Copyright popmatters
“I slip and slide between cracks in time and gaps in CVs.” – Dickon Edwards In 1997, when his major label band, Orlando, broke up, Dickon Edwards went underground, in a way. He lived a low life in Highgate, played in London’s indie-pop demimonde, and started the online journal that would make his name: The Diary at the Centre of the Earth—his Notes from the Northern Line Underground. Few figures embody the meeting of style, solitude, and the early internet quite like Edwards. The Diary at the Centre of the Earth chronicles London’s post-Britpop years with equal measures of wit and woe, long before content creation became a profession. Now, with the publication of his first collected volume, the dandy reflects on art, vanity, and the ongoing act of being – all while beautifully dressed. Dickon Edwards Fabulously Colorized the Early Web Hello, Dickon. Before we start, I have to check: are you still as good at replying to emails as you claimed to be on 29th May 1999? I’m getting very good at replying to emails at the moment. There was a time when I never got around to answering any at all. Now, every electronic missive I receive personally that seems to want a reply is replied to within a week or so. Recently, I took about six weeks to get around to replying to one particular email, so clearly, I’ve become worse. It wasn’t urgent, though; just a wistful correspondence about Henry James’ life in East Sussex. Like playing chess by post. I still reply to letters in the post, too. I respond well to regular nudges, though. Your diary is inextricably linked with the emerging technology of the time – the internet, email, and online community. Diaries would once have been published after death or judiciously selected for the London Review of Books. Some, like those of Alan Bennett and Michael Palin, end up as block-sized books used to weigh down Christmas stockings. With an online diary, were you conscious of doing something modern? Something immediate?Indeed, of writing something that might be ephemeral? When I started the diary, I had to write it in raw HTML code. Oh yes! I also ran up huge phone bills on my dial-up Virgin Net account. This was before broadband existed, let alone blogging platforms. I started because I liked the clean, blank space of the early web: how you could bypass the gatekeepers of proper publishing and publish your words directly to the entire world. It also felt like a big empty space for housing society’s exiles and outcasts – an electronic Plymouth Rock. When I appeared on the BBC’s Imagine documentary about the internet in 2006 or so, one newspaper critic said that the medium was clearly just a place for amateurs and delusional dilletantes. Now, of course, the London Review of Books is all online as well, Alan Bennett’s annual diaries included (and published online a few days before the print version), while many magazines and newspapers, like the NME, Time Out, and the Independent, have ceased their print incarnations altogether. Whether it’s ephemeral is debatable. My diaries are still archived online, because I pay the internet rent to keep them there. That will probably stop at some point, if only with my death. So many other blogs have become “404 Not Found”, the internet equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. Now we have the terrible cyber attack on the British Library, which demonstrates that the internet is not forever, after all. That sort of thing is going to happen more often, we are told, whether it’s Russia or China or, as apparently was the case with the M&S cyber-attack, just bored children. Wikipedia will go the same way at some point, as AI is hoovering it up, errors and all. How does it feel now to see a decade of your documented life become such a volume? Relief! Not just for the anti-AI autonomy and legitimacy of the physical book – my own little Plymouth Rock – but just as a way of backing up the online diary. There was a time a few years ago when the book charts were full of spin-off volumes by young YouTubers. You’d have thought their fans would have wanted a “best of” DVD, but that format has more or less gone too. Printed books still have this unique sense of shark-like permanence. They’ve now become physical props for videos, Instagram posts, and, indeed, Zoom calls, where a wall of bookshelves is the mandatory background for the civilised and intelligent. Books do furnish a Zoom. The Internet Is Dickon Edwards’ Stage Perhaps because diaries are so frequently read long after the writing, they can seem like an antiquated form, carrying a sense of formality and assumed historical importance. Even the phrase “Dear diary” feels both intimate and stylised. Your writing often shares that formal tone. Were you consciously adopting a traditional diary voice, or is that simply your natural mode of expression? I wince at the thought of writing like anyone else. Faced with the internet, it can be tempting to join in with catchphrases like “checks notes”, “the hill you want to die on”, or “not a good look”. I do quite like that last phrase, but to use it just means you’re