{"id":5147,"date":"2019-06-23T19:09:52","date_gmt":"2019-06-23T18:09:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/?p=5147"},"modified":"2019-06-23T19:31:16","modified_gmt":"2019-06-23T18:31:16","slug":"the-late-legitimisation-of-mr-edwards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/archive\/the-late-legitimisation-of-mr-edwards\/","title":{"rendered":"The Late Legitimisation of Mr Edwards"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>Thursday\n11th April<\/em>.\nSome happy news. I am waiting for a train en route to a book event in Peckham\n(Isabel Waidner talking with Jennifer Hodgson) when I check my emails. I may\nhave resisted the heroin lure of the smartphone but I do enjoy the methadone\nsubstitute of an iPod Touch, which can access wireless internet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One email is from CHASE, the government\norganisation to whom I&#8217;d applied for PhD funding a couple of months ago. Before\nopening the mail I pause and brace myself for rejection. This application was,\nafter all, my third and final attempt. The rules forbid any more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This time, though, I am told I was successful.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>From October the government will pay me the\nminimum wage in order to work on my thesis full-time. There is also the likelihood\nof additional expenses for research trips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is a significant event for me, mentally as much as financially. It is\nthe first time in twenty years that I&#8217;ve bagged a full time job that I want to\ndo, as opposed to not mind too much. The last time was when I had a major label\nrecord deal in the mid 1990s. &nbsp;Now I will\nbe paid to read and write what I want to read and write. My project has been\ndeemed, by a group of professionals who do not know me personally, to be of use\nto the real world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I can confidently pre-empt accusations\nof boastfulness over this by indicating the money: a minimum wage in one&#8217;s late\nforties, even for doing something agreeable, is no popular index of success. My\naccommodation still cannot advance beyond the level of the rented room. But\nperhaps this new stipend, once it kicks in from October, will give me the focus\nand energy to undertake more paid work, such as journalism and talks. More things\nnow seem possible. I have work to do, and <em>works\n<\/em>to do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Friday\n12 April 2019. <\/em>A\nvisit to the British Library imbues one with the feeling that everyone is a\nstudent, a writer or a researcher, and no other life exists. The public areas\nare so crowded, even just the benches around the walls. A young man with a laptop\nhovers by me when he notices I&#8217;m preparing to get up and leave, so he can grab\nmy space. This is paradise of a kind. By which I mean it&#8217;s too popular and\nthere&#8217;s hardly any room. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Meanwhile, a brand new UCL student building\nhas opened nearby in Gordon Street, next to the Bloomsbury Theatre, with 1000 desks.\nI think of the TV documentary from the 1970s in which Kenneth Williams laments\nthe rise of university buildings in the Bloomsbury area. Perhaps this would\nupset him even more. It cheers me, though, as I like the way Bloomsbury manages\nto be a university campus without the campus, lacking the detachment one feels\nwith the more obvious universities, from Oxford to UEA.&nbsp; There may be an ivory tower \u2013 Senate House\nLibrary \u2013 but it&#8217;s as much a part of the city as its next-door neighbour, the\nBritish Museum. For Birkbeck students, this aspect is particularly appropriate.\nMature students have spent some time in the wider world already. To study on a\nmore isolated campus might be like moving into a dormitory: fine for the young,\nbut awkward for a forty-seven-year-old. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One now hears the word &#8216;campus&#8217; used for\nthe headquarters of tech companies like Google. It&#8217;s a kind of university envy\nby corporations, who even dub their training set-ups as &#8216;academies&#8217;. While this\nis reasonable for a youthful workforce, one wonders if older workers, if any\nare allowed at Google, are required to act like students too. In which case, in\nmy funny child-like way, perhaps I am more a sign of the times that I thought. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Google has meant that everyone is a\nstudent researcher now. Even student researchers. And yet the majority of\nwriters still look so ordinary and non-descript. Given the way I look I have a\nvested interest in this aspect, obviously; a literally vested interest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Sunday\n14 April 2019<\/em>.