Blind Man's Buff

In 2006, I was a member of the company for the Summer Festival Season at Pitlochry Festival Theatre. Later in the season, once there was no more rehearsing, a group of us got together in the studio of the local radio station, Heartland FM, and recorded a couple of radio plays I'd written.

This is not high-tech stuff- it was an interview studio, not a drama one, and our attempts at sound effects and atmos are rudimentary and non-existent, respectively. And I didn't understand the editing software very well so we had to do every scene in one take!

But the quality of the acting was so high, and they're sweet stories- cheerful romcoms which might make people smile in this weird time- that I thought I'd put them online. I hope they'll fill a little time in a self-isolated or quarantined day.

This is the first of them- BLIND MAN'S BUFF. Written in 1999, recorded with a few rewrites in 2006. (If I had been able to see the future I probably wouldn't have called a character Alexa...) If people enjoy it I'll put up the other play, a comedy about dating and maths called BYPASSING JENNY.

Here it is!

https://soundcloud.com/jondrytay/blind-mans-buff?fbclid=IwAR2DniOQF4oe4lhjd7fuwsuuGMMMvOP6EF8Dsmg7hEAvYcBEh2YlWk4IlBE

Cast in order of appearance:

Rachel: Helen Logan
Alexa: Amy Ewbank
Alan: Ronnie Simon
Tom: Anthony Glennon
Jill: Michele Gallagher
Tony: Darrell Brockis

So Could Anyone

Let’s be clear: the last thing I want to be doing in the wee small hours as Christmas Day turns to Boxing Day is to be writing something about a song we’re all sick of discussing. But the alternative would be lying in bed unable to sleep as the same old thoughts rotated through my brain with the insistence of the NYPD choir singing Galway Bay.

So the upshot is, I’m sat in my sister’s lounge, where the only light is this laptop, trying to explain yet again how this time of year is harder than it needs to be if you happen to be a cheap lousy faggot.

Last week I was in the glassware department of John Lewis at Brent Cross, trying to find one last Christmas present for my faggot of a husband. I was listening to a podcast but, faggotishly enough, I don’t have noise-cancelling headphones so I became aware of a song that was playing in store.

It’s a fucking brilliant song: rackety and festive and sad and funny and ding dong merrily on high. But it’s gradually become a song that has made me flinch. There’s a word in it that faggots like me- not all of us, but a good number of us- have found harder and harder to hear, over the years.

There was a time when the word, in context, didn’t bother me at all. I bellowed it, eight pints down, along with everyone else, and then we all talked about how the song it’s in is the best Christmas song, because it is. But the thing is, there have been a lot of changes in the last thirty years or so. The thing about being a frightened minority (and we faggots all know how that feels, even though there are other minorities worse off than us) is that you don’t even know how oppressed you’ve been until you start being a little less frightened, and that can take generations.

As a cheap teenage faggot in the 1980s, I internalized the idea that being different made me worth less. I was so, so ashamed of what I loved. As a lousy twentysomething faggot in the 90s, I welcomed the changes to the law that made me a little less lesser. I didn’t believe in equal marriage then, by the way: marriage was for the people who were real. I hadn’t yet met my husband, but I sure as hell believed I wasn’t allowed him. As a scumbag thirtysomething faggot in the 2000s, I started realizing that language had been a huge, huge part of the narrative of shame I’d grown up with: that the fear of being called a word, or words, had diminished me in what should have been the shiniest years of my life.

This was round about the time the vocalist who sang the word in the Christmas song started singing an altered lyric, by the way, because she was a brilliant human being who saw what it meant before most of the rest of us did. You'd think that would have been the end of it, but she died in horrible circumstances so her opinion on how words change over time became irrelevant for some reason.

And then, just the other day, I was in John Lewis buying a Christmas present for my husband when I heard the song and I couldn’t bear, couldn’t BEAR, that I was about to hear the word in a nice cosy shop surrounded by hundreds of other people. I wanted to turn up my headphones and drown it out, but a part of me thought that would be cowardly, so I came to the good old faggoty compromise, and accepted that I have to hear a vicious slur about myself a hundred times every Christmas, and that the little stab it gives me every single time is something I have to deal with, because to be upset by it is snowflakey and PC and woke and it’s just a word in a song for god’s sake and they’re singing in character and what’s your problem with hearing that word while you’re doing Christmas shopping, faggot?

(That ‘it’s a character’ defence, by the way: what a doozy. I’ve been in quite a lot of plays and played quite a lot of characters. They say all kinds of stuff. I’m going to write a Christmas classic where a ‘character’ sings ‘I have cancer/ It’s terminal/ I will probably die in agony/ During the Nine Lessons And Carols’ and if anyone finds it less than festive I will say ‘Unfortunately that is what the *character* in my lovely Christmas song is thinking and of course you should put it in your TV ad/department store/sitcom because DUUUH CHARACTER DUUUH’.)

So tonight- Christmas night, ffs- some of my family (which includes two faggots) watched the ‘Gavin and Stacey’ Christmas special. The Christmas special of the beloved sitcom, on BBC1, on Christmas Day, that decided to include the song, and the word, in a way that dared anyone to have a problem with it. ‘It’s a song! It’s a word!’ they winked as the character whose probable gay past has been a running joke for nearly a decade sang ‘faggot’ to families everywhere. It’s funny because he hates himself!

They definitely knew. All of them. When they decided to put it in a scene, they knew. When the producers received the script. When they shot it and edited it. When they trailed it and broadcast it and tweeted about how proud they were of their show. They all knew that they had decided to address the fact that some faggots feel their shoulders tense up when that song starts to play: that we instantly start the internal debate over whether we’re allowed to be upset, that our hearts beat a little faster and we get a stab of anxiety. That every year, the season of peace and love and goodwill to all men yells a word at us that is formed entirely of hate, and we have to be good sports and claim not to be bothered. They knew that, and the message they decided to send to us was ‘suck it up, faggots’. To put it mildly, that doesn’t feel like punching up.

