Category: Column

I’m sorry to be a gay stereotype but football bores me senseless.

I’ve never seen more than a few minutes of any sports match and I don’t intend to change that now. For the duration of the World Cup I’ll be avoiding the TV and newspapers (it seems to have pervaded everything, even Google has football themed graphics). I’ll definitely be staying out of any pub that has a huge flag draped outside and a television the size of a standard door. I’ll be wincing at pound shop nylon flags draped on cars or people wearing face paints.

My family weren’t sports viewers and we grew up without the presence of competitive sport anywhere in the house and with a healthy disinterest in people running round in rash inducing nylon. Surely there are more important things to put your competitive energy into like fighting for the right man, a good place to live or the killer job. I’ve sustained the disinterest and taken it to a slightly higher level (i.e. hatred of all sports). I just don’t get why people become such fanatical crazed monsters. My worst public transport nightmare isn’t the slurry drunk or the youth playing music and spitting. It’s the two men avidly discussing sport and becoming increasingly shouty and loud as their tempers and passions rise. I feel like I may as well be hearing a Martian language for all the sense it makes to me.

I see the appeal of football for some gay men: men in skimpy shorts frolicking about on a field. That can be found elsewhere though. Why bother watching the game? Just take it to another level and search for one of the multitude of sport related porn flicks on the Internet. At least you don’t have to watch the dull bit and the action is more interesting than a few men kicking a ball to each other. If you’re unlucky the film will have a ‘plot’ a.k.a. a couple of South Londoners shouting across to each with lines they’re reading off a card whilst they ineptly kick a ball just before the shower scene when the fellatio starts.

Last night I was kept awake till the early hours. I don’ t know what the result was but they were either happy/sad/angry/elated/disappointed. It seems to translate into the same way: drunken people shouting at 2am. I love that people have a passion but what the f**k? I get very excited by literary awards but you don’t catch me running down the High Street shouting about them in the small hours. It strikes me that sport lacks decorum at times.

I can waffle on for hours about things I hate, like orange skinned W.A.G.s, bizarre hairstyles and hideous tattoos. I can bemoan overpaid dunderheads and managers in car coats. Let’s maybe just leave it that football is not my thing and I can choose to avoid it and will try really hard (except when I’m in the supermarket, looking at social media, in the street, at work, reading the news, on the train or anywhere out of the house at all when I can’t avoid it all as it’s being rammed down my throat). If you need me for the next month I’ll be in isolation with a pile of books and a pot of coffee or maybe partaking of my own particular sport: competitive complaining and griping.

I did something sly and naughty this week. I kept a big secret. I wasn’t hanging around in a sauna in a skimpy towel, working my way through a selection of sex toys, snorting Crystal Meth or shoplifting. My secret was far worse: I was having a birthday, a secret birthday.

I’m not ashamed at aging. I’m irritated by aging (thinning hair, ear hair, nostril hair and other hair related things) but not ashamed. I don’t mind being in my early 40s at all. I feel more comfortable in my skin and more assured of what I do and don’t want and am able to better articulate this.

One thing I don’t want is to be made a fuss of. I can’t abide those silly office things where colleagues put a few quid into a pot and ritually buy each other a card with a silly slogan and a gift voucher for some shop you wouldn’t necessarily set foot in under usual circumstances. I’d rather get something useful like a packet of cigarettes or a tenner off my supermarket shopping. I hate all those inane Facebook messages and tweets from people you barely know that only know it’s your birthday because the site tells them so. I’m not keen on shelves full of cards that the combined cost of would buy me something useful (e.g. cigarettes). They seem a bit of a waste of money to me.

I’m pretty rubbish at pretending. I can’t do faces of delight when offered a present I don’t want. I’m actually pretty impossible to buy presents for. Who’d want their clothes or household items chosen for them? Not me, for sure. From the age of about 5 I was quite determined to choose my own attire and soft furnishings. The usual suspects are out: booze and chocolates (drink issues and migraines rule those out). That leaves books, DVDs or music which are surely impossible things to buy for someone unless you actually inhabit their head and police their taste and monitor what they’ve already read, seen, own or have listened to.