\nTo the sun-kissed paintings of Sorolla at the National Gallery, then the Nitty\nGritty club night at the Constitution in Camden (with Debbie Smith DJ-ing),\nwhich is also my landlady K&#8217;s birthday bash. My previous unease at group events\nis now diminished: if nothing else, the funding means I can answer the dreaded\nquestion &#8216;and what do you do?&#8217; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Tuesday\n16 April 2019<\/em>.\nA news story in the <em>Times<\/em>: &#8216;Hundreds\nof students with the worst A levels are going on to get first-class degrees\neach year, fuelling fears of grade inflation at universities&#8217;. One explanation\nwhich escapes the <em>Times<\/em> is the\nconcept of change. Birkbeck responds on Twitter in this spirit: &#8216;We make admissions\nbased on students&#8217; future potential, not just their past attainment.&#8217; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I add my voice to confirm this, summarising\nmy last decade in a single tweet: &#8216;Birkbeck admitted me for a BA despite my\nlack of A-Levels (had a crisis at 17). Got the BA, stayed on for an MA, now\ndoing a fully-funded PhD, all at Birkbeck. Still no A levels.&#8217;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A little later Joan Bakewell quotes my\ntweet, adding: &#8216;As Birkbeck&#8217;s President I&#8217;m proud of the chances we give people\nand congratulate Dickon on his success&#8217;. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure of the correct way to\naddress the Baroness, though I find an article where she likes people to call\nher by her first name. So I tweet back: &#8216;Thanks Joan!&#8217;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Friday\n19 April 2019<\/em>.\nRather aptly, I spend the morning of Good Friday in an act of self-sacrifice. I&#8217;m\nusing the sink in the bathroom when a pool of water creeps onto my toes from the\ncupboard below the sink. I crouch down to open the cupboard doors and immediately\nidentify the source of this impromptu Nile: one of the joints in the sink &#8216;s outlet\npipe is leaking, so it&#8217;s probably a blockage. As my landlady is away, and I\ndon&#8217;t fancy calling out a professional on a bank holiday weekend (the only time\nwhen these things happen), I decide to have a go at tackling the issue myself. I\nunscrew the u-bend section of the pipe, take it out, and then clean it out in\nthe bath using the shower hose. Lumps of awfulness emerge to a satisfying\nrelish: dark compounds of hair, mini-fatbergs and what the characters in <em>Withnail and I <\/em>would describe simply as\n&#8216;matter&#8217;. I replace the pipe and use a plunger on the sink for good measure.\nThis fixes the problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My joy over this comes not so much from\nthe feeling of making things better as it does from the relief that I haven&#8217;t\nmade things worse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Monday\n29 April 2019.<\/em>\nI submit my revised Chapter Two to my supervisors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Thursday\n2 May 2019<\/em>.\nTo the Curzon cinema in Aldgate to meet Shanthi S. The area is highly\ngentrified: clean and pristine new blocks of flats, probably hugely expensive,\nand with the usual feeling that no one actually lives here. We miss the film\nbut end up having a pleasant evening at local bars like The Pride Of Spitalfields\noff Brick Lane, one of those older pubs which still manage to exist. The pub&#8217;s\ncat, Lenny, comes to sit next to me. Shanthi takes a photo, which I tentatively\nshare on my Instagram account. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Friday\n3 May 2019<\/em>.\nI read Jenny Turner&#8217;s article in the <em>LRB <\/em>on\nthe Mark Fisher anthology, <em>K-Punk<\/em>.At one point she suddenly pulls off a haughty\nflourish regarding Fisher&#8217;s favourite music: &#8216;I&#8217;ve always made a point of not\nbeing impressed by Joy Division or New Order&#8217;. It&#8217;s the choice of words, rather\nthan simply &#8216;I&#8217;ve never liked&#8217;. Indeed, much as I admire Mark Fisher and Joy\nDivision myself, neither were much at home to camp. Though they did deal in a\ncertain type of masculine sentiment, which Ms Turner appreciates. