The real reason is that I fear I’d never put the thing down once I bought it. I do have a mobile phone, deliberately chosen for its cheapness and ugliness. So I find myself switching it off most of the time, and I often leave it at home altogether when I go out. Which rather defeats the object of a mobile phone, but if the alternative is to be one of those people who never put their phone away at all – and I fear I would be – then it’s for the best.

Actually, I realise it’s increasingly strange in the city to NOT have one’s phone to hand all the time. So I’m hoping I can just work this omission into my image of a fogeyish weirdo not entirely in phase with the world.

I do have a vade mecum, though: a pocket notebook and pen (either a traditional-sized Moleskine or a passport-sized Moleskine Cahier, depending on the jacket). In fact, the other night I was standing in the audience at a cabaret event, jotting down notes, when an audience member pounced on me. What was I writing, he demanded to know. And who was I, anyway?

Had I been using a phone to take photos or record video, or to update Twitter or Facebook, I’m convinced his interest would not have been piqued. Tapping at a shiny, glowing gadget in public is now an invisible act. Writing discreetly in a paper notebook, meanwhile, is more likely to attract attention by the laws of scarcity value. Though admittedly I often draw the attention of strangers anyway, and the notebook may well have been an excuse.

Today Harper Collins announced they’re publishing Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall as an application for the iPhone, bundling it with video interviews of the author by way of extras. My initial reaction was to wonder how many people actually read whole novels on a mobile phone. Then again, I had similar doubts ten years ago when MP3s started to appear, and I was convinced that listening to music through a computer would never catch on.

But that was before the era of the iPod. Portability is everything. iPhones, Kindles and iPads are thin and light, and until now Wolf Hall was only available in hardback – one the size of a house brick.

(Actually, I can remember when mobile phones were like house bricks, too.)

The author Christopher Fowler wrote in his blog recently that he hoped the e-book revolution would see publishers catering for people who still prefer paper books, but who don’t have the kind of biceps for carrying fat doorstoppers as we saunter about town. He suggests they put out cheap paperback editions at the same time as the hardback, as small and as slim as production can manage (maybe Gideon Bible-thin paper). He cited a limited edition of Susanna Clarke’s epic Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, published in one edition as a set of three thinner, more portable paperbacks, reminiscent of those Victorian multi-volume novels. Count me in.

Until then, I have to admit being attracted to ebooks purely out of lack of butchness.

Afterwards to the ICA bar for Stephen Harwood’s birthday cocktails, repairing after that to the Retro Bar in the Strand. Both unchanged for years, though the ICA is in trouble. There’s news afoot of debts, redundancies, threats of closure and general angry finger-pointing at ICA boss Ekow Eshun. Were it down to me, I’d appeal to the Queen and Prince Charles about the rules stopping the ICA putting up adverts, or indeed any indication there’s something going on at all, on the building exterior on the Mall (close to Buckingham Palace). Many passers-by aren’t even aware they’re walking past a famous arts centre. A friendly, classy redesign of the ICA’s logo and all its advertising is equally overdue – the kind which rejuvenated the Barbican a few years ago.

I’d also redo the bar and corridors to give it a more cosy, ornate salon and club feel: red walls, drapes, Greek columns, ferns, mirrors, artists’ tiles, plush chairs and sofas. An ICA to out-Palace the Palace. I’ve been a guest of Buck House myself, and much as I was grateful for my mother’s MBE, I did think HMQ’s place could have done with a bar. So that’s my ‘vision’ for the ICA, if Mr Yentob is reading (again). Make it the New Palace Of Glittering Art (With Special Offers On Cocktails).

***

Ms Silke has a Joe Orton-style montage of photos and clippings on her wall. Favourite actors, rock stars and writers are mixed in with her friends and relations. She’s put a photo of me between Lord Alfred Douglas, Richey Manic and Lassie.

Mr MacGowan has made a charity record for Haiti, featuring his friends Nick Cave, Johnny Depp, Bobby Gillespie, Chryssie Hynde, Paloma Faith and others. It’s a rather devilish version of ‘I Put A Spell On You’, and comes out on March 8th. Proceeds go to Concern, the Dublin-based humanitarian organisation which has been working in Haiti since 1994.

