Category: Weather

In the Bleak Midwinter

East Anglia tends to get to best of the weather – it’s often drier and warmer than other parts of these wet little islands. During the bleak winter weeks, when low damp clouds cloak the rest of the nation and drive half the population into Thomas Cook to thumb through the glossy travel brochures, we often enjoy clear skies and bright sunshine. But in the last twenty-four hours, we’ve gone from this:

Sunset Over Norwich

To this…

…as an Arctic snap blew down from the North Pole closing roads, runways, schools and A&E Departments. Brrr…

So today, I thought better of my routine (a stroll to the gym – like I need an excuse to step off the treadmill – followed by a steaming americano and a trawl through the free papers). Instead,  I slipped on my fluffy mules, whacked up the heat and tuned into daytime TV. Let’s hope the weather turns by tomorrow. At my age, a diet of soporific trash on the box could easily become habit forming.

Catching Crabs

Those naughty young men at Warwick University Rowing Club certainly know how to perk up a dull day.  Since first getting their kit off in 2009 to raise money for their club and to combat homophobia in sport, they’ve raised over £200,000 in 77 countries. Not to miss a trick, the enterprising bunch have also branched out into posters, tee shirts, greeting cards and hoodies. They’ve dropped their drawers again for 2015 and have just completed a three-week promo tour in the USA. These boys are getting as big as the Calendar Girls.

Believe it or not, back in my old school days I used to row myself. No, really, I did. And I wasn’t the cox. It was infinitely preferable to playing rugby, a sport I loathed with a passion. Paddling up and down the Thames in the rain could be a bit grim but mucking about in boats during the summer months was a pleasant way to pass a warm Wednesday afternoon. I was the Bow in the B Crew and we excelled only at catching crabs.* As if to prove our uselessness beyond reasonable doubt, in 1976, we proudly came last out of a cast of hundreds in the Head of the River Race, an event that takes place between Mortlake and Putney every year. Quite a feat, don’t you think?

Here’s the school boathouse at Barnes Bridge.

Emanuel School Boathouse

Needless to say, none of my crew looked anything like the fit boys from Warwick. More’s the pity.

*A rowing error where the rower is unable to timely remove or release the oar blade from the water and the oar blade acts as a brake on the boat until it is removed from the water. This results in slowing the boat down. A severe crab can even eject a rower out of the shell or make the boat capsize (unlikely except in small boats). Occasionally, in a severe crab, the oar handle will knock the rower flat and end up behind him/her, in which case it is referred to as an ‘over-the-head crab.’ Source: Wikipedia.

On the Seventh Day of Christmas

2014 has been quite a year for us and our brethren…

The Seventh Day of Christmas

Okay, okay, I tried to make it scan to the tune of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ but failed miserably. Liam’s the musical one, not me. With such a helter-skelter year, I guess it’s it’s no wonder I didn’t get the second book out in time for the festive rush. The good news (or bad news, depending on your point of view) is that it’s with my publisher and will be out in the new year. Liam is hyperventilating at the prospect – my fiercest critic seems to like it. The blog’s done brisk business too with over ninety posts. Here are the top ten hits for 2014 – the usual diet of Turkish delights, smut, divine retribution, emigrey nonsense, men in women’s clothes, internet curios, fine guides and the love that dare not speak its name. I’m nothing if not predictable.

There is Bodrum and Then There is Turkey | The Biggest Cock in Town | The Great Flood |  | Gumusluk Travel Guide | Pantigate | The Love Letter | Istanbul Pride 2014 | Desperately Seeking Doreen | Bearded Men in Dresses | Norwich-Over-the-Water

There is Bodrum and Then There is Turkey
The Biggest Cock in Town
The Great Flood
Gumusluk Travel Guide
Pantigate
The Love Letter
Istanbul Pride 2014
Desperately Seeking Doreen
Bearded Men in Dresses
Norwich Over the Water

This was the most popular image for 2014. I can’t think why.

Tom's Posing Pouch

Here’s looking ahead to more pansy adventures in 2015. And the Man Booker Prize. And oh, a few less real life medical dramas would be nice. Happy New Year to one and all.

Camp as Christmas

What with all the glitter, tinsel and shiny balls, there’s nothing as camp as Christmas and there’s nothing camper than the Christmas tree outside Chapelfield Shopping Centre here in old Norwich. The flashing extravaganza is a symphony in lights and music, brightening up the low grey skies every thirty minutes throughout the day. So, ladies and gents, girls and boys, to brighten your day during the dull interlude between Christmas and New Year, I give you the climactic finale.