I do like cake. Cake is good. I just can’t be bothered with all that embarrassing attention that goes with it. I nonchalantly spent the day at work and almost forgot it was my birthday, pulled up occasionally when I typed the date. It was perfect. My partner insisted on taking me out for a meal, which was sweet and a friend made a cake for me. We quietly consumed it whilst watching T.V.

I’m not totally miserable but just know what I like. Being older is great. Being able to choose to do or not do something is better than anything.

I’m afraid that I’ve got some really bad news for you. I’m not usually so blunt but there’s something that I need to tell you. You’re going to die one day. Sorry about that. I know it’s not palatable but it’s going to happen. No one has, as yet, escaped the inevitable. It’s an uncomfortable fact for most of us and one which we, generally, try to avoid thinking about.

The organisation Dying Matters has been promoting talking about death, forward planning and trying to break down taboos surrounding death. Their recent survey findings are fascinating. Only a third of people have made a will, half of people don’t know what their partner’s funeral wishes are and over 70% of people haven’t given any though to what would happen to their on-line legacy. Future care planning is important too. How can medical professionals decide what treatment to give us if we haven’t made our wishes clearly known about what kind of treatments we’d like to have carried out?

There are a whole host of additional issues that can present themselves for LGBT people. If you’re in a relationship, is your partner the person nominated to be your next of kin, your advocate or your beneficiary? There are whole hosts of horror stories about bereaved partners who are left homeless, cut out of funeral plans and denied the place they should be entitled to in the pecking order of mourners by resentful and bigoted families. I certainly wouldn’t want that to happen to mine or anyone else’s partner.

The digital legacy frightens me. I hate the idea that my social media accounts would linger on with mawkish pictures of sad kittens and inept tributes after my death. That’s not my style at all. It may suit some people but isn’t for me. My partner has strict instructions to close the accounts down the minute I croak. He just has to look in the bureau and find the folder marked “Death” to find the will, passwords, explicit instructions and funeral plans. Maybe I’m an extreme example of a control freak but is that so bad?

Naturally, LGBT people have their own special issues. No one wants a Grindr account loitering in the ether with their preference for ‘hard tops’, after they’ve been hit by a car. What about your collection of European twink porn? Is that something you want your mum to have to sort out for the charity shop along with your barely worn Aussie Bums? Does anyone know which Britney song you want at the funeral and which ex shags you definitely don’t want there?

Flippancy aside, it’s something that’s worth thinking about. Anyone who’s had an unmarried or non-civil partner-shipped relative or friend die intestate will tell you just how much easier it would have been to sort the post mortem affairs out with a sturdy will in place. Anyone left with a dying relative or friend who has had no idea about what their care or funeral wishes are will tell you how hateful and hard that can be.

It’s definitely worth checking out the Dying Matters website. It’s not as bleak or painful to read, as you’d think and it’s bloody important. Seriously.

Read more here: http://dyingmatters.org/

As a child my parents were occasionally like a composite of the characters in the sit-com “The Good Life”. Like Margot and Jerry Ledbetter, they were a teaming mass of petty snobbery but also like Tom and Barbara Good, they were quite self-sufficient. We were dragged along on a regular basis to their allotment garden and forced to help out. In between we’d be roped in to help tend flowerbeds or the fruit trees in our suburban home or water and clean the many potted plants and herbs indoors.

I would receive unwanted gifts to sweeten the pill: a bright blue children’s wheelbarrow and a various miniature garden tools. For me, a Dutch hoe will always be something you push between your potatoes rather than a woman in a bikini in a window in Amsterdam. I recall happily the joy of being given my own patch of soil to grow vegetables in and watching little shoots of life poking through but this was counterbalanced by the horror of being a picky eater with parents who had a seemingly never ending supply of fresh vegetables.

Mud was never a thing I relished, being a pernickety child who liked to dress in tweeds and velvets like a mini aristocrat. I hated being outdoors and whiling away hours that could have been spent indoors hunched over a book reading about Milly-Molly Mandy or Narnia. I’d petulantly pace around collecting insects in matchboxes then putting them back unharmed later or kicking moodily at old tree stumps whilst thinking about the good-looking music teacher who played a guitar. I still recall the repetitive boredom of picking green beans or shelling peas, followed by the even worse indignity of having to eat them.

I longed for parents who bought their vegetables ready washed from Marks and Spencer. Actually, I longed for parents who didn’t buy vegetable at all unless they were pre-cut into crinkle cut chips.

