From time to time I pop into the veteran independent bookshop Gay’s The Word in Marchmont Street, which has a unique and often exclusive selection of new and used books on gay topics. My rare copy of Mr Hoare’s Stephen Tennant biography was found there. There’s also a good stock of homo-themed graphic novels and comic books.

It’s been going since 1979, right through the Thatcher years and Clause 28, and is now struggling to hold its own against the escalating rents of 2007 London. With the demise of Compendium Books in Camden and Sister Moon of Charing Cross, I think many people of my age and older are surprised to learn that it’s still going. Well, just about still going. This story in the Times is fascinating.

Plenty of authors voice their concern at its possible closure, and the shop is offering a chance for supporters to ‘Sponsor a Shelf’ at £100 a go. I’d cough up myself if I could afford it.

Incredibly, though, Jeanette Winterson thinks the shop has had its day:

“Bookshops have made real progress by including specifically lesbian and gay books on their shelves, both generally and in special sections. The very fact that it is thinking of closing may mean that its work is done.”

But there’s more to GTW than providing a real-world, specialist shopping experience. I’m shocked at the use of the word ‘only’ in this part of the same news story:

Today, the only homophobia the shop suffers is ‘a brick through the window once a year and twice a week people spit on the windows,’.

Work not quite done there, I feel.

Lately, I’ve found myself spotted by published authors, or generally treated nicely by published authors. Needless to say, everyone should buy all their books. I only attract the best.

Andrew Martin, author of The Necropolis Railway: A Novel of Murder, Mystery and Steam. He chats to me while I’m loitering in Archway Video, and says he’s spotted me in The London Library.

Travis Elborough, author of The Bus We Loved: London’s Affair with the Routemaster. He chats to me in The Boogaloo and says he’s spotted me in The British Library.

Dan Rhodes, author of Timoleon Vieta Come Home. Now, he hasn’t spotted me in a library but he can’t avoid spotting me at his book event in the Boogaloo the other evening. Because I am rather drunk and am bothering him about how great the band Orange Juice are. Like many authors, he’s a voracious music lover; the solitary act of writing often coincides with the need for a well-considered soundtrack. I think a compilation of his favourite music was playing in the background to his book launch. And Orange Juice must have been on the track listing.

I can’t quite remember the details, because on this evening I am rather drunk. I have been to another launch party earlier the same night, the launch party for the Latitude festival, in a trendy club off Shaftesbury Avenue. There, I down a few free wines on an empty stomach before topping them up with a number of drinks at the Boogaloo.

I think I was in rather flirty mode of drunkenness. I hope I didn’t try to get off with Mr Rhodes. Or indeed Mr Ben Moor, the comic actor and performer of the brilliant stage show Coelacanth. Mr Moor was at the Boogaloo, and also at the Latitude event. And I had seen him at Latitude festival itself in Suffolk last year: he was performing Coelacanth in the Theatre Tent and it was rather fantastic. Full of clever wordplay with lines such as ‘like a white flag to a bull’. So I bothered him about that. I think I annoyed him by saying I hadn’t worn one of his badges.

I regret not being able to remember very much about this night of flirty alcohol, but I don’t regret feeling extremely happy. It was a very happy kind of drunkenness.

What I can say is that at one point Dan Rhodes gives me a free signed copy of his new novel, Gold. It has rounded corners and isn’t too long. Mr Rhodes is a believer in keeping stories short and to the point: he has also published a collection of 101 stories each lasting 101 words.

On the flyleaf, he’s put a quote from an Orange Juice lyric – “To Dickon – I’ll Never Be Man Enough For You.”

Scraps of lost days, notes, general tidying up.

I keep starting and stopping new entries. Better I set down short entries than none at all.

(And then I end up writing a long entry)

I think I badly need to get into the swing of writing. And indeed, in the swim of writing.