YouTube video of the song
Facebook group
Digital download pre-order page

***
I’ve written a piece on pseudonyms for the New Escapologist magazine, issue 3. Purchasing info at www.new-escapologist.co.uk.

It’s a superb issue, focusing on up-to-date ways of ‘escaping’ the soul-destroying aspects of modern life, without quite going entirely ‘off grid’, as they say. Editor Rob Wringham talks about how he effortlessly moved from Glasgow to Montreal, where he seems to be having an entirely nice time of things. Turns out Montreal’s cost of living is half the amount it is in Glasgow.

In fact, more than a few bohemian friends have been making the big leap abroad of late – with Berlin being a particularly popular New World for modern Impuritans.

Val G, DJ and promoter of London indie club nights like The Fanclub for some years, has just moved to Hong Kong, pretty much for good. ‘London’s dead’, she said.

Well, it’s certainly dead expensive. Tube and bus fares have gone up, for a start. Even if an event is free, getting there and back and buying a drink or two still prohibits going out much more than once a fortnight, if one is on the dole, that is. Money just keeps running out, whatever I do.

Much to my chagrin, I’ve had to sign up for a Job Centre job search programme, a mental health-based one. They want me to prepare a CV, which for me is the stuff of pure science fiction. ‘Just put down everything,’ they said.

What about the time, I muse, I was hired to be the only UK performer at the Stockholm International Poetry Festival? Or my engagement as guest of honour for an exhibition on male fashion, at a museum in The Hague? That was work I was considered qualified to do, after all – and head-hunted for it internationally. Those two invitations felt like achievements, that I was Of Use To The World, which is what a CV is meant to be about. But I rather think a typing speed of 45 words per minute (on a good day) is all that’s applicable.

And I’m trying very hard not to add ‘Works Badly As Part Of A Team’, ‘Copes Badly Under Pressure’, and ‘Isn’t Very Good With People.’

As for emigration, much as I love London, if I did suddenly get an offer of an income abroad – Stockholm, say – I’d move like a shot. But I’m not holding my breath. Trying to stay sane, sheltered and fed is at present, ambition enough.

One, Phil King (JAMC bassist at their reunion gigs, including the Coachella one with Scarlett Johansson), has just moved in next door. The other, John Moore (JAMC drummer 1986-1988), hasn’t. Though Mr Moore was once meant to share a Cambridge hotel room with me, and instead decided to sleep on Rowan Pelling’s floor. I didn’t take it personally.

I give them a hand with unloading the car outside – Indie Band Removals, at your service. Am particularly impressed with one of Mr K’s possessions: a framed poster for the 70s film The Final Programme. That’s as cult as cult movies come: a Michael Moorcock adaption featuring the dandyish Jerry Cornelius.  I saw it on TV years ago, and vividly recall the ending: our hero merges with a woman during sex, then walks off into the sunset as a kind of hermaphrodite ape. As must we all.

Messrs King and Moore play together in the John Moore Rock & Roll Trio, whom I enjoy that same December evening, at the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury. The club night is called ‘You Fill Me With Inertia’, which is a Peter Cook quote from Bedazzled. More cult movies.

While I’m watching the band – and they really do perform your actual vintage rock and roll – a woman comes up to me. ‘I just wanted to tell you how cool you look. Though I know I’m drunk.’

Phil King’s been in so many bands, but one he actually fronted, The Apple Boutique, are having their ultra-rare Creation single ‘Love Resistance’ reissued this very month. Phil’s shown me his copy – a desirable little 3-inch CD. It’s highly jangly, blissful, 12-string guitar-smothered, Go Betweens-y summer pop. Video and more details here.

Recently, I bumped into Phil outside my door, as neighbours do. Though instead of attempts to borrow cups of sugar (did anyone ever do that?), our conversation tends to be like this:

Him: Hi, how are you?

Me: Okay. I’m writing a piece for a fanzine about Felt & Denim.