Of course it didn’t make things instantly, materially worse for queer people. It was just a moment in a sitcom. But I can promise you that a lot of queer people had a moment of sadness. Of otherness. A lot of us were reminded that we exist in your world for as long as you permit us, and if you ever changed your mind there wouldn’t be enough of us to make it a fair fight. History kind of bears us faggots out on that one. That's a sad thing to be reminded of on Christmas Day.

(In fairness, some queer people instantly took to their social media to say how unbothered they are, and that they wanted to distance themselves from anyone who has a problem with the song or with the sitcom. To those people I would like to say that nobody would EVER know and it is TOTALLY fine to LIKE being MASCULINE because god knows you wouldn’t want to be one of THEM. Btw and fyi boys: the people who hate the queens hate you just as much. Unfair, right? Soz).

The rest of us, though: we’re tired. And sad. And increasingly scared. And if- like Shane McGowan, or Rob Brydon, or James Corden, or Ruth Jones- you’ve never been called a faggot (or any of the other words for difference) by someone who knew it to be true and wanted to do you harm, then you don’t get to tell us that our sadness and our fear aren’t valid.

Happy Christmas, that word in that song. I pray god it’s your last.

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National Poetry Day 2016

At first you don't notice.
With a toddler's confidence 
You are the world.
And even when it creeps in,
When you're six or seven
And you say or do something
Which is right and normal
But which makes other people
Do a face
You still don't fully get it.

When you clock it
When it hits you
You're in or near adolescence
Which is not ideal.
You have all the other stuff,
The clusterfuck of hormones
To deal with.

So when you're eighteen,
Twenty, twenty five,
That's when you rationalise.
You try out words 
To see how they sound in your mouth.
You say 'I am this'
And hope you're not.

Past forty
You get bullish
And proud, and angry
And you look at the child you were
And honour his fear
And his pain and his bravery
And you say to him
Don't worry.

And you thank him
For doing everything you needed to do
For being scared
But not scared enough
And letting you
In your middle age
Say with pride and scars
'I am different.
I am just as different as anyone else.' 

"Day 106..."

Celebrity Big Brother is about to start on Channel 5, and the ads for it have made me suddenly realize what it is the Labour Party leadership elections are reminding me of.
They’re housemates.

Liz Kendall is the one whose VT makes you want to hate her. The things she says have you so riled up that you’re ready to pick apart every word she says. But as it turns out, she’s not in the edit much, and when she does show up she seems more likeable than you expected. You still don’t warm to her, but you grudgingly accept she’s probably not as bad as you thought.

Jeremy Corbyn is the one who is nominated by the other housemates every week. They notice that the public keeps voting for him, but can’t process why. Every eviction night they expect him to go then wonder why he hasn’t. His popularity makes them angry with the public but they have to stop themselves saying so. Occasionally he'll say something that makes you think 'wait, what?' which will be used as the basis of a whole episode if nothing much else happened that day.

Andy Burnham is the one who sees himself as the alpha male of the house. He’ll say what seems reasonable to whoever is in front of him, and will bank on people not noticing the inconsistency. His schtick is the 'hey, I'm just a normal guy' thing, but he gets worryingly furious if someone implies he isn't best human. The Andy Burnham housemate in your average series of BB gets to the final, but comes sixth.

Yvette Cooper is the one who relies on keeping quiet and hoping the other housemates are unpopular enough for her to sneak a win. She’s the one who stands up for herself over an argument about washing up in week 7, then constantly refers back to that conversation when people accuse her of fence-sitting. She’s never up for eviction, and leaves the house to neither boos nor cheers. 

Who wins? You decide. Unless you’ve ever tweeted something positive about the Greens.

2015 BC

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2015/06/24/londons-iconic-gay-pub-the-black-cap-to-be-converted-into-a-cafe/



It seems oddly appropriate that the Black Cap is to become a branch of the Breakfast Club. To take somewhere which has been badly-behaved for fifty years, while at the same time providing a haven for society's rejected, and to turn it into somewhere where you can get French Toast for nine quid on the way to work strikes me as a perfect symbol for what is happening to London. 

I've nothing against the Breakfast Club, in particular- I've had some nice food in various of their branches. Actually, I do have one thing in particular against them, which is the disingenuous, poor-little-us-are-we-the-baddies? narrative they're trying to pass off onto us, but that's just a symptom of something larger, and tidier, and more cosily antiseptic.

One day everything will be rag-rubbed, and we will all sit on upcycled pine, and read menus that pretend to be your friend and chalkboards with quirky little aphorisms on them, and nobody will remember that London used to be a place where the genteel could be genteel if they wanted, but where there was also space to be dirty or edgy or dangerous or unconventional or- in the most inclusive sense of the word- just a bit queer. Where you could go to places whose primary function wasn't just to chummily relieve you of as much cash as possible.

And we'll sit there, and wonder what happened to the chaotic, exciting city we used to live in where not everyone was a millionaire, and how everything got so boring and so identically soulless, and how they managed to make that dinky little sprig of parsley sit so perfectly on top of our goat's curd and chorizo scrambled egg.

Word Association.

Let’s play a game. I’ll say a word, you say the first one that comes into your head. Ok?

Here goes.

‘Immigration’.

If you’re the journalist Allison Pearson, more than one word comes into your head. When Allison Pearson hears the word ‘Immigration’, she thinks ‘the abuse of children in Rotherham’.

Presumably, when someone says ‘Gloucestershire’, she thinks ‘Fred West’. If someone says ‘Happiness’ around AP, she hears ‘That Todd Solondz film about paedos’. If you say ‘Love’, she probably gets an image of Kurt Cobain shooting himself.

