To blog or not to blog

The few days of sunshine we have had of late have at very least given me a chance to take a few photos that at least give the impression that Spring is here, and the clock change is a pretty good landmark. I remain unconvinced about daylight saving and its costs/benefits. Part of me really just wishes we could stick to one time and stop all this temporal confusion. We (the Brits) created GMT, it runs through our country and from it every other time on the planet is measured, yet for half the year we don’t even use it ourselves! Oh well, the plants and wildlife isn’t bothered by such man-made contrivances, although our cats just see it as an opportunity to moan on for twice as much food (in which ever direction the clocks jump).

One thing I haven’t lacked over recent days is company. Usually it is a somewhat hermitic existence that I endure, and beyond David my only mortal contact seems to be with the Postman (who is the stuff of 70s sit-coms meets Hammer House of Horror) and the two cats. But the last week or so has been a veritable overflowing of visitors and a maelstrom of activity.  I am reminded of an episode of “To The Manner Born” where Audrey Fforbes-Hamilton is feeling more than a tad lonely but sates her need for human contact by employing an endless stream of tradesmen (you could call them tradesmen then, none of this tradesperson malarkey) to provide her with quotes, measurements, estimates and designs for work she had no intention of ever commissioning.  In the course of the last month we have had so much work done on and around the house that at times I have felt like we were living in the middle of an episode of Property Ladder, minus Sarah Beeny’s latest baby bump and billowing boobs, of course.

The boiler (I refer here to our heating system, NOT Ms Beeny, in case you were wondering at the somewhat inelegant conceptual juxtaposition), as recently reported, was the first to receive attention, has now been upgraded to a combi and is wonderful. But that lead on to us buying a new bathroom suite, thanks to some extra money that landed in David’s lap. Sales prices, pre-VAT increase benefits, extensive ‘shopping around on t’interweb’ and a good deal of bartering landed us a pretty good deal and we ended up with bog, bath and basin residing in the back bedroom for a few weeks. Brian, the plumber, was off sunning himself in Tenerife (presumably on the proceeds of our boiler installation) and seemed strangely reluctant to curtail his holiday to spend a few days in our ‘smallest room’. Some people have no sense of urgency!  This however did give us time to fill the remaining floor space in the spare room with tonnes of tiles and gallons of grout and eventually Brian succumbed to the allure of a semi in Salford and commenced demolition. Brian comes complete with his sidekick somewhat inevitably called Charlie. They are both local people. Obviously the bathroomectomy meant long periods with no water but I remembered my boy scout training and has sufficient bottles filled in advance to still be able to provide endless brews (builder’s strength with a mountain of sugar) throughout the day. I have to say my water storage abilities were second only to a camel although with much less spitting and far fewer Arabs.

We had a few challenging moments with no loo, but having spent a couple of months in hospital I am no stranger to pissing in a plastic container (although did take care to ensure that the ‘in’ bottles were never mixed with the ‘out’ bottles – or at least I think I did). Thankfully we were flush-enabled before any greater urgency required for more creative waste disposal solutions.

Why do people associated with the building trades always think that they can drop plaster, nails, bolts, screws, grout and polyfiller down the loo and expect it to flush away? All you ever get is some sort of modern art sculpture in cement and metal stuck solid to the bottom of the pan which requires scooping out or plunging to the brink of extinction? At least that isn’t such a bad job with a new toilet; maybe it is their way of paying you back for whatever they found in the U-bend of the old one. Those dentures were NOT mine!

A bathroom stripped of all its ceramics is a sorry site (sic) and it just shows how shoddily modern buildings are thrown together. Slowly though the new suite migrated from the bedroom to its new home to a fanfare of blow torches, clanging wrenches and clattering in the loft as the wiring for the shower was moved. Apparently the loo fittings are ‘a bugger’ and the bath outlet is ‘uncommonly low’ resulting in more holes being bashed through the walls and I had to shift all our patio furniture, bins and garden paraphernalia to allow external access. I don’t DO furniture removals! Do I look like a Bernard Cribbins song character?

Right said Brian, outlet is a bugger, couldn’t be much snugger,  little room you know
Tried to budge it, couldn’t even nudge it, he was getting nowhere and so
He had a cup of tea

Right said Brian, gave a shout to Charlie, up comes Charlie from the floor below
After straining, heaving and complaining, we was getting nowhere and so
They had a cup of tea

Charlie had a think and he thought they ought, to
Take apart the cistern
And the thing that’s like a piston,
But it did no good,
Well I never thought it would

Right said Brian, have to make a new hole, right behind the new bowl, wouldn’t take a mo
Took his hammer, hit it with a clamour, should got ‘em somewhere but no
So Charlie said lets have another cup of tea and I said right-o

Right said Brian, have to get my ladder, sod your straining bladder, you’ll have to wait to go
I was cursing, insides nearly bursting but it got us nowhere and so
They had a cup of tea

Right said Charlie, that’s the waste disposal  that I just suppose’ll really have to go
Into the soil pipe, but the fitting is the wrong type and so
They had a cup of tea

Right said Brian, climbing up a ladder, with his crowbar gave a mighty whack
Was he in trouble, half a ton of rubble, landed with a thwack
So Charlie and me had another cup of tea on the patio out back

I’ll said to Brian, thanks a lot for trying, but I really have to poo
He said he ought’a reconnect the water and that’s the thing that he would do
If it wasn’t for the leakage, the risk of major seepage and so
I had to hold my pee

Right said Bri, gotta sort your ball-cock, think it’s got an airlock that’s blocked your overflow
But when he started flushing, the water started gushing
So with much relief to me I got to have a pee and then they went home

Now nepotism rules on the Avenue and Brian had organised for his son-in-law to do the tiling for us. Just to explain the intricate family relationships involved here, Charlie is Brian’s son and he lives on the estate. Brian’s daughter, Ruth, lives diagonally opposite from us, about 20 yards away, and she is married to Rob the tiler. Rob couldn’t come round to tile our bathroom for a week, so we were left with naked walls, no shower and old grout in all our crevices.

But this was not a week of rest by any means. Having shifted the patio furniture for Brian to access my soil pipe (Matron!), then moved it all back again when he had finished, we found that it all had to be moved yet again! A while ago we were approached by a man in a fluorescent jacket and gruff tones with an offer to fill our cavities as part of a council scheme. Never ones to turn down such an offer we agreed (who would turn down a man with a big hose offering to pump you full at no cost at all?). It’s amazing what the council will subsidise these days. I wasn’t aware that my cavity was in need of such attention, but he drilled a test hole and announced that I was in need of a good lagging, so who am I to argue? He left, promising to return with a team of burley workmen (again, a bargain) and we have been waiting to hear his gang bang at my front door. They chose this week to arrive, and so we had to shift all the patio stuff yet again, to give them the access they needed. When you have a gang of men coming up your back passage waving their hoses, you really want to ease their entry as much as possible. Now, the noise of several men going flat out with hammer drills and a huge foam-spewing nozzle is enough to give anyone a headache. Add to this the fact that the integrity of my cavity had been compromised by Brian bashing through an extra hole and we ended up with foam ‘snow’ drifting into the bathroom and it has been quite a fun time. Still, they promise that we should be 30% more efficient (or I assume that equates to a 30% increase in green credentials – if we go much greener we’ll be positively vegetative).

And on the subject of all things green we have now also welcomed a new greenhouse to the back garden. My seedlings and propagators were taking up all available window space in the house (we had even cobbled together a second tier on the kitchen window), so that looking out was much like peering through a jungle. B&Q had a sale. Say no more. To be fair we bought a greenhouse frame, base, glass, all the doings to make the foundations, weed barrier and slate chippings for less than the frame itself was supposed to cost. And they supplied a better model than the one we reserved.

So, at one point we had boxes of frame, base and glazing also piled in the back garden, along with bags of sand, cement and slate, all of which were included in the items that had to be constantly moved around to allow Brian et al to position their ladders.

Now, neither David nor I naturally gravitate towards DIY tasks (hence the need for plumbers, tillers and very odd job men). Our relationship with DIY is much like our ability to fly – we don’t have the right tackle, if we tried to fly unaided we would hurt ourselves and anyone around us and we are better off paying a man with a machine to do the flying for us. God chose to give us the gay gene, not the DIY gene. (Only lesbians get both).  But just occasionally we get overwhelmed with a sudden feeling of ‘how difficult can it be?’ which more often than not ends in disaster. We don’t do tiling because once a hammer decided to miss the tile targeted for removal and appeared again in the next room. We don’t do plumbing because indoor fountains are only cool when you plan them. But a greenhouse foundation – that’s just some holes in the ground, right?

Well, yes, and no. Remember too that I am very limited in energy, stamina, flexibility and strength. Picture a somewhat gnomic figure sitting on a stool, hunched over and picking away at the lawn with a trowel, stopping every ten minutes for a rest and wazzed up to the eyes on pain killers and you’ll not be far from the truth.  Two years ago the work of levelling the plot and digging a few holes for concrete foundations would have taken me an afternoon. Now though, picking away with a trowel and having to stop whenever anything needed lifting, shifting or manoeuvring was a somewhat herculean task.David has the muscle that I lack, but has no idea of how to go about things; I have the planning skill but not the execution. In true Mr and Mrs Jack Spratt style we ended up with the required number of holes in the right places, dug to the appropriate depth.   I invoked all the Gods of trigonometry, geometry, calculus and advanced quantum physics to ensure that the base was both square and level. I was only one step short of sacrificing a virgin to appease the heavens but they are only available in Salford by mail order (– or is that male order?). The foundations, unlike the virgin, were duly laid. We were committed (probably should have been years ago). Once that concrete set there was no turning back. Even a slight wonk at this stage would mean that the frame would be twisted and the glass would not fit. You want excitement in your life, you want pressure? Build a greenhouse!

A weed barrier membrane and slate chippings were added, as per the best gardening advice websites I could find. No way were we up to laying a concrete floor and I don’t think my nerves would have stood for slabs. I have read so many websites on the subject that my eyes are crossing and the only conclusion I have reached is that no two gardeners seem to agree on a single method of doing anything. At all. Ever. The slate will be fine and looks quite good, at least for now. How well it will stand the test of time remains to be seen.

Now, as a kid I was much more in the Lego camp than Meccano; an opinion which the frame construction has only served to strengthen. I turn cold at the thought of anything that needs a spanner and somehow scaling up Meccano to full greenhouse size did nothing to make the job any less fiddly or frustrating. But slowly and surely a structure began to form and I can say that for a moment I felt the same sense of pride that Isambard Kingdom Brunel must have felt when he tightened the last nut on the Clifton Suspension Bridge. I just wonder if he too shared that awful sinking sensation when he realised that Strut F2-4 was suppose to be fitted with the recessed flange pointing towards the apex (on Model £4552D only) or that he had forgotten to insert bolt E12-6 into slot G (Fig 2)?