diminishing your own unique voice. It’s important to me to offer something as unique as possible, if only by way of punctuation. Likewise, it’s important for me to never wear jeans, shorts, or trainers, only suits and ties. With sparkly seahorse brooches. Formality is also a function of wit. How conscious were you of constructing a witty public persona through the diary, as opposed to simply recording a private life? To publish your writing, even a tweet, is to perform in public. Twitter bios often feel the need to be jokey or witty. Some social media dramas have erupted purely as a result of jokes gone wrong. If you’re on the internet, you’re on a stage. May as well make it pleasant for the audience. Diary at the Centre of the Earth may also be thought of as a particularly queer form. Figures like Roger Casement, Joe Orton, and Andy Warhol kept diaries that mix the mundane with the transgressive, often masking deep loneliness with arch detachment. Do you feel part of that lineage? Absolutely. I’d add Keith Vaughan, Kenneth Williams, Derek Jarman, Cecil Beaton, and The Diaries of Mr Lucas to that genre. Diary writing is an instant retort to the world’s pressure to conform. To be queer is to feel that need for a retort even more acutely. It’s easy to forget that Jarman’s relationship with his beloved ‘HB’ (Keith Collins) was a close friendship rather than a romantic coupling. His diaries still have a sense of loneliness and detachment about them, made worse by illness, which detaches us all. From very early on, you admit that Quentin Crisp acted as a guiding light in how you lived your life. Quentin died in the first years of the diary and only days before you were to meet him for the first time. His life was obviously an influence on you, but was his death one too? Not consciously. Perhaps his death gave me a need to carry on his tradition, as it were, but when I befriended Sebastian Horsley, I realised that I wasn’t the only disciple! Mr Horsley’s now died, too, so perhaps my own style has become more desperately dandyish. But it’s not for me to say, as I don’t do it purposely. In the early days, you certainly were expected to act as a model or a leader by some journalists. You were asked to hand down rules and edicts for ‘Dickonists’. You were held up as an example of a god, a mix between a goth and a mod. Did you take this as an opportunity to be witty in print? Or did you genuinely want people to listen to you? When you said that, if people dressed like you, there would be no war, did you genuinely believe it? I was certainly expected to dole out aphorisms in interviews, but thankfully, it comes to me very easily. Whether or not these statements are of use to others is not up to me, but like my records, any audience, even the smallest, is a measure of success. I include posthumous audiences, as in that phrase from Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H., ‘the stranger’s child’, which Mr Hollinghurst used for his novel of the same name. The hope is that one’s work connects with someone, anyone, even if they are not yet born (as in ‘the stranger’), or even those whose parents are not yet born (hence ‘the stranger’s child’). One celebrated example is Van Gogh. The original Saint Vincent. I did and do believe that if everyone dressed like me, there would be no war, because wars are overwhelmingly caused by men (even now), and dandyism is a critique of masculinity. You can’t be a dandy in someone else’s uniform – that’s why I always combine my suits with brooches and peroxide hair. And sometimes a lace parasol. You can’t be a dandy warmonger: that’s a contradiction. Mr Trump is a dandy of a kind, and he keeps boasting about stopping wars, not starting them. The problem there, though, is the social rioting he and his pal Mr Farage cause with their chaotic pronouncements. That’s where I diverge. I prefer the example of Benjamin Disraeli, dandy novelist and British Prime Minister of the late 1800s. Disraeli kept Europe from collapsing into war for decades. Another prominent Livejournaler at the time was Lord Whimsy, the dandy, illustrator, and “Mammal of Paradise,” Allen Crawford. It felt like there was movement of dandies – see The Chap, for all its faults. Do you think there was ever truly a community of dandies? Or did Web 2.0 simply give visibility to a group of highly individual figures? The phrase that springs to mind when considering the concept of a community of dandies is ‘herding cats’. Dandies, by their own definition, are against community, at least in the sense of being one among the many. They are self-isolating creatures, though not in the Covid sense. More like detached wanderers in the societal machine. Hence, the cat comparison. One rare attempt to round up a whole gaggle of dandies (perhaps the collective noun should be a ‘brummell’) took place at the London launch of the book I Am Dandy, by Nathaniel Adams, which features photographic portraits by Rose Callahan. I wore the silver velvet suit made for Sebastian Horsley, given to me by his partner Rachel Garley. This was my attempt to represent that tension in dandyism: