When I started this blogging lark way back in October 2010, life in pansies HQ was a different place – different house, different town, different country. Remarkably, the blog took off almost immediately – a bit of a sell-out tour, in fact. It led to that book followed by that sequel and the rest, as they say…
When Liam and I packed up our drag in our old kit bags and paddled back to Blighty on the evening tide, I expected Perking the Pansies to wither on the vine like some dried-up old fruit. But this dried-up old fruit soldiered on, posting regularly but less often. And despite the radical change of scene and my doomster predictions, my random ramblings have continued to pull in the punters with respectable viewing figures. This is particularly gratifying these days with the rise of TikTokers and podcasters, when traditional blogging is a bit old hat.
Just recently, though, my hits surged to dizzying heights – stats for January alone have exceeded those for the whole of 2025.
When numbers unexpectedly swelled in the past, it was because a particular post struck a chord or had been featured elsewhere in the blogosphere. But this time round, the renewed interest in my camp old nonsense is more random, spread across a host of old witterings with no discernible pattern. I know not why. I shall simply bask in the glory – while it lasts. Because it won’t.
Yes, folks, it’s that time again when I look back at another year of my missives from the sticks. The most popular broadcasts of 2025 have a distinctly nostalgic feel, with the leader-board dominated by anniversaries and commemorations, righting wrongs, resurrected traditions, memory lanes and old haunts, and topped with a trip to the seaside.
Numbers-wise, Perking the Pansies enjoyed the best year since 2014, so there’s still some life in the old blog yet. Blimey!
What better way to spend a sunny spring afternoon than a trip to the seaside? We’d never been to Southwold, the classy resort on the Suffolk coast because, without our own wheels, it’s a bit of a trek. So an equally classy neighbour took pity on us and offered to take us. We had a…
It’s taken quite a while but we’ve finally recovered from our frolic-filled sojourn on Ithaca. For our second expedition, we were accompanied by a couple of fellow village people who added an extra helping of spice to the mix. We had a ball. We haven’t laughed so much in years. It was well worth the…
Ours is a quiet little village where little happens except for occasional (but mercifully rare) low-level anti-social behaviour – like bored teens on the wacky baccy and cheap cider mucking about down by the river. But there’s one misdemeanour guaranteed to get everyone’s blood boiling – dog poo. Man’s (and woman’s) best friend is big…
People who know me know that I love an old ruin. Nothing gets me going more than a pile of ancient tumbledown stones. When I can’t visit ’em, I watch programmes about ’em on the box. And few TV pundits get the sap rising better than classical scholar Bettany Hughes. Buxom Bettany flits and flirts…
I am bereft. After 14 series over 13 years, we’ve just watched the final two episodes of Vera, featuring the dishevelled and irascible detective from the fictitious Northumberland and City Police Force, played with great panache by the wonderful Brenda Blethyn. Based in and around England’s most northerly county, Vera blends the gritty streets of…
Our double anniversary has sneaked up on us again – 19 years since our eyes met across a busy West End gay bar fit to bursting with a gossipy after-work crowd, and 17 years since we got hitched. This year, we’ve decided to push the boat out and paddle down the Seine. Yes, we’re off…
We joined the enthusiastic crowd of locals gathered on Church Plain in front of the Loddon War Memorial to celebrate the 80th anniversary of VE Day – the end of the Second World War in Europe. The organisers did a splendid job. So too did the kids from the local primary school who serenaded us…
“In the beginning there was work and work was God. After 35 years in the business, the endless predictability made me question the Faith. Liam, on the other hand, was neither bored nor unchallenged but was routinely subjected to the ephemeral demands of a capricious boss, a soft and warm Christmas tree fairy with a…
Last month, His Maj, King Charles, dedicated the first national memorial honouring LGBT armed forces personnel, 25 years after the ban on LGBT people serving in the military was lifted. Before this, those who were – or who were thought to be – gay or transgender were subjected to interrogation and discharge, a brutal and utterly needless…
A couple of summers ago, I wrote a tongue in cheek piece about Dwile flonking, a notorious East Anglian pub game involving two teams of twelve players, each taking a turn to girt (dance) around the other while attempting to avoid a beer-soaked dwile (cloth) flonked (flung) by the non-girting team. Imagine my amazement to…
Once again, a five-year-old tongue twisting post about a game old bird fit for the pot took centre stage – all thanks to the magic of AI. In fact, it’s currently the most popular post of all time. Blimey!
