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.

Going through stacks of CDs, selling and recycling, trying to live more in the present and less surrounded by the spoils – or the detritus – of the past. I use the rule that if I haven’t felt the hem of a CD for a year, it has to go. I reason to myself that if I really like a song, I should know it so well that I can play it in my mind any time I want. So I don’t even need to hang onto albums I actually like. In theory. Some albums I say fond farewells to, some I hurl out with disgust and embarrassment.

In the booklet for a 20th anniversary Style Council compilation, Paul Weller comments on how he feels about the songs with the benefit (or detriment) of two decades’ hindsight.

“It Just Came To Pieces In My Hands is about how ego can be more destructive than drink or drugs. Ego takes you away from what you should be really going for, gets you sidetracked.”

All very laudable. Deliciously, he then adds:

“You don’t hear lyrics like that these days.”

To the Wolseley Restaurant on Piccadilly for the third Sunday in a row. This is Mr Xavior Roide’s idea – a gathering of some of his bohemian friends and regulars from his Hanky Panky Cabaret event. The Wolseley is a very stylish but affordable place to take afternoon tea. Impossibly high ceilings, black Chinese panelled doors, well-dressed and friendly staff, not too touristy yet not too snobbish either. It may not have the reputation of The Ritz or Fortnum and Masons, but it suits us to a, well, to a tea.

We tend to get a nice round table in the corner, so naturally we all imagine we’re taking up where Ms Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin Hotel left off, passing around books, reading aloud, ruminating archly on Life and Love while the scones and Earl Grey are dispatched. Present are myself (the oldest person), Mr Roide (who I think is about 29 but very little is known about him at all), then some energetic young people who I tend to look upon as my club-going stunt doubles: Ms Lucinda Godwin, Ms Hazel Barkworth, Mr Laurence Gullo. There’s also Ms Alison (a fellow American friend of Mr Gullo’s), and today a Mr Rodrigo, who tells us he once made hats for Brazilian royalty. He also recently made a ten minute film of a dead sparrow decaying in his garden, which we all watched at the cabaret last Friday. This was in between the various musical acts and Mr Ernesto, a poet who takes all his clothes off while reciting his verse.

I’ve seen Ernesto’s act so many times now, I fear I am better acquainted with his genitals than I am with my own.

Books passed around at the Wolseley today include Ms Barkworth’s copy of Joan Collins’s My Secrets, an autobiography with an excellent section on make-up tips. Blusher is underrated, she maintains. I’ve come with a fascinating tome sent to me out of the blue by a young lady in Paris called Ms Sheridan Quaint. It’s Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840 – 1918, by David Deitcher. The text is essentially about the art of speculation upon uncaptioned photographs. Specifically, ancient sepia images of male friends posing affectionately together. The onlooker has to imagine the backstory themselves. Fascinating in its own right, but also useful for inspiring future stories.

I do like the phrase “Men Together”.

===

Today I have an email interview from an Italian woman, concerning Fosca. I always agree to interviews, and love nothing more than talking about myself at length. Even so, I sometimes have to decline a question if I feel it does little favour to me, however I respond.

Sample question: “Which one of these sentences would irk you more?”

I brace myself and read on.

“(a) You sound like Pulp.
(b) You sound out of tune.
(c) You sound not particularly 2005”

Ronnie Barker dies.

I light four candles.

(and expect the same joke to have already been made elsewhere. I check. Yes, yes it has.)

To the Prince Charles Cinema, for a live DVD-style commentary-screening of The League Of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse. It’s just like watching a DVD with the audio commentary on, except the actors are in the front row of the cinema with radio mics. It’s a strange event, but then the Prince Charles is a cinema famed for its umpteen ‘singalong or shout-along’ screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and more lately Singalong The Sound Of Music, where the audience are provided with their own puppet nuns.

One might imagine a ‘shout-a-long’ event for other films. For Revenge Of The Sith, the entire audience could scream throughout “please hurry up and turn into Darth Vader so we can all go home and get on with our lives.”

Here, there’s no puppet nuns given out. But I do get two free drinks. A ‘glass’ of wine turns out to be a generous beaker filled almost to the brim, so I am more than happy. Cheers to the League Of Gentlemen.

What most intrigues me about the LOG is how they’re unashamedly self-mythologising when chatting about their own work. Like the makers of Spaced and Shaun Of The Dead, they are obsessive fans who create obsessive fans. It’s narcissistic (an adjective I only ever use as a compliment) and deliberately self-aware cult entertainment. It knowingly feeds and encourages a following of disciples, because the makers themselves are the same sponge-like fan of culture, popular and highbrow. During the live commentary, they allude to anything from The Shining to Sartre’s No Exit to Ms Fern Britton’s weight.

