The Moroccan hotel manager looks concerned.

‘Votre ami: il est malade? Vous voulez un docteur?’

‘Non, merci. Il est bien. Vraiment. Il est souvent comme ca. C’est de rien. Alors, c’est de rien pour lui.’

**********

An internet cafe, Blvd Pasteur, Tangier, December 2005.

This is going to take some getting used to, the fake-blond man thinks. And some time to type.

The fake-blond man, feeling like the world’s most naive Englishman, which he very possibly is, struggles slowly with the unfamiliar computer keyboard. Where’s the button for the full-stop? Oh, up there, press and hold SHIFT plus the semi-colon key. Must be less used here. The temptation to just type away as one would on a – he stops himself saying ‘normal’ – British keyboard is overwhelming. He types his own name without looking at his fingers:

Dickon Edaqrds;

In Tangiers, most people speak Moroccan Arabic, then maybe French or Spanish in that order. Putting it very nicely indeed, his French isn’t too good, and his Spanish and Arabic is non-existent. His travelling companion and employer has been here before and can speak a bit of Spanish, though on some days he barely speaks at all. Today the friend is confined to his hotel room, sleeping, reading, smoking and drinking. Mostly sleeping and drinking. The unitiated are often distressed, even upset to see him like this, but the fake-blond man is used to it. The Irishman may no longer be a heroin addict, but he’s still a gin and tonic and cigarettes junkie. To stop those, he says, would kill him.

Besides, as the Toothless Junkie told his Toothsome Secretary the previous day, ‘I didn’t come here to wake up.’ And he giggles his rattlesnake giggle: ‘KKkksshhhhhhhh.’

The friend, who has treated the Englishman to an impromptu week’s paid holiday here, is a famous Irish rock star. Or at least, famous to those who have heard of him. In Tangier, only what really matters really matters. People here earn a tiny fraction of the average Englishman’s wage, even a tiny fraction of the non-average Englishman’s wage, like the fake-blond man. He may be a housed beggar in his home country, but here he has the spending power of a minor aristrocrat. Which is what he always thought he was anyway. He feels wealthy, vulnerable and lost, but doesn’t mind too much. This is Tangier, city of dreams according to all of those dead literary hooligans connected with the city, whom he feels connected to himself: Paul and Jane Bowles, William S Burroughs, Jack Kerouc, Truman Capote and all their decadent pals.

What must the locals think of this pair? The nervous fake-blond younger Englishman in the white suit is older than he looks, but mainly because he hasn’t really begun to live. The older man with black hair in the big black coat gets annoyed when hearing himself referred to as English or American (‘I’m Irish! Irish!’); he looks and acts like he’s lived several dozens of lives. English and Irish; White Suit and Black Coat; Yin and Yang; Innocence and Experience.

Tangier is another planet, even more so than Tokyo. Which is perhaps why so many Western science fiction movies and TV, from Star Trek to Star Wars to Serenity, imagine that most settlements on other planets look like Tangier. People in scarfs, cowls and hoods mingling with the modern, ululating howls from exotic temples, streets which are really one-person corridors in buildings, desert and ocean vistas around the corner, drugs and street hustlers, the bizarre and the bizaars; indecipherable but beautiful alphabets, indecipherable but beautiful everything.

The Englishman sniffs away at the beginning of a cold, and stops typing in order to find a piece of tissue with which to blow his nose. Is there ‘une Kleenex’ pres d’ici? The place does have a toilet, but no toilet paper. He asks for some, and they smile and laugh as if this is an entirely unreasonable demand to make. You buy your own, you bring your own. He does have a pocket handkerchief, but it is only for show. Serves him right, really.

The Englishman decides to check his email. To be continued. He will be back in London on Tuesday. He has to rehearse with his band, just as his employer has to rehearse with his. Both men are known, if known musically at all, for their lyrics. One is playing at the Camden Purple Turtle, the other is headlining Brixton Academy.

Till then, he feels a little like the butler at the end of Citizen Kane.

