Wedding anniversary

Last night, at about midnight, I had a sudden flash of “what the fuck?” I realised that we are actually living through what, for so many years, has been the sort of thing which only happens in movies. Thirteen years ago, I worked as the acting coach on a film called 28 Weeks Later. The film was set in a post-apocalyptic London, 28 weeks after a weird virus had turned most of the population into rage-fuelled, blood-thirsty zombies. Actually, we weren’t allowed to call them zombies because they weren’t actually dead - they were known instead as the “infected.” We did a lot of filming in iconic London locations in the early hours of the morning. At the time it felt like quite a treat to be on Shaftesbury Avenue with all the theatre marquees turned off and no cars or pedestrians in sight. It gave us the opportunity to go down into abandoned tube stations, and strange tunnels and snickleways. One Sunday morning we did some filming in Finsbury Park. This particular sequence focussed on an upturned car on Stroud Green Road, positioned outside a bashed-up pizza restaurant. I think there were some corpses. To be honest, there were always corpses - it was a horror movies after all! I remember watching a night bus passing the scene, and a group of somewhat terrified clubbers, bleached-out from a night of partying, staring down at the scene, trying to compute what they were witnessing. 

And last night, I suddenly realised that I was living through the very thing which had seemed so far-fetched back in 2007!

I watched aerial footage of some of London’s key tourist destinations, all eerily empty. There was a shot of the pedestrian bridge over the Thames which runs from St Paul’s to the Tate Modern. We filmed sequences for 28 Weeks Later there as well - one early morning in October. The sunrise we witnessed on that day remains the most spectacular sunrise I’ve ever witnessed. The sky was initially filled with streaks of mauve and lavender and then, as the sun appeared, everything turned orange and yellow. Every window lit up - almost as though the whole city were on fire. 

I have another rather special memory attached to that bridge. Back in 1999, when it opened, Sam Becker and I were working at the New Ambassadors Theatre. The bridge had some sort of design flaw which none of its architects had predicted. If people walked on it, on masse, their footsteps would somehow align, and the whole bridge started to bounce - really quite dramatically. Sam and I, keen for new experiences, decided to walk from the theatre down to the bridge to experience the phenomenon for ourselves. I guess it was almost midnight when we finally got there, but the place was heaving with people having a fabulous time walking across the bridge. And it was the most bizarre, stomach-churning experience. Like a fairground ride. It was almost as though the floor were somehow rippling underneath our feet. It was how I imagine an earthquake must feel. 

Of course, the following day, the bridge was closed for an extended period whilst they figured out how to remedy the situation, so I am always very grateful that Sam and I had thought to be so spontaneous. 

I think I feel a little better every day. I’m not coughing anything like as much as I was, but my sense of smell still hasn’t returned. I thought I could smell the soap I was using in the bath this morning, but that might have been a memory of the good old days! I am having surreal dreams, which my father tells me is a symptom of a virus. I dreamed a few days ago that I’d learned how to play the flute. For me, this is about as random as anything I could ever have imagined. Hell would freeze over before I EVER took an interest in the devil’s pipe. Flutes are the coriander of the musical world.

It was our sixth wedding anniversary yesterday, and, in line with our once-yearly tradition, we strolled up to Alexandra Palace. Readers will remember that we got married - in song, and on the telly - in a disused Victorian theatre deep within the “Ally Pally” complex. 

Our yearly visit to the Palace gives us an opportunity to see whether spring has come early or late in any given year. In 2014 it came particularly early. We’d had weeks of wonderful, unbroken sunshine in the run-up to the wedding and this is very much captured in the filming we did for the show’s opening sequence. Meriel appears in shot at one point like Julie Andrews twirling in a sunny alpine meadow!

Nathan’s sister stayed with us the night before the big day, and we got a taxi up to the venue first thing. There are a number of photographs of me holding a bouquet of dusky pink roses which had been sent to us by the singer Katie Melua - a particularly wonderful surprise and it was the first thing we were handed as we arrived. I remember my brother arriving very early, and then Hilary, and the five of us walking, with our photographer Gaby, to a blossom tree where we spent a wonderful few minutes enjoying the sensation of the pink and white petals falling down on us like confetti. The view from Ally Pally over London is spectacular and I remember it looking very misty in the early morning sunshine. I also remember noticing that the rainbow flag was flying from a flagpole outside the complex and feeling incredibly moved, welcomed and accepted. It was amazing to think how far the gay rights movement had come in my lifetime. That frightened little child who didn’t dare to tell his Mum that he’d been spat at in the street because people had decided he was gay was now the poster boy for true equality. And that felt magical. 

