Category: London

Brighton Rocks

To mark our joint birthdays, Liam and I are off to Brighton (London-by-the-Sea) for a couple of days in the company of a pair of drunken old playmates to take in the sea air and drink the town dry. Thankfully, the lashing remnants of Hurricane Gonzalo have already cylconed over otherwise the air might have been a little more bracing than we had bargained for. After the Brighton booze cruise, we’ll be in London to mark the coming of age of my nephew and namesake, Jack. He’s having a bit of a do with the class of 2014. And yes, we’ll be the old farts hiding in the corner sipping on a sweet sherry and trying hard not to leer at the young men in big hair and skinny jeans. No doubt we’ll be bringing our livers back in a Sainsbury’s bag.

Here’s Jack with the old girl earlier in the year.

Jack and Mum

 

National Coming Out Day

Coming OutIt’s National Coming Out day today. I highly recommend it. It’s good for the soul. Easy for you to say, you might think. After all, I grew up in metrosexual London not the bible-bashing Prairies or Koran-thumping Steppes. New York may be the city that never sleeps but London is the city that doesn’t give a shit. And, to a certain extent this is true. It was relatively painless for me to trampoline out of the closet, disco dancing to ‘I am what I am,’ (The Village People anthem not the later more famous song from ‘La Cage aux Folles’). Still, it wasn’t quite the walk in the park some might imagine. It was the Seventies and, at the time, few people joined me out in the cold. And anyway, this post isn’t about me. I’m old hat. It’s about those still struggling to come to terms with their sexuality. So to mark National Coming Out Day, I am republishing my classic 2012 hit ‘Letter of Hope to LGBT Teens’. If it helps a bit then I’m glad.

Rainbow Stripe

Dear 15 Year Old Me,

That was Then…

Jack, what the hell are you doing? She’s a nice girl and all that but, really, you know you’ll never get beyond heavy petting. Come on, be true to yourself. You’re leading her down the garden path to frustration and disappointment; she deserves better. Just admit that you don’t like ‘it’. Her pretty bits are all in the wrong places, aren’t they? Okay, it’s 1975, it’s the decade that fashion forgot and you’re only fifteen, but you know you know. It’s not just a phase.

London may well have swung through the Sixties when androgynous men wore makeup and liberated ladies burnt their bras, but it’s not stopped you thinking you’re the only one. Yes, trendy Chelsea is just across the river but it might as well be on a different planet. Pick up a newspaper, any paper, and it’ll scream ‘pervert’ at you. ‘Paedophile’ even. The thing is, you don’t feel like a pervert and you’re certainly not interested in pre-pubescent boys. You’re just different from your brothers and the other boys in your class. Stop beating yourself up and get a grip. It’s okay to be different. Your parents will love you regardless, though I admit the conversation might be awkward, perhaps painful. They won’t like it. There may be tears and recriminations. No parent wants their child to stand out from the crowd for all the wrong reasons. It might be dangerous taking centre stage in a hostile world but you’re strong enough to take the flak. Come on, Jack. You learned real pride and you learned it at your father’s knee.

This is Now…

Jack, what the hell are you doing? Turkey’s a nice place and all that but, really, it’s a Muslim country and you and your partner are living openly as a gay couple. You are 51 and resolutely ‘out’ to everyone, take it or leave it. I hear you got ‘married’ back in 2008, a splendid fanfare of friends and family. So, they came round then? You’ve had a life full of peaks and troughs, good times and bad. This is life as it should be. So, your sexuality is only one of the things that define you but it is one of the important things. You’re a happy, rounded individual. You don’t compromise. You change attitudes just by being you. You see? You did it.

Billy Elliot, Live from London

Billy Elliot1September was a bit of a cultural marathon ending in a theatrical flourish. Liam surprised me with an early birthday present, a broadcast of the musical Billy Elliot streamed live from London. Set in a small mining community in the northeast of England during the 1984/85 miner’s strike*, Billy Elliot is the tale of a young boy’s unusual ambition to become a ballet dancer set against the backdrop of a divided community on the edge of defeat and the inverted snobbery of his family.  Obviously, his nearest and dearest get behind him in the end and Billy goes on to play the lead in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. What we didn’t know when we took our front row seats at Cinema City was that the show was also going to be beamed to 554 cinemas in Britain and Ireland and to others around the world – simultaneously across Europe and with time delays to Asia, Australia and North America.

