'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

Went to the eerie free-standing church tower in Crouch End last night for an evening of music and ghost stories. They had it done up wonderfully, at once properly uncanny and not too terrifying for such kids as were brought along...and then blew it completely. The first teller seemed to be reading his tale for the first time, and it wasn't like the material was going to save him when it had Mayor Richard Whittington in the 17th century (or, at one point, the 19th) and gargoyles falling where no gargoyle had been. Site-specificity is not a cheap way to add heft, it needs work. We left still disagreeing over whether the subsequent cellist's faux-rap was outright racist, or just really shit. A missed opportunity.

Last weekend, though - that was the first big weekend of the summer. You could even measure it from Wednesday (because normally Thursday is the new Friday, and I had Friday off) when, in a happier use of a normally disregarded space, the funny little community hall on Whittington Park hosted Philip Jeays' comeback show. At first a little uncertain after 18 months away, by the end he looked ten years younger and reminded what a gift he has. The support included two acts who were good if they were character comedy and alarming if they were not, plus - most unusually - a quite good poet, Sophia Blackwell. Don't think I've seen that happen since Murray Lachlan Young.

Then into the long weekend proper, celebrating lovely xandratheblue's birthday. First comedy; Josie Long (whom I'd never seen do a full set before) and Thom Tuck. Thom's show this year didn't make me laugh so hard I couldn't breathe, unlike his last one (and unlike John-Luke Roberts, who with Nat Metcalfe had done the first Edinburgh preview show I caught this year - yay local comedy mafia). But it's lingering with me like few comedy shows I've seen. I'd like him to get famous, at least cultishly Kitson-style (because I somehow can't see him doing arenas). Then on Friday, to East London and its already famous (though oddly, not to other cult East London businesses) cat cafe. Which does indeed have a lot of cats, even if only two of them seemed particularly keen to talk to us. I suppose if you wanted guaranteed friendliness, you'd have a dog cafe instead. Up to the Geffrye Museum, one of the dwindling band of London museums I'd never visited (it has good chairs), and pubwards for the evening. Saturday, picnic; no pinata this year, but my first ever go on Cards Against Humanity, which is every bit as excellent as the Daily Mail's hatred of it suggests. Plus, someone brought a dog! See above re: friendliness thereof.

On Sunday, because it was if anything an even lovelier sunny day, I went to sit in a municipal building to listen to a grumpy man. But it was Jonathan Meades, one of our finest grumpy men, so that's OK. The Stoke Newington Literary Festival is somehow even more North London than I'd expected; you even get given a free atheist periodical on the way in.

Apparently David Cameron's not just a Smiths fan, he likes Modest Mouse too. He's certainly doing his bit to keep their album titles topical. I skirted the edge of the protests yesterday. I wasn't in town to agitate or demonstrate - I did that the last time a party students trusted turned out to be lying about tuition fees, and I don't see that my contribution would achieve any more this time around - but since one of the routes I could take would combine the journey I was making anyway with a little disaster tourism, why not? With the lines of riot police blocking empty streets, the searchlight helicopter, the riot vans haring around in sixes, it all felt very Eastern European.

This was on my way to see the Jeays festive show at the Battersea Barge which - perhaps because of the disruptions? - wasn't as full as the past couple of years. The raffle format bore fruit, as it usually does - even when audience members chose songs I don't love on record like 'The Man from Del Monte', Phil's live performance has enough of Brel's demonic side to make them fascinating. The regrettably obligatory support slot from performance poet the Speech Painter was introduced by Phil in verse. A lengthy poem which was far more savage, and much funnier, than any of the supposed poet's work. It almost seemed too cruel. Almost.
Other shows seen this week include Brontosaurus Chorus (on excellent form - album-in-full shows are so much less depressing when it's a new album rather than a sanctioned classic), Jonny Cola (still with the new line-up), Boy Stood Alone On Mountaintop (solo acoustic singer-songwriters aren't really my thing, alas), Bleech (Amy Pond's sister and a slightly out of date Hoxtonista trying to be Elastica, but not as good as that sounds) and Pan. Apparently two thirds of Pan used to be Le Tetsuo, a name I knew but not a band I ever heard. The name doesn't really suit them, the sound being very tight and constrained, and their singer looking like David Morrissey as the young Gordon Brown. These are not bad things, you understand - simply things which contradict the name. I can't quite make out the lyrics, but the words I catch in one chorus include 'lesbian' and 'exes', which are both good words to have in your chorus.

Saw two of my favourite bands over the past few days - also, incidentally, the two bands I think of whenever some fool asks why young bands aren't addressing the issues of the day. Any time you see such a diatribe, remember the options: the writer is unaware of The Vichy Government or The Indelicates, and hence too ignorant for anything he says to be worth attention; or else the writer could not understand their lyrics, or did not consider them sufficiently political because they made no mention of 'Tony B Liar more like', in which case he is too stupid for anything he says to be worth attention. Both bands are confident enough that their sets were pretty much stripped of the old favourites, and both are creative enough that it barely registered because the new stuff is at least as good. Where matters diverged was in the support. The Indelicates had England's finest chanson man, Philip Jeays, solo and even better that way, wowing an incongruously young section of the audience; a particularly melodic and vaguely Springsteen incarnation of Keith TOTP & his etcetera; and the increasingly lovely Lily Rae. Vichy, on the other hand, were lumbered with one Joyride. Given they caused only sorrow, and stayed in one place (the stage) when we really wished they'd depart, I wondered whether this name might be cause for a Trade Descriptions case, but apparently not. Ripping off The Fall and the Mary Chain as ineptly as I've ever seen, and that's saying something, they managed to be thoroughly rubbish in spite of having one member in a Girls Aloud t-shirt and a song with the chorus "I'm the Bishop of Southwark, it's what I do".

