To blog or not to blog

Dear Santa

As is customary I shall be leaving your annual bribe (two mince pies and a glass of extremely cheap sherry) beside our non-existent fireplace. I’m sorry that for the second year running I can’t afford to run to the extent of a carrot for Rudolf, but there is a recession on, and with adequate boiling I can feed both David and me on the carrot for three days.  We all have to make sacrifices and I’m sure you understand. It is just as well Rudolf doesn’t run on unleaded, the price of which has sneaked up again, although if he did, I guess the nozzle insertion would go some way to explaining his perpetual look of surprise! Is there something you are not telling us? Has Rudolf been running on petrol instead of the carrot-based bio-fuels as you claim? You’ll soon have to get him converted and there are many decent hybrids coming on the market, although I have yet to see any mileage stats for reindeer and it may be a bit disruptive to you if you have to stop every 200 miles for a recharge.

I gather that Top Gear will be doing a Christmas Special and the Stig is scheduled to roadtest the new Volvo VT20i sports-edition Sleigh, so you might watch out for that.  Clarkson was raving about Sleighs being the next big thing in transport solutions – they solve so many congestion problems although, as James May pointed out, Air Traffic Control are raising a right fuss about increased workload.  I don’t know why they complain, so many airlines have gone bust that their radar screens can hardly be bipping at all, and BA probably won’t be an issue much longer either. On a positive note, Gardeners’ Question Time the other day ran an interesting article from Kent (you know, where the UK Sleigh Research and Development Company is located) saying that reindeer shit is particularly good for rhubarb so there could be a decent side-line there for you if you can just perfect the delivery system.

I digress, so back to the point of my letter. As I say, your ‘payment’ is available for collection as usual and this year I shall, in light of the economic climate, scale back my demands. Clearly last year my request for world peace was beyond your abilities and if the best you could manage was a Nobel Prize for that damn yank, then I really think you could have tried a little harder. Still, I make allowances for your increasing age and senility.  Let’s try something a little easier for 2010. It would be really good if we could have some proper seasons – you know, in the traditional pattern, and of appropriate duration. Last year you seemed to opt for the ‘four seasons in one day’ approach and it all got very troublesome.  I have tried to perpetuate the cover story you suggested about climate change and global warming, but to be frank, people are not falling for it in the way you had hoped so I really think it is time to return to the old system. Don’t you?

Last year I think I was a little imprecise in my list and as I recall I asked that health-wise you make me better. No complaints – you did just that and I am indeed better. Better than I was though, not completely better.  It is my fault for being less than specific. What I should have asked for was for you to make me well again, and so that is how I shall phrase the request this Yule.

I am gratified that you continue to be so active in your charity work and I’m sure I have seen your influence in a number of this year’s major events. All those years of asking and finally you made one of Susan Boyle’s wishes come true. Maybe 2010 for the other one hey? (I’ve heard the old silk purse/sows ear trick is one you’ve been teaching the elves!)  I assume you were behind Jedward too? You know, you must learn to be a bit more selective in the wishes you grant and you did those two no favours at all really (but thanks for the laugh)!  And congratulations on getting your own choice of song to Number 1 for Christmas – When you said you wanted the F-word in the top position, I thought you meant Gordon Ramsey in the TV charts. (Although it isn’t the first song to feature the F-word that has reached No. 1 – The Beetles “Hey Jude” has it at about 3-minutes in, if you listen very carefully!)

When I said last year that I wanted something hot from Mexico that would make my eyes water I was thinking more along the lines of some fajitas and guacamole not Swine Flu. Getting Rudolf to distribute it was a masterstroke, and this year I shall leave a box of Kleenex Balsam along with the mince pies, as I’m sure his nose will be even more sore than usual.

I must say you caused a bit of a kafuffle too – I told you that giving all those MPs such extravagant presents would cause no end of bother! I mean, honestly! Who needs a duck island? What were you thinking? And a moat? Hardly appropriate for a suburban semi in Surbiton! I wonder if they will claim for decorations on the duck island – or might that give the geese too much of a clue that they are destined for a good stuffing?

And you were right about JK Rowling, although I refused to admit it at the time.  Obviously it was worth her asking for “inspiration and narrative creativity” on the years when she wrote the early Harry Potter books – quite why she chose to change her wish from those to “a cliniqué gift set and some bunny rabbit slippers” on the year she wrote Deathly Hallows is beyond me. But the film, out this year leads me to hope she enjoyed the slippers more than I enjoyed the movie, which was both deathly and hollow!

