Yesterday: Spend a nice day in the Reading Room. Enjoy some quotes in the museum literature about the space:

“Some are here because they hope these walls of books will deaden the drumming of the demon in their ears.”
-Louis MacNeice.

“That Happy Island in Bloomsbury”
– Matthew Arnold.

My favourite fictional references include, as ever, Three Men In A Boat. Jerome’s narrator goes to the Reading Room in order to look up the symptoms of a minor ailment. After consulting a medical encyclopaedia, he leaves the building a decrepit wreck, convinced he has everything from A-Z except housemaid’s knee.

I check my email in a nearby cafe during my self-imposed lunch break, and strike up a conversation with two men at a neighbouring table. It transpires they are organising the London International Cartoon Festival 2008, to be held in Museum Street. I ask whether they mean newspaper cartoons or the sort that move about on television. They say, “Both.”

Doubtless it’ll have something to do with the nearby Cartoon Gallery, a terrific little museum in Little Russell St that’s I’ve already visited twice this year. It covers everything from Hogarth and Gillray to Steve Bell and Giles, and includes the history of British comics too.

Speaking of which, I finish Alan Moore’s ‘Promethea’ comic series, which ends with a well-intentioned but rather preachy and dull hippy-ish rant about his interests in Kabbalah philosophy: how we’re all at one with the universe, and all part of the same cosmic consciousness, how time and death don’t really exist, and so on. I’m reminded of the children at the end of Philip Pullman’s trilogy suddenly spouting the author’s personal philosophy for living. And it doesn’t help that the best-known Kabbalah-inspired work in recent popular culture is Guy Ritchie’s Revolver, deemed the worst film of last year by rather too many critics.

Just give us the story, I say. Besides, ‘Sophie’s World’ does the ‘philosophy lesson as entertainment’ thing far better. ‘Promethea’ does have some terrific ideas and scenes, though, which is the sort of thing Mr Moore does best and should really stick to. At one point a lady FBI agent falls through the floor and out of the comic world itself, looking down on it from above and seeing the panel-by-panel structure that she’s been living in all this time. Ideas and beliefs should always be channelled into an entertaining linear narrative, I feel, because the reader needs a handrail. Otherwise you just get the feeling of being lectured, and there’s a reason why that term is often used pejoratively.

I go to Mark Moore’s Electrogogo club at Madame JoJo’s, mainly to see Gene Serene do a late night PA there. It’s been a while since I’ve gone out to a late-night club by myself, and the walk from Leicester Square is riddled with anxiety. Perhaps I’m in just an uneasier state at the moment, but I get such a sense of dread when going out by myself at night. I feel utterly exposed and at the mercy of the night’s louder, stronger denizens. It’s about 11.30pm, so I’m surrounded by drunken people exiting bars and venues, having already completed their night out. I’m stone cold sober, and all too aware of it.

None of your Promethea ‘we’re all part of the same consciousness’ here. Walking up Charing Cross Rd at night, I feel utterly at odds with every other person in this world. Stick THAT in your Kabbalah and smoke it, Mr Moore.

But once I’m at Madame JoJo’s, I calm down a bit. The door staff complement me on my appearance (white suit, a bit of make-up, cream scarf), and Mr Moore’s put me on the guest list. I feel safer, if not quite in my element.

I catch a bit of the band Coco Electrik, who have a rather full-on guitar/electro noise with a girl singer, and are pretty good at it. Meet a girl called Katy who has a feathered hat and says she remembers me from the Club Smashing days. Which is over ten years ago. Gene Serene is terrific as ever, her trademark streak of red across her raven hair still wonderfully intact, her performance full of attitude, but sincere rather than contrived for the music. She’s the Patti Smith of the London electropop scene. In one number, she sings while pretending to pluck the strings on a guitar-shaped shoulder bag.

I say hello to Ms Rhoda, pleased to meet someone I actually know, though tonight she seems rather caught up with her own romantic soap opera. Various attractively androgynous young things are there, all peacock hues and shifting genders, but the more I muse on THAT, the more depressed I get. If this were a movie I’d find someone I like who actually likes me back in the same degree, and we’d be together, and the credits would roll. But this is my increasingly desperate life. I know I’ve made my own narrow single bed and must lie in it, but I look on at the club, at the happy dancing attractive people, and think: it’s too late for me. I’ve had it.