The last weeks have seen me spiral inside my head somewhat. I have an addictive personality, in the sense that I get fixated upon one mode, then find it hard to do anything but be in that mode. So if I do nothing, I become addicted to doing nothing. If I’m feeling ill or tired, I become stuck in an ill or tired mode – even if I’m perfectly rested, fed, and healthy. So the only way to really break out of these little spirals is to get into a roll of doing the things I actually want to do. Or there’s the danger of becoming addicted to frustration, addicted to regret, addicted to a pause.

Saturday – a spot of fun, acting for a DIY pop vid. The band in question is The New Royal Family, and singer David Barnett wants me to play a butler spying through a keyhole, in reference to the video for Adam Ant’s Goody Two Shoes. I turn up in my own make-up and bow tie, and I overact a bit, which is putting it nicely. But compared to the butler from Goody Two Shoes (which we consult via YouTube on a laptop – a very 2007 reference activity), I’m the height of subtlety.

I recall a connection from a few months ago, when I attend a small convention for Hammer Horror films in Kensington. There’s a group of Hammer screen sirens signing photos: Madeleine Smith, Ingrid Pitt, Caroline Munro. Next to stills of her roles in Dracula AD 1972 and Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter, Ms Munro is signing pictures of herself from the Goody Two Shoes video. She’s the lady that Mr Ant is seen canoodling with, while the butler spies away.

After the video shoot, off to another cult signing event: the English fantasy author Neil Gaiman at Forbidden Planet. He’s promoting the paperback of Fragile Things, his latest anthology of short stories. I was rather hoping he’d be doing a reading, as he has a truly lovely speaking voice: calm, measured, wry, friendly. From his interviews and audiobooks he sounds rather like a dreamier Douglas Adams. And indeed, dreams are a major theme of Mr G’s work. But I’d gotten my wires crossed: this is purely a signing. Ah well.

After some thought, I decide it’d still be nice to meet Mr G if only for a few seconds, and I was planning to buy Fragile Things anyway. So I stand around, in a backstreet off Shaftesbury Avenue, with a long queue of fans in the Friday rain. Some have queued up for over an hour, and I have a ghastly feeling that after a non-stop signing session of 90 minutes (90 minutes!), there are still a good number of rain-soaked Gaiman-o-philes who have to be turned away.

I’ve only started getting into Mr Gaiman’s work, enjoying his earlier prose collection, Smoke & Mirrors, alongside The Sandman comic saga, which I’m working my way through for the first time. Like Sondheim or Nick Cave, I get the sensation that he has such a cult following it can seem hard to know where to begin for a newcomer. Or even if you’re allowed to be a newcomer – cult followings take on the appearance of private clubs. For me, it helps that he writes ‘normal’ books as well as comics. Mention comics at all at a mainstream literary gathering, and darts pause in mid-flight. I love the works of Alan Moore and Peter Bagge and the Hernandez Brothers, but the whole stigma of the medium colours everything on both sides: you have to get defensive when addressing the mainstream, you have to know everything when addressing the cognoscenti.

It seems outrageously odd to like some comics. To like some Doctor Who. But this suits me fine. I’ve never been one for polarity. And being the odd one out even among gatherings of the odd ones out is another speciality of mine. But this has meant that I’ve sometimes found it hard to discover artists and authors with delineated cult followings. I feel like I have to follow – and be judged – by some sort of club rules.

DE: Yes, I rather like this writer’s work.

The Fans: But do you like him in all the right ways? And have you read everything they’ve done? Sit down, there’s going to be a test.

Neil Gaiman is the biggest Neil on the Internet. If you Google his first name, you get his online journal. Like me, he started his blog earlier than most, which is one reason for the high Google ranking. But being a successful author with a huge internet fanbase probably has something to do with it too. And it’s somewhat less impressive to be the biggest Dickon than the biggest Neil.

I mention this at the signing as he writes my name and draws a shattered heart on the flyleaf. He replies that it’s a subject brought up by his friend, the satirical songwriter Mitch Benn. Mr Benn is the Third Biggest Mitch on Google. The other two are a deceased American comedian and a hurricane.