I do implore you to grant Mr Brown his dream of retirement in 2010 and hope that he has learned the lesson that he needs to be careful what he wishes for – Leadership maybe wasn’t quite all he thought it would be. Any chance of him and Hazel Blears in the Celebrity Big Brother house? On similar lines I have picked my selection of people for the Jungle next year. They include Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand and Andrew Sachs. I’m also thinking Jan Moir and Westlife. How about Derek Acorah and the spirit of Michal Jackson?  I’m not sure how well Jacko would cope with the Bush-tucker Trials though as I suspect that Michael eating grubs in actually the reverse of reality, but you could film it from the maggot’s perspective? You’ll probably find that David Tennant will be looking for work around that time too.

Thank you for giving me Twitter. I’m now best friends with all the major celebrities (and Paul Daniels). I know what they all eat for breakfast, what colds, bumps or headaches they have endured on our behalf, and their views on big issues such as “coffee vs tea” and “minimum wage needed to get a decent butler these days”. My celeb mates (and Paul Daniels) have all shared in great detail the tales of their exotic holidays, gluttonous dining habits, neurosis, psychosis, psoriasis, cirrhosis and necrosis.  And their views on hats. Who needs fame when you can live it vicariously in the comfort of your own home whilst stroking your pussy?

Kirstie Allsopp is a sweetie and brilliant at finding obnoxious people homes they don’t want and can’t afford, but you need words with her about her Christmas Special. ‘Normal’ people [for reference, I define ‘normal’ to mean “don’t have a father who is a Baron and are not entitled to call themselves ‘The Honourable Kirstie Allsopp’”] tend not to have the time or resources for blowing their own glass baubles, quilting festive stockings, making a teddy bear from scratch (ditto chutney, candles, crackers) and all of this less than a fortnight before Christmas. Still, what else can you expect besides gargantuan effort from a woman who’s kids middles names are Atlas and Hercules!

I hope you and Mrs Clause have sorted out your differences. You are right, the crabs probably just got caught in your , eh hum, ‘beard’ when you dropped off the Christmas presents at the GUM clinic. You may be getting on, but there’s still life in you yet, eh?

I bet you are glad you didn’t outsource deliveries to the Post Office.  You can never be sure they won’t try to strike! And I assume that you are responsible for the Channel Tunnel debacle? I know you were concerned about French Postal Services encroaching on your patch, so blocking their main supply route was a stroke of genius, but you could have thought a bit more about the poor commuters too. The snow has been fun all round, and SO unseasonal for December – are you moving back into your more Dickensian approach? If so, dump a load more snow on London; they like it down there and always cope really well in bad conditions  Oh, and can we maybe start Christmas in December next year, instead of July? I know you need to advertise, and it’s a dog-eat-dog commercialised jungle out there, but you DO kind of have the market cornered, having pretty much beaten the Pagans and that Jesus bloke out of the bazaar.

You’ll have no trouble finding our house this year – we are the one without any festive lights flickering furiously outside. We are making our stand for CO₂ reduction, energy conservation, taste and tradition. Also we know that those flashing snowmen throw Dasher and Prancer into a rutting frenzy and Donner and Blitzen end up trying to shag the rope light reindeer. It is often not Santa coming down the chimney, but a randy reindeer getting rude with a radiant red robin. You should take them to the V-E-T and have them de-snowballed!

So, for 2010, my wishes are simple. Please will you make me well again and please can I have David for another year? He’s been wonderful in 2009 and I don’t know what I would do without him.

Love to the Elves

Adrian xx

I don’t want to come over all Dickensian with an outpouring of ‘ bah humbug’ but sometimes I really have to wonder what the world is coming to.

I know Christmas is supposed to be a time of joy and tradition, happiness and sparkle, but there is one thing that has the opposite effect on me, and that is the terrifying increase in outdoor Christmas lights which seems to be spiralling out of control. In previous years I have been just about able to cope with the odd garden decorated in a single colour and with taste, but it seems more and more that taste is the one thing that these illuminated eyesores leave far behind.  This is not what Christmas is supposed to be about.  It seems to be yet another Americanism that we have adopted, coerced into by an ever-increasing commercial pressure to buy tat that we neither need nor, if we sat and thought about it for a few minutes, want.

