A little while ago I reported on Cathi Unsworth's fantastic epic on Goth In The Time Of Thatcher, Season of the Witch, and on Wednesday managed to catch a date in her tour promoting it. The Dublin Castle in Camden, along the road towards Regents Park, I discovered, doesn't serve wine, so I opted for a half of Camden Pale and took it through the swinging doors that led to the music area at the back of the pub. There were about thirty of us listening not just to Ms Unsworth but also to writer Richard Cabut, a gentleman more central to the historiography of Goth than I realised, reading from his novel Looking For A Kiss. Both painted a picture of this particular part of London as a psychogeography of the marginal and the uneasy, which Goth, or Positive Punk, or whatever you might want to call it, fitted into. The authors answered some questions from compere Travis Elborough and from the floor - always a hit-and-miss business, that, but it gave some opportunity to reflect on the debatable politics of Goth.
While I was waiting for the doors to open I wandered down to Gloucester Gate and came across this incredible fountain from 1878 in the form of a Coad-stone folly by the side of the road, looking like a grotto or tiny cave incongruously topped by a bronze milkmaid. I couldn't remember seeing mention of it before, but to my relief it's in Philip Davies's Troughs and Drinking Fountains. He rejoices that Camden Council has been persuaded to restore it. That was in 1989: it could do with a tidy-up again.
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