Him: So am I. Probably the same fanzine.

(It is)

Me: I’m talking about how my band Orlando once covered a rare Denim song at a gig, ‘I Will Cry At Christmas’. It was on the Denim demo, and sounds suspiciously like a left over Felt number.

Him: Oh yes, I remember Lawrence coming into rehearsal with that one.

Which I think is called being trumped.

For the piece I was writing, I watched the video of Felt’s classic Primitive Painters on YouTube. It’s only now that I realise that the one who isn’t the singer is my next door neighbour.

All of which is of no real interest, except when playing Six Degrees Of Dickon Edwards.

[Medical note: First day on a new SSRI prescription. Citalopram. 20mg daily.]

As Mae West said, if you keep a diary, some day it may keep you. Or in my case, clothe you.

I’m writing this in a brand new bespoke cashmere suit. Wool & cashmere, to be precise, but the cashmere’s definitely there. Just as Alan Partridge shouted ‘Cashback!’ as an exclamation of success, I hereby nominate a dandy variation: ‘Cashmere!’

The suit is a gift from Charlie Collingwood, a young tailor who’s just set up his own business in London, Henry Herbert. ‘No charge,’ he said when he wrote to me. ‘It’d just be nice if you could say something in your blog. Assuming you like the suit, that is.’

Can’t argue with that. Turns out that if you Google ‘London’ and ‘tailors’ and ’suits’ – or something like that – you get my diary pretty high up in the results. Though I’m hardly going to turn this into a full-on review blog, it’s nice to occasionally be of some use to doers and makers I approve of.

(By the way, Googling me today reveals I apparently co-wrote an article on John Mortimer in the Independent. It says so on IMDB. A few more clicks, and it turns out I was in fact quoted by the newspaper in a ‘what the blogs say’ piece on his death.)

So: my new cashmere suit. After Charlie got in touch, he measured me up in his Savile Row office then let me choose the fabric from a selection of swatch books, along with the lining. I felt I needed a ‘dinner party and premieres’ number in black, and hadn’t had cashmere before, so I went for that, along with the usual bespoke tailor’s options: choosing the shape of pockets, number of buttons on the jacket and cuffs, type of vent at the back of the jacket, turn-ups on the trousers or not, and so on.

A few weeks after that he called me in so I could try on the ‘baste’. This is the draft version of the suit, with dotted white lines around the stitching as seen in umpteen old movies. Not all modern tailors do the baste process, so I was rather delighted by this bit in itself. Another six weeks or so later, the suit arrived in a bespoke cardboard box, illustrated with dozens of silhouettes of vintage-looking besuited men in various poses: hailing taxis, reading newspapers, but also typing at a laptop. And above all, getting the vintage feel just right: stylish, timeless, versatile.

Charlie’s two key selling points, his friendliness aside, are his use of entirely British-sourced materials, along with the fact that he delivers them via scooter, in true Quadrophenia Mod style.

There’s a feature on him in the Evening Standard here.

Henry Herbert Tailors have a website at www.henryherbert.com, with a Twitter account here.

I’ve been wearing the suit for a few weeks now. It’s a work of beauty. I’d ask strangers to stroke me and feel the cashmere-iness of it, if such a request didn’t risk misinterpretation.

Hooray for Henry Herbert. May their scooters go forth and beautify.

We also drop into the Norman Parkinson exhibition, A Very British Glamour. Stunning photos of ladies from vintage fashion mags. But Parkinson also had a thing for combining beauty with humour, often putting his models in unexpected poses and locations.

In one early 50s shot, his wife and muse Wanda, looking immaculate in a cashmere twin-set, sits in a rural working man’s pub, seemingly playing shove ha’penny with a flat-capped old regular. An unlikely story.

Another, The Young Look In The Theatre (1953), depicts a gaggle of up and coming stage actresses of the day. I love all the different types of outfits, hinting at what the actresses think of their own real life personae. Some casual, some up-to-the-minute fashionable, some timeless and classic, some girlish, some noble, some vampish, some womanly, some motherly.

