[Thanks to Dad for the title pun]

The previous diary entry is, I’m fairly certain, my first to be drafted in longhand. I’m startled by just how out of practice I am with the medium. The last time I was regularly composing prose of any length away from a computer, as opposed to just taking notes, must have been at school.

No, it’s later than that. It would have been writing letters to friends and family in the early half of the 1990s. Then email came along, which suited me so innately that I acquired an email address two years before owning a Net-compatible computer. Somewhere along the line, the parts of my brain used for regularly setting down linear prose – with very few mistakes – began to rust and stiffen. At a computer keyboard, I can rattle out words fluidly, chopping and changing and chiseling till I’m more or less happy. I simply hurl words at a screen, then arrange them in a pleasing order afterwards. Mistakes are so easy to correct and purge from the digital manuscript, with no trace left to muse over. Computers train the mind to see writing as a final version of linear perfection, belying the work that went into it. Perhaps this doesn’t matter to others, particularly those of younger generations who grew up writing on computers, but on the strength of two entries so far, I think it matters to me.

When I decided to force myself back into longhand drafts, it was partly out of a concern to cut down my dependency on electricity or expensive equipment; a back-up on paper being always wise. But it was also because I’m ashamed that my then high-graded teenage knowledge of French, German, Latin and (to a lesser extent) Esperanto had been bevelled down to a few bare phrases of each, through sheer lack of use. As the vernacular of the day would have it, one must use it or lose it. And I was beginning to worry that I was losing the ability to compose in longhand entirely.

So yesterday I started the entry about the strange man on my doorstep. I eschewed my Mac iBook for a pocket Moleskine notebook – the squared paper variety – with a Parker Vector fountain pen and a cartridge of Quink black ink. I’d been experimenting with a couple of other cheap fountains – the Parker Reflex and the Lamy Safari – but the Vector seemed to work best for me. I can actually read my own handwriting with it.

But this tentative step into longhand composition turned out to be hard going. The entry faltered, meandered and spluttered to a halt. Admittedly my severe day-long hangover was probably part of the equation, rendering any reading (let alone writing) nigh-on impossible without a splitting headache. After starting and stopping throughout the afternoon, I reluctantly gave up and vowed to try again the next day.

This morning I awoke with a whimsical compulsion (I rarely have any other kind) to buy an old-fashioned A5 school exercise book, with a proper stapled spine. I spent a deliriously happy hour or so looking at the various dusty brands in the many newsagents and stationers of North London, including brands by the Post Office and WH Smith. The outright winner so far, I am pleased to report, has to be the 20-leaves red Silvine Exercise Book Ref 130F, with the matt finish, lovely old logo and a list of conversion tables on the back cover, including ‘Area And Mensuration’. Capital Newsagents of Tottenham Court Road sell them for 60p each.

Some people get hot under the collar about the latest developlements for Mac computers, iPods or mobile phones. I get a similar thrill from 60p exercise books.

Apart from the expected barcode tucked away on the back, the design has remained the same for decades:

In the middle of the night, the doorbell rings.

It’s about 1.30am, and I’m checking my email before turning in. My lights are on and I’ve not bothered to close my curtains. I had left the house during the day, returning very late and a little drunk. So as I’m emailing away at my desk by the curtainless window, I can probably be seen from the darkened street outside. Or watched.

The moment the doorbell sounds, my somewhat feeble reaction – after the surprise – is to turn off my lights and pretend I’m asleep, or that I am not in. I am, after all, a creature of timidity and detachment, and have only two modes: anxious and really, really anxious. A tightened stomach is my usual reaction to anything unexpected. And to much that is entirely expected, too.

‘Not me,’ I think as I hit the light switch. ‘Let it not toll for me. Or if it’s for anyone who can help, let it be one of the other tenants who answer. Not me. Please.’

Again the bell goes, breaking the night like a siren. This time, I faintly hear the other bells being tried. But no one else is shifting from their flats. I muse that it could well be a fellow resident who’s forgotten their front key.

So I go downstairs. And I open the door.

