A frequently asked question in the mail.

Dear Dickon,

Why don’t you just get a job?

Answer: Because I’ve got too much else to do.

Answer: Because I’m too busy to get a job.

Answer: Being unemployed is a full-time job in itself, involving skills and time in order to survive. So I do have a job. It’s just atrociously paid.

Answer: Because I’ve never lasted in the many wage-slave type jobs I’ve had in the past. It’s only a matter of time before I’m dismissed, or have to leave to avoid collapsing in tears on a daily basis.

Answer: I AM trying to find something, it just has to be something I can do well, as opposed to pretend to do well.

Answer: I’m too far gone.

Answer: This IS my job. It’s a kind of busking with text. I just haven’t managed to earn money from it. Yet.

Answer: Don’t you know who I AM?

Having said all that, of course, I do engage in a small amount of perfectly normal things for the Green Party: envelope stuffing, posting leaflets through hundreds of letterboxes, helping out here and there. It’s just that that’s all voluntary work.

Oh, I nearly forgot. This year I stood for election as a Green Party councillor in my local ward. Though I didn’t win a seat, I DID beat all three Labour candidates. Which hadn’t been done by a Green in Haringey before.

There, I’ve gone a small way in reminding myself I can actually get things done. Sometimes.

Here’s the latest email sent to subscribers of the DE mailing list.

*****

Dear Creature

At the moment, when people come up to me and ask “what do you do?”, I splutter and worry. I feel I’ve done next to nothing in the last year but loaf around, drink, consume, skulk in Highgate, wait for public transport, sit on public transport, moan, worry, and generally get upset.

Then I remember. There ARE a few things to mention where I’ve vaguely left my mark.

1) UK TV APPEARANCE – IMAGINE
Tonight, Tuesday Dec 5th, BBC1, 10.35pm. “Imagine”.
The producer assures me that I AM appearing on this BBC documentary about blogging, talking about being an online diarist for nine years and counting, and how anyone else who has a blog started after 1997 is frankly copying my idea.

2) BOOK – THE DECADENT HANDBOOK
Out now in bookshops. Edited by Rowan Pelling. Published by the 20-year old independent Dedalus Books. It’s a white gift-book style hardback with an Aubrey Beardsley woman on the front, plus a shiny gold spine. I’ve contributed an account of my trip to Tangier with Shane MacGowan, plus a set-list from my club night Beautiful & Damned, plus a photo of me with Anne Pigalle, walking a lobster. It’s £15 RRP, but I’m told you can order a discounted copy for £13.50 including p&p by phoning 0845 458 9910 and asking for ‘The Dickon Edwards Offer.’ Or buy it at Amazon.

‘The book is an antidote to bland modernity…includes contributions from contemporary libertines such as Dickon Edwards (pictured left with pet lobster), to the godfathers of decadence – The Earl of Rochester. J.K.Huysmans and Oscar Wilde. Five stars.’
– The Leeds Guide Book of the Fortnight

‘…’El Hombre Indelible’ by Dickon Edwards has a wonky charm of its own….’
– The Daily Telegraph.

3) MONTHLY CLUB – THE BEAUTIFUL & DAMNED – CHRISTMAS EDITION
Date: Thursday 21st December. Times: 9pm to 12.30am. Venue: The Boogaloo, London N6.
‘Unmissable!’ – Time Out.
‘A divine London night out’ – The Penny Magazine.
This month’s club will include a few of the classier and less painful Christmas songs by the likes of Ms Garland, Mr Sinatra, Ms Day, the Cocteau Twins, Big Star, and the Carpenters.

4) MUSIC ON CD:
SCARLET’S WELL – BLACK TULIP WINGS (Siesta Records)
Buy online.

Scarlet’s Well are a fantastic baroque-pop band fronted by Bid, formerly of The Monochrome Set. I can heartily recommend all the Scarlet’s Well albums; they’re little treasures of secret joy. On their latest release, “Black Tulip Wings”, I’ve written the lyrics to a Gilbert & Sullivan-esque song called “Narcissus In The Maze”. Hearing a musical hero such as Bid sing my lyrics is a complete dream come true.