I fully appreciate that some streets do it with the veneer of a good cause, as per the example here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/somerset/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8405000/8405690.stm but that is an exception rather than the norm – and if people really want to do something for charity there are fare better, more direct and more appropriate ways.

As far as bringing ‘fun and joy’ is concerned, well, I’m afraid that these monstrosities do the exact opposite for me.  The sight of a semi-detached house emblazoned with neon notices wishing me a “Merry Xmas”, fighting for space with multi-coloured ‘icicles’ of light or inflatable snowmen with a 60w bulb stuck up their arses somehow fails to fill me with festive fun. It is, at best, vulgar and at worst totally irresponsible. I’m lucky, we don’t live opposite such a property but I pity the poor people who do.  It seems every other house is trying to out-do its neighbours and the result is the visual equivalent of a cacophony of screaming babies, fingernails down blackboards and caterwauling mating moggies. It is a form of pollution as much as sound or smoke or litter and yet, to protest against it is mean-spirited and grumpy. I’m not – I love the spirit of Christmas – I just wish that the values we place on this time of year were more about thought and caring, less about commercialism and ersatz glitz.

We have the Copenhagen COP15 Climate Change Summit currently debating the impact that humankind has had on the planet. The Stockholm Environmental Institute at the University of York has calculated that Christmas in Britain generates nearly 40 million tonnes of CO2, over one-twentieth of the nation`s annual output. Roughly one-third of this is due to lighting and nearly half is due to Christmas shopping.

For a topic about illumination, it is amazing how dim some people can be, even such denizens of common sense as the BBC in this article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8412332.stm To paraphrase:

A householder in Lanarkshire is drawing crowds to his quiet cul-de-sac with a festive display that includes 45,000 lights that dance in time to music. David Grant, 49, from Blantyre has spent 20 years building up his “winter wonderland”… He is also doing his bit for the environment by only using low-energy bulbs and not running all the lights at the same time

No, Mr Grant, you are NOT doing your bit for the environment, unless by “your bit” you mean helping to bugger it up completely. You would have far less ecological impact by NOT erecting this monstrous display!

The big ecological get-out this year is that people are being green by only using LED lights. What tosh! Yes, they use less power, but they still use more power than ‘no lights’. Plus, consider all the manufacturing overheads, the plastics and glass and metal used (and presumably destined for landfill in a few years time), the packaging and the transportation requirements.  Those LED lights were probably produced in China using their coal-burning power stations!

I even read an article where someone claimed that Christmas lights were ecologically sound because they “use electricity at night-time which otherwise would be wasted”.  Of course, this shows no understanding at all of the balancing operations of the National Grid or the concept that energy production levels can be increased or decreased according to demand. I’ve been to Hydroelectric Power plants where water is stored in high lakes, released at times of peak demand to generate additional power and then pumped back up to the lake when electricity to do so is much cheaper.

The National Grid provide up-to-the-minute readouts of current UK power consumption at http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/Realtime/Demand/demand24.htm

Indoor lights are arguably not so bad, as most of their energy output is in the form of heat and any thermostatically controlled room will see a balancing against central heating output – but that is to ignore the manufacturing costs which I suspect tip the balance.

I know we all like to feel Christmassy, and things like town centre lights all add to that but maybe it is time to change attitudes. I say, “Well done” to Horsham in West Sussex (where the budget for the festive lights has been cut from £70,000 to £14,450) and indeed any council that has taken what is probably a quite unpopular step in curbing such expenses. Oxford Street has, to their credit, adopted only LED bulbs and the lights are powered from solar-charged batteries. I can forgive places like Blackpool, where the illuminations are a key to their tourist industry. I understand their reliance, but not ‘every-other-town-centre-in-Britain’ – who offer the argument that people come to see the lights and it increases retail turnover: No, they will still come and do their Christmas shopping even with just normal street lighting – we manage to buy Chocolate Eggs without ‘Easter lights’ .  These are big and unpopular decisions, but we should be able to rely on our leaders to make them for us – THAT  is their job. And if we can’t make the obvious and relatively easy decisions to protect our environment, heaven help us when we have to face the really tough issues, like population control! And whilst I am on a kamikaze crusade which is bound to make me about as popular as cold vomit on toast, how about this: if we HAVE to wire up our windows and festoon our fences, maybe the Government should consider slapping a huge tax on rope lights and pre-formed flashing reindeer, dedicating any money made to research into renewables? But of course they won’t – that is hardly going to be popular with the people who buy such things and there IS an election coming up.

