January 21st - January 26th 2002
Sunday -
Saturday Bloggies
Friday Blancmange
Thursday Multiple choice
Wednesday Adopting attitude
Tuesday Peter Townend
Monday McAbre
Saturday 26th January 2002
In keeping with my traditional dog-in-a-manger attitude, you'll not have read anything about The Bloggies here on Blogadoon. No quiet orchestration of write-in campaigns to get Blogadoon nominated. No exhortations to "Vote, vote, vote!" (with the unspoken rider: "for me!"). No snide remarks about the qualities of other contestants. Nada. Nil. Not a word.
In truth, I'm not a great one for beauty contests at the best of times. Oh sure, I like to be popular. I like being linked to, I enjoy compliments, all that. (Enjoy? What am I saying? I thrive on compliments.) But to seek out praise, to actively solicit positive feedback is not my style. I prefer to see myself as a full-ahead and damn-the-torpedos man. (Too many Jack Hawkins films as a child, I guess.)
Imagine, then, my supreme delight at discovering from Philo that Blogadoon actually made it into the preliminary Bloggie nominations for best gay weblog. Arguably, that makes it one of the seventeen most popular GLBT-blogs in the world. Which is, you know, neat. Who knew?
Intriguingly enough, Wherever you are nominates Blogadoon for The Social Whirl Award - "For services to allowing readers to experience vicarious entertainment without having to go to all the trouble themselves".
At a time when I've been worrying about this blog deteriorating into nothing more than one of those "This Crazy World" collections of trivia torn from the newspapers, that's very heartening. Thanks, Vaughan.
Friday 25th January 2002
Blogadoon's fashion correspondents took to the streets of Soho last night, in an epic crawl through six bars in five hours. Deciphering their scribbled notes, we find:
Those cloth bags that people have taken to wearing down the middle of their back, suspended by strings from each shoulder? The ones that look like the bag in which you used to carry your plimsolls? The emptier they get, the more they look like a scrotum. Do us all a favour and plump them up with some used gym kit.
Darling, if you are a fit thirty year old a sleeveless vest will indeed make you look sporty and athletic. If you are a scrawny forty year old, however, it just looks as if you've come out in your underwear.
And a general note to all gangs of plump middle-aged women out on a spree: remember, a tight rubber top is a difficult look to get right at the best of times but on you it resembles the skin on a black blancmange.
I'm working tonight, so I won't be able to celebrate Burns Night with you - but give my regards to any sonsie hurdies you come across, by all means.
Responses to yesterday's multiple-choicer proved, as expected, that, given a choice between a clear repetitive pattern and a good story, people will opt for the answers that make me look like an idiot, every time.
Just for the record: in each case, the first answer reflects the truth of what happened. Sorry to disappoint you but no, I wasn't 20 fags up by the end of the evening and, no, I'm not going senile. Not yet.
Thursday 24th January 2002
Wednesday 23rd January 2002
Hmmmm. It seems the last great battle for gay liberation may be closer than we think.
Now pay attention because this gets a little complicated.
A new amendment to the Adoption and Children Bill will insist only on "a permanent and stable relationship" as a criterion for the legal adoption of children. As an all-party amendment, this is very likely to be carried when the bill returns to the Commons. As it stands, this amendment would allow gay couples to adopt.
This is not, in itself, the final frontier of gay rights - but it would defeat specious arguments from anti-gay-marriage cranks such as Family and Youth Concern, who were recently quoted as saying that "A gay relationship is one for personal convenience and taste. Gay relationships do not stabilise society. Most gay couples don't have children."
It would also mean the de facto defeat of Clause 28 - you can hardly ban discussion of homosexuality in classrooms when some of the children may themselves have gay parents.
However, a further amendment is proposed, an amendment to the amendment, that would define unmarried couples as "a man and a woman living together in a stable relationship." (Guess the party allegiance of the MP who is proposing this.)
And that's where it gets interesting.
Because it seems to me that the debate over this further amendment cannot but force a debate on the possibility of gay marriage. And gay marriage is, arguably, the Last Great Battle.
Legalising gay relationships (as in Germany, France, Holland, and all of Scandinavia) answers, at a stroke, the last remaining inequalities: the right to parity in respect of inheritance, pensions, tenancy, and social security: no more stories about long-term lovers being denied access to their dying boyfriends or being forced to leave the family flat after the death.
The Conservatives (despite Ian Duncan Smith's dithering over Clause 28 and Francis Maude's suggestion that future party leaders might be gay) are certain to support the idea that legal relationships are for Adam and Eve rather than Adam and Steve.
The Liberals seem likely to oppose that idea (there will be much reference to London's recent introduction of a partnership register.)
And Labour will be split. David Blunkett, one of the sterner Home Secretaries in recent history, is a firm supporter of traditional family structures. Lady Morgan the minister for women and equality has already said that she is considering introducing a nationwide register for same-sex partners. Downing Street says that "the Government had not yet decided on the way forward".
