Coming Out

I have a boyfriend.

We met at a barbecue the weekend before last, at the end of the Indian summer weather.

I'm not sure of his real name; people call him Dude.

He has had a hard life - rejected by his family, fostered and subsequently adopted in early childhood. Perhaps because of that early rejection he is hard to get to know...rough, self-sufficient, uncommunicative, somewhat remote.

I think affection comes hard to him, but I believe he has a noble spirit and an endearing vulnerability which tugs at the heartstrings.

Not everyone would find him handsome. But in love, it is the peculiarities that attract, not the perfections. His lower jaw is strangely malformed, as if it doesn't belong to him, so that his lips never close over a perpetual smile. This may be inherited or a product of early neglect, but he is self-conscious about it and I haven't asked. His hirsuteness is strange to me too, but he has all his own hair, his breath is sweet, and he runs like the wind. There is natural grace in his stride, and an irreverent gleam in his eye which is full of promise.

It may have been the wine, or the red glow of the sunset, or the music, but as we relaxed together on a bench in the embers of the evening our eyes met in mutual recognition, and he stretched out beside me and laid his head in my lap, and somehow I knew that it was right. That whatever people might think or say, whatever society's mores and expectations, there was a beauty in this relationship which dare not speak its name.

Nokia Waterloo (My my, I tried to hold you back ...)

Yesterday the Social Secretary had a difficult day. Her mobile kept shooting out of her jodhpurs pocket like a bar of soap (too small a pocket or jodhpurs too tight? I wasn't going to ask). So when, tacked up and ready to go, she popped into the stables loo ('Nothing serious', she insists), she held it in her mouth to be on the safe side. As she flushed she said to herself, "I mustn't let it fall in". At least, she started to say it to herself. Aloud.

Fishing it out can't have been fun.

When she got back an hour or so later the phone still wasn't working, so I scrubbed up, snapped on a mask and latex gloves (unnecessary, I know; it's a private, sartorial thing) and we set to work.

After a vigorous shake (water poured out like brine from a drowned man), we stripped it and I began passing organs for treatment...battery, subscriber identity module, plastic slidey bit. Then resuss with a hair dryer played on several tiny orifices.

After some charging (the battery had shorted out completely), the first vital signs returned. However, the patient was still deeply confused; WXYZ was swopping round with TUV, and GHI with MNO, causing predictive text to produced psychedelic interpretations. We repeated the process three times before a little colour returned to its cheeks and it was able to recall the date and remember its address.

It's more or less back to normal this morning, although callers sound like goldfish.

And we're all insisting the SS washes her hands after texting.

Loseley Park

Yesterday to the wedding of a friend and former work protégé who, far from seizing the opportunity to absorb my sober tutelage and carve out a sensible career in local government, had wound up teaching me so much (how to do considerably better in the private sector; how to get thrown out of a pub for staging a puppet show with your socks; the health and safety implications of teenage mutant ninja turtles in Danish discos; how crawling on all fours doesn't necessarily render you invisible in the dark.)

It was a generous and meticulously organised wedding, clearly planned by a tasteful romantic. I don't want to make a snap judgement here, but I'd say this may have been the influence of the charming and beautiful bride, rather than of friend-and-former-protégé.

The ceremony was in a relaxed secular format - no hymn singing (probably nobody knows the tunes anymore anyway), but tranquil music choices (Canon in D, Glasgow Love Theme), followed by various moving and thought-provoking readings ("I knew that I had been touched by love when I started thinking in terms of 'we'," provoked the thought that I shouldn't have snatched that last coffee before we left).

The Great Hall at Loseley House, with its panelling, stained-glass roundels and scent of wood smoke, was a timeless setting for the ceremony (it was already 130 years old when the Pachelbel processional was written). The reception and breakfast were held in a lofty timbered barn, the tables invitingly decorated in white and purple with a gift-boxed spirit shot at each place-setting (mine was a very thoughtfully-chosen miniature of Jura malt).

We were at a good table. On one side was Gareth Malone, the choirmaster in the BBC 2 documentary series about reviving school choirs. He swore he wasn't, and his name card said something different, although he admitted that we were not the first to remark on the likeness. Anyway, he was good company and probably sings beautifully. On our other side, best surprise of the day, was the girl with lovely eyes, whom I haven't seen for ages and much miss. With her was her partner, whom we hadn't met. Clearly a man of taste, he seemed very likeable, with a restrained dry humour that hinted at dineability.

I am easily provoked into a diatribe about wedding excess; the absurd amounts that people are expected to spend on weddings now, when a do in our day meant coronation chicken vol-au-vents and asparagus tips rolled in brown bread, washed down with a few glasses of Asti Spumanti; when you could count your friends by your cheese-boards, tin-trays and toast racks; and when at t' end, when all was said and done, there was still change out of' tenner for t' meter.

But it's awful nice being on the receiving end of a really good one, and I'm only sorry we had to leave before the band arrived and the evening celebrations began.

Boiled Eggs, Soldiers and Tummy Ticklers

A comment from the Saggittarian got me thinking about those peculiarities and sayings that families have. For instance, when it comes to boiled eggs I come from a family of spoon tappers. Apart from the atavistic satisfaction of bashing in it's skull, you don't waste any of the white, you don't cut your thumb and you don't get your knife eggy before the toast and marmalade stage. And we had soldiers with it. The Social Secretary, on the other hand, comes from a long line of egg-beheaders, and her soldiers were called dippies. Inevitably the children have grown up as dippy decapitators.