I somehow doubt that if three wise men happened to be passing through Salford they would be able to even see a bright new star in the sky for all the light pollution!

We three kings of Salford are
Somewhere above us is a new star
But we cannot see it, where could it be, it
Must be behind that Sant-ar

O Star of wonder, star of night
Totally hidden from our sight
Neon lighting, really frightening
Flashing reindeer far too bright

On the roof, a flickering sleigh
Dazzling bulbs – you’d think it were day
Lit forever, ceasing never
Adding to our dismay

O Star of wonder, star of night
Totally hidden from our sight
Neon lighting, really frightening
Flashing reindeer far too bright

Over there I think it’s a tree
Festooned in rope light for all to see
Icicles dangling,  jingle jangling
Sod the nativity

O Star of wonder, star of night
Totally hidden from our sight
Neon lighting, really frightening
Flashing reindeer far too bright

Walk much closer: damage your eyes
Radiant beams sweeping the skies
Piercing the air – shafts bringing down aircraft
Makes us just wonder “Why?”

O Star of wonder, star of night
Totally hidden from our sight
Neon lighting, really frightening
Flashing reindeer far too bright

Never mind the price we all pay
Energy used in this frightful display
Carbon rating we’re forsaking
Our future we all betray

O Star of wonder, star of night
Totally hidden from our sight
Neon lighting, really frightening
Flashing reindeer far too bright

Captain’s Blog Stardate 07.12.202009

Our ten Quabble mission to explore the distant Sol system is drawing to a close and we will soon be heading home to Kizotrix IV. The exobilogists and archaeologists are beaming back on board with their last few samples and our databanks are brimming with gigaQuimms of information. But what lessons have we learned from our study of this system, and its remarkable third planet?

> Planet Sol 3 from geostationary orbit

The only planet in the system capable of sustaining life is a beautiful place, green/blue with majestic mountains and sparkling seas, much like Kizotrix used to be, before the Great Exodus, rich with vegetation, abundant with a myriad of lifeforms. But it is the archaeological record that interests me most and our scientists have done a great job in piecing together the story of the civilization which used to live there.  They were an amazing people, these inhabitants of Sol-3, with beautiful architecture, a network of transportation systems and social communities.

> Crude data pod

Much like the aracnians on Gat’nk Delta, it seems they relied heavily on a web structure, which, by the height of their civilization, had spread to cover most of the planet.  It’s all gone now, of course, beyond the ruins that our scanners have mapped and the few trinkets we collected.  Nature soon wipes out her mistakes and leaves little for us to study, but I have a good team on board and  we were lucky to stumble upon a set of files on one of their primitive data storage pods, which at first we overlooked. Mr Wallik, my chief of Sciences, recognised its significance and developed a method to extract the information.

They named their planet ‘Earth’ and organised themselves into hive-groups which they called ‘cities’. Their social structure seemed to align with the hive mentality too, with individuals designated workers, soldiers, builders, farmers or breeders. Huge farms, or ‘Tescos’ supplied them with food. Each hive had at least one of these Tescii. They enjoyed art, music, poetry and had many recreational activities – something called soccerball which involved chasing a sphere around a rectangular playing area, much akin to our game of Pong, and they worshipped a God they called Cowell to whom they prayed every seven-rotation cycle. A favourite pastime was ‘clubbing’ which apparently involved baby seals. All of this was underpinned by a crude bartering system, where they exchanged their produce or services for plastic credit tokens.

> Example of typical meal

Their favourite food was a type of bovine meat, pressed and formed into a disk shape which they ate between two ‘buns’ – similar to our Sarg-cakes but made with crushed seed powder.  These were called ‘Kentucky Fried Mac Pizzas’.  This meal was often accompanied by something called ‘Coke’ which was either drunk or sniffed, depending on the requirements of the social gathering. They had at least one queen, although the record shows an increasing number of queens as their civilization grew.  Within the hives, social structure was dominated by factors such as hide-colour. These strange little people came in four colours: White was the dominant class, followed by yellow and then black. The Reds, it seems, were hunted to extinction in their indigenous super-hive, called The Untidied Stains of America, although their history books suggest that some survived and moved to the area they called Russia where they set up a red army.