My Old Lady

My Old LadyA foul afternoon of driving rain pushed us through the doors of Cinema City to catch ‘My Old Lady’, starring Kevin Kline, Kristen Scott Thomas and the incomparable Maggie Smith. We sat in the back row and watched the film above the nodding heads in fifty shades of grey. Kevin Kline plays a penniless, ex-alcoholic, never-to-be-published New York author who inherits a rambling run down Parisian apartment from his philandering father. He thinks he’s in the money but finds out that he’s also inherited a sitting tenant in an equity release arrangement, French-style; she can’t be evicted and he must pay rent to her. Step forward Dame Maggie as the feisty old madame with her foot in the door and Kirsten Scott Thomas as her brittle spinster daughter. It’s a salutary tale of how your parents fuck you up (along the lines of the Philip Larkin poem) and how not to let the truth get in the way of a fine romance. Set in the trendy Marais district of Paris, the BBC production oozes cool Gallic va va voom laced with arty pretensions. The film has had mixed reviews but we found it well worth stepping out of the rain for.

Godspell Reloaded

Godspell Reloaded

Godspell from Mixed Voice

September has been a bit of a culture fest – a fabulous film about rainbow comrades rattling the tin for the cause, Liam’s born again experience when kooky Kate flew out of reclusion and, right at the start of  the month, a musical treat from Mixed Voice at the Norwich Playhouse. Every year, Norfolk’s premier entertainment company asks the audience to vote on a show they should try on for size. Last year it was Rent. This year, the vote went to a revival of Godspell, the retelling of the parables attributed to the famous Galilean. With its happy clappy tunes, a flower power cast in primary colours and a newly polished script fit for the iPhone generation, it’s huge fun. Not nearly as successful as the unstoppable and overhyped Lloyd Webber juggernaut, Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell offers more of a playground intimacy and really suits a smaller venue. Believers and non-believers alike, who could argue with the carpenter’s message of peace and love, particularly when it’s delivered by the multi-talented players of Mixed Voice? But I did spot a small congregation of dog collars fixed firmly to their seats during the standing ovation at the end. Maybe they didn’t like the frocks. There’s no accounting for taste.

Norwich Pride 2014

We’ve had a good run of sun so far this summer and there was no rain on the Pride Parade. Old queens that we are, we watched the Technicolor pageant from the balcony of the Theatre Royal with a triumphant glass of chilled white. A striking feature of this year’s procession was Umbrellas of Love created by local artist Vince Laws, highlighting the desperate plight of many LGBT people throughout the Commonwealth, particularly poignant as the Commonwealth Games are currently being held in Glasgow. According to the Commonwealth Charter, member states agree to respect and protect human rights. Total crap of course. It’s illegal to be gay in 42 of the Commonwealth 53 nations where punishment ranges from the terrifying to the barbaric – 10 years imprisonment to execution. And don’t get me started on female genital mutilation. So there it is, the Commonwealth Charter is just so much cheap toilet paper.

My underpowered Samsung so-called smart phone wasn’t smart enough to do justice to the fun and frolics of the parade. For a good selection, take a gander at the Norwich Pride Facebook page.

Coach and Horses

After the procession we re-grouped in the Coach and Horses pub to quench our thirsts. Today, of course, we have terminal wine flu.

The Lofty Visitors

English weather at its worst is a depressing and insipid affair – no drama or performance, just days of persistent damp greyness. A few weeks of low-lying gloom were brightened by a warm front of visitors to the Norwich micro-loft. The high pressure pushed the clouds aside, to leave the flatlands basking in sunshine. First up were vintage friend, Clive and his partner, Angus. The generous day trippers brought booty : a ‘corkcicle,’ a nifty little ice fairy’s wand that magically chills wine in an instant, and a fabulous hand-thrown bowl that Clive lifted from the souks of Marrakesh. From the practical to the decorative; they know us so well. We lunched in Wild Thyme, a vegetarian restaurant with a Dickensian address you couldn’t make up if your tried – The Old Fire Station Stables, Labour in Vain Yard – and bread and butter pudding to die for.

Wild Thyme

A few days later came Karen, our very own Mrs Madrigal, who, during our Turkey years, stored us in her en-suite loft on our trips back to the motherland. It was a significant birthday for her (discretion prevents me from revealing which) so we dined at the opulent Assembly House, one of the most gorgeous examples of Georgian architecture anywhere.

Spending a penny found us accidentally caught up on a film set with the cast and crew milling around waiting for the cameras to roll. As I emerged from the gents, a familiar face flashed past wrapped in a white towelling robe. A little digging later revealed that we’d stumbled upon the making of ’45 Years,’ a film starring Tom Courtney and Charlotte Rampling. It was the ravishing Miss Rampling, the classy lead of many a Seventies’ film noir who I’d seen rushing to her close up. Men over fifty will remember that, unlike page three stunnas, Charlotte got her baps out for her art and not for their titillation (or so it was claimed).

