The sadness of taking down Christmas decorations abounds, with people walking into the temporary tree recycling service in Highgate Wood carrying their now less perky Christmas trees. I bin my chocolate Advent Calendars and like the idea of thinking that was all I lived on in December. It wouldn’t be true, but it’s a good image.

To a preview screening of Amazing Grace, a historical drama about William Wilberforce to mark the 200th anniversary of the Abolition bill. This was just the curtailing of the slave trade and not slavery per se, which didn’t end till 1833. But as the drama points out, political change – then as now – had to be implemented gradually, so it became inevitable rather than radical. Anything that looked vaguely like revolution – particularly at a time of uprisings in America and France – was branded as nothing short of sedition. Seems ridiculous now that something so obviously wrong couldn’t be stopped as soon as the campaign gathered public support in the hundreds of thousands, but one only has to look at a million people marching against the Iraq War (and ignored) for a modern echo.

In 1788, supporters of Abolition could wear fashionable cameos depicting a Negro in chains and inscribed with the Abolition Committee’s seal, “Am I not a Man and a Brother?”. Rather like the Make Poverty History wristbands today.

In the movie, Mr Wilberforce is played by Ioan Gruffudd, last seen as Mr Fantastic in The Fantastic Four. For this real-life 18th Century superhero prone to bouts of illness, his hair is frequently tousled and messy. I can’t help thinking he looks like a young Bob Geldof. Which is rather fitting.

The film lacks the wit of The Madness Of King George, and I note its screenplay is by the writer of Dirty Pretty Things, another well-intentioned but thinly characterised film of late. But it’s otherwise rather good, and definitely needs to be seen by anyone unware of Mr Wilberforce and the story of Abolition in the UK. The singer Youssou N’Dour plays Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who bought his own freedom and published a bestselling book of memoirs in 1789, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. It’s one of the earliest known British books by a black writer, and is still in print – I pop over to Borders after the screening to have this confirmed.

I’m reminded of Mr Blair’s statement last year to the New Nation newspaper, where he expressed sorrow for Britain’s role in the slave trade, but stopped short of an actual apology. Among those wanting him to go further was an irate caller to a local radio programme. She pointed out her lifelong anger at having to bear the surname given to her ancestors by a slave trader, and never knowing what her family name should really be.

Billy Reeves, former songwriter in The Audience turned BBC London traffic news reporter and general London character, is managing a new band called Friends Of The Bride. They are young men in impeccable suits who play a kind of Monochrome Set-type jazzy swaggering pop. I approve.

Alex de Campi writes:

Three days ago, in a small North African city on the edge of the Sahara, Mr B brandished his newly-purchased fez and declaimed, “I shall wear this to the next Beautiful & Damned!”

I thought it might amuse you to learn that your night was remembered even in deepest Tunisia.

Just filed my latest movie reviews for Plan B magazine. These include Notes On A Scandal, which is already one of my favourite films of 2007. Not least for quotes like these:

“You’ve got a basement flat off the Archway Road and you think you’re Virginia frigging Woolf!”

(Archway Road is my local high street)

“Her fetish for the boy was simply her snobbery manifested. ‘He’s Working Class and he likes Art’. As if he were a monkey who’d just strolled out of the rain forest and asked for a gin and tonic.”

I heard a critic on the radio the other day bemoaning the casting of Rene Zellweger as Beatrix Potter in the new film Miss Potter. His point was that she was stealing work from perfectly good British actresses. Well, Cate Blanchett isn’t British either, but I defy anyone to see her as the trusting if pretentious schoolteacher Sheba Hart in Notes On A Scandal and come to the same conclusion.