I say this, because Pearson has tweeted her anger that Ed Milliband didn’t mention immigration in today’s speech. And the reason she's angry he didn't mention immigration is  Rotherham.

How does a brain do that? How does somebody move seamlessly from the vexed, complex, vital issues of nationhood, borders, asylum, diversity and culture into a crime perpetrated by a group of sick men? How does someone hear ‘foreigner’ and go straight to ‘rapist’?

What happened in Rotherham is disgusting, troubling and upsetting. Evil men did evil things and chances to stop them were missed time and time again. Questions must be asked and blame must be apportioned- particularly, in this case, to the Labour council which screwed up.

I am sad to say that I am no massive supporter of the Labour Party. I’d like to be, but they make it so bloody difficult.  I will vote for them, but holding my nose and thinking 'least worst'.  I condemn the failures of Rotherham Council in the strongest possible terms.

Rotherham means that questions have to be answered about criminal justice. About policing. About social work. About local authorities. All of those things spring to mind when one reads about what happened because even though to cite some of them may be a little broad-brush and generalised, they all have a major part to play in the case. 

But, you know what? When I hear about something a few hundred people did, I don't assume that they're identical to another few hundred thousand. When I hear that some people who committed a crime shared a cultural identity, I don't assume that everyone of that cultural identity behaves the same way.  

And as a result, Rotherham isn't the first thing I think of when I hear the word ‘immigration’, or even- especially- the first thing I think of when I hear a speech in which immigration isn't mentioned. 

 

To do that, you’d have to be a massive… well, you know the word. And anyone who really cared about the awful things that happened to those poor young women would hate the idea of using them to make a cheap party political point.

I expect Allison Pearson isn’t a… well, you know the word. But she is undoubtedly a cynical opportunist who is happy to appeal to people who are.

Tinfoil hat. But then he would say that, wouldn't he?

(Note: this blog post has been tested by an independent adjudicator- well, me- and found to be totally neutral. By me. Suck it.)

So. The whole indyref thing. Isn't it awful how the BBC is totally pro-union and constantly pushing a pro-union message?

Also, isn't it awful that the BBC is totally pushing the Yes agenda and giving far too much time to that awful Salmond fella?

We've been here before, of course. Gaza is the most obvious, recent, painful example. Anyone who spends any time with any social media will know that the BBC led with a hideously pro-Israel, anti-semitic, Palestine-friendly, Zionist agenda.

There's no more telling example of confirmation bias than a nicely divisive issue. It's very, very easy to see someone one doesn't like on the news and fall into the trap of thinking 'LOOK! LOOK! THEY'RE PUSHING THE THING I HATE!' And once you've seen it, it's pretty easy to believe it.

Here are some things I know about the way the BBC works. I've been involved with providing drama and LE content to the BBC, so I have a take on the organisation as a whole, but from an outside (and generally a frustrated) perspective. On the other hand, someone who has been one of my best friends for twenty years is a Producer for BBC News. And I know a wee bit about Ofcom, owing to a combination of the above.

Firstly: Compliance is king, emperor, deity. You try putting out some content of any kind, it's going to be vetted on a lot of different levels. This is where any kind of agenda gets flagged, flayed, and put down with a lethal injection.

Secondly: In stark paradox to the above, people who DO have an agenda are nonetheless given the chance loudly to express it. This is why the Farages, the Hopkinses, the Phillipses get a platform on the BBC to shout about how they don't get a platform on the BBC. When did you last hear ITN or Sky run a report about something shitty that had happened on ITN or Sky? Clue: you didn't, ever. 

Thirdly: The neutrality which the BBC must maintain causes a kind of sibling syndrome: tougher on the 'loved ones' than on the 'enemy'. The Telegraphy, Colonelly people who bang on about the left-wing bias of the Beeb are largely right, in a way, because- surprise!- the people who choose to live in big diverse cities and work for a publicly-funded broadcaster tend to be of the left. That's WHY we keep getting, for example, the lunatic fringe of Christian Voice invited to talk about, say, abortion, or homosexuality. It's why we have to have someone like Toby Young on every time an actual scientist talks about climate change. For balance. Or, if you will, 'balance'.

Fourthly: There's regulations. Let's use, as an example, the nasty little fuckers at UKIP. Thing is, at the last-but-one EU elections, they came fourth in the public vote. What that meant, under regulations we'd all largely be in favour of in principle, is that they HAD to have a percentage of the airtime for the most recent EU elections. In which they did significantly better, so they have to have MORE airtime at the next EU elections and so... but you get the idea. Vicious circle. Question: did that initial rise in their votes, the rise that triggered the Ofcom regs, come from the BBC or the tabs? You decide. (PS: it was the tabs)

Look, I'm not a wild-eyed, naive, Beeb-lover. God knows, anyone who tries to work for them as a freelance, or as a representative of an independent provider, is unlikely ever to say 'bbc' without saying 'the pissing sodding fucking...' first. There are mistakes made all the time in the reporting of sensitive issues. That has happened with the kippers, and with Gaza, and with issues of race and gender and pretty much anything that people care about enough to invest with a news story. 

Barely a day goes by without a march or protest that people think should have been reported, and they're probably right. Because, of course, the people who decide what goes on the news- being fallible- make mistakes. One of the triggers for this post was a news report about the referendum to which my friend Kate drew my attention; a horrible, patronising report of a shortbready, tartanny, white Scotland where people sit in pubs reciting Burns to haggises. That kind of thing is, unquestionably, a fuckup.

But a fuckup is all it is. One of the great things about being British is that we have no need to hold on to conspiracy theories, because those who seek to subjugate us are so sodding incompetent that we inevitably find out about it. Our national broadcasting corporation has its incompetent moments too, but if you think it's pushing an agenda- for left or right, union or independence, Israel or Palestine, Beyonce or Jay-Z, or whatever- you should probably try projecting a little less. 

