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º February 12th-February 18th 2001
Sunday Lurid Digs, Saturdays
Saturday Islington
Friday Bennett, Bars, Belle
Thursday ...and Browning
Wednesday Circulation, Quizlette
Tuesday sClubOfSeven
Monday "Are you a man or a woman?"

º Sunday 18th February 2001

"Palace: Prince 'not gay' shocker"

A small comic treat, carefully timed for those of you who can only check out feelthy pictures at the weekends, when there's nobody else in the office: Lurid Digs, in which the hard-core is subsumed to the decor (and oh, what decor).

I'm no great fan of Saturdays, as a rule; way to much bridge'n'tunnelling going on, with people from the suburbs standing swaying on street corners, trying to read their text messages from the label on their bottle of beer.

So as a general rule, I schedule myself in to work on Saturday evenings, and hope to get away by midnight if the urge for entertainment strikes. But once in a while, the schedule goes awry and I finds myself with a free Saturday. And, do you know, I think I may be on to something: the key to Saturday evenings is...Saturday afternoons.

It works like this: leave home at a leisurely pace at around 3pm, steer quickly through the obstacle course that is Covent Garden at a weekend to pick up some bare essentials (freshly roasted coffee, decent bread, The New York Review of Books), then find David at Compton's and sit and watch the parade go by till you fall over.

Judging by the two or three not-unattractive people who staggered up to us around 5pm muttering "..been on the piss all afternoon.." I am not the only person to have discovered this strategy. (Obviously not, given that David rang me at 8pm last Saturday crying "I'm in Bond Street. And I don't know why!".) Neil and Guy were there earlier, before they went off to see Hannibal, but we didn't see them again, so perhaps they went off to eat. I also seem to recall seeing two large fluffy bunnies at some stage, though I think that may have been a GMFA promotion.

Getting home proved painless enough (once I'd deciphered the text message from my beer-bottle) and appropriately enough I was back in plenty of time to watch, yes, 101 Rent Boys.

º Saturday 17th February 2001

David and I agreed that we were both far to ill to go out on the town, so we went to Islington instead.

At the Edward VI (the Mavis Wilton of gay bars) things were proceeding at their usual homely pace - I can't remember the last time I fancied anyone in here (bar staff emphatically excluded).

On the other hand, things at Bar Fusion (the Danniella Westbrook of gay bars) were almost too lively, complete with dancing on the bar, flooded toilets and a nice middle-aged dyke who wanted to continue the non-existent conversation we'd had last week (about her alcohol-dependency counselling, hmmmm).

David and I left around midnight, he to go home, and me to go on to the Spiral. But apparently, David got involved in a conversation about genital piercings with a group of straight youth on the tube and had to go to the Black Cap to catch his breath, and I came over all nauseous walking down City Road and came straight home.

I daresay we'll be too ill to go out again tonight - so see you about nine?

º Friday 16th February 2001

I wish Alan Bennett kept a blog, something like this:

17 January The Prince of Wales and Mrs Parker Bowles come to The Lady in the Van. Normally royalty is guaranteed to put a frost on an audience but their presence peps up things up and it's a very good house...
Their arrival at the theatre comes shortly after that of Barry Manilow, who is puzzled to find the press and paparazzi abruptly deserting him as they go in pursuit of grander quarry...
John Gielgud was once telling me about Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. 'Mind you,' he said, 'she'd have made a disastrous queen. Didn't go to the theatre at all.'

Or perhaps even a meta-blog:

21 March Read the hitherto unpublished extracts from Sylvia Plath's diaries without much interest. I hadn't known about Hughes's homophobia - though I'm not sure that antipathy to Truman Capote can be so subsumed, Capote really deserving a phobia to himself.

2 September Finish Peter Nichol's Diaries, a good read and hard to put down. He's blessed, as Osborne was, with droves of relatives (who) are a good source of material. I may not be the one to talk but with Nichols the vestibule between Life and Art is quite short and nobody lingers in it long.

The text (but not the links) are from Bennett's diary for the year 2000, extracts of which were published in the London Review of Books earlier this year. The LRB has been a rich source of blog-related material on journals and diaries lately. More soon, maybe.

Something of a pea-souper in London last night, traditional weather in which to venture out in search of News from the Shoreditch Gay Bars:

The Spiral Staircase has been closed for a couple of days; apparently they're installing new toilets (no comment).
The Norfolk Village is no longer gay (but you knew that) - eating outside ain't much fun in the depths of winter, it seems.
The Joiner's Arms is to close soon for a major re-furb, including the repositioning of the bar to the right-hand wall, a new timber floor and lots more tables and chairs  (and a new clientele? - Ed)
At 333 (the-venue-formerly-known-as-The-LA) they're having another go at hosting a regular weekly gay night: LA3 debuts next Sunday (till 4am which could be handy).
And UP, the oh-so-cool club on Whitechapel Road, continues it's erratic schedule with a night this Saturday, then nothing till March 10th.
Oh, and no news from The Royal Oak - so no change there then.

