You don't look a day over 799

There was an extraordinary event in Cambridge last night. A light show was projected onto the white walls of the Senate House. It was basically a kind of PowerPoint presentation outlining the history of the university, which is 800 years old this year, but what a screen!

Quentin Blake provided drawings of Darwin and Newton, Milton made an appearance and Stephen Hawking got sucked into a black hole. It all got a little psychedelic at times - a bit like a Pink Floyd concert without the music (which is, of course, fairly appropriate given their Cambridge roots).

There was music, but you could not hear it until you came to leave. The bells of Great St Mary were booming out, as were the bells of many other churches across Cambridge and across the whole country (and the world, in fact, with bells in New York and Melbourne among others, joining in).

Someone behind me - someone connected with the University clearly - said to whoever they were with - 'We've actually done rather a lot really, haven't we?'

Yes you have. Well done!

Oliver Twist

I finally finished reading Oliver Twist to my son. I'm not sure whether the literary merits outweighed the problems I have with the book. In fact I'm sure they don't. The fact is, Oliver Twist is not a very good book. It has some fantastic moments - it is written by Dickens, so that goes without saying - but it also overwrought and overwritten, and often just plain silly.

I had never appreciated before what a folk tale Oliver Twist is. The boy Oliver is like some poor orphan from a Grimm's fairy story, setting off into the dark forest (except that London stands in for the forest). And there he falls prey to an evil goblin. . .

Fagin is not a character, he is a caricature; a collection of attributes. He is ugly, big-nosed and a miser, constantly wringing his hands and clutching at clothes, collecting children about him and corrupting them in ways that are only hinted at in the book. Fagin could step unchanged into a Nazi recruitment poster.

I have yet to read Peter Ackroyd's biography of Dickens, but I do have it on my shelves. I searched the index for any discussion of antisemitism but could not find any references. I do know that it was mentioned at the time and he received complaints and may have altered the text in response. But there does seem to be some idea that because Dickens was a decent sort, he could not also have been antisemitic. Here is how he introduces Fagin to us, standing like a demon in hell, toasting fork in hand:

In a frying-pan, which was on the fire, and which was secured to the mantel-shelf by a string, some sausages were cooking; and standing over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair.

And what about:

The mud lay thick upon the stones, and a black mist hung over the streets; the rain fell sluggishly down, and everything felt cold and clammy to the touch. It seemed just the night when it befitted such a being as the Jew to be abroad. As he glided stealthily along, creeping beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal.

Pages go by where Dickens never refers to Fagin by name but only as 'the Jew' or 'the old Jew' or the 'crafty Jew'. Dickens may well have defended himself by saying that he was creating a vile character who happened to be Jewish, but Fagin is defined by his Jewishness. It is hard to believe that Dickens did not feel that some part of Fagin's depravity was bound up in the man's Jewishness. Fagin is an extraordinary creation, but one that does Dickens little credit.

In a recent BBC adaptation, they tried to make Fagin more sympathetic (but Dickens has no sympathy for him) and even tried to make him the victim of antisemitism at his trial (when he is himself the product of antisemitism as a character). He was played by Timothy Spall - a man who could not be more physically distant from the shrivelled gargoyle Dickens created.

The Dickens of Oliver Twist is nothing like the Dickens of David Copperfield or the writer of The Signalman. It was an early book and he got better - much better - as a writer. Young Dickens was clearly not above Carry On style humour either. The character Charlie Bates alone is called Master. Master Bates. Geddit? Take this paragraph for example:

The three boys sallied out; the Dodger with his coat-sleeves tucked up, and his hat cocked, as usual; Master Bates sauntering along with his hands in his pockets; and Oliver between them, wondering where they were going, and what branch of manufacture he would be instructed in, first.

With his hands in his pockets. Hilarious. Of course there are flashes of brilliance - particularly in his descriptions of London seedier side:

Crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half-a-dozen houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and threatening to fall into it- as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage; all these ornament the banks of Folly Ditch.

Sykes is the one character that rings absolutely true. Sykes seems to be spot on: a brilliantly realised creation. Sykes swaggers off the page. I feel like I've crossed the street to avoid Sykes, heard his growling voice in the pub, felt his dog sniffing round my leg. He is terrifyingly real and horribly modern.

The same adaptation I mentioned above also tried to make it seem as though Sykes hanged himself because of his remorse at killing Nancy - a change that actually outdoes Dickens for sentimentality. Dickens is a lot harder on Sykes by making him haunted by Nancy's eyes, accidentally hanging himself while trying to escape a baying mob in arguably the best section of the entire book.

Roadrunner once

I went running this evening after a bit of a pause. I set off far too quickly and suffered for it later in my circuit. It was good to be running again, though there was so much traffic I ended up coughing for about half an hour when I got back. Instead of a healthy glow, I felt like I'd been chain smoking.

I like running in the dark with my iPod playing. I have a play list for running. The tracks have to be the right beat to really work and there is a certain type of music that seems to work well for me. I remember recently running through moon-shadows of trees on part of my route while Tom Verlaine's Days on the Mountain was playing. It was magical. Sometimes music just fills a gap you didn't even know was there and makes something perfect.

One argument against people walking or running around with headphones on is that we are providing a soundtrack to our lives as though we are in a movie. To which I say - what's wrong with that?

Writers are probably not the most psychologically stable of people. There is probably a common habit of stepping outside of the moment and observing, recording, rewriting - editing. I have always felt as though I was to some extent an actor in a movie.