As for Miss Potter, it’s fluffy and visually sumptuous fare but has more modern substance than appearances suggest. Beatrix, Frederick Warne (Ewan McGregor) and Millie Warne (Emily Watson) are all careerless thirty-somethings dismissed by their families as aimless wastrels best kept on a leash. Rather reminds me of a few people I know in 2006. Though the film does move away from such issues to ultimately resemble an advert for the Lake District Tourist Board, I found it perfectly enjoyable. And Ms Zellweger’s casting is fine. Her accent may be a slightly posher Bridget Jones, but it works. Ewan McGregor twinkles sensitively behind his Christmas Cracker moustache, and all is well.

Another appeal to make, this time to my Swedish readers and those connected with the Swedish indie music scene.

The dazzling baroque-pop band Scarlet’s Well, who are fronted by Bid of The Monochrome Set, and with whom I’m an occasional lyricist and ardent fan, are keen to play in Sweden. They want to know if I have any contacts with promoters over there. Well, what happened with Fosca last time was a group of Fosca fans actually became temporary promoters themselves, purely to put us on. I don’t think I really know any proper professional Swedish promoters.
But if any are reading, do please contact Bid and Scarlet’s Well via their webpage.

That’s enough appeals for friends for now. I’ve got a backlog of requests, in fact, from all kinds of people asking me to publicise their projects or help them find collaborators, but this is meant to be a diary, so I must keep such announcements sporadic if I do them at all.
Back to me. A fellow Highgater with a blog consisting entirely of drawings suggested by readers has recently featured me as a subject. Link (with permission)

Donny asks: Please could you draw a picture of Dickon Edwards?

Anna asks: Please would you draw a robot wearing a feather boa and a hat with wax fruit on it?

Decided to combine the modern day dandy that drinks in the local and the robot dolled up for a nice cabaret show. Don’t they look cute together.

Actually, I think he’s drawn me as the fifth Doctor Who wielding a Sonic Screwdriver and a piece of Psychic Paper.

I’d forgotten to mention that Gentleman Reg’s songs have been featured on the soundtracks to the US TV series Queer As Folk and the movie Shortbus. You can hear a few on his MySpace page here. Lovely, lovely stuff.

An idle, aimless drifting around the clock governs my opening days of January, so I decide to impose a strict timetable. I force myself to be out of bed at 6am, into a sandblasting shower, strap myself into the uniform and start writing a diary entry by 6.30. The aim is to get a daily entry posted by 7am. I feel a diary should be written either last thing at night or first thing in the morning. I prefer the morning – the sense of being the first in the queue, as it were.

An announcement, first of all. The splendid Toronto singer-songriter Gentleman Reg, aka Reg Vermue, is coming to London to play a few gigs. He’ll be in town from the 10th to the 15th and tells me he’s looking for floors to sleep on for himself and his two bandmates. “I have the last few nights covered but not the first few. Let me know if you have friends with huge london apartments…”

I wouldn’t normally make such an appeal if I hadn’t got to know him in person the last time he visited. I can therefore vouch that Mr Vermue is as Gentlemanly as his recording name suggests, the very opposite of that rather uncouth young rock singer on Celebrity Big Brother. If you can help, Dear Reader, please contact Reg via his site at www.gentlemanreg.com.

He’s playing the 12th at the The Royal Vauxhall Tavern, and on the 14th at the Windmill in Brixton, and is well worth catching.

RIP today to two favourite London institutions: the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden and the Monday night club Trash. The former saw many a pleasant visit from my teen years to one of the rare attempts to use my college training as a Stage Manager in 1992. This was when some fellow Bristol Old Vic Theatre School graduates mounted a production of Mr Godber’s “Bouncers” in the Museum’s performance space. Still Bristol-based at the time, I stayed in Lambeth with a kindly gay gentleman who worked at the Drill Hall. His huge record collection consisted solely of classical and opera, with the exception of one pop album: “Behaviour” by the Pet Shop Boys. While I was staying there, I bought the latest Unrest album from Rough Trade (“Imperial” – still a favourite) and tried it out on his hi-fi. The stylus must have recoiled in horror.

