Thursday last, and I’m in the waiting room of Highgate Group Practice, an unshowy, old-ish building and thus free from the soaring glass walls of the Whittington Wing. It’s like most GP waiting rooms: a few chairs, children’s toys littering the floor, plain white walls, maybe one or two small windows, and a wall-mounted rack of slightly-out-of-date magazines.

I leaf through the Observer Music Monthly’s June edition, which is here for some reason, separated from the rest of the newspaper. I decide that the reason is for me to write about it a whole month later.

It is a Teenager Special, with a feature on new upcoming bands, all of whom have members under 20. There’s also a gaggle of teenage Guest Editors, and the usual pieces on what they’re into, what they’re wearing, and what makes them tick. Myspace, mobiles, types of jeans. Their spotty photos are lined up on the contents page. Some parts of it seem a little patronising, others could even be voyeuristic in the Bill Wyman sense. They are there not for who they are, but for how old they are.

In the case of columnist Paul Morley, it’s an opportunity for a doting father’s indulgence, like the firms who allow a Bring Your Children To Work day. He lets teenager Maddy Morley (relation) take over his space to talk about how she resents sharing her favourite band, The Arcade Fire, with lots of people old enough to be her dad. Including her actual dad.

Actually, author Neil Gaiman has recently been letting his near-teen daughter – another Maddy who gets on well with her father – take over his popular blog, too. So, if in doubt, call your daughter Maddy.

It’s certainly interesting to get the perspectives, but I can’t help thinking in the case of the Observer that the filters of the adult territory can’t help but be ultimately in place. These are teenagers very much aware that they are out of their own world, and must tell the older adults what they want to hear, at least to a certain extent. Some adults are best friends with their children, but others prefer to keep the adults at bay. Says one of the teenage editors, confessing to the obscene slang he uses with his friends, ‘There’s the fact that my Dad might read this and I really don’t want him knowing what I’m saying.’

I’d be interested in the more undeniably predatory side of the teenager’s place in the music industry. Articles from teenagers who have had relationships or affairs with musicians, agents, managers, DJs, or indeed other music journalists, all of whom were old enough to be their fathers. On one page: ‘My Teenage Daughter Writes’. On the other: ‘My Teenage Girlfriend Writes.’

But I think such matters would be out of place for a Sunday supplement. Something about the day of the week and the tradition of the format imbues Sunday newspapers with a kind of laid-back cosiness, even when they say they’re tackling ‘issues’. The Observer is The Guardian in slippers.

Many teenagers are baffling, volatile fountains of sprawling chaos and unfettered unease, and the full horror of what some think about and what some get up to will never quite fit into any newspaper report. Even the News Of The World’s expose on MP Mark Oaten drew the line at describing what it was he actually got up to with his rent boys. They wanted to know, but not know. It’s why I think fiction and drama are far better spotlights for such darker corners. To tell the less printable truth, you need the distance of fiction.

Or comedy. I’m reminded of a sketch from A Bit Of Fry And Laurie. Hugh Laurie is making avuncular banter with a teenage boy at the door, who’s doing Trick Or Treat at Halloween.

Hugh: So. You fond of football, young shaver-snapper?
Boy: Yeah.
Hugh: Do you fancy Arsenal this year?
Boy: No way. I quite fancy my sister though.

Today it is my friend Emma Jackson’s birthday: 29 today. She was in the best teenage band of the 90s, Kenickie. Happy Birthday, Emma.

Late Friday afternoon: to the Whittington Hospital, Highgate Hill, to have my foot x-rayed.

Grumpy woman on main reception. She insists on finishing her magazine article before looking up and speaking to me. I would like to thank the makers of that magazine (the type which jeers at the looks of celebrities on one page and provides make-up tips for looking like celebrities on the other), for keeping their articles short and to the pointless.

Third floor reception. No one there for about a minute, but I’m not in a hurry so I don’t mind. Besides, this enormous new reception area has a ceiling so high it feels one’s outside, and glass walls commanding a spectacular view of the London skyline – as good as the one on Primrose Hill. It’s the way of many modern office blocks, but not enough hospitals. Who needs to sit around reading magazines when you can gaze out and dream at the capital’s skyline?

A handsome and friendly young man appears at the desk, apologising that he was busy eating his Toblerone. He offers me some. When I go through to the inner corridor of X-ray rooms, there’s another mini-reception where one must await further instructions. The man on this one is eating some of the same bar of Toblerone, handed around by his colleague.

He points me to my allocated door, and I go in. The man taking the X-Rays is short, short on English as a first language (Chinese, possibly), and short-tempered. He barks commands at me like an army officer: ‘Lie down there! No, move up! No! Keep still! That’s it, go now!’

He has no Toblerone to speak of.

After being out of sorts for the last few weeks, and thus letting my diary lapse somewhat, today I wake up full of energy and a renewed interest in living life. Funny how depression can be like that.