It’s a man I don’t know. He’s drenched in the rain with no umbrella, hat or hood. He bears a passing resemblance to the Cockney actor Phil Davis: 40-ish, a thin, long and boney face, light sandy hair. He’s wearing one of those fluorescent yellow jackets favoured by outdoor workers of all kinds, from civil engineers and architects to stewards at rock festivals. And he is also wearing an expression of anguished apology.

‘I’m really sorry to disturb you so late,’ he begins. And then he stops. I attempt a kindly smirk.

‘Well, go on, then.’

And he tells me that he lives around the corner. That his car broke down in Lewisham. That he doesn’t have quite enough money to pay the tow truck driver. That he badly needs his car in order to collect his wife in the morning. So could I possibly – and he’s SO sorry about this – could I possibly lend him the £18 he needs to pay the driver? Well, he says, call it £20. If I want, he’ll leave me his mobile phone by way of security. I tell him not to bother.

‘Where do you live, exactly?’ I ask. And he hesitates.

‘Southwood.’

‘Southwood what?’ There’s a few streets in the area which share this prefix. Southwood Lane. Southwood Avenue.

‘Southwood Lawn. 40 Southwood Lawn.’

There IS a Southwood Lawn Road around the corner, and though I’ve never heard anyone abbreviate it like this before, I suppose it’s possible he lives there. To my wary Londoner shame, I don’t know who lives opposite, let alone around the corner.

Something about his jacket, his manner and the time of night convince me. I find myself digging out a £20 note and handing it over. Part of me is doing so just to get rid of him, and in the hope he won’t bother anyone else. I add that I’m currently jobless and so can’t really afford it, but that I’m obliging him because he is a fellow human being in need. What I don’t add is that I’ve been reading about the Quakers, who see the good in everyone, and the God in everyone. And that I’m a little drunk.

He thanks me profusely, promises to repay me in the morning via an envelope through the letter box, then returns to the rainy darkness that spawned him. His expression of mortified apology remains in place throughout, even after I give him what he wants. I feel sorry for him. Which is the whole idea.

It’s now two days later, and there’s no sign of any envelope. So I wonder if I’ve been the victim of what’s called a damsel-in-distress scam. If so, I have to admire the man’s rain-soaked resolve, his Oscar-winning performance, and his sheer nerve. To ring a stranger’s doorbell in the middle of the night and simply ask for money: that takes a talent of a kind. I wonder if he had been watching me from the street earlier, my open curtains advertising that I was awake, alone and had a face that suggested I’d be kind enough to help someone in need. Or gullible enough to believe his story.

If he was indeed a crook, I’m grateful that he took off with only £20 in cash, nothing more, and left me entirely unstabbed. And I’ll be more on my guard next time. ‘Tuition fee’ says my father at any mistake that costs money.

And I will advise my London friends to look out for a man in a yellow fluorescent jacket asking for financial aid, who vaguely resembles Phil Davis. You know, I will say to them, that Cockney actor who’s in lots of things. Vera Drake. White Teeth. Notes On A Scandal – he’s the other teacher who fancies Cate Blanchett. That’s him. Well, not really him, obviously. I realise actors in the British film industry aren’t exactly rolling in it, but when it comes to finding an income between jobs, even they must draw the line at doorstepping strangers in the middle of the night.

Then I realise that putting the same sign on both tubs is unnecessary: one will suffice. So I don’t bother with affixing the other sign, but do decide to add the words ‘IN BOTH TUBS’ in the only space available on the first sign: at the bottom. I also add brackets, to indicate an afterthought, but really indicating that I’m someone uncertain in my life and prone to making a mess of things.

So it now reads:

‘PLASTIC BOTTLES ONLY

– SEE LEAFLET IN HALL.

(IN BOTH TUBS)’

Clearly, I’ve made it even worse. Not only does it look messy, it now sounds that it’s the leaflet that’s managing to be in both tubs, as well as in the hall. A kind of God-like, omnipresent leaflet that will be with us at all times.