With the skeletal frame balanced tentatively on the base our next task was to glaze the beast. A few ‘challenges’ awaited, not least of which was that the boxes containing the glass had been left outside at B&Q so were sodden. Place two identical panes of glass together with a film of water between and try parting them. Go on, I dare you! They were laid out on the lawn to dry off but even after a good few hours it took extreme persuasion to force them apart. None of these panes were labelled at all, or if they had been the wet had obliterated all trace. It would have been ok, but some of the panes differed in size by just 2mm – that is 2mm that meant they were either fractionally too big or too small for all but one specific place. This fact was buried very deep in the minutia of the installation diagrams and I can’t believe we were the first people to have practically dismantled the frame thinking we had somehow got that wrong, when in fact the ‘square by all but 2mm’ glass was the wrong piece.  Four panels were cracked, but not so much as we couldn’t fit them temporarily but we’ll have to get them replaced at the weekend.

Fitting the automatic opener for the ‘window’ required a degree in advanced mechanics. I say ‘window’ because the term is somewhat redundant in an already fully glazed building – the whole thing is one big window, which is why the term ‘ventilator’ is often used. Of course I can’t test that the vent will open at a suitable temperature until the greenhouse reaches such a tropical clime, and with snow forecast I guess that won’t be for a while. Typical though, isn’t it? I was getting all excited about sowing out some veg directly into the garden in soil that has been fed, manured, nurtured and generally had more products thrown at it than a queen getting ready to go out on a Friday night, and still I dare not actually plant anything for fear of frost!

The base was, if I say so myself, perfect. The frame fitted without so much as a wobble or a twist – I don’t think an experienced foundation-digger could have made a better job. I shall be writing myself a letter of appreciation. You see, all those lessons in geometry at school were not in vain after all. Although I confess that at 43 years old I have still found no sensible use for the Quadratic formula!

I take more credit than I should for managing this wondrous erection. I certainly could not have done it myself and believe me, where the instructions say ‘best with two people’ they are not kidding! We managed with one and a half! David has had to do all the lifting, carrying, reaching and clipping, and I have been reduced to the position of navvy, handing tools and trying to fathom the instructions. His patience has been unparalleled and for all the trials and tribulations we never once mentioned divorce, murder or even creative insertion of a screwdriver. I have to say that David has been brilliant throughout – he’s magnetically repulsed by DIY so how he has kept his temper and good humour I shall never know.

We dismantled the old plastic greenhouse thing and, in a stroke of eco-recycle-brilliance with a few well placed hacksaw cuts it now forms staging and has saved us about £80 if we had bought new. It is certainly as good as anything we can buy custom made for the job, and we’d only have thrown it away.

Over the last day or so I have been transferring plants and seedlings from various window ledges to the new greenhouse, amid the comings and goings of Rob-the-tile. You may remember I said he lives over the road, about 20 yards away? He turned up yesterday morning having DRIVEN HIS VAN here! It isn’t like he had much equipment to bring – a spirit level, trowel and chisel – everything else was waiting for him here.  He did the same thing today; it will have taken him longer to get in the vehicle, belt up, drive here, unbelt, disembark and lock the van than it would to walk over the road. He did walk home for lunch – I was tempted to offer him a lift!

It is looking good so far – when he finishes today there will just be the grouting to do in the morning and hopefully we can get the shower back up and running. I hate having baths; I really don’t see what people like about them. The water is always the wrong temperature, they hurt my bad foot like crazy and you lie there wallowing in your own filth. But by the weekend all that will remain is the addition of a shower screen, decorating the bits that are not tiled, laying a new carpet and buying a new cabinet. Oh God, when I say it like that it sounds like we may never be sorted again. Oh, sod it, at least now I can go hide in the greenhouse and pretend I really am a garden gnome!

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And now, in ‘Other News’….

Seasonal News:

Life moves on with relentless repetition and I have little to report beyond a few observations. Advent is upon us. It used to be that Advent heralded the start of Christmas planning, but we have been bombarded with festive TV ads since the end of summer.  Maybe it is no coincidence that Advert and Advent are but a pen stroke away from each other.  I saw a billboard yesterday which insisted I should “Get him what every man wants this Christmas: A DeWALT power stripper”.  I presume this to be some sort of erotic performer who comes with her own batteries. Can you really Power Strip? Is it the exact opposite of Power Dressing? I didn’t realise I wanted one, but apparently I do, if the advert is to be believed. I don’t know where we’d keep her. Do they need feeding? And what if both David and I get one each this year? We don’t have the bedrooms. Please don’t get me one for Christmas – I really couldn’t cope with the lingerie.

In our Gardening Section:

We’ve been tackling a few outdoorsy jobs over the last few weeks, tidying and making plans for next year.  We have had some of the lawn dug up to give us a bit more viable growing land for veg. It needs to be left now over the winter to allow the frosts and rain to break down the soil a bit more,  although I am fighting the temptation to put in a few things now – Garlic can be planted to over-winter – but I shall listen to advice and leave the plot alone for now.

The spring bulbs I planted in tubs are all way too ahead of themselves – yesterday I added a layer of peat to try to protect them from the forecast frosts, but they seem to have shot too soon – which is always a problem!

We’ve cleared and tidied the shed. How much rubbish had we accumulated? Anything remotely physical is still really hard work for me and takes ages to do, but over the course of two days moving things round like one of those sliding-tile puzzles, it now at least has a semblance of order.  I hate having to rely on other people to help with jobs I used to take in my stride, but David is a good lifter, shifter and general pack mule.  Of course, any such job just throws up a list of other chores that need to be tackled and this one certainly delivered on that promise. So, in true “I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue” style I can now report that following the discovery of a noticeable dribble, we eventually got felt up on the shed roof! Well, not strictly roofing felt, rather a rubber membrane to keep out the rain, but that doesn’t sound as rude.  Or maybe it does? We grappled with some rubber to protect our tools? We took protection to keep our dibbers dry?

I’ve sprayed the paths too – to clear some moss and get rid of a slight build up of algae – the last thing I need to do is fall on a slippery path, so hopefully this treatment will work. Failing that I could crush up, dissolve and spray some of the hundreds of left-over pills I have in a cupboard upstairs – they seem to kill pretty much any and every possible lifeform so I’m well equipped for biological warfare, albeit more of the Kim and Aggy variety than the International Terrorist model. Maybe I should just use a squirt of lemon juice and vinegar, which seem to be their standard arsenal against all things slimy.

Health and Medicine:

Speaking of biological warfare, I’m due my Swine Flu jab today, after what seems like a ceaseless battle with my GP’s surgery. They really have no idea how to organise themselves. They didn’t even have me on their list, even though I qualify on at least four different grounds. I didn’t have the right flag apparently. I didn’t know I was supposed to carry one. They have had the vaccine for a fortnight but couldn’t work out how to go about distributing it. Hopeless. Every other surgery in the country seems to have managed. Even the concept of inebriation in an ale house is beyond them, let alone the ability to arrange the metaphorical gathering. They don’t know their acne from their eczema, their aphasia from their epilepsy and indeed, quite probably, their arse from their elbow. If I went in complaining that I had acute angina they would probably call a gynaecologist!  I go there every time with the lowest possible expectations, which they consistently fail to meet.  All they have to do is stick a needle in my arm. Am I hoping for too much? If I don’t blog again for a few days you’ll know they messed up and injected me with Domestos or some such delight. They probably have the most swine flue-resistant nurse’s chair in the country where they have missed the patients completely!

International news:

I have to report that sadly Chinese-Woman-Over-The-Road has left, taking her unmentionables with her. You may find her Chinese Crackers coming to a bedroom window near you. The Avenue seems a somewhat duller (and essentially less ethnic) place without her daily display of dazzling dainties but I’m sure some neighbourhood will learn to love her laundry as much as I didn’t.  I have seen evidence of Extremely-Old-Chinese-Man-Who-Is-Probably-The-Landlord popping in to check post, absence of squatters and continued structural integrity.  There have been occasional Curious-Visitors-With-Clip-Boards poking around.  I’ve not taken to the look of any of them. I believe I should at least have some say in the contents of the knickers to be displayed in the window opposite our lounge; squat, fat, Chinese and female falls a long way from my preference.  It is possible to take the concept of a chink in the curtains a bit too literally!

Speaking of all things  Eastern, there was a programme on TV the other day which featured Chinese identical twins. I have to wonder, how could they tell? Don’t they all look the same any way? It’s a repetitive redundancy at least!

In our Science and Technology section:

It is good to note that the large Hairdryer at CERN has been turned on again. Not only is it working now, but it has already started to break records (as well as particles) – according to the BBC –

“The LHC pushed the energy of its particle beams beyond one trillion electron volts, making it the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator.”

Zap. Oh, it’s so butch! It is no coincidence that Hadron is an anagram of Hard On. It even has its own website – http://www.lhc.ac.uk/ which is suspiciously out of date. Maybe they haven’t bothered updating the website because they know something we don’t know…

Clearly the suggestion that the Collider was destroying itself from the future has failed to deliver on its promise though – well, not yet anyway. I was thinking about that and realised there was a basic flaw in the theory. The idea was that the LHC would create a Big Bang ‘event’ similar to the start of the Universe and in doing so would destroy our planet, so, a future version of it had come back in time to prevent the experiment ever happening. But, IF the experiment worked, then there would be no survivors to live into the future and come back to stop the explosion. If it didn’t cause ‘the end of the world as we know it’ then there would be no need for anyone to pop back and scupper the device. Non argument. Logic wins the day. I’m coming over all Vulcan!

Actually I was thinking about this time travel business a bit recently and came to a conclusion about temporal paradoxes. They only exist when there is time travel into the past. If the direction of travel is only forward then no paradox is created. It’s as soon as someone goes backwards that your head starts to hurt! Let me try to explain.  The simplest paradox is the idea that if I travel into the past and kill my grandfather, I will then not be born and won’t be able to travel into the past to kill my grandfather. But if I travel into the future, then so what? I could possibly meet an older version of myself there, but that’s OK. A bit weird maybe, but not a paradox as such. If I killed a future version of myself, well, that is just tough, and the end of his timeline – who is to say that isn’t what was meant to happen anyway?  This of course assumes that the current me stays in the future timeline. As soon as I come back again I would have the knowledge that, in the future, a me from the past would try to kill me and I could avoid being in that time and place. Which could then mean that the present me, who travels to the future, didn’t kill the future me, and maybe didn’t return to the present, so that the present me would know in the future that the past me was trying to kill me! Simples.

If I travel back in time
And kill my own grandpa
He would not have a child one day
To marry my dear Ma

They would not bear a son at all
If they were not alive
And I’d not come into this world
Time travel to contrive.

But if I travel forwards
And meet a child of mine
When he has grown much older
And seen the passing time

Then we could live quite happily
No paradox created
I’d be much older than my child
But still we’d be related.

I could kill my son one day
In the future years ahead
Who’s to say that’s not his fate
That I live when he is dead

But if I travel back again
To this time which is my present
I could tell my son of this
and make that future obsolescent

I could tell my son the date and time
That I will cause his death
And he can change his plans that day
And not breath his final breath.

But then I’d not have killed him
So could not have known about his fate
Nor travelled to this timeline
His future to relate.

