February 2022 - Crossing the Finnish line

Those of us lucky enough to be able to work from home have been in a privileged position during the pandemic, but nearly two years of laptop life in the living room from Monday to Friday has really taken the sparkle out of doing the same at the weekend - even if I'd be replacing my own workload with Captain Olivia Benson's. Last year I set myself a challenge of walking three thousand miles. A lot of it was local, but I eventually ranged further and further afield, swapping pavements and paths for tracks and trails. I yearned for space in a way I can't remember feeling before. I started 2022 fitter than I've probably ever been, and so when my friend Bumpers suggested a 'winter activities' break in the Finnish wilderness, I pulled on my Reebok high-tops and said 'joo!' Please understand, pre-lockdown the closest I'd get to 'being outdoorsy' was drinking two bottles of Chardonnay at your barbecue and chatting up a patio heater. People were justifiably surprised when I started seeking recommendations for base layers and insulated trousers. I got a lot of queries about what my travel insurance covered. It turns out their worries, and all the optional additions to my policy, were unwarranted. I am posting this having survived trekking through knee-deep snow in boots and snowshoes, snowmobiling, driving a sled pulled by six very hard working huskies and, in a true endurance challenge, spending several hours around a camp fire in the middle of the woods making conversation with some vegans from Richmond. I helped build the fire! Well, I remembered Bumpers had a lighter when the matches wouldn't catch, but without me those vegans wouldn't have had any hot berry juice. It was brilliant - especially the snowshoeing. Our guide, Janina, said I took to throwing my legs high and wide very naturally. I've even tested negative on my mandatory day two lateral flow swab on returning to the UK, so I'm calling the whole thing a triumph. We stayed at the Nellim Wilderness Hotel on Lake Inari - closer to Russia than Helsinki, where we transferred planes. I can't say enough great things about the place: I love that, like Gaston, they use antlers in all of their decorating; I love the snow boots they immediately swapped my ridiculous Reeboks for; I love the staff, who didn't really explain anything that was happening, but always looked so unruffled whilst ruffling hundreds of napkins that I never saw used, you could only be reassured; I (might be in) love with Petri, the snowmobile instructor who gave me second helpings of salmon stew in his warming hut and third helpings of his grey-eyed time when I had many, many burning questions about ice thickness; I love the on site gift shop full of knitwear and gnomes; I love the angry chef who magicked dinner's leftovers into breakfast delight; I love the husky puppies and the husky cocktails, both of which had quite sharp teeth; I love discovering the word kalsarikänni, which means getting drunk alone at home in your underwear. So, though I can sadly no longer sooth my lightly aching muscles in the private sauna that once nestled in the corner of my log cabin, I can indulge in a little kalsarikänni as I ponder my next adventure - I’m considering letting some lucky person take me right up the Allalinhorn. Nellim opens for its winter season in November. This post is not sponsored by them, but if they'd like to invite me back when I might actually see the northern lights, I'm happy to make myself available.

January-December 2021 - Three Thousand Miles Later

According to my Fitbit I’ve managed to walk over three thousand miles this year. It works out at about ten miles a day at my purposeful mince, with one day of rest each week, which was my goal. I’m delighted with myself.

 It’s the only New Year’s resolution I’ve ever managed to keep up until the renewal date. I managed it in rain, in snow, in a succession of diabolical trainers. I managed it hungover. I managed it when we were barely allowed to leave the house by going up and down my own stairs hundreds of times. I managed it with a burst blister the size of the flaming Eye of Sauron on my sole by sticking a panty liner on my foot. I managed it when my dad was in hospital. I managed it when the world’s lack of care, curiosity and compassion would have flung me horizontal at any other time.

 I managed it when the sun was shining and everyone else was in the pub. I managed to tempt some people out of the pub to walk the Wandle Trail and the Medway Valley and the Calder Valley and across the Brontës’ moors with me. And back to the pub. I walked (most of) the London Loop. I walked around some parks I’d never even heard of before – Beckenham Place Park, Kelsey Park, Valentines Park. I walked around some parks over and over again and saw them bloom and grow and change – Avery Hill Park, Eltham Park, Greenwich Park. I kept getting a bit lost in Oxleas Woods and rewarded myself with bacon at the café every single time I found it, stumbling over branches, panting and desperate like I’d just escaped the Blair Witch.