(Clicking on the photo takes you to a much larger version on the Christie’s website, with a click-and-zoom facility)

The exhibition doesn’t list who’s who, frustratingly. So I get on the Net and find out for myself.

Top row (upside down, the old wag): Norman Parkinson himself.

Middle row (on the bars, left to right): Virginia McKenna, Elizabeth Henson, Patricia McCarron, Josephine Griffin.

Bottom row (standing, left to right): Hazel Penwarden, Zena Walker, Yvonne Furneaux, Jill Bennett, Patricia Owens, Ruth Trouncer.

I also love one Vogue portrait of Enid Boutling, model and wife of the film director Roy. Captioned ‘Impertinence (1950)‘, she’s wearing a dandyish suit with a cropped hair, a stand-offish glare, and – shock horror – is smoking a cigarette without a holder. Regarded as very daring at the time, at least for Vogue.

Another favourite is of Audrey Hepburn with a baby donkey. Parkinson clearly punning on the ‘what an adorable creature’ response.

Am back in the Highgate bedsit after three weeks flat-sitting in Crouch End. No more cat to look after me.

Somewhat taken aback by the contrast in heating. In the flat, there was a boiler and radiators and the knowledge that I didn’t have to pay the heating bill. Back here I have just my little electric fan heater for the room. Which used to be fine, except that Highgate, like most of the UK, is currently in the grip of a proper winter spell. I sit here at my desk still wearing my winter coat, with the fan heater on full right by my toes, and still I shiver. During the night I don two old t-shirts plus my old jogging bottoms (noting that it’s about time I bought some pyjamas), position the heater right by the bed, and still I’m freezing.

Tonight, then: blankets. And I’ve just bought some M&S pyjamas – first time since my teens. I chose the ones that looked the most like hand-me-downs from a Matthew Bourne ballet. I can’t be bothered working out if pyjamas on grown men are stylish or not. They are on me, and that’s an end to it.

***

During the day I spend as much time in heated public buildings as possible. Library, cafes, shops. Quite the opposite of being ’snowed in’: the snow helps to get me out of bed (7am) and out of the house. Highgate like Crouch End still looks like Narnia, the snow crunching pleasingly underfoot, but central London is utterly, hilariously devoid of the stuff. A sense of the capital saying to the snow ‘Don’t you know who I AM? Don’t you DARE fall on me. I’m a Very Important City Centre.’

***

In the London Library toilets, one member walks straight from the cubicles back into the library without washing his hands. This is something that many men do which utterly appalls me. If he’d been a recognizable author, like more than a few LL members, I’d instinctively feel like naming him here and urging the world to boycott his books. But then I remember about WH Auden and his peeing in the sink (as brought up in the new Alan Bennett play). Not an excuse, but a reminder to trust the art, never the artist. Particularly the piss artist. Readers of my own work might like to note that I always wash my hands after visiting the lavatory. Whatever you think of it, it has been written by properly cleansed hands.

***

Packing away the Christmas decorations, I notice that 2009’s Christmas seems to have brought me more Christmas cards than I’ve had for years: 30 to 40 of them. In this digital world, it feels even more special. I know I go on about my love of getting proper handwritten letters and cards, but actually getting them is something else. Thank you, all those responsible. One favourite is from the band The Real Tuesday Weld. It contains a little 3-inch CD EP of the band. I’d forgotten how lovely 3-inch CDs were. Favourite track: ‘Plastic Please’, featuring the Puppini Sisters. It’s a fanbase mailout, but singer Stephen has handwritten a greeting to me: ‘To Dickon. Keep Dreaming.’ Which makes all the difference.

***

I see in the New Year by DJ-ing at White Mischief at the Proud Cabaret venue off Fenchurch Street. Lots of gorgeous dressed-up people, and fantastic live acts, particularly Frisky & Mannish, plus The Correspondents, who do a real 1910-meets-2010 techno rap set, merging cravats and waistcoats with what looks like skinny emo leggings. My own highlight is helping to locate a burlesque Judy Garland’s detachable plait. That says it all.

View from the flat a few days before Christmas.