I was last at the Theatre Museum a year or so ago, when it hosted some panel debate on circus arts versus burlesque or some such. The museum itself was always gorgeous and magical, and it’s a genuine shame it couldn’t keep going. Exhibits which spring to mind include the sinister skeletal horse costumes from the original National Theatre production of ‘Equus’.

Last time I was at Club Trash, I felt my age all too keenly: the clientèle always tended to be under 25, if a fashionably dressed under 25. In fact, I’m pretty sure some young acquaintances said “Aren’t you a bit old for this, Dickon?”. I’d been going since it opened in 1997 and was once featured as a ‘Face’ of the club in an Evening Standard feature circa 2000. In fact, I’d started going to Erol Alkan’s previous club Going Underground in 1995, recalling him spinning Pulp’s ‘Common People’ before it was released. Trash was more of the same, but gradually morphed from just another indie disco popular with students, NME readers and tourists into Britpop, and into something unique. Entirely down to Mr Erol’s infectious spirit, I think. For me, he’s always been one of the few London well-connected types who manages to buck the cliche of being stand-offish and unfriendly. He was serious and ambitious about the club, yet retained an amiable and open attitude. It’s impressive that he never missed a single Monday night for ten years, and that he kept the door price far below what he could have gotten away with given then club’s international reputation in its latter years. Again, bucking that London cliche of charging what you think you can get, and then adding more, just because it’s London.

I was a regular for about seven of its ten years, and Trash provided many happy memories. I’m sad it’s closing, but I’m sure Mr Erol will be okay. He’s passionate about what he does, always walking about with a bag full of records and a pair of headphones. The proper DJ all-enclosing sort, not those ubiquitous little white iPod bugs.

Am recovering from either food poisoning or gastric flu.

Spend my first hours of 2007 sleeping on the floor of Mr Hughes’s boat moored on the canal in Oxford, but in utter agony. I am kept awake with stomach pains and having to make frequent visits to the toilet. My host Mr Hughes is enormously tolerant, even when I break the tap in his bathroom through turning it the wrong way.

I am tortured twice during this first night of the year: once with the stomach cramps, and twofold with the guilty knowledge that getting up for the toilet will probably awaken my host. I am the mercy of my condition, and therefore so is he.

The journey back to Highgate the next day is equally fraught – I find even sitting down makes my predicament worse, even though the train and tube have plenty of seats. I’m all for not being able to sit down after a night of debauchery, but in my case the reasons are more Joe Pasquale than Joe Orton.

The previous afternoon and evening – Dec 30th – is spent with Anna S and David B, drinking happily and steadily at The Flask pub and then in their Archway flat. This puts me in a state of severe hangover for the 31st itself. My plan was to escape London for New Year’s Eve, and take it easy with my boat-bound friend. I hadn’t banked on being first fragile and ill from overdoing it the night before, and then fragile and ill from contracting some stomach-related ailment. What a guest.

The pains are still ongoing, so I’ve cancelled all social functions till I recover fully. Shame, as this week I’ve been invited to TWO birthday gatherings, a book launch, a magazine launch and a concert. I’m behind with a couple of writing commissions, and I really should get those done as it is.

Back to Oxford, and for midnight we eschew the pubs. Walking through George St, the streets are like Anytown, UK. Loud young people – and the not-young people acting young – with the hint of violence about them, marching in packs from bar to bar. Screaming in shop doorways at each other to hurry up, and it’s barely 9pm.

Once we cross Cornmarket into Broad Street and the university part of town, it’s like crossing into Narnia. The streets are comparatively deserted, the neon hue of the High Street signs replaced by ancient college walls, and the noise dies down. Thank God. We spend a few minutes in The Turf Tavern, a pub which is so civilised it closes at 11pm on New Year’s Eve. The King’s Arms, another studenty haunt with lots of places to hide, is open, but is full of young men pretending to be Stephen Fry. Quite frankly I get enough of that at home.

Actually, that’s a good way of describing the difference between London and Oxford in 2007. In Oxford, all the young men think they’re Stephen Fry. In London, all the young men think they’re Pete Doherty or Russell Brand.

