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º May 21st-May 27th 2001
Sunday Complications
Saturday Less ordinary
Friday Gay London
Thursday My supportive best
Wednesday The truth
Tuesday True or false
Monday Really?
º Sunday 27th May 2001
After work yesterday, I caught the last tube to Shoreditch for a couple of pints at the Spiral.
Delighted to see a friend there, even more delighted to hear his news, not least the complications of his love life. He is currently dating:
- a man he hasn't met in the flesh called Hotboots2 (or similar)
- a young Spaniard who speaks hardly any english, and
- a classic schizophrenic who is never quite the same person two times in a row.
º Saturday 26th May 2001
A night less ordinary, yesterday.
After a quick check in Bar Code, I met Andy and friends at The King's Arms on Poland Street. The Kings Arms, like the Quebec, traditionally caters to, ahem, 'a more mature crowd', a term traditionally taken with a pinch or two of salt given that the gay market seems to be maturing at a rate of knots.
I only had time for a quick pint but couldn't help noticing the music: Dean Martin singing '"That's Amore"? That's kinda...post-mature.
After a rather riotous tube-ride (we are the people your parents warned you about), we arrived at Dukes, just down the road from the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, for Chunkies, a night for, ahem 'men of a fuller figure'.
In fact, it struck me that there was something slightly more subtle going on: although there were some big blokes there (and presumably some admirers), there were also a lot of guys who simply didn't think that they fitted into the accepted mould - some with good reason, some not, or not as far as I could see at any rate.
Sometime around 2, we bailed out and went across the road to The Fringe Bar, where Oi! is clearly not doing too well at adjusting to its new London home. The ground floor bar was deserted; upstairs looked like nothing so much as the end of a private sex party in a squat.
We left an hour or so later, and I ended up on a night bus that took me, as night buses seem to have a habit of doing, to Shoreditch. There was supposed to be a Family after-party at the Joiners, but if it was happening it was very very quiet - the place looked dead. So I went to Chariots instead, and rolled home around 9 in the morning.
º Friday 25th May 2001
One of the things about working around a newspaper office is that you get to see the press photographs that most organisations find too shocking to print.
Case in point being yesterday's story about the Lebanese private pilot whom the Israelis decided was on a kamikaze mission. Their helicopter gunships blew his Cessna to pieces over Netanya, leaving what was left to plunge through the roof of a naval school, creating a hole a yard and a half wide.
Most papers showed the hole in the roof, many with a woman looking up at it, one hand held up in wonder. Most papers spared you the corner of the room slightly behind her and to her left, where the two adjoining walls and the floor have been splattered for a radius of approximately two feet with what I'm afraid, in colour, looks like nothing so much as strawberry jam.
Am I one of the authors? Well, yes Daveo, as it happens, I am (though I take no credit for the line about the suntan.)
I was asked to contribute to Gay London after the original author died, leaving behind a few contributions and a list of what other attractions he thought should be covered: I cherry-picked the venues and topics I knew best (and made just enough money to make it worthwhile, thank you.)
Although I'm quite pleased with what I wrote and have had it uploaded for a while now, I've hesitated to broadcast the url because the bare extracts were quite a long way from being the on-line resource they seemed to cry out to become. (There was also some very loose talk about another edition but I think that's passed over now, sadly.)
Prompted by Daveo's enquiry, I've just spent half the night expanding my original contributions and made them available here.
I hope you like them.
La gusset mentioned Fray 5 in the ukbloggers list. Not sure how I feel about an all-day story-telling event, but it would suit my friend Guy. He's a professional story-teller (and even gets funded to travel to distant parts of the globe in pursuit of his trade.)
º Thursday 24th May 2001
I made my way, as advertised, to the beer garden at the Edward, and nestled myself into a square yard of sun, the other sunshine being occupied by two tubby queens with their tops off.
Settling into my book and my first pint, I looked up to see Alan (not his real name), a young man I've not seen out in public since he broke up with his boyfriend nine months ago.
Alan told me he was just starting back at work after a few months off. When I asked what had been wrong, he smiled, gestured vaguely at his brow, and mumbled "head-stuff". He did like a pill, as I recall, so I was concerned but not terribly surprised.
