Author: Jack Scott

Imagine the absurdity of two openly gay, married, middle aged, middle class men escaping the liberal sanctuary of anonymous London to relocate to a Muslim country. I chronicled our exploits with the mad, the bad, the sad and the glad in a blog for the whole world to ignore. Then came the book which became a critically acclaimed best seller. Its success opened out a whole new career for me, firstly as an author, and now as an indie publisher. Who'd have thought it? Certainly not me. In June 2012, we ended our Anatolian affair and paddled back to Britain on the evening tide, washing up in Norwich, a surprising city in eastern England, then to the wilds of Norfolk as the only gays in the village. I’m sometimes nostalgic for our encounters with the hopeless, the hapless and, yes, the happy go lucky. They gave me an unexpected tale to tell and for this I thank them.

Sochi 2014

As the Winter Olympics kick off in Sochi (the most expensive Winter Olympics of all time),  a timely reminder of Tsar Putin’s nasty little law.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Jack Scott's avatarPerking the Pansies

Putin

With the introduction of a vaguely worded law in Russia banning the promotion of homosexuality to minors (i.e. the very mention of it will attract a sliding scale of fines and repeated violations may result in a stint in the clink), the chattering classes have called for a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi on Russia’s Black Sea Coast. The idea is to give Tsar Putin and his Russian Orthodox cabal a good kick up the arse. I can’t see it amounting to much. After all, the soccer World Cup circus will be coming to town in Qatar in 2022, a gulf state with a less than sparkling record on human rights of any kind and we seem happy to do brisk business with a host of nasty little regimes around the globe. Let not conscience get in the way of the beautiful game or making a few…

View original post 235 more words

Bath Time Blues

One thing I won’t miss about the Weaver’s Cottage is the bath. It’s enormous. I’m not the mightiest of men (at 5’ 5.5” and shrinking in my socked feet) so it’s like lying in a flotation tank. I have to grip the tap with my toes to stop myself from going under. At 6′, Liam fares a little better, but not much. Thankfully, our new gaff has a bath of standard dimensions. I’m looking forward to giving the shower a miss messing about in the bubbly hot tub, glass of chilled white in one hand and a copy of ‘The Week’ in the other. Fabulous.

Mind you, I didn’t always covet bath time with such decadent relish. As a child of the Sixties and the youngest of four (until my sister accidentally came along and usurped my position as baby of the family), I was last in line for the soak and sponge. Back in the day, we lived in the married quarters of the former Royal Army Medical College along Millbank next to Tate Britain in central London. Accommodation was strictly army-issue utilitarian, no central heating and only rudimentary hot water. Like families up and down the realm, Sunday night was bath night in the Scott household and we all took turns for a scrub. It was done in chronological order so by the time I climbed into the bath, the water was tepid and covered in an oil slick. Disgusting really. These days it would be considered child abuse. But then we’re talking about the era before deodorant, when men were men and pits were ripe. The Sixties stank as well as swung.

The Medical College closed in the Seventies and the buildings now form part of the London University of the Arts. It’s a sign of the times and one I rather approve of.  This was our billet:

Chelsea Schoolof Art

The parade ground once had a small children’s playground on the right of the image and that’s where I did my swinging while my father counted beans in the offices on the far side. I’ve passed the building many times in recent years. In fact, Liam and I got hitched just round the corner in the Sky Lounge in what was the City Inn Hotel.  It’s the Hilton now. You see, nothing stands still and in my book that’s a good thing.

Itchy Feet

In the summer of 2012, we parachuted into Norwich on a wing and a prayer. We hadn’t the slightest inkling whether this golden-oldie city of medieval steeples would suit us or not. It was a difficult ask: somewhere we could replant our off-peak life but avoid the workhouse and somewhere within a bearable commute of London so we could keep tabs on our folks.

