November 12th - November 18th 2001
Sunday Fucking games
Saturday Beardy builders
Friday Queen visits pub
Thursday Afghan street-chic
Wednesday Blockheads
Tuesday By the bollards
Monday On track
Sunday 18th November 2001
"Grae Cleugh's Fucking Games, is a gay play that, had it been written by a heterosexual, might well have incited accusations of homophobia... Cleugh has a good ear for the feline finessings of bitchery, but his play unfolds in a succession of twosome tête-à-têtes that are engineered by feebly motivated exits and entrances.
"At the Royal Court, savage yet tearful buggery has become what bounding through a set of French windows once was in the West End."
Tennis, anyone?
Saturday 17th November 2001
"In my extensive experience, straight men much prefer to get off with you if you don't have a beard, while gay men are substantially more positive about facial hair.
"Both really get off on hyper masculinity, however, so big butch beardy builders can have their pick."
Gay times? Pink Paper? No, it's the letters page of The Independent.
Friday 16th November 2001
Mrs Queen has obviously been listening to the advice of Hogwarts stalwart Richard Harris, whose publicity interviews for his most recent opus have included the memorable line: "I hate movies. They're a waste of time. I could be in a pub having more fun talking to idiots rather than watching idiots perform." Hence, no doubt, Her Majesty's decision to visit the Queen Vic later this month.
Given this is only the second visit to a public house during her entire reign (the first was when she got stuck in a snowdrift on the Yorkshire Moors), I don't imagine we'll be seeing her down The White Swan any time soon.
On the other hand, who knows? If it's good enough for Graham Norton, it's certainly good enough for her. Just as long as one doesn't insist on getting up on stage and removing one's clothing...
It's official: junk mail violates your human rights.
Predictably enough, retired major-generals all over the country have been up in arms over the news that schoolboys (and public-school boys, at that) made ecstasy from instructions found on the internet.
Ironic really, given that the first thing you find with a Google search for making ecstasy is an interview on the late Nicholas Saunders's excellent site, wherein a group of would-be manufacturers complain long and loud about what a total pain in the arse it turned out to be, and what a nightmare it was trying to sell it afterwards.
Thursday 15th November 2001
I'd like to think I'm being light-hearted here, but have a scarey feeling it might happen, and happen soon:
Next season's essential look: Afghan street-chic.
The thought is inspired by the photo on page 3 of todays Independent, in which twenty or so Alliance soldiers stride confidently towards Kabul with a cocky strut that recalls nothing so much as the walkdown at the end of a highly successful fashion-show.
You can see how it would work: a mix-and-match look comprising a stunning combination of boots and camouflage pants with tweed jackets and ankle-length overcoats, highlighted with bright embroidered waistcoats and topped off with assorted scarves, shawls and tea-towels.
Add plain self-coloured cotton robes, aviator sunglasses and assorted webbing belts to taste: it says virile, it says ethnic, it says low-maintenance - it'll walk off the shelves.
Not quite so sure about the woolly berets and flat hats, but those who want to go the whole hog can always grow big beards. Just as half the male population of Afghanistan shaves theirs off. Irony, darling.
Next up: wash-and-wear burqas. Say goodbye to bad hair days!
Concluding today's extended literary tip, please spare a moment to mourn the passing of Dorothy Dunnett.
"The two lengthy and complex series of historical novels that she produced - the six-volume Lymond Chronicles and the eight-volume House of Niccolò - recreated medieval Europe, and brought to life a cast of characters so meticulously researched and lovingly described that they became as real to their followers as their own families." - The Guardian
"Dunnett wrote big, fat 500-page, 300,000-plus-word books raging with life and colour and plot. Particularly plot... She had a mind attuned to deviousness, and nowhere was this quality more apparent than in her last sequence of novels, the splendid 'House of Niccolò' series. Set in the 15th century, in the worlds of commerce and banking in the Low Countries, Italy and the Levant... the books follow the up-and-down fortunes of Claes, sometimes known as Nicholas or Niccolò, who rises from bastardy to a position of great power." -The Independent
Complex, splendid, devious - colour me a big big fan. It was always a great delight to find a new Niccolò in the shops, and my life is the poorer for her passing.
Having tried my hand at a novel or two in the past, I always feel guilty (slightly guilty) about dismissing the toil of others in a mere paragraph or two.
Not so AN Wilson, puzzling over the fact that this year's John Llewellyn Rhys Prize went to Edward Platt's Leadville rather than Zadie Smith's (excellent) White Teeth:
"Who were the judges? They were D J Taylor, a clever journalist, but as yet an unsuccessful novelist; Paul Bailey, known to us all as Pearl Barley, who is, or was, a brilliant novelist, but who has never had the success he deserved; and Margaret Forster, who must by now realise, at 65, that she is never going to write a good novel, though she has been gallantly trying all her adult life."
Do not be surprised if Mr Wilson is found face down in a gutter somewhere soon, his life cut short by three sharpened quills stuck firmly in his back.
I imagine I buy books in much the same way other people buy food: a weekly or fortnightly shop puts a temporary strain on the purse which is more than offset by the security that one now has enough in the cupboard to last through the days to come.