 Sometimes I walked with friends and sometimes with my parents – slowly before dad’s surgery, even slower afterwards, then virtually running as he got back on his bike one day and chased me into a hedge. I walked with my eighty-year-old great aunt, who lives with dementia, past sites that dredged up ancient memories and sights that seemed to confuse her more than ever – thank you, dog yoga.

 Mostly I walked by myself, around and around the same old streets where I live. Puppies grew into dogs, babies grew into toddlers, none of them seemed to get any more obedient. Someone took their garden in hand, someone else let theirs go. The McFaddens built a horrible extension, their shouty neighbour settled for new curtains (also horrible). Amazon delivery vans were everywhere. I liked to pretend they were an undercover police unit following me and took evasive manoeuvres.

 I listened to a lot of podcasts. I’ve become insufferably over-informed. Mostly about the strange foods celebrities eat, but still.

 When I started commuting back to the office one day a week, I got a really early train to London Bridge to avoid people, then I’d skirt around Borough Market in the dark, turning the corner so that the rigging of the Golden Hinde emerged against the sky just as it was getting light. There would only be me and a few runners along the South Bank as St Paul’s peeked over Southwark Bridge. I’d pass Shakespeare’s Globe, the Tate Modern, the trees strung with lights approaching the National. I’d cross Hungerford Bridge on the west side and emerge outside the Playhouse Theatre – transformed into the KitKat Club for its production of Cabaret. I’d go up to Trafalgar Square, pass the galleries, then along Charing Cross Road and all those other theatres - Garrick, Wyndham’s, Palace, Phoenix - not forgetting the Hippodrome, outside of which I once heard two women wondering whether they were in the right place to see ‘Magic Mike Goes Wrong’ and I laugh about that every single time I see a poster for either Magic Mike Live or Magic Goes Wrong.

 After the Dominion Theatre I would turn down Great Russell Street to pass the British Museum and Bloomsbury Square. When this hits Southampton Row there’s a very handy Greggs that never has anyone in it if you need an emergency cup of tea. And a sausage roll. I’d then turn onto Theobalds Road and head to Clerkenwell, waving at the giant UMBRELLAS sign over James Smith & Sons and the Italian Church along the way. By the time I got to the office I always felt grateful to be able to walk and work and live so close to these things. Even closed, the history of it all felt reassuring. As though, if it has all survived numerous wars and governments and trends and whims and economic, ethical and environmental revolutions, surely there’s a future worth something.

 Anyway, I’m not suggesting you commit to walking three thousand miles, but if you’re in London and have an hour, give that route a go. Or just have a little stroll.

 John can’t recommend his Fitbit Inspire enough. It’s an old one and doesn’t do anything fancy, but you can give the clock a little cat face and it has really kept him on track.  

You Scholl go to the ball

It was the first time my friend Beatriz had seen me from the neck down in almost a year. She did a slow sweep from head to foot and then her gaze got trapped under my shoe.

It was a size 12.5 extra wide-fit Dr Scholl’s casual trainer - double Velcro fastening, inch thick orthopedic mattress sole. Once white, it was now stained in a muddy rainbow from bandage to bad vindaloo thanks to constant wear.

Emerging from this shoe and reaching up to mid-calf, was a Minion-yellow fleece-lined slipper sock decorated with actual Minion faces, and tucked into this the leg of a pair of threadbare tracksuit bottoms, so heavily bobbled from repeated washing that a braille reader might be able to decode cries for help by running their hand across my thigh.

The matching sweatshirt at least had its tightness in the trunk disguised by an ancient and enormous zip-up fisherman’s gilet (once my great uncle's), with pockets numerous and deep enough to hold tissues, half packets of Polos and somewhere a National Trust membership card – all the things a middle aged lady would ordinarily keep in her handbag.

On my head, a hand-knitted orange hat in an unfortunate onion shape – and since my hands knitted it, nobody else to blame.

I’ve skipped over my face, as this was not wearing anything yet, though a determined expression was drying on the line.