trying to be myself but referencing Mr H at the same time. I very rarely wear that suit, even though I had it altered to fit me, which perhaps proves that dandies can’t be in a community. If the cap fits, a dandy can’t necessarily wear it. It’s only in books like I Am Dandy that these creatures can be found together. There’s a follow-up to I Am Dandy in the making: indeed, Mr Adams has asked me for suggestions. So I always look out for new brother dandies, even if I don’t associate with them. They often see me coming, anyway. The Chap has yet to acknowledge me as one of their kind, though I do like their magazine and events. Lord Whimsy was nice to me, and I do like his work too. As for Web 2.0, there was that mid-2000s BBC Imagine documentary on blogging that I appeared on, so I was granted increased visibility there. If only temporarily. Once YouTube, Twitter, and smartphones took off circa 2010, internet dandyism, in the sense of self-broadcasting, became the norm. However, a true dandy would never be caught staring at a phone screen in public. Phones should be treated like toilets: unflattering necessities that should only be used when you absolutely have to, and then only used away from the eyes and ears of others. In fact, the red public phone boxes of old were notorious for doubling as makeshift urinals, so the comparison is not far-fetched. Dickon Edwards’ Dazzling Multifacetedness The beginning of Diary at the Centre of the Earth deals with the breakup of your major label band, Orlando, followed by your efforts to promote a new band, Fosca, in which you are the singer. You quote Glen Johnson from Piano Magic saying, “The only good bands are the ones with day jobs. Where the lack of pressure to succeed results in better music.” You didn’t agree with this theory, but you couldn’t sustain a day job either. Did you see the diary as a possible escape from the rat race? Or even as a new path to success? The diary was very much a new start after my time with the band Orlando. I never thought of it as any kind of escape, more a coping mechanism, or even a kind of self-medication. As for the rat race, I was never going to be part of that for very long, though I’ve dipped in and out. I’m just not made for that world; never was, never will be. Which is frustrating when it comes to paying the rent, but there it is. I’m always open to new solutions. So, you left Orlando, a band you wrote for but didn’t sing in; you founded Fosca, a band you do sing in; and finally, around 2005, you sidelined music to focus on writing. Was this a process of finding your voice? Is that the story of this volume of Diary at the Centre of the Earth? I don’t really believe in a single voice, more voices, plural; modes and phases. Different sides of me have emerged at different times, often due to the times and situations I found myself in. So in that respect, the diary is a tale of trying to find one’s place in the world. Whether I succeeded or not, it’s hard to say. One person’s idea of staying true to oneself is another’s idea of acute unemployability. Was there a moment when you realised that the diary might be your major artistic contribution? As a diary is always in process and never complete, does it have both failure and defiance built in? When Travis Elborough used excerpts in his anthologies, that was certainly a breakthrough. Ultimately, I see a diary as channelling the same impulse of a graffiti artist: trying to make one’s mark on the world, to say: “I too existed.” Philip Glass once said that he felt successful not when he earned enough from his music to give up driving a taxi, but when he had an audience. In which case, the diary is a success. As to the diary being my major artistic contribution, I’ve always worked with words, whether it’s song lyrics or diary entries. Music can divide as much as it unites – particularly if people don’t care for the musical style or the singer’s voice. Music can cut deeper into the heart than books. Some music. So it’s always worth trying both. I’m not done with music; I just want to give writing books a decent go. Morrissey was another guiding light. On reflection, how does he match up against Quentin Crisp? I still consult Mr Crisp, but less so Mr Morrissey. Perhaps because my passions have changed, moving closer into the world of words by themselves, rather than the world of words with music. My main guiding light is now Ronald Firbank, who wrote strange, Wildean experimental novels while living as an eccentric, anxious dandy loner. Firbank was more curious about the wider world than Morrissey, and today I am too. In fact, I look to the late Mr Bowie as a musical hero now, with his more varied interests and phases. I particularly love the 1983 Bowie look, obviously. All that said, I did like Morrissey’s single ‘Spent the Day In Bed’. Just as you opened Diary at the Centre of the Earth, gearing up to meet Quentin Crisp, the book closes in 2007 when you have developed a friendship with Shane McGowan. McGowan and Crisp seem very different to each other, but they were both in the profession of being, living by performing the