I pass the Christmas week painlessly enough, cat and flat-sitting on my own in Crouch End. The freedom of having a whole flat to myself including a bathroom (I’ve spent most of my life sharing a shower with other bedsit tenant), plus no worries about heating bills, is reward enough. But Jen also gives me a generous Christmas present to unwrap on the day: a year’s membership to the NFT. It comes packaged with one of the BFI’s DVDs, Richard Lester’s surrealist 60s classic The Bed Sitting Room. It’s only now that I realise the apt nature of the title, given the escape from my normal dwelling.

Another present: a glider postcard from Maud Young. Also pictured is Erika Moen’s excellent autobiographical comic book, ‘Dar’, a present to myself which arrived in the same post.

My present to Jen is a copy of William Burroughs’s unlikely essay on his love of cats, The Cat Inside. It’s just been republished by Penguin:

Christmas Eve: I realise I need to buy Christmas crackers for the duck feeding ceremony in Waterlow Park the next day, as Ms Silke will be joining me.

Well, I say need… Funny how personal Christmas rituals can creep up on you. Yes, every Christmas Day I feed the ducks in Waterlow Park. And if a friend comes too, we pull crackers by the pond and put on the hats and pass around wine and mince pies right there. It’s just become the thing I do.

Me modelling the Budgens Deluxe Christmas Cracker hat. It’s essentially a hair band made from a red bin liner.

Buying Christmas crackers has to be done long before the 24th, which I discover too late. By now all the local supermarkets have sold out, except for Budgens. Which curiously has a tall stack of boxes of 12 ‘deluxe’ crackers (in so much as Budgens does ‘deluxe’) behind the counter. I see other shoppers coming away with a box each, and with big smiles. But curiously, it’s a smile of amusement, not relief.

‘They’re half price,’ says the cashier. ‘Because they’re faulty.’

‘Because they don’t make a bang?’

‘No, they bang fine. But they have all the same joke.’

This makes my Christmas. I spend the next twenty-four hours musing on the significance of this One Joke To Rule Them All. What can it be?

Noon the next day, and I pull the crackers with Silke at the duck pond.

Q. Where do snowmen go to dance?
A. To a Snowball.

Times twelve.

We then walk to Alexandra Park to feed the ducks there too, given it’s close to Crouch End. After the proper spate of snow a few days before, Christmas Day is only White in patches. The snow has vanished from the pavements and grass. But the duck ponds are still mostly frozen:

We also manage to see some proper Christmas Day snow. The tennis courts in Wood Vale have a thick layer of the white stuff, entirely untouched.

The photo the papers are using is from seven years ago, when the unkind leg fetishist was a 16-year-old visiting London, as taken by his teacher. He stares directly at the camera with typical teenage defensiveness, while tugging at the brim of his Nike woollen hat as if to draw attention to the brand. It’s that Nike tick that gets me: the ubiquitous symbol of US corporate domination. I wonder if he’s still got the hat, whether embracing it (’they’re enemies of Allah, but they still make nice hats.’). Or perhaps he’s inverting the Nike slogan with grim irony: ‘Just Do It’.

Everytime I have to take my shoes off in airports (never Nikes), I think about Richard Reid, the equally thwarted shoe-bomber who nonetheless achieved a petty kind of success: the introduction of those x-ray machines for shoes. Like those soap products from Lush which carry a little cartoon of the staffer who made them, I think of the machines bearing a similar cartoon of Mr Reid. Failed terrorists still get to be choreographers of new inconvenience, and so achieving a small scale victory. Somehow, it feels like those nonsensical instances at school, where teachers would adopt a kind of homeopathy approach to justice. ‘Because one child was naughty on the school trip, we’re never having that trip again. It’s his fault.’  The measure made no sense to me then, and still doesn’t now.

Similarly, seeing armed policemen at Heathrow never makes me feel safer about being there. Quite the reverse.

(This year’s London tree: in the foyer of the 100-year-old Phoenix
Cinema, East Finchley, Christmas Eve 2009. Just before seeing the new
print of  The Red Shoes. Photo by Ms Shanthi.)