So the paradox is created
Only on the backwards trip
Remember that, dear reader
If you invent your own time ship

So to all those esteemed scientists who say that time travel is impossible, I say, maybe it is possible, but only in one direction (We do that already of course – and I defy anyone to prove that we experience time at a steady rate or that each of us experiences time at the same rate as the others. It’s all relative, as Albert would tell you). And before anyone shoots me down with a barrage of quarks (that’s a Hadron reference there – cos I like gets phisiks an science stuff and everything  innit and don’t never say I doesn’t cos that’s lame an shit and anyway I got a note.) I know that Quantum Theory has a different take on things (ie at every decision point, every option is both available and taken and it is only the observation that determines the outcome). So maybe in another timeline the Hadron Collider did blow up and destroy the Universe. I didn’t see that coming. And I did.

Let me tell you the story Schroedinger’s cat
Kept in a box, all alone the pet sat
A lid on the box hid it from view
Along with the cat were some instruments too
A radioactive compound was placed by the pet
And a Geiger counter, its decay to detect.
The compound decayed at a very slow speed
An atom an hour, and thus we proceed
Attached to the counter, a can full of acid
Which does not a thing when the decay is placid
But when an atom from the substance decayed
Into the box the acid is sprayed

Because we can’t see it, and thus we can’t tell
The cat in the box could be dead or quite well
But Quantum Mechanics tells us in fact
That both possibilities exist for that cat
Because we can’t see it, both options exist
Until observation, when one choice becomes fixed
So the act of observing determines the state
And once we have seen it we have created its fate
The cat was fictitious but I’ll let YOU decide
If at the end of this poem it was dead or alive!

I’m thinking that maybe I should write to CERN though and tell them that there is a sure-fire way to ensure the safety of the planet, if they can just invent the necessary technology. Every sci-fi fan knows that all they need to do is send an inverse tachyon pulse through the main deflector array at a modified photon torpedo, creating a stream of chronoton particles that can then be slingshot around the sun, travelling back in time, with instructions of how to build a main deflector array through which to send an inverse tachyon pulse at a modified photon torpedo.  Just like that. Magic. And as Arthur C Clarke famously prescribed: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Er – does that mean that Paul Daniels and Derren Brown are from the future? Heaven help us!

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Welcome to Friday 13^th.

Now I wouldn’t say that I am an especially superstitious person, and I didn’t wake up this morning with a feeling of impending doom, as some may have done, overwhelmed by the sinister stigma of the date.  My relationship with superstition is pretty much on a par to my relationship with religion. I can’t say I’m a fully paid-up card-carrying member, by any stretch, but by the same token, I’m not going to shit on a crucifix ether.

I tend to not believe that burning ears mean someone is talking about you; there is almost always a more scientific explanation, like you just fell asleep with your head against the radiator.

Some so-called superstitions are really just a way of wrapping up common sense advice, like not walking under a ladder for fear of something dropping on your head – paint, nails, slates, window cleaners, lesbians with power tools etc. Not stepping on the cracks in pavements is logical – with the state of British paths these days they are fraught with tripping hazards and badly laid slabs are just a liability. See a pin, pick it up and all day long you’ll have less chance of standing on a pin.

Some are more sinister. Literally. The idea of throwing spilt salt over the shoulder is to ward off the Devil, who is said to sit at your left side. Why the left shoulder? The Romans used to march with the regimented left, right, left, right chant we recognise in modern soldiers, but the Roman words were ‘sinister, dexter, sinister, dexter’ and hence the word has taken on its evil undertone.

Opening  umbrellas indoors is seen as an unlucky thing to do, but that probably stems back to the times of ancient Egypt where umbrellas were used to provide shade from the sun; opening them indoors was seen as an insult to Ra the sun God, who would punish the offender. You really wouldn’t want to upset Ra, or his wife, She-Ra.

Why is Friday 13^th also considered unlucky? Friday was execution day in ancient Rome and therefore Christ is thought to have been crucified on that day. Following the trend, Friday used to be Hangman’s Day in Britain and some believe it was the day God threw Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden (although the National Trust say there is no specific reason why a garden should be closed on a Friday so that is a largely unsubstantiated claim). There were 13 people at the Last Supper and the 13^th Tarot card is Death.  Oh, and Margaret Thatcher was born on Friday 13^th, so that seems as good a reason as any to fear the worst.

Amusingly (or not) the houses on our side of the street take the odd numbers, so 1, 3, 5 etc and next door to us one way is number 11, meaning that we SHOULD live at number 13. Our house is actually 15 and to the other side is 17. Somebody thought ill enough of the number 13 to miss it out although I can’t help but wonder if this is a bit like the premise of the Final Destination films – trying to skip the number is flawed logic and the bad luck will happen anyway. Would we have bought this house if we had realised it was really number 13? I am not so sure.

I’ve never held with the idea that having a bird poo on you is lucky though – seems damned UNlucky to me (especially if the bird in question is a forty-something, thick-set, heavy-hipped Brummie called Barbara). The whole bird poo thing just smacks of being one of those things that an anguished parent once said to a distressed child who had just been targeted by a defecating duck. Parents say some terrible things to their kids and should be ashamed of themselves.  If you eat apple pips a tree will grow in your tummy. If you swallow chewing gum it will get wrapped around your lungs and suffocate you. If you keep shaking your sister her head will fall off (it never did). They still do it these days too – apparently if you eat runner beans you will turn into a runner and if you eat Green Giant sweetcorn you will turn into a slightly camp version of the Incredible Hulk.  Telling a child that ‘if the wind changes, your face will stay like that’ is just pure evil. As is the notion that picking your nose will cause your head to cave in.  It hasn’t, despite many a pleasurable rake out.  It is however, a well-known biological fact that if you unscrew your belly button your bum will fall off. Warts are a sure sign you have kissed a frog (despite the fact that kissing frogs is the only way to snare yourself a prince – methinks Camilla was a vivacious herpetologist in days gone by).  Don’t get me started on Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Bogeyman or the tooth fairy. Any parent who tells their offspring such lies should be put away for inflicting mental cruelty, although I guess it could be argued that these are just preparing kids for the adult equivalents, the lies and concoctions that society throws at us every day – politics, weather forecasts, DFS sales, train timetables and religion.

Some superstitions are mostly harmless – I see no point in NOT saying hello to a magpie, and touching wood is a useful ‘just in case’ tactic.

We have a horseshoe above the front door, but that is just to counteract the fact we should be number 13. (I figure that IF these things are to be believed, one should neutralise the other and thus we can carry on with life untouched).

A specific superstition that I know to be true however is one that I was introduced to at school and has stayed with me ever since. It isn’t really a superstition, more a complex conspiracy theory, woven in a mesh of misinformation and sprinkled with just a little secrecy to keep things interesting. The enchantment goes as follows: If you sneeze three times in succession and nobody says ‘bless you’, you can be taken by the fairies. I feel the time is right to now expose the full truth of this spell, and that the world is in fact ready to know of our master plan. This is the way that the homosexual community has been recruiting for millennia. Three sneezes and you become a fairy. Forget all your theories about genetics or environmental conditioning.  Forget biological predisposition, familial tendencies or possibilities that early trauma causes people to be gay.  None of that is correct. It just takes three sneezes without a ‘bless you’ and you are ours! We can come and get you at any time. We don’t always convert you straight away, of course. That would mean a disproportionate recruitment peak in flu season (we invented flu too, by the way, just to make you sneeze more. And pollen) – no, you just get tagged and we can take you any time we want. We find this method of recruitment to be much more effective than TV commercials, newspaper campaigns or leaflet drops. So don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Graham Norton used to be married with three kids you know, until he sniffed a particularly pollen-filled tulip, and look what we turned HIM into. John Barrowman used to be a dustman.  Sandi Totsvik and Sue Perkins were both straight porn stars in their youth – Sandi, you may recall, also performing as the stunt double for Jessica Rabbit many moons ago. Yet, one squirt of Fabreeze too many and they were sneezing like troopers.  (We do apologise for the Touch And Go “Poo at Paul’s” commercial, but we needed to attract a younger apprenticeship and those things really do make people honk out some hefty sneezes).

Matt Lucas used to be a bricklayer from Luton and, prior to initiation, Julian Clary was a docker called Pete. Don’t think that marriage will protect you either. Elton John was, after all, a happily married heterosexual man, as was David Beckham (you’ll see what I mean when he eventually ‘comes out’).

You will have noticed the increase in gay activity in your neighbourhood of course, as we further our plans of world domination. Although we have to be careful. The last time we tried anything on this scale was way back in the 1660s when one particularly enthusiastic boffin tried to make a new type of sneeze-enhancer distribution system, which was to be deployed by miniature percussion cartridges strapped to the back of rats (working on the assumption that no person is ever more than 10 meters away from a rat). Sadly the spray was too potent and ended up causing some nasty side effects. We covered it all up, of course, by calling it bubonic plague, and setting fire to London as a distraction, but it was a close call!

In case you were wondering, yes, swine flu is ours, as was its precursor, bird flu but we’ve not quite got the dosages right yet and we’re rethinking the whole animal deployment programme, mainly because such schemes seem less effective on vegetarians. If ever you see pink Pepsi though, remember, you heard it here first.

If you mention any of this to anyone, we will deny it, and you have no proof. But watch out next time you pass through the perfume section in Debenhams – it isn’t always eau de toilet that they spray and it is best to travel in pairs so you have a ‘bless you buddy’ just in case. On puff and you’re ours!

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I’m so sorry. Really, I am. I’d meant to send you a Christmas card, and get you a gift, maybe even invite you round for a festive glass of wine, but it is too late now. Christmas has passed and all I can do is wish you Happy New Year.   In my defence, I hadn’t expected Christmas to happen so soon. I’d assumed it would take place on December 25^th as usual, not the second weekend in November. We didn’t even get the decorations up this year, or a tree. But you see, I just didn’t realise that the whole shebang had been brought forward, well, not until I was watching TV last Friday and by then it was too late to do anything.

It’s my own fault. I should have realised, what with the Christmas adverts starting in September, and all the extra catalogues we’ve been getting through the door for seasonal reductions on everything from bras to beds, sofas to sandwich makers.  I’m just a bit slow on the uptake these days. The clues were there, of course, with all the decorations up in town and even the most mundane product packaging redesigned with a festive feel. Holly on your toilet roll – a more likely combination has yet to be conceived.

But the chocolate penny finally dropped at the end of last week when I saw an advert on telly for a joint of beef. And thank heavens I saw it, or Christmas would have passed me by totally, without so much as a mince pie or turkey sandwich.  The advert in question came from Morrisons (to whom I shall be forever indebted) and took me by surprise. With the jingle of bells and the generic Christmas tune the short ad promoted their special Christmas offer of outstanding value on their joints of beef. An offer which ends today, 9^th November. A Christmas offer that ends in November. Well, by extrapolation I could only conclude then that Christmas occurred this past weekend, if an offer promoted as being for Christmas finishes today, that must mean that Christmas has happened, surely?