The performance began with a tribute from Elton John (who composed the score), a back stage tour from one of the current quartet of Billys (and our Billy for the day), the incredibly gifted Elliott Hanna, and an introduction by Stephen Daldry, the director of the musical and of the 2000 film on which the stage show is based. The gloriously uplifting finale was a specially choreographed foot-tapping mashup by 25 Billys from past and present. The raw energy and mesmerising talent made me feel distinctively average.

I have to confess that I’m a bit of a Billy Elliot disciple. I blubbed all the way through the film, cried buckets during the stage show (which I saw in 2008) and wept uncontrollably into my large glass of Pinot Grigio through the broadcast. I wasn’t the only one failing to get a grip. The broadcast became the first live event to go to Number 1 at the UK Box Office. It was seeing those hunky miners in tutus that did it.

I leave you with Grandma’s Song (different Billy, same grandma). If you don’t like a little bit of swearing, you’d best change channels now.

*This was the second strike-themed show of our September culture-fest, the first being the fabulous film Pride which we saw at the beginning of the month.

Pits and Perverts

Thirty years ago, the National Union of Miners (NUM) was in a desperate battle with the Thatcher Government to save their livelihoods and their communities. It was a war of attrition that went on for twelve long months. It was also during the dark days of the gay ‘plague’ with John Hurt scaring the life out of OAPs with crashing tombstones every night on national TV and a certain fire and brimstone chief constable saying that gay people were ‘swirling in a human cesspit of their own making.’ Believe me, it was no fun on the picket line or the dance floor. The Police had a habit of raiding both. At the time, I was living with a quantity surveyor who was neither ‘out’ at work or to his family. What sexuality has to do with counting bricks I shall never know but that was the way back then – most closets were firmly locked from the inside. Society had a habit of making hypocrites of us all. I was his guilty secret (needless to say, he wasn’t mine).

So what do striking miners have in common with dancing queens? Not very much you might think. I didn’t think so either until I saw Pride, a new BBC Film by Marcus Warchus, the new Creative Director at the Old Vic. On general release today, this funny and illuminating movie is based on the true story of a small group of London activists who raised money to help the families of the strikers. They called themselves ‘Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners’ and they did exactly what it said on the collecting tin. Officially, the über-straight, blue collar, backs-to-the-wall-lads NUM weren’t too keen on accepting the support of a gaggle of dirty pervs, even during the worst of times. So the brave pervs took their cause direct to the coal face by sprinkling a little fairy dust (and quite a lot of cash) on a small Welsh mining village. Cue the considerable talents of some seasoned pros (Imelda Staunton, Bill Nighy) who know how to deliver a line or two and some gifted fresh faces to inject a dash of youthful angst and exuberance. The clash of cultures is pure magic. Moving without being sugary, political without being preachy, candid without being gratuitous and clever without being patronising, the film is a joy to watch and one of the best British films I’ve ever seen. Really, it’s that good.

Kate Bush: Before the Dawn

kate bush1It’s fair to say that Liam is a HUGE Kate Bush fan. She was the poster girl above his student bed. He knows every note and every word of every track. So when Ms Bush announced her London gigs (her first for 35 years), he began hyperventilating and hasn’t caught his breath since. Liam was working the day the tickets were released so it was my finger hovering over the mouse at the prescribed time. It was made abundantly clear to me that failure to secure a ticket was grounds for divorce. Lucky for me then that I got hold of one in the minutes before they all sold out. Just the one ticket, mind. I like a bit of Kate but not at any price. Then the gushing reviews came rolling in like this one from John Aizlewood in the London Evening Standard…

‘The audience so desperately wanted Bush to be brilliant that by simply turning up, she had triumphed without trying. That she did try so very hard and that she was so obviously, so unambiguously brilliant, made last night something to tell your grandchildren about.’

Liam is at the concert and I’m home alone. I now rather regret my decision.

Lauren Bacall, RIP

Lauren Bacall died today. I’m not easily star-struck. As a young gay about town along Chelsea’s Kings Road, I worked in Habitat during its heyday. Stars and celebrities were ten a penny. I even had a ding dong with a famous actor once. It was no big deal. But one day, during a frenetic Saturday afternoon on the tills, Miss Bacall breezed in from the street and stopped the traffic. Her name spread through the building like flu and the store froze, jaws dropped and cash registers fell silent. Now that’s what I call a Hollywood moment.