When I put food out for the birds, I don’t expect a big fat pheasant to waddle along and scoff the lot. Bold as brass it was. Where’s the pheasant plucker when you need him? I feel a tongue twister coming on. I’m not the pheasant plucker, I’m the pheasant plucker’s mate, And I’m only…
And what was the most popular image of the year? Drum roll please…
This image of John Garner and me from our first holiday together – to Majorca. Anything that keeps alive the memory of an extraordinary young man is fine by me. As I once wrote in a book…
I remembered John cuddling a weeping stranger at London Pride after the red balloons had been released, each one commemorating someone who had died of AIDS. I remembered John buying a McDonald’s Happy Meal and handing it, without a word, to a beggar on the street. I remembered John helping a drunken tramp to his feet because he’d fallen over and cut his face. I remembered his quick wit and winning smile that lit up my life.
Happy New Year to one and all. If I were the praying kind, I’d be straight down on my knees wishing for a lot more peace, goodwill and glad tidings in 2026.
“In the beginning there was work and work was God. After 35 years in the business, the endless predictability made me question the Faith. Liam, on the other hand, was neither bored nor unchallenged but was routinely subjected to the ephemeral demands of a capricious boss, a soft and warm Christmas tree fairy with a soul of granite – Lucifer in lace. He feared for his tenure. I feared for his mental health.”
These were the fateful opening lines of my very first blog post on the 8th of October 2010 – fifteen years ago – when Perking the Pansies was born on a wet Friday afternoon in Bodrum. Over 1,500 blog posts later, these pansies are still as perky as ever.
They were also the first few lines of my first memoir of the same name, with its enticing, Amazon-friendly book blurb (or so I hoped at the time)…
Jack and Liam, fed up with kiss-my-arse bosses and nose-to-nipple commutes, chuck in the towel and move to a small town in Turkey. Join the culture-curious gay couple on their bumpy rite of passage. Meet the oddballs, VOMITs, vetpats, emigreys, semigreys, randy waiters and middle England miseries. When prejudice and ignorance emerge from the crude underbelly of Turkey’s expat life, Jack and Liam waver. Determined to stay the course, the happy hedonistas hitch up their skirts, flee to laissez-faire Bodrum and fall under the spell of their intoxicating foster land. Enter Jack’s irreverent world for a right royal dose of misery and joy, bigotry and enlightenment, betrayal and loyalty, friendship, love, earthquakes, birth, adoption and murder. Suburban life was never this eventful. You couldn’t make it up.
Fifteen years is several lifetimes in blog-land. In this attention-span-of-a-goldfish era of TackyTok, Instapout, Faceache and the debased twit thing with its daft new porn-site-sounding name, who blogs these days anyway? I may be old hat but I’ve not run out of steam quite yet. And so, as they said just before the outbreak of World War 2, I’ll just…
Way back in 2013, I wrote a brief throwaway piece about a day trip to Wroxham – ‘Gateway to the Norfolk Broads’ – a town entirely given over to those who like to mess about in boats and those who service them. I called it Roy’s Town because we were baffled by the dominance of what seemed to be some bloke called Roy – Roys Supermarket, Roys Pharmacy, Roys Toys, Roys Garden Centre, Roys Car Park. Note the missing apostrophes. Tut, tut.
Last week, the long dead and buried post attracted fresh attention. This happens now and again, usually without rhyme or reason. But not this time. BBC East – Auntie Beeb’s local news hereabouts – featured one of those newfangled ‘influencers’ who was also baffled by Roy’s riches. He posted about it on TikTok.
Riding on his coat-tails, my post got a few hundred extra hits. He got millions. Such is life.
