Stonewall

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, which is considered the single most important event in the fight for LGBT rights. The rebellion took place on the 28th June 1969, in the West Village, New York, the day of the funeral of Judy Garland. The two things were inextricably linked. Judy Garland wasn’t a gay icon simply because she sang Over The Rainbow. She passionately supported her gay fans in an era where she was effectively risking her career by doing so. When she died, there was a massive outpouring of grief from the LGBT community, and, as a result, the gay bars were due to be very crowded on the evening of her funeral. The police knew this fact, and it’s one of the reasons why their decision to raid the bar that night was so profoundly despicable.

Somewhat bizarrely, The Stonewall Inn was owned by the Italian mafia. It was an absolute dive. There was no running water behind the bar and no fire exits. It therefore tended to cater to the most marginalised members of the community, including butch lesbians, Latino and black gay folk, homeless young men, and trans-people. It was the only gay bar in New York where dancing was allowed.

Raids happened on a monthly basis. Customers were forced to line up against a wall and show their identity cards. Those without cards, or those in drag were immediately taken to police stations. Gay women were required to wear at least three items of feminine clothing to avoid being arrested. People in women’s clothing were forced to go to bathrooms with female police officers to “verify their gender.”

I would like to point out that all of this was going on just five years before I was born -

A high number of people were in the bar at 1.30am when police moved in. Some had never experienced a raid before and were absolutely terrified, trying to escape out of windows, all of which were blocked by police. 

The police were particularly callous that night and dissatisfaction spread rapidly when they started to inappropriately “feel up” some of the lesbians who had been lined up to show their papers.

But there was something in the air. Perhaps it was Judy Garland’s death, perhaps it was the wave of recent anti-Vietnam demonstrations, but those who were allowed to leave the bar didn’t simply scuttle into the shadows as normal. They hung around outside the bar. And a crowd started to gather (one of whom was Bob Dylan!)

As a second police van arrived, the crowd started to sing. At that point, a policeman violently shoved a transvestite, who retaliated by hitting him over the head with her handbag. The crowd booed the policeman and coins and bottles were thrown.

A young lesbian called Stormé Delaverie was dragged out of the bar in handcuffs. She squirmed out of the handcuffs, was re-cuffed, then squirmed out again, and so it went on for ten minutes until she was struck by a police baton. As she was man-handled into the back of a police wagon, she screamed at the crowd, “why don't you guys do something?” At that moment, the crowd went nuts, and the path of gay rights was altered permanently.

Drag queens fought in the street in their high heels. Quite why I find this particular fact so profoundly moving I’m not sure. It’s one of the reasons I get so angry when members of the trans lobby complain so vociferously about drag queens, because, let me tell you, when the shit hits the fan, you want a drag queen on your side. It was drag queens who mobilised and raised money for the early victims of AIDS, whilst the rest of us buried our heads in the sand.

Anyway, huge pieces of street furniture were ripped from the street. The police were so frightened, they barricaded themselves into the Stonewall Bar, before the angry mob used fire hydrants to batter the door down. The policemen would almost certainly have been killed - torn apart by people who had suffered such profound indignity for so long - if back up hadn’t arrived.

The disturbances went on for three days. The LGBT community used their intimate knowledge of the twisting streets of Greenwich Village, New York, where the bar was situated. There’s an account of police chasing one group of youths down a street and emerging in another with the youths chasing them! Many refer to the event as a riot. Those who were there prefer the term “rebellion” because they were defending themselves and fighting back rather than rushing around, smashing anything they could find.

What the disturbances effectively did was raise awareness of the plight of LGBT people, whilst simultaneously sending a message to the police that they couldn’t continue to treat the community with such contempt. Sympathy for the community spread as stories of police brutality were reported in the media and the struggle became a pride movement, which ultimately led to men like me being able to get married on national TV.




Men, women and other folk of Stonewall. I salute you.

Ill gotten

It’s little things which suddenly become upsetting when you’re leaving an area.

Today, whilst on my way to the tube, I discovered that my favourite footpath, the one which snakes down the ravine to the station, is closed. I subsequently discovered that the path is only reopening in mid July, so it’s possible I’ll never enter the tube via that route again. I certainly won’t as a local resident.

Here’s a question: Today, whilst on the tube, a rather large woman sat in the seat next to me, and then proceeded to invite her seven-year-old child to come and sit on her lap. The child wriggled and squirmed, as children are apt to do, and I found the entire journey incredibly uncomfortable as a result. The ruck sack of toys came out. There was a colouring book for a short while. Then a tangerine. And all the time I found myself getting more and more claustrophobic.  Should children be sitting on laps in public places? 

Of course all of this first world niggling pales into insignificance against the image in the newspapers yesterday which is being billed as the “picture which shames America.” I’m afraid I found the photograph so distressing that I was unable to read beyond the headline which related the picture to the issue of the Mexican migrant crisis. The image was of a dead father and his daughter, washed up in a river, the daughter still clinging to her father’s back. I can’t imagine what must have gone through their minds as they realised they were in trouble. How the daughter must have placed her trust in her dad as she climbed onto his back. How the dad must have struggled to keep them both alive. How desperate he must have felt to risk their lives like that. 

The picture makes me want to scream at all the people in the west who are terrified of immigration, in whatever form it takes. We are all human beings. That some of us feel we have an inestimable right to the spoils we’ve inherited purely as a result of being born into a wealthy country makes me furious. Particularly when our country’s wealth has been created by colonialism, slavery and a culture of navvies and work-houses. Everyone has a right to generate wealth by working hard. Everyone deserves a future for their children. If they’re brave enough to pack up their lives and start again with nothing, then they deserve to share our ill-gotten gains. 

Piano woes

Whoever said that moving was one of the most stressful things a person can do was not lying. I have spent all day oscillating between sheer panic and complete resentment. Just changing our address for the purpose of car insurance, council tax, electoral roll, home insurance, medical records, parking permits, banking, (the list goes on and on) takes a lengthy phone call which almost invariably involves an automated system. The councils don’t deal with information centrally. You have to call each of their countless “divisions” to get yourself out of - and to sign into - a myriad money-making schemes. Why there isn’t some central database which all of these approved organisations can join, I’ve no idea. By and large, Nathan is dealing with the admin bullshit, whilst I do heavy lifting. My particular stress is related to not feeling like I’m getting anywhere. It’s like I’m individually moving grains of sand with hopes of moving an entire beach. As we get about half way from Highgate to Finchley, a knot starts to form in my stomach because it means I have to carry scores of heavy bags up many flights of steps. Nathan wants to move the flat one room at a time so there’s a series of mini milestones. My philosophy is to chip away on all fronts because one day everything will be done. That day just seems like a long way off right now. The only thing I WILL say is that, with every emptied car load, I feel a little lighter... emotionally and physically (I have sweated gallons!) The biggest stress of all is trying to move my piano. We live on the second floor, but the stairs up to our flat twist and turn a great deal. It turns out that piano movers call each turn a new floor, so essentially, from their perspective, I live on the sixth floor. Moving the piano is therefore completely prohibitive in terms of cost. Probably £600-£1000. And people have been so rude. One person gave me a quote based on the idea that my flat had a lift! I mean, how likely is that? This particular company were really unpleasant and wrote me a really snippy message telling me I’d “wasted their time.” I told them that if they knew as much about removals as they claimed to, they’d know there wasn’t a residential flat within a mile of either of our properties with a lift in it! The piano belonged to my aunt. It’s not valuable, but I am hugely attached to it. I’ve written every single composition I’ve ever created sitting at it. The idea that I might have to give it to someone on free-cycle who has a van, or is prepared to take it off my hands, makes me want to curl up and weep, but at times like these, sentimentality is pointless. Poor people don’t have the right to be sentimental!

