May 6th - May 12th 2002
Sunday Cats
Saturday Potters Bar
Friday Pim (again)
Thursday Mincing stance
Wednesday Blank Holiday
Tuesday Queer Pim
Monday Pim
Sunday 12th May 2002
Like Matthew Wright, Blogadoon has never felt the need to see a show before condemning it as a pile of cheesy rubbish.
So: farewell Cats - and good bloody riddance.
Saturday 11th May 2002
When we decided to move to Norfolk our choice of a small village just south of Kings Lynn was further validated when we discovered that it had its own small railway station, serving the line that runs directly from Kings Lynn to London.
The rolling stock was antiquated in the best way, big interior sprung seats and windows with their own blinds. And if you boarded early enough in the morning, you could walk down the corridor to the dining car and get a silver-service breakfast, invariably administered by a steward who was fiercely keen to uphold the catering reputation of the provinces. ("Would that be one zossage or two, zur?")
After a year or so, a new timetable reduced the number of trains that stopped at our station to little more than one or two a day. And if a weekend guest wanted to return to London on Sunday night, he or she would have to be driven to another station a good ten miles or so further down the line.
After a few more years, we were delighted to find that there were plans to electrify the line and, after considerable disruption, trains began stopping at out station once again. Admittedly, the carriages were now nasty plastic economy travel capsules, but that seemed a small price to pay for a journey time that was reduced to a mere hour and three-quarters.
Thus it was that, several years ago, as the train whizzed towards London, I heard a disembodied voice, throbbing with rural pride, announce: "Ladeez and gennulmun, this is your Chief Steward speakun. I would loik to announce that this train is now travellun at One Hunnerd Moils per hour. Oi repeat: One! Hunnerd! Moils per hour!"
And Potters Bar station sped past us as he spoke.
Friday 10th May 2002
I'm not what you'd call a big fan of any of the Telegraph's columnists, who usually make your average Disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells look like a woolly liberal - especially when, following ther proprietor's party line, they spring, yet again, to the defence of Israel's latest atrocity.
Mark Steyn - who is usually not half as funny as he seems to think he is - is a particular bugbear of mine. Doubly annoying, then, to find myself nodding along to his latest piece:
"So this guy, Pim, is another charismatic, hateful Right-winger like Le Pen, who believes in.." I reached under the desk and pulled out the BBC's handy How to Spot a Right-Wing Madman chart. "So, like Le Pen, he believes in Right-wing policies like economic protectionism, minimum wage, massive subsidies to inefficient industries. He's opposed to globalisation, fiercely anti-American."
"No, no," said Ron. "Pim doesn't believe any of that conventional Right-wing stuff. He's the other kind of Right-winger."
"What other kind?"
"The kind that's a sociology professor who believes in promiscuous gay sex and recreational drugs. We've got a call in to Norman Tebbit and Baroness Young asking if they'd like to pay tribute to him from one of their favourite gay bathhouses..."
Thursday 9th May 2002
"Oi! Ian! No!" I hear you cry, "No more bloody obituaries! No more gratuitous Telegraph-bashing, neither. It's too easy! And that's quite enough about Pim bloody Fortuyn, too."
Well ok. But what am I supposed to do with this?
"In a nation where debate is generally conducted by consensus among bland Centre-Left liberals, Fortuyn adopted a deliberately controversial, mincing stance."
Excuse me?
(I guess you won't thank me for pointing out that Fortuyn's assassination led the Telegraph's vox-pop-in-a-pub column - "Your Shout" - to venture into a gay bar for the first and probably last time, either.)
Wednesday 8th May 2002
It used to be so simple. For some people, maybe, it still is simple: you work nine to five, Monday to Friday, and you party at weekends. (For 'party', read 'barbecue' or 'put up shelves' or 'lurk under duvet'; Blogadoon is not proscriptive, heaven knows.)
On bank holidays your bank goes on holiday: the notes and cheques spread themselves out on sunny beaches, the silver pays visits to stately homes, and the brown money packs itself into excursion coaches and sings 'Roll Out The Barrel' all the way home. And you party harder.
Only.. I don't work nine to five, nor even ten till late. And I don't work Monday to Friday. I work pick-any-three-or-four-nights on any evening that isn't a Sunday. And, as often as not, I only discover that I'm scheduled to work on a Bank Holiday when somebody innocently asks what party plans I have for This Weekend.
As in This Weekend.
Friday, I worked. And very dull it was too. Enough of that.
Working on Saturdays is always confusing because we start earlier and, in theory, end earlier. So even on a long shift, if some well-meaning Danish friend texts you around 1130 and asks if you can come out to play, you invariably answer: "Too soon to tell but possible, possible, definitely possible."
And they text you and say: "Meet me at The Spiral." And you pause for breath and the next thing you know it's 0145 and there is no damn way you're going to get to go anywhere other than home, bah. Where you listen to your messages and grit your teeth when you hear "I'm waiting at Spiral because I want you to take me to Stunnahz!", double-bah.