After standing alone, stewing like this for too long, I leave the club and head for the bus stop. Bump into Grant The Club Promoter at the stop. He’s friendly and it’s good to always be able to find people to chat to like this, particularly when feeling fragile and exposed in the dark of Central London at 2am.

It’s not just my dwindling energy and dislike of nightbuses that puts me off going to other people’s clubs at the moment, it’s also the sense that I just don’t enjoy them as much as I used to. What are you supposed to DO there? I love dancing and chatting, but recently I have felt no inclination to dance while at a club, and have had enough of holding conversations that must be shouted directly into each others’ ears to overcome the noise. What I enjoy now more than ever is the company of friends, but preferably outside of crowds, clubs or concerts.

I feel I’ve forgotten how to have fun. Now there’s just a shroud of nerves and anxiety. I suppose I could see my GP about this, but I really don’t want to go back onto the dreaded paroxetine, or indeed any other kind of pill. So I’m reading and writing it out, in order to ride it out. Onwards and upwards, he typed with a heavy heart.

As Mr MacNeice says, I need to deaden the drumming of the demon in my ears. Which is where we came in.

In an attempt to impose a routine on my chaotic existence and get a steady quota of reading and writing done, I have taken to commuting to libraries every day. It’s important that the library hasn’t got a free wireless Internet service, otherwise I’d just be idly emailing and web-surfing my days away like I’ve been doing at home for so long. So the new plan is to get up at about 7 and go straight to the institution of choice, as soon as it opens. I divide the day into periods of ‘work’ and breaks. So I now enjoy the discipline of having a job, without the troublesome business of actually having a job. The larger public libraries of London are my office.

I’m a British Library card holder, but though I enjoy the current St Pancras building (when I have reason to use their collections), I far prefer to sit in its ghost-ridden former venue, the fantastic Reading Room of the British Museum. With its leather book rests and pen-hooks, glorious domed roof, and 99.9% perfect circular structure (4 cm off, I learn), it’s a fitting working environment for a penniless aesthete.

I’d also love to use that Groucho Club of libraries, The London Library in Piccadilly; but alas their membership remains beyond my means at £195 a year. It’s on my To Do list when I have the money. If I ever have the money.

The BM’s Reading Room is now the Museum’s public reference library. Anyone can wander in without registration or membership of any kind and sit down at one of the famous desks. There are rules to observe: be quiet, no eating or drinking, no photography, no mobile phones, don’t leave your bag unattended. Standard stuff, you’d have thought. Yet there are one or two absolute idiots who happily make calls on their mobiles here – without even whispering. Still, the place isn’t that much louder than the crowded Humanities rooms of the British Library proper.

I do wonder how some people can think a public library is a place to use their mobile phone, and glower to the point of threatening violence when they’re politely asked to desist. Is there no act more shockingly arrogant and uncaring of one’s fellow man in the field of modern etiquette? To not switch off your phone as you enter a library just beggars belief.

I did once hear of some kind of technological solution which broadcasts a mobile blocking signal across the building. If such a divine box of tricks exists, it must be installed at every library immediately.

A common source of sporadic income for the penurious wastrel is being interviewed for market research. Many of my friends have earned easy sums of cash this way, pocketing anything upwards of £30 for an hour’s slight inconvenience. All they have to do is go along to these little sessions and help some company improve their product by answering a few questions.

I would like to describe what exactly these events are like, but to date I have completely failed to even qualify past an initial selection process. This is my fifth attempt. I wonder if I can be officially designated as Not Normal Enough.

Their message to me:

“Thank you very much for your time and interest in taking part in our mobile phone research. Unfortunately I am contacting you to let you know that we won’t be able to use you on this occasion – I am sorry, but the client’s requirements were most specific and there was simply a mis-match between your answers and the profile they needed for the research.”

‘Simply a mis-match’. Another phrase for the gravestone.

I suppose I should feel pleased that I fail to fit in with their world of ticked boxes and firmly delineated socio-economic groups. But I’d rather lie that I’m a Target Market and have the money, than be honest and poor. Pity I’m such a bad liar. Or a bad actor.