After dinner, it was back to the loft for a little more fizz and a lot more gossip. At the end of the evening, we poured Karen into a cab which conveyed her to the Maid’s Head Hotel, reputedly the oldest in England. Next day, Karen’s verdict was that, unlike the well preserved Miss Rampling, the depressing old pile is in dire need of a facelift. Time to call in the Hotel Inspector?

The Great Flood

Flood 2014

As a card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding heart pinko liberal (though not in the party political sense), I don’t have much time for the UK Independence Party. To me, it looks like a motley crew of disaffected Tories, the swivel-eyed variety, bible-thumping zealots, little England xenophobes and closet and not-so-closet fascists – not the kind of people I’d give my last Rolo to. Just sit back and watch as they trip themselves up with their own silly rhetoric, something that happens with embarrassing regularity. Cue the nice UKIP town councillor from Henley-on-Thames, David Silvester. Mr Silvester raised a few eyebrows when he wrote a letter to his local rag, the Henley Standard. In it, he claimed that the floods which recently beset these soggy islands were divine retribution for the legalisation of gay marriage. He wrote:

“The scriptures make it abundantly clear that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel (and in naked breach of a coronation oath) will be beset by natural disasters.”

Mr Silvester was once a Conservative councillor (nuff said) but defected to UKIP because of the Government’s policy on marriage equality. I wonder how the wise councillor explains the Great North Sea Flood of 1953, the very year of the Coronation. It was a time when England was still largely the God-fearing, church-going, gay-jailing, warm-beer drinking, class-ridden, women-know-their-place, whites only earthly paradise that, presumably, Mr Silvester pines after. The flood claimed the lives of 300 souls in England alone (with more in Scotland, and the Low Countries), badly damaged over 24,000 buildings and forced 30,000 people to flee their homes. God really does work in mysterious ways.

Mr Silvester’s words unleashed a firestorm of ridicule on social media. So much so, that he’s now considered too extreme even for UKIP, who have since suspended him from the party.  The delicious furore has even spawned some spoof news items. My personal favourites are:

The UKIP Shipping Forecast

Married Gays to Tour Drought-hit Countries

Liam is packing our saddle bags as I write but we think the Sahara might be a challenge, even for these two unrepentant sinners.

Downtown

Downtown

Unlike many of the stately old homos of my generation, I never quite developed a taste for the torch-song trilogy of Garland, Minnelli or Bassey. And I can take or leave the new old girls on the block – the fallen Madonna, nip and tuck Cher or crazy Diana (Ross not Spencer). But, my spot is very soft for a classy dame from Surrey, a woman who first hit the streets in the year war broke out. Then, she was performing with an orchestra in the entrance hall of a Kingston-upon-Thames department store for a tin of toffee and a gold wristwatch. She was seven. Seventy four years on, she is still going strong and is currently on national tour. I am, of course, referring to the iridescent and timeless Petula Clark – child protégé, forces favourite, Hollywood starlet, Sixties pop princess, chanteuse Française and West End superstar.

Autumn was fashionably late this year but made quite an entrance when it did eventually arrive. We were battered by brolly-snapping weather as we wandered the windy streets of Ipswich in search of the Regent Theatre, East Anglia’s largest.  We had a stiff double at the bar while we dried off. The drench did nothing to dampen our spirits and as we took our third row seats in the auditorium, the crowd buzzed with anticipation. Miss Clark has been treading the boards for a very long time and this was no better illustrated than by the giddy silver-haired fans who surrounded us. Every care home in Suffolk must have been drained that night. I swear I spotted a St John’s Ambulance crew on standby just in case the excitement got too much; mercifully, we were spared a medical emergency. Still, our Pet raised the blood pressure with a superb performance, giving those X Factor wannabees, a fraction of her age and a fraction of her talent a marathon for their money. From Gershwin to Lennon via Elvis and Gharls Barkley, Miss Clark stepped through her set with style, humour and remarkable agility. Naturally, ‘Downtown’ got the biggest cheer but, for me, it was ‘I Couldn’t Live Without Your Love’ that got me all dewy-eyed. You see, I’d chosen it as the soundtrack to the champagne reception at our Civil Partnership (“Ah,” I hear to cry in unison).

Come the finale of the two-hour gig, the wrinkly congregation got to their feet for the much-deserved standing ovation (though, in truth, it was more of a slow stagger than a youthful leap). Even a wheelchair-bound man in a turban found his legs, Twas a miracle from the lady who famously played Maria Von Trapp’s favourite singing nun. Hallelujah, sister.

Get your hankies ready…