But that's kinda ok, because the one day you never ever work is Sunday, because Sunday is choir practise at The Vauxhall Tavern with your friends, followed by assorted minkering, followed by drunken conversation at Dukes and, as like as not, a late night-bus home alone. Sundays are sacred.
Except when it's a Bank Holiday. And your friends are variously scattered to the South Coast or points yet more southerly, and the RVT will be even more crammed than usual, and full of day-trippers who haven't been trained in how to raise their glasses without spilling beer on you or move more than half a pace to the right without treading firmly on your toes. Which could be a cute opportunity to initiate conversation with attractive strangers if the strangers were attractive, which they're not.
So you stay in bed even longer than usual and make arrangements to go directly to Dukes to meet the South Coast contingent for a full debriefing. And when they eventually turn up ("Pano is now trying on Marcus' jeans but we will be there soon") 'debriefing' becomes a mot ever more juste because a stripper is suddenly waving his bits in your face while you fiercely mutter "Don't even think about going there" and he mutters back, just as fiercely, "It doesn't bite you know" before flouncing off, naked, all the way round the bar and back to the stage and you're left feeling quite pleased with yourself, but blushing.
And then it becomes a potential multiple debrief situation because Marcus has managed, clever boy, to procure five free passes to Sleaze which you'd been meaning to go to but not necessarily with assorted friends and friends of friends, towards some of whom you have distinctly carnal intentions, which could get complicated.
And then it all gets a bit blurry, and you have a distant memory of doing something complicated which you probably shouldn't have done, but hey I blame the strategically placed pet food, and yet another Swede, a Swede that you've never knowingly seen before in your life, is saying "Where's your boyfriend?" and "I'm a bit drunk actually" and "I live in Clapham" and we all know what that means.
Only it doesn't really, because you've lost him somewhere between the coat-check and the taxi-queue. And then you do the night bus home alone thing.
So now it's Bank Holiday Monday. And you're a bit hung-over and full of unsatisfied urges and your friends are calling in full party-mode from faaaabulous West End penthouses to tell you about their plans for the evening and you have to reply "I'm WORKING!" Dammit.
And then, then, it's Tuesday. And everybody else is recovering from their five-course weekend. And you've had one night out, which was good, but strange, and you, you, want more. Bad timing, I tell you.
But hey, we nixed the pop quiz and met at Comptons ("EVERYBODY is here") and then we bought a jug or beer at The Friendly Society and set the world to rights, and then I bumped into Sven at Bar Code and set the world even more to rights and smoked my first joint in ages at Old Street and eventually walked all the way home. Without singing Roll Out The Barrel even once.
So it all worked out okay in the end. I guess.
Tuesday 7th May 2002
It now appears that Pim Fortuyn was killed by, of all things, a militant vegetarian.
So he leaves life as he lived it - refusing to be easily assimilated into the way things ought to work.
Difficult not to think of this as fundamentally.. queer.
Monday 6th May 2002
Pim Fortuyn caught my eye a while ago, at a time when he seemed set to join Chris Smith, the mayor of Paris, and at least one German in the limited pantheon of successful overtly gay European politicians.
Indeed, when the Dutch government resigned last month, I only just failed to make a cheap joke about "Gay skinhead delighted to get Kok out".
And now he's been shot. And I'm confused.
On the one hand, at a purely human level, he seems to have been one of a kind - and one of our kind, at that (the Daimler! the butler! the spaniels!). These are the attributes that led the press, at its gentlest, to reach for words like 'gadfly' or 'flamboyant' or 'maverick'. (That's after they've exhausted 'self-confessed homosexual' and (John Simpson, better) 'outspokenly gay'.)
On the other hand, there are his politics, which were almost unanimously summarised by headline-writers as 'far-right' - a convenient shorthand at a time when journalists were caught on the hop by BNP successes in Bradford and Le Pen's shock success in France, and a useful label when writing wise-after-the-event, hand-wringingly-anxious pieces about 'the right-wing backlash' in Europe.
More considered analysis shows that it's not that simple at all. Once beyond the blanket political-correctness that brands all discussion of immigration issues as incipient fascism, it's clear that Fortuyn's take on 'race' issues was very different from that of Le Pen: he was not anti-Semitic, for one thing, neither was he remotely in favour of forced repatriation.
Fortuyn's concern appears to have centred on the potential clash between the cultural values of 'hosts' and 'guests'. Like many others he worried, out loud, about how to square Muslim attitudes to women, to drugs, to marriage and to gays with modern, liberal, European sensibilities. (Politicians dismiss this as 'populist' - i.e. they have no idea what to do about it either, but daren't talk about it.)
Jaded as we are, it's difficult to resist the temptation to vent a wicked giggle when someone like Fortuyn rocks the consensual vote. He was a newspaper columnist who became a politician, so it's quite possible that his ability to articulate popular concerns may not have been matched by his capacity to produce pragmatic solutions.
But now we'll never know.
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