VARIOUS – THE KIDS AT THE CLUB (How Does It Feel Records)
Buy online.

I also have my own band, Fosca. We’ve been releasing albums and gigging for years. John Peel played us. We’ve got fans who make their own videos for Fosca songs (now on YouTube). The next Fosca album is still a work in sporadic progress, due to my spiralling anxiety and general bouts of minor ill-health, physical or mental. But in the meantime, you can hear us on “The Kids At The Club”, a compilation of current indiepop bands. Fosca contribute a track from the current sessions, “I’ve Agreed To Something I Shouldn’t Have”, which is about as straight-ahead indiepop as we get. The rest of the new album will be more… deviant. A quick Google reveals that the track has been played on a number of radio stations from Texas to California to Germany, Portugal, France and Sweden. It’s great when you get emails asking when you’re playing Austin, Texas, but also rather frustrating. The answer is, “when we get some kind of decent backing in our own country”. Will that ever happen with Fosca? Well, let’s get the album done first.

5) MUSIC ON ITUNES
As of this month, you can download Fosca songs legally from the iTunes Store. This includes both albums and “The Kids At The Club”.

6) WORDS IN MAGAZINES
I contribute a smattering of film reviews for the monthly alt-music magazine Plan B, edited by Everett True.

7) OTHERWISE
Finishing the Fosca album… writing more lyrics for Scarlet’s Well and the composer Martin White… writing stories… possible lyric-writing work with various different London characters… “The Dickon Edwards Songbook”… moping about the British Library… trying to stay healthy, energetic and staving off the sadness and madness… trying to do more as opposed to just thinking about doing more…

RECOMMENDATIONS
I’ve also spent a lot of time enjoying the works of others. Here’s some favourite things of 2006:

FILMS: Breakfast On Pluto, Capote, The History Boys, The Queen, Red Road, Wild Tigers I Have Known, Brothers Of The Head.

DVDs: Happy Endings, Oh! What A Lovely War, Peep Show Series 3, Doctor Who (2006 series).

ALBUMS: Xiu Xiu ‘The Air Force’, Dresden Dolls ‘Yes, Virginia’, Hidden Cameras ‘Awoo’, Doris Day ‘Darling: Songs From The Films’, Joanne Newsom ‘Ys’, Jarvis Cocker ‘Jarvis’, Tender Trap ‘6 Billion People’, Morrissey ‘Ringleader Of The Tormentors’, Final Fantasy ‘He Poos Clouds’, The Organ ‘Grab That Gun’, Elizabeth Taylor ‘In London’, Maria Friedman ‘Now And Then’,

AUDIOBOOKS: Alan Bennett – ‘Untold Stories Parts 3 & 4’, ‘That Mitchell & Webb Sound’

BOOKS: Pat McCabe ‘Winterwood’, Jake Arnott ‘Johnny Come Home’, Karina Mellinger ‘A Bit Of A Marriage’, Tony O’Neill ‘Digging The Vein’, Herbert Rosendorfer ‘Grand Solo for Anton’, Rupert Everett ‘Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins’, Sarah Waters ‘The Night Watch’, The Dedalus Book Of Finnish Fantasy, The Portable Edgar Allen Poe (Penguin – 2006 Edition), Sophie Parkin ‘Best Of Friends’.

GIANT MECHANICAL ELEPHANT: The Sultan’s Elephant, London.

Thanks for reading this,

Mr Edwards

Marks & Spencer currently sells limited-edition Christmas handwash.

The bottle reads: “Fragranced (sic) with the seasonal scent of orange and clove.”

It turns out that the Radio Times listing only mentions me in the website version of the magazine, not the print version. I say ‘only’, though it IS about people who use the Internet, so on this occasion you could argue the web version is more important.