Or maybe Morrisons are blatantly exploiting an extraordinarily debatable proximity to Yuletide in a way that I find offensive in the extreme and deeply worrying.

I am not a card-carrying religious zealot by any means and my relationship with church is very much of the ‘hatch, match and dispatch’ variety, but I really do think things are getting out of hand. Christmas now seems to take up a quarter of the year in terms of its commercial exploitation, and more so if you consider the ongoing debts that linger way past the last remnants of turkey.

Has the spirit of Christmas not mutated beyond recognition to a beast of commercialism and the house of prayer become a den of unscrupulous thieves, forcing us to bow to an entirely different deity?

I understand that it is the most profitable time for retail and that in a recession shops need to tout for all the business they can get, but how on earth can anyone justify a “Christmas Special” that runs for a week in November? This is not the spirit of Christmas. And I’m not talking a Dickensian ideal, I know that the world changes and Christmas is now a very different beast.  In a multicultural society maybe we have to find a common thread to such celebrations to make them palatable for all, but we seem to be trying to take the Christ out of Christmas and perverting everything about it. I wonder what the impact would be if we tried to reinvent some of the other religious festivals to the same extent. What of Ramadan or Diwali, Yom Kippur or Hanukkah? The suggestion of renaming the December holiday to “Wintermas” is no more ridiculous than the invented concepts of Mothers’/Fathers’/Valentines’ day (known as Hallmark Holidays because they were invented largely for commercial purposes).

Part of me wishes that the emphasis were more aligned with the little drummer boy than the wise men and their expensive gifts. Christmas isn’t about the birth of Christ anymore and has been rebranded almost beyond recognition. The pagan worship of the winter solstice was smothered by the Christian festival which in turn has become more a celebration of Santa Clause than anything else. And I fear that in recent years even that concept has been bastardised and corrupted to leave us with little beyond the hollow shell of commercialisation.

Our economy seems to now rely on this season and appears determined to stretch the run-up to Christmas further and further each year.  It is a con. Does Morrisons really need to cite Christmas as the reason they are reducing a joint of meat for a few days in the autumn, and does the fact that they are doing it not diminish and devalue any meaning left in the advent period? It feels like bullying, increasing pressure to pay more and more, give bigger and better, spend, spend, spend and to hell with the consequences. Apparently my Christmas won’t have any value unless I buy a new settee, TV, kitchen or bike. What on earth would make me think that I need a new shower to be able to celebrate the nativity? “And Mary laid the baby Jesus in a whirlpool bath while the three wise men dressed in the latest fashion gave gifts of iPods, digital cameras and a new Sat Nav which proclaimed “at the next Star of David turn right and you will have reached your destination.”’

We are bombarded with offers and discounts and bargains and wrapped up in linguistic tricks that advertisers think we won’t notice.  There is an ad at the moment for a printer. It asks, “have you stopped printing because it costs too much for replacement ink?”  And suggests you should “buy an all-in-one printer and save over £100 a year.”  Now I’m no mathematician but let’s do some sums. I’m spending nothing on printing at the moment. I have to buy a new printer and paper. I will have to buy more inks for that printer. How do I end up spending less than zero in all this? It is the same as these seemingly endless sofa sales (the price reductions being endless, not the sofas) where we move from the Christmas sale into the New Year sale which leads into the Spring and Easter and Summer sales and so on round the calendar: it is just a way to mislead us into thinking we are getting a bargain. I don’t particularly need a new sofa, so no, DFS, buying a new one from you will NOT save me £500 it will COST me £700 and I also see your ‘get out of jail free’ small print that says your pledge of guaranteed delivery before Christmas is “available on some models” but probably not the ones anyone actually wants. I’m not saying that regulations are being breached but there is an underlying trend towards ambiguity. Retail is about creating desire but we are being manipulated to live beyond our means.

Where is the civic responsibility in that? I don’t claim to be an economist, but surely there must be a tipping point? Sooner or later this is all going to back-fire. I’m sure I oversimplify when I wonder when our buy-now-pay-later culture really is going to implode, and more than it has in this recession. How much more can the banks be propped up, when will the gold reserves finally run out? I can understand the principals of needing a healthy retail sector which generates demand for products and then benefits manufacturing, which can go on to produce more products more efficiently and at lower cost. I can see that our economy needs to be competitive and attract foreign investment but are we not also at risk of the beast becoming too hungry and devouring everything?  Yes, Christmas will aid retail, but with public debt at £800 billion can we really carry on like this? I quote from the Times Online – 19^th September 2009:

Britain is clocking up debt at a rate of £6,017 per second. Net borrowing for the first five months of the financial year stood at £65.3 billion, compared with £26.1 billion at the same stage last year. Total borrowing soared past the £800 billion mark for the first time and total state debt as a proportion of national output reached 57.5 per cent.

Just to pay the interest on its ballooning debts the Government must find more than £30 billion a year — about £500 for every man, woman and child in the country.

I won’t be getting into further debt this Christmas. I just can’t do it. I’m not sorry about that either – maybe I should be, maybe I’m a bad person for not being prepared to spend hundreds of pounds on gifts for my parents, my partner, my nieces, my friends. Maybe I’m not helping prop up our economy by injecting it with its Christmas fix. The Ads on telly seem to work on our sense of guilt and greed in equal measure but I refuse to be bullied like this anymore.  I am tempted to not send any cards this Christmas – I can come up with a dozen good reasons for that from ecological to financial but when I think about it I send the majority of cards for the wrong reasons anyway. If I really cared about Michael from College I’d write to him throughout the year. I just don’t want him to think badly of me for not sending. And that is the trap. Do I really need to send a card to my Mum? We speak every evening on the phone. What does a card add to that relationship? And why should David and I feel obliged to buy each other cards to proclaim our love when we do that every day through our words, our actions and our deeds? We’ve all fallen for the bait set by the commercial conglomerates who have built up such a ritualistic dependency that we don’t know how to break free.

The circle has to be broken.  Not sending a card does not mean I think any less of you – it’s just that I spent the money on a bargain joint of beef in November instead.   Now then, where does a chap buy an Easter Egg around here?

• On the first day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me a “buy one get one free”
• On the second day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the third day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the forth day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me four credit coupons, three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the fifth day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me  five late bills, four credit coupons, three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the sixth day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me, six visa statements, five late bills, four credit coupons, three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the seventh day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me seven default notices, six visa statements, five late bills, four credit coupons, three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the eigth day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me eight debt management programmes, seven default notices, six visa statements, five late bills, four credit coupons, three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the ninth day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me nine county court judgements, eight debt management programmes, seven default notices, six visa statements, five late bills, four credit coupons, three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the tenth day of Wintermas the ships all gave to me ten IVAs, me nine county court judgements, eight debt management programmes, seven default notices, six visa statements, five late bills, four credit coupons, three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the eleventh day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me a file for bankruptcy, ten IVAs, nine county court judgements, eight debt management programmes, seven default notices, six visa statements, five late bills, four credit coupons, three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”
• On the twelth day of Wintermas the shops all gave to me a shattered global economy, a file for bankruptcy, ten IVAs, nine county court judgements, eight debt management programmes, seven default notices, six visa statements, five late bills, four credit coupons, three months to pay, two discount vouchers and a “buy one get one free”

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It’s been a while now since I updated my blog; life, the universe and everything has somehow intervened as I hopelessly hurdle the haphazard highway as I hitchhike through life.  We’ve been abroad: Northern Ireland to be precise. And yes, for all your pedants, I know that Belfast isn’t technically abroad, but consider this:

• We went in a plane; the plane was delayed
• We crossed the sea
• We needed our passports (or other appropriate photo ID, opened at the photo page) to get into the country
• They use a different money over there (you try paying for anything in England with a NI £5 note!)
• And they speak a different language, so they do.

I think that pretty much ticks all the boxes for ‘abroad’ in my ”Eye-spy book of holidays”.

We went there because David’s brother, Allen, is a trained sports physiotherapist and had offered to give me some treatment aimed at reducing the pain I have in my left leg and foot. It is hard to explain the pain; the closest is to say it is like the feeling you get when you step into a bath of just-too-hot water. It isn’t so bad that you are prepared to look a pratt and jump out hopping in burning beetroot agony, but you do find yourself wishing for the immediate presence (prescience?) of the Jedi Knight in charge of such matters:  Luke Warmwater.  As the Americans would say, “May the forcep be with you”.

During his trial, Guy Fawkes was tortured. In a letter dated 6 November, King James I stated:

The gentler tortours [tortures] are to be first used unto him, et sic per gradus ad maiora tenditur [and thus by steps extended to greater ones], and so God speed your good work

I mention this, not only because Guy Fawkes Night is but a moon away, but also to note that Allen bypassed ‘the gentler tortours’ and went straight for the full barrage of agonizing instrumentation at his disposal. Now, you will have to remember, I was lying half naked on a bench with my face through a hole (breathing being the only luxury allowed), so could only rely on the sense of sound and touch to build up my picture of the events, and the fog of pain may have clouded my memory a little. I think there may have been a rack involved, although I seem no taller (bugger!). If there were thumbscrews, manacles or an iron maiden then I was passed out at that point and have no recollection, but I do remember several beatings and poundings over the weekend as my back was bashed, broddled, banged, battered and bruised with the intention of shifting my snaking spine from the graceful ‘S’ shape it has adopted back into the more conventional straight-line model favoured by most pain-free persons.  He used a special machine which helps free the joints in the vertebrae through increasing pressure and vibration. According to the website (http://www.tamars.co.uk/en-GB/Default.aspx) it is also great for treating whiplash and dowagers hump (if you are kinky enough to have experienced a widowed dominatrix I suppose – maybe that is where the thumbscrews and manacles come in).I do Allen a disservice; he took great care of me and actually the treatment wasn’t half as bad as I had expected, although sitting on steel benches at the airport while our return flight was delayed for three hours was not the ideal after-care regime and I shall never tenderise a steak again!

Once back in England’s green and pleasant land we hunkered down ready for the biannual temporal shift that sees us wave goodbye to British Summer Time and plunge headfirst into the commercial cornucopia that heralds the Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Changing the clocks is such a nuisance, and there’s always one we forget. You try telling two feisty felines that they have to wait an extra hour for their Felix Fishy Flakes!

And so, hello to All Hallows Eve, and remarkably we only had one premature Halloweener, who, I’m guessing still confused by the clock change, arrived a day early to receive neither trick nor treat.  This year David had a cunning plan (well, maybe not cunning, but appropriately evil for the spirit of the occasion) and instead of sweets or money we gave the trick-or-treaters each an apple.  And, again appropriately, this gleaned looks of pure horror beyond anything we could have accomplished by wearing ghost costumes and carrying plastic skulls! “An apple?!” they protested, as if David was offering them a turd on a plate. It seems that kids today expect nothing less than a fiver or something sticky that comprises at least 150% of their RDA of sugar.  But this year, in the spirit of apple bobbing and toffee apples they were met at the door by a fruit!