The table

We have spent the last two days doing nothing but lug boxes, bags and suitcases full of our belongings from Highgate to our new home in Finchley. It turns out that there is nothing more intense than the rage one experiences when lifting incredibly heavy objects, particularly when said objects get stuck in doorways and you’re trying to move them on one of the stickiest, muggiest days you’ve ever experienced. I found myself wanting to shout obscenities at complete strangers whilst rivers of sweat ran off my forehead and stung my eyes. Every time I arrive in Finchley Central, I have to remind myself that this is my new gaff. It doesn’t have the genteel quality of Highgate. I’m not sure many areas in London do. Finchley feels poorer than Highgate. Things get dumped in side streets and the area feels a great deal less cared for. Next door have a bright blue, mildew-covered tarpaulin stretched over their outside walkway. There are a lot of betting and charity shops on our new high street. People go through the bins behind Tesco looking for food and things which they can sell on. I shall particularly miss the trees in Highgate. Every view from our house is a riot of different shades of green. However grotty and rain-damaged our house got, I always knew that Queens Wood and Hampstead Heath were just around the corner. And I could escape to a Merchant Ivory world. It was Sunday yesterday and we pulled up on the street outside our new house to unload our belongings. Returning to the car after five minutes, we discovered a parking ticket, which felt outrageous. All the streets in the area have free parking on Sundays, which begs the question as to why on earth a parking warden was out and about. Our only crime was parking slightly on the pavement. The warden must have thought all of his Christmases had come at once when he found our car. For heaven’s sake! Welcome to Brent Council! I also discovered to my horror yesterday that we now live in Margaret Thatcher’s old constituency. How horribly ironic is that? It’s still in the hands of a Tory MP - albeit a gay one, although I don’t know that this makes him any better. It was actually 1992 when I last lived in a Tory constituency! That said, I’ve just read up about our new constituency and seen that it was briefly a Labour seat, and that, in the last election, the Tories had a very small majority. I’m pleased to say that I drove to Thaxted yesterday to collect the kitchen table we used to sit around when we were kids. It’s been in my parents’ shed for ten years, but I’ve longed to have a kitchen big enough to house it. It holds so many memories. We ate every meal sitting at the table. Breakfast was always accompanied by Radio 3. We played games: Escalado, Rat Fink, Cheat... We did all of our homework there. Edward used to sit there to conjugate German verbs with his friend Scott. Tammy and I made an igloo cake there. Fiona, Ted Thornhill, and I sat there to eat chocolate chip cookies, whilst rehearsing string trios. Tash died my hair purple sitting at that table. It was the place where people gathered. It was the hub. Name me a person who visited the house and I can picture them sitting at the table. We were all therefore rather relieved that the table came out of the shed in one piece, without woodworm or warping and I was able to drive home (with the thing crammed into the car, dangerously close to my neck!) I was also more than a little excited to smell the infamous ghostly smoke as I exited Thaxted. I see that as a good omen!

Women’s football

Today I turn this blog’s attention to the women’s football World Cup. This, I guarantee, will be the last time I write about football, so enjoy it whilst it lasts! Now, obviously I’ve been out of the country, so can’t comment on whether the aforementioned World Cup has had the impact of a World Cup of the male variety. I probably wouldn’t have noticed even if I’d been here. Of all sports, I feel football is the most ludicrous. It’s a game of posturing, and arrogance. What I’ve never quite understood is why the women’s World Cup can’t happen at the same time as the men’s, firstly to capitalise on a wave of excitement and patriotism and secondly to save us all from what I consider to be somewhat tragic attempts to market the women’s game by using the tropes and cliches of male football. I’m not here to make judgements about whether or not women’s football is exciting to watch. All football is boring in my view. But what annoys me is the way that it gets talked up by the media. Firstly, no discussion about the current World Cup seems complete without some sort of discussion about equality and gender identity. There’s always the implied threat that if we don’t watch it, or take it seriously, we’re somehow being sexist. ...And then there’s the advert. The one that gets played constantly. The one I can’t avoid when I’m channel-hopping to avoid watching the football. The one with the female football player walking over a moorland. She talks about “fifty years of hurt” and in a somewhat knowing way, flips that oft-trotted-out phrase into a discussion about the hurt that female footballers have endured in the process of trying to gain recognition. She speaks in a sort of “I’m-not-an-actress-I’m-a-real-person-who’s-too-cool-for-inflection” monotone and if the advert isn’t cringeworthy enough, it ends with a long list of the achievements of English women footballers. But just like one of those cheesy pundits from the 1990s, she gives all the women nicknames, the last of which is Nobsy, which is too ironic to be true! When same sex marriage was granted to us in 2014, the thing which annoyed me most was a sort of latent sense which existed within the dominant heterosexual community that LGBT marriage was all about lost sinners learning to behave like proper people. It was like we’d been let into some sort of special club with special rules. Marriage was an institution that we had to ape rather than define in our own terms. Or we’d somehow destroy it. When Nathan and I got married, aside from the deeply repugnant, oft-asked “joke” about “which one’s the bride?”, we had to endure questions about what sorts of flowers we wanted, what we’d be wearing, what kind of cake we’d like... the answer to all of these questions was “we don’t care. These are all the tropes of heterosexual weddings. Don’t assume we’ve grown up dreaming of our wedding day, because getting married was illegal for us until yesterday.” So we did things OUR way. Of course, some LGBT people want weddings which feel traditional and heteronormative, but there are plenty more who have realised that we can make our own rules regarding everything from fidelity to who makes the breakfast. The thing about equality is that it needs to be about an oppressed community finding their own way. Making their own rules. Celebrating differences, not aping the more dominant force. If women’s football is to break away from constant comparisons to the men’s game and constant misogynistic remarks about it not being as popular and therefore not having the right to be monetised in the same way, it needs to decide what makes it unique. And that, my friends, is what true diversity is about. The celebration of uniqueness.

Tory toffs

This Tory party election is a farce isn’t it? It strikes me that we haven’t had a legitimately elected Prime Minister for goodness knows how long. The fact that Boris Johnson seems to be by far the front runner, is nothing but a joke, and the idea that he’ll become prime minister whilst Trump reins supreme in America is the biggest joke of all. I was looking at the shortlist for the next prime minister a few days ago. Fortunately, the two women on the long list, who were the massive homophobes, didn’t make it that far, but it strikes me that one of the most frightening things about those who are being taken seriously is the lack of thoughts on anything but Brexit any of them seem to be displaying. And then, even when it comes to Brexit, quite how flimflam these policies are. Frankly, Johnson might as well have said “I just want to give Johnny Foreigner a good kicking.” Most noticeable of all, however, is how astoundingly middle class and toffy the short list was. We need only look towards the candidates’ middle names for this particular point to be very clearly made. Quite how we think that someone whose name is “Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson” is going to understand what it’s like to be a single parent mother on benefits, I’m not sure. Jeremy Hunt’s middle name is Streynsham. And then there’s Roderick James Nugent “Rory” Stewart. It comes to something when Michael Gove, whom I consider to be one of the most out-of-touch politicians in the country, gets the vote for the person with the most ordinary name!

