To blog or not to blog

I’m starting out with the intention that this will not be a long blog today, but if I get molested by my muse, who knows?

I have been away for a few days, stopping with my parents in the North East – a place that will always feel like home to me. It took the train over as driving that sort of distance is way beyond me at the moment. The place still has more than its fair share of problems, and the pall of depression has never really lifted from it since the decline of the ship building industry. I watched the last ship being launched into the Tees in 1986, when I was a kid – it was a very sad day and with it went the hopes and aspirations of a whole workforce and, it transpired, those of generations to come. The demise of ship building and the fall of the iron and steel industry (even to recent news that Corus are laying off more of their workforce) is a sad epitaph to a once world-renowned area at the forefront of industry, innovation and invention.

Middlesbrough (so named as it was originally a farming hamlet [with about 25 people in 1801] at the half-way point on the Monk’s trail between Whitby and Lindisfarne) has always owed its existence to industry. Before the town as we know it today came into being coal was brought from the Northern coal-fields and collieries in Teesdale and shipped around the world from Stockton, Yarm and Darlington. The deeper waters downstream around Middlesberg or Mydilsburgh meant that larger ships could be loaded and so a spar was added to the Stockton-Darlington railway line allowing the coal to be transported to these huge cargo carriers. Dalliances with Salt mining and then the discovery of iron ore in the Cleveland Hills saw the growth of the iron and steel industry and at one point Teesside set the world prices for these commodities. With the biggest blast furnace in Europe situated at the mouth of the Tees, and miles of rolling mills to turn the ore into sheet metal, Teesside ship-building became a mainstay of the local industry, but also the area became famous for bridge manufacture. The Tyne Bridge in Newcastle, Aukland Bridge and Sydney Harbour Bridge were all fabricated and manufactured in Middlesbrough. The Transporter Bridge stands iconic of an industry long gone; spanning the river like a dinosaur, a relic of a once glorious past.

One of my favourite places in the world is South Gare, at the mouth of the Tees. On one side, miles of totally unspoilt sandy beaches, behind, the massive, bellowing beast of the blast furnace, spewing sulphurous steam as white-hot iron pours into ‘torpedo’ containers destined for the rolling mills, the river (once the busiest port in the country) and the North Sea, sometimes still and calm, sometimes raging with fury. It is a place of contrast, nature against industry, but I see beauty in both landscapes.

So my trips home always evoke a lot of feelings for the area and the places where I grew up. It is always good to touch base with your heritage, your background and your family. Needless to say though that these visits are challenging despite the fact that I love my parents and I know how much such a trip means to them. This last year has been hard for them, I have put them through the kind of hell I cannot begin to imagine and I owe them things like these visits, but I’m not sure the debt extends to being inflicted with 3 days of ceaseless sport – I mean, me, sport? Oil and water. I’m afraid I do fall into the sport-phobic stereotypical gay man clan. I have never been a sportsman and sport, over the years, has caused me pain, embarrassment, humiliation and torment. Being the anti-Adonis that I am, I was never cut out to be sporty, and all my failings in that area were pointed out and used against me during my formative years. If hell hath another name it is PE. Not helped of course by well-meaning parents who think that the answer is ‘extra lessons’ – “Join tennis club” only resulted in further opportunity to show how uncoordinated, inept and ultimately ‘gay’ I am.

If I could go back in time and give my parents three pieces of advice that would have made my life so much better, these would be:

1. Don’t try to force an un-sporty kid to do sports – there are plenty of other ways to be physically active that don’t involve having projectiles thrown or kicked at you, sticks smacked around your legs, or being humiliated to within an inch of suicide.
2. If you want your child to grow up with any interest in gardening, even if that just means keeping a lawn tidy or a flower bed free of dandelions, then you should not use ‘go and weed the patio for an hour’ or ‘cut the front grass’ as a punishment.
3. No man will ever be able to ‘cure’ homosexuality, so suggesting a specialist doctor, a shrink or a vicar really isn’t a helpful contribution to the ‘Mum I’m gay’ conversation. And no, I didn’t do it just to piss you off!

So back to the trial by sport: tennis one night, cricket the next afternoon and football that night. But you have to know the true nature of this – we are talking simultaneous broadcasts of each on TV and radio – telly in the living room and radio in the conservatory. The radio allows for other activities, such as reading a book during the boring bits, and then when a goal is scored it is a dash into the other room to see the replay on Sky. Both have to be ‘on’ all the time, and at a volume that probably breaks sound pollution legislation, but everyone else in the village is probably deaf now already so they are not going to complain.

When the sound is louder than your own internal dialogue and you literally can’t hear yourself think, I have to say that you just can’t protect yourself from the inane ramblings of the commentators. I don’t care that a butterfly has just landed outside the commentary box or that there is someone in the crowd with a green wig. Is the cricket really so boring that this is all you can think of to say? Ah, yes, it is.