We move ever closer to November 5^th and I’m surprised that we have yet to be besieged by the usual pilgrimage of spotty yoofs banging on the door (with the degradation in GCSE difficulty they have yet to master the complexities of a doorbell) and demanding, “Penny for the guy”. Ironically they would feel somewhat short-changed if offered only a penny and I’ve yet to see any evidence of the aforementioned (and integral , as far as I am concerned), effigy of Mr Fawkes.  Incidentally, we should probably call him Guido Fawkes, as this was the name he used when signing his confession, having adopted the more European version while fighting alongside the Spanish against the Dutch. But that just doesn’t sound English enough and heaven forbid that any major figure in English history should have overseas associations. I mean, that’d be like outsourcing the Monarchy to somewhere like, I don’t know, Germany maybe.

I know I’m getting old now though because my allegiances have tipped over into the ‘ban public sale of fireworks’ camp. I’ve held my share of firework parties, and I have no problem with organised displays, but what rationale says it is sensible, safe or sane to make explosive products available over-the-counter to people who, if their brains were gunpowder, wouldn’t have enough to blow their hats off?

Maybe my damning demeanour is a product of a disappointing and disastrous dalliance with fireworks in my tender years. Before I progress I must say, for legislative reasons, that no animals were harmed in the making of this anecdote although several children were emotionally scarred for life in scenes that some viewers may find upsetting.

Many years ago in a land far, far away (well, Suffolk actually), there lived a young boy and his sister. These were ancient times, before the MacDonald clan had invaded England all but destroying their Wimpy rivals, before the internet ensnared us in its web and when “Wizard” meant Paul Daniels and not a software install program. Simple times of custom and folklore, where the villagers observed such traditions as ‘early closing on a Wednesday’ and ‘shops shut on the Sabbath’.  Chips were made out of potato, not silicon and ‘gay’ still meant ‘happy’.  The boy and his sister had been saving their pocket-money for weeks, cherishing the coins, each the size of a saucer and pound notes that were big enough to sheet a bed. Doing odd jobs around the house, to earn a few extra pennies, forgoing sweets and treats with the promise of something better, something magical, to come. Each night they counted their earnings, spurred on by their excitement and anticipation. And, when the day finally arrived they handed their money over to the Elder who took it off to market and returned with a box of the biggest, the brightest and the best fireworks ever. There were sparklers and Catherine wheels, rockets and roman candles.  A party was arranged and all the children for miles around were invited to watch the display. They brought fireworks too, Jumping Jacks and Bangers, with exotic names like ‘Mount Vesuvius’ and ‘Star Seeker’, ‘Diablo’ and ‘Spitfire’.  All the little tubes of delight were gathered up and placed in a metal box, safety being the mantra of the day. They would be safe there and dry. The Elder was wise; he knew to not play with fireworks. He knew the ancient words: Never return to a firework once it has been lit. The young ones were ushered into an awaiting caravan where they could watch in wide-eyed wonder cocooned and closeted in complete comfort.  The countdown commenced and silence settled as the Elder lit a safety taper, took one of the middle-sized pyramids of pleasure from its metal incarceration and set it down on a stable surface. “Light the blue touch-paper and retreat” we mouthed from our ‘safe distance’ caravan.  And it started: the culmination of all that saving, the planning, and the suffering without chocolate. The firework burst into life with a shower of stars and sparkles. Stars and sparkles which, carried on a light breeze, floated straight over to the metal box which stood lidless close by.

Now you might expect that such a collection of explosives, when simultaneously ignited, would produce a glorious display. But no, not when tightly packed into a metal box. Their splendour was turned in on itself, and the proverbial explosion in a fireworks factory yielded little more than an ear-splitting bang and a cloud of smoke dense enough to  cut and serve in slices with the hot dogs and jacket potatoes, leaving in its wake another metal box, full of crying inconsolable infants.  So the fireworks and several of my hard-earned friendships went up in smoke and I soon realised that the Elder was in fact also the Village Idiot.

I’m a forgiving person, but some crimes really do deserve pretty harsh punishment and on that night there was another guy who, in my eyes, should have been hanged, drawn and quartered for treason.  So, this year, if you MUST have a firework party, be careful, be safe and don’t forget to put the lid back on, for Fawkes’ sake!

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I’ve had a somewhat musical few days one way or another although at times deteriorating into discord and approaching cacophonous, but I shall start with something altogether more melodious. Let me confess a guilty sin: as I was growing up I was a huge fan of ABBA and listened to their music pretty much constantly. Don’t hate me – I was young, impressionable and had a crush on Bjorn! Coming out as an ABBA fan was a somewhat brave thing to do, when considered in the context of my peer group and the bullying I endured at school. I could have made my life easier by liking Adam and his Ants or Dire Straits, Duran Duran, Genesis or OMD, but oh no, I had to go for the group with the least possible street cred and the worst stage costumes ever designed. I was a bully’s wet dream, pre-packaged and offering all the ammunition they could ever need. Even I will admit that I was a misfit, speaking with a non-indigenous accent, short, unsporty, academically engaged (or a ’swat’ if you prefer)  and struggling with my sexuality; I was bound to be a target and the slings and arrows of outrageous children found their mark. What do you do when all the kids are calling you a puff and you think they are probably right? So I escaped into art and music; headphones cut out the taunts and I took my comfort there. Don’t pity the child though as those experiences have made the man. Music gave me the escape I needed; I remember the euphoria of hearing that a new album or single was due for release and the excitement of getting the train from the village where we lived into Middlesbrough on a Saturday morning with my saved-up £5 note and a ritualistic trawl around Woolworths, WHSmiths and Our Price to see which shop sold the album at the best price. Then the decision – cassette or LP? Record departments had their own unique smell, vinyl and cardboard, which you just don’t get these days. I remember when “The Visitors” was released (Nov 30, 1981) my parents told me that they would buy me it for Christmas, but that was a month away! It was one of the first albums in the world to be recorded entirely digitally (ABBA pioneered quite a few musical advancements) and I had to have it! I managed to buy the cassette version without anyone knowing, and listen to it in secret. Then on Christmas day I acted all surprised and delighted. Sorry Mum, but a boy has needs!

Buying music now holds none of those joys with downloads and app stores providing instant, but shallow, gratification. Maybe I should blame ABBA for that and for the development of all-digital recording techniques which paved the way for the ephemeral music download.  There’s just no excitement any more, at least not the excitement born of anticipation and the pleasure of ownership. So ‘thou shalt not covert’ may be a good principal when applied to a neighbour’s wife (or even his ass, no matter how pert it may be) but those discs really meant something to me, I was proud of them and I kept them pristine, scratch-free and perfect. It isn’t the same waiting for Amazon to deliver a CD or a tune to download from the interweb. You can’t hold an mpg file in your hand, you don’t have a tactile relationship with the physical album; material music on palpable plastic has become, well, immaterial.  I mourn that but, when all is said and done, the world moves on.

As did ABBA who, as a group, didn’t last forever although a few solo projects kept my addiction sated and the collaboration with Tim Rice that resulted in the musical ‘Chess’ gave me many hours of pleasure. I saw Chess in London in its first week of opening – a big adventure for me as it meant getting the bus for a six-hour trip to the city and an overnight stop amid the bright lights, turmoil of cars, dazzled by the crazy magic and city chaos.

Last week, by complete chance, I spotted that our cinema was showing a recording of Chess, filmed in the Royal Albert Hall last year to mark the 25th anniversary of its release. So I had a wonderful few hours in an almost deserted cinema in the middle of the afternoon belting out show tunes and reliving some of the guilty pleasures of my youth. Thank God that nobody was there to see me and that the sound system drowned out my caterwauling. I’m such a hypocrite – as I’ll demonstrate later.

Musical theatre, I admit, is one gay stereotype to which I subscribe, and my record collection (well, CD collection really although I have boxes of vinyl in the loft and ironically no deck on which to spin them) includes Les Misérables, Evita, Cats and Jesus Christ Superstar as well as several recordings of Chess. I like the extended narrative that these shows bring and the songs are iconic. Like ABBA songs, even if you don’t profess to ‘liking’ then, you recognise them and probably in moments of weakness might even find yourself singing along. I know you know “I Know Him So Well”! You maybe even recall “One Night in Bangkok” – and remember, Confucius say, “Man who walk through revolving door at airport with erection, going to Bangkok.”

I hadn’t listened to Chess for years but was still word-perfect in all but the parts where they had changed the lyrics. (Note: THEY changed the lyrics, I didn’t get them wrong!) Word-perfect doesn’t mean pitch perfect though and I’m sure the melodic accuracy I heard in my head would have sounded less tuneful had anyone been sitting close enough to hear! I don’t care; I haven’t had as much fun for years!

There was a concert in Hyde Park at the weekend to celebrate ABBA, their songs and subsequent ventures including Mamma Mia, Chess and some of the work they have been doing since the group drifted apart. It was broadcast on Radio 2 and I bloody missed it! I will be making full use of the iPlayer to correct that error, although I shall do it alone, secreted away, so as to not inflict my addiction on anyone else. We addicts like privacy.

I missed the tribute concert broadcast because David and I went out for the day for a drive up the Pennines and over Saddleworth Moor to take some photos. It was most refreshing to get out into the wilderness, although Myra Hindley country has an unnerving quality at the best of times. We came back through some of the Yorkshire mill towns, with their huge, imposing factories and warehouses, blocking the light and blackened with an age of grime, the colour of their industrial past. William Blake was spot on when he wrote about our ‘dark, satanic mills’ in the poem that we now recognise as the hymn “Jerusalem”. I like a bit of Blake, both the William and the “…’s Seven” varieties. The Jerusalem connection takes me neatly into the last night of the proms…

…which is what I ended up watching on TV on Saturday for lack of anything better to do. I rather think that with my complete inability to sing in tune I somewhat crucified Jerusalem. The poem refers to the suggestion that a young Jesus was brought to England by Joseph of Arimathea (where they allegedly visited Glastonbury). There are many tales rooted in this concept, including stories that the Holy Grail is buried under the Tor, but they can wait for another blog. Jerusalem is constantly proffered as England’s National song ( see http://anthem4england.co.uk/ ) and it gets my vote over Land of Hope and Glory or Rule Britannia any day.

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green and pleasant Land.

But the ‘music’ didn’t stop there as the peace and tranquillity of England’s green and pleasant land – well, our back garden – was utterly smashed the other evening by the most astonishing sonic performance I have ever heard. Chinese-man-next-door (not to be confused with Chinese-woman-over-the-road) seems to have invested in a Karaoke machine and with abundant amplification was assaulting all auditory acceptability with an absolutely atrocious acoustic accompaniment. I failed to categorise the wailing as pop, rock, opera or ballad: It was indefinable although I would say it definitely would NOT be found listed under ‘easy listening’.

