October 24th - October 30th 2005
Sunday Dhimmitude
Saturday Liverpool Street
Friday Organ grinding
Thursday Vituperation
Wednesday Slap up slapper
Tuesday Nante
Monday Travelling, hopefully
Sunday 30th October 2005
I know what it means; I know what it ought to mean
Dhimmitude: - the multitude of the less intelligent: "But by the time the dhimmitude catch on, we'll be back in power for another four years."
Saturday 29th October 2005
Liverpool Street, Autumn 2005
Friday 28th October 2005
The fact that at least one person has already reached Blogadoon by Googling for rome on hbo big penis cock probably ought to worry me slightly more than it does - but I'm basically just comforted to find I'm not the only person who got half way through the sixth episode of the HBO/BBC co-production and reeled away in shock.
Mark Anthony's mistress Atia wants to send a gift to the lover of her uncle, Julius Caesar. Hence the opening shot, a close up of a heavily bejeweled tortoise, from which the camera pulls out, and down, to reveal the cushion on which the tortoise is presented, the naked slave carrying the cushion and...this:
(This image deliberately shrunk in pursuit of office-safety; I'm sure you can work out how to make it bigger.)
It will be interesting to see if this shot makes it onto British tv when the BBC screening reaches this episode: keep your ears pinned that week for the sound of Mary Whitehouse turning in her grave.
Thursday 27th October 2005
Watching 'Soho Boho', part of BBC Four's Lost Decade season, with its brief clip of the infamous Muriel Belcher ensconsed at the bar of her Colony Room, and an even briefer shot of her equally infamous barman Ian Board, reminded me of my own brief, and surreal, brush with the place.
I think I probably did meet Muriel at least once, but as it goes without saying that I was blind drunk at the time, I certainly remember nothing of it.
After she died, Ian took over the running of the club and a friend of mine began drinking there regularly: word would occasionally reach us of Ian's latest (painfully unfunny) sally: George Melly called him 'a monster of aggressive, sometimes incoherent rudeness' which, in my experience, somewhat understates the case.
It's probably genetic, or plain snobbery, but I've always had a problem with the kind of drunken bragadoccio that cloaks affection in outright aggression. (In many cases, I suspect such behaviour simply disguises the plain fact that the aggressor hasn't a fond bone in their body.) I was in no hurry to make Ian's acquaintance.
Imagine, then, my delight, halfway through a long-haul flight to Bombay, to discover that our Colony-oriented friend would be joining us during our two-week stay in Goa - bringing Ian Board with her.
Once we'd managed to persuade said friend that there was Absolutely No Fucking Way that Ian would be moving in with us, and she'd found him a room somewhere else, we didn't actually see much of him, though I do dimly recall several painfully unfunny afternoons spent sitting listening to him alternately expectorate and vituperate all over our favourite beach-bar.
In the world of Soho Boho, that holiday should have become a rich source of remembered anecdote and outrage - but as it was we, for our part, were seriously stoned for most of our stay and Ian, for his part, was comparatively mellow. Or simply ill - he died very soon after we returned.
All in all, not a cause of regret.
Wednesday 26th October 2005
My newsagent delivered a copy of the local paper alongside my standard daily this morning, presumably by accident. Quite bizarre, changing gear from the Independent to the East London Advertiser.
A letter to the advice column ('Ask Trisha') offers a taste of the change of tone implicit in switching from a national to a local focus:
My husband walked out on me for a little slapper - boob job, hair extensions, collagen gob, the works.
He came back after ten weeks, cried, begged me to take him back and it's done us good. He makes a lot more effort now. But the slapper is still around.
Why should my kids have to go to school with her kids? I've given her some slappings and her mates threatened to call the police.
My husband hates her and tells her she's a slag every time we see her.
How can I get her to move? - S.P.
Tuesday 25th October 2005
Monday 24th October 2005
I could probably riff for quite a few paragraphs about the parallels between the Cinderella myth and my regular Sunday jaunts to Horse Meat Disco: some day my prince will cum, you shall goatee the ball, Barren Hardon, and, of course, plenty of ugly sisters plus the occasional fairy godmother (with a sadly mis-shapen wand, as a rule).
But the obvious parallel is the most germane: that moment when midnight strikes - or, to be more accurate, those several midnight moments which stream towards me as I get increasingly drunk.
The first of these begins to loom around 10.30. By this time I will usually have been in the bar for an hour or so, sunk a pint or two, and be progressing amiably towards that stage of the evening when it seems there are more and more attractive men arriving.
Although the place does indubitably begins to fill only after 9.30, it's counter-intuitive to suggest that attractive men arrive later, so either the men look more attractive because they've had more time to prepare themselves (a little unlikely, given this crowd), or - yeah - my standards slip as my alcohol intake rises.
Either way, things inevitably begin to warm up just as it starts to be time to think about leaving.
Unlike many of the people here, I live on the other side of town and a journey home involves three separate tube lines. Sunday hours being as they are (WHY?!), this means I have to leave before 11 if I want to be guaranteed a trouble-free trip.
On a good night, tearing oneself away can take at least a quarter hour: there are pints to be finished, tentative farewells to be made ("If I'm not here it's because I've gone, yah?"), coats to be rescued from the coat-check, coat-check boys to be flirted with, attractive men to be given one last chance...