Thing is, I wonder if it’s occurred to these firms that most people who apply for market research are not going to be a ‘target market’ de facto. They are absolutely desperate for money, and live hand to strawberry-lipsalved mouth. The people they do want to interview are too busy having their careers and 2.4 iPods to take any time out for research. I suspect that an awful lot of game playing goes on at these sessions, as the poverty-stricken interviewee pretends he earns £40,000 and is looking for the right type of mobile phone that protects and deodorises 24 hours a day, for the busy executive on the go. Because he’s worth it.

Then again, it probably wasn’t helpful that I asked the research people why they didn’t have a tick-box under ‘Gender’ for ‘Don’t Know’.

Fascinating interview in Metro the other day, with the always engaging comedian-turned-activist Mark Thomas. He’s a Green Party supporter, and like me often gets fools asking ‘Isn’t that a wasted vote, though?’

My response is usually to point out that no votes for the Greens are wasted: they’re all counted and recorded forever, and are USED to help the party know they’re doing the right thing, to indicate that people actually want something to change. An election is officially announced as a Notice Of Poll, because it’s THE poll. So to vote for one of the big parties purely because they’re more likely to win is like voting for your favourite film from a choice of two, where neither is really you. What’s the point of voting for something you don’t entirely like? A vote for Least Worst rather than what you really, actually want. THAT’S a wasted vote. As is not voting at all.

Mr Thomas puts it better:

MT: I’m a Green Party voter.
METRO: Doesn’t that seem like a wasted vote?
MT: Not unless you say what you want, you’re not gonna get it. I’m not gonna play the game of ‘let’s vote for who came second in the throat-cutting competition’.

Short notice, I know, but tonight at the Boogaloo there’s an ‘indie comedy night’, The OK Club. Nothing to do with me, but I feel obliged to publicise it as the venue’s Ambassador, and I’d like to see more live comedy at The Boogaloo. As long as it’s not the usual ‘trouble with airline food / difference between men and women’ drivel.

I’m also plugging this because Josie Long asked me to, and I think she’s fantastic. She was handing out flyers for this at the Latitude Festival.

So the aforementioned excellent comic Ms Long is hosting the night. Robin Ince is also mentioned as appearing, but given he’s also doing his solo Edinburgh show in Luton the same night, it’ll be interesting to see if he manages to do The Boogaloo as well. The Thameslink to Luton is very fast, but even so…

Anyway, I’ll be there.

Here’s the flyer details:
The OK Club: live comedy, music & DJs. Theme: “My Favourite Mix Tape”.
Thursday 27th July. Starts 7pm. £3 entry.
Venue: The Boogaloo, 312 Archway Rd, N6 5AT. Next to Highgate tube.
http://www.myspace.com/lesmarsh

The July Beautiful & Damned, last Thursday, starts slow but ends pretty well, with a decent amount of happy dancing people. The barbecue is cancelled, as the people organising it are convinced it’s going to rain that night. I go along with their fears and say fair enough, as I’m not the one who has to light the thing and serve the food. Of course, it then completely fails to rain. Still, if I’d been proven wrong in the other direction – the barbecue going ahead on my insistence and it raining – it would have looked far worse for me. A case of choosing the lesser of two evil outcomes.

Mr MacGowan & Ms Clarke turn up and dance. I’m wearing a white shirt, braces and one of the bow ties kindly donated by The General. Seems far too hot to wear a jacket, so I’ve gone to town with my hair by way of compensation, heavily slicking it down so it looks drawn onto my head in proper 1920s style. Mr MacGowan points out that HE’S happily wearing a black jacket, black shirt and tie, and is not bothered by the heat. “You’re a dandy lightweight!”

Meanwhile in Cardiff this week, sweltering skin-baring shoppers watch David Tennant running around in a full suit, as filming goes on for the Doctor Who Christmas Special. If both Doctor Who and Shane MacGowan can wear suit jackets in this heat, there’s really no reason I should let the side down. Besides, the Boogaloo is well air-conditioned these days.

Earlier, when I describe the night to Mr MacGowan, he replies, “So it’s a Fag Rock night, then?”