Too much to do

I just have to learn that I don’t like flying. I find it very difficult to think beyond a flight. I returned to London today, but, until I landed, couldn’t get my head around what that meant, because every time I thought about the future, there was this yawning ten-hour chasm of fear and boredom obliterating any thoughts I might have otherwise been able to formulate! Flying is a necessary evil, however, and I’m nothing like as bad at it as I used to be. I used to write these lengthy and highly dramatic streams of consciousness about how I was feeling. Every bump or bank of turbulence was notated in a panicked, doomsday scrawl. The flight staff with American Airlines, with their sour faces and lack of empathy would have added a whole new layer of hideousness to the experience as they came running down the aisles, launching food like paper darts and rolling their eyes at customers. Twice now on American Airlines flights, I’ve sat next to someone who’s asked for water and been told by a hostess that she’s not sure there’s any spare. Read, “I can’t be arsed to get you any.” On my flight on the way over, as we were waiting to taxi to the runway, the hostess looked down at me and said, “who are you?” When I told her my name, she got on the radio and said, “Till is on the flight. Yeah, he’s here.” She walked away without any further comment. Not a glimmer of a smile touched her lips. Or any explanation! Whilst in LA, I became obsessed with the idea of experiencing an earthquake. Part of me feels like it’s a right of passage. They’re nothing like as rare as you might think in LA. Minor tremors happen there all the time. Despite this, I managed to royally freak out the member of staff standing at the top of one of the tall structures at the water park yesterday by asking if she’d ever been up there during an earthquake. Her face went pale as she admitted that she hadn’t. It turned out that the journey home was a British Airways-staffed flight, which made me very happy. The moment I got on the plane, the experience was entirely different to the American Airlines nonsense. There were smiles. The staff were falling over themselves to help, and be attentive and polite. It makes such a difference. The only issue is the infernal announcements by cabin staff, which include a lengthy spiel about the British Airway’s charity, and way too many incorrect uses of reflexive pronouns. The flight was long and deeply dull. I did quite a lot of work on Brass, and watched a couple of films. I saw The History Boys for the first time, which I thought was excellent and very moving in places, and then got bored rigid by the hugely indulgent Dream Girls. I genuinely thought I loved ALL film musicals. But this was something else. Plot-light. Jeopardy-light. Full of unlikable characters. Full of songs with no purpose. Full of songs written in a style I don’t particularly like. Loads of shrieking and vocal theatrics, which were impressive enough - Jennifer Hudson, in particular, has pipes to die for - but once you’ve heard one mega-bout of belting, your ears start to bleed. The film first made me angry, and then just really bored. So what happens the day you get back to London from LA after not sleeping a wink? You organise to do a shed load of stuff, all of which requires a lot of concentration! I had a meeting with a union, a dental appointment, and a quiz to prep and run! It’s probably the largest quiz I’d ever run. I think there were 36 teams and the sound system was very poor quality. The dentist was another experience altogether, but this might take a bit of explaining... For the past year or so, I have been on the NHS PrEP trial. PrEP is a wonder drug which essentially prevents the HIV virus from entering a body. It’s like a vaccine and it means that if I come into contact with the HIV virus, PrEP will kill it before it takes hold. Thousands of gay men are on the trial and thousands more buy PrEP privately. And the results are staggering. Particularly in London, where HIV is no longer deemed an epidemic and there’s been a 90% drop in new diagnoses. If everyone took PrEP for ten years, HIV would die. I am, however, often staggered by medical professionals’ lack of knowledge about the drug, and indeed all things HIV-related. Today at the dentist’s, I was asked, in the public waiting room, if I was on any medication. I told the dentist I was on PrEP. She instantly got uncomfortable but tried not to show it. Then she actually wrote on my form “patient takes PrEP for AIDS.” Firstly, there’s actually no such thing as AIDS any more. No medical practitioner would use that term. And secondly, I do not have AIDS. I am not HIV positive. In fact, it is very dangerous for an HIV positive person to take PrEP. I do not want to have to educate a medical practitioner in public. For me the whole sordid and excruciatingly embarrassing conversation was a symptom of a far wider problem, which is, for far too long, many straight people have brushed HIV aside as a gay disease. Well, let me tell you something. It’s coming your way! More straight people in the UK are now HIV positive than gay people, and new cases of the disease are still on the rise in the heterosexual world. Time to wake up and smell the coffee. A baby is no longer the worst thing you can catch!

Water park!

One of the most beautiful sights in LA at this time of year is the Jacaranda tree, which has the most beautiful, purple flowers. There is nothing in the UK which comes even close to the colour of these delicate and beautiful blooms. We drove out of the city today and the road sides were lined with them. Google them. They’re truly lovely.

We were driving out of LA to visit Raging Waters, a large water park where all the staff are instructed to tell you to have a “raging day.” Frankly, the only things which are raging in the UK are hardons, ‘flus and queens!

Aside from its complete lack of vegetarian food, the water park was a huge amount of fun. The first “ride” we went on was called Drop Out. Riders climb up a tall structure, position themselves somewhat perilously on the top of a water slide, and then let themselves drop. It’s an almost vertical fall and it is terrifying. You end up shooting off the bottom of the slide and being dumped into a pool of water, somewhat dazed and confused, with a load of water up your nose. I’m proud of myself for having done it, but would never do it again!

For the rest of the day, we bobbed up and down, clung to giant water rings, shot off the edge of ramps, climbed tall structures, swam, got bashed about like rag dolls, aquaplaned and generally giggled uncontrollably. My favourite moment was when Matt’s friend, Jamie, was thrown out of his seat in the rapids ride and landed in my lap. Terrified that he was going to be thrown clear out of our giant rubber ring, I put my arm around him and clung onto him for dear life until we reached the bottom of the ride. Laughing hysterically! 

The lack of vegetarian food was troublesome. There was a somewhat disingenuous pretence from staff at the water park that someone asking for vegetarian food was something so rare that they had to respond to the question by simply staring blankly, like the person asking was making the most insane demand! One woman at one food stall actually got on her radio and asked the park manager where someone might fight vegetarian food. In the end, they sent me over to a stall where the bloke said he could do me a burger, just without the patty. “So you mean a bread roll with some lettuce and tomato?” I asked. He nodded.

I eventually found a pizza slice. It was most peculiar. This is LA. Everyone in LA is a fussy eater!

Because it was a Monday, and because the weather was fairly overcast in the morning, the place was half empty, which meant we didn’t really have to queue for any rides.

We drove back into the city along the freeway. The buildings of downtown LA were silhouetted in the hazy, early evening sun light. And the palm trees, with their long, tall trunks and leaves like Tina Turner wigs, were stretching high into the peachy sky. The City of Dreams.

Wok-a-doodle

I rather feel that jet lag is catching up on me. Matt had a friend called David over to his house last night, and, by 11pm, I was drifting off to sleep mid sentence! Matt kept waking me up to ask if I was asleep! I think perhaps my body is subconsciously telling me that it needs lots of sleep. I polled ten hours last night without the slightest bit of effort. 

I’m still in the wars: still deaf in one ear, and now nursing a large cut underneath my tongue, the product of a nasty run-in with a fortune cookie!
We went to visit two of Matt’s friends for brunch down in Santa Monica today. One of them, Dean, is a writer, and we have a number of friends in common. More bizarrely, Matt suddenly announced that he’d brought Dean and his wife, Tamara, to the party at my house in 1999 where Matt and I had first met. I joked that it had taken them twenty years to return the invite, which must be something of a record! 

It feels rather strange that Matt and I have known each other for exactly twenty years now. The party where we’d met was a house warming for Sam Becker, who’d just moved into the somewhat eccentric flat in Tufnell Park where I lived. It sprawled over three floors.
Matt had come as the guest of a guy called Robbie with whom I’d had a one-night stand which had ended up as nothing but a long giggle-fest. Robbie had told me that, as a child, he’d once sung at the Eisteddfod Singing Competition, dressed in a lamb costume he’d worn in a nativity production because it was the only way his mother could convince him to stand up and sing in front of a crowd of people. He told me that he still occasionally wakes up in the night, in a sweat, remembering the howls of laughter coming from the audience as he walked onto the stage. I enjoyed his company so much that I immediately invited him to my party. And he came, bringing Matt (and, it turns out) Dean and Tamara. 

It was a wonderful brunch, peopled, almost exclusively, by ex-pat Brits. I’ve noticed that the Brits tend to stick together in this mad old city.

My Mum would have described the food we ate as a “cold collation”. There were lots of cheeses, salads, beigels, crisp breads and so on. We ate in the garden, next to a wonderful water feature which attracted hummingbirds and butterflies. 

Santa Monica is a charming part of town. There are lots of little artisan cafes and shops around the corner from the house, and I’m told we weren’t far from Venice Beach. Santa Monica Boulevard, which runs through the whole of LA, is actually the famed Route 66. The Mother Road, as some call it, officially ends at Santa Monica Pier which we visited the last time we were in LA. We ended up playing arcade games, obsessed with winning a set of little cards with images from The Wizard of Oz. I was determined to get the elusive one of Judy Garland to give to my friend Llio. 

We went out for dinner tonight with two of Matt’s friends, Hunter and Roger. Hunter is one of those curious first names which are only surnames in the US. We ate at the worst named Chinese restaurant in the world, Wokano. Its logo shows an erupting volcano sitting in a wok. If it had been my choice, I’d have called it Wok-a-doodle-doo and had a logo with a chicken sitting in a wok. 

The sky in LA is very white at night when there’s a lot of cloud cover. It’s almost like day. There is so much light pollution, it’s scary. We sat around the fire pit tonight eating cookies whilst tiny specks of rain fell onto us. “Should we go inside?” Asked Matt. “Call this rain?” I replied!

Past lives

Matt has lemon trees in his garden. They just grow. Lemons. Large, ripe and yellow, as though they’re saying “look at us basking in this glorious tropical climate.” I keep singing the song “Pasadena” because it reminds me of everything here.

“Home in Pasadena, home where grass is greener. Where honey bees, sing melodies and orange trees scent the breeze.”