It’s battering down with rain. Mr Hughes has lent me a folding umbrella, and as soon as I get hold of it, the thing naturally turns inside out in the wind and falls apart, spokes akimbo. So we sit in the King’s Arms for a while. In a corner of the pub, the worse pub band in the world is attempting to play Radiohead’s ‘Creep’. An unkind passer-by adds ‘Perhaps it’s Radiohead.’

As soon as the rain clears, we stand by the dome of Radcliffe Camera to listen for the various city bells ringing in the New Year under a star-swept sky. Mr Hughes recites Yeats:

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

I retort by saying I’m feeling ‘old and tired and full of sleep…’.

On the stroke of 12, we exchange manly English handshakes and make our way back to the boat, taking a diversion to avoid the George St revellers. Or anyone else.

Happy New Year. He said, still feeling like someone has punched him in the stomach. It can only get better from here.

Here’s this month’s B&D details. If you’re in London that day, come, be nice, enjoy feeling lightly attractive and not saturated in London sarcasm.

THE BEAUTIFUL & DAMNED – JANUARY EDITION
Date: Thursday 25th January
Times: 9pm to 12.30am.
Venue: The Boogaloo, 312 Archway Road, London N6 5AT, UK. 020 8340 2928.
Tube: Highgate (Northern Line). Buses: 43, 134, 263.
Price: Free entry, but patrons are strongly encouraged to dress Timelessly Stylish.
More information on the News page.

Have let the diary slip once again. My waking hours are a battleground of anxiety, of wondering what to do with the time I have. And then of course, I spend more time worrying about what I should be doing than actually getting on with doing it.

The other day I heard someone on the radio talking about Adult ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), and typically wondered if I have a form of it myself, given my skittish behaviour. Would an ADD-treating medication such as Ritalin help me concentrate on getting more writing projects done? Should I bother my doctor about it?

The period between Dec 27th and the 30th has a strange unhappy limbo feel, particularly as this year’s Christmas break involves a few days’ extension due to the two Eves falling at the weekend. Some people are still staying with their families, and are starting to regret it. Others are getting impatient with the general slowing down of business and of life. Hurry up with New Years’ Eve, they cry. Anything other than these floating, bloated, aimless final days of December.

There’s a pervading sense of wanting to cut to the chase. Saddam Hussein is hurriedly hanged today, and it’s reported as if his main crime is just being on the To Do list during this most fidgety week of the year. The Telegraph reports the late dictator’s choice of breakfast cereal while awaiting the inevitable: Raisin Bran Crunch. ‘But he objected to the sickly sweet Froot Loops.’

Photo by Suzi Livingstone.
Location: The Waldorf Hilton, Aldwych, Dec 24th 2006.

Preparing to write a Christmas Message, I look back at diary entries from the last few Decembers only to discover I’d not bothered with an actual Message for a couple of years. Just photos by way of a Christmas Card to you, Dear Reader, which is rather lazy. My memory is becoming so poor that this diary is fast becoming a lifeline, reminding me not only what I have or haven’t done, but who I actually appear to be.

Well, today I feel rather cat-like. So this is A Cat’s Christmas Message.

In the past year I’ve felt more than ever like a cat-like guest at the gatherings of others. Drifting from group to group, appearing uninvited, but not ejected. Indulged, praised, fed and watered like a child-substitute – often by those without children (people with offspring rarely seek to know me) – and I do my utmost to show my gratitude by appearing well-groomed. Kicked by some strangers, stroked by others. A space-wasting parasite to some, a Good Value Guest to others. A spy of sorts, though a spy who works for no one and is happy to be a calming confidante. I slip into rooms and worlds, mostly silent and keen to not be trodden on. I’m lazy, I spend far too much time asleep, and far too much time wandering aimlessly around the streets. Aloof and alone, neither happy nor sad. Thinking about things, or just content with existing. The days are as empty as I want them to be: I’m always confident I’ll get an invite to something. Today it’s Lucy Madison & Dale Shaw’s Christmas Day Drinks & Games do at their Art Deco flat in Highgate Village. I’ll go along, though not till Doctor Who finishes. Everything, even substitute cats, must stop for Doctor Who.