Hearing them ramble on for 90 minutes over their own movie is perfectly engaging and enjoyable, as I generally enjoy DVD commentaries anyway. In my more perverse moods, I find comedy commentaries can be funnier or more interesting than whatever’s being commented upon. As for the actual LOG movie, it’s not entirely my cup of tea all the way through, and I would never place it in a time capsule as representative of the LOG at their best (for me, that would be a selection of episodes from the TV series). But I do find many of the jokes genuinely amusing, many of its ideas genuinely inspired. He said ungraciously, sipping on their free wine.

I suppose a live commentary has the added frisson not just of playing to an audience, but also being free of any editing for libel. Not that I can recall any salacious gossip from the evening.

An audience also provides a quick way of testing the best jokes – or rather the jokes that work best even when talked over. Going by this crowd, the movie’s clear highlight is the ejaculating-giraffe scene towards the beginning. Further references to it solicit an equally fulsome response. “Calm down. We don’t want to milk the giraffe… Oh, I didn’t mean that, either…”

There’s another big laugh when they mention an idea for a spin-off sitcom featuring Herr Lipp as a plumber: ‘Lipp Sinks’. They’re joking, which is a shame given the paucity of real spin-offs which do get made, like Joey or The Green Green Grass. Sitcoms where you have to spot the joke in Episode Four.

As audience members take their seats before the screening, I hear something which instantly reminds me I’m in fanbase territory. People are loudly swapping the addresses of websites.

The movie DVD’s poster campaign relies upon two favourites from the TV series: Papa Lazarou and the ‘Local Shop’. This gives rather a false impression, as both are barely in the movie at all. Seems a bit mercenary, given the film is about the LOG trying to move away from their past TV success. But perhaps that’s the point of the ad.

Place: Glam-ou-rama Presents Club Bohemia at the Buffalo Bar, Highbury Corner, London.
Event: Night Of A Thousand Ziggys / Performances by John Howard and Shard / Simon Price’s Birthday
Date: London September 24th 2005.
Photographer: Brian David Stevens.
Other nocturnal peacocks frozen in time here.

Yesterday: to the Kafka-esque Benefits Agency building in Euston, to prove I’m still eligible for the government’s kindness and am not pulling a fast one. It’s where you have to sum up and justify your entire life. This is who I am, you say, this is what I feel my vocation is, I haven’t managed to make a living from it. So please can Mother Government not cut off her paltry if starvation-preventing payments? No problem for me, as I’ve done this so many times before. Which IS the problem.

How do I feel at the age of 34?

I notice things I didn’t before. Never mind policemen getting younger; I feel there’s more young people around full stop. And I think I resent them for being young. When really I’m resenting myself for not feeling older in any other sense than not having died yet. And for not having attained what I feel should be the position of a 34-year-old. There are compensations for being 34. It’s just that I don’t have them.

I don’t know many other 34-year-olds. I suspect this is because the average 34-year-old doesn’t want to know me. When I do keep company, I find it tends to be with those a few years younger. Or older people who are a bit unconventional. Actually, I need to find a few more of those. One can only care about the love lives of young people so far – before they call the police.

Not that I’m ungrateful for the company and readership of the young. It’s just that I worry if they’ll still be about when they’re 34.

Cut to the next decade, and a typical 34 Year Old. “Oh, Dickon Edwards! I remember him. But I’m over that phase now. Sorry, I have to go, we couldn’t get an i-Babysitter for tonight…”

So, 34 and still living on state benefits. Which are never enough for ‘living’ in any real sense of the word. Added to which I’m in debt, with the bank charging me £35 this week for a bounced rent cheque, due to me not paying close enough attention to my budget. £35 is half my weekly income. I had to laugh.

I look around and see people of my own age or younger who are so much further ahead in life. I look at adverts in the press for flats and houses and again, I can only laugh. It’s the sums written down. Thousands of pounds, hundreds of thousands of pounds, millions of pounds. I wonder what’s it like to have that sort of money. What must it be like to have savings? What must it be like to NOT rent a furnished bedsit on housing benefit forever? Will I ever know? I’ve been like this for years now. No signs of changing. Just signs of ageing.

Admittedly, living in a cheap room in one of the wealthiest areas of London probably aggrandizes such thoughts. Down and Out in Hampstead and Highgate. But I can’t deny there’s an inner voice that cries, this is not as it should be. Not now. Not at 34. Not you…

Teenagers try to survive, full stop. Working out who you really are isn’t the number one priority when you’re trying to breathe. At school, you’re surrounded by people you’d cross the street to avoid in later life. Yet you have to get along with them daily at the most fragile time of your life. The best advice to a teenager is to take cover, and to hang on.

Twentysomethings can breathe a little, meet as many different people as possible and try every social sphere available. They find out who they really are, and what they’re best placed to be doing with their life, and have fun doing it. They care about what’s going on, but also about Getting On.