 

Say it Again, Sam

I’m like a stick of rock. No matter how much you nibble, you always find the word ‘London’ running through me. But, my love affair with the Old Smoke has cooled of late. Now I’m older, slower and stiffer, I’m less in the mood for the no-time-to-talk, coffee-on-the-go fast lane of many colours that is the great metropolis. These days I’m content to dip in and out as and when. And each time I do, London whacks me across the face to remind me not to neglect my ardour. Just like the time, during the Turkey years, we returned for Christmas and found ourselves surrounded by a gaggle of girls painting the town red and having a ball. We’d got so used the absence of women from our Turkish townscape, it felt totally liberating. Then there was the afternoon we emerged from Tottenham Court Tube Station to be swept along by a tsunami of people drawn from the four corners of the world demonstrating how truly international London has become. And just recently, I stood in the concourse of Victoria Station and noticed how young everyone was as they darted around me. I suddenly felt ancient. Norwich, by comparison, seems positively geriatric despite her two universities and student vibe. Wasn’t it Samuel Pepys who famously wrote, ‘when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life’? I may have slowed down a little but I hope I will never tire of either.

Driving Miss Daisy

Driving Miss DaisyApart from a half-hearted attempt at learning to drive in my twenties (booked some lessons, took a test, nearly killed someone, didn’t bother with a replay), I’ve never seen much point in getting behind a wheel. After all, the Tube has always been the best way to get around the Smoke; only plummy-voiced wankers in Chelsea tractors and micro-dicked Russian oligarchs in Jags drive through Central London. And let’s face it, I’ve always been partial to sipping the sauce, so a night bus was always the obvious choice as I tottered off home in the wee small hours with a drunken Yank in tow. I do admit though that I’ve always taken the precaution of stepping out with a bone fide driver;  a chauffeur comes in very handy for those out-of-town errands.

Liam was driving a company VW when we first met. I can’t deny it was convenient and the cross-Channel lunch in Le Touquet via Le Shuttle was a fun date. My pert booty slipped quite nicely into the front passenger seat and the sound system was loud and fabulous. When we took the momentous decision to jump ship and paddle ashore to Asia Minor, the Golf went back to the dealer and we didn’t buy a car in Turkey. Why would we? We were neither mad nor suicidal. Four years later, with family duties to perform in London, we pitched our tent in Norwich and parked a sexy-arsed Renault Megane outside it. And now, with a new flat and different duties, va va voom has been handed down to my sister and we’re car-less once more. They’ll be no more driving Miss Daisy here. And anyway, Sainsbury’s deliver the Pinot Grigio free of charge.

Births, Deaths and Marriages

Over the cold winter on the sofa nights, ITV, Britain’s main commercial broadcaster, ran a documentary series featuring the activities of the City of Westminster’s Register Office where births, deaths and marriages are recorded. It was a distracting little show, a  funny and touching fly-on-the-wall human interest fest for a chilly midwinter’s evening that helped the digestion and wasn’t too taxing on the brain. There is something rather dignified and valiant about the ordinary people – the hatch, match and dispatch squad – who deal daily with the relentless cycle of life that we must all face and the relentless cycle of emotion that goes with it. Veteran registrar of 28 years, Patricia Gordon, confessed that she was none too comfortable with the notion of civil partnerships. But, through friendship and by example, fellow registrar Tommy helped her see the light; now she can’t wait for him to find his own soul mate so she can do the honours. And guess what? Patricia officiated at our Civil Partnership in 2008. Here is she doing the business:

Thank you for changing your mind, Patricia. 

The Biggest Cock in Town

On a recent trip down to the Smoke, Liam and I decided on a post-matinee snifter. We headed towards Trafalgar Square to the stage of our inaugural meeting, a chilly evening in the spring of 2006. The chance encounter is best described in my first book:

PtP_Excerpt

The rest, as they say, really is history.

As we hurried past the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, we were confronted by the biggest cock I’ve ever seen, glowing bright blue in the late afternoon sunshine. It caused quite a stir, I can tell you.

Two cocks for the price of one
Two cocks for the price of one

The puffed up rooster, by German sculptor, Katharina Fritsch, is the latest temporary exhibit on the empty corner plinth of the Square. The work is intended to poke fun at the vainglorious imperial statues of puffed-up men (Nelson, George IV, and generals Havelock and Napier) that surround it. There have been many fleeting displays on the podium down the years, from the daft to the inspirational, the profound to the whimsical. The reason there is no permanent statue has been an open secret for years. The plinth is reserved for an effigy of Her Maj after she drops off her throne. Given her mother’s longevity (the last Empress of India lived until she was 101), the chances are they’ll be a more temporary erections to come.

Back in Norwich, the cock of the coop theme continued.

Coop

Personally, I’d rather win a week in the Maldives but then, this is Norfolk, the nation’s bread basket and home to Bernard Matthews, king of the gobblers. It’s a funny old world.