Mr Benn manages to write two new topical songs per week on Radio 4’s Now Show, in diverse musical styles too. Like Mr Gaiman, he manages to be prolific and tirelessly charming to strangers, as I found out when I met him in the kitchen of a Shepherds Bush party a few years ago. Truly commendable qualities. I’m rather fed up with being non-productive and grumpy.

As for Mr Gaiman’s work, I remember seeing copies of The Sandman comic when it originally came out in the late 80s. I was shown them by a cool Oxford boy in his bedroom. Or was it a cool Oxford girl? I can picture the event in my mind, the bedroom, the comics, but not the face or even the gender of the person showing them to me. Maybe it was an Oxford androgyne into comics. I’ve known one or two.

Aptly enough, the Sandman chapter I’m on introduces a character called Desire, a rather New Romantic-looking androgynous personification in a suit. Rather up my cul-de-sac.

Which reminds me. At Beautiful & Damned the other night, one of the Boogaloo regulars approaches me:

“Dickon, there’s this androgynous person in make-up and a suit sitting at the bar. I think it must be one of yours.”

There’s going to be a photographer at Beautiful + Damned tonight, taking pictures for official B&D flyers, a dedicated MySpace page and the like. Please come; and if you’re coming, please dress up. 8pm start, Metropolis on the screen, a bit of live performance, anything goes. And indeed, ‘Anything Goes’ from The Boys In The Band.

Tonight, I intend to play Paul Williams’s ‘The Rainbow Connection’ from The Muppet Movie, and either ‘Let’s Go Fly A Kite’ or ‘Feed The Birds’, or both, from Mary Poppins. I’ve also discovered a rather good version of ‘Cabaret’ by Louis Armstrong, which Russell “Not With A T’ Davies alerted me to on his excellent Radio 2 programme.

Trivia learned from the same radio show: Mr Sinatra’s song ‘New York New York’ – the one with the opening line “Start spreadin’ the news” – owes its creation to Robert De Niro, the star of the 70s Scorsese film for which it was written. The songwriters Kander and Ebb (of Cabaret and Chicago fame) originally wrote a completely different theme song, but Mr De Niro dismissed it as ‘too weak’. So they went away and produced the all too familiar one we know today, particularly popular after a few drinks.

Diary entries, like dreams and phobias, can be dangerously close to wishes. One must be careful.

I think I hinted recently that I harboured a castration fetish. Partly because of these troubling pains in my reproductive organs, but mostly because the line of my suits would be improved.

The real reason, of course, was because I thought it was an interesting and uncommon thing to read in a diary. Anything for an interesting and uncommon read.

The old joke (possibly music-hall). A tailor is measuring a man for a new suit.

Tailor: And which side does Sir dress?
Customer: Away from the window.

Well, I hereby withdraw, exorcise and cancel out such arch wishes for eunuch emulation. I would like to make it clear to all possible universes than I very much want to remain intact in that department, just painlessly so. Thank you.

I mention this because the other week I once again troubled my GP, who once again ruled out all the major causes for concern.

Me to a friend: I’ve been officially cleared of cancer, AIDS, and all possible STDs and infections.

The Friend: Well that’s always a plus, I find.

Back at the doctor’s, the GP is starting to think I’ve been withholding information:

GP: Do YOU have any idea what it could be?

Me: Not really, apart from voodoo.

[In which case, please could the pin-sticker in question kindly desist and contact me to resolve their grudge in a more civilised manner. Life’s too short, really. Even for voodoo.]

Back with the GP.

Me: Well… it’s been going on for months. And the pains vary from a slight itching to the sensation that someone has applied sandpaper to my testicles.

(long pause)

GP: And HAS someone…?

Me: (very quickly) I don’t go to those sort of parties.

He sighs and books me in at the Whittington Hospital on Highgate Hill for an ultrasound scan. “Though I don’t expect it to find anything.”

He was wrong.

And here’s where I’m tempted to end the entry to keep the reader in some sort of suspense.