I have a feeling that Pasadena is where the Big Bang Theory is set, but to me it will always be the song that I used to sing as a teenager when I wanted to be a post-war Siegfried Sassoon and live in the 1920s. I always longed for a wind-up gramophone, a monocle and a wireless. I never found a monocle despite looking in every antiques shop I could find, and I could never afford a wind-up gramophone; although when I was a teenager, they were ten-a-penny. I should have seen it as an investment!

It was overcast again this morning. A sort of white mist has hung over LA every day I’ve been here until about 2pm when the sun breaks through. I noticed something similar with the weather on my last trip to the city, which, I think, was about this time of year.

It’s actually rather cold under the mist, but it feels refreshing, so I rather happily sit at the huge table by Matt’s swimming pool working on Brass.

At the moment I’m dealing with crude, broad strokes, getting everything down on the page with a view to refining things in a later pass.

I’m attempting to surround myself with inspiring art whilst I’m out here. Matt and I are watching a number of films and documentaries which trigger quite a heavy amount of nostalgia in me. This feels like an appropriate place to write from. There is a curious sensation which I’ve always had with Brass that I’m somehow writing my memories down. It sounds profoundly weird, but I suspect it’s simply because my obsession with the First World War was so engulfing in my teenaged years, and I read and saw so much material about it, that things have simply lodged themselves in my subconscious and I’m accessing them rather than dealing with some sort of past life issues!

Jet lag has suddenly caught up on me. It’s 23.15 and I’m already heading to bed!

Gaybos

It’s difficult to describe the joy I feel when I see hummingbirds. It’s a rare treat. I’ve seen them in New Jersey and in San Francisco and today they’ve been darting and tarting about in Matt’s garden. There’s something magical about the way they seem to hover in mid air. It’s like an optical illusion.

I’m deaf in one ear today. It happens every time I swim for long periods of time on a holiday. The water must get into the ear, dislodge a load of wax and then it all goes horribly wrong! I think you can probably get special ear plugs specifically to stop this sort of thing from happening, but I would never remember to bring a pair at times when they were most needed.

One of the most troubling things about being in the States is the need to take identification with me when I go out to bars and things. Because I don’t have an identity card and haven’t bought my driving license, I always have to take my passport out with me, which ends up looking very tatty on account of it being stuffed into various pockets which invariably get sat on. Part of me always wants to point at my white beard and ask the doormen in these bars to guess whether or not they think I’m over 21. At a certain point it becomes quite a nonsense!

We went to Mel’s Drive-in, which is a sort of burger-joint-cum-milkshake-bar reminiscent of Grease. It’s all rather 1960s space age with a big slanting roof and brilliant flashing neon signage. There were juke boxes on every table. Put 25c in, and you can dictate what the rest of the room hears. I was more than thrilled when ABBA’s The Name of the Game started playing.

We strolled down to the gay district of LA which is in West Hollywood on Santa Monica Boulevard, passing the Viper Rooms, where River Phoenix very sadly died. I’m told it all happened publicly on a sidewalk, which feels particularly tragic.

We took a little stroll around the gay block. All the bars in this area are particularly colourful. It was LA Pride last week, so the gaudy rainbow decorations are still hanging proudly from the street lights and palm trees.

The gaybos in this part of town are remarkably primped and preened. The older ones often have fake-tanned, over-moisturised faces with the strange feline eyes and thin, long mouths associated with facial surgery and fillers. The young men are either twinks, more often than not sashaying with their elbows surgically attached to their rib cages, or they’re attempting to create the illusion of masculinity, with carefully plucked facial hair and crisply-ironed plaid shirts.

Most of the bars were heaving and filled with male gogo dancers giving lap dances for dollar notes. We opted for the quietest looking bar, The Felix, and sat outside watching the world going by.

We were joined by two somewhat drunk youngsters, who engaged us in confusing conversion about The Israelites - whoever they are. I think it’s a Christian thing. I got the impression that one of them was trying to suggest that the “ish” bit of Jewish meant that Jewish people weren’t actually true Jews. She kept pointing at the table top and saying “that’s purple-ish - it’s not properly purple.” 

It wasn’t long before we were running for the hills!

Supermarket sweep

The area of West Hollywood where Matt lives is really quiet. It’s in the hills, away from the large, busy boulevards, so really the only sounds you hear are the chirping of birds and the wind rustling through the palm trees. It’s about as idyllic as you could ever imagine. I feel very lucky to be here.

I managed to sleep until a very respectful time this morning, and woke up at about 9am, taking myself to the garden to work on the screenplay version of Brass. I was recently given a set of very detailed notes on my first draft. There’s much to do to whip things into shape. I’ve never written a screenplay before, and I’m very much learning on the job - with a brilliant teacher putting me through my paces. I’m trying to take the piece further and further away from the theatre show version, repeatedly trying to remind myself how concise and distilled the language in a film should be, and how much you can convey through the visuals alone.

Of course, there’s nowhere better to write a screenplay than sitting by a pool in LA! I sipped tea in the cooling morning breeze before leaping into the pool for forty lengths (each length being about six strokes, so don’t be too impressed!!)

We worked through the afternoon. At the moment we’re simply throwing ideas around, watching films and diving into the internet, but it’s a lot of fun, especially as we can suddenly decide to dive into a pool instead!

There’s an early evening light which descends on LA which feels unique to the city, in the same way that there’s a specific Tuscan light and a definitive New York light. The LA evening light is a little hazy, quite washed-out and more than a little nostalgic. I realise as I write this, that it’s the light of Hollywood films.

We went shopping in a supermarket, which is always a treat for me. This particular supermarket was filled to the brim with weird and wonderful food stuffs. They were selling something called a “Mug Treat.” It seems that you pour a sort of dry mixture into a mug, add liquid, shove it in the microwave, and, hey presto, you’ve got fluffy muffiny goodness. In a mug. A mug I say!

I then stumbled upon a display of “sippies,” which are plastic bowls with a straw hanging out of the side. One assumes they’re there to encourage kids to drink their milk after they’ve consumed a bowl of cereal, maybe the brand of cereal they were selling with biblical quotes scrawled all over it!

The Americans love their soda drinks, and you can buy pretty much anything of that type in Matt’s local. Coca-cola over here is like a franchise. Cherry Coke is old hat compared to Georgia Peach Coke and California Raspberry Coke. Even the water is weird. I found one bottle in the shape of a teddy bear. It’s called “whoops” water, which sounds like a more suitable name for an incontinence pad, but it’s tag line is “because water is fun.” With all those brightly-coloured soda options, water needs to market itself very aggressively!

That said, I am more than a little grateful to the fact that, over here, there’s still sugar in drinks, which means things don’t all have the bitter, nasty aftertaste of stevia and aspartame.

The ice cream aisle needs to be seen to be believed! It’s the gem in the supermarket’s crown, with freezer after freezer filled with tubs of the stuff, which actually light up as you pass them, making everything within look extra specially colourful, so your children just won’t stop nagging you to buy!

West Hollywood

I’m in the USA again. In the land where people talk about guns like we talk about human rights. As Nathan drove me to Heathrow Airport this morning, there was a piece about gun control on Radio 4. A load of Americans in a Colorado city which had suffered a major gun massacre were asked about their constitutional right to carry arms. When confronted with the idea that tighter gun control might save lives, one of them actually responded, “yes, it might save lives... but at what cost?” It was an answer which actually made Nathan and me gasp out loud.

The flight to LA is long and deeply boring. Being cooped up in a giant metal bird for over ten hours is something you just have to zen yourself out of. I was exhausted, but, as usual for me, every time I fell asleep, I immediately woke up again, gasping and flailing my arms about like someone with deep-routed psychological issues.

Fortunately no one was sitting next to me. In fact, Matt had actually bought me premium economy seats, so I had lots of terribly exciting trimmings. A foot rest. Proper headphones. Amazing food. I watched three films which included the atmospheric and moving Call Me By Your Name. The only issue with American Airlines is its staff, who always surprise me with their general grumpiness. Apparently it’s a known thing. Everything gets done in a real rush, and they walk down the aisle barking orders, tutting and sighing. One of them was really shouty as she told us “I can’t serve you a snack unless your table is out and flat.” 

The national airline of a country which prides itself on its service industry could perhaps do better?!

So, here I am in the West Hollywood Hills, in a little slice of paradise. We’re not that far from iconic streets like Sunset Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard, so we’re right in the middle of the American Dream. Hurray for Hollywood.