A Fosca rehearsal for the band’s first UK gig in 2 years goes well, with my brother Tom finally playing in a band with me after all these years. Our parents are happy about this, needless to say, and I hope the fans are too. He’s one of the best musicians I’ve worked with, regardless. New song practiced: “In-Joke For One”.

***

I now have a part-time job of sorts, in my capacity as Shane MacGowan and Victoria Clarke’s sporadic Gentleman Secretary and Impersonal Personal Assistant. Victoria is planning a new TV and book project where the pair chat to various famous names about the pursuit of happiness. They’ve employed me to send out her proposal-cum-invitation to all the illustrious names on their list, and Shane has bought me my own little phone and fax machine. Within minutes of setting it up, I receive two calls from an Indian call centre trying to sell me deals on One-Tel mobiles.

Although I bridle when referred to as the Pogues singer’s ‘New Romantic Butler’, despite looking exactly like one, yesterday he did ask me to fetch his socks from the third drawer.

Last night – to see Bob Dylan at the Brixton Academy with Mr MacGowan, Ms Clarke, and Ms Clarke’s charming sister Jo. Somehow, we arrive a bit late and apparently annoy family members of Bryan Ferry by unknowingly sitting in their seats while they’re in the bar or something. I consider making some remark about Otis Ferry invading the House of Commons, and that what goes around comes around, but think better of it. In case they set the hounds on us.

Shane: Dickon, do you want to get the drinks in? Hang on… Bryan!

Bryan Ferry: …. (visibly peeved with us and trying to watch the concert)

Shane: Oh… Bryan Ferry doesn’t want a drink.

End up being moved from a seat next to either Neil Tennant or a Ferry relative who looks like Neil Tennant, to a seat next to the singer from the Stereophonics. Fairly safe to say we’re not mutual fans of each other’s music, but he seems a nice boy and is rather handsome in the flesh. Unless it was just someone who looked like the singer from the Stereophonics. I could go on like this. I myself am just someone who looks like Dickon Edwards. And writes and speaks like him. I keep thinking of that Alan Bennett quote from the documentary where he’s sitting for a portrait.

“When people say, ‘just be yourself’. What they really mean is: imitate yourself.”

I suppose Mr Stereophonics and I at least agree on Mr Dylan, who obligingly does rather good versions of Like A Rolling Stone and All Along The Watchtower, dressed in a fantastic red and black suit and hat. I spy the Oscar for his song in The Wonder Boys propped up on an amp nearby.

*****
Previously – to the Boogaloo for a magazine launch party. Except there’s a bit of a problem: no magazine. Due to some publishing mishap, State Of Play, a new music publication impressively featuring the Fire Engines on the cover, has no physical state to play with. But the party goes ahead anyway. This is very London – a launch party without the launch.

Someone writes to say they spotted me in a video for the band Readers Wifes (sic), looking very ‘Quentin Warhol’.

This would be the consequence of an afternoon spent in a South London bar earlier this year. I was part of an audience watching the group mime their song over and over again. No payment for this appearance: I think I attended the shoot partly because I heard there’d be free drink (which turned out to be just one free drink), and partly because I approve of the band. Tie-wearing male DJs in heavy make-up and tranny wigs who play the likes of Paul McCartney’s Coming Up at their club, Duckie. One of their songs has lyrics specially written by Julie Burchill.

I’ve not seen the video myself, but sometimes that’s the way things should be. A memory springs to mind of a BBC make-up girl I met a few years ago. Discussing my looks, I told her one reason I must never get fat is so I’m never confused with Boris Johnson.

‘Who’s that?’
‘You know, the buffoonish white-haired Tory politician, often on Have I Got News For You.’
‘Oh, I never watch TV.’
‘Really?’
‘No. I’m too busy making it.’

On the bus from Muswell Hill to Highgate, a large black woman with gappy, protruding teeth gets on, talking constantly, though it quickly becomes evident she’s by herself and is not talking to anyone in particular. Her utterances are a series of repeated phrases spat at each and every passenger in rotation, her head like an automatic lawn sprinkler.

‘You – you are all responsible. How dare you put children in care! You are all doing it. You killed my baby. You! You put children in care! Killed my baby. You all do it.’