> Evidence that humans ate their young

Our studies show that they reached level 4 on the Jitrov Civilization Scale, which is remarkable for a species that still ate its own young. We see proof of this infanticide in digital advertising of the time, for such products as ‘Jellied babies’ , ‘Jelly tots’ and ‘kid’s mix’.  Similar promotional material that Mr Wallik has been able to decipher, provides key insight into the biology of this species, as we have been able to glean that they must have had a cobalt-based circulatory system; we know for certain, from audio-visual ‘advertisements’,  that females had blue blood which they collected every 28 solar cycles in winged pads and we assume they used this to make a local delicacy, ‘black pudding’. Allegedly somewhere called ‘Britain’ had talent. For reasons our meteorologists have yet to understand, there was a predisposition for canine and feline precipitation.

To their credit, there is evidence that they had developed rudimentary nuclear technologies and had embarked upon the early stages of space travel, although we are unable to detect more than speculative evidence to suggest that they made it as far as their closest moon.  Nevertheless, they showed a great deal of promise, and had they not made some fundamental mistakes their people could have developed to be equal to our own great race.

> Polution from a single domestic stove could be seen from miles around

It seems that the indigenous mammalian bipods ran into difficulty towards the end of their First Industrial Revolution, as so many other civilizations we have met on our travels have done.  This all happened about 200,000 Quabbles ago by our time standards.  Mr Wallik has pieced together a tale of how these ‘humans’ (as they called themselves) were little more than highly developed apes who based their technology on hard-fuel-burning engines, and combustion. Now of course, our scientists know the folly of such action, but these were an underdeveloped people for whom science was little more than guesswork and magic. They still had Religion, for FarcQ’s sake, and could only travel in four dimensions. They took the apparent abundance of carbon-based compounds for granted; never thinking these would run out. They thought ‘fire’ to be their greatest discovery, and then spent the remainder of their time on the planet finding different ways to burn things! There is evidence that they ritually burned their own people in annual sacrificial rituals – especially anyone designated with the name ‘Guy’.  They used liquid ‘oil’ for everything, based their whole civilization on it, turning it into fuel, and plastics, medicines, cosmetics and something they called ‘sticky-back-plastic’, from which they could make almost anything. But like a Gippol beetle in a dwang fruit, they had no thought for what would happen when there was nothing left to use as raw materials and their obsession with burning things for power, heat and light was their biggest mistake. Maybe a few more Quabbles and they could have amounted to something special. They were barely starting to investigate the basics of quantum mechanics, which we take for granted, and were too busy burning things to really study photonics.  Black matter was little more than a theory for them, although there are a few traces of recorded evidence to suggest that they were on the brink of unravelling some of its basic properties; they might have even discovered the Higgs-Bosun Drive, had they not messed up the science.

> Relase of toxic gasses

We have seen news-pods recorded at the time that tell how the emissions from their industry and the smoke from their obsession with burning things, became trapped in the atmosphere and started raising the planet’s surface temperature through the greenhouse effect – it is the same process that our terraformers use when they want to raise the ambient temperature of a seed planet.

On the Earth, ocean temperatures started to rise and this caused changes in climate, melting the polar ice caps, turning fertile rainforests to desert and raining on the bonfires.  Of course, we understand oceanic flow and its correlation to weather systems – it seems almost unimaginable for us that these humans never built weather farms, and never developed oceo-engineering to control their seas.  Perhaps, given a few more decades, they may have started to realise the relationships between sea and sky, but their focus was on other things, like burning their resources, territorial fighting and the development of ever-more barbaric ways to kill each other. Our doctors say that even today some of the mammalian life on the planet carries antibodies to a type of influenza that we believe the humans used in a form of biological warfare against each other.

> Severe flooding in many capital hives - this 'city' was known as 'the big smoke'

Of course, with all the burning, they suffered terrible climatic disasters as a result of their short-sightedness, with whole communities being flooded, crops wiped out, their city hives in coastal areas or near rivers under constant bombardment by storms and tornadoes – our civil engineers know the folly of building on flood plains but the humans were blind to the risks. Our geologists tell me that there is evidence that they tore down vast swathes of forest and polluted their seas. They showed scant regard for the other forms of life which lived among them and those creatures which were not slaughtered for food were kept as pets or exhibited in massive stadiums to be ridiculed by their masters. We read a report of a conjoined entity (perhaps even a genetic mutation of their own species) which was ritualistically made to perform terrifying feats of endurance on a regular basis, while they watched and listened to its pitiful, tortured, wailing; the ‘humans’ then had a form of mass election process whereby they decided if the creature should live another week or be slaughtered to the God Cowell. We can only assume that this poor being, a biological rarity by all accounts (having four legs, two heads but only one brain) was hunted to extinction and wiped from the face of the planet, as we found no evidence to suggest the ongoing survival of the Jedward.