The sun is setting. I’m sitting in front of a fire pit by a swimming pool. Jasmine and bougenvillea drip from a tall bank of trees behind me. There’s an overpowering honey-like smell. There’s a hammock. There are twinkling lights. And, of course, because I’m in LA, there are enormous palms trees. My twelve year-old self would have been thrilled. I was obsessed with palm trees back then. 

But, because it’s now tomorrow at 8am in the UK, or something weird like that, I’m also jet-lagged. Time to sleep. Night!

Heathrow (again...)

I am sitting in Heathrow Airport, waiting for my flight to LA to be called. I’m off to spend a week with my mate Matt. We’re hoping to write a musical together and are going to do some research and kick some ideas around.

I find airports a necessary but unsettling evil. Most of the people wandering about are experiencing negative emotions. They’re either knackered, terrified, or highly stressed.

I am all three right now. I only managed three hours’ sleep last night, I am scared of flying and am stressed because I had to jettison a load of belongings at the security gate as a result of exceeding my personal limit for toiletries, which, it turns out, is one (tiny) plastic bag.

Matt had asked me to take him some Bovril and I went to three different supermarkets last night trying to find a jar small enough to take through security. In the end I bought a 250ml jar, which was plainly never going to get through. It looked so ludicrous in a plastic bag with toothpaste and hair gel and the man spotted it right away, giving me the look that said, “nice try.”

I ran a quiz last night in Runnymede, which is where the Magna Carta was signed. The hotel where the quiz was being held is right on the river Thames, and the client arranged for my assistant Lydia and me to eat like King John himself. They have a sort of posh eat-all-you-can-eat buffet there, full of the most delicious food, which you eat while watching the river gently flowing towards central London. I have seldom eaten such wondrous tomatoes. It is hugely rare to find a tasty tomato in this country. There were amazing puddings, a brilliant pasta bar, salads of every description... Lydia and I kept going back for more, not quite believing our luck.

I adore Lydia. She’s always such fun to be around. She’s actually a taxidermist, which I think is really cool and her work is incredibly imaginative. She tells me that her freezer at home is filled to the brim with animals waiting to be stuffed because she finds it very hard to turn the offer of a dead animal down!

Speaking of stuffed animals, Nathan and I spent the whole of Monday up in the loft, sorting through boxes and throwing bin liner after bin liner away.

There’s a little corner up there where our childhood toys are kept. I wrote about Panda and Horsey in a blog a few days ago. Perhaps it’s a little tragic, but, when we moved in, we sat them all on a little crocheted rug so they’d be nice and comfortable. What neither of us expected was that some awful parasitic creature would get at all the natural fibres in the toys and essentially wreck them. Some were alright. Panda, Horsey and Jemima escaped relatively unscathed, but a little woollen hedgehog which my Grandmother used to keep on the floor in her hallway, had almost turned to dust.

It was Nathan’s toys which were really badly affected. I don’t think I will ever forget the deep pang of pain which surged through my body, as I heard him whimpering, “oh no. Belinda! Belinda!” I turned to see him lovingly cradling a threadbare rabbit. We spent the next ten minutes crying bitter tears which weren’t just about our childhood toys being destroyed, but about being adults in a frightening world.

Out of the frying pan

I am continually astounded by British politics and what people think it’s okay - and not okay - to put up with from their politicians. If I have to read another sensationalist account of Tory Party hopefuls “trying” drugs whilst at university, I’ll probably go insane.

Firstly, the phrase “I tried cannabis once whilst at university” is nothing short of a cliche. It’s the catch-all phrase which means anyone who comes forward to say they saw X or Y smoking pot can be told that it was the one time they tried it. 

Secondly, we can’t expect MPs to be super human. We’re all deeply flawed, we all have demons and it’s only the very blandest of people who don’t have a colourful past. And the last thing we need is bland politicians. Bland politicians like Theresa May, David Cameron and the Millibands say only what they think will keep them in power, then run for the hills when the going gets tough.

Call me a showbiz liberal, but, if I strongly believe that, unless the police are involved, what we do in the privacy of our own houses (and I include extra marital affairs and sexual proclivities here) is only a matter for public discourse if it stops us from doing our job properly or if we show chronic hypocrisy by condemning other people for what we’re secretly doing ourselves. The fall out from John Major’s ghastly Back-to-Basics campaign in the 90s rightly led to the resignation of a number of politicians who simply couldn’t practise what they unwisely attempted to preach.

Because of all this, I think there’s a degree of justification in criticising Gove. I couldn’t give the slightest if he took coke in the 1990s when he was a journalist, but if it’s true that he published stories condemning drugs, someone ought to call him out. I’ve always felt very uneasy at the thought of journalists pretending to be our moral guardians. I wouldn’t trust one as far as I could throw one. 

As far as I’m concerned, all of this talk about drugs is a smoke screen which conceals far more important questions, namely what these Prime Ministerial hopefuls think and believe about the issues which will directly effect ordinary people. What do they think about the environment? Austerity? The arts? Benefits? Human rights...

Some of them, for example, have taken quite brutal anti-LGBT stances. Andrea Leadsome, it seems, abstains on voting on any bill which mentions the words “same sex” and Esther McVee has systematically voted against equality for LGBT people. 

And then, of course, away from the leadership race, on the other side of the house, comes Lisa Forbes, the newly elected Labour MP for Peterborough, who has replaced an MP who went to jail for lying about a speeding ticket. Forbes recently “liked” a brutally antisemitic tweet which linked the mosque shootings in New Zealand to Judaism, whilst accusing Theresa May of having a “Zionism slave master agenda.” We’re told that Forbes liked the tweet without “reading it properly” and therefore, the sordid business is being reported as “careless.” But in a climate where the Labour Party is frantically attempting to distance itself from antisemitism, I genuinely think it’s party faithful SHOULDN’T be careless. Liking a racist or homophobic tweet of this nature would almost certainly have seen Forbes dispatched from her post before she could say “I didn’t read the twe...”

If I’m honest, I think politicians who believe in, or support the promotion of, weird conspiracy theories, are far more worrying than those who took drugs twenty years ago, or, dare I say, someone who lied about a speeding ticket...

Our of the frying pan and into the fire.

New songs and other esses

It’s been a very busy day. I was up with the lark to sing at shul. It’s the festival of Shavuot, which is a double celebration of the wheat harvest in Israel and the giving of the Torah to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai. Most excitingly, it’s a festival which people celebrate with the eating of cheese, so I intend to eat my body weight in halloumi this evening!

There’s always half a ream of new musical material to learn for the festivals. As with Christianity, each holiday has its own set of traditional songs, so there’s always something new to sink one’s teeth into... and to scare the living daylights out of us!

As a choir, there can be a slight sense that we’re flying by the seat of our collective pants on occasions like this. We have limited rehearsal time, so the emphasis is on being as prepared as possible. I think we got away with it!

This afternoon, I went to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, to attend the Stiles and Drewe Best New Song Competition. Against the Tide from Em had been selected as one of the twelve finalists. The third year in a row I’ve had a song in there. The event is coupled with the Stephen Sondheim Student Singer of the Year award. (And try saying that drunk and with a lisp!) Essentially, each of the twelve songs is sung by an emerging singing or acting talent in their final year of drama school training. Each of them also gets to sing a Sondheim song.

My song was performed, wonderfully well, by Ahmed Hamad, who’s just graduated from Arts Ed. I was terribly proud to see a number of former NYMT kids in the line-up of performers as well, proving what a great early training that organisation provides.

Against the Tide didn’t win. This year’s prize went to a brave, angst-ridden piece. I was a little disappointed to note that the judging panel, though hugely eminent, comprised of two lyric specialists m and two actors. I would have liked to have seen a couple of composers there for overall balance and a result which may have favoured some of the songs which were melodically stronger.

The event was organised brilliantly well and presented with panache by the incomparable Joanna Riding, who moved me to tears with a special performance of Losing My Mind. Also deeply moving was the sight of Anthony Drewe having to stand and present the award on his own without his partner, George Stiles, who had a stroke very recently and is still being rehabilitated in the US.

A hearty congratulations to all of my fellow writers and chag sameach to all of my Jewish friends.

“You don’t have any idea!”