Then she pauses, smiles sweetly at a man sitting near me, flutters her eyelids and asks him if he likes her necklace. He mumbles something minimal and kind. A moment later, she’s back with the shouted accusations, with no exceptions. The man is just one of Them once more.

I sit there impassively, trying hard to ignore the hard to ignore. But even this non-expression screams a certain passion. It’s the very English desire of just wanting to reach one’s destination without incident.

Back from Radlett with Tom E, mixing the first few songs for the new Fosca album. One lesson learned: it’s all very well putting down 47 separate instruments on a song (I’ve Agreed To Something I Shouldn’t Have), but mixing the thing takes about 47 times longer. By the time you’ve finalised the correct treatment of Hank Marviny Guitar #3, you’ve forgotten all about Kevin Shieldsy Guitar or Jimi Hendrixy Guitar or Juno 6 Synth Pretending To Be A Glockenspiel #9.

The simplest song of the batch, Kim, contains more or less the same amount of instruments as the version we’ve been playing live, albeit with Tom playing my guitar parts due to my – as Mr Bowie says on the back cover of Hunky Dory – inability. Kim was the fastest to mix and, strangely, sounds the most impressive. It must be that we’ve given the song room to breathe.

It doesn’t help that some days I turn up to the studio telling Tom “make it sound like Phil Spector”, while on other days I say, “make it sound like Nico’s solo albums.”

Nico produced by Spector? Hmm. I suppose that’s more or less the Spector-produced Leonard Cohen album, Death Of A Ladies’ Man. Which Mr S and Mr C all but disowned.

I, however, rather like it.

The first diary entry in the new format. I am indebted to Neil Scott of Noble Savage Web Design, for creating a brand new DE website incorporating the diary safely within its own virtual bosom. There’s still some minor tinkering to do on the archived diary entries, which stretch back to 1997, but otherwise the new website goes ‘live’ today.

Welcome, then, to the New Martian Chronicles. Do take a look around.

If you know about RSS feeds, use the little orange Atom and XML boxes to the right to be alerted to future diary entries.

If you’re a LiveJournal user, you can add the new diary to your Friends page with this link.

At Mr Scott’s suggestion, there’s some discreet Google adverts lurking at the bottom of individual diary entry pages. This is in the vague hope of paying off the site costs. I rather like the look of them, actually. The adverts are automatically selected to fit with the content of each diary entry. So when I moan on about my dentist experiences, this results in a small text ad for a tooth whitening service. Far from compromising the style of the diary, I equate these with the adverts found at the back of old 1940s Penguin paperbacks for Craven A cigarettes. ‘The Doctor’s Choice’.

So, after three years, I bid the LiveJournal ‘blogging’ community goodbye as an active member, though I’ll keep my account there to read the diaries of others. It is an excellent system, arguably bringing the likeminded but otherwise isolated together better than any other set-up involving computers and phone lines. But I have to conclude it’s not really the place for my diary anymore. As soon as I feel I’ve become part of a club, I feel I’m at its mercy. I can be pigeonholed, written off, explained away. That won’t do. A certain distancing is a healthier option.

I hasten to add I feel this only applies to myself. I remain a voracious reader of other people’s published diaries, whether they’re by Virginia Woolf (A Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. Pimlico Books, 1997) or a teenage girl from darkest Middle America waxing lyrical about her love life to Internet Friends (which often means complete strangers) while hiding behind a photo of a kitten.

But once I’d turned off the public comments function on my own diary a few months ago, I felt I was missing the point of the whole LJ structure. With LiveJournal, a diary entry is encouraged to become the opening of a debate, a chat, an exchanging of information, or a coconut shy. All very well, but I started the diary in 1997 to give recent thoughts and events a permanence. Marking Time before Time marks me. With a public comments box, the permanence is gone, and the entry will never be finished. There, I want to say as I put down my pen, that’s an end to it. If further thoughts spring forth and demand to be chronicled in the same place, I feel happier they should be my own, chronicled as and when I see fit. Perhaps in later entries, perhaps not at all.