No. I'll go further. If you think the BBC pushes an agenda, you're a dick. You can go ahead and cry foul, but you *will* be being a dick as you do so.

Unless, of course, you'd rather our only broadcasters and news sources were paid-for, commercial ones. Good luck with that.

Inevitably...

I put finger to keyboard reluctantly. I never wanted to be a predictable person, and given that my blog has ended up being mainly about opera or The Gayz, the fact that I find myself tapping away on a subject that links the two makes me feel terribly boring. But there’s important stuff going on here, and it’s getting harder and harder to work out who are the goodies and who are the baddies, so I’m going to go ahead and big fat do it anyway.

And also: sometimes I write about football, too, so actually I’m rounded and actually YOU are the boring one. In your face.

So. Tamar Iveri. A year ago, a post appeared on her facebook page in which she criticized the President of Georgia for condemning violence against a gay rights march. So far, so labyrinthine, I know. To simplify: march happened, violence was done on marchers, president condemned violence, Iveri’s FB criticized President for condemning violence. She talked of ‘Pure Georgian blood’, and said that ‘sometimes it’s good to break some jaws’ and went on to talk about homosexuality in terms that were worryingly obsessed with excrement.

(Sidebar in the neutral, facty bit of this post: I think this is being lost in all the discussion. The president said ‘Hey, let’s not beat up the gays’ and Iveri's post, at length, said ‘No. NO. We SHOULD beat up the gays’. Let’s bear that in mind.)

Anyway, that all happened in 2013, and as we all know in 2013 we were all still wearing flares and talking about Ceylon. I mean, it’s an unimaginably long time ago.

So, way back when, some people objected to Iveri’s FB post and it was deleted. She sort of apologised, a bit, and then didn’t do a concert in Paris she had been scheduled for, and it all went away.

Until now. Iveri was cast at Opera Australia as Desdemona, in Verdi’s opera OTELLO, based on Shakespeare’s play in which, as you will remember, neither hate nor words are remotely dangerous. Somehow, her FB post was dredged up, and what is now being called a ‘social media campaign’ was launched to suggest to OA that she might not be everyone’s favourite colleague, or the darling of every audience member.

It gets murky from here on in. People don’t look very nice.

Iveri doesn’t look very nice, because on top of everything else it would appear she lied. Once it became apparent that this wasn’t all going to go away, she came up with another FB post claiming that the butler did it. Her husband, she claimed, had written the offending post, because he is a fervent Christian and the gay march had been scheduled on the same day as a march commemorating Georgia’s war dead and a friend of theirs had died and he was angry and we were never at war with Eastasia.

(For information, again: the gay rights march and the memorial march were not on the same day, and it took a year for her to say that her husband had written the post, and he has his own facebook page, and why is any of this relevant to incitement to violence, which is a crime, anyway?)

What happened next was that Opera Australia equivocated, and got people angrier and angrier by their refusal to condemn what, in most any other profession, would be counted as gross misconduct.  You don’t, in any job, go on record saying that some of your colleagues are faeces and cancer and need their jaws broken without expecting at the very least a slap on the wrist from HR. If OA had acted immediately, I suspect this shitstorm would have been less shitty (simile: courtesy the Tamar Iveri School Of Scatology).

Inevitably, finally, Iveri was fired. She made one final FB post where she- and this is where the word ‘disingenuous’ is stretched to its utmost limit- claimed that she had only opposed the march because she was worried that people might get hurt. Ho ha hum.

But, if you can believe it, that’s where it got nastier. That’s where people, on all sides of the political spectrum, took a horrible story and made it worse. I can’t really bear to spell it all out, so I’ll opt for bullet points from now on.

1: People started worrying that she was the victim of a 'witch hunt'

I can deal with this quite quickly, can’t I? No she wasn’t. This isn’t an issue of freedom of expression. This is someone who condoned- encouraged-  violence against fellow humans just because they weren’t wired the way she was.  We don’t even need to do the racism test, where you replace ‘gay’ with ‘black’. If she worked for a PR firm or a bank or a shop or anywhere other than the nervously liberal arts, she would have been out of the door so fast her head would’ve spun. And you don’t need me to tell you that freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences, right?

2: People started going on Iveri’s and OA’s Facebook pages and having misogynist rants

This is where the double-nasty comes in. Iveri is certainly a bigot, and maybe a fascist. What she isn’t, or not acceptably at any rate, is a bitch or a cunt or a whore. I can understand why people wanted to vent against her, but so many of them got it dead wrong. The correct response to OA’s decision to fire her was silence. Job done, bigot sent home to have a think. I can’t remember a better example of moral defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. Anyone who posted anything abusive about Iveri which was based on anything other than her opinions- here’s a slow handclap. You have given useful, quotable ammo to the very people who ought to have none. And yes, I think she should go to a teacher to work on her higher notes, which have a tendency to go flat, but that is NOT RELEVANT HERE.

Which leads to:

3: People started using the abuse Iveri received as a kind of defence for her actions

This is where I sort of want to give up and blast humanity into space (or, to coin a phrase, to break its jaw). The fact that some idiot misogynists called Iveri a bitch DOES NOT retroactively make her a martyr. The fact that she lost her job should be treated on its own, as a closed book. The fact that some woman-hating trolls did their woman-hating troll thing is a MUCH bigger problem. Prominent women are called the names Tamar Iveri was called every day, time and time again, on the internet. Most of them haven’t angrily defended the physical injury of other humans. If you want to get angry about what was said to her, be my guest. You should. Just don't make her your poster girl.

4: But - AAARGH- those people above are sort of right.