A 2020 post I wrote about a game old bird waddling around our modest smallholding took off last year, and it’s been pulling in the punters ever since. The post is called ‘I’m Not a Pheasant Plucker’. A cheeky nod to the deliciously smutty tongue-twister, it’s remained inexplicably popular. So I did a bit of digging. Google now uses the magic of AI to summarise search results, and when I searched for the post’s title, Google Gemini returned the following AI Overview…
“I’m Not a Pheasant Plucker” is a well-known tongue twister, often repeated as “I’m not the pheasant plucker, I’m the pheasant plucker’s son, and I’m only plucking pheasants till the pheasant plucker comes.” Some sources say it’s a favorite for those learning to speak quickly and clearly, though it can be tricky to say without tripping up. There are also variations and related phrases, such as “I’m not the pheasant plucker, I’m the pheasant plucker’s mate, and I’m only plucking pheasants ’cause the pheasant plucker’s late” according to Perking the Pansies. The phrase highlights the challenge of rapid and clear articulation, and some find it particularly difficult when spoken in a specific accent or with a certain cadence.
Fame at last? Even I have to admit that citing me as an authority on tongue twisters is a tad far-fetched. And anyway, as AI is constantly ‘learning’, my fame has been fleeting. When I recently repeated the search, Gemini returned an entirely different AI Overview sans pansies – sad face. So I’ve been cancelled by AI. But then, won’t we all be in the end?
The 2024 top of the crop had a distinctly thespian theme – gays and the arts. Could it be any more of a cliché? Or maybe it just reflects a need for a distraction in worrying times. Who knows? Also thrown into the mix were celebrating the life of a dearly departed, a fond memory from our lotus-eating days in Turkey, and a few Greek postcards from gorgeous old Corfu Town. Oh, and then there was the little piece about my money-making side hustle as an Only Fans porn star. If only.
For some inexplicable reason, a 2020 post about a game old bird fit for the pot waddling around our modest small holding took off. Why? It’s a mystery.
Also, numbers-wise, Perking the Pansies enjoyed the best year since 2016, so there’s still life in the old blog yet. I thank you.
Happy New Year. Let’s hope for a lot more peace for 2025.
When I started this blogging lark way back in October 2010, life in pansies HQ was a different place – different house, different town, different country. Remarkably, the blog took off almost immediately – a bit of a sell-out tour, in fact. It led to that book followed by that sequel and the rest, as…
What better way to spend Valentine’s Day than a love story at the flicks? So that’s what we did. But this wasn’t any old love story. Oh no. This was the latest cinematic reimagining of Emily Brontë’s epic novel Wuthering Heights, as sweeping as the desolate Yorkshire landscape it’s set against. This new version was…
Another remarkable little gem lifted from the Queer Norfolk Archive at Norwich’s Millennium Library is the astonishing story of the Ferrow sisters of Great Yarmouth who became the Ferrow brothers. Census records reveal they were born in 1922 and 1924, registered originally as Marjorie and Daisy and then re-registered as Mark and David. Mark medically transitioned in…
Earlier this week, I sprinted through the half a million barrier for pansy hits. When I say sprinted, it’s been more of a gentle stroll, and it’s taken nearly fourteen years to get there. Back in October 2010 when I published In the Beginning, my first ramble, the whole social media-verse was pre-big bang. Faceache and the Tweety Pie were only just taking off, and Instapout and Tik-Tac-Toe-Tok were still forming in the ether.
But things move on as they must – technology has become faster, smarter and more accessible. As a result, we now live in a world of information overload where separating the wheat from the chaff is too much of a faff. For the time-poor in a constant rush, it’s just easier to watch and listen rather than read and think. For many, vlogs and podcasts have become must ‘go-tos’ making instant cyber-celebrities of random nobodies. The fifteen minutes of fame we were all promised have been cropped to fifteen seconds to fit. And for the really attention-deficient, there’s a thin diet of cutesy pet pictures and short videos. And who doesn’t love a thirty second TikTok clip of a couple of hunky plumbers lip-syncing to Kylie while waving their heavy tools about?
So what that traditional blogging is old hat. Half a million hits in fourteen years may be small change to the new cyber-kids on the block, but I shall keep on scribbling my old nonsense, regardless – until I don’t, that is. ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ as they said in the War. Victory will be ours.