Then there are those sayings that are only understood within the family. If we wanted a bit of cheese without biscuits, we asked for 'cheese like a mouse' (do other people say that?). The SS's family calls those humpbacked bridges that leave your tummy floating for a moment, 'tummy ticklers'. My mother's family knew them as 'Thank you maams', after a past chauffeur who would warn his passengers one was coming with, 'Hold tight please', and then thank them afterwards. Caravans are 'Jo's' (don't ask), unnecessary urban four-wheeled drive vehicles are 'Ilfords', croutons are 'sippits' and chocolate digestives 'Daddy Bs'.

In one family we knew, if one of them was relating an anecdote that might put another down, someone would mutter 'Lith', and the speaker would immediately stop. Lith, we discovered, stood for 'loyalty in the home'.

One of the barns in my childhood home, in which the mowers and tools were kept, was known as 'the agricultural shed'. When my sister and I bought our own houses, out of habit we each called our garden sheds 'the agricultural shed'. This amused our father, who reminded us that the original barn had also been used as a second garage. Getting us to call it an agricultural shed was a ploy to stop us innocently giving away its garage use to any visiting council official, who might then have increased our rates. Probably our children in turn will have agricultural sheds.

There is also a stubborn inertia in the names we gave things. For example, there was a green, perforated steel food safe which was once used to store half stiltons. Over the years it moved house with us and was repainted white, but it was always known as 'the green thing'.

I'm guessing we all have these idiosyncratic quirks which help to define our membership of our individual clan, and set us apart from those unfortunates outside the magic circle.

Martin Stephenson and Helen McCookerybook

To Whitstable on Saturday night, to see Martin Stephenson and Helen McCookerybook.

It was a beautiful, mild evening. We parked on Middle Wall and crabbed through Squeeze Gut Alley to the Horsebridge. On the beach and the sea wall near the Pearson's and the Royal Oyster Stores there were clusters of people standing with drinks and cameras, watching the sunset over the estuary, as if it was the tropics. We bought a drink and it was almost perfect and to complete the moment, to the SS's chagrin, I blagged a rare cigarette off a couple standing nearby. They wouldn't take anything for it, but wound up next to us at the gig, our new best friends (thanks Michelle; here's to Limerick and original sin!).

Helen opened, quickly winning over the audience. For Freight Train she pulled the promoter/sound man on stage to accompany her; he looked thrilled and terrified in equal measure, clutching a guitar as if it was a fig leaf and singing rather well. Martin Stephenson joined her for several songs too. It was the first time we'd seen Helen perform, beyond parties and people's sitting-rooms; she was confident and relaxed, and her set was flawless.

In the break we visited the bar and looked down from the Horsebridge Centre's balcony at the fizz of laid-back provincial night-life below. (I once wrote a design brief for new development in Whitstable. It suggested weather-boarding, seaward-facing gables, balconies and external staircases, and maybe someone read it, because much of the newer stuff has these and the town has hung on to its quirky character).

Martin Stephenson gave a stunning performance and provided a masterclass in audience-connection. The stage had been erected between the two doors, so that any comings and goings couldn't easily be ignored. And there seemed to be many comings and goings, individual and group. No one escaped Martin's quick (but malice-free) wit. A smiley man with protruding teeth sitting near the front had a magic phone which leapt repeatedly out of his pocket and clattered on the floor like a spawning salmon (we saw him later on an ancient bicycle, wobbling home down the High Street on the wrong side of the road, shedding things). In the front row a small boy slept on his mother's lap. When he woke near the end, tired and disoriented, Martin turned whatever song he was doing into Postman Pat and sang it right through in a magical little concert for one, and no child has ever smiled more widely (there is something strangely endearing in a rock musician knowing all the words to Postman Pat).

You can't pay an audience a bigger compliment than to give the impression that you are enjoying yourself and don't want to stop, and that's the impression Helen and Martin gave us.

Thanks guys.

Across the Universe

I'd never heard of this movie (clearly don't get out enough) and only bought it on spec. We watched it last night and were completely blown away. Like Mamma Mia it is a love story woven round the music of one group, but it was in an altogether different league.

The cinematography, choreography, and sets were stunning, and the cast could actually sing. The plot and characterisation may be a spare - it is, after all, a musical - and the songs were sometimes crudely stitched in, but the political and cultural backdrop of the Sixties and the sensitively set Beatles' music gave it a gravitas which made MM look like a package holiday. This was 'Moulin Rouge' to Mamma Mia's 'Una Paloma Blanca'

Although the locations flit between Liverpool, Greenwich Village, Detroit and Vietnam, this was a British film through and through, from the Karl Ferris style false-colour palette, through the Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais screenplay, to the cameo roles of Joe Cocker, Eddie Izzard and Bono.

I wallowed nostalgically in the trippy, psychedelic sequences, and it's turned K onto Beatles' music in a way that fifteen years' of fogey parental promotion had naturally failed to do. This was simply a haunting, beautiful film. I only wish we'd seen it on the big screen.

Plug

Just in case you are in need of a lift, A Free Man in Preston's posts always work for me. If you haven't visited him for a while, read his latest post (see my blog roll).