Well, who am I kidding. On one level, I suppose it is. But I like to think it can also be cool, or friendly, or strange, or camp, all depending on what angle you look at a club that plays Doris Day and showtunes next to David Bowie, Sinatra and the Divine Comedy.

This month we try out showing silent movies, projected upon a screen at one end of the room. It’s feared among the staff that people might just sit and watch the films rather than dance or chat to each other, but this proves ungrounded. I think if the film is black and white and comes with its own vintage caption cards (as opposed to subtitles), and is actually designed to be seen with music in the first place, people don’t find it off-putting to their dancing or conversation. The film illustrates the club’s music, rather than the other way around. Tonight we screen ‘Pandora’s Box’ and ‘Piccadilly’.

Also present: David Barnett & his mother, Anna S, Suzi L, Robin & Ellen, Emma Jackson, Anneliese, Ms Red’s Mr Ollie, Ms Hazel, Ms Mary. I meet a couple from Canada who are absolutely thrilled with the night.

El Records have accidentally sent me two review copies of their new Doris Day compilation, ‘Darling’, so it seems fitting to offer my spare CD as an extra prize for the best-dressed people there, in addition to the usual cocktails. The Canadian young lady is well turned-out in 20s garb, and I’m feeling ambassadorial, so the CD goes to her. I point out to her that El Records is a gem among UK indie labels. These days it puts out classy compilations and rare albums of classic artists, such as the Elizabeth Taylor In London album. None of your tacky TV-advertised compilations cashing in on a dusty old song used in some yoghurt commercial. El Records CDs are made to be seen with in public.

The cover photo of ‘Darling’ is typically unusual in the El Records way: an early shot of Doris looking unrecognisably young and girlishly sexy, as opposed to the more common later photos where she’s faux-virginal and camp. It’s Doris Day before she became ‘Doris Day’.

Mr O’Boyle suggests I play ‘Fiesta’ by the Pogues, and it works surprisingly well. I also spin both versions of ‘Beyond The Sea’, ie M. Trenet’s ‘La Mer’ as well as Mr Darin’s hit. During ‘One’ from ‘A Chorus Line’, Ms Red – who is an experienced musical actress as well as my fellow DJ – performs a proper leg-kicking dance with her boyfriend Mr Ollie. People applaud.

Noel Coward’s ‘The Party’s Over’ makes a pretty good closer, but I’m asked for a DJ encore. Cue yet more selections from ‘Bugsy Malone’, ending with Doris Day’s ‘Secret Love’. Emma J tells me she knows all the words to ‘Deadwood Stage’ from ‘Calamity Jane’, and promptly recites them to me on the spot. The whole song.

I’m disappointed that there’s many men in attendance who haven’t bothered to dress up at ALL tonight, but Ms Lou tells me the bar takings are the highest for a B&D night so far, and I like to keep the venue happy. It’s a dress recommendation, not a dress code enforced on the door. I don’t want to turn casually-dressed people away if they’re not giving the dressed-up dandies any trouble.

Still, I do wish I could convince more men to make the effort in their attire. I never have any trouble getting women to dress up. I suppose I could literally shout at the offending gentlemen like Matthew G does at ‘Kash Point’ (“How DARE you come to MY club in JEANS and a T-SHIRT! How DARE you!”). But no, that be rather out of character.

I do tell them off when they ask for requests, though. Albeit with a harmless smirk.

“Got any Etta James?”
“I’ll tell you when your clothes are worthy of an answer.”

Next month’s Beautiful & Damned is on Thursday August 17th. For the silent movies, I’ll screen ‘Metropolis’ and something with Ms Garbo, I think.

Idle TV advert spotting.

MFI Sale – music by Suede. ‘She’s In Fashion’, ho ho.

Hotpoint washing machines – music by Stina Nordenstam. Well, it’s actually Vangelis featuring Ms Nordenstam. I suppose even eccentric, reclusive, ethereal Swedish singers have to use washing machines.

Transport For London: Oyster Card. A fast-paced diary entry of a young man’s adventures, with equally speeded-up narration. I’m convinced this is a direct steal from the recent movie ‘The Rules Of Attraction’, where one typically self-centred character recounts his European holiday adventures in a similar montage manner. The movie’s sequence is truly a feat of jaw-dropping editing: months of work compacted into minutes.