Of course, a lot of people at the time were telling us that gay marriage was going to lead to the end of society as we know it. Back then, the Christians were convinced there would be a giant flood. God was really going to let us have it to show quite how much he hated the concept of same-sex marriage. In the end God sent weeks of sunshine - and ironically chose to break the glorious sunny spell, some three weeks after we’d got married… on Easter Sunday! I’m sure there were one or two very disappointed and confused Christians that year. I often wonder how these religious sects must feel; you know, the ones who sit on the edge of a cliff waiting for the rapture to come. At what stage must they think, “oh dear, we’ve given all of our worldly possessions to the people who told us the end of the world is nigh, and now we’ve got to re-enter society with our tails between our legs.”? I think, if I weren’t brain-washed, I might feel a bit of anger. 

The blossom wasn’t quite as advanced on the trees this year as it was back in 2014. It has been very sunny of late in London, but yesterday morning, maybe just as a little subtle warning from nature not to spend the weekend passing the virus around willy-nilly, it actually hailed. Proper hail. 

Ally Pally was, of course, next to empty. The weather didn’t help, but they’ve also closed the car parks to stop people from congregating there. They’ve also blocked most of it off, so you can’t go up to the building itself. We walked up to the boating lake. They have these wonderful pedalos shaped like flamingos and swans, but all are moored to the island in the middle of the lake. One wonders how long it will take for nature to start taking over. How long will it be until the boats are covered in mill-dew and algae? How long until weeds start to push up through the tarmac? One day, we may well know whether those set dressers on 28 Weeks Later got it right. 

If reading this blog has given you a sense that you might like to see our wedding again - or for the first time - we have a link which you can follow for a private viewing. Let me know if you enjoy... Happy times. 

www.nathantaylor.co.uk/ourgaywedding.m4v

The infected

It feels like forever since I last wrote a blog. I’ve had very little to write about. Since the business with Nathan last summer, I’ve not much liked the world. It’s felt vengeful. Brutal. Angry. Divided. I’ve felt irrelevant. Ignored. Old. 

And, of course, in the last few weeks, the world has descended into… well, what is this? How can any of us effectively describe the situation we’re presently in? Is this the “black out” that the shamans warned us about? Is this the beginning of the end? Or is this the moment when we take a collective step backwards in an attempt to learn what we’ve been doing wrong, so we can finally begin the process of healing? 

It’s certainly a surreal time. A frightening time. More than anything else, I suspect, it’s a time when we realise how fragile ALL human beings are.

My union, the Musicians’ Union, awarded me a grant of £200 to help me to pay this month’s rent. For the first time in my life, I received financial assistance without having to fill in a painstakingly long form. I wasn’t asked which word best describes my gender or ethnicity. I wasn’t asked to apologise for being who I am. The union simply asked if I needed help. The answer was yes and a day later the money was transferred into my account. 

My own story is, of course, echoed by creative freelancers around the world. Three weeks ago, I lost nearly all of my work. Every day, over the course of about a week, the emails came in to tell me that my diary had been denuded. I fell into an absolute panic, waking up in the night in pools of sweat wondering what was going to happen to me. 

But then I realised it was happening to other people. More and more of us. Other musician friends were losing their work. The theatres were closing - and the bars and cafes. Then the schools, the shops… And there we all were; an army of workers, scratching our heads, shell-shocked, challenged in ways we could never have predicted. 

And then Nathan and I got sick. We spent nine days in complete isolation, living with this infamous virus which had travelled all the way from a market in a region of China I’d never heard of. We initially told very few people and simply hunkered down. The stigma felt great - and we didn’t want people to panic. The problem with Coronavirus is that it consumes all of your thoughts. The news seemed to suggest that it was the second stage of the illness - the coughing - which was carrying people to their graves. And so you sit, waiting for the cough to come, going to bed at night with a heavy chest wondering if you’ll even wake up in the morning. And the other thing about the virus is that it makes your head feel very strange. A sort of fug descends which, on one hand, fills your brain with bizarre existential thoughts, and, on the other, makes it almost impossible to focus on anything. And worse than that is the fact that the symptoms come and go. One day you’re full of beans. The next you’re exhausted again. And after a while, this can start to make a person oscillate between depression and anger.  

