May 13th - May 19th 2002
Sunday Geronimo
Saturday Make mine a marine
Friday Queen, musical
Thursday -
Wednesday Drop the gay
Tuesday Our world
Monday Eventful
Sunday 19th May 2002
I suspect only British boy-children of a certain age will understand this, but I need to record that, in the middle of a very very sexy snog with a very very sexy Latin this weekend, I pulled back and murmured "What's your name, anyway?" and he replied, in a heavily throaty fashion, "Geronimo.."
Well, quite.
(I suspect he would spell it.. Jeironimo? Which makes him.. Brazilian?)
Saturday 18th May 2002
Say what you like about our involvement with Afghanistan; it certainly gives our gallant war correspondents a chance to keep the home fires burning for fetishists back in Blighty - as with this recent snap of a sunbathing marine from today's Daily Telegraph:
If this nice weather continues, expect to see this look in Soho Square sometime very soon...
Friday 17th May 2002
The new Queen musical, "We Will Rock You", has opened and the critics have delivered their verdict.
The range of adjectives employed starts at shallow,lazy, and incompetent descending through awful, vacuous, trite, tacky, and tragic down to insulting, embarrassing, pathetic, disastrous, risible, and totally vacuous.
What's the correct theatrical term? Oh yes.. disappointing.
The Telegraph has a compendium of the most scathing bits, but my favourite is the plot-synopsis from The Independent:
An organisation called Globalsoft, led by the Killer Queen, reigns supreme. The enemies of the state are the Bohemians, a group of outcasts in constant search of "the lost vibe".. Then we have the inevitable love story between our two young rebels, Galileo and Scaramouche..
You can see the problem - "concept" is a concept best applied to individual albums rather than entire musical careers, as any fule know.
Hence: "All White":
The show opens with the "Cry Baby Cry", the road-side lament of our asylum-seeker heroine and her gently weeping guitar. Julia has left her glass onion in the U.S.S.R where it has been built over by ex-revolutionary turned capitalist property-developer Bungalow Bill.
Bill's gun-toting monkey brick-layers, Obladi and Oblada, disguise themselves as a blackbird and a raccoon in an attempt to persuade Julia that Bill is Mother Nature's son, a strategem that fails when they find themselves imprudently serenading Julia's companion Sadie with obscene suggestions that involve getting hardcore on the hardtop ("Why Don't We Do It in the Road?").
All ends happily however, and the show concludes with a long celebratory birthday picnic at which the entire cast pig out on wild honey pies and savoy truffles.
(Opening soon: Ibiza Chill Out II.)
Wednesday 15th May 2002
Conversation on the subs bench:
She: Can I use 'priest' instead of 'bishop'?
He: I guess. Why?
She: This headline is one character too long.
He: Let's have a look.. Oh, just drop the 'gay'.
Tuesday 14th May 2002
Many of you will have seen most of the following four stories, but I archive them here not for you but for visiting anthropologists from other planets.
Welcome to our world:
Anne Naysmith, a 60 year old former concert pianist who has lived in an abandoned Ford Consul for thirty years, had her home towed away after she resisted all attempts to persuade her into more comfortable accomodation.
Miss Naysmith, who wears clothes made of rags, scraps of discarded umbrellas and pigeon feathers, resisted the seizure - as did many of her neighbours on her Chiswick street, where houses sell for up to £800,000.
Chante Mallard, a 25 year old nurse, has been arrested and charged with murder after running over a tramp. After the collision, Ms Mallard drove home with the tramp stuck headfirst through her windscreen, and then left him parked in her garage for three days as he bled to death.
Ms Mallard, from Fort Worth, Texas, said in her defence that she went out to check on the tramp from time to time and apologised to him for his situation. She was arrested after the police were tipped off by someone who heard her talking about the incident at a party.
Luke Helder, a 21-year-old art student, whose pipe-bombing campaign was interrupted after 18 explosions, told the sheriff who arrested him that his intention was to draw a smiley face pattern on the map.
The completed pattern would have covered upwards of 16 states.
Alice Houghton, aged 80, her brother Walter, 77, and her husband Ray, 78, have been successfuly traced to the foothills of the Pyrenees after a nationwide police search that began when they failed to alert their families that they had changed their holiday plans.
The three pensioners had initially booked themselves into a flat on the Mediterranean coast but changed their mind, without telling anybody, when they discovered they would have to climb a steep flight of steps.
The Houghtons' son Peter, who shows a lively imagination, said "Our worst fear was that they had been car-jacked and were lying dead in a French barn while some drug addict used their credit card. We are very relieved."
Monday 13th May 2002
Pleasant as my life has been lately, there's been a certain uneventfulness to it, which has made me slightly restless - when you keep a blog, you can't help but hope that each day will bring you something dramatic to write about.
That said, I'm old enough and wise enough not to tempt fate: one man's drama is another man's crisis, after all, and the last thing I want right now is to be beset by cataclysm.
Having made it to Wesley's birthday lunch at the Beehive yesterday, I was surprised to find the place positively, ah, swarming with homosexuals: the last lunch I attended here hosted approximately ten men; this week there were at least thirty. Very nice.
From there to the Vauxhall Tavern, where Dame Edna provided a slightly lacklustre show. Various people came and went. Marcus and David and I betook ourselves to Dukes where, as usual, the conversation slalomed wildly through various poles of drunken intensity.
So far, so blah.
More than a little drunk, I realised I had only just enough time to catch the last tube and hurried to Vauxhall station, down the escalator and onto a train for Green Park.
At Green Park, I rushed onto the down escalator - only to find myself at the bottom of it somewhat faster than I'd planned. Lying on my face.
Someone muttered "Y'allright, mate?" and I hauled myself upright just in time to avoid being caught on the viscious brass-toothed comb that guards the bottom. A train was just pulling in and I lurched on board, collapsing onto a seat opposite a rather startled man who, bless him, dug into his pocket for a paper tissue.
I looked down at my feet, to see the floor splattered with scarlet coins. I fought the urge to apologise to the other passengers. As I mopped my bleeding face with his tissue, I mumbled something to the man opposite about not being sure how badly I was damaged. He indicated I had a nasty cut on my nose. I could feel, through the tissue, what felt like a wide gash in my upper lip.
I decided it might be wise to take myself to the emergency department of the London Hospital at Whitechapel, just a couple of stops beyond my original destination.
Patting away with the sodden shredded tissue, I realised that I was no longer pouring blood. I counted the drops on the floor, looked away for a while, then counted them again. No change. Probably not an emergency, as such, then.
I decided to go home first, to get to a basin and a mirror and do some damage assessment. It wasn't a pretty sight, but my biggest fear - that I'd broken something or punctured myself in some kind of unstoppable way - proved unfounded.
I put my coat back on and started walking up towards the hospital. I remembered what it's like sitting in A&E. I poked myself here and there to double-check that nothing was broken. I turned round and came home.
When I woke up this morning I felt like hell. I went back to sleep for another few hours and woke up feeling slightly better, so most of that was hangover.
Tonight, the pain in my ribs is receding, and I can draw a deep breath more or less without pain. My hands are scattered with various scratches, grazes and cuts, the worst of them on my middle finger, which looks as if it's been attacked with a hammer.
There's a big blob of congealed blood on the bridge of my nose, surrounded by a small urban transit map of parallel scratches and cuts. And there's a viscious looking track of blood from my right nostril down to my right lip - my worst fear is that this will scar.
But then again, I dare say my face could do with looking a little more lived-in at this stage of my life.
One wouldn't want to look.. uneventful.
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