I had the most profoundly bizarre dream last night. I dreamed I was with Abbie, and her son Wilfred, who was born a couple of months ago. Wilfred, in the dream, looked surprisingly grown up and I told Abbie that I reckoned he was going to be quite an early talker. I’m not quite sure why I was suddenly an expert on the development of babies, but I felt sure that Wilfred, who incidentally was dressed in Victorian clothing, was going to speak earlier than any other baby in the world!

...And sure enough, just as I’d given my prediction, Wilfred opened his mouth and said “you don’t have any idea!” The voice was crystal clear, quite sing-songy and incredibly loud in my ear, to the extent that I immediately woke up, convinced that I’d been awoken by someone actually in the bedroom. It was such a freakish occurrence that I made a note of the time: Two minutes past five.

It turns out that Abbie was, indeed, awake at that time, and quite stressed as a result of Wilfred crying continuously in the night. I wonder if our wires crossed over on some spiritual plain!

Nathan and I only have one set of car keys. Up until today, we’ve muddled by, with a little hook on the wall where we hang the key when we get into the house after driving somewhere. 

We were both working yesterday. I was singing at shul and Nathan had two knitting classes booked in rural Berkshire. As ever, I took the tube in, and Nathan’s only option was to drive. I usually switch my phone off as soon as I leave the house on my way to synagogue. I like to spend the tube journey going over my music and it’s my nod towards Shabbat rules which ban, amongst other things, using electronic equipment on the sabbath.

Thankfully I didn’t, and happened to look at my phone as I changed trains at Oxford Circus. There were missed calls and countless text messages from Nathan, all asking where the car keys were. My blood ran cold, and I did that thing of almost not daring to touch my jacket pocket where, instinctively, I knew I’d find the keys.

I immediately went into a panic. My heart was pounding in my ears. Nathan and I exchanged more texts, “oh hell, I’ve got the keys” “then you must turn around and bring them back” “I’m at Bond Street. I’ll never make it to shul if I turn around now.” “Get out of the tube and order an Uber...” 

And so that’s what I did. And I stood, on an empty, early morning Oxford Street, waiting for the cab to arrive. Horrifically, it became apparent that there were roadworks in every direction. The Uber app kept telling me that my driver was three minutes away, then one minute, then three again. I could see the poor guy on the map driving round in circles in an attempt to get to me, thwarted at every pass by road blocks.

So there I was, running through the streets in a panic, a weird sticky mizzle enveloping me, attempting to get out of the area around Bond Street tube which seemed to have become such an effective anti-car oasis! Thankfully, the charming driver persisted, and didn’t bugger off, as is so often the case with Uber drivers. Fifteen minutes later, I’d handed the keys over and he was winging his way back to Highgate.

Nathan ended up being 40 minutes late for his class, but was mercifully pragmatic about the pickle I’d left him in.

Lessons of the past

I was thrilled to hear the news today that a group of camp survivors have been awarded honours for the work they do in raising awareness and educating people about the holocaust. For me, this is the most vital thing that someone can do if he or she has experienced, first hand, what happens when human beings get out of control. And it’s a brave, brave thing to do. Imagine standing in front of a group of strangers on a weekly basis and telling them about the very worst period of your life? A period so black that you’ve blocked most of it out for fear of what might happen if you remember? They should have been honoured long ago.

I heard a radio piece earlier in the week about the Rwandan genocide. It is staggering to think that this happened in the 1990s. There is a tendency in all of us to think that we’ve somehow evolved beyond behaving like animals, but the makers of the documentary were incredibly clear about how the genocide came to pass. Propaganda. Hutus turned against the Tutsi people after a century of mistrust and misrule, but they were galvanised by a radio station. Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines, (RTLMC), played up-to-date music and had young, funky presenters, some of whom had honed their craft in more established radio stations outside the country. These presenters spread malicious gossip and told obscene jokes which whipped up the Hutu population into a frenzy to the extent that they thought killing their neighbours with machetes and brutally raping them was not just okay, but an absolute duty. What these presenters did has been viewed, in retrospect, as SO damaging, that many are now serving life sentences for the role they played. 

Can you imagine getting to a stage where you think it’s your duty to kill someone? Of course you can’t! Or can you? 

Sadly, the likes of Derren Brown have proven time and time again that, in the right circumstances, many of us would kill and maim if we thought we could get away with it, or were pushed into a temporary place of insanity where we felt we somehow had no other choice.

It’s why I worry about the press today. It seems we can justify any position simply by accusing someone else of supplying fake news. Two diametrically opposed sides of an argument will frequently use the same statistic to prove their point. Black can become white in a heartbeat.

For every atrocity there’s a conspiracy theorist waiting in the wings to say it never happened. I read an insane piece of junk today which claimed that the murder of military drummer Lee Rigby never happened. Or was it junk? A conspiracy theory gains more and more traction as it falls into different pairs of hands. How many times have I only heard the bit of a story I want to hear, or gone off on a rant as a result of reading nothing but a click-bait headline?

A lot is going wrong at the moment, both on an international level and a national level. I don’t know if it’s coincidence, but many friends of mine seem to be very troubled on a personal level as well. Society is disintegrating. People are feeling less and less responsible for their neighbours. A gulf has opened up between rich and poor. Many of us perceive ourselves to be right at the back of every queue...

So now’s the time to ask one simple question: what would it take for ME to do something terrible? Ask that question right now whilst you’re secretly thinking that nothing in the world could make you dob in a neighbour for harbouring a fugitive or turn a blind eye whilst someone is killed outside your front door. But what if you’d been told this person is a paedophile? What if you’d been told he was a murderer? Would you turn a blind eye then?

The lessons of the past are everywhere and sometimes we need a little refresher course.

Sexy by comparison

At some point tomorrow, I am going to head into our loft and literally start throwing things wildly into a dustbin. Anyone with a loft will attest to the fact that piles and piles of stuff that would otherwise have been properly processed by those without a loft, get shoved into a loft by those of us with one! There will be boxes of CDs up there. Video cassettes. Tapes. Bags filled with cables which only fit items which were made in the 1990s. Years of tax receipts. Picnic hampers. Ten rounders bats (don’t ask). Old carpets. Cupboards Nathan made at school. Televisions. Tattered curtains. There will be things up there I don’t even recognise and can’t for the life of me work out how they got there. A lot of it will be water damaged. All will be covered in layer upon layer of brick dust. We have a mattress up there which friends used to sleep on. When the workmen ripped the roof off, they threw the old dormer windows onto the top of it. We’re not even going to attempt to rescue the bedding underneath...

There’s a little corner where we keep the soft toys from our childhood. I only have three: Panda, Horsey and Jemima. I will never throw them away because they played such an important role in my childhood. The first two belonged to my brother but Jemima was mine. She’s a rabbit and was once a lovely fluffy thing with beautiful white fur and a charming dress and pantaloon set made from an early ‘70s printed fabric.

These days she looks utterly horrifying. Anyone who sees her gasps. Her fur is matted. Her clothes are threadbare. At one stage in my childhood I thought she’d look considerably prettier with makeup. Obviously the horrific concept of testing makeup on animals was entirely lost on me, so I tried to make her look like Agnetha from ABBA, with great dollops of bright blue eye shadow, some fetching blusher and blood red lipstick. The effect was dazzlingly awful. Over the years, she’s got quite grimy, and her legs look like they’ve been broken in several places, so she resembles a murdered leporine prostitute, whose body has been dumped in a wheelie bin.

Sadly, the soft toy from our childhood which seems to have vanished without trace is a giant lump of a soft sheep. I suspect any jokes anyone reading this will be tempted to make about the son of a Welshman being given a sheep to play with, will be exacerbated by the knowledge that we named said sheep, “Sexy.” I kid you not.

I know, I know! How were we allowed? How did we even know that word? To make matters considerably worse, I had a chronic lisp as a kid, so he was actually called “Thecthy”. To my retrospective great relief, I was never tempted to make Sexy sexier by daubing him with makeup, like I did Jemima, but I do remember at one stage Brother Edward and I being encouraged to changed Sexy’s name to George. But George never stuck. Sexy wasn’t a George. Sexy was Sexy.

But then, one terrible day, Sexy the Sheep simply vanished...

Now, if I didn’t know that my parents were fine, upstanding, decent human beings, I might suspect that they’d played a part in Sexy’s disappearance. They had, after all, given us the chance to change Sexy’s inappropriate name, and we had singlehandedly failed.

