Gay Dunkers

I had a meeting this morning at the Musicians Union. Fiona and I are both members of the writers' committee, which means, periodically, we attend events, which involve a group of us sitting around an enormous table whinging about the music business and occasionally cracking inappropriate jokes. The inappropriate jokes are almost exclusively my terrain. Things just pour out of my mouth. Heaven help me when I'm old. Today, for example, an old timer was talking excitedly about an accordion recital. My mind thought, "that sounds a bit dull, I wonder how she made it so exciting?" My mouth said, "was she performing naked?"  Out of the blue. Just like that. Mortifying. 

In my defence I was actually recovering from the shock of eating meat for the first time in my life. A number of boxes of sandwiches and wraps arrived for our lunch and I overheard someone pointing at a box and saying, "the veggie ones are all here..." I chose one at random from the box and ate it without thinking anything apart from that it tasted a bit smoky and weird. At the same time a group of us were discussing how long we'd been vegetarian and I was proudly saying that I'd converted to the dark side in 1982. I realised with horror that it was only the wraps with little green flags sticking out of them that were veggie and that I'd been chowing down on some kind of smoked pig. I laughed it off, of course, saying that I felt like a new man, but secretly I felt sick and sad and my tummy immediately started looping the loop.  

En route to the meeting (which was in Oval) Fiona and I noticed a circular, very tall building on the horizon which neither of us had ever seen before! It's astonishing that a building could suddenly appear which two, generally observant people, would fail to notice going up. After much conversation we decided it was the lighthouse-shaped building in Vauxhall, the one which the helicopter collided into in fog a year or so ago. I'm used to seeing it from the river, which provides a very different vista. I plainly don't venture into the south very often! 

This evening I went to BAFTA to see Carol and Julie's rehearsed reading. Their organisation sets out to promote the work of black and Asian writers in film and television and they do so with great aplomb. I wondered why there wasn't something similar for LGBT people but then remembered that it's the norm to be gay in the Arts!