===

But I couldn’t handle having to bat off all the emails if I did.

So, last week, deep within the bowels of that newly-expanded sci-fi leisure centre that calls itself the Whittington, I lay back on an adjustable chair in one of those odd 1970s gowns that lace up in a back-to-front way, and which never quite looks right. A strange man introduced himself to me and promptly applied lubricant and a plastic device to my nethers.

The good news is that I am not pregnant, and that everything between my legs is normal and correct. Nothing to really worry about. What he did find, however, is the men’s health equivalent of varicose veins. Called a varicocele. Veins and their valves not doing the right thing, blood not going where it should. Absolutely minor stuff, I’m assured, but if it continues to cause pain I can have an operation to fix it. And no, not that drastic an operation.

He said the only side-effect of not having the op might be a drop in fertility. The very least of my possible worries, suffice it to say.

So I’m setting these thoughts down in order to clear them from my mind. The more I don’t set them down, the more I dwell on them, and the worse I’m probably making things. Diary entries can also be exorcisms, even conducive to mental well-being.

It’d be nice if the pains went away and I didn’t have to have an operation. So that’s what I’m really wishing for, in this instance. Good, got that off my chest. Well, not my chest.

The only operation I’ve had to date was also for varicose veins, in my left leg about five years ago. They usually happen to pensioners. And sometimes, to younger men who act like pensioners.

At the Whittington, they currently give you these huge plastic pagers which flash and beep noisily when they’re ready to see you. I can only hope this system is not used for the heart disease department.

Just a note to say that this month’s Beautiful & Damned is now starting at the earlier time of 8pm. This is to cater for patrons who have to leave before the night really gets going, due to it being a School Night in Slightly-Out-Of-The-Way-Shire.

So, 8pm till late, then, Thursday 22nd.

And there’s the high possibility of some live performance this time, too.

Full club info at the DE News page.

Writing this first thing in the morning, for the first time in a while. Just managing to get up and greet the day as it starts to pick up speed is achievement enough for me. Like being the first one into the swimming pool, breaking the surface before anyone else gets there.

I should put ‘typing’ this first thing in the morning, really. I’ve become one of those people who can type faster than they can write in longhand, and it’s worrying me a little. I genuinely can’t remember the last time I wrote someone a proper letter, on paper, with a pen. It’s not good to rely on computers and typewriters for writing; I have to keep my longhand in practice. And notebooks are a lot lighter than laptops. And a lot less likely to make you feel nervous when you’re carrying them about, worried about being mugged.

I used to write letters all the time, and still have folder upon folder of the things, mostly from the 90s. At some point I shall have to go through them all, and work out what’s worth keeping.

Dad writes to me – email, of course – about my thoughts on ‘Hot Fuzz’ and the innate need of some boys to play cops and robbers, or ‘war’, while other boys (like me) never had such urges.

…a lot of my boyhood free time was spent playing elaborate war games with toy guns when they were available and pistol-shaped sticks when they were not. Our favourite part of the walking route to Sunday School – less to do with the parents being Christians, more to do with getting the kids out of the way – was the grounds of a nursing home which had lawns well-strewn with debris from the wind-blasted trees. So we were able to arm ourselves for playtime …But you have to remember this was a South-Eastern coastal town in the early 40s, when every adult seemed to be in uniform, army vehicles and anti-aircraft guns were parked in our street, and many houses were inhabited by army personnel, the former residents having fled from the genuine possibility of invasion. So maybe playing war games in our case was more to do with patriotism than what kind of boys we were.

Tuesday – to Tom’s for working on the Fosca album. We’re resuming work after a long gap, but as ever the work itself gets us interested, galvanised, and as the session ends I’m the happiest I’ve been for months. If you do nothing, you tend to do more nothing. A little work tends to call down a lot more work.