The irony is that my parents taught me some valuable skills: patience and the ability to tend and grow things. I’m now a demon gardener and totally love nature. I’m also a vegetarian who eats at least 10 of my 5 a day. The ironic bit comes in also when you realise that in my London flat I haven’t got a sod of soil to my name. In times of stress I drift off and imagine myself in a soothing suburban garden full of flowers and fruit trees (an unlikely prospect, given London house prices). I picture myself in a cast iron Victorian conservatory spraying greenfly with a copper implement.

Even in my fantasies I draw the line at growing vegetables, though. There’s a huge supermarket round the corner. Some childhood experiences put you off things for life.

I’ve never been a fan of exercise. I don’t suit Lycra, sweat just standing still and don’t like any activity that you can’t do and smoke a cigarette at the same time.

There’s also the whole business of how it taps into my teenage memories of draughty sports halls, hideous PE kits and the barking, homophobic bully of a teacher we had. I once went to look round a gym and had to have a lay down on the sofa afterwards. I didn’t like the testosterone fuelled grunting and the grim determination but the vending machine looked fine to me. They didn’t seem to have a reading area or a kiosk selling cigarettes and Cosmopolitans, though, which was a major negative.

I’ve always thought that I could get away without exercise. I walk for miles. I am thin as a rake and am generally creakily healthy. I’ve been getting these badgering letters for the past year, at least once every couple of months. Apparently, as I’m over 40, I need a health check. My discomfiture at being frequently reminded that I’m over 40 is immense.

Stupidly, I succumbed and am have now been told that I’m fat on the inside. I have moderately high blood pressure, high cholesterol and am carrying a 10 to 20% risk of developing heart disease in the next 10 years. I feel so much better for that. Although I have the BMI of a jogger, I have the blood of a slightly obese man who watches a lot of daytime television.

I protested, naturally. I’m a vegetarian who eats about 15 of my 5 a day. I walk a lot and although I have a penchant for a sugary latte and the odd cream cake, my diet is pretty good. The nurse countered back by pointing out that the main problem was the part of the cholesterol which indicates that I’m not getting enough exercise.

She helpfully suggested that I try swimming (near drowning in 2001, municipal baths, memories of verruca socks: Big Fat NO!), cycling (aside from the fact I can’t balance well enough to ride one, there’s all that mangling type death stuff on the roads to consider: even fatter NO), a gym (Just NO!) and jogging (…live to 90 but with agonisingly painful knees: NO!). Apparently all of these things also need to be done 5 times a week for 30 minutes. Now that’s fanatical, if you ask me. I have a job and a lot of theatre to see.

Naturally, I have a plan. It involves an exercise. I’ll walk up to the counter of Costa Coffee in a brisk manner and very quickly say “A skinny latte please” and without breaking out a sweat, I’ll pour in 2 sachets of sugar instead of the usual 3. I think that should help. I’ll think about the exercise next year and in the meantime I’ll briskly turn the pages of a novel. That should sort it all out.

It’s that time of year when the sun shines (on and off) and we go to work on and off due to a string of bank holidays. If you’re anything like me then your mind will, sadly, turn to the dull subject of cleaning.

I’ve always had a bit of a minor obsession with cleaning. Maybe it’s because I’m descended from a long line of Northern housewives. Bleaching net curtains and scrubbing steps is part of my heritage. I don’t quite go as far as donning a crossover pinny and a headscarf though.

It started in my youth. My father was an obsessively tidy man and would set us all off into cleaning missions at the weekends. This was compulsory. I soon managed to gain a little number where I would get extra pocket money if I helped out as a regular thing. I quickly learnt that the power of creating order out of chaos was a cathartic, as well as financially lucrative, act. Pushing round our old feeble vacuum cleaner with its crinkly brown paper bags and flicking away at dust with a bright yellow duster bought me an enormous sense of satisfaction.

A psychologist once told me that my desire to be clean and tidy was a way of exerting order into my often-chaotic life. Although I have little control over my stressful job, the sometimes-dodgy men in my life or my family, I can control how shiny the bath taps are. She definitely had a valid point.