And the sodding thing throws insane symptoms your way. All of those adverts which say that the only two things to watch out for are a fever and a dry cough are just nonsense. I, for example, have had no sense of smell or taste for four days. Nathan’s eyes ached and he had weird deafness. I had oddly painful feet, terrible upper back pains… But the number one symptom is fatigue. A deep, dark, fuck-this type of fatigue. 

The other thing you find yourself regularly doing is shouting at the telly to tell them that their numbers are wrong. They have to be. If no one but the very ill and the very famous are getting tested for COVID-19, how on earth does anyone know how many of us have it? Our Prime Minister has it. Our future king has it. This thing is everywhere. I have it. Nathan has it. Becky has it. Jo has it. Thierry has it. My brother probably has it. Are any of us included in the official figures? Of course not! And then the next question is whether there are legions of people who are getting it, but experiencing no symptoms. And we won’t know any answers at all until we start aggressively testing. 

What does seem to be the case is that the virus has sunk its teeth into my synagogue. The festival of Purim, I suspect, came at the wrong time. 

I’m horrified to say that people are dying. 

I was devastated by the news of the passing of one particular old gentleman of whom I was particularly fond. I actually dedicated an arrangement to him and his wife in the concert we did last month. He got ill on Friday and died on Monday. His wife, now ill, has been forced to self-isolate. There’s no one there to hug her or do any of the things which bring hope and respite to the grieving. 

And then, of course, other members of the community are feeling frightened and desperately lonely. 

The irony, of course, is that we endured gale after gale in the first half of the year, but since we’ve all been in lockdown, the sun has shone every single day! Spring has come. Blossom is heavy on all the trees. I woke up two days ago thinking how much I wanted to see my parents. On a day like that, at any other time, I’d have jumped into my car and gone to see them. But we can’t. Mothering Sunday came and went with very few people getting to see their parents. 

There is, however, something strangely comforting about all of us being in the same boat. It reminds us of our commonality in an era where we were being forced to see only difference. And I believe this is the key to the healing of society. 

At 8pm yesterday night, something very beautiful happened. The entire nation stopped to applaud our beloved National Health Service. I wasn’t entirely convinced that Londoners would want to get involved in an initiative like this. Though it’s painfully true that, here in the capital, we’re ahead of the curve in terms of numbers of infections, Londoners can be a little prickly and arch. We aren’t renowned for our sense of community spirit. 

Anyway, at a few minutes to 8, I opened my window and looked out into the street. I could see a group of three people standing on the pavement opposite who seemed to be looking at their watches. Of course, the eerie thing was the lack of traffic on the roads. If people had started clapping on Ballards Lane at 8pm on an evening before self-isolation started, we almost certainly wouldn’t have heard anything but the roar of engines. 

But suddenly I could see windows opening in flats above the shops opposite - and, at the stroke of 8, the applause started. It echoed down the empty streets. Soon it became cheering and then whistling. It lasted about a minute. It would almost die-out for a few moments and then take off again. 

The idea that people were doing this the length and breadth of the country was deeply moving. My mother said that her entire street in Thaxted had taken part. Hilary and Meriel applauded in Lewes. We were united in our pride in and love for the NHS. Many of us will desperately need its services over the next few months. Some of the people who stood and applauded last night will find themselves on NHS ventilators, feeling absolute gratitude that our health system is still available - free - for everyone. 

We none of us know where any of this is heading. The only thing we know for certain is that things will get harder before they improve. I can’t help but think that this is an opportunity for us all, however. This event could go down in history as the movement when we rediscovered the true meaning of kindness. The moment when we collectively reappraised the meaning of happiness. The time when we stopped shouting and started listening. When we discovered that there’s a difference between what we want and what we need. When we stopped demanding our rights and instead focussed on our responsibilities. Who knows, this may even be the moment when we finally redistribute wealth. Owning a house might become a basic human right and not another way of making obscene amounts of money. 

Please stay well. And if you’re lonely - reach out. Tell someone. They may not be able to come running to you in the flesh, but the one thing about this crisis is that we’ve all got a lot of time on our hands to listen.