So I never, ever, get to leave before 11.15, at the earliest.
If I leave between 11.30 and 11.45, I'm pretty much guaranteed the worst option of all, which is to travel hopefully all the way to Canada Water only to find I've just missed the last northbound East London Line train and am now maroooned on the wrong side of the river.
From there, if I could walk on water, I could be home in less than ten minutes; lacking that skill-set, my only option is to walk for a while, stand and wait for a night-bus for a while, and then walk a lot more, usually in the rain. This would be annoying enough when fit and sober; drunk and tired it's the absolute pits.
(And this is to ignore the perilous excitement of changing trains at Green Park late at night, where - for reasons best known to their therapists - the staff issue an increasingly stentorian set of urgent travel updates as last trains come and go: I'm sure I'm not the only person to have been harried near to early death by their furious announcements as I hurtle down the escalator.)
Hence, all things considered, if I haven't made it out the door of HMD by 11.30, it's makes a lot more sense to step down to Plan B, a deeply tedious but much less demanding travel plan that requires me to be at Vauxhall Bus Station (aka Hell's Waiting Room) by midnight, in time to catch the slowest night bus in the world for a leisurely trip through some of south London's most dispiriting suburbs before being dropped off, unaccountably, at Liverpool Street, whence I trudge slowly home.
Any later than that, and the only public transport options available all involve changing at Trafalgar Square which these days, and at that time of night, resembles nothing so much as a very badly organised refugee camp. Not ideal.
Plan C is by far the most civilised alternative: stay much later, then simply fall out of the bar and into a cab. Not a black cab (do you think I'm made of money?), but a mini-cab, and only after lengthy, albeit good-natured, negotiations with large dark men and their minions. I've never yet managed to get the price down below £14 - which is usually more than I've spent on the entirety of the rest of the evening. Which rankles.
(A late-evening form of logic comes into play once Plan C swings into operation: if it's going to cost me that much to get home, I might as well spend another ten quid or so to go on to some even later-night venue. The last time I obeyed this logic, earlier this year, I literally lost my shirt and had to travel home bare-chested. Frankly, I was lucky still to have my trousers.)
But anyway...
All that by way of introduction to a much more exciting topic: the specifics of my journey home last night.
After a very pleasant evening involving, amongst other things, friends' revelations pitched at a degree of surreality so extreme that I propose to wipe them from my mind plus a live demonstration of traditional Japanese men's underwear (no, really), I willed myself off the premises at 11.30 sharp.
Or.. thereabouts. I noticed that the RVT had closed up for the night as I passed, which is usually some kind of bellwether.
But I caught the Victoria Line without any trouble and noticed, with relief, that the urgency of announcement at Green Park had not yet reached fever pitch. Waiting 12 minutes for an eastbound Jubilee Line train, however, made the prognosis considerably more gloomy.
Failing sleep, I traditionally spend this part of the journey willing the train to travel faster. But, somewhere down the line, Victoria perhaps, a party of young men boarded the train. They were drunk - very, very drunk - but amiably so. And quite attractive. More to the point, all six of them were bare-chested. In London, in October.
I tried not stare, I really did, even when two of them came and sat directly opposite me. Even when two more came and sat on the first two's laps. Remarkably, each of my fellow passengers immediately went into 'this is so not happening' mode, a considerable achievement given that the boys started bantering with each other about getting naked.
But I was drunk, too. So it sort of made sense to grin back at them, and not to look away when one of those still standing pulled down his trousers to reveal his black boxers.
Whereupon the two sitting on the laps opposite, holding their discarded shirts bunched discreetly at the groin, proceeded to pull down both their trousers and their pants.
At which stage I fear I gave up any pretence of not being intrigued - though, hopefully, I veered rather more towards projecting a fellow-zany-outlaw vibe than revealing the dirty old pervert gibbering only just below the surface.
They certainly seemed to take no offence. A couple of the slightly more sober ones murmured not-especially sincere apologies and muttered something about this being what happens when you start the night in a sports bar (eh?). I think I may even have replied something along the lines of, au contraire, thank you for enlivening a dull journey.
At which point the cute one opposite me caught my eye and started lifting his shirt from his lap to give me glimpses of his cock. At which point I turned to his companion and dared him to follow suit. Which he did.
And then it was Canada Water and time for me to drag myself, very reluctantly, away. Grinning.
A night to remember - but there was more to come.
I was so cheered that, when my arrival on the East London Line platform was greeted by the loud-speakered and all-too-predictable announcement that "the last northbound train has left the station, I repeat, the last...", I kept grinning.
Kept grinning as I started towards the stairs, kept grinning as my gaze swept over a fellow maroon, kept grinning as I noticed he was actually very cute in a small Brazilian way.
Kept grinning as he asked me for advice on how to get home, grinned even more when he said he needed to get to Wapping, kept grinning as we boarded a bus to Tower Bridge, kept grinning as we walked home along the north bank of the river. In the rain.
When I left him at his front door, just two hundred yards from my flat, the snog we shared took the grin off my face. But only for five minutes or so...
Not all coaches turn back into pumpkins at midnight.
......previous week
