Category: Ireland & Irish

The Only Gay in the Village

We fancied a singalong fright night in the village and headed down to a local beachfront steakhouse. Popular with the hardy resident emigreys, it’s owned by bubbly, brassy bottle-blond Berni Belfast and her Turkish husband, Deniz, who cooks the best steak on the peninsula. Berni lays on the usual winter fare of fixed price menus, quiz nights and karaoke to coax the emigreys out from under their duvets. I like unpretentious Berni. She is the real deal, calls a spade a shovel and is a bracing breath of fresh air on a brisk night.

Proletarian Berni has a high-octave accent delivered like a sub-machine gun. As my Mother is from that part of the world I can catch the conversation. Alas, poor Liam understands hardly a word and just nods and smiles politely like the Queen at a Commonwealth jamboree.

Berni regaled us with tales of the bar wars. Allegedly, following months of clandestine subterfuge, her former front of house left without warning to launch his own restaurant taking with him their head chef and photocopies of their menus. I sense industrial espionage is rife in the catering trade here but to set up a new establishment dishing up identical fare for the same audience only a few hundred metres along the pretty promenade does seem a touch provocative. The bilious bad blood bubbles just beneath the surface.

Blackpool Bobbi was our camp karaoke compere for the evening’s random entertainment. Unforgettable veteran resident Bobbi fosters a unique, instantly recognisable look. Uncompromisingly clad top to tail in Persil whiteness from his back-combed highlights to his shiny patent leather loafers, he belts out a passable interpretation of ‘My Way’ between the vodka shots. I admire his pluck. Truly, Bobbi is the only gay in the village.

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.

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.

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.

Let Them Eat Cheese

The European Union’s plans to distribute cheddar to the needy of the Irish Republic in the run up to Christmas must be causing a stink. It’s gratifying to know the poor children of the Emerald Isle will not go to bed hungry. Would you like pickle with that? You couldn’t make it up.