Later, over our second pint, he filled in the details: broke up with Lawrence, slept around a lot ("lost it big time"), went home to his parents and collapsed with what seemed to be an overly prolonged bout of flu.
So, of course, he convinced himself he'd got AIDS, as you do. And spent the next few weeks putting off going for a test. Then he finally went for a test, and found himself diagnosed - positive.
His most immediate concern, it seems, was to find out whether he'd infected (or, presumably, been infected by) either of his previous boyfriends ("I couldn't live with that") so he had to nag both of them to go for tests as well.
Both of them proved negative: good news for them, but not so good for Alan, who has now decided he caught it during his losing-it period.
Over a third pint, as I did my supportive best, I noticed how comparatively uninformed Alan was: "On my first bloods, the good stuff was very low and the ones that are bad for you were way high. But on my second bloods they were the other way round. So now I'm waiting for the third lot of results."
I forget how much of my time I spend with people who have a solid grasp on the statistics of their status.
After Alan had left I had the good fortune to see Gerry, the gardener-cum-sculptor whom I'd hoped would be there, and we settled into our usual stoned conversational mode, giggling a lot and exchanging gnomic remarks that neither of us quite understands. ("Pessimism of the basement, optimism of the atelier, innit?")
More drink was taken, and I staggered out into the late evening light around nine o'clock.
There are some nights when only a decent beefburger will do, don't you find?
This was one of them. So I walked down to the Angel, past Sadlers Wells, through Exmouth Market, past Turnmills, down St John Street to Smithfield, and back up to Old Street roundabout, my antennae twitching all the way.
Italian, yes, Chinese, yes, Indian, yes, Vietnamese, even - but nowhere I could sit down with a decent quarter pounder with mayonnaise, pickles, blue cheese and a relish tray. I had to settle for fish and chips in the end.
Where's a dead cow when you need one?
º Wednesday 23rd May 2001
The sun is shining, shining, shining and, despite having not had quite enough sleep, I think I will take my book off to the beer-garden at The Edward.
Hurrah for the life of a lady of leisure.
Paradigmatically, victory at the pop-quiz last night hinged on the all-important question of whether the correct title of The Vengaboys' single was "Boom!Boom!Boom!Boom!" or "Boom!Boom!Boom!".
My team (which is to say the team nearest to whom I sat trying to look as if I knew everything but could not or would not tell) lost by a Boom! - and the traditional half point.
I am the only child of a mother who died when I was nine years old. My father re-married, to a widow who had one son. Both my father and his second wife are dead now, and her son lives somewhere in Wales.
My father's brother had one son. The former must be assumed dead by now, and the latter was last heard of working in Switzerland.
My mother's sisters emigrated to Australia. My mother's brother (and his wife) lived in Hemel Hempstead but are probably dead by now. They had, I think, just one child, called Susan Thatcher - my only known living relative in this country.
So point (1) of the ten listed below is True. "I have only one living relative in this country." (Probably.)
I've been to Paris several times, and Amsterdam more times than I care to remember. Germany: a Rhine boat trip with my parents plus several business trips to Frankfurt (for the Book Fair) and to Stuttgart. (I've also had business trips to festivals in Annecy and Cannes.)
I accompanied my father to Scandinavia on a business trip (and got drunk for the first time) in my late teens.
I've holidayed in Greece and Turkey, I've had several villa holidays in Spain, I worked in Madrid for a month, and I visited Barcelona with my second boyfriend.
He and I went to Venice and Florence together too, and he was also supposed to be part of our house-share just outside Sienna one year but cried off due to pressures of work.
I lived in The Hague for much of my adolescence, and visited Brussels and Bruges.
I went on two school skiing trips to Austria, and the train went through Switzerland. But not Andorra, Luxembourg or Monaco.
So point (2) "I have visited every European country except Portugal" is False. (Strictly speaking.)
My Dad worked for Shell (as some sort of glorified accountant, I think - which is kinda ironic) and on one of his earliest trips to Holland he brought me back a pair of souvenir clogs, carved from solid wood.
I have vague memories of shuffling up the street to the corner shop in them, only to discover that it was closed. I may be conflating there, but I can definitely remember that local shops used to take one afternoon off a week, usually Wednesdays, but sometimes Thursdays (which, I read somewhere, is why elections always happen on a Thursday.)
