Now we’ve moved to the big city, we had to go to the bank to change our branch. A simple enough procedure, I just had to write (yes write) a short letter requesting the change. Now, teacher Clive’s hand is lucid and tutorial. You can almost imagine three neatly ruled lines. Maurice’s hand is precise, crisp and artisan as befits his elevated status as an engineer. Philip’s script is stately, born of a more genteel age and fashioned down the years to a pleasing flourish. I can imagine him as a medieval monk devoting his life to illuminating the Gospels (and buggering the rector in the rectory). The common denominator here is that all of these marvellous hands are easy on the eye and perfectly legible. My small missive, on the other hand, was not. Furthermore, even after just three simple lines, my hand ached. A dozen or more years tapping on a keyboard has rendered my handwriting laboured and indecipherable; pretty to look but as Liam said, might as well be in Gujarati. So there it is. I have been permanently disabled by new technology.
Category: Family & Friends
So You Think You Can Write a Pop Song?
Listen to this and then read the story.
Liam’s been setting some lyrics to music. The words in question were penned by our nephew and my namesake, Jack. The prose is very deep, very torch song – all lost love, bitterness, angst and misery. It’s entitled the Promise. It escapes me what a 14 year old adolescent could possibly know about mislaid love. I put it down to the comprehensive system. Classically trained Liam can’t do hooks and struggled with the composition. He’s developed a deeper appreciation of the well-crafted three minute pop song. What you heard was the result. Not a pop song perhaps, but beautiful nonetheless.
Ask Angela
I’ve been working on a website for our friend Angela. A vetpat of distinction, Angela is like a delicious transatlantic cocktail – a Fulham girl with a Yankee twist. She provides a one stop shop for all of your needs in the Bodrum area. We have first-hand experience of Angela’s great service – fast, efficient, friendly and cost effective. Take a look at Ask Angela and if you need any help, give her a call.
PS I don’t get a penny!
Sweet Swedes and Wretched Russians
My faith in our distant Nordic cousins has been mercifully restored by the arrival of Joel and Mikaela, a sweet couple from the northern pinelands of Mother Svea. They own a Tepe house on the level beneath us. Joel is a tall, slim, handsome older man with silver hair and a laid-back charm. His wife Mikaela is the archetypal Aryan beauty, a blue-eyed blond bombshell. Their warm and kindly disposition is a welcome respite from the grumpy old Danes next to us. They invited us in for tea. Their grand villa is a picture of understated Scandinavian chic. We chatted away for hours, a delicious smörgåsbord of wit and wisdom.
I recalled my first visit to Stockholm when I was a hormonal adolescent. The little local grammar school I attended laid on the most incredible journeys designed to broaden horizons and expand the mind. One early morning in 1975 twenty or so sweaty boys boarded a train at Victoria Station and headed for the coast. We sailed on the morning tide to Flanders where we began our grand passage across the great North European Plain.
First stop Berlin. It was the height of the Cold War and we spent two days exploring the cruelly divided city, escorted through the wall at Checkpoint Charlie. Onwards east, our carriages were pulled by an ancient steam locomotive that choo choo’d through a flat, monotonous landscape. As we neared Poland our party was raided by a detachment of East German border guards brandishing Kalashnikovs. The mean-looking, chisel-chinned troopers in tight beige uniforms rifled through our belongings and ransacked the couchettes. Perhaps they were looking for Levi jeans. Calm was quickly restored and we continued our incredible journey. A brief stop in Warsaw precluded an excursion to the city. We continued on across the Soviet border to Smolensk where the entire train was silently raised from its bogies and placed onto a new set of wheels to fit the wider Russian railway gauge.
Second stop Moscow. Tsar Brezhnev was on the Soviet throne and we were tightly chaperoned by an over-painted woman in cheap scent. She was tailed by the KGB. Shops were empty save for Russian dolls, and strangers approached us in Gorky Park wanting the clothes off our backs. Moscow was drab but the metro was palatial. The Kremlin was magnificent and Red Square was vast and windswept. Lenin in his marble tomb looked like a Madam Tussauds’ dummy. The comrades around us looked fed up and miserable as they shuffled dutifully past the macabre exhibit.
