarves and colourful, effeminate, shiny and skinny 80s-ish clothes, leaves me thinking about Romo (again). The eternal appeal of the dressing-up box. Perhaps the laddish Britpop fashions of the 90s will shortly take their turn as the least lovely decade in the last fifty years, as the 80s and 70s did before them.

***

The press on the Tutankhamun show in the papers this week refers to the relics’ last major outing at the British Museum in the 70s, complete with vintage shots of raincoated visitors queuing around the railings in Bloomsbury. It is History as a Greatest Hit. Though the broadsheet consensus on the Egyptian nick-nacks this time hints more at a tacky cover version, or a desperate remix. One should never put too much store on reviews, of course, but when the ticket price is extravagant (£20), and the venue out of the way (the former Millennium Dome, now tackily rebranded by a mobile phone company as The 02) these things do tend to make up one’s mind, just as they can do with West End shows.

For books or films or albums it’s different. Not only are they more affordable, but with the crowd element removed a bad critical reception of a book, film or CD is more likely to make you feel the critic is not right for the work, rather than the other way around. With a play or exhibition, it’s much harder to feel a personally favourable connection, when there’s an unfavourable consensus. Though I still wish I’d seen that Mike Read-penned Oscar Wilde musical, before it closed after one disastrous night. If only for the novelty factor.

***

Kept from the diary due to either feeling too tired or too ill. Sometimes it’s as if I can only exist in one of three states:

1) asleep,

2) awake but so tired I don’t feel up to writing, instead killing the hours wandering around in a sticky-eyed state of dreamy wooziness, or

3) awake but wracked with a painful ailment that just makes me want to go back to bed and hope I’ll feel better the next day.

This latter state has been the case for much of the past six weeks. The ailment in question is the weird stomach pains which my GP thought was IBS. Have nearly run out of those IBS pills he prescribed, which don’t seem have had much effect, to be honest. Also ran out of the expensive high-strength Manuka honey, which seemed to make things easier. Either that, or I was distracted enough by its sweetness. Sometimes, a spoonful of sugar becomes the medicine’s stunt double.

Definition of healthy: the state of being sufficiently distracted from one’s unhealthiness.

As soon as I visit someone or the phone rings, I’m fine. Or I forget about it, so I might as well be fine.

I wonder if it’s something psychological, linked with anything that resembles work. I also wonder if it’s an ulcer, an infection, or a dietary allergy. Gluten or lactose, that sort of thing. Pains triggered by eating too much of something, or not enough of something.

But most of all I just think: Ouch.

***

Am staying in Claudia A’s flat in Upper Holloway once again, cat-sitting Sevig while his owner’s out of the country. Am enjoying the little upgrades from a bedsit: the extra space to pace around in, and having my own bathroom, though the hot water seems to be on the blink.

Friday: I set up my guitar and amp and compose some suitably ambient instrumentals for the Martina Lowden set in Stockholm. I have the TV on in the background, only stopping to turn up the sound for the Doctor Who sketch on Children In Need. Peter Davison and David Tennant together, an indulgence for the older fans (surely baffling for the kids), but with a poignant twist that manages to give it depth amid all the chummy frivolity of the occasion: Tennant’s Doctor is a loving admirer of his younger yet older self. Meeting one’s hero, where the hero is one’s own past self. You don’t tend to associate Children In Need sketches with philosophical musings on being. Though having said that, I suppose the now traditional sight of BBC newsreaders doing comedy dance routines could lend itself to an essay on Baudrillard.

***

Saturday – to Hampstead Heath, where I am filmed by Jenn Connor for a sort of video postcard back to her friends in California. The idea is she bumps into her friends around London and asks them about what they love about the city. I natter on about the Heath and its history as a happy accident and a place for all kinds of recreational pleasure across the class divisions, including of course gay cruising.

By way of historical context, I bring along a make-up compact. In 1918 a man was arrested on the Heath for homosexual importuning, his possession of a powder puff cited as admissable evidence for the prosecution. In fact, the court records for interwar London are full of such cosmetically-based arrests, and the Historical Journal recently published a fascinating essay on the whole subject (currently online here).

Which reminds me.

A year or so ago, I attended a Scritti Politti gig in Kilburn with Tim Chipping. By this time, Tim had become more conventionally presentable than he’d been during the blue-nailed, writing-on-faces, glitter and boa days of our band Orlando. Seeing him in minimum-risk jeans, t-shirt and trainers, I’d assumed his cosmetic days were now a thing of the past. Or so I thought.

The venue had a security guard on the door – one of those who insists on searching bags for knives, drugs, bottles of drink, cameras, recording equipment, and anything else they might like the look of. While going through Tim’s bag, the bouncer pulled out a case of foundation, studied it, and asked what it was. He even asked Tim to open the case and prove it was indeed the more legal kind of habit-forming powder.

Granted, it was make-up for correction rather than decoration; for looking healthy rather than gaudy. But make-up all the same. The bouncer’s mixed sense of suspicion was hilarious. He seemed vexed that it was no longer 1918. As for me, I was delighted that one happy echo of 1995 had yet to fade.

(A: So now you’re over 35, are you going to stop wearing make-up?
B: No! Because I’m over 35, I have to keep wearing make-up.)