When we first paddled up the Wensum, we somehow ended up living in a Grade II listed Seventeenth Century brick and flint weaver’s cottage. The place had been through the wars and oozed history. By the Nineteenth Century, weaving had gone the way of the dodo and the cottage was reincarnated as a public house. In the Thirties, the Great Depression depressed ale sales along with everything else and time was called on the Devil’s brew. After that, the building gradually fell into miserable dereliction, boarded up and unloved. The final insult came when the building was gutted by fire; demolition seemed likely. Cue the city elders who stepped in with their compulsory purchase powers, repaired the structure, modernised the fabric and flogged it off. In 1986 the Weaver’s Cottage was reborn as two comfortable maisonettes with all mod-cons. The partially charred beams above our marital bed are the one remaining sign of that near-death experience.

A year and a bit on, those itchy feet are back but this time we’re moving across town, not continents. We’re rather taken with Norwich and have decided to put down roots by buying a small piece of it (while we can still afford to). So it’s goodbye to our pretty weaver’s cottage with its olde worlde beams, toffee-coloured fireplace and drafty halls and hello to our handsome warehouse conversion just beyond the old city walls with big picture windows, views across the burbs and proper insulation. We’re expecting our bills to plummet. Otherwise, that workhouse beckons.

Expat to Expat

Writing the closing scenes of my new book brought good and not so good memories flooding back. They came in erratic waves, like the mad traffic that used to vibrate past our stone cottage in Bodrum. Our time in Turkey was the best of times, a four year white knuckle ride that frequently left us breathless. Like all adventures, it wasn’t without its challenges. Language, culture, resentment, home sickness, red-tape, isolation, plunging interest rates, political uncertainty, the dreadful expat rat pack – these were just a few of my least favourite things. They made me sad and from time to time, they queered our pitch. I’m glad to say we batted most of them off. Like seasoned old pros, we settled down to a life of wanton self-indulgence in an emigrey bubble of our own making, for a while at least. The trouble is, all bubbles burst sooner or later and now we’re back on planet Earth. We’re grown-ups again, albeit a little older, a little wiser and with completely different priorities.

Expats_002

I’ve often been asked what we would do differently if we had our time over again. The answer is very little. Before we stepped off the treadmill and abandoned the long grey days, Liam became my very own forensic researcher. “Dib, dib, dib, dob, dob, dob,” as the Scouts say and, just like the Scouts, “Be Prepared,” was Liam’s mantra. Even so, despite extensive preparation, we still got tripped up. You see, whether you move to a foreign land for the filthy lucre, the thrill of discovery or just to put your feet up and wait for the Grim Reaper’s call, something unexpected will pull the cultural rug from under you. Trust me. It will happen whether you like it or not so best get used to the idea. That’s not to say you should just jump in the deep end without a rubber ring, that would be daft. No, it makes sense to to avoid that painful belly-flop. Do your homework and find out as much as you can from the people who have been there, done that and bought all the fake tee-shirts. In the long run, it will save you a lot of heartache. And if you like to take your advice in handy sound bites, check out HiFX Expat Tip page, from those in the know. There’s even a little tit-bit in there from me.

Enhanced by Zemanta

The Great Flood

Flood 2014

As a card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding heart pinko liberal (though not in the party political sense), I don’t have much time for the UK Independence Party. To me, it looks like a motley crew of disaffected Tories, the swivel-eyed variety, bible-thumping zealots, little England xenophobes and closet and not-so-closet fascists – not the kind of people I’d give my last Rolo to. Just sit back and watch as they trip themselves up with their own silly rhetoric, something that happens with embarrassing regularity. Cue the nice UKIP town councillor from Henley-on-Thames, David Silvester. Mr Silvester raised a few eyebrows when he wrote a letter to his local rag, the Henley Standard. In it, he claimed that the floods which recently beset these soggy islands were divine retribution for the legalisation of gay marriage. He wrote:

“The scriptures make it abundantly clear that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel (and in naked breach of a coronation oath) will be beset by natural disasters.”