At one point, near the end of their reign on the Earth, it looked as though there might have been hope. The hive leaders all came together on the summit of a hill in a place called Copenhagen, in an attempt to address the ecological problems facing their species. We have seen pod-pics and read reports of a growing realisation that relying on fossil fuels was causing immeasurable damage to their environment, but their culture was based on a theology of economics over ecology. How strange that they rewarded their economists and financiers far more than their healers, their teachers or their scientists. Being a “banker” was the most respected and highly paid of all professions, although we see little evidence that these individuals contributed at all to society. For a hive species they seemed to exhibit a disproportionate level of individual greed. Our ice core samples tell the story in terrible detail. By the time the human race realised the problems it was causing, they were too late, doomed. Their fossil fuels lasted only about another 20 solar cycles, despite rationing, and their futile attempts to develop ‘clean fuels’ failed due to a lack of global cooperation.  They simply ran out of things to burn and by that time the bankers had made off with all the money so their economic infrastructure collapsed.

> Location of nuclear waste dumps

They played with other options; hydrogen extraction, geo-thermals, bio fuels and power harnessed from radio waves, but investment in the development of these technologies was obviously not seen as a priority as we can find little proof that these were ever adopted on a global scale.

If they had realised their dependency on fossil fuels sooner, they might indeed have ploughed resources into developing other options, but a growing population is a hungry beast and they had only one viable route when the oil ran out and so we can see the evidence of a brief increase in the use of nuclear power. We have found a number of radioactive dumps, some deep underground, and we believe that in a twist of irony they used the empty mines as repositories for spent nuclear rods. When the mines were full the ‘humans’ must have jettisoned their waste into orbit.  Much has since fallen back down to the surface, but some remains, circling the planet where it still poses a danger to space traffic.  Mr Wallik has recommended we leave a warning buoy. We calculate though, that even after the move from fossil fuels to nuclear energy, the planet’s supply of radioactive compounds lasted only a couple of generations – and within one hundred solar revolutions, their industry and civilization had collapsed. When they had nothing left to burn, they just ended up burning each other.

> Solar farm in Stockholm

I have seen images from the planet’s surface which show the arid, sandy ‘Ikea Desert’ of the region they called “Scandinavia” where, even today, there is evidence of huge solar farms, which we believe may have been a last-ditch attempt to move to renewable sources.  There is no doubt that this would have been a woefully inadequate solution when compared to the population explosion which remained unchecked.  Giant dams still remain in other (now) tropical regions – the Gamburtsev dams show proof that hydroelectric power was at least considered, and this may have been viable for the few decades that the ice cap, which once covered the mountain range, was melting.  But climate change soon evaporated the lakes and the power plants fell silent.

> Sahara ice plain wind farm

The Ice Flats of Africa are peppered with the ruins of what our archaeologists think were wind turbines. Our simulations support the theory that these would have had to be adopted on a global scale to have any impact, and now they stand rusting and decaying as a sorry testament to what must have seemed like a valiant attempt by the humans to survive. But this was all too little, too late. The tipping point had been reached and there was no way this once promising race could save itself.

Whenever we set out on these missions of exploration, we always hope to find evidence of intelligent life. Sadly it seems that Sol has little to offer on her eleven planets (we are pleased to have discovered the hitherto undetected outer gas giant, now labelled Sol 11). Most of these planets are too distant to support life, and even the one designated ‘Earth’ is now of little interest beyond an historical curiosity. On our travels we have encountered evidence of many species who have died out through natural disaster, planetary collision, even the devastation caused by an untamed spacial wormhole, but no tale of mass extinction has touched me quite as much as the one of the humans of Earth. Of course, the planet has now fully recovered and is flourishing with an abundance of vegetation and wildlife. But nothing that shows the potential of its once so promising human inhabitants.

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!

nor·mal (nôr?m?l)

adjective

Conforming with or constituting an accepted standard, model, or pattern; esp., corresponding to the median or average of a large group in type, appearance, achievement, function, development, etc.; natural; usual; standard; regular

Oh to be normal, to look normal, to feel normal, to ooze normality. An odd request, maybe, and one which begs the question, “what IS ‘normal?” to which I can only answer, “not me.”