The only clear message that the sign does carry is one to myself: everything needs a draft version first. And that slower people prone to making mistakes should allow for this when dividing up their time.

At this point, it’s getting on for nine, and I have to get on with other things. So I leave the awful sign, a testament to why I am best sticking with my own little world rather than dabbling with the real one, and decide to remove it later.

The thing I first have to get on with is filling out a payroll form for my DJ spot at the Latitude Festival. It’s pretty simple stuff: address, bank details. Except, of course, I make mistakes, and the thing is posted off in a fit of frustration, speckled with crossed-out words and tiny correct numbers floating limply above the blacked-out wrong ones they should have been.

I check my email, and Tom tells me that I’ve put the wrong date on a Fosca rehearsal – again. Have I changed the session, he reasonably enquires? I can see what I’ve done: copied from an old erratic email but failed to copy the correction. Do I mean the Saturday or the Sunday, he asks. I go a bit hysterical by this point, writing back, “It’s SATURDAY SATURDAY SATURDAY!” And then I fire off another mail, saying “SORRY SORRY SORRY”.

I’m a wreck of nerves and bad temper, and it’s not even half past nine. How do all those other people cope, I wonder, looking at the commuters walking off to the Tube outside. Why is it just me? If I had a sniff of a normal working life, would I be better, or worse?

I stagger out of the house, my thoughts in spiralling hysteria. Feeling doomed to making a mess of things and take too long about it into the bargain. Worrying that I’m ‘losing it’, or that I’m just the most useless person in the world. That life is essentially a race I have no hope in ever properly taking part in, let alone winning or losing. That I am going mad. AND that I’m slow.

Then I calm down, pledge to spend less time on the computer and more time writing on paper. And I decide to go shopping for a nice fountain pen.

Just as well no one’s life is in my hands. It could be worse. I could be a surgeon.

I have to remind myself to make drafts for everything involving writing. Some golden people can just put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and write something quickly, straight out, with no mistakes or typos, making linear sense and requiring no rewriting. I’m not one of them.

I wonder if this is what years of using word processors has done to me. They enable me to be used to making erasable mistakes and move sentences and clauses around so easily that when it comes to using ink on paper I make far more errors than I did before owning a computer. Or perhaps it’s just my funny little brain acting in not quite the normal way, as ever.

On Monday night I open the shared recycling tubs by the side of my front door to discover some fellow tenant has put plastic trays and cartons inside. Even though such items are marked with the little recycling arrow, it doesn’t necessarily mean one’s local council will recycle them, at least not yet. The only plastics currently accepted are bottles. Anything else is what the council collectors regard as ‘contamination’, resulting in the tub either being ignored, or the contents tipped into the landfill-bound van along with all the non-recyclable domestic waste. If so, all that diligent sorting by myself and the other tenants has been for naught. The details of what can and can’t be placed in the council tubs are on a leaflet I’ve pinned to the board in the shared hallway, by the taxi cards, takeaway menus and local information sheets. I had assumed everyone keen to use the tubs would read the leaflet. In this case, I sigh, it seems not.

Although I note the plastic trays and cartons, I decide to do something about it first thing in the morning, with the excuse of needing sunlight. Though it’s probably more down to my general tendency to procrastinate.

Feeling terribly worthy with that sense of being the first one in the queue, I bound out of bed at 7am, dress quickly, and write a couple of stern paper signs to affix to the tubs: ‘PLASTIC BOTTLES ONLY – SEE LEAFLET IN HALL.’

I take a reel of sticky tape, go down to the tubs, and lift the lids. The trays and cartons have gone. Someone has beaten me to it; perhaps it’s even the erring resident in question, correcting their oversight. It’s a mixed feeling: I’m pleased that other tenants are as environmentally concerned as me, but feel slightly shown up for leaving it to the next day and being trumped in the good deed contest.

But I still have my signs. So I tape one sign to a lid. It’s only now that I’m aware my text isn’t good enough. ‘Plastic bottles only’ could mean that this tub must only be reserved for plastic bottles and nothing else; no newspapers or tins or glass bottles or other perfectly recyclable materials that the council do allow. So I go back in, grab my permanent marker, go back out, and heavily underline the word ‘BOTTLES’, hoping this will improve the sense of the message.