I suppose it could have been worse. Some parents name their children the most awful things. Sarah Cox’ son is called Issac, for example. Brad Pitt’s son, Shiloh, is perfect for a Spoonerism. I went to school with a girl called Hoo Flung Dung, my godson has a classmate called Shittage and there was a girl in my mate Matt’s class called Fuquenisha. Her name was banned by teachers and everyone had to call her Nisha.

...Sexy, by comparison, seems rather tame!

abandoned car

I parked the car yesterday on the little spur road which runs parallel with Southwood Lane. We’re currently in the somewhat unenviable position of not having a permit to park on the streets around our house. This is mostly because we’re about to move, but also because it took the DVLA a pathetic 3 months to send a log book through when we changed cars. Our last car literally fell apart at Pease Pottage Service Station in a scene reminiscent of The Wacky Races! One apparently can’t have a parking permit until ones log book is sent through. You can’t get road tax either. The more I go through life, the more I realise it’s fuelled by Catch 22s!

The good news is that, about ten minutes walk from us, there’s a street which doesn’t have parking regulations. And in London, these days, that’s like finding the Holy Grail. Sure, it’s in the middle of a wood, and most evenings one of the cars parked down there gets broken into, but free parking is free parking and our car isn’t exactly criminal bait!

Of course, you can only find a space down there at night time because, during the day, it’s full to the rafters with the vehicles of cheap-skate commuters who drive into London from their lovely houses in the country and pick up the tube at Highgate.

So many people who live in the countryside are so vehemently smug when it comes to issues surrounding the protection of the environment. “I have a vegetable patch and I grow ALL my own food in the summer.” Then they get in their enormous, gas-guzzling four-by-fours, drive into the city, making the air us city dwellers breathe more choked-up, buy their plastic bottles of water, throw the layers of plastic wrapping from their Pret lunch into London dustbins, and then drive back to their rural idylls, complaining that people in the cities are being outrageous by suggesting global warming is anything other than a problem generated by the cities themselves! The same people then get somewhat aerated when you suggest that we may need to build more houses in their villages and are very fast to talk about the need to fill brown field sites in cities first. Yay! Strain the infrastructure even more!

Anyway, that rather lengthy digression took me away from the point of my story, which is that, when I parked up on the spur road, I noticed that a car had been dumped, somewhat unceremoniously, in the middle of the road. It wasn’t parked. It looked a little bashed-up. The spur is a cul-de-sac, and the car was right at the top, so it wasn’t blocking anyone’s access apart from the people whose houses were at the very end of the road.

I went over to the abandoned car for a closer look. One of its tyres had blown out. The wheel arch had caved in. A few little labels had been attached to the back windscreen which said “police aware.”

As I was staring at the vehicle, I became aware of an old lady looking out of the window of a nearby house. She signalled for me to wait and then came to her front door and told me I was looking at a stolen car which had been dumped there the Friday before the Whitsun bank holiday, and that one of her neighbours had heard a loud bang, and had looked out of her window to see a group of lads in hoodies running away from the now abandoned car. She was in a real pickle. The car was entirely blocking access to her house.

The police had decided it wasn’t their responsibility and had passed the buck to the council, who, in turn, had told my new friend that there was nothing they could do because they couldn’t get a pickup truck down the narrow road.

Let’s put all this buck-passing nonsense into context. Firstly, broken windows syndrome dictates that any street which becomes a dumping ground for bashed-up cars, will, inevitably, go into decline. The message this abandoned car sends out is that this is a road which is not cared for. It’s a road where gangs of young people might decide to congregate to smoke dope. If the road is considered not to be monitored by police, then a gang member might decide to chuck a stone through the window of a local house or set fire to the abandoned car... and so it continues.

More to the point, the lovely lady with whom I was speaking was 92 years old. She’d recently got rid of her own car because she no longer felt safe driving it, but was utterly reliant on her driveway for carers, deliveries and taxis, so the abandoned car was actually stopping her from leaving her house. She’d been frantically calling people but felt no one was listening. As I left, she said, rather pathetically “what if I need an ambulance?”

Obviously I took to Twitter, because, tragically, negatively shaming people online seems to be the only way that anything gets done these days. I angrily tweeted Haringey council with a photograph. I angrily tweeted my MP with a different photograph. She responded and asked for more information.




And low and behold, this afternoon, I noticed that the car had been removed. Ah! The power of social media.

London tut

I spent much of the day today not knowing if I was sweating or covered in rain water. It was muggy in the extreme, everything smelt of wet dog, my suit got soaked through, and the world seemed to be in a very bad mood. You could see everyone getting particularly frustrated with each other on the tube. The London Underground is not air-conditioned like its New York counterpart, and it gets very hot down there. I’m told there are now species which have evolved in those darkened tunnels which you’ll find nowhere else in the world. I think I’m right in saying it’s the only place in the UK where you find scorpions. That might be an urban myth before anyone starts to panic...

I’ve seldom heard as many London “tuts” as I heard today. You know the London tut? We specifically do it to people who don’t know the etiquette of our city. Someone will inadvertently stand on the left hand side of the escalator so we give them a London tut. Someone pauses for a moment before getting onto an escalator, because he or she is slightly wary: We tut. Someone stands too near the door on a lift and the door doesn’t shut. Tut. We hear that a train is delayed because there’s a suspicious package at Bank. Tut. Person under a train? Tut. Terrorist attack? Tut... You can put so much feeling into a tut. Sometimes if you do it to someone’s back and they turn around, you can smile sweetly. Usually you scowl. Other Londoners look at you proudly. “Yes, that behaviour definitely deserved a tut. If you hadn’t done it, I’d’ve had your back!”

I went to the amazing Wilton’s Music Hall today. It’s a stunningly beautiful building. For those who don’t know it, it’s one of, I think, three surviving Victorian music halls in the UK. One of the others is the Leeds City Varieties, which is where Brass premiered.

They’re amazingly intimate spaces, with wonderful acoustics and interesting stages. The one in Leeds still has its original passarale, which is a little walk way extending from the stage into the audience. But whilst Leeds is beautifully opulent with gold fittings and wonderful seats, upholstered in the same red velvet material as its giant curtain, the Wilton’s Music Hall is exactly as it was found, all shabby chic, with plaster tastefully falling off the rag-washed walls. It’s absolutely brilliant.

I was allowed to stick my head into the space, as a group of actors were teching a show, and I couldn’t believe how atmospheric it was. It is steeped in authenticity. You could put anything on that stage with a little bit of lighting, and it would look perfect. I felt ashamed never to have been there before, but excited to be discovering it.

£2

I went to the Hornsey Central hospital for an ENT appointment today. I’ve been having issues with a cough which won’t clear and they suspect I’ve got a form of acid reflux, which, bizarrely, is potentially linked to my hyper-mobility, which, I’m told, is the new term for double-jointedness.

Anyway, in true Haringey Council style, the fancy new hospital building I was in today - all glass atriums and steel - doesn’t have a single water fountain. Not one. I went to the woman behind reception and asked where I could get some water and she said, somewhat nervously, “you could go to the cafe and buy some.” I’d actually walked to the appointment and genuinely didn’t have my wallet with me, so buying water wasn’t an option. Furthermore, in an ENT clinic, which deals with matters of the mouth and throat, I think you might expect some sort of water fountain, particularly if patients are being asked to sit and wait for their appointments in a hot atrium with the sun pounding down through a glass roof. Frankly, shouldn’t all public buildings have access to water? Is it even illegal not to?

The receptionist very kindly filled a mug with water and handed it to me, apologising and telling me there wasn’t a water machine because no one would take responsibility for it! But it felt very strange. There were “hygiene stations” everywhere for patients to “decontaminate” their hands, but you can’t drink that gel stuff! Or can you? ;-)

Whilst I was waiting, I became horribly aware of a very high-pitched beeping. It was like the sound dial-up modems used to make in the late 1990s. It was right on the edge of audible and it made me incredibly confused to the extent that I went to another receptionist to ask what was going on. She merely shrugged. When I returned to my seat, I asked the man behind me if he could hear it as well, and he nodded, confused. It was at that point that a woman sitting on the front row of chairs turned round and said “it’s his hearing aid.” She pointed at the old man sitting next to her. I looked at her, “oh crumbs. Does he hear all that awful noise as well?” “Yes, it drives him mad!”