All my life I have felt segregate, especially at school – usually for reasons beyond my control: a different accent to my peers, a non-standard height, gay not straight – being a petite posh puff was no primary school picnic in the park! Being picked last for football became the norm, so much so that the act itself almost became more of a joke than I was. No amount of logical reasoning can counter the illogic of a mob of pre-pubescent peers and ‘pick on the poof’ was the preferred playground pastime. Too often those differences have been used against me, so maybe it is not unexpected that I would quite welcome the disappearance into the monotone of normality. Age and growing tolerance have improved things greatly of course. There has been a massive normalising of gay relationships for a start, and that is brilliant. That is evidence of how a perceived extreme has been absorbed into the mainstream, well, mostly absorbed – I think we are still a way off a time where David and I could kiss in Tescos without raising an eye – but there again, I don’t think it is necessarily right for anyone to be snogging by the Deli counter, as were a straight couple I saw the other day.

Our society has such a confused way of dealing with anything it sees as different; it is either ridiculed or revered, dreadful or desirable – sometimes both at the same time and maybe it is just fashion which dictates what is in vogue at any one time.  Twenty years ago being a puff was akin to having leprosy but today we are the ‘must-have’ fashion accessory. No street is complete without its resident gay couple. We have become the token blacks. But that is a lot better than I ever dared dream would happen and I’m not complaining.

Maybe ‘normal’ is a somewhat utopian ideal, unattainable for a species as diverse as ours, which relies on mutation for development and praises those who break the mould. The Guinness Book of Records would hardly include “the most normal person in the UK” or list all the names of those “of most average height” – instead we hail the tallest, the shortest, the fastest, the thinnest (I can feel a song coming on here…) Survival of the fittest and the basic concepts of Darwinian adaptability means that some must be less fit and, to borrow from Mr Orwell, maybe it has to be that some animals are more equal than others. It isn’t normality that pushes at the edges of social, scientific or medical understanding.  Frontiers are only explored by the exceptional. But it is still normality that I crave.

Many, I am sure, would think of ‘normal’ as boring, homogenised, lacking in diversity, individuality or creativity. The gay community, as a subset of humankind, is a great example of the conundrum we face – on one hand wanting the level playing field of equality and on the other, our desires to retain our separate identity. We want to be treated as normal people but still be different, ab-normal – after all, does ‘queer’  not mean ‘strange and unusual’? But we all judge ourselves against the concept of normal all the time; are we too fat, to thin, too tall, too short, too loud, too quiet, too active, too sedentary?  Does my bum look big in this? Is my hair style fashionable? Am I behaving in an appropriate way? Do I fit in?

I’ve never regarded myself as anything other than a misfit; that tends to happen when you are significantly below average height, need glasses, and have hair that, if left unshaved, looks something akin to an explosion in a wire wool factory.  I’m the next best thing to a hobbit, except they are generally cuter. I hide behind humour, proclaiming myself to be “unlanky” or “not really short, just further away than you think I am”.  But I have always tried to take care of my body, after all it came with a non-exchange clause and, whilst some spare parts may be available, a whole body transplant remains the gift of Time Lords and I have yet to master the finer points of reincarnation (besides, I’d probably come back as Sylvester McCoy and Who’d want to do that?)  So, one makes the most of the raw materials available, without falling foul of fanatical fashion or the need to buy enough male grooming products to keep Cliniqué in business for the next decade. I will never tread the path of the Adonis, the male model or ‘dreamboat’.  I hold no aspirations of winning the Mr Universe competition, and, even if through some galactic irony, I did end up in the final alongside a Slitheen, Judoon, Sontaran and the inner squidgy bits of a Dalek, I’d settle for fifth place and the train fare home.  If beauty really is in the eye of the beholder then I thank whatever higher force there may be that I fell for someone who is short-sighted, colour blind, has monocular vision and a lazy eye. But that said, I’m no troll either. I may have fallen out of the ugly tree but I managed to miss a few of the most severe branches on the way down.

I have such a tempestuous relationship with my body image, largely based on the prejudices of society against someone who doesn’t quite fit the standardised concept of ‘normal’ and I have talked at length in previous blog entries about the difficulty of finding clothes or shoes that fit. You learn to be less fussy when the choice is ‘this or nothing’ and any sense of a clothing ‘look’ I might have is based entirely on availability rather than design.  There are a few exceptions to that rule and a couple of ‘outfits’ that I think DO suit me, but none of them fit me anymore and so I shuffle around in my scruffs.