Mr Silvester was once a Conservative councillor (nuff said) but defected to UKIP because of the Government’s policy on marriage equality. I wonder how the wise councillor explains the Great North Sea Flood of 1953, the very year of the Coronation. It was a time when England was still largely the God-fearing, church-going, gay-jailing, warm-beer drinking, class-ridden, women-know-their-place, whites only earthly paradise that, presumably, Mr Silvester pines after. The flood claimed the lives of 300 souls in England alone (with more in Scotland, and the Low Countries), badly damaged over 24,000 buildings and forced 30,000 people to flee their homes. God really does work in mysterious ways.

Mr Silvester’s words unleashed a firestorm of ridicule on social media. So much so, that he’s now considered too extreme even for UKIP, who have since suspended him from the party.  The delicious furore has even spawned some spoof news items. My personal favourites are:

The UKIP Shipping Forecast

Married Gays to Tour Drought-hit Countries

Liam is packing our saddle bags as I write but we think the Sahara might be a challenge, even for these two unrepentant sinners.

Oi Speak Narrfuk Oi Do

Anyone living on these damp little islands and anyone who visits them knows that Britain is a nation of a thousand and one accents and dialects. Homespun and imported lingo twists and turns through town and county. We may live in a global village and in a mass media world where ‘Globalish’ (the cut-down version of English-light) dominates, but that hasn’t stopped many regional accents kicking against the tide. In many cases, they are thriving. English in all its variants is constantly evolving and because the language is such a magpie, words are being dropped and added, borrowed and adapted, created and extended all the time. Our cousins across the Pond might be forgiven for thinking that there are only two English accents: posh and Cockney. But even those stereotypes are changing. These days, only the Queen speaks like the Queen and the word on the street, the inner city London street, is a marvellous infusion of words, phrases and pronunciations from right across the world. Quite different from an Eastenders episode.

Unfortunately, many English dialects are truly indecipherable to an untrained ear. Pity the poor foreigner, jumping into a cab at East Midlands International Airport to be greeted by:

“Ayup me duck.”

The thick Norfolk accent, aptly named “Broad Norfolk” is no less difficult to fathom and notoriously difficult to imitate. Norwich may only be 115 miles from central London but that’s far enough away for Broad Norfolk to survive the onslaught of the insipid Estuary English, the dominant accent of southeast England (and the one Liam and I speak). There’s even an organisation, the Friends of Norfolk Dialect (FOND) which is…

…dedicated to conserving and recording Norfolk’s priceless linguistic and cultural heritage, thus keeping ‘Broad Norfolk’ alive.

Broad Naarfuk is rich in local words and phrases, some of them variants on standard English, others completely unique. A year in and Liam and I are only just beginning to look a little less baffled. Here’s a few to give you a titty-totty taste:

Norfolk_Words

Want to know how all of this sounds? Take a look at this. I’ll be testing you later.

 

Tales from Turkey

Peoples_RepublicLast month I had the pleasure of being interviewed by the gorgeous Shelley Antscherl for the People’s Republic of South Devon, the premier online newspaper for that bejewelled corner of this sceptre’d isle.

“We’d both reached a professional impasse and thought it was high time to take a break from our labours while we still had our own teeth.”

Update – Friday 17th January

sad-face

I’ve just checked back with the People’s Republic of South Devon and my interview (and, the entire website, it seems) has disappeared from the ether.  That’s rather unfortunate. It was there yesterday. My witless words are now lost for all time. Sorry about that.

When Did You Choose to be Straight, Evander Holyfield?