I’ve bought every gimmicky cleaning product on the market, over the years, damaging not only the environment but also my pocket and probably my lungs. I’ve staggered out of chemical warfare clouds in foggy bathrooms, burnt my hands with excessive bleach and teetered on rickety chairs to reach nooks and crannies that really don’t need reaching. I’ve washed the numbers off the controls of a brand new cooker by using neat detergent, taken the surface off loo seats and generally caused a lot of mishaps.

I’m much more moderate than I used to be. Maybe I’m more mentally healthy than I used to be or maybe just too tired to be bothered with it all. I’ve learnt to live with the odd streak on the mirrors or a dusty crevice. It’s not the end of the world and certainly no terrible reflection on me or my morals and decency.

I definitely see a solution ahead but it’s a complex and difficult goal. It involves a rich husband and a fleet of maids. I’m not sure that my partner would approve though.

It’s almost one year since I moved to London from the Midlands and it’s been an interesting experience.

My friends fell into two camps. They were either horrified that I could think of moving to such a place, visualising that I’d be living in a minute flat somewhere akin to Piccadilly Circus and spending my days shouldering rude and unfriendly people out of my way, lonely and afraid and paying ten pounds for a latte. The other camp was more excited and saw it as a huge opportunity.

Maybe both were right. It has been the most exciting opportunity but my elbows are definitely sharper and keener to shove. The chances to see art and culture are amazing and I tend to wear myself out trying to see too much. I’ve had to give myself a stern talking to after periods where I’ve been doing so much that I’ve been left feeling frazzled.

I live in a place no busier or madder than where I lived before and the coffee is the same price. Maybe my rent is a little higher (3 times higher and the increased wages don’t cover this) but it feels worth it and I have plenty of room and lots of leafy green spaces nearby. As for the unfriendliness: people here are just as friendly as in the North. People talk to me at bus stops and checkouts and are happy to engage and connect. The place I work is full of people who are warm and kind. People on public transport are no less rude than further north (i.e. still quite rude). Maybe the tube is less friendly, but who can blame that population. They’re crammed into packed carriages underground trying hard to get somewhere: wouldn’t you be a little bit determined with no energy left to chat or smile?

Statistics show a huge North/South divide in terms of money and employment and rates of immigration that falls into pockets depending on area. Personally, I hate lazy stereotyping. People are people wherever you live. Yes, those London accents are sometimes tricky to understand and they do get irate when I call them all Cockneys. Yes, jellied eels will never replace chips and gravy in my heart but I bloody love London and I also bloody love my hometown too. Long live mobility.

I often feel such apathy when it comes to politics and I’m a little ashamed of this. We live in an age of complacency when we often feel that having the latest technology, watching the latest T.V. program or owning the latest item of clothing is of rank importance and it’s hard not to fall into that pattern.

Sitting in the comfort of my home, I feast my eyes on the events of other countries and let myself feel briefly indignant at how homosexuals are treated in Russia and some African countries and then I pour myself another coffee and carry on flicking through a glossy magazine or idly perusing the Internet.

I saw a play yesterday about the 1967 legal changes that paved the way for gay equality in the UK. The laws that were passed led to homosexuality being decriminalised between consenting adults in private, albeit with an unequal age of consent. It’s hard to believe that it was so recent in our history that we were recognised as lawful and not some sinister and grotesque force of evil.

Contrast this with stepping out of the theatre and seeing a right wing group with racist and homophobic ideals marching in protest through central London. It’s a stark reminder that we may have won the majority of the battles over the past 50 years but that the war is far from over. We’re in constant danger of losing ground. Public opinion changes and forces with evil or just ignorant and misguided intent gain ground without us even noticing.

Pre-1967 there was a dark and dangerous climate for us. Blackmail, imprisonment, and psychiatric therapy: these were all far from unusual things for the homosexual male to be faced with as well as venom, hatred and vilification.

Like most of us, I’m a little bit lazy, slightly complacent and frequently preoccupied with own tiny sphere of existence. This isn’t going to change massively. However, I have made a vow and that’s to be more aware. I’m going to read more, notice more and see where that takes me. I’m not going to turn into Peter Tatchell and put myself in the firing line constantly (my nerves are too fragile for that) but at least it’s a step forward. Maybe you could join me in this? Who knows where it’ll take us and what good it might do.

Right, that’s enough politics. The soapbox can go back for storing soap in and I’m off to look around shops. I’ve done my political thinking for today.