By 34, you know what you care about. You can follow the news and the trends in music or fashion if you like, but it’s finally okay to focus upon what only matters to you. You’re meant to have worked out who you are, and be in some kind of stable career path. Or at least able to say what you do. You’re meant to have savings. You’re meant to have a flat. You’re meant to have a direction. Maybe a loved one or a family. You’re not meant to still be living alone on benefits with no sign of ever signing off.

I sometimes feel I appear to be living like a heroin addict, without the heroin. So when I wear short-sleeved shirts in hot weather, I’m pleased that people can see I’m not a junkie. Though I’m far more pleased they can also see I spend some of my benefit money on chemically removing the hair from my arms. And yes, Veet is such a silly name for what used to be Immac.

One recurring dream: I am running in a race, but impossibly left behind. I stop to catch my breath and wonder: is it worth continuing? Ah well, I never cared for Games. Can I be excused with a note from a doctor? From Life? (answer: yes). And does the racetrack have a bar?

In another, I’m in a relay race of great writers, songwriters, actors, wits and artists. The baton is handed to me – and I promptly break it.

I look in the newspaper Vacancies pages, and it’s like the Properties pages again. An alien world, a world for other people. Not me. Experience X required. Qualification Y required. Would suit a young graduate. Competing, hustling, bullying and networking required. If you’re not young, then you’re expected to have experience and references. And if you’re not young, and you don’t… It’s hard not to feel utterly useless, worthless, hopeless, suicidal.

So it’s just as well I don’t feel those things. Even a depressive narcissist has a sense of self-preservation. It’s called a mirror.

I badly want to get off benefits and earn a modest living doing something I can do well. Which I think – I hope – is writing, or rather writing the way I write. It’s just the thought of hustling and ‘talking myself up’ that drains me. What I want is someone to get in touch, rather than spy something and have to fight for it. The latter is just not me.

It’s all true. I’m afraid I genuinely believe the world owes me a living. And I laugh again.

Cricket is in the air. The England team have won the Ashes, beating Australia for the first time in a rather astounding 18 years. On Archway Road, the off-licences and pubs have offers on English champagne, their pavement blackboards and computer-printed sheets of A4 in the window bedecked with celebratory St George’s crosses.

Just as there was with rugby last year, I feel there’s a fair-weather fans’ trend, people only getting into a sport when their country’s team becomes capable of winning a major prize. Popularity, like success, has a snowballing effect. Fair enough – it’s the timeless urge to want to join in, to get into the party, to have a share of the zeitgeist fun, to belong, to not want to miss out.

My entire philosophy is based on resisting the rush to join in with whatever seems terribly popular at the time. In many sci-fi tales like Night Of The Comet (a great 80s b-movie, by the way) or Day Of The Triffids, most of the human race is left blinded, turned to dust or turned into zombies by taking part in some mass event like watching a comet. Those that miss out for whatever reason find themselves among a surviving minority, charged with continuing mankind – or not – on their own. It’s possible that I read a little too much into these silly stories.

Nevertheless, one must never be afraid to not join in. There’s no need to follow the cricket if you’re not that way inclined. Similarly, there’s no need to get married and have 2.4 children, or 2.4 cats, or 2.4 iPods, to watch a comet, to tune in for Lost, to wear trainers, to rush out and buy a few more Coldplay records just in case no one else does.

Relax. Other people WILL do all these unpleasant things for you. And they will INSIST! Look upon the rest of mankind as your unpaid stunt doubles.

What an incredible sentence to write. It’s nice to remind myself I am who I claim to be. If I woke up tomorrow and found myself to be Judi Dench, I wouldn’t know what to do. One for the Dickon Edwards section in future books of quotations.

Look upon the rest of mankind as your unpaid stunt doubles.

This default against-the-grain pose of mine is, of course, ridiculous, and I don’t always embrace it myself. Many popular things are actually rather good and should be tried at least once. And many unpopular or (as the euphemism goes) “cult” works remain unloved by the masses for a very good reason. But if you believe in Mr Robin Hood’s principle of redistribution of wealth, you must recognise that much of the modern world’s wealth is the Currency of Attention. When most heads seem turned in one particular direction, looking to one side can be no bad thing. Other experiences are available.

For my part, I have tried to get into cricket in the past. But like bisexuality and bungee-jumping, it’s not for everyone.

Fowler: Are you trying to be clever or something?
Judd: I don’t have to try. I am clever.

The above dialogue is from Another Country, the film that most springs to my mind whenever anyone mentions cricket. In one scene, schoolboy Rupert Everett umpires a match. He deliberately skews the proceedings in order to favour bowler Cary Elwes, with whom he is in floppy-fringed love.

Perhaps this year’s England team are just much better-looking than the previous 18 years’ lot.

I don’t know, I’m not looking in the same direction.