We went into Muswell Hill for lunch and went to various banks to pay in various cheques. I had to stand in a queue at Barclays for about twenty minutes. The middle-aged woman in front of me broke my heart. She wanted to pay £2 into her account. It struck me that this is the sort of money I regularly spend on a cup of tea which I gulp down in seconds, and there she was treating two pound coins like they were the most precious things in the world. There are so many layers in society.

I went to the gym, and then we went to Kwik Fit to get a new tyre fitted, having a little walk on Hampstead Heath whilst waiting for the work to be done.

I came home and spent the next six hours taking every single book down from the loft. Our loft has become a fifteen year dumping ground for anything we can’t think of anything else to do with! I have thrown 100 books away - mostly those which were utterly destroyed by building work over the summer, and created a pile of some 600 to take to charity shops. I have kept about 100, all of which are really special in some way. Many of them were filled with little drawings done by friends of mine in the 1980s. Some were the annotated scripts of plays and musicals I’ve directed. Others had photos and postcards stuffed inside. There were some beautiful messages on the inside sleeves. Others as good as broke my heart, including some of the books that Arnold Wesker gave to me. Quite bizarrely, he once wrote a book of erotic stories, and the inscription he’d written inside said, “Dear Ben, I’m not quite sure why YOU should want to read these, but here they come with my best wishes for 1999. Love ‘Nold.” He always liked that I called him ‘Nold...

I’m quite shaky as I go to bed tonight. Emotionally drained as well as being quite physically damaged by all the heavy lifting of books. I am not much looking forward to this move. It’s gonna be exhausting. More reason to chuck everything away!

Bin bags

I went for a very lovely walk on the heath this evening. Some sort of weather front is rolling in, to take all the glorious sunshine away, and a fresh wind was blowing fairly keenly. The trees were roaring appreciatively, saying “look how beautiful our leaves look in this glorious breeze.”

Nathan and I have been throwing stuff away today in preparation for our big move. We’ve filled bin liners with clothes which we’re never going to wear again, each with its own set of very particular memories. Punting trips, sunset walks, picnics, laughter. The jacket pockets are stuffed full of theatre tickets, back stage passes, mucky extra strong mints, grains of sands and impossibly large bits of fluff! I found the jacket which I’d last worn as I walked the length of the River Nene. I was moved to see that I’d worn an AIDS ribbon throughout, a full six months before Nathan became HIV positive.

Of course, cleaning out ones belongings is a deeply therapeutic thing to do. There are hugely positive benefits: you feel lighter and more able to tackle the world. But every little object which has stayed with you for any length of time can also generate a “what if?” 

We very nearly didn’t move to Highgate in the first place. I was working as a casting agent with Shaheen Baig in the flat below and when the landlord first approached her to ask if she knew anyone who might like the flat upstairs, I immediately said no. 

The journey to our accepting the flat is a story in itself. Nathan and I were living in Tufnell Park in a lovely little flat with a hugely eccentric lay out. It was situated over three floors. Our kitchen was on a half landing, so people living in flats above would traipse past us whilst we were cooking or cleaning our teeth! The bathroom was even more bizarre. It was on the ground floor - right next to the back door - so to go to the loo or have a bath, we had to go down two flights of communal stairs. It was a nightmare in the night, and we’d sometimes bump into our neighbours wearing nothing but a towel.

Anyway, we only had a bath and a loo in the bathroom. We washed our hands in the bath because there was no sink. It was, however, a fine, enamel-covered, really deep bath. One of my great joys in life was lying in it on a summer’s evening with the window to the back garden wide open and the cooling air tickling my face.

Nathan was always more of a shower man, and one day asked the land lady if we might have a little shower unit fixed above the bath. She was curiously obliging and immediately said that she didn’t see why not.

My friend Tammy was staying with us at the time, and we came home one day, horrified to find my precious bath, in pieces, dumped in the front garden. We went into the bathroom to discover that a horrible shower unit, built from flimsy plastic and chipboard had replaced it. I hate having showers, so our exit from the flat was almost immediately assured. To make matters worse, the landlady hadn’t thought to give us a sink. It was one thing washing our hands in the bath after using the loo, but quite something else having to turn the shower on, risking getting absolutely soaked if the shower head hadn’t been pressed against the cubical wall.

It was a nightmare. I immediately went back to Shaheen’s landlord, and asked if his flat was still available. Astonishingly, it was. It was at least a month since I’d turned it down. In those days (2005) it was really easy to find flats to rent. Everyone was buying, because houses were much cheaper.

So that’s the story of our little flat in Archway Road, and the biggest “what if” of all is wondering what might have happened to me, to us, had we stayed in Tufnell Park. The flat we’d lived in there came up for rent again at the start of the year and I made an enquiry. The three self-contained rooms we used to have as two bedrooms and a sitting room, had been turned into a one-bedroom flat, with a bathroom and kitchen crammed into the old living room. I was staggered to discover that it was on the market for just under three times the amount we’d paid for it when it had twice the number of bedrooms! London is a very different place 15 years on...

I suspect I shall be feeling increasingly nostalgic as we get closer and closer to the move date.

Fairfield Hall happiness

I found myself on the Central Line yesterday, in my own happy world, trying to pretend I wasn’t on a highly-crowded tube. I was standing in the area where the seats are and suddenly became aware that someone was shoving me from behind, whilst angrily shouting “excuse me” as she sat down in the empty chair in front of me.

She was probably in her thirties. Very well dressed. She had some sort of accent, maybe Brazilian, with a tinge of American. She was carrying a nasty fluffy dog in a basket. She came across as entitled and spoilt, like someone who’d never really been challenged in life. She huffed and blew and shot a few evil looks in my direction.

The next thing I knew, she’d stood up again and was leaving the train. I heard her, yet again, saying “excuse me” really angrily. And then I was aware that she’d shoved a young Asian lad really hard in the back, to the extent that he’d fallen out of the train and onto the platform.

The lad suddenly started pointing at his ear and it became clear he was wearing a hearing aid. He was deaf and hadn’t actually heard the woman talking. Instead of instantly backing down and apologising profusely to the man she’d pushed, Little Miss Entitled just shouted more loudly and angrily. People on the tube were utterly aghast as the woman stormed off down the platform, still yelling. I hope the fluffy dog bit her. 

The deaf bloke was plainly really shaken. He got back into the carriage and made himself as small as possible, like a wounded animal. It was a really upsetting sight. I tapped his arm and asked if he was alright. He could plainly lip read because he nodded, looking anything but alright. “If it’s any consolation,” I said, “she was horrible to me as well. She’s obviously having a really bad day.”

And then I got thinking. Plainly she’d felt it was okay to push two men out of her way. Dishing out a bit of violence against two men is okay. They’re men: they must be bullies, they deserve it, and, besides, a woman can’t bully a man etc etc. But the fuss that would rightly have be made if I’d pushed a woman out of a tube carriage is not worth thinking about. Certainly someone would have chased me down the platform and given me a piece of their mind. In a world where we’re all searching for equality, we really need to learn that there shouldn’t be one rule for one gender and another for the other.

On a far more pleasant note, I was given a tour of the newly-refurbished Fairfield Halls in Croydon yesterday. It opens in September, and there’s plainly still a lot which needs to be done but it’s very exciting. I was provided with steel-capped boots, a hard hat, hi-viz and gloves which made me feel very masculine. Sadly I also had to wear a pair of enormous plastic goggles, like the things we used to don during science experiments, and suddenly I was a massive geek! 

What is absolutely clear is that the building is going to be sensational. Everything has been thought through so carefully. There are cafes, roof terraces, studio spaces, theatre spaces, and, of course, the famous concert hall which is known for its almost perfect acoustic. 

Designed by the same bloke who did the Royal Festival Hall, the Fairfield Halls opened in 1962. I was very pleased to hear that they’re stripping the building back to how it would have looked when it was first built: that fusion of space-age glamour and no-frills modern brutality. These buildings, as I recently learned on a trip to Coventry, are much better understood with the original signage, fonts, and, more crucially, those amazing coloured tiles: usually duck egg blues, crimsons and light purples. When you strip away the 1980s gaudy plastics, cheap melamine and wood-chip counters, everything suddenly makes perfect sense, and you find yourself looking at a style icon rather than a tatty, weatherworn disaster zone.