Just finished Max Adams' The Firebringers - At, science and the struggle for liberty in nineteenth-century Britain, which is a frustrating bloody book. The main problem I had was no fault of Adams' - he overlaps quite a bit with Richard Holmes' Age of Wonder, which I'd not long read. But the comparison does show how Holmes' 'relay race' structure serves him brilliantly, while Adams lacks restraint and tries to tell too many stories at once, breeding confusion and occasional repetition. I was mainly reading the book in so far as I wanted to know more about John Martin, the painter who "single-handedly invented, mastered and exhausted an entire genre of painting, the apocalyptic sublime". I've loved his work ever since I saw his final great trilogy, Judgment, in what is now Tate Britain - it hangs there still, though very badly situated. He was big news in his time, though critical opinion was not kind then and is even less so now; as far as I'm concerned he still sits only a very little behind his friend and contemporary Turner as one of the best painters, never mind British painters, ever. Adams, on the other hand, likes him more than the critics but less than the Regency public. Then, for whatever reason, he has attempted to make this a group biography - perhaps because he was told they sell better now, on which more later. So we also get the other Martin brothers: Richard the soldier (his autobiography is alas lost, so he mainly appears in 'mights'); Jonathan (yes, confusing, but in an age of high child mortality it happened a lot) the religious maniac who set York Minster ablaze; and William, who started as inventor and ended another lunatic, riding around on a self-designed velocipede with a brass-bound tortoiseshell as a helmet, selling pamphlets about how he'd been swindled, a few of the stories true but most sheer paranoia.
Except the Martin brothers are still not enough, so they become a spine for 'the Prometheans', an undeclared, unrealised movement united in their desire to free mankind. Their membership includes Shelley, Godwin, the Brunels, various politicians...or does it? Because Adams' definitin of Promethean ideals seems more Procrustean; obviously most of his posthumous conscripts don't quite fit it, for which they are ticked off. Shelley was too extreme in his declarations, hence unpublishable and useless - but the Reform Bills were too timid and compromised. There is still good stuff to be salvaged from among this historical kangaroo court, but it's a trial.
And then, of course, the publishers clearly told Adams that The Prometheans wouldn't sell, so the title had to be dumbed down to The Firebringers. It's a bit of a mess, but not an uninteresting one.

Visited Kew Gardens for the first time yesterday, and it's magical. For somewhere so popular, it still doesn't feel crowded; for somehere so labelled, it doesn't feel lifeless. I suppose it's a combination of two of my favourite things, a mad old-style library manifest as a country house garden. Plus, dragonflies! The day before I'd been worrying that I'd yet to see any this year, but clearly that's because they're all getting busy down in Kew.
We also saw some guinea fowl. Even speaking as a vegetarian of nearly two decades, their combination of unflappability and fat-assedness screamed 'lunch'.
Then on to see the magnificent Philip Jeays, chanson supergroup in tow, launch his new album (and yes, I'm going to keep linking to him whenever the subject arises until you all become fans, buy his albums and send him straight in at Number One). The Jeays Battersea Barge shows are the social event of the season, but that season is early December; I have seen him here at other times of year before, but not for bloody ages. The usual supports make jokes about this, and it turns out that last December, when I thought the Speech Painter was maybe improving, I was just overwhelmed by red wine and christmas spirit; his presence is once more justified only by the extra piquancy he gives 'Geoff', Phil's song about shagging the Speech Painter's wife. We expect the new album set to be followed by a hits encore, but in spite of finishing early, there are only three old tracks. Stranger still, the new album doesn't include 'Thank You British Airways' - but then, 'Mr Jeays' was being played two albums before it was released. The new stuff is, however, brilliant - and he seems to be playing to his strengths, with fewer 'war is stupid' songs than ever, more lovelorn and timeworn heartbreakers. Thank you, Mr Jeays.

For the first time since he died, yesterday I deliberately listened to a Michael Jackson track. Not one of the ones blaring out of every car and shop, but the last one I remember having any interest in, before it became clear how wrong he'd gone: 'Scream'. And it's a bloody mess. In his paranoia, you can tell he's almost approaching that wonderfully dehumanised sound R&B revelled in around the late nineties and early noughties, but perfectionism and endless second-guessing just leaves it clattering and confused. Shame. For a happier Youtube experience, I recommend Nathan Fillion from Firefly as Green Lantern; alas, this is a fan-made trailer for a film that does not exist but still, how good does it look? That was from the mailout of one of the UK's best comics shops, Page 45; the other, Gosh, also alerted me to a gem: Comics creator stopped by Transportation Security Administration for carrying script about writer under suspicion by Transportation Security Administration.