But print IS all. The main reason I’m writing a diary online is because no one has employed me to do it in print. I see the other advantages (complete editorial freedom, instant access to a global readership and so on) as perks of the format. The advantage is the freedom and lack of filters. The disadvantage is also the freedom and lack of filters.

Books and magazines are real, websites are… an aid to the real. A reference. Maybe that will change, but I still wince when I hear people discussing websites or blogs in public. It still seems ‘faddy’, like Tamagotchis. But then, I’ve been doing this for nine years, and I feel the rest of the world catching up with me (ho ho) is like the way even a stopped clock keeps the right time twice a day.

At least BBC1 is a ‘real’ channel that even old people have heard of. And although there’s been news reports about the way the Web is stealing leisure time from TV, this only matters to those to whom it matters. Yes, I get most of my TV via downloading from torrent sites and watching on my laptop. But that’s not most people. Not yet. I don’t think TV will quite be replaced by the Net, if only because, like books and newspapers, people need a professional, authorised filter as a kind of handrail to the Web’s madness of infinite choice.

The producer did email me to say I’m definitely in the Imagine programme next Tuesday, but you should never count your chickens till you cross them.

Hope is such a destructive demon. There’s that wonderful line from Michael Frayn’s Clockwise:

“It’s not the despair. I can handle the despair. It’s the hope.”

Likewise, I shouldn’t have said I’d have a new entry done in the morning, as this is late afternoon. I was up till about 6am dawdling and dreaming without actually sleeping. And then I fell asleep, of course. This is the luxury of the man who can do what the hell he wants to do, but also the curse. I always feel I’ve missed out. And I have. I used to think nights are more fun than mornings. Not anymore. I like dawns, sunrises, shops about to open, people on the streets who’ve decided that life is actually worth living today, despite what the news says. That work is worth the less fun bits.

Noting Laurence Hughes’s advice, I’m trying to take a lot of brisk walks into town by way of daily exercise, avoiding public transport entirely where possible. After all, walking has more practical side effects than other forms of exertion – you actually get somewhere at the end. You save money. You feel free and alone. You don’t have to wear unflattering clothes. And there’s the whole flaneur connotations as well.

I usually take a vaguely scenic route in order to avoid the main roads as much as possible: up the hill to Highgate Village, through Waterlow Park onto Swain’s Lane, down to Camden Street. Maybe stopping in by St Pancras Old Church for a bit, and muse upon the Dark Ages ghosts that must gather there, as it’s been a site of Christian worship since the 4th century.

The first time, I arrive at the Library wheezing, gasping, absolutely exhausted. The second time, it’s a lot easier. Breaking myself in.

These days, the homeless Big Issue seller outside the British Library is losing his pitch to the more aggressive pushers of free newspapers like London Lite.

He shouts, all too aware of this usurping on the London streets:

“Big Issue! Big Issue! Yes, I know it’s not fashionable anymore…”

Last night, to a Dedalus Books reading. ‘Marthe – The Story Of A Whore’ by JK Huysmans, in a new translation by Brendan King. Huysmans’ 1876 debut, it was rather hurriedly finished when he heard another novel about the life of a prostitute was about to be published. He wanted to be the first one in the Naturalistic Prostitute Novels genre. And he was also trying to be a writer as opposed to just write, using this first work in order to get into the celebrity literary circles of the day (eg Zola). Still, rushed ending or no (and barely 150 pages), it is beautifully written, sensitively translated, and vividly takes the reader to that whole Paris demi-monde world.

In King’s introduction, we’re told how Huysmans had the first edition published in Brussels in order to avoid prosecution in France, but then made the frankly rather silly mistake of trying to return through customs with 400 copies at once, hoping he’d be lucky. Half his print run, confiscated in a second.

At the reading, Mr King is friendly, nervous and gentle, which makes you want to buy all his books, of course. It shouldn’t matter, but somehow it does. Whenever someone says they’ve met a well-known author or artist, the automatic question does seem to be:

“But is he nice?”