I prowled in and out of the real world in May, standing as a Green Party candidate for the local council elections. And I was fascinated at seeing first hand how the voting slips are counted – in a huge hall (at Alexandra Palace), by hand, with pens and paper; and not a single computer in sight. Contrast that with my other attempt to leave a dent on the real world in 2006 – appearing on a BBC1 documentary about blogging and the internet. My computerless neighbour said to me in the street the next day, ‘Saw you on the TV last night. I didn’t realise you liked computers.’

She reminded me that the Internet still only matters to those to whom it matters. And of course, the answer is I’m not a computer sort of person at all. Which is why I switched to a Mac this year – the computer for those who use the thing as a vehicle to reach a destination. Not for those who like computers per se. A means to an end, not an end in itself. These days, new computer games are made either for proper games consoles or for PCs. Which suits me.

Thomas Sutcliffe reviewed the documentary in his TV review column for the Independent:

The web itself supplies perspective. When I Googled my way to the online diary of Dickon Edwards, a cravated dandy who represents the new frontier of the blog, it turned out that he was prepared to say what [the programme] wasn’t about the chief attraction of this hi-tech form of vanity publishing: ‘The main reason I’m writing a diary online is because no one has employed me to do it in print.’

Indeed. Though that is me being a little harsh on myself: with my website statistics, I can point to thousands of regular readers who haven’t just stumbled upon these words by mistake. Vanity publishing usually has a suspected readership of one.

And yes, although I do moan about never being paid, I am still pleased to write here unfettered and unedited, able to reach people anywhere instantly, and have every past entry available to them as well. Doubtless Mr Sutcliffe was paid for his words – including the quote he lifted from my diary – but once the day of publication is past, his review could only be accessed by physically entering a public reference library which keeps old newspapers. Unlike The Guardian, The Times and the Telegraph, the Independent doesn’t archive its full content online.

It should also be noted that his TV review column appeared above a section called ‘YOU Write The Reviews’, where Independent readers are encouraged to email in their accounts of concerts they’ve been to, presumably for no payment. A sign of the times.

Ultimately, I’d rather be available to just be read, above anything else. The lack of money is a pain, but I can’t complain when I’m treated so well in all other respects. I’m regularly treated to food and drink and even clothes from kind friends and readers. I’m writing this while wearing a tie sent by a reader from Portugal.

Likewise, it’s obviously a shame I wasn’t paid for appearing on TV, or for writing a piece in the well-marketed Decadent Handbook, a piece which I’ve since discovered has been excerpted by Mojo Magazine (without asking me, though I’d have said yes). But I’m in no position to grumble. In both instances I was fed and watered and given shelter and cat treats (a bottle of absinthe and a copy of the book from Dedalus Books; taxis, tea at Maison Bertaux and a DVD of the show from the BBC). And as the cliche goes, it’s all good experience and looks good on my CV. But at the age of 35 and thus having lived a fair amount of the Vitae on my Curriculum, I do worry if the day will ever come when I stop doing unpaid work for ‘the experience’ and actually earn a living BECAUSE of my being ‘experienced’. Oh, that dreaded phrase ‘Work Experience’. Am I really still to be given Work Experience, and never be given Work? Well, of course, this means I have to pull my finger out and actually work a lot harder to prove I can deliver. I dread my gravestone reading: ‘Here Lies Dickon Edwards – Well, At Least It’s Good Experience.’

Still, the New Year includes a meeting with a TV company about new projects, so fingers and paws crossed. Till then, thank you to all those who give to this constant taker, this beggar with a choice, this lazy decorative cat that must evolve into a productive working human.

A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO YOU.

Dickon Edwards
Highgate, London.