November 19th - November 25th 2001
Sunday Dan's the man
Saturday Skullduggery
Friday Cunt
Thursday Swan King Taboo
Wednesday Disappointed
Tuesday Eastendlife
Monday Cunt(2)
Sunday 25th November 2001
What a total fucking delight to meet Dan at long last: quiet, bright and cute. Truly ultrasparky. And uniquely featured in the gonad department, also!
Saturday 24th November 2001
Madge gives an interview to The Mirror, and says "Guy doesn't like it when I wear see-through shirts. He doesn't want anyone to see my raspberries," thereby confirming herself as one of those foreign fools who, having spent a week on our foggy island, assume themselves suddenly fluent in cockney rhyming slang. (Raspberry Ripple is a (defunct?) ice-cream flavour - you work it out...)
I've never heard this particular coinage before, and I have severe doubts as to its authenticity, largely because it seems so redundant: difficult to imagine a genuine cockney ever bothering to distinguish between raspberries and bristols in the first place.
But who knows, maybe they got sophisticated behind my back, and are busy whispering obscure sexual propositions to each other: "What say I gets out me leather flower, you slip into your farah; I'll slip some Irish on the video, we'll dig out the rubik's, and you can give me a phantom before we get dahn to some serious skullduggery?"
(Late news: Andy points out that which I can't believe I'd forgotten: 'raspberry ripple' is of course rhyming slang - but not for 'nipple'; try 'cripple' instead.)
Friday 23rd November 2001
Nice to see the vitriolic debate about accusations that the "United States had it coming" in the Letters page of the London Review of Books rumbling on into the current issue, complete with withdrawals of labour ("I am sorry to tell you that I have sent my Shostakovich review to another periodical for publication...") and the use of the phrase "a resentful little cunt", albeit in inverted comments and not used in quite the context you might at first imagine.
Thursday 22nd November 2001
I rattled home from the White Swan last night thinking about The Music of the Spheres. I know, I know, how unlikely is that?
But the thing is - what other metaphor can you reach for to explain how the same night at the same venue can be mind-numbingly dull one week, and just faaaabulous the next?
As my friends know, I like to keep to a fairly regular schedule of places and days: Tuesday, Pop Quiz; Wednesday, Strip Night; Sunday, RVT. Mild autistic obsession explains some of that, I guess, but there's a slightly nobler explanation too: something about minimising as much of the random as you can manage so as to highlight and appreciate the other changing flavours?
A good night out depends, of course, on all sorts of non-computable factors, not the least of which is the mood in which you arrive. (I almost wrote 'go out in'.)
But, empiricist that I am, I still hold to the belief that there really is some kind of clockwork in place, some unfathomable mechanism by which one is guaranteed that for every duff night, there will be two or three sorta-kinda-ok nights plus one Pretty Good Night.
Last week was definitely duff - despite the presence of Guy and Andy. More duff, come to think of it, thanks to Guy and Andy - because when you have good friends with you, good friends who don't visit a place as often as you do, you want the place to be filled to the brim with casual acquaintance, all of whom will take time out to greet you as you pass. And, last week, there was none of that.
Whereas, this week, there was:
Michael, the mad Marseillaise. (He's not remotely French, but with his swagger and bad teeth, he always looks to me as if he's been auditioning for a walk-on in Querelle of Brest.) Michael will always be close to my heart because he once told me I looked 17. In the right light.
Louis the Lovable (who would be appalled to know that I still fancy him to bits, even after all these years.) Louis and I have quite some history, a lot of which centres on the housing co-op flats in which I lived before I moved here, and in which he has continued living in the meantime. But now he's moving out. To a houseboat. At Kings Cross. Gosh. (At least one other facet of Louis's life, I was disappointed to discover, remains quite constant; I can't talk about it here, except to say: tsk. And possibly: tchah.)
He Who Could Break My Heart, so blind drunk that even I declined to take advantage of him, which has to be some kind of first. His friend was nice, though.
Wossname, the rent boy with the unfeasible name who used to be really cute but has gotten flabby. Ortan? Grith? Snard?
Assorted cute boys, none of whom I knew but many of whom deigned to give me the impression that I wasn't entirely beneath their notice.
Pretty much everything else about last week and this week was identical: the same absence of Jimmy (thankfully), the same three pints or so, the same No Graham Norton, the same lippy host(ess), the same parade of not especially attractive drunken men getting up to take their clothes off.
Actually, I lie. The amateur strippers were slightly, but only slightly, more interesting this week. And one of them was so desperate to win the contest that he stuck his cock in the mouth of a fat man in the audience.
That is not, trust me, enough to make the difference between a good night and a duff night. But I suppose it helped..
My list of things to go hmmmm about was further extended when I got home and watched a recording of Joan Bakewell's Taboo which was interesting enough, I guess, given that her opening theme was changing attitudes to public nudity. (Nothing about fat men in the audience, though.)
I like Ms Bakewell a lot, not least for the sheer grace with which she is ageing. And she's so damned professional. Slightly too professional, I realised, as I watched last night's programme - which was, if nothing else, carefully designed to maximise its own ratings, complete with a much-touted pixellated hard-on in the closing minutes.
Despite the fact that many of the contestants at Amateur Strip Night are nakedly interested in winning the £100 prize-money, the night is not really about money - if it was, you can be sure the whole thing would be a lot more professional, and lot less fun.
