February 9th 2004 - February 15th 2004
Sunday Survival
Saturday Bimboed
Friday Anything went
Thursday John Stephen
Wednesday Of which we speak
Tuesday Coincident
Monday Heartfelt
Sunday 15th February 2004
You know Valentine's Day is well and truly over when the DJ at the White Swan plays "I Will Survive" - and the crowd goes wild.
Saturday 14th February 2004
Eight months to go before the next US presidential election, so it must be time to: bring on the bimbos.
Friday 13th February 2004
In a persistent and unprecedented act of generosity, our good friend Andy takes his friends to the theatre every year - at least two dozen of us, all male, all gay.
As you might imagine, it makes for an evening liberally speckled with glints of surrealism - not least, this year, the moment when I looked back as we walked from bar to theatre to see a parade of middle-aged gay men walking down the middle of the street, like an impromptu protest march. ("What do we want?" A cure for male-pattern baldness. "When do we want it?" Now, ideally.)
Given the circumstances, the show - Anything Goes - was pretty much beyond criticism (though a big Blogadoon hi! goes out to one particularly cute chorus member...)
But, speaking personally, the shock-highlight of the evening was when the show's Musical Director took an extended (over-extended, some might say) final bow, and I realised, as I should have done some hours before really, that it was Gareth Valentine. Things being what they are, I've been expecting to find myself in his company again for about twenty years now. Turns out it was he who recommended the show to Andy in the first place. Same old modest Gareth then.
Thursday 12th February 2004
Obituary Watch
His way to Carnaby Street, though, was lit by the photographer-turned-retailer Bill Green. Green was a figure photographer who worked on near-nude studies of muscular males. To protect against outrage and arrest in an austere decade, he covered his models' modesty in tiny briefs and worked under the name of Vince.
When fans of his work began asking where they could buy such skimpy apparel, he began a mail-order retail outlet, soon moving to premises in Carnaby Street - then an undesired and seldom-visited back alley full of abandoned warehouses - with his pseudonym as the shop's name.
The shop also stocked shirts in yellow, purple and scarlet, building a reputation among the theatrical, artistic and then almost invisible gay community - and a sniggering fame among black-cab drivers...
John Stephen never married.
Wednesday 11th February 2004
Happy birthday, Luca. (Great news about your wall.)
Speaking of walls, Lord knows I'm no Zionist, but I do feel a responsibility to point out a rare instance of the Israeli Government copping the wrong end of the image shit-stick
That infamous fence they're building to 'defend themselves from Palestinian terrorists'? The one you think of as built from concrete, twenty feet high? You know how much of that is actually built that way, rather than made of wire?
Just five miles. Out of 400.
Speaking of walls, we were looking for a quote from which to coin a headline for the story about how today's teenagers recognise David Brent more readily than the Bard. Did Shakespeare ever say anything about The Office?
The best I could come up with was a dimly remembered "serves it in the office of a wall" from John of Gaunt's speech ("Precious stone..silver sea..this earth, this realm, this England..") which we decided, regretfully, was a little too...recherché
Speaking of recherché, I really need to remind myself that there's a simple and consistent drawback to brandishing arcane tags and phrases that few of your colleagues recognise: you think you're being clevah; they write you off as merely incomprehensible.
We were discussing whether we would have the right (or the nerve) to sub-edit John Simpson when he used "distinctly" three times in just two paragraphs.
"Ah well," I concluded, "Even Homer nodded." Which earnt me a very blank look.
The dangers of using 'Homer' and 'Simpson' in the same conversation when talking to anybody under thirty didn't strike me at the time.
Speaking of the youth of today, have we all enjoyed the story of Tom Smith, the from Victoria Park, who trousered his father's credit card and took off for Rome on a £12k Gucci and Versace spending spree, topped off by a limousine trip to Brighton with his chums?
(Irresponsible spending, silk trousers, champagne, cocaine, Rome, Brighton - and did you clock the haircut? Don't tell me this boy is not, at the very least, a trainee homosexual.)
But most enjoyable of all? The way everybody, but everybody, read the story and immediately thought of just one verb: SLAP.
Speaking of Brighton, even the sports desk at work were unsurprised by the news that the city can now officially claim the highest proportion of gay couples in the United Kingdom. Nice to see our existence officially recognised in the census; not so nice to see newspaper columnists desperately trying to milk copy from it.
Independent (gay) columnist Philip Hensher did his best but only made matters worse by off-handedly wondering if there might be a link "between the proportion of homosexuals in a society and the level of crime. I mean, have you ever seen a fight in a gay bar, or heard of a gay burglar?"
His flight of fancy came brokenly to earth the very next day, with a letter from one Robert Brown: "Having worked as security in a variety of gay venues, and a former prison officer in a south London prison, I have come across both many fights and many burglars who are gay. It is also a common anecdote that where there's a lesbian night there always a fight!"
(Hence the expression "Lesbian fling".)
Tuesday 10th February 2004
You have, by now (of course you have), submitted your tax return.
Those of you who work for themselves have spent many moonlit hours calculating your precise incomes and expenditures. In the absence of the occasional invoice or receipt, you may have felt entitled to invent the odd figure or two - but only at the cost of several days paranoia.
Do your final figures look genuine, neither too large nor too small? Above all, do they demonstrate a credible randomness of digit?
Perhaps you woried unnecessarily. These are the late-eighties profits of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation as declared, in Australian dollars:
1987: A$364,364,000
1988: A$464,464,000
1989: A$496,496,000
1990: A$282,282,000
Monday 9th February 2004
I wanted to celebrate the birthday of the truly cute author of one of the funniest, and most heartfelt, blogs in town. And I decided that would be best done via a considered, sincere, lengthy email.
But then I thought: sod it.So hey: Happy Birthday Marcus.
......previous week