Being in your thirties, you realise not so much what you really want to do in life, but more what you really want to NOT do in life. Thirtysomething life is more about saying no and filtering things out than choosing what you do want. That’s more of a twenties thing – the need to try everything in case you’re left out. If you’re in your thirties, the world is no longer made for you whether you admit it or not. And then you can relax and get on with being who you are, rather than what you’re expected to be.

I’d found myself thinking ‘when can I go home?’ about far too many evening engagements lately: parties, gigs. I also feel the sense of having to keep plates spinning with all the different social scenes I’ve slightly dipped myself into. The trouble is, I know lots of people very slightly. And I know few people very well. So when I get an invitation to a gig or club, a lot of the time my principal thought is: how can I possibly get out of this without looking like a complete swine?

With the majority of invites, I can only see myself standing there, alone, thinking about going home. Thinking that I should be getting on with something creative. When I’ve done that, then I can go back to the parties, and have something to say when they ask me what it is exactly that I do.

I’ve also found I can only take so many solitary nocturnal journeys home on public transport a week. Again, it’s because I’m more and more aware that this is the domain of the younger person. I’m more of a cab-taker. Ideally I’d take cabs all the time, and the times I do have a bit of money, most of it does go on cabs. Happily. No taxi is overpriced for me: not when I feel every iota of my very soul collapsing on every minute of a late night bus or tube. Not when my abiding memory the next day is not the gig or party, but how I felt tortured by the interminable journey back. Not just for all the young people who shout – and who shout at me for the way I look. It’s also the waiting for a bus, or waiting for a tube. And the delays. I feel the weight of every bus I’ve ever waited for. Of course, this is all stuff a therapist would have a field day with.

I feel more than ever the need to avoid my fellow man at night, particularly if my fellow man is badly-dressed and insists on wearing jeans for EVERYTHING. And if my fellow man is louder and drunker and younger than I.

When you’ve reached that sort of mindset, I think you have to stop going to things for the sake of keeping your more peripheral friendships and contacts alive. Some of the spinning plates need to be allowed to gently, more honestly, fall and shatter. If someone really does want to stay in touch, well, they’ll get in touch. And not just nod at me across a noisy room that I’ve decided to commit my evening to. The Beautiful + Damned night is a good way of handling this – if someone really wants to see me, they know where to find me. On my own territory.

How many friends does a person actually need? Real friends? So that none of them say ‘I never see you these days, do come down to my club with a pricy bar which starts at midnight on a Monday night’. I need to have my own haunts, my own social circle rather than hover on the edges of about a dozen of them.

I suppose you shouldn’t really go without seeing a friend – a real friend – for more than a week. Seven days in a week – seven friends maximum? That’d be truly brutal for me. Hah, listen to me, complaining about having too many friends.

But if I am to stop feeling so thinly-spread and start clearing my life of all the unfinished projects and unfulfilled promises that are preventing me from really living, I have to start letting some plates drop. Thinly-spread, spinning plates.

I also have to stop mixing my metaphors.

My three favourite films to remain unreleased on DVD, ie If…., O Lucky Man! and Performance, are finally coming out on the said shiny format this year. Performance is already out this week.

A few moons ago: to the Muswell Hill Odeon to see the film Hot Fuzz, the follow-up to Shaun Of The Dead. A movie that comes with such extreme self-awareness about its audience, it almost feels like there should be a closing credit saying “Now go away and talk about it on the internet, we know you will.”

The Hot Fuzz core audience is The Matey Geeks. People who like movies more than is strictly healthy, but who still manage to be vaguely functional and inclusive and get on in life. People who can quote lines of films, yet know how to go to pubs without fear, how to wear trainers and say “Cheers, mate” and mean it, how to hold down a job and get on with their more mainstream workmates, who behind their backs think they’re overgrown students. So not so much people like me, but people I know. It’s like that 60s TV sketch with John Cleese and the Two Ronnies. “I am the mainstream non-geek who runs the world. I am more functional than the Matey Geek, but the Matey Geek is more functional than Dickon Edwards.”