Dad, a fellow Doctor Who fan, asks if the Gormley statues moved when myself and Mum were looking at the nude bikers, and thus not looking at the statues. He’s referring to the Doctor Who story that evening, “Blink”, where the monsters are the kind of stone angels found in cemeteries. They move and get you whenever they’re not being watched, or even if you blink. Truly gripping in the old-fashioned 70s Doctor Who style (even though it involves the world of DVD extras), well-written and beautifully acted. One can certainly imagine the army of bronze Gormleys going after people. I imagine his big box of fog is a particularly good place to attack victims.

***
Sunday afternoon – to the Wolseley in Piccadilly for afternoon tea. I always have Earl Grey with scones. Present are Xavior Roide, Suzi Livingstone and Hazel Barkworth. Suzi and Hazel have tickets to the Princess Diana memorial concert, at which Duran Duran and the Spice Girls are playing. Xavior still has a seemingly charmed if deeply unusual life where strange men he found on the Internet come round and pay him for the pleasure of cleaning his flat. It’s their fetish, their sexual kink: cleaning the flats of young men, and paying for this pleasure. Like a naughtier version of the Tom Sawyer fable. Apparently these men don’t even wear special clothing in which to do it.

Everything is sexy to someone: you just have to find them. There must be people somewhere in the world who derive erotic pleasure from filling out other people’s tax returns. Though there is always a line drawn somewhere. “I’m only attracted to filling out the tax returns of buxom blondes between the ages of twenty-five and thirty who wear opera gloves. Nothing strange.”

***

Mum and I walk through the courtyard of Somerset House, as we’ve never seen it outside of winter when the famous ice rink is in place. On this scorching June day, the courtyard is host to a grid of fountains set in the ground. A few brave tourists walk through the narrow gaps and take photos of each other, fully-clothed. Small children in swimsuits jump about in the jets with their Dad, while their Mum sits at the side with the piles of shoes and clothes. It’s the sort of thing one sees on the front of newspapers the next day, always with some caption about record temperatures. The hottest June on record. The hottest day of the year so far. The hottest day since last Tuesday.

Many of the offices around the courtyard still belong to the Inland Revenue. For years this space of ice rinks and fountains and simple joy was a car park for tax inspectors. I like the juxtaposition of these eternal extremes: uncomplicated children’s happiness against complicated adults’ grumpiness. If you do have to work in a tax office, I imagine there’s worse sights to look out of the window at in between all those forms and filings. Beats car parks, anyway.

I find some days contain enough novelty and adventure to generate several diary entries, while others are wastelands of duty, chores, reading and writing (or trying to write) and quiet nights in. It’s not so much that nothing happened on these duller dates, more that nothing new or particularly noteworthy happened.

If you’re going to see “A Matter Of Life And Death” and would rather not know about the controversial ending, best avoid this entry. The ending has been debated in corners of the national press, though, and I would say the point of the production is the whole show: it’s not a murder mystery. I knew about the ending in advance myself, and it was still pretty shocking.

So, it’s the previous Saturday, and I’m at the National Theatre with Mum to see the stage production of A Matter Of Life And Death, based on the 1940s film by Powell and Pressburger. It has had mixed reviews, not least because of its choice of endings, where the David Niven character lives or dies on the toss of a coin. What’s more, the coin in question is handed to a member of the audience to do the honours. It’s said that some audience members have fibbed about the result in order to save the hero’s life. Mum and I agree that if the coin were handed to us, we’d have to refuse and ask the next nearest person to oblige.

At this Saturday matinee, the coin comes up heads, and the Niven character lives. But though the audience sighs in relief, the closing song, presumably in place for both endings, is still pretty sombre and bleak. Either ending is a sad one, because of the point it raises: war is random and death is unfair.