Third stop Leningrad that was. The Venice of the North was a more visually pleasing spectacle with imposing baroque architecture painted in multi-coloured delicate pastels. The majestic enormity of the Winter Palace containing the Hermitage Museum was too vast to comprehend. As if Peter the Great’s grand imperial capital wasn’t grand enough we embarked on our fourth stop, a day trip to Novgorod, one of the most celebrated cities of medieval Rus. This ravishing city is twinned with Watford of all places.
Fifth stop Helsinki across the Gulf of Finland. This picturesque and verdant city reminded me of a mini-St Petersburg. Our whistle-stop excursion was all too brief.
Sixth stop stunning Stockholm where we expected to see a sex shop on every corner. It was the sexual repressed seventies when buttoned-up Brits were convinced that emancipated Swedes were at it morning noon and night. We were disappointed.
We steamed back to Blighty across the cold northern seas in a Ruskie rust bucket that saw service in World War Two. We shared the wreck with a party from an all-girl’s school in Scarborough. I watched the boys chase the girls and wondered what all the fuss was about. Our teachers allowed us to take a drink at the bar. Perhaps this is where my gradual but certain descent into alcohol dependency all began.
Final stop Tilbury Docks and back to earth with a bump. Three weeks for 150 quid which my parents saved for months to pay. All in all a fantastic adventure that was a little lost on a bunch of post-pubescent fourteen year olds whose main preoccupation was masturbation.
PS Perking the Pansies has few followers in modern Russia but I spied a lone flasher in Novgorod the other day.
Wacky Races
Clement invited us and Karen to inspect his new country pile. Charlotte, Alan and Charlotte’s mother, Lucia, were also asked along. They knew the way so we decided to follow them in their car. We took the Torba Road, one of the most perilous on the peninsula. It had been raining earlier in the day and the pot-holed, uncambered road was liberally puddled. As we approached a tight bend a coach conveying early bird tourists careered towards us. Liam slammed on the breaks. The car skated uncontrollably towards the coach, bounced off the side and performed a pirouette the great Margot Fontaine would have been proud of. Miraculously, the car came to rest neatly at the side of the road. Shaken but not stirred, Liam looked around to see which of his petrified charges had snuffed it. It was a relief that we were all still in the land of the living but my lower half had moistened uncontrollably.
Charlotte and Alan realised that we were no longing tailing them and returned to find us. They parked up on the opposite side of the road and crossed over to our car leaving Lucia in the front passenger seat. Within minutes, like a set piece from ‘Casualty’, a car sped around the same bend, skidded on the same oily wet patch and hurtled towards Lucia. The car ricocheted off the driver’s door and crashed into the ditched verge. Liam fretted that the driver had not survived the impact and ran to the rescue. Others ran towards Lucia fearing the worst. The ditched man climbed unscathed and smiling from his battered Fiat. It seemed he rather enjoyed the theatre of it all. Before we knew it we were all up to our ankles in mud attempting to haul his sorry wreck back onto the road. Lucia was extracted unharmed, a little shaken but otherwise in fine fettle. As the fiasco unfolded more cars joined the elaborate ice dance, skids and near misses piling up like a scene from ‘Wacky Races’. Fearful that she might join the casualty count Karen sensibly disappeared into the woods for safety. Lucia joined her.
The damage to both our cars was astonishingly slight and the matter was glossed over with the coach driver in a typically Turkish way – a nod, a wink, a half-hearted exchange of details and rounded off with a hearty handshake. Needless to say, we didn’t make it to Clement’s that day.
Party Poopers
In honour of Karen’s visit we decided to throw a bit of a do, our very first. We were a tad anxious. We didn’t want to transgress the unwritten social rules that must be obeyed. We sought the advice of catering Guru Chrissy on the food situation. She assured us that nibbles and a cold platter would be acceptable for a cocktail party. Guests will know to eat beforehand.
Our début soiree was well graced. Liam and Karen prepared a delightful spread of cold meats, cheeses, mezes, breads and objects on sticks. Karen mingled amiably with la crème dispensing easy urbane charm. We had our first delicious taste of Charlotte’s mother, Lucia, a seasoned older lady with a twinkle in the eye and a racy past. The more Lucia imbibed, the more her carefully cultivated middle class Donegal brogue degenerated into Bogside. Towards the end of the evening, we showed a DVD of our civil partnership ceremony – a calculated risk but one that went down a storm. Eyes welled, even those of macho Chuck.