That’s where it’s all ultimately depressing. There’s that old, self hating thing that members of minorities can’t help but think: ‘Oh dear, if we get angry about this bigot saying his bigot thing then he’ll hate us all the more’. And there’s no point in that. For all her ‘gay friends’- and I suspect she’ll have met a few of us, apparently we crop up here and there in opera-  Tamar Iveri isn’t going to have her mind changed if we shut up nicely and let her express her desire to see us in casualty without repercussions. I have no interest in keeping schtumm so as not to confirm haters in their hatery.  It was absolutely worth speaking up and standing up for ourselves.

But, at the same time. You people who jumped in to call her every name under the sun. You people who allowed her to look like a victim. You people who used the hate speech men have used against women for centuries and thought you were striking a blow against bigotry: you silly fucking cunts (so to speak). All you have done is taken someone who was unequivocally in the wrong, and given her the chance to look as if she was a little bit in the right.

Conclusion

I couldn’t do bullet points without a conclusion: it would be a sin against GCSE Science. So let’s try this one.

Online misogyny is a massive problem, and one which is much bigger than the Iveri affair. Let’s not mix up the two: let’s robustly condemn the people who spaffed their anger all over the internet, and let’s treat that as a problem which has nothing, in the end, to do with a woman who quite rightly lost a gig.

Open Letter

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Dear John Lyndon Sullivan,

Hello! I’m one of those whatevers you’ve read about. I hope it’s not presumptuous of me to assume that you don’t really know any of us- I just get the feeling you might not. If you’re still determined to be a politician you may end up pretending that some of your best friends are etc etc etc, of course, and without doubt you’ll have met some of us. Maybe you had an unmarried uncle who was quite gentle and fond of baking. Think back.

Anyway, I’m writing to take you up on your kind offer to shoot one of us, so that the other 99 (you may need to re-check your statistics) change their minds over whether the whole gay thing is a matter of genetics or education. I’m happy to be your guinea pig in this fascinating social experiment.

I’m guessing you’d be shooting me in the shoulder or the leg, rather than somewhere actually fatal; for elected (or even non-elected) representatives actually to murder fellow citizens who are innocent of any crime is frowned upon in our namby-pamby liberal society. But even so, it’ll send out a powerful message. If we can get a date, time and location fixed, I’ll try and get as many ‘poofters’ as I can to come and watch you prove your point.

A couple of things you need to know: firstly, I won’t back down. You may have run away with the idea that we’re a sissy, physically cowardly lot. You might assume that I’d turn up, pretend to be ready to take a shot, and then run off and write a musical or press flowers or something. But just think- if I did that, your hypothesis wouldn’t be properly tested! I am committed to this project, and although being shot will doubtless sting a bit, I can’t wait to find if it actually works the way you suggest. The idea of standing there, bleeding from a flesh wound, while so many of my friends instantly demarry, fall out of love with their partners, or just plain stop fancying each other is too fascinating to pass up. And besides, you might be surprised. We’re quite hardy, as a bunch. Some of the things we do to each other for pleasure can be really bloody painful.

Another thing to bear in mind is that you’d be pretty well disposed towards me, if the rest of your party is anything to go by. I’m white, I speak nicely, I pay my taxes, and I’ve never been caught being Romanian. Admittedly, your party also doesn’t want me to get married to a man (and if I saw the error of my ways and got married to a woman, it wouldn’t want her to get any maternity pay should she try and bring forth some more white, nicely-spoken non-Romanians). But once I’m shot, your party will have no worries about me getting free medical treatment. That’s why I’m perfect for your experiment- if you found yourself shooting, say, a Frenchman,  on English soil you’d object to your tax money going towards stopping him from dying. But you can shoot me without any such worries. At least for now; if you shot me in a world where your party were in government and had privatized the NHS, you might have a few worries about whether I could afford to have someone pop a plaster on it.

You should also remember that you will get arrested and probably imprisoned. Your party is a big fan of the rule of law, after all, and we can’t have people shooting each other on the street and getting away with it, even in the name of science.  The law seems to be less important when it comes to corporations, admittedly, but I’ve yet to hear any of your colleagues argue for the total deregulation of, say, theft, or mugging. Well, it’s different, isn’t it?

The last thing I’d like gently to mention is the 1980s. It was in that decade that the whatevers faced up to something a little more dangerous than a wannabe councillor with a shotgun. Millions of us, worldwide, died, and hundreds of thousands of others continue both to die from and to live with a disease which threatened our community more than any law ever had. You may have heard about it- it’s not unique to us, it can happen to anyone, even straight white men. It’s laying waste to the third world even now, with no distinctions of sexual orientation, belief or lifestyle (although you may not be hugely informed about the third world because, you know, kipper and all). Anyway, even when that terrible, desperate nightmare stalked us, even when it briefly looked like it was stalking ONLY us, we didn’t change our minds or our orientations. Quite the opposite. We wrote and we sang and we fought and we protested and above all we loved. We loved, and we carry on loving, and we always will.

So I look forward to the results of your fascinating experiment. My shoulder, your gun, your call.

And once you pull the trigger, you wait and see how the ‘next 99’ react. You might just get a surprise.

Yours, in your sights,

Jon

Fever Bitching.

To get to Clockhouse Way, home of Braintree Town Football Club, from London involves eighty minutes on a commuter train followed by a brisk fifteen-minute walk through Anytown, UK. You pass a pub called ‘The Pub’ which will sell you a Bellybuster Breakfast from 7am, and whose attached nightclub ‘Jardins’ is both available for private hire and the venue for Aeropump classes. Further along is another pub, called THE SPORT MAN (I think an ‘S’ has been liberated from the sign somewhere along the way) which proudly boasts that it is ‘Open from 10am-12pm', a brave two-hour window to be trading in. The ground itself is pleasingly non-league. There are rusty turnstiles, and dusty terraces, and a timewarp of a bar/social club with That Carpet. In the way of non-league football, there’s no home or away end- you just stand behind the goal your team is attacking. It was at Braintree Town that I realised that we’ve been lied to all these years. Never mind Shankly and his ‘more important than life and death’ schtick. The thing about football is that it’s much, much more enjoyable when you don’t care.