This is something of a departure from the classic film’s conclusion of love winning against the celestial order. It’s a very 2007 interpretation by director Emma Rice, who blends in post-Dresden awareness, and indeed post-Iraq awareness. She also nods to her own personal story concerning memories of her bell ringing grandfather, who survived the War but was a witness to many who died. The show features much otherworldly bell ringing, and only by reading Ms Rice’s poignant programme notes does one truly appreciate this detail.

Also in the programme are real letters home from airmen, including one to be handed to their parents in the event of death. It’s from the base at RAF Wattisham in Suffolk, with a Bildeston phone number. Bildeston is the village I grew up in.

Much as the 1940s film is a masterpiece, I have always thought that parts of the trial sequence are very of its time and hold up the otherwise timeless nature of the story. Mr Niven’s prosecuting counsel is the first American soldier to be killed by a British bullet, and there follows a lengthy musing on very 1940s attitudes held by the UK and US towards each other.

In Ms Rice’s stage remix, the prosecution is conducted by no less than William Shakespeare, who calls witnesses from the dead mothers of Dresden and Coventry, all dressed identically. The Niven character is the pilot of a Lancaster Bomber with over sixty ‘ops’ to his name. The show thus argues that his unfair death breaking a loving couple apart is no different to the umpteen similarly dividing deaths he’s had a hand in himself. And thus to the climactic coin-tossing over his own life.

It’s certainly thought-provoking, and though Mum and I thoroughly enjoyed the show, I can understand why many fans of the film, or indeed just people who disagree with this concluding sentiment, aren’t entirely happy with it.

I would say it’s better not to judge the production as an adaptation of the film, more as an idiosyncratic and personal spectacle that takes the Niven movie as a departure point for its own ideas. Of which there are plenty.

It’s not a dull couple of hours: the company are the very physically-inclined Knee High group from Cornwall, who specialise in a more physical and visual approach to drama. The star of the show is the staging itself, the actors merely its servants. Nurses on bicycles (but unlike what we saw later on Waterloo Bridge, they’re fully clothed), pedalling upside down on hospital beds, lots of ropes and climbing about on swinging platforms, lots of original songs (even a rap-style number at one point) lots of precision choreography and inspired costume and set design, and one favourite moment of mine where pocket torches shoot up out of the players’ hands to become stars in the night sky. Imaginative ensemble playing all round.

The opening scene where the Niven hero falls in love over the radio with a female base operator is still incredibly powerful and moving, and is pretty much a straight lift from the film, though the heroine here is English, not American. But with all the music and rope climbing and similar goings-on, there’s times when the story can’t help but take a back seat to the spectacle.

Still, when you’re an actor trying to play out an emotional scene while negotiating a series of hospital beds suspended some distance above the stage, that’s only to be expected. At such moments, the audience are more concerned that the players aren’t going to have their limbs broken, let alone their hearts broken.

Actually, I wonder how the Knee High Company wish each other good luck before a show? It can’t possibly be “break a leg”.

Saturday, 9th June, 4.30pm or so. A painfully hot day in London. Well, painful if you insist on wearing a black suit with a lining purely because that’s who you are. Should have worn the white linen one, only it doesn’t last long before needing a good dry cleaning, while the black ones are more practical. For a person living hand-to-mouth, I must spend far more on dry cleaning than I do on food. But what are luxuries to some are essentials to me.

I am standing on Waterloo Bridge, the South Bank end by the National Theatre. With me is my mother. We have just seen the matinee performance of ‘A Matter Of Life And Death’ by the Knee High Company, and are about to walk across the bridge and into the main part of the city.

Then my mother says, “Oh, look.” And I stop nattering on about whatever I am nattering on about and see if I can see what she sees. Always had a problem with that one. I rarely notice what others notice when walking in company, most of my badly-wired brain dedicated to the act of being in company itself. It’s only when I’m alone do I really notice my surroundings.