I find the Chinese language somewhat shrill and uncomfortable at the best of times but this was a combination of fighting cats, strangled wife, nails on chalk board, baby crying and emergency siren, punctuated with an attempted baritone that resembled the noise you’d get if a fog horn tried to mate with a buffalo at the bottom of a very deep well. He reached a crescendo and I hoped I could get the rest of the washing off the line in relative peace, while I still remained tympanum-intactus, Oh no. The second track began and Chinese-man-next-door started up again. Now to give you an idea of how bad this was I will tell you that it took me a good first verse and chorus to recognise that the tune was in fact not a Chinese funeral hymn but was actually the Rod Stewart hit, “Sailing”. At least that is what the karaoke machine was playing. Chinese-man-next-door somehow seemed to be trying to rearrange it to fit a pentatonic scale (which he then managed to massacre). Ironically, for a song about sailing, it doesn’t travel well, and the translation into Chinese had all the elegance of an epileptic sperm whale, mid fit. I was reminded of the Morecambe and Wise sketch with Andrew Preview/Andre Previn where Eric plays the piano and Previn accuses him of playing all the wrong notes. Eric’s reply is, “I’m playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order”. Well, Chinese-man-next-door went one step further and managed to sing all the wrong notes all in the wrong order, plus I think he invented a few new ones along the way too.  So, you would think that the wailing and straining couldn’t get much worse? Think again. He then started to vocalise the instrumental break, “Ahhh, Ahhhhh, Ahhh, Ahhhhhh” etc (sort of like the sound you might make whilst trying to sing at the same time as having one of your teeth filled) but now accompanied by bloody bagpipes – the most un-musical instrument ever inflicted upon human kind, with the only possible exception being the School Recorder!

Maybe Chinese-man-next-door should get together with Chinese-woman-over-the-road and form a group with him on ‘vocals’ and her on the bagpipes, which, let’s be honest, are really just a recorder with an airbag attached – I could probably make one with a penny whistle and an old hoover bag (you don’t get them any more these days either). They could call themselves “The Take Aways”. She has a face on her that could sour milk and he looks like he’s been hit very hard and at speed by a projectile wok – his ears even stick out like the handles on either side and I’m pretty sure his hair is made of Teflon. They’d make an ideal double-act. They could sing songs by Tim Rice, or release a cover version of such hits as “You’ll never Wok Alone”, “Wok on the Wild Side” or the Simon and Garfunkle classic, “I am a Wok”.  I shall write off, on their behalf, for an application form for next year’s “X-Factor” as I believe the nation deserves to hear this awesome new talent.

But good news dear reader, for Chinese-woman-over-the-road has started hanging her underwear in the bedroom window again. I know not why she stopped, but her smalls are back with a proliferation of panties and gussets galore. Maybe, like the amount of wool on sheep, or the quantity of berries on a bush, this is a portent of a bad winter. Perhaps I should start an “old wives’ tale” of my own:

When the panties are none
We will have sun

If you see her trolleys
You will need brollies

When the gussets show
There will be snow

Now you may be wondering how, when my theme for today has been musical, I feel I can link in the window wonders of woman Woo, well I shall avoid the obvious references to “Chinese Laundry Blues” and simply state that she wishes to get some Air on a G-string. Over to you, Mr Bach.

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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!

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It has been a busy week, concentrated on, in and around Manchester Gay Pride, the annual ‘outing’ of all things camp and tacky for which such events have become infamous.  ‘Gay’ apparently now means “pink, sequinned and with more feathers than granny’s eiderdown”.  If I wanted to look like a flamingo I’d eat more shrimp.

Pride 2004

The Pride ‘celebrations’ take over Manchester’s Gay Village for the Summer Bank Holiday weekend, with a parade, through the city, of floats (or more accurately a traffic jam of cannibalised lorries with balloons, streamers and banners), whistles and much waving of disposable gay pride flags. The Village becomes impenetrable and the whole city turns into a trembling mass of ‘pseudo-support’ for the gay community.

It is sad that for many of the gay men of Manchester though, the so-called ‘Gay Village’ has become an inhospitable place these days, invaded with clucking, squawking hen parties and swathes of Neanderthal straight men, grunting and dragging their bleached blonde conquests by the hair – obviously going ‘clubbing’ (with the original definition of the word). We’ve been forced out, banished, exiled from Oz wondering where Dorothy took a wrong turn off the Yellow Brick Road. Some Saturday nights you can walk past the bars and wonder if you really are the only gay in the Village.

For those who don’t know, Manchester’s Gay Village is centred around Canal Street (apparently the ‘C’ is silent, as is the ‘S’ in Street) and spreads to include venues in the surrounding vicinity. The history of the Village is a study in changing attitudes to gay culture, at one time being the clandestine and ‘underground’ meeting place for gay people through to its height at the turn of the century and the unfurling of the rainbow flag along its cobbled streets where the balconies and pavement tables, echoing the café culture of Central Europe, were seen as progressive, and touching on ‘trendy’. We were Queer as Folk and the height of fashion.

Canal Street

But later years have seen a change to the whole dynamic of the area and not, in my view, always for the better. In simple terms, what happened was this: single straight females found that Canal Street offered them a safe environment for a night out, without the risk of any unwanted male attention.  I guess there is an irony in that on Canal Street we wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole. Of course, once the ‘blokes’ found out about this they too made the area the focus for their libidos and swarmed in for the easy kill. The pressures of commercialism and our new-found equality left us powerless to prevent it.

We got it wrong. We said we wanted ‘equality’ but that is a knife that cuts both ways. What we really wanted was ‘rights’; the right to express our feelings openly, the right to have our relationships recognised in law, the right to ensure that our partners benefit from our pensions and wills, but absolutely NOT equality. Heavens above! What idiot ever thought we did? Equality takes away the things that make us different. Equality does not allow us to have gay bars, men-only venues and exclusivity. It stops the sparkle and homogenises the homos. On paper at least it means that we should be able to walk into any pub, cinema or restaurant and hold hands or kiss just as straight couples do, but it also means we have to allow them to do that in our places as well. And that is what is slowly and surely strangling the Village.

EuroPride 2007

As I said, it was Manchester’s Gay Pride this weekend and the Village was cordoned off for the event. I have very mixed feelings about Pride. It is a huge party, lots of fun for thousands of people; it brings business to the city and a much-needed injection of cash. The pretext is to raise money for local gay charities and that is a laudable cause, however I question the validity of fencing off ‘our’ part of the city and charging us entry to the street where we can walk for free 51 weekends of the year. I wonder how much of the entry price goes towards security, providing the cordon, staffing the ticket offices and access points, paying Police costs for closing the roads, making up for lost revenue in parking-spaces, clean-up bills, promotion, administration…? Could the money not be raised in other ways for a fraction of the cost?

I suppose my core issue though is with the parade and the message it now sends to the world. I have marched in Gay Pride parades in the past, years ago, when their purpose was to affect change, to turn our alleged ‘wrongs’ to rights and change attitudes. These were protest marches, with a clear message. But surely that isn’t needed anymore? Methinks we doth protest too much. Part of my problem is the way the media portrays such events. I bet that if you saw any press coverage of Pride then the foremost image will have been of a drag queen with a huge feathered headdress: it always is.

Pride 2004

But that is not what being gay means to me, not at all. I don’t relate to glitter and glamour, high heels and headdresses, feathers and fringes, make-up and mincing, fag hags and hag fags. And I don’t want the Pride march to reinforce those stereotypes. Of course other types of gay men marched in the parade but it isn’t shocking, illegal, deviant or sickening to be ‘normal’ gay these days, which is why the media have to pick on the most outrageous fringes to concoct a story because just the ‘gay’ element alone isn’t enough.

For example, see the image chosen by the Manchester Evening News to portray Pride : http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/1134315_city_shows_its_pride_

Okay, so 22 Police forces were represented in the parade, but so what? That shouldn’t be newsworthy anymore and there is a danger that it is us who are perpetuating the stigma when the world has moved on.

Celebrating being gay is fine, but let’s try to make sure that we don’t lose sight of what we really want; our rights, our relationships, our bars, our clubs and our community. There is a huge difference between tolerance and acceptance, equality and rights. What about the guys who attended Pride? Where will they be next weekend – supporting their local gay bar by attending in the aftermath of Pride and then continuing to attend so that the bar CAN remain open and true to its meaning, or sitting at home watching “X Factor” and moaning that, “there’s no point in going out”?  David and I do our bit with our monthly club night, trying to provide an excuse for people to come out, but there is a limit to what we can achieve and gay venues need support the whole year round, not just once a month and not just at Pride.

Pride brings a lot of business to the Village, but for weeks afterwards the city shudders like an addict in withdrawal, suddenly deprived of the huge fix that was just injected into its veins.  Has Pride become that ever more ravenous animal that has grown so big and so hungry that it devours without discrimination?

Maybe if the cordon was there to keep straight people OUT for a weekend then Pride would take on a very different meaning and we might just remember what the Village and its surrounding venues are all about. But of course, that will never happen – that’s discriminating against straight people.

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It has been an challenging week or so since I last managed to blog, physically and emotionally, with some high points and a few severe dips too (literally as it happens). So sorry it has taken me a while to get over my bloggers constipation, but I think I have worked one out today though! It is fair to say that the last ten days I have been “up and down like Zebedee on E” and at times I’ve not known here from there, left from right or whether I was just looping back on myself. It all started with a trip to the hospital for my 6-monthly CT scan. The procedure is fine, but I detest the copious amounts of Satan Sick you have to drink for 24-hours beforehand. Waking up at 7 in the morning to face 1/3 liter of “Devil’s Discharge” is not the way to start the day and Beelzebub’s Bile in no shape suffices as an accompaniment to breakfast, dinner or tea! I hate these scans; not for the process which is painless except for the needle in your arm, and I’m not afraid of little pricks any more, but because they hold up a metaphoric mirror to the last year and the realist in me can’t help but consider how I would react if the cancer was shown to be returning.

Scan scanned, I scrammed, and that evening turned my attention to the skies, hoping to catch a glimpse of the promised meteor shower. I guess the middle of a major city, with cloud cover and light pollution aplenty makes for less than ideal conditions to see shooting stars and I was rewarded with a stiff neck and little else. And when I say cloud cover I mean thick cloud, none of your wispy stuff that might have broken to reveal a quick peek at the Pleiades. Let’s just say that pilots must have been having a bitch of a time navigating between all those silver linings!  But the next night was much clearer and I did catch one superb trail traversing Cassiopeia and confirmed by a few local people too. I wish I still had my telescope, which I foolishly give away, and through which I did manage to see the rings of Saturn in quite spectacular display. But I saw my shooting star and had a wish, which was all I really wanted to do.  I’ll come back to stars later… Oh, and the wish did come true!