I’m reminded of what Katherine Mansfield wrote in her own diary about living alone in London in 1917, “If I find a hair upon my bread and honey – at any rate it is my own.”

If I wasn’t going to use the comments function, I concluded, I might as well not be on LJ at all. Once Mr Scott assured me a stand-alone diary was as easy to update as a community blog, the move was inevitable.

Apart from anything else, my mother reads the diary now. And my aunt. So I feel, as Mr Nelson felt 200 years ago this week, that this increasingly diverse nation of readers expects me to do my duty. To present them with a fresh diary that doesn’t favour users of particular system above non-users. A diary tailored for readers who may not want to go anywhere else on the Web. That’s the difference between a blog and an online diary. Blogs point outwards, encouraging the reader to look elsewhere, look away. Diaries point only within. Blogs are surface signposts; diaries are deeper destinations. To this extent, I’ve banned myself from putting links in future diary entries.

My mother must be protected from people at a loose end babbling on about the new Doctor Who to anyone who will listen. She gets enough of that at home with my father.

A Ms Brandi from Los Angeles sends me a drawing.

For reasons best known to herself, she feels compelled to depict me in a suspicious-looking hot air balloon.

I write, driven to distraction, in every sense, by recent dental work. I’ve had a porcelain veneer fitted to one of my upper front teeth, to bring it into alignment with the others. It rather feels someone’s rammed a piece of a sink into my face. Which is exactly what it is, of course. The tooth looks much better, but I’m not fully ready to judge until its neighbour is equally dressed in porcelain. For this other front tooth, a new crown was to be fitted at the same time as the veneer, but the dentist thought it wasn’t fitting properly, and sent it back to the mysterious lab that forged it for a replacement.

I’m grateful that she takes this trouble over getting it right, but am irritated that I have to spend an unexpected 2 and a half weeks with a rather gappy temporary affair in its place. And the more I think about it, the more I’m starting to feel unhappy with the veneer. Is it really better? Does it really fit? Can I smile in the same way I did before? Has it made things worse? Should I see yet another dentist about it? The more I anguish over this, the less I can think straight about it.

Unlike doctors, I never seem to fully trust dentists, even the ones I like. I can’t stop thinking about the incongruously large amounts of money asked for at every turn. I view lawyers with the same suspicion.

This is why I could never work in such fields myself. At the moment of telling the patient or client how much my services are going to cost, I would find it impossible not to laugh out loud.

===

The Quentin Crisp evening went well. At my suggestion, Xavior put a small charge on the door this time – less than half the cost of a drink from the bar. This was purely for crowd control, and made all the difference. We performed to those who wanted to see us, rather than those who were just drinking. People like to pay for things – especially if the things are cheap. And once they do, they tend to want to see what they’ve paid for rather than talk over it.

It turned out to be the first time I’ve performed spoken word and felt I actually did okay. It helped that the material was the work of someone else, so I thank Mr Crisp from beyond the grave. One of my recitals of Crisperanto occurred right at the end, when the kind fellow on door had retired for the night. Naturally, with no gate-keeping in place, a drunk fool immediately strode in and pulled up a chair right by the stage. He started to have a go at me, and to everyone’s surprise (not least my own) I stopped my reading, glowered at him and hissed slowly, carefully, and in the most serious tone I’ve spoken in my life:

“Please respect me. And I will respect you afterwards.”

I have no idea where that came from, or even quite what it means, but it does mark the first time I’ve spoken back to anyone in my life, to their face. A date for the diary indeed. And about time too, some might say.

It helped that the next line from Mr Crisp’s philosophy was:

“Every day, when you wake up, you should say to yourself, preferably out aloud:

‘OTHER PEOPLE ARE A MISTAKE!'”

At which I paused and stared directly at the heckler for a little too long. The audience laughed and applauded. It seemed they were on my side, not his.

This was my first inkling of the feeling a stand-up comedian must get when he wins such battles in the field of their profession. And they ARE battles. I now realise such comedians must have a pugilist instinct in them, far more so than an actor. If they lose such battles, they ‘die’ on stage.

I used to think that was a rather over the top expression, but now I understand what it means only too well. Last Friday, at last, I managed to live.