For as long as I can remember, there’s been idle speculation about how and when someone’s homosexuality is established – nurture or nature, a bit of both? Who knows? Certainly not me. Nor do I much care. To my way of thinking, identifying the ‘cause’ of something tends to suggest there should be a ‘cure’ and I’m not in the business of being cured. Why would I be? I’m not sick. What is blindingly obvious is that, whatever the reason, the sexual and romantic attraction to a member of the same sex is not a choice. If it was, many gay people might choose to be straight. After all, it’s so much safer to run with the pack rather than against it. Of course, this doesn’t stop many (almost exclusively straight) people claiming that sexuality is just a lifestyle choice like nipple piercing or kerb crawling. Or smoking, as Evander Holyfield claimed after being the first to be kicked off Celebrity Big Brother here in the UK. This gives a whole new meaning to giving up the fags. Really, Mr Holyfield, it’s time to shut up, bank the cash and go home. This whole ‘choice’ smokescreen is just an easy and convenient excuse to oppress and eradicate, and is used to hateful and sometimes deadly effect across the world, even in the so-called socially advanced West. It’s just lazy thinking from the pond life, the bigots, the politically hoodwinked and the religiously deceived. No, sexuality is not a choice. The only choice an individual has is whether to express their sexuality in a meaningful way. And that isn’t a walk in the park in far too many communities and societies. Who wants to be cast out onto the street by their families, get terrorised at school, end up with twenty years hard labour or get lynched from the nearest olive tree?

No doubt the sterile navel gazing about alleged lifestyle choices will rumble on across the airwaves, in the press, the pub and from the pulpit, long after I’ve shuffled off this mortal coil. Let me leave you with this little video* that debunks the entire myth in a deliciously simple and effective way. Please take note Mr Holyfield. 

*Thank you to my old friend Richard who posted the video on Facebook and who is lucky enough to live out his dotage with his partner, John, on the gorgeous Greek island of Kefalonia (the venue for my first late deal with Liam). Lucky sod. The clip was also featured on the liberal social media site Upworthy

Enhanced by Zemanta

Oo-er, Missus

Most_PopularLet’s face it, the days between Christmas and New Year can be a bit of a damp squib. Unless you’ve been forced onto the tills by the hordes of hysterical bargain hunters flashing the plastic, it’s a time to tread water. The entire western world is stuck between the over-bloated, over-indulgent and sometimes over-wrought Noel (a time when suicides soar) and the over-bloated, over-indulgent and sometimes over-wrought New Year’s knees-up (the most popular time to get dumped). Even the desk-bound know that it’s the graveyard slot with only the filing to do.

Sadly, Liam and I both succumbed to the dreaded festive lurgy. Our inter-feast days were spent on the sofa under a duvet with a keg of Lemsip and a crate of Kleenex extra absorbent. Sadly, there were no hide-the-sausage shenanigans either: we had neither the energy nor inclination for a furtive fumble beneath the eiderdown. Still, I did manage to get my stiff little digits moving and before long I was fingering the internet with gusto, a willy-nilly and desperate attempt to amuse myself. Judging by Perking the Pansies, I wasn’t the only one who swallowed the boredom pill. And what a fruity lot the pansy readers were. On 28th December, four out of the eight most popular posts (as revealed by my sidebar) featured racy images. The lean, semi-naked scaffolder was particularly popular. I hope my thrill-seeking surfers weren’t too disappointed by what they actually found. To quote the late, great Frankie Howerd, Oo-er, Missus.

Enhanced by Zemanta

New Year for Old Farts

We’re getting too long in the tooth for this exhausting New Year malarkey. The days are long gone when we would queue up in the rain, squeezed into sequinned hot pants outside some over-priced sleazy boyz club to take recreational drugs and shake our booties into the wee small hours, surrounded by half-naked sweaty men in tight jeans wrapped in fur and tattoos. Come to think of it, it doesn’t sound that bad at all. Sadly, the spirit is willing but the flesh is oh, so weak. Such unfettered decadence is best left to the young bucks who bring up the rear with stamina and a little lovin’ in mind. No, for us, it was a quick bite in town then back home to a warm hearth, Graham Norton and a bottle of bubbly, all capped off with the South Bank fireworks courtesy of impossibly blond London Mayor, Boris Johnson (a wolf in a golden fleece if ever there was one), Vodafone and good old Auntie Beeb. And fabulous pyrotechnics they were too. It’s always good to bring in the new year with a bang don’t you think?