myth of themselves. Both born on Christmas Day as well. Do you feel you learned anything different from your proximity to him than you did from your distance from Crisp? Shane MacGowan believed in books, music, art, and generosity. He sought me out as a fellow traveller, literally, as he took me with him to Tangier and New York. He would re-read Finnegans Wake – as holiday reading! A complex, bohemian, aloof figure, who was interested in the world yet was all too aware of his weaknesses: perhaps that’s his common ground with Quentin Crisp. Both men also believed in New York as a romantic symbol of everything human. I’m not done with London and Britain myself, though. For now. Dickon Edwards Exposed Himself Crucial to Diary at the Centre of the Earth is your developing openness about your mental health – depression, listlessness, anxiety – and how that affected your ability to work in a conventional sense and produce in an artistic sense. Did you ever feel uncertain about sharing any of this? Might it have shattered your well-put-together exterior? Or did it help explain you? I never regret anything I’ve exposed about myself. It’s not so much a mask slipping as a glimpse of rough drafts, behind-the-scenes, works in progress. There’s always been different sides to me, different moods. The only concern I’ve had is whether I’ve breached the privacy of others, which I’ve tried not to do. Partly because that would be unfair, but mostly because I try to supply something rare and different, if only as an alternative perspective. Many of the British indie bands that first inspired you thrived and developed through the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which ended in 1991. What was it like being on benefits in the UK in the 00s? Might you have been better off under Mrs Thatcher? It was sometimes a struggle. I remember collecting some free tins of EU tinned stew from the job centre in Archway. They had the blue EU flag on the label, with the circle of yellow stars. From one of the “food mountains” one reads about in the news. The stew was absolutely disgusting, but preferable to starvation. Or indeed to doing some job I didn’t want to do. Whether Mrs Thatcher would have given me a better or worse time, I don’t know. I was allowed to continue to exist and in a bedsit in leafy Highgate too, so I am grateful to Mr Blair. In a 2004 entry, you start to recontextualise your listlessness and passivity as idleness. You were asked to write a foreword for a reissue of Jerome K Jerome’s Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow. This was around the same time that Tom Hodgkinson’s How To Be Idle was released. I remember reading both in the dole queue at the Andersonstown Social Security office. Were you influenced by the growing cultural interest in idleness at the time, or did you feel you were already aligned with it? The most wonderful paradox about the Idler and Mr Hodgkinson is that he was, and is, very hard-working and productive. I did love that Jerome K Jerome book and went out of my way to be involved with the Snowbooks edition. Aligned, yes, but wanting to be recognised for my alignment! The Dandy’s Distant, Recent Past It was around the same time that you began your diary that I started reading Quentin Crisp in school in Belfast. Invariably, I found your diary when it was hosted on LiveJournal, and my old bandmate was certainly one of the emailers to whom you replied within the week. Did publishing the diary connect you with like-minded people, or did it invite unwelcome intrusion? Why did you first join, then eventually move away from LiveJournal? I’m always grateful for attention and connection – what else is there? To be stalked implies some sort of core normalcy worth stalking. That would never do. I’m closer to Warhol in that respect. On second thoughts, look what happened to him! As for Livejournal, I joined for the same reason I join all the popular platforms (MySpace, Friendster, Friends Reunited…), to see if it’s where the party’s at. It was, for a while, but like all parties, one has to go home at some point, if only to recover. LiveJournal certainly connected readers in a more manageable way – cloistered comments, but no likes, thumbs up, or heart reactions. Do you have any nostalgia for early Web 2.0? Not in the slightest, because I’m not the same person. We all become graveyards of our younger selves, admittedly, but in my case, I’m still curious about the current world and am still keen to try new things. If only to get Hastings Job Centre off my back. As a young man, LiveJournal allowed me to build a constellation of North Stars (very disorienting, obviously). This included diaries by yourself, Rhodri Marsden, and Momus, all of which, in distinct ways, documented failure and defiance, an artistic imperative against the indifference of the industry and public. Both of those writers appear in Diary at the Centre of the Earth, so do you recognise a kinship with them? Or does that constellation say more about me at the time? The stars don’t know they are part of Orion’s Belt. Yes, I’m certainly indebted to both Rhodri