Read Poul Anderson's Brainwave on Tuesday - a novel in which the Earth exits the intelligence-dampening field in which it's been stuck for millennia, and everybody suddenly gets a lot smarter. Reading it in the park at least served to keep me posted that no, this was not really happening, but it's still an astonishing book - and one with which I especially sympathise in weather like this, because I can feel the heat making me dumber. It's from four years before Flowers for Algernon, and while I've never read that (science fiction which gets mainstream critical acclaim usually leaves me suspicious), I've read enough things which riff on it to suspect that it got a lot of inspiration here. Poul Anderson is a weird one - my dad is a fan, so realistically I must have read some of his stuff as a kid, but I have no idea what. The only one I could tell you for sure is The Broken Sword, an impressively bleak fantasy novel he wrote before fantasy became entirely codified, set in the real Middle Ages (complete with all the stuff people then knew about but we tend to ignore) rather than an analogue, which always gets me on side. This...this has almost nothing in common with that, except a certain majestic clarity of vision. It's not flawless; it does at times feel like the cosmic vision of Olaf Stapledon forced into a format which looks something a little more like a novel, and suffering accordingly (Anderson's evolved humans, for instance, still all seem to be locked into heterosexual monogamy - because he was more stuck in his ways than Stapledon 20 years earlier, or just because he had less space?). And the idea that the superbrains of future Man find no consolation or worth in any of the species' past achievements...well, I'm as contemptuous of humanity as the next person who'd gladly sell us out to the first civilised species that made contact, but I don't buy that. Anderson's brain-boosted humans abandon TV for magazines, then magazines for books; after the change, one simpleton thinks 'I can read a comic book. Maybe I can read a real book now.' Well, as someone who can happily go from Ulysses to Mighty Avengers, and always hated John Stuart Mill's spurious distinction betweem 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures, you can guess how I feel about that. In the end, the advanced humans become something not unlike Iain Banks' Culture - just a bit less fun. But still, that's an awful lot to fit in 160 pages. Plus, you know that thing from...Mickey Spillane, maybe? 'Whenever I don't know what happens next, a guy comes through the door with a gun?' Poul Anderson goes one better. One chapter ends when a chimp comes in with a gun. On an elephant.

Those of you who've been paying attention may notice that my Current Music all December has been christmas music, and today it's not. Why so? Well, there's a lot of good christmas music one can't sensibly listen to during the rest of the year, but there are even fewer occasions when it makes so much sense to listen to songs about being five years from the end of the world. Which is not to say that I am definitely expecting the Eschaton - I've seen far too many supposed Last Days pass for that (though I do remember being terrified on my first one, back in the eighties. Stupidly, I don't remember the date, only the fear, and being pulled around in a sledge by my parents, which helped somewhat). It's more that I see the world filled with so many vectors towards a bad apocalypse (climate change, superbugs, fundamentalism, the list goes on) that if I want to feel any hope at all for the future, it seems worth half-believing that a good apocalypse might arrive first. I'm all too aware that we might all wake up on December 22nd 2012 having made no evolutionary leap to the hypercontext, no contact with benevolent aliens, no progress at all. But the chance that we might seems distinctly more plausible than the alternative. The effort and ingenuity of the small portion of humanity who understand how bad things are being sufficient to get us out of this hole? That's just crazy talk.

Maddening selection of good gigs on Wednesday, but I couldn't abandon the annual Jeays extravaganza. Not quite so crowded this year - I think maybe the advance sales backfired, with people who knew they wouldn't get seats deciding not to bother. But still excellent. Peacock still does one song I really like ("you change and adapt"), and the Speech Painter finally deployed some (not bad) new material even if I am now convinced he's Sylar (watchmaker by day + eyebrows). And Jeays was on fine form, complete with messiah complex, no navel and a really good corduroy frock coat-type-thing. Maybe it was a duster, I've never been entirely sure what dusters are. Our numbers came up, so that was 'Richenda' and 'Midnight In Trieste' guaranteed, and the rest of the crowd didn't choose anything too dreadful.

As against the genteel Jeays show, all civilised and seated, Patrick Wolf's crowd look like the cast of Skins let loose on a Manics fan's wardrobe (except that like so many real young people, most of them are not actually that attractive when you stop and look). This goes double for Wolf himself: in the flesh he looks about 12, and may I be permitted a rockist moment if I say that I found the raven he was wearing on his head for the early set somewhat distracting? He clearly doesn't have an insincere bone in his body, which is essential if you're going to go this OTT musically while dancing in the fake snow against a backdrop of giant snowflakes. He's a star like they used to make, except somehow more fragile. I think part of what makes me feel so old watching him is that at the back of my mind I can't help but worry about him, especially in light of his live problems earlier this year (no sign last night, thank heavens).

Oh yeah, and speaking of feeling old - my birthday's all been organised by Facebook and email this year, hasn't it? If I don't know you via those channels then you're probably a creepy stalker and not even a very good one - December 27th, The Noble, Crouch Hill, from 7pm.