I mean, I cared a bit. The reason I happened to be in mid-Essex was that my friend Ross is a fan of Gateshead FC. This was a proper six pointer- Gateshead, at start of play, sat three points ahead of Braintree in a playoff place, but with an inferior goal difference. That’s where they sit now, too, since neither team could conjure a goal- or, if we’re honest, anything much in the way of football- over the 94 minutes. But although I wanted Gateshead to win, for Ross’ sake, and because my late granddad was from Gateshead, and although I managed a sort of strangled happybark when Braintree’s late penalty was saved, it didn’t really matter. I wasn’t invested, you see. My heart was gently pumping blood rather than imitating a Prodigy bassline (the Prodigy, by the way, are from Braintree, which explains them).

Things are very different where Fulham are concerned. Like Hugh Grant, Lily Allen, and Mohamed Al-Fayed (I’ve long considered myself a perfect combination of the three) I support Martin Jol’s I mean Rene Meulensteen’s I mean Felix Magath’s Lilywhite Army. I’ve watched us lose at home to Torquay and beat Juventus 4-1. I’ve seen a 0-0 draw with Carlisle and a 3-0 win over Manchester United (and Manchester United, like A-Levels, were harder in those days) but I’ve never watched us with the simple, uncomplicated pleasure that I got from watching Braintree hoof it one way and then Gateshead hoof it the other.

This season, in particular, ‘pleasure’ has not been the word to apply to any but the most cringingly masochistic of Fulham fans. We have lost about ten matches more than we’ve played. We’ve conceded more goals than have been scored in the entire history of football.  Going 1-0 up has generally meant losing 3-1. And yet, due to either tactical genius or a cruelly delusional Dead Cat Bounce, we’re not out of it yet. Having scraped a win on Saturday while being comprehensively outplayed by Norwich- I’ll say that again, by Norwich- we’re in a position where a couple of wins from our last four games might just see us lining up alongside Hull and Stoke and Burnley in one of Europe’s elite leagues next season.

And all I’m getting from it is the potential for a stomach ulcer. During that Norwich game I was working, keeping one eye on Soccer Saturday and the other on my job. For most of the last twenty minutes of the game, as the might of Norwich bombarded Stockade Stockdale, I felt genuinely physically sick. When the whistle blew for full time, seemingly some seventeen hours after all the other games had finished, I didn’t feel any euphoria, just a knackered, spent kind of relief. And I have to do that four more times before the end of the season, and STILL we might go down at the end of it. I don’t mind the despair, as John Cleese says in the best line ever to grace a bad film, it’s the hope I can’t stand.

Yes, there’s an orgasmic buzz when it goes well (‘Dempsey- FOUR-ONE!') but in general football makes me uneasy, and breathless, and dyspeptic, and aggressive (‘Why won’t you just blooming lie down and die, you Welsh fools’ I yelled at my laptop when Cardiff went ahead at Southampton, except I didn’t say ‘blooming’ or ‘fools’). It gives me a good two hours of unremitting nervous tension a week. Remind me, which bit of that is supposed to be fun? Why have I, a grown adult, allowed myself to become emotionally- and, dammit, physiologically- invested in the (under)achievements of a bunch of twentysomething millionaires? Give me a 0-0 draw between Braintree and Gateshead any day. Enough of being THE SPORT MAN; I’ll see you down The Pub.

Three Short Stories About Innocence

1: 1976.  Somewhere in the air.

My first trip in an aeroplane, aged 2. I was flying to Poland with my mother and sister to join my father, who was directing one of his plays in Krakow. My first memory is of looking out of the window and Mum saying 'That's Holland'. I didn't know what a Holland was.

I have subsequently learned that Van Gogh and Ruud Gullit and Gré Brouwenstijn were Dutch. Friends of mine recommend Amsterdam as a holiday destination (I'd definitely go to the Anne Frank House). There was that film maker who got shot. They used to own Surinam. I could go on.

What a lot I've learned about Holland, since 1976.

2: 2013. Keswick.

We were on holiday for my mum's birthday- me, sis, mum, bro-in-law and niece. My niece is a bright, sparky seven year old, and because she's got a brain on her it's sometimes problematic to keep her occupied while the grown-ups do grown-up things like drinking. Fortunately, she's a big fan of 'Strictly Come Dancing' and will happily watch it, making notes of the scores in her little book until she decides to do something more interesting.

Anyway, there we were in the Lakes. I had mistimed dinner so the rest of the family was watching TV while I pottered hurriedly around the kitchen. Deborah Meaden and her partner, Robin Windsor, took to the floor. My niece looked up from her colouring book.

'Mum, is Deborah married?' she asked. 'Yes' said sis.

'Is Robin married?' she asked. 'Yes' said sis.
 
As The Only Gay In The Room I gave my sister the Hard Look. Because my sister recognised it and is brilliant, she added 'Robin is married to a man'.

'Oh' said my niece, mildly, and went back to her colouring book.

3: 1985, London/ 2013, London

So here's the thing. On the tube tonight, I discovered that the campaign to put PG stickers on music to protect children dates from when I was one of the children worth protecting. I was 11 and then 12 in 1985, when Prince released the song 'Darlin' Nikki', whose lyrics were deemed so filthy that Tipper Gore decided children should be protected from them. My sister, five years older, listened to the album containing that song a LOT. 

