August 2nd 2004 - August 9th 2004
Sunday Brighton Pride 1
Saturday Decisive
Friday Bien sur
Thursday Cross4
Wednesday Distraction
Tuesday Really Rooney
Monday Soho Pride
Sunday 8th August 2004
Another weekend, another Pride. But this is the best Pride of them all: Brighton Pride - a day that, for me at any rate, consisted of a thick slice of fun squeezed between twin veneers of ghastliness like a glory-on-gloom sandwich.
For the last seven days the txt-waves have been thick with discussion about how to get down to the coast: "Have bought tickets and will be on 1105 from London Bridge", "Farringdon, to avoid the crush?", "0830, from King's Cross", "Friend says take train Hove, get bus from there."
I refused to commit myself (now there's a surprise). All too aware that I'd be working till past midnight the night before, and knowing myself well enough to predict that I'd wouldn't resist a drink after that, I decided that I'd get my ass down to Brighton...some time after I woke up. And left it at that.
Thus it was that, after just four hours sleep, I found myself running a swift bath at 10 o'clock in the morning, a time of day that I usually see only when I've been up all of the night before.
A very swift bath, as it happened. The taps ran out of water with the tub less than two inches deep. The plumbing in my flat has been fucked for a while now, so I assumed that this was simply Nature's neatly timed way of finally forcing me to call a plumber. After I got back from Brighton. Which would be a Sunday. So on Monday then. After a day without any water at all. The joy.
And then I heard the kraken call of my next-door neighbour, outside the front door: "'Ere, you got any running water in yours? I'm just running the litl'uns bath and it's run aht!" And the next-door to the next-door neighbour's reply: "The main's busted. From that buildin' work up on The Highway. Put a bulldozer through the mains..."
So: not a weekend spent without water. Just a day, or less than a day. Spent, not in the flat, but far far away from it, at Brighton Pride. Hurrah!
Saturday 7th August 2004
Overheard at the office [2]
B: What are we doing for the Cartier-Bresson obit, picture-wise?
I: Cartier-Bresson's died? Ow!
B: Yup.
I: That'll be a Decisive Moment then.
All: Eh?
I: Er...photographer's joke. Move on.
Friday 6th August 2004
Overheard at the office
I: Can you shorten that headline about "Don't put your confidence in Blunkett" please.
[pause]
A: Which way does the grave accent on 'confidante' go?
[pause]
I: Er......Well. If it's a grave it slants from bottom left to top right, as grave accents tend to. But I'm not sure 'confidante' is quite the word you're looking for. Where were you proposing to put the accent?
A: On the final 'e'? Confidant-uh?
I: Did you do French at school?
B: A-level!
Thursday 5th August 2004
I work at Canary Wharf; I live in Wapping. So I drink, more often than not, at The White Swan (aka BJs). And then I stagger home, drunk.
There is, happily, no direct path from door to door: I guess I could proceed due east along Commercial Road and then turn south down Cannon Street Road [sic] and The Highway, but that's no fun.
And although the route parallels the curve of the river, by and large, there's no single footpath alongside the Thames that I can take - although on a fine night I do occasionally add a small detour to stare broodily over the broad and glossy water at the banks of Rotherhithe across the way.
Mostly I proceed by leaps and hops, zig-zagging through a series of staggered lefts and leaning rights. I've lived in this area for over ten years, and I've visited the Swan most Wednesdays and at least once most weekends. So I've probably stumbled home this way getting on for, what?, a thousand times.
Over that time, the route home has achieved a rich patina of remembered incident and observation (plus a thick crust of behaviour I prefer to forget). Hence Ten Stages of Cross, in which I split the twenty-odd minutes of shambling amble into a series of attempts to reconstruct the psycho-history of my way home...
Wednesday 4th August 2004
I know I shouldn't like Max Clifford - but I do, rather, not least for his propensity to spill the beans about how his feelthy trade operates. Here he is, speaking in the aftermath of the (only-in-Britain) Sven nonsense:
Lots of people I represent would be distraught if, for example, a story about them taking drugs appeared. It could stop them working in the States, and ruin their careers.
A sex scandal, on the other hand, could actually do them some good. So if you see a story - and I've done this - in which a massive star is involved in an orgy with two or three members of the opposite sex, the chances are it's been created to bury something worse.
Bear that in mind as you browse through the red-tops.
Tuesday 3rd August 2004
GIven Blogadoon's recent interest in one Wayne Rooney, you wouldn't expect me to pass up the chance to pass on the inside word on how the prostitute recognised him: "He was dead ugly, wearing a white Marks & Spencer shirt."
Monday 2nd August 2004
Soho Pride came and went, and as far as I recall I enjoyed it very much - not least for the way it tied friends to locations: bumping into Guy at the top of Soho Square, meeting David and Roberto by arrangement outside Bar Code, finding The Dane in Frith Street, locating Jonathan, Andy, Kevin - and countless others - outside Comptons.
A bit like having a whole month's worth of dissolution rolled up into one afternoon - but without the massive hangover.
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