Addendum: I had assumed the tradition of shops closing early one day a week had long since died out but this seems to prove me wrong.
Whatever, point (3) is True. "I remember early closing days." (Indisputably.)
Although Terry Pratchett is nowhere as good as Douglas Adams, he shares his anarchic sense of humour and love of language. Plus, he's written scads and scads of books, always a plus point in my, er, book.
I started working my way through Mr Pratchett's oeuvre a year or so ago but have been stalled halfway through Guards! Guards! for about six months now (making him that rare thing - an author who writes books faster than I can read them.)
Point (4) is therefore True. "I enjoy Terry Pratchett." (with reservations.)
When my best friends had their first baby they were living just off Ladbroke Grove, and I was living with my boyfriend-from-hell in Holland Park. We realised that the vagaries of the property market meant that, despite being extremely cash-poor, we were sitting on considerable assets.
The only way to cash those assets in, however, was to move somewhere cheaper. So we decided to buy a house together outside London, eventually settling on an Old Rectory set in two and a half acres of a small village just outside Kings Lynn.
The Rectory has 23 rooms (if you count walk-in airing cupboards and guest bathrooms), and I lived there with my friends and their two children for about 14 years (making regular long trips to London all the while, you may be sure.)
When I was set up with my own company in 1995, I had to live in London permanently and I bought an ex-council flat in Wapping for £40k. Although I regularly return to The Rectory to celebrate New Year's Eve, I somehow never seem to get to go back at any other time. Which is a bit silly.
Point (5) however is True (given a little poetic license.) "I own ten rooms and an acre of garden in Kings Lynn."
Lindsay Anderson's 'If...' made a big impression on me: it was the late 60s, I was stuck in a minor public school studying French and English Lit and I was consistently bullied for being gay (or, more correctly, for having been discovered being gay.)
Somehow, the idea of further education seemed pretty futile - I was very eager to get to London and start some kind of life on my own terms. So I put very little effort into getting good exam results and failed to qualify for any kind of decent university place (though I guess I could have studied something like Theology at somewhere like Aberdeen if I'd wanted to.)
I started work as a dogsbody in a small City advertising agency at £13 pounds 10 shillings a week, and rented a room in Crouch End for £5 a week. Eight years later I was earning a small fortune, buying my own flat and cultivating my first boyfriend. And then I gave it all up because I wanted to write - but that's a different story.
Points (6) and (7) are True. "I had no further education beyond the age of 18 (provided you ignore a short course of evening classes) and I started work at a salary of £13.50 a week."
I never actually made a conscious decision to grow my hair, I just failed to bother having it cut sometime in the late Eighties or early Nineties. By the time I moved to London in 1995, I had a substantial ponytail, which did at least have the virtue of making me instantly recognisable on the gay scene at a time when everybody else was getting into Number One crops. (It didn't do any harm career-wise either - why do so many nerds have long-hair?)
Although it has been variously attacked with various pairs of scissors in the last ten years, it has never had any professional attention. I am going to have it cut properly sometime soon. Probably.
Point (8) is True. "I have not had a haircut for ten years." (given a strict definition of "have a haircut".)
News cinemas, like early closing days, may still exist somewhere but I rather doubt it. There used to be quite a few of them, showing a constant loop of cartoons, 'newsreels' and other short films. Most of them were situated near mainline railway stations, presumably so that rush-hour commuters could duck into them whilst waiting for a train.
In retrospect, it's obvious that they also provided sites for many a tacky gay fumble but I'm sure I didn't know that when I visited the aptly-named Eros cinema in Picadilly Circus, on some bored afternoon when I'd sneaked away from school.
Although I mucked about with quite a few fellow students at my boarding school (and fell desperately in love with several of them) that was my first encounter with an adult cock. Hardly the most romantic of debuts, but I can't say it did me any harm.
Point (9) is True (subject to your definition of 'adult' and 'sex'.) "I first had sex with an adult at Piccadilly Circus."
Point (10) is true. "I do not own an iron." Ironing is for cissies.
º Tuesday 22nd May 2001
"Are you gay (or cute enough to try out for the team)? Are you a blogger (or thinking of starting one)? Do you live in London (or anywhere near by)? If so, come and join us upstairs at Compton's on Wednesday 30th May from 8pm onwards for London's 1st Gay Bloggers Meet."