"What have you come as?” Beatriz asked.

If I’m honest, I’ve always found getting dressed an effort. I seem to be an unthought of shape for high street clothes. I’ve just never known what I’m supposed to wear and the idea that I’d never look particularly good regardless took root early. I learned over the years what people said suited me and, when I had to present myself in public, I reckoned I could pass like I knew what I was doing. As in many areas of my life, when cornered I just tried to drown the problem in camp. I wore a lot of brooches, things covered with animal motifs, florals. Often on the train into work I’d see immaculate people and find it incomprehensible that anyone could get themselves together that tidily in time for the 7.18 to Cannon Street.

All that is to say, it really didn’t take much for me to quickly embrace a ‘working from home’ wardrobe. At the beginning of the first lockdown I still used to put a dressy jumper on for work calls, but as my IRL interactions dwindled to the five seconds it took to open the front door, pick up a box, shout thank you and shut it again, everything but the same three tracksuits got pushed to the back of the drawer.

I bought the slipper socks for around the house, but they were so warm and soft I started wearing them out. Their thickness made my old trainers a bit snug, so I looked for a size bigger and wider. If you Google ‘wide-fit trainers’ once, you’ll be inundated with options – and why pay for Nikes when eBay have new-without-tags comfort-assured Dr Scholl’s for under £20 with free delivery?

Not worrying about what I looked like opened up a lot of space in my head. It was quickly filled with worries about other things (working out, based on any virtual appointments you have coming up, exactly how long it will be before someone realizes you are dead if you died right this second is a fun game), but it felt very freeing to dress entirely for practicality and comfort.

Many of us are beginning to wonder how we’ll reintegrate when (if?) we’re allowed to start engaging with each other in 3D again. How many days we go into the office a week and how far we’re willing to travel for holidays (or anything) might still be up for debate, but I think my Dr Scholl’s will have to stay. They may be the ugliest item of footwear ever designed, but it's like putting your feet to bed every time you slip them on.

"What have I come as?” I said to Beatriz. “Me. Get used to it.”

Get your Dr Scholl’s on eBay now! This post is not sponsored by them, but you can buy John a drink to say thank you next time you see him.

How to mend a broken promise: a Christmas love story at The Repair Shop

The barn door had been left open again and Suzie wasn't happy. "He has ONE job," she shouted, surveying the collection of long leather off-cuts, straps and buckles on her sadlemaker's bench and wondering which she'd use to punish Jay with later.

Will chuckled, he had a four-colour tulip yoke fairisle knit to keep him warm and now, even better, a clear view of Dom at the outside workshop vigorously rubbing down the shaft of an enormous weathervane in the shape of a rooster. The church deacon who had brought the tangled wreckage in had worried that it might be too much for one man to handle, but Dom had only smiled and given a twitch of his shoulders. His humble little shrugs belied hands that could work magic, the rememberence of which made Will blush.

Whilst the barn was distracted by another of the Teddybear Ladies' filthy jokes, Will picked up the ancient hinge from the tuck box he was working on and slipped quietly outside. Dom was throwing the heavy wrought-iron bird around like it was made of tin and Will thought he hadn't heard him approach, until Dom said: "come for a closer look at my cock?"

Dom turned and Will took in his dark Spanish features contrasting against the traditional Icelandic pattern knitted across his chest, so similar to his own. The smell of grease from Dom's work gloves was more intoxicating to Will than any cologne and instantly conjured memories of the feel of Dom's beard rough against his chin, his neck, his lower back, which was smoother than a French-polished escritoire and the gateway to just as many secret nooks.

"I... I just wondered if you could loosen something up for me?" Will said. Dom didn't even glance at the rusted hinge in Will's hand but kept their eyes locked together. "I'd like nothing more," Dom said, "but you broke your promise."

"I didn't tell anyone about us," gasped Will. For all of his affability around the barn, Dom had shown Will that he deserved his name last night and now Will felt that he'd do anything to please him. "I didn't break my promise," he whispered.

"Then why did those foul-mouthed Teddybear Ladies ask me if you'd stained my wood when we came in this morning? Why was Kirsten looking at me like one of her erotic sculptures?"