I remember the lines 'I guess you could say she was a sex fiend/ I met her in a hotel lobby/ Masturbating with a magazine'. Here's how, aged 11 or 12, I parsed those lines. Firstly, I couldn't really imagine what a 'sex fiend' was. I knew there was something called sex. I knew I wasn't interested in it. Therefore a 'sex fiend' was right up there with the Dungeons and Dragons fans, another interest I didn't share.

She was in a 'hotel lobby'. I had been in very few: I connected them with waiting for my parents to pay some kind of incomprehensible bill.

Now, here we go. She was 'masturbating with a magazine'. I can't remember if I knew the word 'masturbation' when I was 11/12 but I certainly had a vague idea of the concept (Note: I didn't link my fiddling about with the 'sex' that Darlin' Nikki was a 'fiend' for. Tiddling with my dinky was one thing- 'sex' was something boring adults did). Anyway, at some later point I clocked that Nikki was 'masturbating' and had an idea what that meant. But with a MAGAZINE? I had been told how the female body was constituted. I knew about 'mating' and what was supposed to go in where. That's where my knowledge ended. I'm not going to spell out what I innocently assumed Nikki was doing with that magazine, although I bet you can guess.

Later on in the song, Nikki did a lot of 'grinding'. No idea. Coffee?

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What's the moral of this story? I can't help but think that my discovery that there was a thing called Holland was no more harrowing or ground-breaking than my niece's discovery that Robin Windsor has a husband; just another fact to store in the fact list. As for Prince's groundbreakingly filthy song, I'm kind of glad that my parents didn't sit me down and explain to an eleven year old the mechanics of female masturbation- they, and I, would have been embarrassed. If they had, I would have spent less time assuming that the song referred to someone sitting in a Holiday Inn, rolling up a Marie Claire, and risking all kinds of intimate paper cuts. But, you know, I realised that eventually.

I'm not a parent. But I remember being a child. There are things you get told, and things you find out for yourself. And it strikes me that when you're told stuff, the attitude with which you're told it is the important thing. It strikes me that when you find out stuff, it's stuff you'll understand one day, even if you don't at first.

It's not what we tell them, or when. It's how.

Manifesto.

 I’ve had a brilliant idea. It’s the perfect solution to something that’s been bothering and upsetting me for a while.

In just under a year, the people of Scotland will be voting on whether they should become independent. I have worked in Scotland a lot, and have many beloved Scottish friends on both sides of the border. I was also born into a country called Britain: it had been like that for a couple of hundred years. I’ve never seen myself as anything other than British. If that country is pulled apart, it will pull me apart with it. I’ll become stateless. I’ll become something called English, which I never signed up for, and I'm not that keen on, and without anyone even asking me.

So I hope Scotland votes No. But most- not all, but most- of my beloved Scottish friends are going to vote Yes. I don’t think they’re going to do that because they dislike the English. Some Scots will vote Yes for that reason, but I don’t think the majority of Yes-voters will. No, I think those Scottish friends of mine who are going to vote Yes will do so (and break my heart in the process) because they’re sick of being governed by Westminster.

That’s when it struck me. I’m sick of being governed by Westminster too. I am a grudging member of a party I haven’t believed in since I was 20, merely because I have decided they’re least worst. That party is out of government: instead, we’re being governed by a savage and moronic bunch comprised of the other two parties, a government which is tearing apart our most treasured national ideals like a bunch of gatecrashers who know the police have been called. A government which is only in power because three quarters of it is unwillingly/willingly propped up by the other.

If I were Scottish, I’d be so annoyed about that, because they didn’t vote for those people. Then it struck me: nor did I. And nor did my city.

So that’s the idea. If Scotland votes for Independence, I am going to start the LNP like a shot: the London National Party. We, like most UK cities, tend to go red on Election nights and end up with a Blue government. If my 5 million brothers and sisters North of Hadrian’s Wall can escape from that, then so can my 8 million London compadres. (Well, not quite 8 million, acksh: I’m going have to trim things off after zone 3 because it’s all those Beckenhams and Bromleys and Richmonds whose votes stuck us with that floppy-haired psychopath. Don’t worry, they won’t mind- they’ll happily live in Tory England while those of us over the border in Leftie London celebrate).

Don’t think, by the way, that when I rejoice in the idea of an independent Left-wing London that I’m necessarily talking about the Labour Party. They’d have to behave- they learned that in 2000 when they tried to foist the well-meaning apparatchik Frank Dobson on us and he ended up losing to a leftier alternative.

And seriously, who would be upset about this? Wales would soon follow suit and have a nice Plaid (in both senses) government. Manchester and Liverpool and Leeds and Newcastle would all opt for independence, I’m sure, if the alternative were to be part of an England made up only of the True Blue shires. Birmingham's always wavered between L and R, but I'm sure finally becoming capital would sweeten that pill. ‘England’ could have its monarchy and its tradition and its pound notes and the rest of us would happily make do with President Izzard, renationalisation of TFL, and nice tax and spend cities with decent schools and hospitals. And of course Independent Scotland and the People's Republic of London could form a New Auld Alliance that would make Gloucestershire shake in its boots.

So I desperately hope my country doesn’t get torn apart next year. But if it does, I have a GREAT alternative to being part of a Forever Tory England. Who’s with me?

Late night depression.

There was a sort of semi-party after tonight's show: we have a fortnight off while EDWARD II techs and dresses and previews and opens.

It was joyful: we're not-too-far from the end of a smashing job, so everyone was in a good mood and we had a little drinkup at the Pit Bar.

Then I got a cab home.

Yeah, you'll be waiting for the old 'I got a cab and the cab driver wasn't a spotless liberal' story. We've all had one of those. But this one was scarier, and more upsetting, and felt worryingly as if it were illustrative of a wider problem.

I was sharing the cab with one of the cast, and we had the usual 'and then this happened' show-type conversation. When my castmate got out of the cab, the driver said 'so, you're an actor, are you?' At this point I would usually make something up, but he'd picked us up from a theatre and had heard us talking about the show, so I answered in the affirmative.

