Nick Richardson

On my way to band practice last night, I came out of Camden Town tube station to find a group of men and women dancing about, singing songs and tooting on kazoos. They were, they told the assembled crowd, the Citizens’ Kazoo Orchestra, and they were there to protest against Camden Council’s decision to ban unlicensed busking in the borough.

Writing drunk rarely works. Writing hungover, on the other hand, can be surprisingly effective. A bastard behind the eyes can still the frivolous part of the brain – the part that wanders off and watches cats on YouTube, or scrolls through Vice’s Dos and Don’ts – and allow the serious part to take control. Daily Rituals, Mason Currey’s compendium of working methods of the ‘great minds’, is full of writers who spent their nighttimes getting wasted, then got up and almost immediately started producing.

How we look, and transform how we look, has been Ellen Gallagher’s preoccupation for the last twenty years. Throughout AxME, Tate Modern’s stunning retrospective, images of our mutable features – lips and eyes especially – recur with a frequency that suggests fevered obsession. A large, early painting, Oh! Susanna (1993), looks from a distance like an Agnes Martin abstract weave of dots and lines on a smudgy orange background, but is actually composed of tiny lips and eyeballs and the odd, disembodied Barbie’s head.

Earlier this year Jesse Norman claimed that so many Etonians end up in government not because they’re born into money and power, but because ‘other schools don’t have the same commitment to public service’. Boys at Eton are encouraged to run parts of the school, so ‘don’t defer’; they also study rhetoric, poetry and public speaking, which are ‘incredibly important to young people succeeding in life’. Norman failed, however, to mention the kind of all-important physical training that Edmund Marlowe puts at the centre of his new novel of Eton life, Alexander’s Choice.