August 8th - August 14th 2005
Sunday Soho Pride
Saturday Bindon
Friday Neighbours
Thursday Grandma bashing
Wednesday Monopod
Tuesday And finally
Monday Brown-nosing
Sunday 14th August 2005
Soho Pride, Summer 2005
Saturday 13th August 2005
After a few pints (how many is unknown), he would perform his favourite party trick, a routine used many time in pubs across the world over the next 40 years: "I'd hang five half-pint beer glasses on me manhood. Everyone would ask how it's done beforehand so I'd put them out of their misery and thread my old chap through the handles of the glasses.
Friday 12th August 2005
Problems with noisy neighbours?I'm having a relatively quiet time of it lately, praise the Lord. Ever since the baby upstairs slung his hook, the wooden floor broadcasts nothing more irritating than the new girl's stiletto footsteps for a brief quarter of an hour or so each morning. And whilst my next-door neighbour's get-togethers with her female family still sound like nothing so much as an aviary on GHB, they too have quietened down considerably,And it could be worse. The Independent recently carried a report [now tucked behind their subscription firewall] about events in Rome's Campo di Fiore, where local residents' attempts to cut down on noise from neighbourhood bars have started a din-war, escalating from restraining orders, through mob football matches carefully organised to start some time after midnight, up to local youths chatting with each other across the square - on megaphones.
Thursday 11th August 2005
The thing I like about The White Swan (just about the only thing, actually, above and beyond meeting familiar faces and having anonymous sex on the way home) is that just when you're thinking hey-ho-another-night, something unexpected turns up.As per last night, when a considerable number of eyebrows were raised by the sight of a young Asian guy wandering through the crowd wearing a dhoti kurta - something considerably more surprising than it should be, given Limehouse's preponderance of sub-continentals, and given a little frisson by the cross-cultural ramifications of the, ahem, current time of heightened security.
Most queens took one look and decided he'd probably wandered into the wrong venue by mistake: little did they know he was wearing lycra cycling shorts beneath his skirt.
Given that I was drunk and he was not unattractive, we soon fell to chatting, a conversation that I almost sabotaged immediately by asking if it was Muslim Pride Week - insulting enough on its own, you might think, but made worse by the fact that every fule no the dhoti is worn primarily by Hindus (or, in this case, a Jain; pity any befuddled queen who overheard that).
More intriguing still, he was dressed as he was because he'd come straight from cremating his ghee-smeared grandmother.
I'm guessing he was the only man in the bar that night who had been required, at just the right moment, to smash his grandmother's skull. ("With a traditional little silver hammer?" "No, with a big stick.")
Wednesday 10th August 2005
I'll say this for my new camera, it has at least provided the perfect excuse to get me out of the house when the sun is shining (as opposed to peering through the grimy windows at a small patch of blue sky and muttering 'It appears to have been another nice day'.)
Last week, I went for a brief cam-troll through a patch of the City: the sun went in as I got off the bus and stayed in for the next two hours, waiting until the precise moment my battery ran out before it emerged again in its full late afternoon splendour. Ah well.
With nothing to lose light-wise, I ventured into St Andrew Undershaft, a slightly bizarre space that combines sixteenth-century funerary monuments with electronic door-locks and a full panoply of catering equipment (they feed the five thousand, presumably).
Trying, and failing, to do justice to the elaborately carved pulpit in the ecclesiastical gloom persuaded me directly to a nearby branch of Jessops, an equally unsatisfactory experience that did, finally, result in the purchase of that tragically nerdy accessory, a monopod (think amputee tripod).
My hand hovered over the monopod as I set out this afternoon, thinking to take a stroll down by the sunlit river, but I left it behind, confident that it would be full daylight all the way.
Which is, of course, why I ended up deep in the heart of the Wapping Project, a hydraulic power station converted into an art gallery-cum-restaurant whose biggest asset, beyond the carefully unsanitised machinery that litters the rest of the space, is the vast dark Turbine Hall, to which I'd been directed by a black-clad chatelaine with the (opaque) instruction "Do kick the bags, and don't move the fans, though everybody does".
I'd read of several of the startling installations that have filled the Turbine Hall over the past few years, and regretted not seeing them, so it was a very real pleasure to pass through the door and find myself at the top of a flight of stairs leading to a massive brick vault housing a huge spotlit tree constructed from rough planks nailed together.
Fairly spectacular in itself, but there's more: hundreds of plastic bags floating hither and yon, animated by a phalanx of fans.
It's not especially skilled, nor even particularly clever. Nor (despite overhearing the artist being interrogated by an earnest mother with her child in tow - so educational!), do I think there's any ecological or political agenda in play.
But it's ambitious, and spectacular and, above all, fun.
Paul Davis's exhibition (there are also a lot of - slightly repellent - drawings and, up on the roof, the wreckage of a planned armada of paper boats) ends 14th August.
Tuesday 9th August 2005
Considerable disappointment at the office last night when we reluctantly decided that we couldn't in all conscience head up a piece about how the death of ABC news anchor Peter Jennings heralded the end of the traditional newscasting as we know it with the words: And finally.
Monday 8th August 2005
Who can forget Brown's merciless parody of Sir Roy's Diaries, especially the bit when our hero is regaling his "very dear friend" Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother ("as always, she was looking positively radiant, straight out of Botticelli") with gossip about the V & A.
Not wishing to be left out of the conversation but without any clear idea of the identity of her interlocutor, the Queen Mother chips in: "And apparently, they all absolutely loathe the new Director. They say he's a self-serving, publicity-mad, social climbing ponce".
(Hugh Massingberd really doesn't like Roy Strong.)
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