My sister Jo, brother-in-law Gavin and two nieces, Sam and Shannon came to stay with us for a long weekend and I hope they had a good time although to be perfectly honest I was way out of my depth and for all I can tell they may have had a vile vacation. You see, if there is one subset of the population that gay men really never encounter, have no experience of dealing with and are scared to death of having to interact with, it is that of pubescent she-children. To us they are completely alien, and not even in a ‘Nannoo Nannoo Shazbat’ Mork and Mindy integrated-with-humankind sort of way. They speak a different language, they require different routines, and they behave in unpredictable ways. They are neither adults nor kids. Their emotions are about as stable as nitro-glycerine on a damp day in December, and just as explosive. They go from adorable to abhorrent and back again at warp factor eight and with far less provocation than Gizmo in Gremlins! They have to be entertained for 26 hours a day and a good book does not count, nor a DVD or any TV programme aimed at anyone aged over about 5 years old. There were more hormones flying around than in an over-staffed brothel which is a shock when you consider that our house is usually an oestrogen-free zone. Is it contagious? Can you catch female hormones? Are there detectors to tell you when you have had too much exposure (and I’m not used to exposing myself to women, honest!)  I’m scared. And as a gay man, am I more susceptible? Is there a vaccination? You know how they say that three women living together will eventually synchronise their periods, well, can over-exposure to oestrogen, make-up, hairbrushes, leggings and highlights start to rub off on you? Can one start to develop an unhealthy fascination for handbags? Because I saw this very nice Louis Vuitton clutch purse…

On the Sunday we all went to Alton Towers. Last year, when I had just come out of hospital, I promised the girls that we would take them to Alton Towers as soon as I was well enough to do so. It was their choice of destination and one I regarded as something of a challenge especially since six months ago I was still using a wheelchair but I have to say that we managed remarkably well. The park is very well organised for people with disabilities and we were allowed to queue-jump the rides which was fantastic and actually made the day a possibility. I don’t like being disabled. I don’t like the fact that I am in constant pain. I don’t like not being able to walk far but I do like joining the rides at the exit and not having to queue! There have been few advantages to what I have suffered this last year, but by jiminy that was one!  I would never have managed to stand in queues for an hour per ride and as I was allowed to take two ‘carers’ with me each time it meant we all pretty much got on the rides we wanted. (Or in my sister’s case, got on the ride she really didn’t want to go on – she ‘endured’ Air, suspended, shaking, and eyes firmly shut.) We even managed a couple of rides as a family, with Jo getting soaked on the river rapids and me managing to stay bone dry with barely a drip on me!

I’m still trying to understand why a Theme Park was the chosen destination since Gavin doesn’t like rollercoasters, Jo can only cope with the ones that have an excitement level akin to a cup of horlicks and a quick nap before bedtime, Sam and Shannon bottled it for any ride with a target audience above about 6 years old I am not going on Oblivion for all the tea in Tetleys! I’m fine with Nemesis, Air and the somewhat obliquely entitled “RITA, Queen of Speed”, which blasts you forward at speeds that would have cracked Scotty’s Dilithium crystals, then corkscrews you round with the ferocity of an epileptic washing machine stuck on the fast spin cycle and tumbling in free-fall about all three axis. Although you do feel the acceleration and the g-force gets you Right In The Abdomen! The last time we rode RITA, David and I had our photos taken, showing the rictus expression as your skin is pushed back on your face, your eyes sink back into their sockets and your mouth and nostrils gape wide, blown open by the force of the wind. Didn’t bother getting a photo this year; I look like that all the time now anyway!

We did all enjoy the new aquarium where you can have the dead skin plucked from your fingers by cleaner shrimps, something that David avoided as he has an extreme terror of shrimps, living or dead and has to leave restaurants if anyone in his field of vision is de-shelling prawns. It’s the eyes. He likes scampi; or rather he did until I told him they were prawns too – Dublin Bay Prawns to be exact.I can be a real bastard sometimes! But they are only tiny things, and no reason for abject terror. I guess that is what comes of being too young to have been raised on a ration of Finger Bobs. Speaking of children’s TV programmes, I don’t think enough is done to recognise Andy Pandy for being the quintessential gay icon that he was. Even in Black and White he made Quentin Crisp look butch! Hartley Hare in Pipkins was a screamer. Mr Benn’s shopkeeper was a peeping tom, only interested in watching his male cliental undress and Hamble from Play School was such a dyke she was known, when off-camera, to have a power-tool fetish and to try to do the dirty with Jemima behind the arched window. We’re talking a serious Seventies Scissor Sisters situation here! I shall say no more about Bungle, Zippy and George in Rainbow, or Tony Hart, bless him, with his pink cravat and obscure relationship with a lump of plasticine called morph (who grew up to be Wallis and Gromit).  Is it really any wonder I turned out to be gay?

Alton Towers was fun though, despite its ups and downs (see what I did there?) and we made it home safely in time for a night of in-house entertainment. Normally I am very careful with what I put in writing, but in this case I make an exception to the point that the next detail I shall reveal ONLY in writing, as saying it out loud could lead to persecution, prosecution and penalisation! That night I let my nieces have a good few hours playing with my Wii. Their parents had a go too, and so did David. I think that’s the most people I have had on my Wii in one evening for quite some time. I’m surprised I stayed up so long. My Wii isn’t used to such attention and to be honest it took quite a battering and nobody was being gentle, all competing against each other to see who could last longest, get their points up, come first, shoot the furthest, get it in the hoop or hit the centre of the ring.

David deserted for the next two days, making some feeble excuse about “having to go to work” so the male/female ratio in the house dropped further and I was in great trepidation that someone would suggest a make-over. When you have a shaved head, hair straighteners are a thing of mystery, as are brushes, bobbles, scrunchies and for that matter all the bathroom parafanalia associated with hair styling. My pubes don’t need conditioner, curlers or a towel wrapping round for an hour until they dry. You’ll notice it is Head and Shoulders, not Head and Crab Ladder – and I’ve never heard of a case of testicular dandruff in all of my 42 years! So I decided that public places would be safer than staying home, besides which, there is a limit to the entertainment value I can offer, even with my Wii fully exposed and available for gratuitous use. I try to be a cool Uncle. Maybe that’s the thing though. Maybe the really cool Uncles are the ones who don’t need to try.

We went to the Imperial War Museum which is only a few miles away and was appropriate in that Sam is studying the Holocaust next year at school although the gift shop seemed to hold attention far more than any of the exhibits. Did you know you can get a pencil eraser disguised as a miniature tank? If ever we are invaded by alien mini-rubber people, we’ll be one step ahead there! Or, if the Germans try to invade us againwe can hold the rubbers really close to their faces and tell them the tanks are actually far, far away and really very big. You can also get ‘authentic wartime seeds’ – again a disappointment as it transpires they are not there to allow you to grow your own Heavy Artillery or air raid shelters, but are just common or garden carrot seeds in a brown paper envelope and at three times the price I can get the same seeds at B&Q – war time must have been tough but peace time is expensive! Sadly no peas though which is a shame as, considering the context, it would have been good if they’d opted to give peas a chance!

On the final day of the familial visit we went to MOSI, the Museum of Science and Industry because they have an excellent hands-on section there where you get to play with experiments, solve puzzles and generally learn without knowing you are doing so. And for free too. Well, by ‘free’ I mean subsidised by the exorbitant prices charged in the canteen and the gift shop’ (which again provided a good few hours of purchasing potential amid a torrent of total tat). I never knew I needed a wooden snap-together ant, a glass made out of recycled glasses (presumably the same ones as on sale, but returned broken because they looked about as ergonomic to drink out of as a buffalo) or some ‘MOSI environmentally sustainable food crops’ – yes, more carrots but this time in a green paper envelope.

It WAS lovely having the family here, despite the bitter, paranoid and desperate ranting of a ‘well past his sell-by date’ somewhat uncool Uncle. The girls are really very good and I love them to bits; they are a credit to their parents and the world would be a better place with a few more kids like them, intead of some of the guttersnipes we seem to be producing as a nation. We did get to celebrate Jo’s birthday and also Shannon’s (she celebrated on Sunday at Alton Towers and on Monday – her actual birthday – with a cake and candles). There’s also a party to be had for her school friends. I’m somewhat niggled that anyone should get THREE birthday’s a year! I mean, birthday-polygamy is supposed to be reserved for the royals and David and I are the Queens in this house!!

Wednesday, whilst seeing a significantly quieter and emptier house was no less fraught as I had to go to the Hospital for the results of my CT scan, the headlines for which are that the lymphoma is officially in remission, thank goodness. But, and in this case the but is a big butt, the scan did show a ‘thickening of the bowel wall’ and as a result they want to stick a camera up. That’s what they say anyway. I secretly think that this has more to do with the gastroscopy a few months ago where they stuck a camera down. I’m thinking maybe they left something in there – lens cap probably (I know I’m always losing ours) – and it has now shown up on the recent CT scan. So, camera up to locate where it is wedged and then, as is customary in these situations, I assume a medical team will be miniaturised, loaded into a microscopic submarine and injected up my jacksie. No doubt there will be an evil scientist hell bent on destroying the mission and added tension shoe-horned into the plot by the needless introduction of a deadline (cue ticking countdown clock – no, not Countdown, with (or without) Carol Voldermort, just a timer counting down to 00:00.01) at which point the sub and mini-me-medical-men will all expand to full size unless they can make it to my tear duct in time.  Actually, I’m wondering if they have the technology to stream the live feed to Facebook or link it via Twitter? We’d need a title – I’m thinking “Harry Potter and the Deathly Bowels” or “Harry Potter and the Chamber Pot of Secrets”. Well, even a camera up my arse will show less shit than the current Harry Potter film. Seriously, don’t waste your money going to the cinema to see it, instead, wait until it comes out on DVD and then don’t buy it!

I said I would return to the subject of stars. Yesterday was David’s birthday but also way back in history in 2AD (according to the astrologers who can calculate such things), on 20^th September, the planets Venus and Jupiter were in conjunction and lined up to form an incredibly bright star which we know as the Star of Bethlehem and, albeit the calendar is a few years out, supposedly guided the three wise monkeys to Bridlington, or something like that. Anyway, and pertinent to my beloved, the astrological alignment created what was also known by an alternative name as The Star of David. How perverse that my David was born on the anniversary of something known throughout history for the size of its twinkle.

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I think in my last blog I mentioned that we were changing our interweb provider and that I had concerns that the switch may not go smoothly. I have to take back any accusations I may have made on that front, and say that the transition from one ISP to the other couldn’t have been easier. I think we lost connectivity for no more than seven seconds. Brilliant! I stand corrected. That said, the service since then has been abysmal. Nightmare. Up and down like Cynthia Payne’s panties or Dr Jeckyll’s mood swings. We have a bi-polar router which seems to exhibit all the unpredictable moods of a manic depressive. One minute she’s fine, super-fast downloads, like a router on E, the next, she throws a strop and kicks us offline for no apparent reason then sulks for about thirty minutes, with a definite reduction of serotonin in her CPU. She’s a right temperamental cow and really does take several minutes of coaxing to let us back on line. We have to stroke her ego, telling her how wonderful she is, with slim, gorgeous lines, dazzling flashing LEDs, and a dongle to die for. Her hubs do NOT look big in that case; she’s perfect in every way. Usually it takes the promise of a candle-lit dinner and a box of chocolates before she’ll agree, with reluctance, to ‘give out’. And she IS a SHE. There’s no doubt about it.

