July 31st - August 6th 2006
Sunday Annual arse
Saturday Brighton Pride
Friday Zombie strike
Thursday Ten Stages of Cross
Wednesday Camden Town
Tuesday Soho Pride
Monday Indiscreet
Sunday 6th August
Thank you all for writing in to point out that the last few entries here have been dated 2005 rather than 2006: it seems to be a recurring - and marginally mysterious - glitch on Blogadoon.
Much as I'd love to blame it on the machinery, it's actually down to the hand-rolled nature of this blog: having worked out a format for certain recurring features, I tend to copy and paste from the past rather more often than is healthy.
Endearing though, wouldn't you say?
Saturday 5th August
Brighton Pride, Summer 2006
(click for pix)
Friday 4th August
A few months ago, for example, a large number of disgruntled zombies, who felt they were getting a raw deal compared to the humans, went on strike.
They stopped attacking people and headed for a park in the centre of Malton where they held a mass demo. The high concentration of characters in one place caused problems for the server, and the refusal of so many to play - the strike received a huge amount of support, from zombies and humans alike - threatened to sink the game.
Kevan (everyone's on first-name terms in Malton) responded to their demands by improving the zombies' lot; the strike came to an end; and, to celebrate, the zombies went on a rampage round the city, attacking each of the shopping malls in turn, in a campaign that became known as Mall Tour '06, and once again significantly changed the dynamics of the game.
It's perhaps noteworthy that the zombies tend to have a much better sense of humour than their more po-faced human counterparts.
- Thomas Jones muses on his memories of computer games past and present in a recent issue of The London Review of Books
Thursday 3rd August
This, you may remember, is my attempt at a pyscho-geographic-historical analysis of the short twenty minutes or so it takes me to shamble home after a pint or three at The White Swan - a journey which, when I first started writing about it, I calculated I'd made about a thousand times - a figure which, some two years later, must now be closer to 1,200.
Much has happened on my route home since I first started writing about it.
Some incidents - such as the (repeated!) encounters with an attractive stranger on Cable Street - might conceivably be attributed to my having written about the journey in the first place.
Others - like the (hitherto unreported) vituperous argument that I fell into with a dwarvish chavette, that climaxed with her threatening me with a knife so small that I couldn't actually see it - I cannot claim responsibility for. (She really didn't strike me as much of a reader.)
We left our intrepid (drunk, moody, giggling) traveller peering along the cat-haunted gloom of Glamis Place towards the comparatively bright lights of the junction of The Highway and Glamis Road where, did he but know it, a very brief affair with a mildly overweight Brazilian stood in wait for him.
We won't dwell on that, not least because it was so long ago that I don't even remember his name. (Did it end in an 'o', I wonder?)
Suffice it to say that that otherwise alarming stretch of road - the only set of traffic lights that I have to deal with on the way home - will never be the same for me again - especially since I now fully appreciate the usefulness of the nearby pedestrian underpass...
Once across the Highway, the road begins to slope steeply downwards towards the river. At the top of this southern section of Glamis Road, on the left, someone's garden spills roses over the wall, and we normally nod to each other in passing.
The eastern side of the road is bounded by the King Edward Memorial Park, once the site of a short-lived fish market. A stretch of wire netting separates the sunken tennis courts from the road, which is cast into deep shadow by a row of trees.
I admit there are nights when I have stopped for a pee here, out and down over the court, looking east to where Canary Wharf insults the horizon. That may or may not have anything to do with the police car that slowed to a halt as I stood there at 2am last week.
From a wound-down window a police-woman politely enquired as to what I was up to. Drunk as I was, I toyed with the idea of telling her to mind her own business or, better yet, enquiring as to the likelihood of my being intent on burgling the tennis courts.
But I settled instead for the terse but truthful answer: "Watching. A. Fox". That was a plausible enough excuse to have seen them on their way: I offer it to you for the next time you're caught up to no good.
The southern edge of the tennis courts is bounded by an alleyway that runs behind the Shadwell Basin Outdoor Activity Centre to a riverside walk; any thoughts of nocturnal Outdoor Activities are soon quashed by the discovery that the riverside walk is locked away at night.
On the opposite side of the road the wall that once contained the easternmost end of the London Docks, but which now shelters nothing more exciting than yet another waterside housing development, comes to a sudden halt at the bascule bridge.
A footpath leads around the northern edge of Shadwell Basin, and it was from here, one recent Friday night, that I was delighted to see someone emerge...
...but more of that next time.
Ten Stages of Cross:
East London
Canary Wharf to Wapping
Limehouse to Wapping
The White Swan
Limehouse
Cable Street
Brodlove Lane
Wednesday 2nd August 2006
Camden Town, Summer 2006
Tuesday 1st August
Although I posted a couple of photographs from London's Europride this year, I didn't write about it - what's to say other than: floats..parade..and the streets of Soho rammed with drunken totty?
Been there, done that.
A similar ennui characterised my reaction to this year's Soho Pride, a distinctly under-organised event, and one which I had little compunction in avoiding - as did, so far as I can tell, most of my friends.
Is it an age thing, do you think? Too jaded to enjoy the company of thousands of gay people in the sunshine? I hope not.
Or is it something to do with the feeling that these events are less and less to do with celebrating one's sexuality and more and more to do with pumping pink pounds into big brewers' pockets?
When being gay was a special secret, nobody worried too much about the fact that, more often than not, the chance to share space with one's fellow inverts meant paying inflated prices for a beer or a creme de menthe. These days, when every Tom Dick and Harry can register their interest at the local town hall, that seems a high price to pay.
Not that you have to pay money to get it on: I've been delighted to discover recently that, even in these gaydar-dominated times, the art of outdoor cruising is far from dead.
So let's hear it for George Michael who, as those of you who have seen this weekend's papers will know, was recently accosted by a News of the World photographer as he hauled his weary body home from Hampstead Heath.
Did he hang his head in shame? Did he hell:
Are you gay? No? Then fuck off! This is my culture.
Well quite.
Monday 31st July
As I was saying to some friend of a friend at Horse Meat on Sunday, there's a classic discretion curve to any blog that last longer than a year or so.
You start off writing strictly for yourself, usually in full-confessional mode, all too aware that nobody but you is going to read the damn thing.
And everything is grist for the mill: the drunken fumble at the office party, the snatched snog at your cousin's wedding, the back-alley blow-job on the way home from the pub.
But before you know it, you've told your friends about your blog and your friends, if you have any left, have told their friends and - unless you've taken considerable care to keep your identity secret - everyone can read your darkest secrets.
At which stage, you start writing in code - about 'encounters of a certain nature' with 'a gentleman friend of my recent, very recent, acquaintance' and so forth.
People who know you well enough to ask pick up the hint that there's something they should sidle up and ask about, and the rest of the world is left with the - not entirely unflattering - assumption that you're a bit of a wild child on the side.
The years go by, and you suddenly realise that your boss may well be reading your blog. Your boss's bosses too. Your boss's bosses' boss, even.
And whilst you would like them to admire you for, ahem, your way with an apostrophe, you probably don't want them to be thinking about your sex life. Not at all.
So you tone that side of things down entirely: the discretion curve bottoms out; in print, you're a nun.
Had I but time enough, and cared, I could probably trace that curve through Blogadoon - although, to be brutally frank, the lack of any commentary of my sex life these days is more likely to be down to the lack of anything much to talk about rather than the need to be discreet.
Or so I thought.
But the Saturday before last, staggering home from The Swan, I was delighted and surprised to discover that...
......previous week