There seemed to me to be a big intellectual gap in Taboo, a whole missing argument about how our changing attitudes to nakedness have been driven, not by what we might like to think of as increasingly progressive attitudes, but by sheer sordid commerce. It seemed strangely hypocritical to see La Bakewell using the BBC to pander to our lust for flesh without, as it were, following the money.
Nonetheless, nice to see some dick on the box. And in peak-time too, la.
All of which (taboos, cute boys, pop culture) seems to segue rather too neatly into the Jonathan King affair.
I need hardly explain that I'm no fan of Jonathan King. Indeed, I rather doubt that such a thing exists. But alarm bells start going off for me whenever the Establishment starts handing out jail sentences for sexual encounters. And my initial reaction was to think that a seven year sentence seemed somewhat excessive, under the circumstances.
His career, after all, is now effectively terminated. If you doubt that, check out these reactions to the news that Gary Glitter is planning a new album. Glitter, as far as we know, never even laid hands on a child.
So I initially felt a certain sympathy with the man. And then I discovered - last to know, as ever - that King was responsible for Who Let the Dogs Out, a hanging offence is ever there was one.
I don't know though.
I've long held to the ring-fence theory of public morality, the idea that the further we spread the circle of what's accepted, the higher we build the fence that separates perceived right from wrong. When adultery became tolerated, homosexuality suddenly became much more evil. Now that it's ok to be gay, it's paedophilia which concerns us - so much so that you can't even talk about it without people looking askance.
Anarchist-wannabe that I am, I get these twinges of civil liberty flavoured conscience at times like these. Part of me wants to point out that King's (anonymous) 'victims' were all approximately 15, in many cases just a few months short of our currently accepted legal limit. That most of them seemed to have had no problem in returning to receive his attentions, again and again. That the worst damage that seems to have been done is that one of the kids blames his addiction on depression following encounters with King - hardly a robust response, surely?
But then I shrug, and remind myself that I know next to nothing about adolescent sexual psychology. That I believe that all relationships based on unequal power are wrong. And that I'm not in the best of positions to take sides given that, in common with so many other gay men, I'm a bit of a chicken-hawk on the quiet.
And besides, three words: Una Paloma Blanca. Nuff said.
Blimey. It seems like only yesterday that I reported on the ornate East End funeral procession of the woman who lived across the courtyard from me.
And today, woken by the unaccustomed click of horses' hooves on tarmac, I pried my blinds apart to discover another funeral, this time issuing from the flat directly beneath me.
I don't know much about the middle-aged black lady who lives there, except that she moved in after the previous tenant, something of a nutter, died following an epileptic fit (cue more bouquets on pavements).
The epileptic used to have long loud screaming matches with her boyfriend. The black lady has been much quieter, though once in a while I can hear her and some young guy (her son?) raising their voices at each other.
So I'm afraid to admit that my first thought (after going "She died? I didn't know! Well...how would I?") was to start to calculate how this latest decease would impact my environmental serenity, such as is.
My second thought, not unconnected, was to notice how wonderfully quiet it is round here when there's a funeral on: nothing to hear except the faint squeak of the aluminium mini-ladder as the portly beadle figure clambers up to arrange the floral tributes on the roof of the hearse.
Looking more closely at the flowers though, I noticed "UNCLE" and "To my only grandson" - so I guess it's not my neighbour herself who's shuffled off the coil. Hmm, maybe it's the shouty son...
Wednesday 21st November 2001
Faced with the strangely synchronised faint-heartedness of my quizzing comrades, both of whom returned from their respective holidays too tired to take part, I willingly partnered Wendy at the Pop Quiz yesterday.
You will be expecting an exhaustive breakdown of the score and a comprehensive analysis of the questions. And you will be disappointed.
Tuesday 20th November 2001
The real Eastenders (cont'd) - stories from eastendlife that you won't be seeing on TV any time soon:
The body of a patient who threw himself from a balcony at the Royal London Hospital was found three days later
The Tower Hamlets' trading standards team will be sending confiscated counterfeit designer goods to be distributed in Romanian orphanages
A fireman was hit by a brick thrown at him when his firecrew called to extinguish a November 5th blaze in Stepney
Muslim Community Radio will be broadcasting 24 hours a day during Ramadan
Tilly Butcher was left with a broken wrist and fingers when she was mugged near Watney Street Market. Ms Butcher is 93.
Monday 19th November 2001
A visit to The Hoist on Saturday with Guy and Andy, and low-level maunderings thereafter, meant that I didn't get to bed till past nine on Sunday morning, and woke up mid-afternoon feeling tired, jaded and hungover, poxed and hexed.
Seriously considered giving the Vauxhall a miss, but dragged my weary ass down there in time for Edna's show, which went some way to restoring my joie de vivre.
Very limited cast of featured players this week, though - Andy'n'Alex, Karl, Peter, Wesley - so I sloped off even earlier than usual to nurse a pint in Dukes and sit trying to look attractive in case anyone attractive was looking at me. Fruitless, really.
Dukes seems to have run out of sad old drag acts to recycle on a Sunday (and, it's true, they're dying off in droves these days): two strippers were scheduled for later but...nah.
Intent on a quick smiley squeeze through the crowd before de-checking my coat and going home, I returned to the Vauxhall. But found it quite difficult to get back into, both physically and mentally.
Standing in front of me, one guy was having particular trouble hanging onto his vodka and coke amidst the crowd-churn. I ventured some cheery remark about next time he should have it served in a squeezy bottle. He stared at me, leant over and said "Do me a favour?"
"Sure," I said.
"You're a fucking cunt, fuck off," he replied.
Great end to a great evening. Cheers mate.
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