and Momus in that defiant artist sense, though both are much smarter and productive than me, which I envy. Rhodri is especially good at connecting with strangers: witness his “Duvet Know It’s Christmas” project. I couldn’t do that at all. Although Momus is more aloof, he still signifies to me a degree of belonging in the world. I feel less a part of the world than ever, but in a way that I’m at peace with. Is it possible that people are now more like Dickon Edwards than ever? Young people don’t like making phone calls either. They are open about their mental health online. They are anti-work. Hold no prospect of owning property. They are concerned with being authentic, but are also image-conscious. There is no contradiction for them. For them, adulthood doesn’t begin until their thirties. Were you a proto-zoomer? I don’t think I was a proto-zoomer, as I’ve never liked Skype or Zoom—they’re still phone calls. I was certainly attracted to the way email and the web could empower one’s sense of self in real time: I had an email address in 1995, two years before I had a computer. I used it in cybercafes. How I miss those gentle, geeky places! My problem now is that everyone lives for ‘likes’, unable to live within their own income of praise. My motivation to keep up my online diary has hit something of a crisis as a result, but hopefully this book version will consolidate my funny little place in the world. I still write paper letters – and to young people, too. Although I should add that they initiate the correspondence. I seem to be a kind of bookish Andrew Tate to them. I was fascinated by that phase in the 2010s when YouTube stars like Dan and Phil put out spin-off books that became bestsellers. They were boy bands without any music: just putting out rambling content about their lives was enough. Books have always been brand ‘merch’, and they work well in internet videos: they are props of authenticity. I’ve just had a peek at what Dan and Phil are up to now: they’re doing nostalgic stage shows about the 2010s for their fellow thirtysomethings. No time is more distant than the recent past. “I look like that Dickon man because I am that Dickon man,” you write, “Somebody has to be.” Hans-Georg Moeller writes about a new age of identity, proflicity, where we are no longer our “true selves”, but rather “profiles” or “personal brands”. Do you think you were at the forefront of this? Or were you part of the last authentic generation? Having different personae is nothing new: one’s writing self is not one’s speaking self. The difference today is the impact these personas can now acquire through the internet, and the difficulties of keeping them apart. You’re meant to be less of a complex human being. I love the phrase ‘horny on main’, as in letting one’s sexual desire slip out in the wrong Twitter account. I love the tension of the LinkedIn job-seeking persona versus the Instagram ‘thirst trap’ persona. Perhaps I am one of the last ‘authentic’ users in that sense, as I’ve never been able to formally reconcile these different selves in the way that society insists upon. Advisors at Job Centres have asked me to keep quiet about the diary in job interviews. They even ask me to keep quiet about my PhD thesis. You’re meant to present a different persona for each job application, and to rewrite your CV to suit the role. The giveaway is that jobs are called ‘roles’ at all. All work is acting work. In my case, I believe that gaps in the CV are how the light gets in. Heresy! So perhaps I’m authentic in that sense—too authentic. The job interview advice ‘just be yourself’ is quite misleading. Employers don’t really want to hire humans at all, with all their messy human complexities and desires and views on things. All employers really want are machines. Thankfully, the rise of AI will sort out once and for all the answer to Ms Streisand’s question: whether people really do need people. I’m sure you could program an AI to give Dickon Edwards-style answers for this interview: it would be more likely to deliver on time. An AI wouldn’t take hours to write these answers longhand in purple fountain pen ink on a yellow legal pad (there’s my authenticity right there!), then edit them by hand further, before typing them up on a PC. Does it make a difference, though? Interesting times. I have some proof of my own that young people have anxieties over authenticity: one of my Gen-Z correspondents sent me a pop compilation on cassette. I had to buy a brand new Walkman to listen to it. It has a USB socket! I do have a brand in a wary sort of way, though I’ve never felt part of a generation. All generations are interesting to me, and I bristle at being thought of as a typical Gen X-er. I have no wish to attend an Oasis concert in 2025. Just as well, given the prices. There are other ways of being a fiftysomething, and cheaper ones too. I’m busy inventing them. The diary has led to paid work and speaking engagements. It’s no longer a problem to be someone others haven’t heard of: celebrity is now so atomized that having any media presence at all is enough. You can identify as