It was Meg what started it; here's mine: nine of them are true, and one isn't.
1) I have only one living relative in this country
2) I have visited every European country except Portugal
3) I remember early closing days
4) I enjoy Terry Pratchett
5) I own ten rooms and an acre of garden in Kings Lynn
6) I had no further education beyond the age of 18
7) I started work at a salary of £13.50 a week
8) I have not had a haircut for ten years
9) I first had sex with an adult at Piccadilly Circus
10) I do not own an iron
I don't think I will ever understand the enthusiasm people feel for The Weakest Link; Ms Robinson's quiz-mistress is a mildly interesting persona, and it's always pleasant to see greedy show-offs being humiliated under a bright light, but beyond that - what?
The truly sad thing is that so many gay pubs feel moved to do poor imitations of the show - presumably because there are damn few other strong females around for drag queens to caricature these days. (A drag version of Camille Paglia - now that would be something.)
Last night we went to check out the weekly quiz at Central Station in Kings Cross which, it being Pink Angels charity week, had decided to recast itself as..? You guessed it.
And it was just awful. Amiably awful, to be sure, but...ick. The evening was slightly redeemed by the mega-cute guy we sat next to at the bar, and by the falling-down-drunk who practically came and sat on our laps at one stage, but otherwise: file under Monday.
º Monday 21st May 2001
One more thought about Kaycee, predicated on the righteous indignation people seem to be feeling about having had their emotions manipulated in this way.
It leads me to imagine an Author's Statement for The Old Curiosity Shop: "Mr Dickens takes this opportunity to advise his esteemed readers that the character of Little Nell is an entirely fictional construction. Should they feel the need to send flowers, get well cards and hand-knitted pullovers these should be despatched to the donor's Foundling Hospital of choice."
My contribution to the fascinating Kaycee meme is pretty lame, but slightly surreal and ever so contemporary, darling: I dreamt that I was trying to trace my way through a maze of weblogs, tracking down whether an actor had or had not been substituted for the quadraplegic whose job as Technical Director featured heavily in a reality-tv version of Thunderbirds. ('Am I F.A.B or Not?')
"The key to the Flamingo's success [circa 1963] wasn't just the music. Without any alcohol on sale, the kids who went there needed an alternative to keep them going through the night....So the Flamingo became one of the best places in London to pick up speed. Every weekend it was full of American Airforce men on weekend passes who paid for their night out by selling Benzedrine tablets taken from their cockpit emergency kits, usually for sixpence each, though if you hadn't bought one by 2am you might find the price going up to a shilling."
Thus Simon Napier-Bell in his entertaining (though not well-written) 'Black Vinyl White Powder'. Plus ça change, eh?
It reminds me of the Daily Mirror headline that caught my eye last week, on a story about the end of price-fixing for pharmaceutical products: High Street drug prices halved.
On the one hand, Andrew Sullivan (the ex-editor of New Republic) is bright, cute and gay. (He's also a long term HIV survivor.)
On the other hand, he's raaather right-wing, and a Christian to boot.
And he has a sort of a blog.
Very little talk of shagging, sadly, and even less beer; quite a bit about foot-and-mouth though, including this: "the morally horrifying slaughter continues. At the peak of the epidemic, around 33,000 animals were being slaughtered daily. That figure has now increased to a daily kill-rate of 79,000."
Morally horrifying? I guess he hasn't read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation yet, a book which mentions, in passing, the eight-hour shifts worked by slaughterhouse 'knockers' who are required to slaughter one cow every ten seconds.
Did you know that Clare Rayner is recovering from a double mastectomy? Oo-er.
Election special - check out these urls: www.newlabour.co.uk and www.tory-party.co.uk
Guess how many Hotmail users there are now. Go on guess. Give in? One hundred million. I'll say that again. One. Hundred. Million.
Have 'Beenz'? Has-beens.
If Jonathan Harvey had written the Closer to Heaven that I wish he had written (rather than the one he wished to write), he could have found his epigraph in Oscar Wilde's De Profundis:
The important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing that I have to do, if the brief remainder of my days is not to be maimed, marred, and incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has been done to me, to make it part of me, to accept it without fear, or reluctance.
The supreme vice is shallowness.
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