Never mind an author’s biographies, the letters, the diaries, the memoirs. The actual books. We just want to know if they’re nice. Reading a novel is effectively deciding to spend hours in the company of a stranger, so maybe it’s something to do with that.

The reading takes place in the basement of a wonderful bookshop called Treadwell’s, in Tavistock Street, Covent Garden. Upstairs is Treadwell’s itself, selling used books on witchcraf, folklore, the occult, philosophy, travel writing and so on. The sort of place you expect to find a genuine book of spells. They also sell home-made soaps and spices, making it surely one of London’s best smelling bookshops. Downstairs is Offstage Books, specialising in Theatre and Film. The staff on both floors are the sort of independent shop workers who are so friendly, they often forget they’re working at all.

[Links:
http://www.treadwells-london.com
http://www.offstagebooks.com ]

I get the tube home with Mary Groom, a proud glasses-wearer who’s annoyed by a current ad campaign on the tube trains. It’s for contact lenses, aimed at women, and implying that women really shouldn’t wear glasses, not if they want men to fancy them. “I looked deep into her… specs.” That sort of thing.

It’s not the same the other way round: Jarvis Cocker, Graham Coxon, etc. Even David Tennant’s Dr Who is allowed to look good in specs. Maybe there needs to be a heavy Nana Mouskouri comeback.

From the Radio Times website:

TUESDAY 5th DECEMBER
BBC1 London & South East
10:35pm – 11:25pm

“Alan Yentob journeys into the world wide web to find out how it began, who’s out there, and where it’s taking us. He meets Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the web, and explores how Lee’s creativity has fuelled the creativity of millions of others – such as Dandy blogger Dickon Edwards and sex blogger Abby Lee, the hardcore members of the Arctic Monkeys message board, masked animator David Firth, and Ewan Macdonald, the young Scot who wrote the millionth entry in Wikipedia.”

So I’d better start writing entries more regularly, then. Maybe this is the slap up the arse I need. Or is it a kick in the face? I always get those confused.

Saw Dad last Friday in Suffolk. He seems pretty much his old self now, and is recovering slowly at home. The only lasting damage from the dreaded stroke is a lack of grip in his drawing hand, and severe fatigue, though he’s not bed bound. It seems entirely possible that these symptoms will improve too, though it has meant his 70th birthday bash I was to DJ at has had to be postponed till another time. I put all the songs he’d requested for this occasion onto one CD compilation, and included it with his birthday present. Which was a DVD of Miyasaki’s ‘Porco Rosso’, as he’d ogled it when we were last out shopping in London.

Happy 70th Birthday for tomorrow, Brian ‘Bib’ Edwards.

Let’s get my own ailment stuff out of the way, as it’s so boring when people bang on about their health. Forgive me. But I do feel that writing it down helps to purge it from the ever-babbling maelstrom of anxiety in my mind.

Have been feeling a bit sorry for myself lately, and thus have neglected my diary. The aches and pains are still there, despite my bodily fluids being tested for everything possible (all clear), along with two different checks for hernias, appendicitis and what they now euphemistically call Men’s Health Issues. At the Naughty Health clinic, I am poked and prodded in every known orifice, including the tiny one that you’re meant to wince at. I don’t wince, not really. I’ve never seen this as my body, just a kind of vessel I’ve been set down in and asked to deal with. I harbour lifelong fantasies of being entirely genderless between the legs, after all. I must try that as a chat-up line.

I’ve always felt genitals should be applied for as an optional extra, with proper licensing from the authorities. Like firearms. Indeed, the gun analogy goes further: they’re too often the source of trouble across the world, and in my mind are best restricted to the movies.

Yesterday, the GP gives me a full examination, finds nothing worrying, and just sends me away saying ‘It’s just one of these things. Come back in two weeks if the aches are still there.’

He didn’t even give me anything to deal with the pain. It really is bothering me. I may have to ask for some kind of painkiller at one of those new NHS drop-in clinics, or try a third GP. It can’t be right to be in pain whenever you sit down. Unless you’re in love. (Yes, I know, couldn’t resist it).