The French and German’s have the right idea – they assign genders to all inanimate (and animate) objects. I think we should do something similar in the UK. Not to complicate the grammar – we don’t need different verb declensions depending on gender or familiarity. Just “He is”, “She is” and for undecided objects, “It is”. We do it anyway for many things – ships are always, “…and all who sail in her” Trains are male, such as “The Flying Scotsman”. Many vessels/vehicles are assigned the feminine gender as evidenced by such expressions as “Fill ‘er up” or “Take her for a spin”. The difference I’m suggesting is that WE should be able to dictate the gender of objects we own, depending on their quirks and personalities.

I’m absolutely not advocating that we need to classify every object with a gender, although that might be fun for the easy things, such as bassoons, bras, spades, doilies, fires, mountains, hoses, cabbages or wheels, but would get somewhat tedious when delving into the realms of chemicals and particle physics. Our European protagonists have it far too complicated anyway and besides, they don’t agree on the assigned gender anyway. For example, take the words for ‘the sun’ and ‘the moon’; in German it’s ‘die Sonne’ (feminine) and ‘der Mond’ (masculine), but in French ‘la lune’ and ‘le soleil’, the other way around. Does, “The moon, she is clear tonight” not sound more romantic? But there again, we assume there to be a ‘man in the moon’ which would imply a degree of masculinity. I assume there are panels of experts who sit and decide what gender should be assigned to every new word, or is it done via a vote? Maybe they let the word loose for a while without a gender and see which way it tends towards. Does it feel it’s inner woman or would it prefer to be a chap? What if it’s gay, or bisexual? Fine if it wants to be hermaphrodite – it can be an ‘it’ but what if it is a female word trapped in a male word’s body? What right do we have to impose gender on a word anyway? Enlightened families allow their words, I mean children, to grow up with whatever gender identity they prefer. Can a word be surgically altered to change its orientation? Can a ‘towelette’ get the snip to become a much more masculine towel? Surely that way lies chaos – or we’d not know whether to order a cheese and ham omelette or a mushroom omel! Maybe free-range words are not such a good idea and if a word HAS to have a gender then it is decided at birth. But what a job THAT would be! For example, would you like to suggest the gender for any of the following?

• Draculin – an anticoagulant found in the saliva of vampire bats.
• Olympiadane –  a mechanically-interlocked compound based on the topology for the Olympic rings.
• Psicose – (C6H12O6), a rare low-calorie sugar that provides 0.3% as much energy as sucrose.
• Cadaverine – a foul-smelling diamine produced by putrefaction of dead animal tissue.

We do have some genderised words in English, such as Actor and Actress, Master and Mistress, Niece and Nephew but these only go so far and are more misleading than evidence of a rule. We would, for example, not call a female consultant a Doctress or have a builderess advise on a new conservatory. Yet we make a silly distinction between blond (Masc) and blonde (Fem), depending on the gender of the person wearing the hair, even though the hair itself is pretty neutral in terms of its own gender. You wouldn’t say, “It’s a blond hair and I found him in my soup” or “It’s a blonde hair and I found her in my soup”, but “It’s a blond/e hair and I found it in my soup” is accepted, even though we have gone to all the trouble of defining the gender of the hair!  (and the first two examples are sufficiently ambiguous to leave you wondering if it was the hair or the owner of the hair that was found in the soup). It doesn’t happen with black or brown or brunette (surely brunette should be female?), so why do we need to give blond/e hair a specific gender? And if that particular colour refers to a wig, which could be worn by either gender, which word would we use? I guess we’d circumvent the problem by calling it ‘platinum’. Does blonde dye only work on female hair, and what colour does it turn male follicles?  In these days of equality and political correctness many female thespians are billing themselves as Actors – Dame Judy Dench does just that. The dictionary (Collins and others) defines an Actor as a person who acts in a play, film, or broadcast (note lack of gender), whereas an Actress is a female actor. Seems a bit unfair that! Women get to use either word whereas men are lumbered with one. Author/Authoress works the same way, and we do have many other words that imply gender:

But these all relate to people or things with a sex, rather than gender – in French, German and many other languages the sex does not necessarily determine the gender. For example Irish cailín “girl” is masculine, while stail “stallion” is feminine. For us, a pen is a thing, and ‘it’ and needs no ‘s/he’ form or verb declination. We don’t have to remember grammatical rules for declension of definite articles – I still remember reciting “der, die, das, die, den, die, das, die, des, der, des, der, dem, der, dem, den” in German lessons at school and that was just to be able to know the correct form of ‘the’ to use!

For most animals we have a choice of three options; he, she or it, unless the word for the animal is also gender-specific. So, a dog can be he, she, or it, with his, her or its bone, but a bull can only be a he or an it, because bulls are male. So if a cat can take the three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter [and what about a male dog that has been neutered?] the why can’t a doctor? We’d go and see him or her, but to go and see it would be very disrespectful. We have two male cats, one is prettier than the other, with a slim face whereas his brother is more blocky in appearance and heavier set. People often assume their gender based on their looks, which can be quite amusing, especially if the visitor wimps out and opt for ‘it’ which just sounds rude!

But my proposal is simpler, although probably very politically incorrect. We should simply refer to objects based on the characteristics they present. David’s car is (despite what he may tell you) very much a ‘she’. Nice car, bit quirky, and tends to suffer from whims and mood swings. She’s gold, quite slim, and can be a bit petulant at times. She’s jealous too – doesn’t always like it if I get in the passenger seat, and sometimes locks my door even when David has pressed the remote to open them. But she’s not ‘girlie’; more a woman of today who likes to inflict her personality but is always up for a good, hard, ride. Bit of a goer – likes club music, has a thing for mirrors too. If she goes wrong, she goes very wrong, like a crazed thing on PMT. My car however is a bloke. No doubt. Just gets on with what he is used to. Solid, doesn’t need much attention, reliable on a long journey – the sort of car you know would turn up at the pub for a pint, even if it were pissing down. It’d get you home, even if it had a broken leg, ‘cos your its mate and that’s what mates do.

iPhones are female. I will expand no further on that specific item.

Our kettle is harder to define – it’s male, I’m sure, quite stocky, brushed steel, clean lines, but more metrosexual. It has a filter and a blue light. Not enough to make it camp, but it’s letting you know it is in touch with its feminine side too. Mugs are male, cups are female.

Our new server is an interesting one – I’m going to plump for it being a teenage boy I think. Bit grumpy, quite reluctant to do anything more than just sit there looking a little pissed off with the world and its lot in life. You know not to ask it to do anything out of the ordinary. I mean, if it were an actual teenage boy, you’d not ask it to cook dinner for example – you’d end up with everything fried and burnt chips!

Speaking of electronics, our Sky box is male too, but not a “bloke”, not “one of the lads”. More your kind of low-achiever that had potential but ended up getting some bimbo pregnant at the age of 16 and has never really amounted to much since then. Can’t really be relied upon, certainly can’t multi-task. Forgets where it is and what it is supposed to be doing. Ask it to record a programme and it’ll probably forget, or record a different one. Or just get bored half way through the recording and go to sleep with its slippers and a Horlicks.

We had a food blender (well, we still have it, but it is relegated, dismissed, banished and otherwise abandoned) which was extremely idiosyncratic and had more human characteristics than I care to recall. Temperamental is a good starting point, and things got worse from there. I’m thinking spoilt child of the Veruca Salt variety (See Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for more details). Sometimes it wouldn’t start, then when it/she did it/she spat and screamed and moaned and generally refused to cooperate on every level. ‘She’ was fine with the things she liked, like fruit or even making breadcrumbs, but would she blend anything to make a soup? Wouldsheheckaslike! You had to slip a tea-towel over her, so she couldn’t see what you were doing, then whistle nonchalantly, looking the other way, whilst secretly sneaking up to stab at the ‘pulse’ button and force the lid down hard with all your might lest she throw it, and her contents, in a projectile vomit of leek, potato and stock, several feet in the air in something akin to a mushroom cloud!

I know, this is anthropomorphism taken to the extreme but it works for me, and it did Walt Disney no harm (dancing brooms in Fantasia, talking mice, even more recent outings in such endeavours as Toy Story), nor Beatrix Potter (Peter Rabbit et al), Lewis Caroll (Alice’s encounters with the white rabbit and talking playing cards) or Aesop and his fables! This idea of assigning animal or inanimate objects with personality or human characteristics goes back way beyond the days of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” or “Itchy and Scratchy” and is the basis of many of the oldest religions.  I’m thinking the Egyptians with Horus the falcon, Anubis the Jackal or Ra the Sun, although technically this is Anthropotheism – ascribing human form and nature to gods, or the belief that gods are only deified human beings. If one were to be of a theological bent (not just bent in other ways) one would say that we anthropthemise the Christian God, making Him in our own image (or was it supposed to be the other way round?) – did God make us in His image, or do we make God in our image? I guess that is down to belief and I concur that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but if I were a God, making a new race of people, I think I’d make a few design improvements of the current blueprint!

Whilst meandering down the semi-theological backwaters of my mind I also wonder about the examples we have where we’ve just ended up smashing together human and animal to produce a wonder of Therianthropy (joining together of part man, part beast) – the Centaur, half human, half horse (yet a gentle and tender lover) and represented in modern astrology by Sagittarius, who’s human part is that of an Archer (bow and arrow, not Radio 4 farming family). There is also the Minotaur, half man, half bull and of course not to forget the mermaid/merman. There’s Pan too – part man, part goat, with his pipes and an image not dissimilar to the cloven-hoofed iconography of the Devil, although I prefer a slightly less satanic depiction, as per this sketch I did many moons ago.

We do this sort of thing all the time, and it isn’t just animals or food blenders that get the treatment. We do it to concepts too. We’ve all seen images of the wind blowing, with HIS chubby cheeks and wavy hair, (and to maintain the theme, how often is God likened to the wind in that “You don’t need to see it to feel its effect” – it seems we have a need to provide an anthropomorphic visualisation though). We do the same thing with the concept of death via the Grim Reaper.

Terry Pratchett uses the phrase anthropomorphic personification in his Discworld series, with his recurrent character of Death as the most popular example. (Personification is a literary form whereby human characteristics are given to objects – the sun hid behind the clouds – rather than the full anthropomorphic treatment of the sun where it is treated as if it were a human:

The sun has got his hat on
Hip, hip, hip hooray
The sun has god his hat on
And he’s coming out to play

Time, of course, is male (as in Father Time) and lives happily alongside Mother Nature.

I don’t think I have ever picked up a slug and thought it to be female – all slugs are male in my eyes (hermaphrodite by biology and dead if there were any justice in the world).

Tea pots are male, and gay. (If you need me to explain why, you are far too young and must have been brought up in a time after the BBC banned a certain nursery rhyme and accompanying actions).

Interestingly David tends to apply things slightly differently. He still assigns human characteristics to inanimate objects, but almost always in the neutral form, not gender specific. And usually when said item has done something wrong. We get a lot of that in our house; objects that misbehave. Good examples are the times he tells me, “the drink spilt”, “it snapped”, “it fell on the floor”, “it ripped” etc – all things that these items seem to manage to do to or by themselves without any provocation or assistance. We have some very talented items all of which could probably star in their own contemporary version of “Bed-knobs and Broomsticks” which would be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

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