Looking around at our troubled and troubling world, 2023 hasn’t exactly been the best of years – precious little hope and definitely no glory. Despite the doom and gloom, for the most part village life has remained tranquil and quietly satisfying, with the pansies erect and un-wilted. We know how lucky we are. This year’s crop of top pansy posts reflects this theme and has a distinctly personal and domestic feel with splash and crash, a Turkish dilly-dally, a hungry pot plant and a little slice of Essex chucked into the mix. For some unknown reason, July saw a surge in interest. And then there was the old post about our coffin hatch, which suddenly took off in November. Who knows why? It’s a mystery.
I looked around the tidy cemetery. It was serenely silent except for the sound of birdsong and the trickle of water from the mouths of the dolphins in their petrified embrace. It calmed me. I sat on the bench and inserted the earphones of the MP3 player, already cued for the moment. I pressed play,…
We’ve become part-time groupies for our local village bowls team. To the uninitiated, bowls is a traditional sport beloved of the grey herd in which the objective is to roll weighted balls along a green so that they stop close to a smaller ball at the other end – closest wins. A variant of French boules, the…
We returned from our nostalgic dalliance in Dalyan to water trickling down our dining room wall. Okay, it’s a bit of a stretch to call it an actual dining room. It’s more of a dining area. We quickly traced the leak to our bathroom, shut off the stopcock and summoned an emergency plumber. Nice young…
It’s been a quarter of a century since I last visited Dalyan on Turkey’s pine-clad south-west coast. Back in the day, it was a sleepy village on a dreamy, reed-lined river stuffed with turtles. I’d been told that Dalyan had since grown into a full-on resort stuffed with young Russians avoiding the call-up. As they…
The definition of boredom is cleaning out the bathroom extractor fan with an old toothbrush. Let’s face it, there’s only so much knick-knack dusting a boy can do when home alone. But I’m not yet ready for a meagre diet of daytime TV for the sofa-bound brain-dead – all idle chit-chat from nobodies about nothing.…
I’ve always had a fu*k ’em attitude to authority, particularly the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do hypocrites. You know the kind of thing: politicians preaching ‘family values’ while knocking off their secretaries on the side or hellfire priests touching up the altar boys in the vestry. I’m glad to say that sheer bloody-mindedness is a glorious national trait. And…
We had a little taste of Echo Youth Theatre’s Little Shop of Horrors at the Maddermarket’s recent charity gig and thought, yep, that’s right up our alley. The quirky musical comedy features Skid Row florist Seymour in a kinda horticultural ménage à trois with co-worker Audrey and Audrey 2, his pet pot plant with an…
Liam is away visiting an old friend from his wayward early years as a young gay about town. They worked and played together when Liam did a proper job with a pension attached. It’s the first time I’ve been home alone since we moved to the village over three years ago. Liam left to catch…
We binned the car in 2014 so, unsurprisingly, good public transport is important to us. That’s why we chose a village close to Norwich with a decent bus service – regular and reliable. And Norwich has fast and frequent train services to London for our big city fixes and family stuff. All in all, it…
Essex, the home county to the east of London, has the reputation of being, well, a bit chavvy. But there’s more to Essex than big hair, gaudy bling, fake tans, assisted tits and impossibly white tombstone teeth – and that’s just the men. Beyond the faceless towns of the commuter belt, Essex is a green…
Before the miracle of modern medicine and universal healthcare, life for most was plagued by illness or the fear of it. People croaked in their beds from mundane diseases that today we pop a pill for. Many a cottage stairwell was too narrow for a coffin so some featured a trap door between floors called…
I’m off-air while Liam and I are perking our pansies on Ithaca. Thankfully, Odysseus’ fabled isle has escaped the terrible wildfires that have torched Southern Europe – and now Hawaii and Tenerife – and brought destruction and misery to many, and death to some. Let’s not kid ourselves, the future’s buggered. Our next-door neighbour and his partner were caught up in the devastating firestorms that hit Rhodes last month and were forced to flee their hotel to sleep in a school playground. They made it back in one piece, I’m pleased to say.
So while we’re here…
…I’ve chosen some random photos that didn’t make the grade, blog-wise, during the past year and ended up on the cutting room floor.
And this is my personal favourite, spotted on the underside of a loo-seat lid on a train to London. It brightened up a dull journey. Who doesn’t appreciate a little toilet humour?
Perking the Pansies 