So I look up and I do notice something unusual. Lots of bronze statues of nude men on the roof of the Hayward Gallery and surrounding buildings. I know exactly what they are, as will any Londoner with the slightest interest in the arts. They are the work of artist Antony Gormley, and are based on body casts of his own unadorned physique. We passed one earlier on, on the bridge itself. He’s been doing variations on this theme for so long now, I feel more familiar with Mr Gormley’s genitals than I am with my own.

Funny how we like modern artists to more or less stick with the one sort of idea. When Damien Hirst dies, regardless of his coloured dot paintings and medicine cabinets and anything else he does, the obituaries will have the animals in formaldehyde. For David Hockney it won’t be his photo montages or fax machine pictures or the opera set designs or the paintings of his dog. It’s going to be the swimming pools. Oh, and maybe that one of the couple and the cat. Henry Moore – big lumpy human-like sculptures in parks. Barbara Hepworth – big lumpy abstract sculptures in parks. And even though Mr Gormley is currently exhibiting a new kind of installation – a huge cube of fake fog visitors can walk into – he’s still The One Who Does The Body Casts. Still, it’s not if he’s resisting the label. This time, his body-cast bronzes are on the rooftops of London.

“Oh yes,” I say to Mum. “I see them. Lots of nude men on the roofs.”

“Never mind those. I meant the real nudes on bikes. In front of us.”

My eyes had skimmed over what I thought was some ordinary group of cyclists mounting the bridge. But now I see what she means. The cyclists are the first in a long parade of hundreds, blocking our way forward. And they are naked.

Nude Gormleys above, real nudes on bikes below. My mother standing next to me. The phrase “I don’t know where to look” springs to mind.

Some carry banners protesting against oil-guzzling vehicles stealing the roads, but whatever the message of protest is, it is rather upstaged by the mass nudity on display. Mostly men, about 35% women, pale and pink flesh everywhere. Some are slightly less naked – a few underpants and shorts or bikinis. One or two are even fully clothed. But the vast majority have it all out. Just as well it’s a hot day.

As is usually the case, many bodies on display are less Michaelangelo and more Michael Moore (in every sense). But I’m happy for their cause.

My unease, though, is the one experienced when watching a movie with one’s parents, and there’s a sex scene. Except this is real. I feel I am essentially staring at a parade of real genitals with my mother. And me just out of therapy.

She thinks it’s all rather fun, of course. It’s me that’s mortified. Mortified, and overdressed, in a sea of the undressed.

One or two of the younger riders are actually rather comely. And my thoughts are that, with my luck and my image, there’s no reason not to suspect that this could be my last exposure to attractive naked flesh, between now and the grave. Standing on the street, fully dressed, with my Mum at my side.

And so, as this atypical event is happening, I am thinking, “typical”.

My friend Ms Connor toils in the salt mines of the commercial design world, and has lent her talents to a humanitarian organisation called Share The World’s Resources. She worked on this advert of theirs, which took up a page in the Guardian this week:

http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/bb150/jenconx/STWR_G8Letter.jpg

She writes:

The G8 Nations comprise 2/3 of the world’s economic power, yet only 14% of its population. If you’ve got time, please read the ad (which is a letter to the G8) and feel free to spread the word about STWR to as many people you can. This is about spreading ideads that can change things for the better – nothing more, nothing less. Highlighting the reality of issues facing our world as a whole such as global climate change, poverty, and a severe lack of accountability of governments and corporations to do what is right by us.

For more about STWR: http://www.stwr.net/

Many blogs have open comment boxes. I don’t. Not for me. I prefer to have an email form on the website for anyone who really does want to get a message to me. A little like ‘Letters To The Editor’. It’s only a few clicks of the mouse away from the diary, by which time a reader would have worked out if they really do want to go ahead with their correspondence or are just bored and hey, it wasn’t really important anyway.

I would say about 80% of blog comments are entirely trivial and unnecessary. And that’s putting it nicely. It can be summed up in an equation. Internet + blog comment button + boredom = unnecessary comments, unflattering to reader, author and the human race. Many of such comments are by people who went to university, too. It does them no favours. It’s no good having a First in English from Oxford if the moment you go online, you turn into a dizzy 8-year-old girl.