famous, and it now works. All it takes is the sheer nerve to think others will be interested in your content, and to keep it up (hence YouTubers). I fully expect to be asked to be on Strictly Come Dancing at some point. The Dandy Struts Across the Graveyard of His Younger Self “Where do you see yourself in five year’s time?’ you asked yourself hypothetically in 2006 – “Well, I see myself as a poor, debt-ridden, frustrated, lonely, unfulfilled, bitter, anxious and unhappy man of 40, owning no property, living in a rented furnished bedsit. And that’s putting it nicely. Best to keep one’s hopes at ground level. That way, one can only be pleasantly surprised. And I live in a state of constant surprise.” Without giving too much away for Vol. 2 of Diary at the Centre of the Earth, where are you right about where you were in five years’ time? At 40, I was still in the Highgate bedsit, and still poor. I had begun a new phase of my life by enrolling in a BA at Birkbeck, University of London. That led to getting a First, then doing an MA, which ended with getting a Distinction, and then the PhD, which I was paid to do full-time, and which I completed. A PhD on Ronald Firbank and camp modernist fiction! So I was certainly fulfilled in the cerebral sense, and more content with my lot, and yes, happy. Still anxious, still poor, but happy. The loneliness has since been solved by socialising and by having sympathetic flatmates: the silver lining of being unable to find a cheap bedsit anymore. Is there any power in the reverse: “How do you view the you of five years ago?” Five years ago, I was 49 and in the closing overs of my PhD. It was also the time of COVID, and I was a little crazy with the isolation and uncertainty of it all. London in lockdown terrified me: what is the point in being in London if you can’t go out? Thankfully, I could complete the PhD remotely, and was lucky enough to see out the lockdowns in a cheap bedsit in Angel, thus fulfilling a lifelong ambition to live in Zone 1. COVID and turning 50, though, were enough for me to consider a life outside London by the sea, though not too far away. So I’m now in St Leonards-on-Sea. It was either going to be the Barbican or St Leonards – no other options would do! And St Leonards has Marine Court, which is the drag Barbican. It thinks it’s the Queen Mary ocean liner. How do you feel now about the decade that was captured in this volume of Diary at the Centre of the Earth? 1997-’98 was a period that had some hope: a New Labour government, the internet in the home, the end of Britpop and the rise of pure pop; for me, miles away in Belfast, the beginning of the Peace Process. Mr Blair’s success in 1997 certainly did feel like the start of a new era of hope. As Patrick Keiller’s film London records, there were still regular IRA bomb attacks in London up to the early 1990s, along with a feeling that the Major government was just performing a kind of grey Thatcher tribute act, which no one wanted. One forgets how much more colourful, safer, and more optimistic London was from 1997 into the 2000s. That spirit is captured in Love Actually, a depiction of the Noughties city as a kind of sugary, humanist paradise, an exaggeration but not too far from the truth. The Saint Etienne film from the same time, Finisterre, is arguably an equally idealised love letter to Noughties London. A place where anyone can enjoy themselves, try new things, make new art, enjoy new art, be themselves, fall in love, be happy. Musically, all those dreary one-word bands trying to be Coldplay (Embrace, Keane, Terris, Hovis) were replaced by a welcome influx of spiky bands with tiny hats and tinier songs, all called the Somethings. Along with Lily and Amy and all those Hoxton children with spilt-paint hairdos. All spoofed in Nathan Barley, but at least there was something colourful and fun worthy of spoofing. It was also a period that included major tragedies: 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings. Both events are recorded as objective observations, even given your proximity to the latter. Returning to the immediacy of the medium, did you feel any responsibility in relation to how you covered such events? Those tragedies certainly demanded some sort of response, if only to offer an alternative to the flood of reportage elsewhere. It’s the dandy instinct in the writer: of being in the world, yet keen to stand apart at the same time, if only to offer punctuation. There is no entry in Diary at the Centre of the Earth for December 31st,1999. Everyone was waiting for it. The world was going to end. Did you write anything on the night of December 31st, 1999, and it didn’t make the cut? Or was it a conscious decision to skip such a culturally loaded date? I spent New Year’s Eve 1999 at my parents’ house in Suffolk, keen to avoid the London crowds. I was also busy writing the first Fosca album, so perhaps that sense of a great change found its way into the songs. At midnight, my parents and I walked to the village square to witness the local clock tower chiming in the new millennium. It was late. People were coming out of houses