Category: Britain

Pansies Across the Seas

I’ve recently found a nifty little device that I’ve added to Perking the Pansies. It’s called ‘Revolver Maps’ which pin points the location of my visitors across the globe. I now stare at the screen for hours to watch the cities of the World light up and pulsate to the perking beat of the pansies. Unsurprisingly most of my punters come from Blighty, the Emerald Isle or the Turkish Riviera though the map of Europe is beginning to twinkle like a Eurovision Song Contest score board with nil point currently awarded to France. Perhaps they don’t like pansies in La Belle France though there was little evidence of it when I was last in Gay Paree.

Most unexpectedly are the pansy punters from more far-flung corners of the globe. I seem to have enthusiasts on both American seaboards but have attracted few fans in the vast lands in between where the bible-belters lurk. The Canadians like to perk (well the Mounties will do anything to keep warm in minus 20 degrees) and I have one or two camp followers in Latin America. The fragrant Far East is where the pansies never fade and I’m particularly delighted by our man in Borneo. Oz is a disappointing late starter though the ever cheerful Aussies do have  a biblical flood to contend with. I have high hopes for Africa and track the map from Cairo to Cape Town looking for signs of pansy flashers.

The South Pole is excluded from my pansy blog domination. Nothing grows down there anyway and I don’t want the egg-heads of Antarctica to be diverted from their vital work on global warming lest the pansies drown from rising sea levels.

Emigrey Spongers

Maurice invited us to his gaff for festive drinks on Christmas Eve. I was delighted to discover that Bernard from Majorca was in town. Bernard is the El Presidente of the ‘First Wives Club’, the fellowship of the ring of exes with whom Maurice has remained friends. Liam thinks the whole concept of staying on good terms with old flames is unnatural. I have membership card number five. It’s fair to say that Maurice has a distinct type, since we are all stout short arses. His current squeeze is no exception. We are the six gobby dwarves to his stocky Snow White.

Meeting up with Bernard again reminded me of my encounter with the Spanish chapter of the guild of emigreys many years ago. Bernard runs a bar in Mallorca and Maurice and I visited him one wet, windswept winter. We were invited to Sunday lunch with an east country couple called Doreen and Jim from Norwich.  Jim was doing hard labour retiling Bernard’s bar floor for which he was being handsomely paid. I asked what brought them to Spain. “Too many foreigners coming into the country and sponging off the social” came the depressingly familiar reply. I nearly fell of my chair when Jim boasted, without the slightest hint of irony, that he was claiming incapacity benefit.

We’re Not All Hairdressers

I caught up with Maurice in our favourite Soho dive. We used to be an item and met in the very same bar one damp Friday after work. We spent two years together. We guided each other through some hard times and shared some extraordinary emotional moments of healing and revelation. Maurice is an engineer which is a little unusual among the brethren.

What’s for Tea Tonight Dear?

I trudged across half of old London Town to take tea with Philip. He and his partner, David, run a fancy fromage shop in Twickenham which is doing brisk business judging by the brigade of chattering class Guardian readers queuing around the block. Unfortunately, they just missed out on the EU contract to supply Parmigiano Reggiano to the Irish needy. I managed to extract Philip from the pong for an all too brief catch up.

Philip writes a fabulous foody blog called ‘What’s for tea tonight, dear’ which is a beautifully crafted, chatty read full of mouth-watering recipes. His innate intelligence is beautifully blended with creativity, wit and style. All this pales into insignificance when compared to his astonishing ability to drink me under the table.

Sex, Drugs and Sausage Rolls

London is a rare winter wonderland, gripped by a vicious Siberian front. Nevertheless, we slipped the leash of social and family commitments for a self-indulgent Sunday sojourn to a Vauxhall crush bar. We took drugs, stripped off our tops to display our newly acquired slimline torsos, flirted a little and reconnected with our subculture as the snow fell roundabout. We looked utterly ridiculous but we had a ball. You can take the boy out of London but you can’t take London out of the boy.