It has often been a very dull movie, I hasten to add.

And they could certainly have cast someone better looking as the leading man.

My laptop came back from the technicians today. A little like dry cleaning, there was nothing to actually show that anything had been done apart from a piece of paper attached to the lid. I suppose time will tell.

Shameless name-dropping

I fell off the Manchester book award today. And after all my recent reminiscing about Manchester too! I had been on the longlist, but did not make the shortlist. Ah well. It was nice while it lasted.

Manchester has indeed been on my mind in the last few days. My email conversation with Helen Chase prompted me to Google a couple of people and I found my old friend Jim Parris. Jim was the bass player and musical heart of the band I was in - the one that never played. It was called Theramin. My old friend, former house-mate, studio-mate and fellow illustrator, Alan Adler, was on drums.

And what a fantastic name Jim Parris is, by the way. It sounds like someone Jack Kerouac would have hung out with.

Jim was - and is - a hugely talented musician. He was (and I'm sure still is) very good-looking and cool: everything I was not (and why am I saying 'was' there?). It must have been very frustrating to be in a band with people like me who could barely play a chord without help, though he never showed it if it was. Jim went on to form another band, called Bee Vamp in 1978. John Peel liked them I think. I was very jealous.

Alan also played drums in a band called The Thunderboys when he and the effervescent Carmel McCourt and I all shared a house. Most of the people in the house were in the band (not me though). Carmel was a painting student who, if memory serves, did spot paintings years before Damien Hirst. Carmel McCourt's not a bad name either is it?

Carmel guested on vocals for Bee Vamp and later the band Carmel emerged, with the lovely Carmel on vocals, Jim on bass and Jim's cousin Gerry on percussion. They had a couple of proper hit singles. They were on TV. I was very, very jealous.

After a couple of emails to Jim, Carmel herself got in touch. It was great to hear from her and to hear her news. She is appearing in a play called Song of Songs. I hope I get to see it. I'll give you the dates and venues when I've looked at the email again.

My link with music went in another direction. The other founder of Theramin was Paul Ablett who sang and played sax - or would have had we ever performed. He auditioned me by asking me to play along with James White and the Black's Contort Yourself.

Paul also used to write music reviews for the Student Union newspaper - Pulp. He asked me to illustrate them and those drawings were my first real illustration commissions.

I left Manchester in 1980 and went to London, sharing a house in Palmer's Green and a studio opposite the British Museum with Alan Adler (who was still playing the drums). The Pulp pictures and some paintings of rock stars I did in my final year - Howard Devoto of Magazine among them - got me a job at Record Mirror drawing caricatures of pop stars for the letters page. A job that lasted for five long years. I don't think I ever drew Carmel, but I certainly drew Mick Hucknall of Simply Red who was in her year (the one below mine) at the art college in Manchester.

I had very little interest in the 80s pop scene and I probably did not put my all into those drawings of Bananarama and Haircut 100, looking back. And Boy George stills owes me £200 for a drawing I did for his fan club. My guess is that I'm probably not going to get that back now, am I Mr O'Dowd?

We are on. . .

Apologies to anyone who took my advice and downloaded I Love You You Big Dummy and whacked up the volume and was in any way appalled by Howard Devoto blurting out the f word. I'd forgotten about that. Hey - that was the seventies! But it's great though, isn't it? And while you are downloading things download The Stooges No Fun to hear Iggy Pop before he was an insurance salesman.

Peter Kirkham got in contact to say that he had heard John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten was now a property developer. After a little Googling I have to say that however unlikely this seemed it does appear to be the case. He also appears to want to break into TV. Presenting Property Ladder would be perfect wouldn't it? Altogether now - Property in the UK. . . it's coming sometime - maybe. . .

My laptop went off to Dell for some tough love, as predicted.

I'm bored

I'm the chairman of the bored. . .

If anything was going to work as an antidote to my flirtation with seventies nostalgia, it was going to be seeing Iggy Pop doing an insurance advert. Insurance? Iggy Pop?

I saw Iggy Pop in Manchester in the late seventies. He was wearing nothing but a pair of leather trousers with a horse's tail sticking out of the backside, like he was some kind of demented fawn. He was like a force of nature.

Seeing Iggy pop up on TV was all a bit sad. Younger people won't know who he is, surely, and anyone who does will hardly be attracted by the godfather of punk selling out. It is even more tragic than John Lydon doing a butter advert somehow (and heaven knows that was bad enough).

No fun.

Epiphany

Christmas is officially over. The cards have come down and the wreath is in the recycling bin. In Venice Epiphany (the Christian celebration of the visit of the Magi) has the added attraction of the Bufana - a witch who leaves sweets in children's stockings (or ashes if they've been bad!). There is even, apparently, a rowing race down the Grand Canal featuring men dressed as old ladies.

My son went back to school today and I was in my office in earnest, doing all kinds of dull but important pieces of displacement activity. My laptop has been playing up and though I know that it is going to have to go back to Dell to get fixed, still I let one of their technicians attempt to fix it by remote.

While he was doing this, my agent called. Philippa was ringing to check my availability for a meeting with Bloomsbury, to talk about the latest book and to discuss what happens next.

I always slightly dread the 'what happens next' discussions. It's not that I don't have lots of things I want to do. Far from it. It's more that I get stressed trying to decide which of the many things I'd like to do is the one that has most going for it.