I’m sitting at home with my hair wrapped in the usual polythene hood holding my latest application of cheap purple peroxide. Once more unto the bleach, dear friends.

Someone asked me if I’ve developed any grey hairs yet, but their guess is as good as mine. I’m not too interested in properly growing out the blond to find out, just as I’ve never been interested in not shaving to see what a beard would look like. My face is more or less fixed for life.

Watching a video of the movie Resident Alien, the feature-length documentary about Quentin Crisp in New York circa 1989. This is in preparation for a Crisp-themed event at the Hanky Panky Cabaret tomorrow evening. The occasion has the official blessing of Phillip Ward, the executor of the Crisp estate, and I intend to perform some of the great man’s many comforting words of wisdom.

My main concern is that the audience will shut up and listen. Holding what is essentially a spoken word evening in a cabaret bar, on a Friday night, and in the now fashionable Hoxton area, runs the risk of attracting people who are only present to have a drink. They may well not care for whatever’s going on onstage and will assume it’s okay to chat loudly among themselves just like any other bar.

It’s the wrong kind of drunkenness – where alcohol bevels down any individuality until the crowd becomes one cliched, amorphous chattering idiot-creature with many heads. Turning what should be a special event into any other bar in London. Which is rather missing the point. I vividly recall one book event at the Boogaloo where the author Joolz Denby stopped her reading to directly address those chatting away at the same time.

“Hey – If you want to have a drink and a loud chat,” she spat at some volume, “I believe other London pubs are available. I am only performing in this pub, nowhere else. So please either shut up, or go elsewhere.”

Though she used rather more f-words than that.

I was terribly impressed, and wish I had the same nerve when I take to the stage.

There’s a scene in The Naked Civil Servant that springs to mind. It’s an evening in the 1930s, and a bunch of flat capped ‘roughs’ invade the queers’ Compton Street cafe, looking for trouble. Or rather looking for fun, which translates as trouble for those on the receiving end.

ROUGH: (aggressive, intimidating) You’re going to buy us a cup of tea, aren’t you darlin?

THE YOUNG QUENTIN CRISP: (smiling, one hand on hip, going on the camp as defensive) I thought it was for the gentleman to buy the drinks.

ROUGH: Well, we’re not gentlemen, see. We come from ‘oxton.

In 2005, this gets a knowing laugh. Hoxton is now a haunt for loud club-going media types, including plenty of metrosexuals and indeed fashion-following homosexuals. And yet one could say they are still the town roughs, travelling in packs to gigs and cabarets and chatting loudly over the performance about their high incomes, ‘edgy’ advertising campaigns or their tacky reality TV pilots. The meek individualists of London, whatever team they play for, are at their mercy.

William writes:

Hi Dickon. I don’t know whether you’ve been informed, but your livejournal is the Liverpool Echo Blog of the Day.

Thank you, Ms Liverpool Echo.

I’m discussing Claudia Andrei’s black and white cemetery photos of myself with Mr Scott, with a view to creating an appropriately stylish new DE website.

Comparing my ‘natural’ poses with those of silent movie stars, Mr Scott alerts me to a web site of fantastic movie posters from the 20s and 30s. Stunning inked renditions of wistful starlets and their slick leading men proposing to them in coin-like profiles.

In a particularly spooky two-tone affair for The Redeeming Sin, Dolores Costello in 1929 looks exactly the way her granddaughter Drew Barrymore looks in 2005.

From the poster, the movie looks like a formulaic melodrama churned out at the time, just as Ms Drew churns out formulaic fluff herself, with the exception of the astoundingly unique Donnie Darko.

Yet a poster for even the most disposable and predictable feature from the 20s still retains a certain class and sense of wonder lacking from the pedestrian counterparts of today. Perhaps in 80 years’ time, the posters for 50 First Dates and Never Been Kissed will take on a equally sophisticated and chic quality. And the bulk of Mr Adam Sandler’s work will finally make sense.

I’m horrified and yet secretly impressed by the way Dolores Costello’s career ended. Years of industrial-strength pioneering movie make-up made the skin on her cheeks literally rot away.