and pubs around us, shouting ‘Happy New Year!’ while we were still waiting for the village clock, feeling foolish. ”Anyone can be a millionaire. There’s more millionaires than ever today. But not one of the Lottery lot has the style of Mr Hefner, Mr Rockerfeller or Mr. Trump,” you write, “What is the point in being financially rich if your Style is bankrupt?,” you write. You can’t be held to account for not predicting the future, but, with hindsight, do you feel differently about some of the more glib or sweeping statements from the diary? I’ve since added an annotation about my present thoughts on Mr Trump. I was clearly ahead of the game in recognising his own dandyism, which he has since amplified into political power. He makes glib and sweeping statements himself, of course, some of which are dangerous and have resulted in violence. That’s a sobering lesson for me: I do care about people getting hurt. Another dark example is Milo Yiannopoulos, who I’m convinced stole my look for a while shortly after he became aware of me–we had a slight encounter on Twitter. Even Sebastian Horsley thought it was funny to make racist jokes, just to get attention. He didn’t mean the sentiment at all, but we now live in the age of optics, where intention counts for little. The first rule of the internet is: if something can be taken the wrong way, it will be taken the wrong way. That’s a trick of the system. We all know that in truth, people are complicated, people change, and people make mistakes. Yet the internet tricks us into forgetting those truths. Anger is a false joy, but it’s a joy nonetheless, so I do understand. I found it a difficult experience editing the diary book, for this reason, but once I realised that any anger I might feel at my younger self was just the effect of the internet, I relaxed. Blame the systems, not the humans. Besides, we are all the graveyards of our younger selves. The Dickon Edwards who wrote the diary is not the Dickon Edwards who’s writing these answers. Not quite. Hence, my insistence on providing annotations from 2025, to pre-empt some questions! I’m just glad I never met Mr Epstein. These days, I’m less interested in provocation for its own sake and more interested in wit, comfort, and charm. My continued existence is provocation enough. Dickon Edwards Is Not Done with London and Britain How has Britain changed? More specifically, how has London changed? You were keen in your description of the city and urban life there. Britain is at a strange point in its history. A lot of ‘confused roaring’, as Waugh put it. The cultural landscape of my youth has changed immensely: no Top of the Pops, no weekly music papers, no Smash Hits. I believe Radio 1 and the Top 40 are still going, but their dominance of the British music scene is no more. London was never Britain, though, hence the ‘centre of the world’ in the diary title. World, not country. It’s still important as the hub of all things globally, but the obvious rise in rents has made it more of a luxury than a necessity for the curious and young. The only way forward is a return to the squatting of the 1980s. Either that or a shift back to the belief that a house is meant to be a machine for living in, not a machine for making money. As with so much change, the rot happened in the language when the phrase ‘affordable housing’ was first allowed to go unchallenged. I’ve since seen it updated to ‘genuinely affordable housing’. Still, I’m optimistic that things will improve, London will be affordable for all, and history will look back at these times as a regrettable blip in priorities. For all the urban living of your diary, you often found solace in nature: feeding the ducks every Christmas; “I was reading a book about the Smiths, when the phone rang. It was Geoff Travis,” you write. “He wanted to know what I was doing. I wanted to ask him about the Smiths. He said that Ultrasound were the new Smiths. Later on I went outside and saw a squirrel.” In modern parlance, ‘I went outside and saw a squirrel’ is ‘touch grass.’ Do you touch grass more often now? I live in St Leonards-on-Sea now, which is effectively London Zone 12, as Iain Sinclair has implied. I’ve befriended gulls, badgers, and seals. Once you make eye contact with a seal pup, you are never the same again. I also like to prune some of the local footpaths to the seafront when they get overgrown with thorny branches and the council hasn’t intervened quickly enough. I now have gardening gloves and secateurs! I still do this minor community gardening in a full suit and tie. I also wear a seahorse brooch on my lapel, as a symbol of unconventional masculinity in nature. You write, ”All I do want is to be able to answer the dreaded FAQ, ‘What do you do?’ with something approaching a confident and definite description.. Do you have one now? I know I don’t. The older I get, the more I dread the question, but the less I care about the question. I used to say, ‘I slip and slide between cracks in time and cracks in make-up.’ I no longer wear make-up. So instead I say: ‘I slip and slide between cracks in time and gaps in CVs.’