One of the hardest things about the last 18 months has been seeing the changes to my body shape, and for two main reasons. Firstly, it has taken me even further away from the ‘body beautiful’ and that goal of fitting the norm, or even being ‘acceptable’ and secondly because it is such a visual, unequivocal representation of how Ill I have been. I’ve always tried to convince myself that looks don’t matter, but they do. People judge. People make snap decisions based on physical appearance. We all do it, we’ve all made assumptions about a person because they tended towards a more extreme body shape.  I read on the BBC site the other day a story about the growth and spread (pardon the choice of words) of ‘fattism’ and of overweight people being subjected to unprovoked physical and verbal attacks. But what is really frightening is when you make such negative judgements about yourself, when you don’t just hate your appearance, but you hate yourself for looking like that.  The most terrifying thing for me, when I was in hospital last year, was not the being diagnosed with cancer, not the having months of horrible treatments ahead of me, not even the pain, but the first time I saw myself naked in a mirror. I had lost 40% of my body weight, dropping from ten stone to just under six. I looked like I had aged 30 years and someone had shrunk-wrapped my skin to my skeleton, in much the same way as you can buy supermarket joints of meat with plastic suctioned to every contour.  Slap a bar-code on my bum and sell me as a Tescos Value Person.  Flabby I was not. The cancer had been so advanced that it was using all my energy, all my fat and muscle reserves and more – my body was taking more than I could give it.  The person looking back at me from that mirror was unrecognisable, an imposter – not me, not the face I had grown up with. The body in the reflection belonged to a third world, emaciated, starving, wretch.  The hobbit had turned into Gollum. And that was more frightening than I can ever describe.   I cried for nearly 12 hours solid. Because I didn’t want to be that person and I didn’t want the people I loved to have to look at him either.

I think that was the turning point for me, the point when I decided that I had better get better. I knew for sure that I didn’t want anyone’s last image of me to be the skeletal wraith I had become.

Getting back out among people I knew before has been really hard, and on more than one occasion I have bottled out, opting for the safety of a more reclusive stance; Gollum back in his cave. Sometimes that has been to try to protect others from seeing me in such a state but more often the motivation has been selfish, born of fear. The really good friends have been fine, supportive and kind. Family will love me regardless of how I look. But that only accounts for a handful of people and the challenge is dealing with the ones who see you and judge. The ones who make assumptions. The ones who whisper and point when they think you are not looking.  I don’t blame them, it is human nature.  I still find myself doing it to others almost without thinking and that is something I need to change.

I suppose we all have an inner desire to stand out from the crowd, but we want to do that on our own terms, based on traits, looks or accomplishments that we feel to be worthwhile and positive. We don’t want to stand out as objects of ridicule, but of praise. There is a fine line between gorgeous and gruesome.  I think of people who have taken things just a bit too far and tipped the balance. That one extra facelift that saw the sea change from classic beauty to grotesque gargoyle, the body builder who went from muscle to monster.

I’m getting better, my body is slowly returning from horror to human, but there’s still a long way to go and I pine for the return of the shape I used to inhabit. And so ‘normal’ seems quite a desirable state to be in. Average would be wonderful. I could buy clothes in a range of styles. I could be unremarkable and un-remarked-upon, ordinary, usual, unostentatious.

When I was at school, one of the poems we studied for O’Level (yes I AM that old) was Philip Larkin’s “Born Yesterday” and it caused me some consternation as I couldn’t get my head around what exactly it meant.  I understand now.

Born Yesterday
for Sally Amis

Tightly-folded bud,
I have wished you something
None of the others would:
Not the usual stuff
About being beautiful,
Or running off a spring
Of innocence and love -
They will all wish you that,
And should it prove possible,
Well, you’re a lucky girl.

But if it shouldn’t, then
May you be ordinary;
Have, like other women,
An average of talents:
Not ugly, not good-looking,
Nothing uncustomary
To pull you off your balance,
That, unworkable itself,
Stops all the rest from working.
In fact, may you be dull -
If that is what a skilled,
Vigilant, flexible,
Unemphasised, enthralled
Catching of happiness is called.

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!

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”

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!

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.

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!