Sometimes depression feels like admitting defeat, many days spent going to bed and thinking, ‘I’ll feel better the next day.’ For much of the last fortnight, this hasn’t worked at all. I’ve woken up feeling just the same, and have just tried to put a brave face on it, stumbling through the day, clinging to distractions. Comfort food, comfort TV, comfort radio. Whole days of nothing slipping through one’s fingers like sand. Unable to get out of bed for hours on end, and then before I know it, it’s getting on for bedtime. A terrible existence.

At such times, I don’t feel 35 at all. I feel either 15, or 85, or both.

It would be fine if this meant I had the energy, innate connection to new technology and trends, and untrammelled hope of the better kind of teenager; or the wisdom, experience, better dress sense and healthier perspective of the idealised pensioner. The pensioner that is always working.

But no. On days like much of the last fortnight, I get the bad sides of both. From the 15-year-old I have the moaning, carping, sulking, and frustration, plus the sensation of never quite recovering from childhood solipsism. The time in one’s teenage years when you realise that the world really doesn’t revolve around you, that other people regrettably do exist, that you’re on your own from now on. Father Christmas does not exist, but paying rent does. I’ve never quite recovered from that time. Or at least, I must have missed that class at school when they actually tell you HOW to grow up, as opposed to forever shouting at you to do so.

And from the negative aspects of the archetypal 85-year-old, I have the poor health, lack of energy, creeping small-mindedness (if not downright prejudice), resentment of anything new, and a searing mistrust of the young.

So it’s the worst of both worlds. I can be this way for days on end, oscillating from resentful, unproductive teen to resentful, unproductive pensioner. As if it somehow makes sense. As if I enjoy it (I don’t). As if it’s an easier option.

Well, it seems like an easier option at the time. But, in the same way that putting on a t-shirt, jeans and trainers takes the same effort, energy and time as putting on a suit and tie (or at least, it would do for me), depression is a lie.

Depression is as hard work as, well, hard work. Just as being unemployed is a full time job. The energy and time is the same. Not doing any work is hard work too. The time is still spent. The mind is still working.

So the trick is: telling yourself you can’t be bothered to NOT work. Getting on with work without realising you’re getting on with work. Losing oneself in the flow of it. Thinking, but without thinking about the thinking.

My self-help book would be called ‘Take Yourself From Behind’.

I’ve had more than a few messages from strangers on the dreaded Facebook, asking if I’m the Dickon who:

(a) went to the National Youth Theatre in 1991,

or (b) went to Cambridge University and appeared in many stage productions at the ADC Theatre there,

or (c) worked at Euro Disney.

Answers: (a) No. (b) No. (c) No.

So I’ve decided to make things far less confusing for Facebook users.

I’m going to round up all the other Dickons and have them shot.

Only joking, other Dickons.

Thing is, I’m not keen to be tracked down by people from my own past, let alone those from the past of strangers who happen to share my first name. I’m still working on making sense of my present. When I’m happy with that, I’ll be able to properly approach my past.

Until then, such point-scoring school reunions can only go like this:

Them: Dickon! The Dickster! Long time no hear from. Well, then. I’ve got fifteen kids, seven houses, a yachting business in Diss and my own private elephant. And you?

Dickon: Taxi!

Managed to see a GP today after all. She thinks it might be arthritis, and has sent me off to pose for the Whittington Hospital X-Ray Dept tomorrow. It’s a condition more common in the elderly, but having developed varicose veins five years ago, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. If anyone could contract gout in 2007  London, it’d be me. Fits with the image.

In the meantime, I’ve hit the ibuprofen pills (with the doctor’s blessing), and the pain has disappeared entirely. Contrary to what some pop combo wailed a decade ago, the drugs really do work. Good old drugs.

I’d previously laboured under the impression that Neurofen’s type of ibuprofen was somehow better than the cheap supermarket versions. Not so, confirms my GP. Boots, Co-Op, Sainsburys, Neurofen, it’s all the same.

By buying Neurofen over any other type of ibuprofen, you are merely paying for the shiny logo. Though I suppose it could be argued that there’s a healing power in logos, too. Good graphic design can make an aesthete feel better, just as the Olympic 2012 logo makes many feel sick.

I’ve got yet another new ailment to moan about. It’s increasingly difficult not to believe someone out there really does own a voodoo doll.

I’ve either sprained or actually dislocated the big toe on my right foot. And now I can barely walk properly. Presumably it’s by sleeping or sitting for too long in a strange position. I’ve done this to the toe before (and it was definitely from sitting at my desk too long), but in the past it’s righted itself in a few minutes.

Not this time, however. Yesterday, I was shocked to discover I couldn’t even go to the nearest corner shop to buy provisions, without limping very slowly and with a large amount of pain. I was fighting back tears all the way, and must have been an even odder sight on the Archway Road than normal.