Bernard got incredibly pissed very quickly and fell into the car at the end of the evening. He wasn’t fit to drive but managed to arrive home without running down any street dogs or wrapping his flash BCSD car around the trunk of an olive tree. Drink driving by emigreys is depressingly commonplace. Chrissy telephoned the next day and explained why Bernard had got so drunk – he didn’t eat because there wasn’t any hot food. ‘If it had been my party,’ she loftily pronounced, ‘I would have served a lasagne.‘ What a bloody cheek.
Mrs Madrigal’s Visit
Flush from her Thelma and Louise road trip of Dixieland, jet setter Karen parachuted in for a few days of rest and relaxation. Our London landlady and I became acquainted at work and our attachment is one of the few that has endured in civvy street. Chrissy was were obstinately keen to meet her and dropped by for coffee. The encounter didn’t go too well, nor had I expected it to. Chrissy will never rub along with any female friend of ours for she is determined to be top fag hag.
Mrs Madrigal lookilikee Karen is a superb cook and threw together a culinary tour de force. Liam tried to wrest her from the stove. “Bugger off and get me another drink” she insisted. Our livers took a royal pasting as we chatted into the small hours. The next day we all had wine flu and the kitchen resembled Sarejevo during the Bosnia War.
Hi De Hi
The final instalment of our trip to Blighty was a cheap and cheerful family gathering at Butlin’s in Bognor Regis for my Mother’s 80th birthday celebrations. On the morning of the great day we organised a modest birthday bash. The family assembled at the designated time and my eldest brother gave a speech as befits the head boy. This was followed by the British première of ‘The Only Virgin in London’ a photo and video montage of Mother’s life set to music. There was hardly a photo of the Bognor Belle without a fag in hand. Mother has puffed away on twenty a day since the Suez Crisis with few detrimental side effects. It’s a shame she can’t get her fix on prescription as the cost is crippling on a state pension. Liam had worked on the DVD for months creating a superb piece of slushy, sentimental art worthy of the grand occasion. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
I was pleasantly surprised by Butlin’s. Not at all the ‘Hi De Hi’ potting sheds and am dram vision of Hell I was expecting. There’s even a five star hotel attached. Apparently, Bognor is the oldest recorded Saxon place name in England and the sunshine capital of Britain, though the latter accolade is hardly worth bragging about. The town was bestowed the Regis suffix after George V convalesced there in 1929. Subsequently, on his deathbed royal aides attempted to console the grumpy and dim huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ King-Emperor by suggesting he would soon be well enough to visit Bognor again. His final words are widely, but incorrectly, reported as being “Buggar Bognor!” I have some sympathy with the sentiment.
The Matriarch
We spent a joyous evening with my kid sister, her partner and their four football obsessed boisterous boys. She is the only one of my siblings never to have married. Her partnership has endured longer than any other in my family where divorce has been the depressing norm. Their humble home is south London is warmed by love and respect and my sister rules the roost with gentle discipline and a dogged determination that her boys will be decent people. She is a chip off our mother’s block and she is succeeding.
It’ll Make You Go Blind
Clive and I know one another from our salad days. In those distant times we were two of the three fey musketeers. Our third partner in camp crime was Paul who jumped the good ship Blighty many decades ago to dwell in a Parisian garret and chain-smoke Gitanes. Birds of a feather flock together. We somehow knew we were different and so did everyone else. We were relentlessly teased from the moment we entered the school gates. Nothing physical, you understand. That would be unseemly at a traditional grammar school with 400 years of history. Besides, beatings were reserved for the teachers to discharge. I suppose we hardly helped our cause by being rubbish at rugby and lip-synching to the backing vocals of Mott the Hoople’s Roll Away the Stone in Clive’s front room. Our sex education consisted of lecturing hormonal adolescents on the evils of masturbation. It nearly caused a riot.
Ian is a more recent acquaintance, a mere 15 years so a young friendship. As saucy singletons he and I trawled the dances halls of Europe and had a ball. Nowadays we are both hitched and respectable members of the elder gay community. Ian exists at the epicentre of gay culture by managing a licenced sex shop in Soho. He won’t tell his mother he’s gay. She knows of course. Mothers always do. But then, being nearly 50 with teeth and hair intact and never marrying is a bit of a clue.
Perking the Pansies 