My attempts to engage failed miserably when all I could comment on was how colourful cricketers’ clothes have become these days, that the tennis court was a particularly pleasant shade of blue and I wondered if Victoria Beckham was in the crowd to watch David play. I tried my best! I did, after a while, learn the appropriate times to groan – there is a particular noise you can make that can be interpreted as very enthusiastic, very disappointed, frustrated or delighted. It’s a sort of ‘Ahhhh’ sound and is pitched so it would work equally well preceding:

- that was a brilliant shot,
- that shouldn’t have been allowed,
- that was a close one,
- very skilfully played or
– you complete moron.

(You don’t need to SAY the second part, the parent, hearing the ‘Ahhhh’, assumes that you were going to say what they were thinking anyway.) Another good technique is to just repeat the last thing they said, so he says, “that should have been offside” and I say, “well, it looked like it was offside to me”. She says, “that was a superb lob”, and I say, “yes, superb, a VERY good lob” – then they go away thinking you are very knowledgeable!  The same works well in most conversations with them, with topics ranging from the unreliability of the woman who comes round to perm hair to the problems of carrot fly.

I try to fit in around my parents’ routines, but this means dinner at noon, tea at 4:30 and bed before 10:30. I’ve not been to bed at 10:30 since…well…the last time I went home. At least this time I managed it on my own, and schemed it so that David did not have to go over there too, although he’ll not escape the next time, oh no; Mother will already have washed the spare bedding in preparation and the hints will start in the next day or two. I don’t mean this in a nasty way really, it is lovely that they care as much as they do, but the child/parent relationship is always a difficult one for either party to play and we all fall back on learned patterns of behaviour. If I were an evil person I would point out to my folks that the routines they now follow are a mirror to those of my grandparents 30 years ago. The justifications they use are identical, the values they hold, and the assumptions they make, the games that they play, the rules they create: it is indeed a case of history repeating. They would hate it if I said that, and deny it absolutely, but I see it very clearly. Maybe that is the path laid out for me too, if I ever make it to my ‘silver’ years. Maybe it is about time I learnt how the scoring works in cricket or what the ‘off-side rule’ could be.

But at least now they have come to accept David and me as a couple, and they treat David as a son. That is wonderful and I am so proud of them for it. I’m sure it has been a huge culture change for them, and I guess it hasn’t been easy. I know in her heart all my mum wants if for me to be happy and healthy, but I’m sure that when, as a young mother, she imagined her son’s life and loves, had her dreams and aspirations for me, wondered what sort of life I would lead, there probably wasn’t a 6ft+ (Northern) Irishman written into the equation. Back then the only ‘queer’ in Mum’s life will have been John Inman, behind his Grace Bros counter, and I’m not even sure that people had started to wonder about Tony Hart. Freddy Mercury, Justin Fashanu or Billy-Jean King!  The world needed to change, and it has dragged people of my parents’ generation with it. Mine have, to their very great credit, gone with the flow. I hope that in our small way, David and I have shown then that gay relationships are just as valid and meaningful as straight ones and we have lead by example. Our nieces have grown up with us as uncles, and our relationship to them is perfectly ‘normal’. They don’t care that we are two men. It is a different world now, and I thank the stars for that. We have come a long way.

It seems only fitting today to also mention the letter issued by the Prime Minister yesterday which shows just how much we have progressed and also highlights how terribly prejudiced the world used to be. The full letter is available at http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page20571 and is a record of apology for the horrific way that Alan Turing was treated in the 1950s. Turing was a brilliant mathematician and a major player in breaking German Enigma codes at Bletchley Park during the last World War. Every man, woman or child alive in Britain at the time played a huge part in the war effort, the scale of sacrifice is beyond my comprehension;  their contributions should not be underestimated, but there were certain people who’s roles were pivotal in changing the outcome of the war and Turing was such a person. However, in 1952 he was tried for ‘gross indecency’ after admitting having a relationship with another man. He was given the impossible choice of imprisonment of forced chemical castration, and the latter was inflicted upon him by means of injections of female hormones. Two years later he took his own life. He is memorialised with a statue in Sackville Park, opposite Canal Street and at the centre of Manchester’s Gay Village.

Below is an excerpt from Gordon Brown’s letter, which I will let speak for itself.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

This letter will never make up for what has been done in the past, but, as the Transporter Bridge spans the Tees, I hope it goes some way to providing a connection between what happened then and the world in which we live today. We can never alter the past, we are born from it and are influenced by it. Everywhere around we see echoes of what has come before, be that the steel bridges of Teesside or a family member reverting to the idiosyncrasies of their parents, reminders of the struggle of others that have allowed us to live the lives we enjoy today. Just, please, don’t make me watch any more cricket!