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Loft Living London Style

The Blizzard

We observed the blanket blizzard from the safety and comfort of our loft musing how we might manage the social merry-go-round that is  to come. Still, we were content in the knowledge that the house was warm, snug, leakless and the power uninterrupted. Perchance, I may experience my very first white Christmas.

The Emigrey Express

We flew home on the emigrey express. To our fore was a banquet of bleached, bottle-blonds whose tinted tresses disguised a sea of solar haggard, sour facades. Obviously a peroxide barnet is a VOMIT prerequisite.

To the aft lay a sallow, loud-mouthed, drunken imitation of Archie Moon cuddling an empty bottle of Bells. He’d spent his time in the departure lounge downing the duty free and popping frequently to the tuvalet for an illicit fag. He dozed through most of the flight but awoke ten minutes before touchdown and casually lit a cigarette which was rapidly dispatched by the horrified staff. Meanwhile, Liam munched his way through two packets of chewy caramel, soft nougat and crispy chocolate balls that cost more than the airfare. We landed just before Gatwick was closed for the winter.

Blighty life pal, Karen, is housing us during our trip to the mother country, storing us in her delux en-suite loft. She is blessed with a wonderful home – chic and bohemian at the same time. She is a classy, off the wall lady of taste, charm and substance and fancies herself as a Mrs Madrigal type. The cap really fits. Karen’s husband, Peter, died of cancer a couple of years ago. His decline had been indecently swift, and she is slowly emerging from the disabling pain of grief: a hard slog that I know only too well.

Break a Leg

Sipping my morning cuppa lounging about the patio in sun specs and a T shirt in early December is a novel experience. The stark contrast with the frigid Siberian winds that have plunged Albion into a mini ice age is not lost on me. My mother, a spritely, feisty 81 year old Ulsterwoman still young enough to run for buses, complains bitterly through chattering dentures that she is unable to leave the house for fear of a breaking a hip. She is not the kind of woman to be imprisoned for long. As a beautiful young girl she was swept off her feet by a penniless, pretty soldier boy with a twinkle in his eye. She was plucked from a small Irish town made famous by an IRA bomb and found herself on a slow boat to Malaya. I was a home birth in an army barracks which may explain my enduring fetish for uniforms.

Dear Old Blighty

I make liberal use of the word Blighty. I assumed it to be a relic from the days of the Raj and was curious as to its exact origins. Wikipedia defines Blighty as…

…an English slang term for Britain deriving from the Hindustani word vilāyatī (pronounced bilāti in many Indian dialects and languages) meaning ‘the country’, a word which itself is derived from the Arabic word wilayat meaning a ‘kingdom’ or ‘ministry’.

Well, fancy that.

The Emigreys

The ex-pats we’ve met are a select collection of friendlies and freaks. I have christened them the emigreys, retirees serving out their twilight years in the sun, most of whom seem to be just a little to the right of Genghis Khan and who bought a jerry built white box in Turkey because it was cheaper than Spain (well, it was at the time). Everyday emigrey life operates within a parallel universe of neo colonial separateness preoccupied with visa hops to Kos, pork sausages, property prices and Blighty bashing.

Cream of the emigrey crop are the vetpats, veterans who have been living in Turkey for many years. Usually better informed than their peers with a less asinine view of the world, vetpats have taken the trouble to learn Turkish and are better integrated into the wider community.

A little noticed and discrete group of emigreys is the sexpats, grey men of means who are serviced by young Turkish men in return for a stipend. The contract suits both parties well and the trade is conducted in secrecy far removed from prying eyes and tittle-tattlers.

We are trying hard not to get too involved and cultivate a mysterious aloofness – courteous but distant – spectators rather than participants. We prefer to amuse ourselves with the obsequious wintering waiters, most of whom seem both repelled and fascinated by our obvious union.