Which is why I feel that watching Hot Fuzz is like standing next to a friend at a party, while someone they know – but I don’t – delivers an entertaining anecdote. They’re not excluding me, yet not quite allotting me the same amount of eye contact as the person I’m standing next to. There’s a sense they’re not quite sure what to make of me. Am I their sort of audience? Not quite, but I like the anecdotalist in question, and I’m happy to stick around if they don’t mind too much.

I’ve never seen Point Break or Bad Boys 2 or any of those noisy action movies Hot Fuzz pays homage to, and have no wish to. I’ve also never been one of those boys who liked to play shoot-outs with toy guns. Or been the significant other of such boys (though one ex of mine was a boy who always wanted to be Wonder Woman). To really enjoy Hot Fuzz, you have to be one of those men who used to be one of those boys, or go out with one of those men and affectionately indulge that side of his boyishness.

Thankfully, as indulgent fan-pleasers go, Hot Fuzz is certainly a lot better than Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back. Ye gods, that was a truly shameful showing by Mr Clerks. It’s also topped the charts for a few weeks now, which means real people must like it as well as the ones who get all the references.

Although I can never quite connect with Hot Fuzz in the way it wants to connect, I enjoy it and admire it. The sheer verve of the film keeps even the most fidgety people attentive, and unlike some reviewers I don’t think it’s too long.

On the subject of boys who innately take to playing cops and robbers, when a gun – either a toy or possibly a real empty gun – was passed around at a recent drunken gathering, my inebriated instinct was not to point it in the air or at others, but to instantly put the muzzle to my head and pull the trigger. Interesting, that. So I’m more a fan of suicide in culture than action movies in culture. I was thinking how much I like the movie Heathers. A nice, good, utterly twisted black comedy.

Hot Fuzz is not at all twisted. In fact, there’s a certain playfulness and sweetness to it, despite the surfeit of comedy death scenes and unpleasant woundings. There’s also a scene involving a swan causing a car crash. I wonder if this is a reference to Peter Greenaway’s A Zed And Two Noughts, which opens with such an event?

There are, I imagine, many reviews and discussions online about Hot Fuzz, given the high internet use of the average Matey Geek. I like to think this is the first one to compare it to an 80s arthouse film about conjoined twins and decaying animals.

I feel it’s about time I thanked a few people for recent help and generosity.

Thanks be to, in no particular order:

The London Library Trust, for approving my application to one of their grants, without which I couldn’t have afforded the membership fee. It probably wasn’t the President himself, Tom Stoppard, who handled the application. But I like to think it was.

Dr. Lesley Hall, for being my referee in the above application.

Mr Neil Scott, for maintaining and upgrading this website, transferring it to the new hosting server, and for generally knowing about such things.

Mr Rhodri Marsden, for providing the aforementioned new hosting and associated help.

Le Cool London, for calling me ‘one of London’s favourite characters’.

Mr Julian Lawton for putting ‘Scorpio Rising’ onto DVD for me.

Mr Gary Cook, for designing the current Beautiful & Damned flyer.

Mr Lawrence Gullo, for the flyer before that.

Mr Laurence A Hughes, for remote-control guidance and discipline.

Mr T Chipping, for sending me the Sondheim interview and massive hardback biography of Diana Ross.

Mr Gerry O’Boyle, Miss Red, Miss Lou and all at The Boogaloo for their continuing kindness and patronage in general.

Mr MacGowan and Ms Clarke for their supreme generosity.

… and my long-suffering mother and father who have frequently, suffice it to say, kept me Out Of Trouble. Or at least, the more dull forms of Trouble.

And that’s just the most recent lot.

Thank you.

I’ve been interviewed by the trendy online magazine, Le Cool London.

Here’s the introduction:

If you’ve encountered an extremely blonde man and thought you’d backtracked into Brideshead, then you’ve met Dickon Edwards. One of London’s favourite characters, this contemporary flâneur makes a living – just – through doing very little other than being himself.

.

The interview is here

Photo by Tom Medway.