If Virginia Woolf were about now, would she be posting photos of her pets and expecting the world to give a hoot? Oh wait, she published ‘Flush’, an entire book about a dog. Okay, bad example.

I went onto Myspace last night to find about a hundred messages waiting for me. Most of which were strangers plugging their bands or clubs. The others were, well, hardly the stuff of literary biography. No serious enquiries or proposals. The MySpace website itself was taking so long to respond that I just gave up. Life really is too short to spend hours at a computer pressing ‘delete’ and waiting for the page to refresh.

Too many areas of the Web have made it far too easy to generate pointless messages, and far too difficult to delete them. A decade’s blogging experience has taught me that asking people to write to you directly rather than post a public comment filters out all kinds of knee-jerk trifles, heckling for its own sake, and childish pettiness. There’s a place for that, sure. But I can only read so much of it per day. Once again, there just has to be a balance between Heat Magazine and the Times Literary Supplement.

There’s a feed of this diary on LiveJournal, and occasionally I take a peek to find a comment or two. I wish such commentators would email me directly instead, or I could miss something well-considered like this:

… but Dickon, DJing is creative, it has to be… There are people who’ve set up club nights which have had a far greater impact on people’s lives than most bands… Most good DJs also are musicians, they can match rhythmically, they know how to build a set, they are aware of the context of the music they are playing. See Erol Alkan or Larry Levan. And I’m not ashamed to say my residency has paid me a four figure sum over the past year, because I’m good at what I do, be it ‘just’ DJing… I could have just written, ‘it was good enough for John Peel’ here… But I do agree that ultimately first hand creation is the ultimate aspiration, because it takes more effort, not just some effort. Which is why I am going back to it.

You’re right, it is perfectly possible to be a creative DJ. Erol Alkan certainly is one, with far more ideas and creative worth than many derivative bands, who I don’t regard as creative in the slightest; more like joining in. I do like the odd Daft Punk, Death In Vegas, Basement Jaxx and Chemical Brothers record. They’ve all blurred the original artist / DJ distinction somewhat, and are very much in the ‘creative’ box.

Fatboy Slim is also a master of his art, though when I see footage of him performing to a massive festival crowd and doing his “arms in the air! make some noise!” gestures, part of me does think, “I miss the Housemartins.”

Regarding John Peel, I’d say he was more a broadcaster than an ordinary DJ, with his unique voice punctuating and branding his shows, which is far more creative than just playing records back to back. His voice was as important as his taste.

Still, that’s very true about DJs, club scenes and journalists influencing new bands. Though I would say they’re more catalysts and departure points, not destinations in their own right.

My point – and the Fosca song – is really addressed to artists that give up their songs entirely to become the more lazy, non-creative kind of DJs, slipping into a DJ career because it’s an easier ride and a regular wage. Less risk. More keeping your head down. Safer and more financially secure than marching up to the microphone and expressing oneself via an original lyric. But if you prefer it anyway, then fine. Personally I’d feel a bit itchy myself if I did it as my main activity. It wouldn’t feel entirely right.

God knows I’ve met many PRs, managers, TV producers and promoters who are far more original thinkers, smarter wordsmiths and indeed better dressers than the so-called talent they work for. They should be the ones on stage and on camera, not their clients. Essentially, I feel that if you do have a creative itch, it should always be scratched.

I appreciate the financial side of a proper DJ career is tempting, and it wasn’t easy to turn down offers of paid club work this month. But I’d made a promise to my heart that it was Latitude only for the time being, so I can think more about finally finishing the Fosca album. And because I don’t want to become a regular working DJ – it’s not really me. Just now and again is fine.

Which is a shame on a strict survival level, as I could really use the money. Still it’s better to be poor and happy than paid but itchy. And am I happy? Don’t answer that.

Anyway, at past gigs, I’ve introduced ‘Don’t Be A DJ’ (written years before I did any regular DJ-ing) with a kind of disclaimer:

“This next song… I don’t necessarily agree with in its entirety.”

It gets a laugh.

