I’m slowly but pleasurably editing Dickon Edwards’ Diary at the Centre of the Earth for print. You heard it here first.
I’m up to summer 2006 and Dickon is at Latitude Festival. “My feet are killing me.”
I was there for that!*
Truth be told, I remember being very excited by the prospect of meeting Dickon. On our way in to the festival, I spotted a ticket stub on the ground with the “Richard Edwards” and a London address printed on it. I wondered if it belonged to Dickon and I should retrieve it for him. I was with Neil though, who, better connected, knew it wasn’t the correct address and that the name was just coincidence. I was jumpy, looking for Dickon in all the wrong places.
I soon spot him in the comedy tent during Robin Ince’s Book Club, standing aloof and jotting feverishly. “I always carry a notebook,” he says somewhere in these Diaries. Even then, we don’t actually meet and I must wait a little longer.
When we finally cross paths in the mud, I’m lucky to be wearing my three-piece suit. “Well look at you,” says Dickon, seemingly impressed at my shambolic attempt at dandyism.
I go all shy.
Shortly after leaving Dickon, some teens ask for a selfie with me in my suit. It’s the sort of thing that more usually happens to Dickon than me. My teens are respectful. They say “It’s just not the sort of thing you expect to see at a festival.”
Later, backstage at the literary tent, I’m annoyed when Neil doesn’t introduce me to Martin White properly, or indeed at all. It’s a bad habit he has, which he would repeat years later when we meet Momus at the Glad Cafe in Glasgow. As it happens, I’m friends with Momus now, but in 2006* I lacked the confidence for a more assertive hello to Martin. As such, Martin spends the rest of the night wondering who I am and why I’m trailing him and his friends around the field.
When I try to break away from the group on pretence of seeing an unadvertised Buzzcocks performance in the woods, Neil challenges me to “name three Buzzcocks songs,” revealing that I can’t and that I’m making excuses. I trudge on, a despised junior, an outsider to the outsiders. Gervais kicks Ince, Ince kicks White, White does his best to ignore me.
I should have found Dickon’s “Well look at you” more nourishing at the time. It was perfect. Not too much, not too little. Exactly what I must have been looking for when putting on my suit in the first place. Thank you, Dickon. It took me almost 20 years to realise you made my day, but you did.
*Correction: Neil and I were at Latitude 2008, not 2006. I am an unstuck-in-time idiot.