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My credo, if I have one at all, is that art\ncan be witty, and wit can be art. Hence my interest in camp modernism, which\ngoes back to naming my first band in 1992 after Woolf&#8217;s <em>Orlando<\/em>. In the same way, I never thought it incompatible to be a\nfan of the band the Field Mice, along with Sondheim musicals, the Smiths, Stock\nAitken Waterman and Take That, all at once without any tiresome claims to\nirony. With unlikely intersections comes new space, and new freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Tuesday\n7 May 2019:<\/em>\nTo the Odeon Tottenham Court Road with Jon S to see <em>Avengers: Endgame. <\/em>I go mainly because the previous <em>Avengers <\/em>film ended on a cliffhanger,\nand I&#8217;m admittedly curious to see how the superheroes cheat death. The answer is\nthey cheat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On the way out, the other cinemagoers are\ndiscussing which of the preceding films they managed to see: &#8216;I missed <em>Iron Man 2 <\/em>but I did see <em>Thor 6: Hard Rock Caf\u00e9<\/em>.&#8217; This is the triumph\nof the series: to blend a brand with a mythos, while allowing each film to make\nsense on its own terms. More or less. It will be interesting to see if\nsuperhero films continue to dominate cinemas; this is surely their peak moment.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>** <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This week sees the Met Gala in New York,\nas in the glitzy launch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art&#8217;s new exhibition.\nThis year&#8217;s theme is camp, with reference to the Sontag essay, hence my interest\nfrom afar. The BBC News site initially refers to the author of &#8216;Notes on Camp&#8217;\nas &#8216;photographer Susan Sontag&#8217;. The coverage of the Gala is nearly eclipsed by\nthe hyperbolic coverage of the Royal Baby, which itself is a camp moment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Many of the looks on the red carpet,\nsuch as Harry Styles&#8217;s lacey catsuit, would not look out of place on the\nmid-1990s Romo scene. Or indeed, at Kash Point in the mid 2000s. Vogue magazine\nhas called Mr Styles &#8216;the King of Camp&#8217;. This is debatable, though does have a\ncertain Caravaggio-esque look to him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Weds\n8 May 2019.<\/em>\nTo the ICA for their Kathy Acker exhibition. Some of the late Acker&#8217;s books are\non display in glass cabinets, including her copy of \u2013 what else? &#8211; Woolf&#8217;s <em>Orlando<\/em>. Was Kathy Acker camp? She had\nher moments, such as the poem that goes &#8216;Dear Susan Sontag, Please Can You Make\nMe Famous?&#8217; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Thursday\n9 May 2019<\/em>.\nI like to think zookeepers regularly say to each other &#8216;we need to talk about\nthe elephant in the room&#8217;, and that the joke never gets old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Saturday\n11 May 2019. <\/em>Much\nof the news is now based on journalists simply scouring Twitter and helping\nthemselves to other people&#8217;s words. It&#8217;s now quite common to see people sacked\nfrom their jobs for something they idly typed on Twitter years ago. The format\nlends itself so easily to the removal of context, that it is perilous to use it\nfor anything other than the blandest of statements. The First Law of Twitter: if a tweet can be taken the\nwrong way, it will be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>** <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Sunday\n12 May 2019<\/em>.To the Rio for <em>Cleo From 5 To 7<\/em> (1961), directed by Agnes Varda. I&#8217;d never seen it\nbefore; it&#8217;s mesmerising. Though it&#8217;s not shot in one take, as the more recent <em>Victoria <\/em>was in Madrid, there&#8217;s a\nmagical sense of real time unfolding in a city, and that this is a liberating\nidea rather than a limitation. There&#8217;s currently a vogue for nature writing,\nand for narratives of going to the countryside to be healed, but despite\nsharing my name with the boy in <em>The\nSecret Garden<\/em> I&#8217;m rather on the side of finding answers in the city. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Saturday\n18<sup>th<\/sup> May 2019. <\/em>I&#8217;m walking along a street in Hoxton. As I pass a\nman mutters &#8216;freak&#8217; at me. I used to get upset about this, but my reaction now\ncan only be: &#8216;Still got it!&#8217;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Tuesday\n21 May 2019<\/em>.