If the second amendment fails, however, the first becomes much more contentious. The Tories are highly unlikely to let themselves be seen as opening the door to adoption by gay couples. (Cue all sorts of malignant nonsense by right-wing members for small seaside towns with marginal majorities.)
The Government, on the other hand, is a strong supporter of the original amendment - and, Blunkett notwithstanding, far less likely to get upset by the prospect of gay parents.
So be warned. Peter Tatchell will once again have a gay rights issue to get noisy about (rather than the more general human rights he has been reduced to touting lately). There will be protests, candle-lit vigils, and anger on the streets.
We may even see, please god, the return of the abseiling lesbians. That would be cool...
Hooray! Philip Pullman (long-championed by Blogadoon) has won the Whitbread Award - not just as Children's Winner but as overall Book of the Year.
Hooray! Paul Keating (long-championed by Blogadoon, well ok, long-lusted-after), has been nominated for an Olivier Award - as Best actor, musical or entertainment. (Best six-pack might be more like it, but let's not quibble.)
Tuesday 22nd January 2002
Traditionally, we old people inspect the Obituary pages to check on the ages of the deceased. I've never been quite sure whether the desired result is to find people older than you (in which case you can feel comforted that you still have a few years to go) or younger (in which case you can feel smug at having survived).
Personally, I mostly cast an eye over the final summary paragraph, looking for the tell-tale lack of any mention of surviving wives and children.
Sometimes, though, the obituaries provide decent entertainment in their own right. The utterly bizarre tribute to Howard Finster was one such; the more recent hatchet-job on Peter Townend, former social editor of Tatler, is another.
Nil nisi bonum and all that, but what sort of character comes across from following excerpts? The kicker is the first three words of the last paragraph:
"Peter Townend was a chirpy bachelor with lank grey-black hair, [and] boldly striped shirts... he would materialise at every conceivable party or function [reciting] with enormous relish, the titles and connections of the guests into the photographer's ear in a stage whisper: 'That's the Hon Priscilla FitzTightly ("twice nightly", more like) . . . isn't she charming ?'
"From his small service flat behind the Chelsea swimming baths he would travel up to the West End on the No 19 bus. After lunch, he would arrive - often somewhat tiddly - at Tatler's offices in Hanover Square, where lately he worked from three until four each afternoon. Of an evening, if not required at some function, he liked to repair to the Ritz or Claridge's, where he would take a glass or three of champagne.
"Blessed with talent as a mimic and possessing a highly idiosyncratic vocabulary, Townend could be an amusing raconteur, rather reminiscent, on his better days, of Kenneth Williams. He was perhaps the last man in England to deploy freely the epithet 'common'.
"As the evening wore on, he would become increasingly convivial and affectionate in manner, and his North Country accent would become more pronounced. He was highly sensitive about his background and age ('Just say I'm in my late thirties,' he used to tell journalists).
"In fact he was born Kenneth Peter Townend in Leeds on April 26 1921. His mother followed keenly the doings of the Royal Family and the aristocracy, and young Peter was steeped in society magazines from an early age.
"During the 1950s the Townend persona underwent a curious metamorphosis. The Northern cheeky chappie who wore tan suits and lodged in a boarding house in Beckenham was replaced by a smooth young (or at least youngish) man about South Kensington and Chelsea.
"Peter Townend's idea of heaven was sitting in a garden on a summer afternoon, drinking champagne and listening to the original cast recording of My Fair Lady.
"In his own way, he is quite irreplaceable."
Monday 21st January 2002
A macabre-mix for your Monday morning:
One headline in particular perplexed us at work the other day: East Germans used Nazi babies as cover for spies. Either very big babies or very small spies, we decided.
We commended the sub who had the presence of mind to avoid headlining his story Vacuum cleaners linked to miscarriage.
And we took much non-innocent amusement at the German Goth murder story, too, given that one of our colleagues shares a flat with a gent of distinctly gothic sensibilities: "Manuela Ruda, 23, adopted a full-blown Gothic style, wearing black, lacerated clothes as her alienation from society deepened. She met her future husband after answering his advertisement in the Gothic magazine Metalhammer: 'Jet black vampire seeks princess of darkness who hates everything and everybody.' When police searched their flat they found imitation human skulls, cemetery lights and a coffin in which Mrs Ruda slept during the day."
That Magistrate jailed for building pipe bombs? The man who packed water bottles packed with three kilos of metal nuts as part of a plan to target his former girlfriend's new lover? I hope you didn't miss the details of his day-job. He was "a self-employed computer software expert earning more than £100,000 a year."
And Too much water kills thirsty woman? Another dance-floor tragedy, you're thinking. No. She was 64.
Best yet, though: Envoy's dog came back from kennel in coffee jar.
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