Last night – mixed the Fosca song ‘Don’t Be A DJ’. It’s not strictly anti-DJ-ing, more about people who fall into non-creative jobs around the creative works of others, where they can keep their head down, immune from any criticism. Fear of tall poppy syndrome. PRs who should be stars, working for dull stars who should be PRs (or anything else). Music journalists who are more attractive and have more to say then the dull bands they have to write about. How even the finest piece of music criticism only benefits the subject not the writer. A beautiful essay on Scott Walker only benefits Scott Walker. Whereas if Scott Walker recorded a beautiful song about the journalist… it would STILL only benefit Scott Walker. Thus with DJs. The need to rely on the works of others adds a level of compromise that irks me.

And this is one reason why I’ve turned down any hints of a career in either field myself. I feel the need to get on with writing an original song, story, or even just something in this diary. I’d feel a fraud if I did DJ-ing or reviewing seriously. It’d feel like an alibi. An excuse for not doing what I’m meant to be doing.

Had a discussion about this with producer Alex M, and we agreed that even the lowliest creative act, the record no one buys, the song no one hears, is still more noble than the finest book on pop music. Because creating is always greater than spectating. Then we thought about oh, Coldplay or someone we don’t care for. Are we really saying that Coldplay have more worth than great critics like Paul Morley or Simon Reynolds?

We solved this one by deciding that what Coldplay did wasn’t at all creative… Ah, a cheap jibe I know. I’m sure they feel the sting in their glittering mansions. Sorry, Coldplay.

It’s not like the art of literary biography, writers on writers: if a book on the Sex Pistols survived their music, it’d be worthless. The best thing a book on pop can do is make you go and listen to the records. They can never really stand alone, by their own nature. Writing about music will always be popular, because of the need to make sense of the abstract. But it still needs to come from, and go back to, the music. I leaf through a magazine and read some great pieces on bands I’ve never heard, and it’s all pointless unless I can get hold of the music too. It can’t stand alone in its own right. Just as DJ-ing can’t happen without records, but you can make records without being a DJ.

Dear Lord, let me not die a Fan.

Still, the occasional and unusual bout of DJ-ing here and there is fine, I decide. So I have turned down all offers of summer DJ work except one – the Latitude Festival in Suffolk.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to be booked or not, but today I find out for sure. Yes, it’s on. I’m booked. With Miss Red too, as The Beautiful & Damned. DJ-ing every evening in the Cabaret Arena, while silent movies and strange tableaux abound. And I will be shunning loitering within tent in favour of staying with my parents, in the cottage they rent every year by the Southwold lighthouse. Once again Latitude coincides neatly with their week’s holiday nearby. I like festivals which seem to be arranged entirely around my mother’s holiday plans.

I’ll bring a change of suit this time: last year, I had some unkind comments from passers-by when I walked around Southwold after three days, still in the same white ensemble. It wasn’t very white by that point.

Let’s see who else is there. CSS, Bat For Lashes, Arcade Fire, Jarvis Cocker, Patrick Wolf, Camera Obscura, Charlotte Hatherley, I’m From Barcelona, Final Fantasy, Stewart Lee, Bill Bailey, Dylan Moran, Josie Long, Mark Steel, Jeremy Hardy, Marcus Brigstocke, Roger McGough, The Puppini Sisters, Robin Ince and his Book Club (which I hope includes Martin White), Simon Munnery, Esther Freud. But I should also do the festival serendipity bit: wander into a tent and see if something I’ve not heard of delights the heart.

In my bone fide creative life, Fosca have been asked to play London on Weds August 1st. The Windmill in Brixton. Headlining, for the first time in… well, it must be years. So we said yes. Please come. Bring everyone else. Because, oh, because we’re worth it.

Some of Fosca are single. Well, all right, just me.

When choosing which bands to go and see, at any time, you should be told which band members are in relationships and which one’s aren’t. It should be in the listings. Never mind “Rock” and “Jazz” and “Blues”. There should only be two categories:

“Bands With Single Members Who Are Looking, Actually.

“Everyone Else.”