\nThere really should be some sort of HGV test for backpack wearers. Despite the ability\nof human beings to access whole centuries of culture from a small flat oblong, many\nof them still need to carry yet more stuff on their back as well. Twice today\non crowded tube carriages I am nearly hit in the face with the things, their\nowners oblivious. A backpack wearer is a long vehicle, but it&#8217;s hard to get to\ntheir face to tell them. Would Truman Capote wear a backpack in the city? No. There&#8217;s\nno excuse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To Waterstones Gower Street for a book\nevent. The subject is ostensibly Woolf&#8217;s <em>Orlando<\/em>,\nbut the focus is really on <em>Paul Takes The\nForm of A Mortal Girl<\/em>, a new novel by the American writer Andrea Lawlor,\nwhich I&#8217;ve just enjoyed. <em>Paul <\/em>is set\nin the indie band culture of America in the early 1990s, and features a\nshapeshifting queer protagonist who makes his own music fanzine. The publishers\nhave sent out copies of the book with a promotional fake fanzine, <em>Polydoris Perversity<\/em>. I&#8217;ve managed to\nget hold of one. The publishers have done their homework (presumably with the\nauthor in consultation): the fanzine looks entirely authentic to me. I remember\nbuying and making such zines myself. It&#8217;s A5 sized, photocopied and stapled,\nand features text that&#8217;s been cut and pasted, in the days when the phrase meant\nreal scissors and real paste (or at least Pritt Stick). At the back of the zine\nthere&#8217;s a tracklisting of a home-made compilation tape \u2013 &#8216;mixtape&#8217; was always a\npurely American term. Anachronistically, there&#8217;s a Spotify code for the\nplaylist. It works, too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Lawlor is the same age as me, and I get\na nostalgic thrill from this book, despite the American setting. It works as a\nvivid document of gay social history, along the same lines as <em>Tales of The City <\/em>and Alan Hollinghurst&#8217;s\nnovels. Indeed, Lawlor&#8217;s <em>Paul <\/em>and\nHollinghurst&#8217;s <em>Sparsholt Affair <\/em>both\nreference Carly Simon&#8217;s &#8216;You&#8217;re So Vain&#8217; as a gay song. And as with\nHollinghurst, Lawlor is fond of gay sex scenes, though there&#8217;s plenty of\nlesbian sex too, thanks to Paul&#8217;s ability to change sex at will. On top of the <em>Orlando <\/em>references there&#8217;s a touch of <em>Brideshead Revisited<\/em>,when a soft toy is named Aloysius. &#8216;Of\ncourse it is&#8217; says another character, Robin, another androgyne, who in turn is based\non the Russian princess in <em>Orlando<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What Lawlor gets most of all, though, is\nthe importance of iconography to identity:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;&#8216;Paul\nremembered seeing a picture of Patti Smith for the first time, that flash of\nrecognition when he first came across the Mapplethorpe postcard at the gay\nbookstore in Binghamton, thinking that&#8217;s what he looked like on the inside,\ntaping that postcard up in every room he&#8217;d lived in since.&#8217; (p. 121)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Wednesday 22 May 2019<\/em>. Another book event, this time at Burley Fisher in Haggerston. This is the launch of the Andrew Gallix anthology <em>We&#8217;ll Never Have Paris<\/em>. It&#8217;s so packed that I have to leave early just to be able to breathe. The Andrew Lawlor event was similarly popular, with an extra row of chairs added at the last minute. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This week also sees me fail to get into\na couple of other book events, because they both sell out in advance. I wonder\nif something is going on. The way forward for writers, as with bands, would\nseem to be more live events, and more festivals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Thursday 23 May 2019.<\/em> The EU elections. I go to my local polling station,\nColvestone Primary School near Ridley Road, and vote Green. Labour win in my\nborough, Hackney, while most of the country chooses Nigel Farage&#8217;s Brexit Party.\nInteresting times. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Friday 24 May 2019<\/em>. I cram in three exhibitions: <em>Beasts of London<\/em> at the Museum of London, in which a plague\nbacterium is voiced by Brian Blessed. Then with Mum to <em>Mary Quant <\/em>at the V&amp;A, in which I learn that Ms Quant&#8217;s fashion\nline was genuinely affordable by all. Then on to <em>Manga<\/em> at the British Museum in the evening. The manga show reveals\nthe influence of <em>Alice in Wonderland<\/em>,\nwhich I didn&#8217;t know about, and selects three titles for its gay section: <em>Poem of Wind &amp; Trees <\/em>(the men very feminine\nlooking)<em>, My Brother&#8217;s Husband <\/em>(the\nmen very muscular and hairy)<em>, <\/em>and <em>What Did You Eat Yesterday<\/em>, an\nunexpected tale of an middle-aged gay couple&#8217;s domestic life (the men very\nordinary). There&#8217;s also a section on cosplay and conventions, with a set of\ngarments for visitors to try on. I don&#8217;t join in, believing as I do that\ndandyism is already cosplay; the cosplay of the self. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Friday\n31 May 2019. <\/em>I\nread Jarett Kobek&#8217;s <em>Only Americans Burn\nIn Hell<\/em>, an entertaining\nsatirical novel which uses a lot of what&#8217;s now called autofiction, and manages\nto be very funny too. Very <em>Tristram\nShandy<\/em>, in fact, with its mad, skittish digressions.Mr Kobek often apologises to the reader for being unable to write\na particular scene, and makes a perfectly good point as to why: &#8216;I&#8217;m burnt out.\nDonald J Trump was elected to the Presidency of the United States! So there&#8217;s\nreally no point. Stop hoping that books will save you.&#8217;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On corporate\ncelebrations of diversity, he writes: &#8216;Native American women had a\nstatistically better chance of being caricatured in a Google Doodle than they\ndid of being hired into a leadership position at Google&#8217;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Steve\nJobs, meanwhile, is glossed as &#8216;a psychopath who enslaved Chinese children and\nmade them build electronic devices which allowed American liberals to write\ntreatises on human rights&#8217;. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>** <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Saturday 1 June 2019<\/em>. To\nthe Tate Modern for the Dorothea Tanning show. Her first painting in her Late\nSurrealism style, from the 1940s, is a Dali-esque self-portrait amid infinite\ndoors and strange creatures. It is titled <em>Birthday<\/em>,\nsuch was her sense of new life through art. But the exhibition reveals two\nfurther &#8216;births&#8217;. In the 1950s she changes to a more abstract technique, more Pollock\nthan Dali. And then there&#8217;s a third style of soft sculptures run off her sewing\nmachine. The centrepiece is an installation of a hotel room, where the\nfurniture is turning into such sculptures, while further shapes burst through\nthe wallpaper. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanning worked until her death at 101. I\nthink of Leonora Carrington&#8217;s similarly long life, and while talking to Mum on\nthe phone I wonder if there&#8217;s a connection between surrealism and longevity.\nMum suggests that it might be because such women had to be tough in the first\nplace to tout their art in such a male field. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Monday\n3 June 2019<\/em>.\nI see <em>Booksmart <\/em>at the Rio, a high\nschool comedy about two bookish teenage girls having a late try at being party\nanimals. It&#8217;s uproariously funny. There&#8217;s a couple of boy characters \u2013 drama queens\nin every sense \u2013 who threaten to steal the film from the girls. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>** <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Thursday\n13 June 2019<\/em>.\nI help to organise a student conference at Birkbeck, <em>Work in Progress<\/em>. The staff had picked me, along with three other 2<sup>nd<\/sup>\nyears (Katie Stone, Matt Martin, Helena Esser), because they knew I had\nexperience of organising club nights. In the weeks leading up to the event, the\nprocess soaks up a lot of time, and there&#8217;s some hitches with people cancelling,\nbut it&#8217;s mostly a smooth running affair. Katie Stone live-tweets a lot of the day,\nusing the hashtag &#8216;#bbkwip&#8217;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We host twelve speakers in all,\nincluding our keynote speaker Anthony Joseph, who discusses his novel <em>Kitch<\/em>, about the Trinidad calypso singer\nLord Kitchener. I do some tech supervising, chair one of the panels, and chair\nthe plenary summing-up session, which I learn is pronounced &#8216;plee-nary&#8217;, and\nnot &#8216;plenn-ary&#8217;. My main mission is just to keep the event running to its\nschedule, with echoes of the joke about Mussolini. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Monday\n17<sup>th<\/sup> June 2019<\/em>. To the Rio with Shanthi to see <em>Gloria Bell<\/em> (\u00a35). A subtle and nuanced\ntale of ageing people going on dates. Very little really happens, but at a time\nof shrillness and noise, quiet films can be a tonic. Julianne Moore&#8217;s character\nhas to struggle with two pairs of glasses. This is a detail I recognise in my\nown life now, finding as I do that fiddling with specs is still preferable to\nworking with varifocals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;ve also discovered that increased\nmyopia helps stage fright, or anxiety about public speaking. All I have to do\nis take my distance glasses off, and the audience disappears. I believe Dusty\nSpringfield used the same technique. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Tuesday\n18 June 2019<\/em>.