Belle and Sebastian have a new show in Camden. Belle moves amongst the audience, chatting about her cyanide habit, and Sebastian is nowhere to be seen. The show is called 'The Eye' because Belle wears a speculum and all you can see in the darkness is this huge floating pupil. When I got back from buying a drink, there was a hand-written poster from Belle attached to a pillar asking me not to sit in the aisle and not to wear my own speculum, because it was putting her off. It was a pleasant evening though, ending just now when I woke up.

Given that I know not one damn thing about Belle and Sebastian, I guess this counts as one of my weirder dreams.

º Thursday 15th February 2001

Aha! the first few lines from the script for The Wizard of Oz reveals that, really, The Scarecrow is a Hunk. (Maybe I won't have that haircut after all.)

[I nicked this link from:Minkered...]

Found: the one gay man in the world who enjoyed Valentine's Day. (Pass the sick bag, Sylvie.)

Much risibility last week when a novelist claimed that Eminem's lyrics were up there on a par with Browning. Now it becomes clear: he meant  Paul Browning, the man who wrote: "Shit! Call you back".

º Wednesday 14th February 2001

Average daily circulation figures, rounded to the nearest million for your convenience:

Points to ponder:

- Tabloids outsell broadsheets by a huge margin: The Sun outsells The Independent fourteen to one, The Mail outsells The Independent ten to one

- That said, The FT and The Times sell a lot more than you might think; The Express and The Star sell a lot less

- The Scotsman, despite its regional remit, has the fourth highest circulation of any daily newspaper

- As The Sun is to The Independent, Freaky Trigger is to Swish Cottage (but, ahem, on a scale of 4000 to 1)

- For every one visitor to Blogadoon, there are over 200,000 buyers of The Sun. Oh well.

Another appalling lack of response to yesterday's quizzlette (memo to self: find brighter greedier friends). But hey, I'm now ten quid up.

   ¶ The man who swallowed his mobile phone chip is Alfred Sirven, from Elf, the company at the heart of a huge Europe-wide scandal that will run and run, trust me.

   ¶ The Tory politician who suggested that maybe, just maybe, sometime in the distant future, the Conservative Party could be headed by, gasp, a homosexual is Francis Maude (great name under the circs, I thought). The resulting vitriolic letters to the Telegraph are here (and the Telegraph's mildly encouraging leader response here).

   ¶ The balding rock star of whom Limp Bizkit producer Ross Robinson said "When he was young and his voice was on fire, he was so hot," but who also happens to be gay and is therefore covered by Clause IV of Eminem's lyric about "you faggots can vanish to volcanic ash And re-appear in hell with a can of gas, and a match" (that's Browning???) is, of course, Reg Dwight aka Elton John aka Eminem's prospective duet partner at the Grammys.

Elsewhere yesterday: Retro Bar Pop Quiz Won By Strangers Shock (possibly because it failed to include questions about the name of the first venue played by Roxy Music, or the name of Brian Ferry's first band, see below).

You'll also be surely glad to know that an errant cheque eventually found its way to my account, so the sClubOfSeven lyrics remain unused.

º Tuesday 13th February 2001

Three answers that might figure in tonight's Pop Quiz (but won't):
   ¶ Eyes
   ¶ The Hobbit's Garden, Wimbledon
   ¶ The Gas Board

And three questions that definitely won't:
   ¶ Surname of the criminally corporate mastermind whose first action on being arrested was to swallow the chip from his mobile phone?
   ¶ Surname of balding rock star variously referred to as "young and...on fire, he was so hot" and "...in hell with a can of gas, and a match"?
   ¶ Surname (hello?) of the politician whose call for tolerance inspired a flood of hate-mail at the Daily Telegraph, motivating a vicar, no less, to dismiss 'inclusiveness' as "the new buzz word" (back to The Book, rev), and Jason Robertson of Sheringham, Norfolk (we know where you live, Jason) to look forward to a time when "the wealthy but numerically tiny 'gay community' gradually dwindles because of its disease-creating practices"?

As before, a fiver to the first person to press the hand-written answers to these three questions into my hot little hand tonight.

º Monday 12th February 2001

I have tried hard, oh so hard, to interpret this remark as a genuine solicitation from an intelligent, clear-sighted and sober person but no, it just won't fit: shouted at me on an especially festive Vauxhall Tavern dance-floor last night, "Are you a man or a woman?"

At last! Official validation of dweeb-culture! At the British Museum from Thursday: Annuraaq.

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