So I just went straight back to bed and hoped it would get better.

Now it’s a day later and the toe is still the same. Still can’t put pressure on it without a lot of pain, so I still can’t walk properly.

I’ve a horrible feeling it’s a dislocation, which will have to be snapped back into position without anaesthetic; a procedure that somewhat frightens me.

Off to the GP this afternoon, then. I may have to resort to calling a cab to get there.

A Sunday colour supplement-style pic:

***

From Monday’s London Paper (or as it calls itself on the masthead, ‘thelondonpaper’):

New DVD Reviews
If…
You’ve probably never heard of Lindsay Anderson… He’s Britain’s most underrated director.

Catch And Release
Hands up who’s a bit bored with Kevin Smith doing slacker cameos.

Admittedly, the If…. review does go onto to praise it to the hilt as the classic film it is, but I actually barked aloud ‘Oh REALLY!’ when I read the above sentences on the Tube.

So let’s read between the lines here. Yes, I know it’s probably a silly idea to deconstruct DVD reviews in a free local newspaper. But I’m fascinated about the culture of received opinions and media consensus, and what some now call ‘being on the same page’.

The anonymous reviewer is assuming a couple of things about the average London Paper reader. As their publication is one of the free dailies thrust aggressively into the hands of passers-by, or picked up by bored commuters when left on the seats of buses and underground trains, the readership is presumed to be pretty much anyone walking about in London.

Going by these reviews, the average Londoner:

(a) is meant to be have never heard of Lindsay Anderson.

(b) is meant to know who Kevin Smith is.

(c) is meant to respond well to the phrase ‘Hands up who’s a bit bored with…’ As opposed to feeling they’re being treated like a school pupil. Or that a gun is pointed at their head. Which may as well be the case with the newspaper’s pushy distributors on the streets, but I digress.

This kind of faux matey, playing-to-the-gallery journalism assumes everyone’s just like the reviewer, or that the reviewer assumes he knows what the reader is like. It’s as if they’re writing with a big list pinned up on the nearest wall, detailing just which names the readers are meant to have heard of. Kevin Smith, yes. Lindsay Anderson, no.

Who wrote this mighty list in the first place? Who has decreed just which names are osmotically lodged in the memories of strangers, and which ones need a little explanation?

This increasingly common style of review writing is not only unhelpful, it insults the reader’s intelligence. And it’s arguably a dangerous line of thinking.

It bullies the reader into becoming part of some homogenous crowd, where everyone is familiar with the same limited number of books, films, artists, musicians, celebrities. A fixed quota of names to have heard of. If you’re not aware of them, or if you know about anyone else at all, you are not just ‘out of touch’. You are The Other. And then it’s only a matter of time before the burning pitchforks appear.

So yes, I have heard of Lindsay Anderson, who is hardly ‘Britain’s most underrated director.’ The BFI have always had If…. in their Top 20 Critics’ Poll. But according to the London Paper, you’re not meant to have even heard of the director. Which therefore makes me ‘Other’ from their average reader.

I know who Kevin Smith is too. I like Mr Smith’s Clerks and Mr Anderson’s If…., because they’re both brilliant and original films about different types of boyishness (on one level), and are both very much products of their respective times and settings.

I also know If…. has four dots in the titular ellipsis, not three.

There’s worrying about going over readers’ heads. And there’s asking them to duck.

A reminder of this Fosca gig next week:

Spiral Scratch Presents
Fosca + The Besties + A Smile & A Ribbon + The Parallelograms
Wednesday 1 August 2007
The Windmill, 22 Blenheim Gardens, Brixton, London SW2 5BZ. 020 8671 0700.

Doors 8pm. Fosca onstage 10.20pm.

Tickets £4 advance, on sale now. Go to:  www.wegottickets.com/event/19272

It’s Fosca’s first London gig for over a year, and our first headliner in our own home city (well, for me and Rachel) for much longer. Please buy a ticket and come. We don’t play live very often. And I’m not sure when we’ll play another one, to be honest. There’s too much heavy lifting.

Here’s one taken when I wasn’t aware the camera was snapping away. So it’s a non-posing pose. Except of course, I never really stop posing.

And why shouldn’t I? Britain has 4.2 million CCTV cameras, more than in the rest of Europe put together. Everyone’s on camera. So the least one can do is make an effort to be worth looking at.

Holloway Road, close to where I live, was recently declared the most CCTV-covered street in Britain. I like to think this is due to the fabulous dress sense of the average pedestrian there, rather than the high incidence of unkindness. If not, then it should be.

So it’s this Canute-like attitude which I recognise in my expression below. It’s how I like to think I really am, or should be more often. Strange but essentially harmless. Wanting the best for all. Blowing kisses at the drug dealers. Flirting with squirrels.

Brompton Cemetery, July 2007. Photo by Gillian Kirby. More to come.