\nI watch the last episode of <em>Years and\nYears<\/em>, the highlight of which is a speech by the grandmother about people\nbuying into the more ridiculous type of politician: &#8216;I didn&#8217;t see all the clowns\nand monsters heading our way. Tumbling over each other, grinning. Dear God what\na carnival.&#8217; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By coincidence, this piece of fiction is broadcast after a live debate between the five candidates for the next Prime Minister, all sitting on stools like some grotesque five-part harmony boy band. The favourite is Boris Johnson, now trying his best to be quiet and sensible. Close on his heels is the bland Jeremy Hunt, who has a record of forgetting things, from his wife&#8217;s nationality to his ownership of seven luxury flats. If Hunt wins, it will be because people want to forget about Boris Johnson. Rory Stewart seems the most reasonable of this gaggle, and seems to realise that if he is to succeed he needs to play up his clownishness. Which in fact, tonight he does, suddenly taking off his tie and slouching in his seat, his gauntness making him look like a character from Mervyn Peake. To borrow Sontag&#8217;s phrase about camp, we are in an age of Instant Character. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Thursday\n20<sup>th<\/sup> June 2019<\/em>. To Sudbury to meet Mum. Sudbury seems mostly\nunchanged from my teen years, though Great Cornard Upper School (where I spent\n1985 to 1989) has been renamed Thomas Gainsborough School. When I was there\nthere was no uniform, just a dress code favouring plain grey shirts and\njumpers. This was deemed to be progressive and modern at the time. Not any\nmore. Today in Sudbury I see pupils of TGS wearing a full traditional uniform: blazer,\nstriped tie and even a crest, which must have been invented yesterday. I wonder\nat this paradox, a twenty-first century school choosing a style that seemed out\nof date in the 1980s. Perhaps one can blame <em>Harry\nPotter<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Naming buildings simply after the area\nthey are in is no longer enough. One thinks of Liverpool&#8217;s Speke Airport becoming\nJohn Lennon Airport. It seems difficult to imagine that Mr Lennon needs the\nextra publicity, so omnipresent are the Beatles. That said, Mum has told me of\na child who asked who Paul McCartney was. &#8216;He&#8217;s a bit like Ed Sheeran&#8217;. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The painter Thomas Gainsborough already has a prominent statue in Sudbury marketplace, and there&#8217;s also the nearby Gainsborough House gallery, which we visit today. Now he has a large school too. Even the local train line, which I take today from Liverpool Street, changing at Marks Tey, is labelled the Gainsborough Line. My fellow Sudbury alumni really need to hurry up and produce some masterpieces, if only so the town has more names to choose from. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<br \/><em>This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!<br \/><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.paypal.com\/cgi-bin\/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&amp;hosted_button_id=Q5V5C7CAZWF6Y\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.paypal.com\/en_US\/i\/btn\/btn_donateCC_LG.gif\" alt=\"Donate Button with Credit Cards\"\/><\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.paypal.com\/cgi-bin\/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&amp;hosted_button_id=Q5V5C7CAZWF6Y\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.paypal.com\/en_US\/i\/btn\/btn_donateCC_LG.gif\" alt=\"Donate Button with Credit Cards\"\/><\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thursday 11th April. Some happy news. I am waiting for a train en route to a book event in Peckham (Isabel Waidner talking with Jennifer Hodgson) when I check my emails. I may have resisted the heroin lure of the smartphone but I do enjoy the methadone substitute of an iPod Touch, which can access [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1515,1520,1512,350,1513,1519,593,1507,1518,711,1511,1509,1475,1517,1522,646,1521,1516,1514,1508,1510],"class_list":["post-5147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-andrea-lawlor","tag-andrew-gallix","tag-avengers-endgame","tag-birkbeck","tag-booksmart","tag-burley-fisher","tag-camp","tag-chase","tag-dorothea-tanning","tag-elections","tag-gloria-bell","tag-great-cornard-upper-school","tag-harry-styles","tag-jarett-kobek","tag-london-review-of-books","tag-mark-fisher","tag-met-gala","tag-only-americans-burn-in-hell","tag-paul-takes-the-form-of-a-mortal-girl","tag-sudbury","tag-thomas-gainsborough-school"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5147"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5150,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5147\/revisions\/5150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}