August 8th 2004 - August 15th 2004
Sunday Timmy
Saturday Foam News
Friday Lazy Nigger Award
Thursday Trade
Wednesday DaVinci
Tuesday Brighton Pride 3
Monday Brighton Pride 2
Sunday 15th August 2004
I so enjoyed the Olympic opening ceremonies that, when I fast-forwarded through the teams' parade to see the British sports-people waving to the crowd, I suffered a momentary flush of warmth to the heart when I spotted a familiar face...
Feeling fond of Tim Henman? That's so not right.
Saturday 14th August 2004
Foam news
I have fond memories of the foam parties I attended in Sitges, not least the one where a man waded straight from the bar through 80 thick cubic feet of cumulo-nimbus to place his hand firmly on my crutch.
Less enjoyable was the way my eyes smarted for the next twelve hours; others had even more horrific stories featuring gross genital exfoliation, and worse.
In Croatia, foam parties are now banned after a 16-year-old boy suffered chemical burns to his eyes.
And in Turkey, a 19 year old was electrocuted when he leant against a faulty fridge whilst his clothes were still soaking wet.
Just sayin'.
Friday 13th August 2004
This month's Lazy Nigger (aka the Ron Atkinson Memorial Award for Crass Cultural Insensitivity) goes to Richard Madeley of Richard and Judy, for thinking he can use the word 'dyke' to make himself look hip [sic].
If Dick needs help with his acceptance speech, he should apply to the Independent's Martin Kelner:
As a member of the same generation as Richard, and a semi-professional broadcaster myself, I can sympathise. When you read about a new play on the Edinburgh Fringe this year called Dykes On Bikes..and lady homosexuals routinely refer to themselves as dykes in personal ads, how are old geezers like me and Richard expected to predict that some people will object to the epithet?
(Here's a radical thought, Martin: try asking. Failing that, try to imagine what matching 'epithet' she could throw back at you. If there is none, the balance of power is out of whack, which makes you, yes, 'a bully'.)
Thursday 12th August 2004
Be honest. Faced with the challenge of finding a very short headline for the story of how Peter Mandelson got himself appointed to the position he coveted as the EU's next trade commissioner would you resist the temptation?
We didn't: Mandelson gets trade
Wednesday 11th August 2004
But what's the point in pointing out all the errors? It's like Boots loyalty cards: life is too short...Never mind little facts when the big plot's so absurd...Not so much a plot as a conspiracy. And haven't we heard it before?...One doesn't know whether to weep with laughter or with frustration that people can be taken in.
Led from the front by plucky Blogadoon, the fight-back against the pile of crap that is The Da Vinci Code gathers momentum...
Tuesday 10th August 2004
Around about 8 o'clock, in circumstances which I am so not going to divulge, a tree stuck its finger in my eye. And I mean in my eye - a sharp little twig, hard, fast and direct into the eyeball. At first it only stung a little. Then I began to blink, and my eye began to weep and by the time I aimed myself back towards the railway station, I was stumbling along with a hand clasped tightly to my eye. My left eye, of course, my only long-sighted one, so my vision effectively extended no more than six inches ahead of me. Discovering the time and location for the next train back to town proved somewhat challenging (though I did manage a glimpse of the cock of the man sitting opposite me when he artfully re-arranged his black leather kilt just as I sat down opposite him). The train ride home was tortuously slow, loud with drunken ramble and coke-fuelled monologue, far from the best environment in which to slowly convince yourself you've fractured a cataract and should probably take a cab from Victoria directly to the Moorfields Eye Hospital, assuming any cab will want to take you when you probably look like Bela Lugosi's tearful cousin. The ache is only just now wearing off, after several days spent dabbing at my eye with paper tissues, delicately sponging off mucus in which, if you look painfully close, you can just discern minute embeded specks of moss, algae and God knows what else. Please, no poke jokes. Given my lamentable record when it comes to catching the same train to Brighton Pride as everybody else, and thanks only to Jonathan's unstinting generosity and encouragement, I was highly astonished to find myself two trains ahead of Guy, one train ahead of David and Pano, on the same train as The Dane, in the same compartment as Andy, Kevin, Matthew and Richard (apparently: although they were only six feet away from us, we never did get to spot Kevin through the crowds). By boarding the train at King's Cross, Jonathan and I had managed - miracle! - to get seats, and we spent a very happy hour texting just about everyone we knew to let them know we were on our way. (David and Jason won the how-cool-is-that prize by calmly replying "Just finishing champagne breakfast with friends. See you in the park.") Even before we hit the parade-addled streets, it was all too apparent that this was, yet again, the hottest day of the year. Being shot at by water-pistols from first-floor balconies was a positive treat, though we did equally enjoy the pistoleers meeting their match in a float that paused briefly to unveil its previous history as a water-tender, sending a solid plume of water twenty feet into the air to thoroughly souse their entire first-floor flat. Once in the park, and one giant toke on a festival-strength jazz-fag later, I finally slipped out of task-oriented mode to drift around the edges seeking shade, with a "hi baby!" here, a "don't mind if I do" there, and a "him! him in the blue shirt! Swoooon!" more or less everywhere.Each year, I marvel at the number of attractive men that Brighton manages to attract. Is it linked to the number of universities scattered along the south coast? If there was a specific hormone linked to spotting cute young men, I'd have bust a gland by the end of the day. As it was, my mobile ran out of funds around 4 o'clock, so I spent the last few hours in Preston Park at the mercy of circumstance, bumping into friends only by accident. (At one stage I wandered out of the cabaret tent in urgent need of a little sit-down, casting only a sidelong glance at two prone men indulging in very heavy petting as I teetered towards a bench, which harbour achieved I looked more closely and - yup, Andy and Kevin.) A ridiculously high proportion of those that I met politely enquired if I was stoned. Given that I reacted to these enquiries with a bewildered compound of one part outrage ("What! Am I usually not this fun?!"), one part vanity ("Observing me carefully, are we?"), and two parts amazement at the total redundancy of the question ("In a park, at a festival!? Moi?"), I guess I did nothing to dislillusion them. For the record though: two pints and nothing stronger than a drag on a stranger's spliff. Plus, oh yes, I was happy. (Compromising photographic evidence, available elsewhere, reveals a contributing factor to these accusations: somewhere along the line I'd acquired a remarkable Hoxton fin facsimile, a dragged through a hedge backwards look that I can only attribute to having... rubbed careless hands through my sweat-soaked hair.) ......previous weekMonday 9th August 2004
