May 30th - June 5th 2005
Sunday Haw Haw
Saturday Oops
Friday Traces
Thursday Reform or die
Wednesday Pfft
Tuesday Non
Monday Unadmirable Creighton
Sunday 5th June 2005
Saturday 4th June 2005
Now here's an interesting thing: around 10am this morning somebody came to this site via a search for "shoreditch + sex + street".
The tenth result points to blog197, the page that archives an episode of Ten Stages of Cross, the ongoing psychographic epic wherein I chart my late-night walk home from The Swan, through the empty streets of - not Shoreditch - but Limehouse, Shadwell and Wapping.
The episode in question talks fondly of the faint possibility of casual anonymous sex after midnight. ("And the road is always empty. Or...nearly always.") It centres on the eastern end of Cable Street, and, by implication, on the junction with Brodlove Lane.
Where, last night, at approximately 3am, an attractive stranger (the first I've seen on Cable Street for quite a while) smiled broadly at me as I passed him urinating in a not-especially-dark corner.
Or rather, as closer inspection revealed, not urinating.
We'll draw a discreet veil over the delightful half-hour that followed, but...isn't that quite a coincidence?
Friday 3rd June 2005
Visually, they are rather pleasing with their black or cream stitching, their patched lettering and embroidered sperm.
Yup, Tracey Emin has a new show.
Thursday 2nd June 2005
May I note, for the record, that I have absolutely no fucking interest whatsoever in whether the Spice Girls will reform? Thank you.
Wednesday 1st June 2005
How would it be if, every time somebody annoyed you in public - by talking on their mobile, listening to their tinny walkman, barging ahead of you in a queue - you smiled, reached into your pocket, produced your small bottle of extremely cheap perfume and sprayed them all over?
(Actually, miming might work almost as well.)
Tuesday 31st May 2005
If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No, we will say 'we continue'."
- Jean-Claude Juncker, acting EU president.In fact, it's far simpler than that. Or it would be, if today's politicians ever dragged their faces away from the mirror long enough to consider the common psychology of politics - or, rather, voting - today.
In the run-up to last month's general election, more than one columnist invented a teenage daughter - simply to have her complain that she found her choices confusing: "Like, who am I supposed to vote out first?"
She (or rather they) spoke truer than they knew. Because for most men-and-women-in-the-street these days (and maybe for a long time since) elections are at least as much about who you keep out of power as about who you vote in.
Enamoured of their own lofty rhetoric, contemporary politicians are probably quite sincere when they talk of deciding the fate of the nation, steering a country's destiny, setting the agenda for the future.
But given our increasingly dumbed-down celebrity-driven emphasis on perceived personality, character and charm, they really shouldn't be surprised to find that people are motivated by far simpler, far more personal concerns. As in (a while ago): "I voted for Tony Blair because he seems like a genuine bloke."Or, more potently and more recently, "I'm voting Labour cos I don't want those other cunts in power".
Organising referenda on Europe looks, in retrospect, like an exceptionally foolish offering of hostages to fortune, especially so when the issue purportedly centres on an arcane document that nobody has read and nobody can be expected to read.
Trust us," the politicians whispered, like crooked lawyers with a will. "We know what's best."
And the French, and the Dutch, and anybody else that ever gets a vote look them up and down and murmur: "I don't fucking think so."
Monday 30th May 2005
Obituary Watch
Anthony Creighton the playwright who has died aged 82, collaborated with John Osborne on two plays...but [his] name was all but forgotten until 1995 when he alleged that he and Osborne - who was always publicly contemptuous of homosexuals - had conducted a long love affair.
These claims were utterly refuted by Osborne's widow, Helen, who said that the friendship had been purely platonic. The actress Pamela Lane, who remained friends with Osborne after their brief marriage in the 1950s, also denied much of Creighton's story. "In all those years," she protested, "I think he would have told me."
Osborne's great affection, even if platonic, for a homosexual man, casts much of his work in a new light, particularly A Patriot for Me, his dramatisation of the life of a blackmailed homosexual in the Austro-Hungarian army in the 1900s...
In 2002, after Channel 4 broadcast a documentary claiming that Osborne was a homosexual, Creighton seemed to backtrack on his earlier claims: "Yes, he was the most important person in my life," he explained. "But... we never had a sexual relationship."
He displayed little bitterness towards Osborne, despite the fact that the playwright described him in his autobiography as "a cadging homosexual drunk".
Anthony Creighton died on March 22. He was unmarried.
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