The only explanations that spring to my mind are nocturnal probing by extraterrestrial aliens, or that someone out there is sticking pins into a voodoo effigy of me, having previously secured clippings from my hair.

Which reminds me.

“Nice syrup!” shouted a van driver at me, on the Archway Road the other day.

[Cockney rhyming slang: syrup = syrup of figs = wig]

The response to which is of course, who would dare pay for a wig that looked like this?

And who would want to make a voodoo doll of me? Don’t answer that.

I’ll end on another couple of clippings, and promise to have another entry written tomorrow morning. I know there’s a lot of catching up to do.

These are reviews of The Decadent Handbook, to which I’ve contributed. Published by Dedalus Books, out now. White gift-book style hardback with a shiny gold spine, for obvious Christmas present compatibility. Also features Rowan Pelling, Vanora Bennett, Robert Irwin, Belle Du Jour, Michael Bywater, Salena Godden, Louise Welsh, John Moore, Xavior Roide, and Sebastian Horsley.

“The book is an antidote to bland modernity…It covers everything from decadent sex (we’re talking fornicating with lobsters) to decadent death styles, and includes contributions from contemporary libertines such as Dickon Edwards (Shane McGowan’s New Romantic Butler’, pictured left with pet lobster), to the godfathers of decadence – The Earl of Rochester. J.K.Huysmans and Oscar Wilde. Five stars.”
– The Leeds Guide Book of the Fortnight

“…’El Hombre Indelible’ by Dickon Edwards seems to send up rock journalism by accompanying Shane MacGowan of the Pogues to Tangier, but the piece has a wonky charm of its own, with sentences such as, ‘He re-reads Finnegans Wake every day.”
– Duncan Fallowell in The Daily Telegraph.

‘Wonky charm’, indeed.

Dear Creature (if you’re in London)

Last call for this.

Tomorrow night, right near Highgate tube. Oh, the RELIEF it exists!

THE BEAUTIFUL & DAMNED – NOVEMBER EDITION
Date: Thursday 23rd November
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 do please dress up.

More information on the News page.

Malcolm Ross plays the Boogaloo. He was once in the bands Josef K and Orange Juice, two favourites of mine, and tonight I’m delighted to see he still sings and plays guitar in that rather delicious and unique Postcard Records style. A cute geek croon over an effervescent, crunchy and zingy disco guitar. I feel Franz Ferdinand carry on at least one side of this tradition. Aesthetically too: like Alex Kapranos, Mr Ross still looks boyishly angular, with that David Byrne kind of mathematical cleanliness about him. Worth noting at a time when it’s rare to see men in bands who’ve even had a shave. He performs tracks from a new compilation of his solo stuff, ‘Wrong Place Wrong Time’, including a song that was written for the movie Chocolat.

In support is a rather impressively intense artist called Simon Breed, who vaguely resembles Howard Devoto. The Boogaloo actually shuts up and listens to him, so he clearly has something. Also on the bill is an immaculately-dressed keyboardist called Louis Vause, who plays a blissful lounge set. I’m told he also backs Graham Coxon.

Mr Ross’s musical cohort Edwyn Collins is rumoured to appear, but doesn’t. I presume he’s still on the mend from the dreaded haemorrhage.

The lady on the door looks for my name on the guest list:

Her: Oh, are you ‘Edwyn C’?

In my dreams.

An update from Mum. Dad’s back at home, recovering slowly. He’s lost the ability to grip in his left hand, and he’s a left-handed artist. But thankfully the other effects of the stroke have improved: he can walk, climb stairs, speak and see again. So we’re hoping for the best with his hand too.

Some cheering Victorian sarcasm from WS Gilbert, via John Julius Norwich’s ‘Christmas Cracker’.

This is the opening of his letter of complaint to the station-master at Baker Street, on the Metropolitan line:

Sir,

Saturday morning, although recurring at regular and well-foreseen intervals, always seems to take this railway by surprise.