Slightly gluttonous, then, to have wolfed down not one, but two, whole helpings in less than 24 hours. I feel a little bloated.
Following the success of Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials, bookshops are pushing his three other reissued novels, including The Ruby in the Smoke.
Enjoyable pseudo-Victorian nonsense, largely set in and around Wapping (where I live), this is ostensibly a children's book; like Pullman's other work though, it's refreshingly honest about adult appetites: Famous Five Go to an Opium Den.
Stephen Fry's The Star's Tennis Balls is not something I would normally have bought, but I've pretty much exhausted Border's 3-for-2 catalogue this month, and I'm down to bin-ends.
Misled by the title, I was expecting some kind of Hollywood lifestyle romp, and was pleasantly surprised to find instead a classic revenge story, wherein a hypocritical Tory cabinet minster, a coke-snuffling model agent and a ruthless spy-master each meet their gory come-uppance at the hands of a mysterious dot-com millionaire.
The plot is nonsense, frankly, but Fry's incidental observations and underlying sympathies make the time spin by.
Neither of these books represents anything resembling a solid diet: it's been a little like dining on turkish delight and chips.
And now I'm hungry again.
Wednesday 14th November 2001
I found this today, written about Samuel Johnson:
'The great business of his life,' he told Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'was to escape from himself; this disposition he considered as the disease of his mind, which nothing cured but company.' He 'loved late hours extremely, or more properly hated early ones. Nothing was more terrifying to him than the idea of retiring to bed,' and he would force one, 'by his vehement lamentations and piercing reproofs, not to quit the room, but to sit quietly and make tea for him... till four o'clock in the morning'.
And this, written by his friend Mrs Thrale:
"'Miss Owen and Miss Burney asked me if I had never been in Love,' she wrote a month after her husband's death; 'with myself said I, and most passionately. When any Man likes me I never am surprized, for I think how should he help it? when any Man does not like me, I think him a Blockhead, and there's an End of the matter.'"
Nice to know I'm in good company, sitting here alone at 7:25 at the end of a long night...
Tuesday 13th November 2001
It might have been the story he began to tell me - but it's not as if I'm a Victorian virgin, swooning at the first signs of salaciousness.
Or perhaps it was that dodgy fish mousse, remaindered to 10p in Tescos. A caffeine overdose? One can of Red Stripe too many? Brain tumour?
It certainly wasn't drugs - not unless Friday's spliff took 48 hours to kick in..
Mostly I blame the constant contrast between the steamy heat of the inside and the frosty pavement outside: a little dance, a snatch of conversation, a little dance...
I've said before that the thing I like best about the Royal Vauxhall Tavern is the constant hum of flirty talk on the pavement; the worst thing is the way that winter drives everybody inside, where conversation is strictly limited to the single sentence you manage to yell in someone's ear at the quieter moments of a tune.
This Sunday didn't seem quite so cold (though maybe I fooled myself) and there were plenty of people I wanted to talk to, some of whom I even knew: two of David's exes, Wesley and Peter, Neil, Dorian, Andrew Hodges, this man, that man..
So what with one thing and another, and with several random hurlings of myself upon the mercy of the dancing crowd, I stayed quite a bit later than longer. And, who knows, probably drank a bit more beer than usual too.
Around about eleven, chatting to Paul outside by the bollards, a friend of his, a nice young man, came up and joined us, clearly somewhat chemically enhanced.
"You just don't know!" he grinned. "Up there on the podium... me.. and them down there...so alive... so great... to be up there... after all this..." and gestured loosely at his chest."All what?" I asked, never one to turn down a conversational challenge, especially when posed by an attractive young man.
He frowned slightly, then pulled up his t-shirt. "This," he said, and gestured towards his beige colostomy bag and a livid pink scar, eight inches at least, running vertically up his belly.
"Wow," I said. As you do. "How did that happen?"
"Well," he said, and took a deep breath. "I was running a bar, you know, in addition the the job I was telling you about, and it was a Wednesday, and I was in a foul mood, and I felt, just...and it was a crap night, a really crap night, you know?
"And when I got home I, just, I had this really supersized dildo..."
At which point I fainted dead away.
Never did find out what happened..
Monday 12th November 2001
Go on, admit it: you too have stood at the edge of the Underground platform as a train comes swooping in and wondered, just for a moment, how it would feel to fall onto the track...
Well wonder no more: last week, Osei Kwaku, a religious refugee from Ghana, fell off the platform at Finsbury Parl station into the path of an incoming train. And lived to tell the tale.
Villagers in Burundi have seized a stork fitted with a radio tracking device and arrested it on suspicion of spying. You think they read about Acoustic Kitty?
Rememberance Day is traditionally celebrated on the nearest Sunday to November 11th. This year, spookily enough, November 11th actually was a Sunday, and the traditional two minute silence took place right on schedule: at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
I'm afraid to say that, like most years, I slept soundly right through it.
Never mind though, I'll simply wait for the CD to come out.
You think I jest? Think again.
......previous entries