'My missus is a make-up artist' he said 'she used to work in the West End but now she works in films'.

This led to some pleasant chatter about the difference between theatre and film, and how his missus worked with different people, and yadayada. Until I mentioned the name of a particular film actor. Then things got very dark.

'Oh, that bitch?' he said. 'That whore?' Trying to keep things unhorrid, I asked if his wife had worked with the actor in question and found her unpleasant. 'No' he said 'I don't think the missus has worked with her. But everyone knows she's a dirty little whore. Dirty little bitch. Haven't you seen the pictures? I could give you the link to the pictures."

We'd had a pleasant, chatty journey. I'd assumed that he was a nice fella. But he'd assumed that I would be happy to hear him say that. That we would be on the same page. That a half-arsedly pleasant conversation could be capped by... by THAT.

I overtipped him, and walked into my flat, a little less of a person than I had been before.

Game, Set, Bitch.

So, it turns out it’s Misogyny July. We’ve had InverdaleGate, where a complacent and corpulent male journalist chose to focus on the looks of a superb athlete right at the moment she reached the pinnacle of her profession. We’ve been shown the sickening outpourings of idiot tweeters about the same woman. We’ve had MurrayWadeGate, where much virtual ink was spilled on 1977 and 1936 and 77 years and Marray and Haydon-Jones and all that. But the really disturbing indicator of how our society looks at women didn’t happen anywhere near the All-England Club. It’s happening in and around a TV programme that the media doesn’t really take any notice of any more, and it stinks.

Hazel O’Sullivan is an Irish model, and is single. Daley Ojuederie is an English boxer, and doesn’t seem too sure whether he’s single or not. In the last couple of weeks, they’ve been flirting up a storm. She’s been grinding her behind against his crotch. They’ve been tapping out Morse Code messages on each others’ hands. There has been draping. All this is something, I’m informed, that Young People Do. But unusually for such couples, we who have never met them can be certain that they have never kissed each other, or had sex. We can be certain of this because they have chosen to spend their summer in the Big Brother house.

Ok, yes, this is about Big Brother. They’re Big Brother contestants. But don’t stop reading just yet, because I promise you that what is about to happen to Hazel O’Sullivan is an example of a scarier, more insidious, more prevalent kind of misogyny than anything Inverdale could have dreamt of in his wildest Wimbledon fantasies.

So, Hazel and Daley are in the Big Brother house together. They’ve been there for just shy of a month and have started doing the ritual sexdance of reality show contestants. Canoodling and whispering and everything I mentioned above. You may remember that I also mentioned Daley’s uncertain relationship status: he claimed when he went into the house that he had a girlfriend, but in the last few weeks he has, what with all the canoodling and that, recanted. He has said that his relationship is ‘in a pickle’. He ‘doesn’t know’ whether he has a girlfriend or not. He ‘wishes he could find out’. O’Sullivan, in the meantime, just so you know, knows she’s single. And her knowledge of Ojuederie’s relationship status is what he’s told her: all the vague ‘pickle’ stuff.

Now, let’s guess who Britain- or that part of Britain which watches  and writes about BB, at any rate- has decided to hate, shall we? That’s right. Cherchez la femme.

Hazel is odds-on favourite to be evicted this week. She will exit the house on Friday to a storm of boos. She will be labelled a ‘homewrecker’, and a ‘slag’, and a ‘slut’, all because she did some dirty dancing and some flirting and some cuddling with a man who told her he was more or less a free agent.

Just to rub it in even further, Big Brother’s spin-off, public show invited Daley’s is-she-or-isn’t-she girlfriend Katie on for a tearful interview last night. She insisted that Daley was lying when he said that their relationship was, to coin a Friends, on a break. She insisted that, and she cried. It was upsetting, and she came across as sincere and devastated. At the same time, her take was treated as gospel, when as far as any of us can know, Daley, trapped in the house without an interviewer, is telling- confusedly-  the truth about their status. Immediately after the interview with Katie, presenter Emma Willis asked the studio audience what they thought… of Hazel. She didn’t ask what they thought of the putative cheater; she encouraged them to boo the co-respondent.

Now look. I’m not under any illusions that Hazel O’Sullivan is a sister.  Her behaviour on the show has been at best ill-advised. She may be a thoroughly unpleasant individual; only people who know her can say what she’s like. And it’s only Big Brother, after all. Who cares? It’s a trashy reality show.

But in this case, I think this particular trashy reality show is tapping into something which is bigger than the show, an attitude whereby any sexual interaction between a man and a woman has to be driven by her. After all, if we’re going to blame anyone for Daley’s girlfriend’s tears- are they really Hazel’s fault? Are they not, you know, his? Let’s assume, as the programme-makers did, that Daley and Katie were rock-solid before he entered the house. If we then say ‘Ah, but Hazel went after him with her wiles and he was powerless to resist’ are we not backing up every anti-woman story from Eve to ‘she shouldn’t have been walking through the park in that skirt’?

I remember all those storifys from the weird individuals on Twitter who were insulted that Bartoli had the temerity to win Wimbledon: Bitch, they said. And Cunt. And Slag. And Whore. And it’s easy to get angry about them, because they’re so obviously undeserved.

But another woman is about to get a beasting, on the same social media we deplore for the Bartoli stuff. She’ll be called bitch and whore and cunt and slag and nobody will mind all that much.

And I know you don’t watch Big Brother, but I think we probably should mind about that. Because people who win Wimbledon are basically going to be ok. Whereas Hazel O’Sullivan is about to be publicly labelled as a bitch-whore-cunt because she didn’t quite kiss someone who wasn’t sure whether he had a girlfriend or not. And I think that’s much more worrying than Inverdale being crass about an athlete’s looks.