“Killed By A Bouncy Castle” screams the front pages of a few newspapers today.

I’m not sure which I’m more appalled by: the horrific, Ian McEwan-like event itself; or the fact that it’s considered to be more newsworthy than the Israeli-Lebanon crisis. Though I can see the tabloid editors’ point: the mass killing of innocents in the Middle East is a more depressingly common story than the surreal terror of this unlikely new accident.

Or that the artist Maurice Agis’s signature ‘Dreamspace’ installation, developed over a lifetime through various incarnations, has not only received its zenith of publicity as a result of this tragedy – but to add insult to actual injury, they’re calling it a bouncy castle. That most tacky of summer attractions.

Thousands of people who have visited Mr Agis’s installations over the decades – which were all based on the same sort of ‘colour maze’ theme – know that Dreamspace is not only far from being a simple ‘bouncy castle’, but is part of a famous, enduring and popular series of artworks.

I recall his previous, more simple installations, called “Colourspace”. One of them turned up at the Puffin Show at the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, in 1981. I visited it a few times later, never tiring of wandering around the peaceful, ambient landspace of this unique multicoloured labyrinth. Colourspace was a regular feature of London summers, pitched at festivals or in the grounds of museums.

In the early 90s, the band Pulp filmed their ‘Lipgloss’ video inside one of the Colourspaces. It’s on You Tube, naturally. When I first saw the video, I recognised Mr Agis’s work then, as I do now, despite the ‘bouncy castle’ tag.

The BBC news site has ominous amateur camera footage of the accident – the enormous maze inverting into the sky, folding, toppling. Dreamspace: The Pop Art Hindenburg.

Of all the dreary polls and games bored people like to post on the Web, my least favourite is probably ‘Celeb Haikus’. It’s a version of those “Spotted!” pages in magazines like Heat, where readers are encouraged to send it sightings of celebrities.

“Dale Winton, in a road”
“Sue Pollard, buying things in a shop”.

That’s not an anecdote or even proper gossip. It’s just filling space and encouraging banality for its own sake, not to mention consolidating the notion of celebrity prostration in a godless void. It’d only be justifiable if this yen for so-called celebrity surveillance was of the neighbourhood watch persuasion:

“Spotted! Michael Parkinson, seen washing human entrails from his hands, laughing.”
“Spotted! Bruce Forsyth, killing a boy.”

Haikus have always annoyed me too; at school I regarded them as the quadratic equations of poetry. Cheap rules, cheap aftertaste. So here’s the Celeb Haiku to end them all, he said with foolish optimism.

“Spotted!” Shaftesbury Ave
Mark Frith, Editor, Heat Mag
Not spotted: his soul

Actually, I should confess I rather like the glossy graphics and fun attitude of Heat Magazine. And the TV section is pretty good. It’s just the encouragement of spying upon celebrities as a kind of national sport that irks me.

I’m hearing conversations in the background I could do something about.

Press Tent Girl: (to colleague at desk) “Do you remember Frank Sidebottom?”

(blank response from colleague)

PTG: (to other PR person) Do YOU remember Frank Sidebottom?

Them: Who?

I can’t keep quiet any longer. I turn around.

DE: (with an attempt at a helpful smile) Yes, I do. He’s still very much going. He played the Kentish Town Bull & Gate recently.

Pause. The girl and her colleagues stare back at me with a look suggesting “Who asked you, blondie? Mind your own business”.

I don’t know. It’s so hard hearing a conversation in the background where someone wonders about X, and you know you can go over to them and help them with the enquiry, resolving their wonderings with an answer. But they don’t want to hear your stranger’s Yes, I Know. They want to hear the No, I Don’t Know from their friends.

It’s the history of warfare in a nutshell.

Oh, crumbs, now I’m hearing:

PR Boy: Who’s Tom Verlaine?
PR Girl: I’m not sure.

I am doing my best to remain silent.

Earlier, a girl who was taking photographs for a magazine asked me who Nicky Wire was. I helpfully enlightened her.

Photo girl: How come you know all this stuff?
DE: (speechless)

There MUST be a way of getting paid for knowing what people with jobs in the music industry don’t know, but frankly should. It’s a clear case of supply and demand. And yet I can’t make the connection.