Will had no explanation. Of course he'd wanted to shout from the hay loft that he and Dom had finally come together like a perfect joint - dovetail, tongue and groove, mitred butt, they'd done it all - but he hadn't told a soul.

As the air seemed to grow even colder in the silence between them, Daddy Steve called from the doorway: "hey boys, come inside will you?"

Dom and Will entered the barn to find their fellow bespoke artisan craftspeople gathered around the intake bench. "We've got a little gift for you both," said Steve, peering at them over the top of two pairs of glasses in a firm, fatherly way.

"But we've already done Secret Santa?" said Will reaching excitedly for the mystery package.

"Oh, this isn't from Santa," purred Kirsten, stroking a ceramic figurine of two naked shepherd boys.

"And you don't have any secrets!" cried the Teddybear Ladies, their dirty laughs echoing around the barn.

Will's fingers, usually so dexterous and exacting, fumbled with the wrapping, so Dom stepped up behind him and tore the package open with one practised motion.

Inside were two beautiful matching hand-knitted intarsia Shetland pullovers. Dom and Will looked at each other, then back to the group.

"These are so if you come in wearing each other's jumpers next time you spend all night cleaning your tool boxes it won't be quite so obvious," explained Steve, firmly.

"OR BUMMING!" cackled the Teddybear Ladies.

"I added the leather elbow patches," said Suzie, smoothing the new sweater down over Will's lean physique. "And I could do knee pads to match," she winked.

"You mean, that's how you knew?" said Dom, "and Will really didn't say anything?

"He didn't," said Steve, "but it wouldn't have mattered if he had. We love you just the way you are. Merry Christmas boys!" And he put a firm, fatherly arm around each of them.

At that moment Jay came back into the barn, thinking he'd now be safe from having to do any actual work, and the group turned to him as one and shouted: "SHUT THAT DOOR!"

Everyone laughed, except Jay. The end.

Lockdown, day 94

I had my first virtual consultation with a GP this morning. It was all so easy you wonder why we weren’t doing this before the lockdown. No week-long delay for an appointment or getting up before you’ve gone to bed to beat the elderly to the queue for the drop-in surgery. No waiting for an hour on a plastic seat not loving Love It! magazine whilst mothers discuss the burdens of their germ-riddled offspring as though they were evacuees assigned to them by the local parish. No receptionist loudly and disgustedly mispronouncing your name because it has the front to contain two zeds. The doctor was especially impressed with my expertise at positioning the web cam to display any part of my body at its most confrontational angle, though she eventually said that really wasn’t necessary to discuss an ear infection.

The only thing that slightly confused me was that, before I could access the service, I had to complete a declaration on the surgery’s website to ensure I did not require emergency care.

Are you having a heart attack? The website asks. Is there a pain like a very tight belt or a heavy weight or a sensation like a large hand squeezing inside your chest? Think about it. Is the pain moving into your jaw or neck?

What about a stroke? Are you having a stroke? Have a look down this list of possible symptoms of a stroke and let us know if you think you might be having a stroke: face drooping to one side, not being able to raise both your arms, not being able to speak properly, feeling numb on one or other side of your body. Raise your arms and try to say something. Stroke? No?

How is your breathing? Any difficulty there? If you are gasping, choking or struggling to get words out, that would be considered severe. Try to say something again. Are your lips turning blue?

Are you uncontrollably bleeding from anywhere?

Having answered that I was not experiencing any of these issues, three hours later I was in the pharmacy collecting an ear spray, a new toothbrush, a pack of Berocca Mango Effervescent tablets, some Clean & Clear Exfoliating Scrub and a pregnancy test. Only the ear spray was prescribed, but I don’t put my shoes on for less than five items these days.

I suppose it’s best for humanity that the sort of person who would go online to contact their GP if they were bleeding heavily from an open wound would most likely die before they got to that question. Still, it worked for me.

John unreservedly recommends his GP’s e-consult service. He is not pregnant.

Goodbye, Dolly

Ocado sent me a 20% discount voucher in the same month that David died. It felt like fate was telling me never to go out again, so I didn’t. It’s not the grief, I joked, it’s the means. He left me the flat and some very successful investments – and honestly when you can have a boneless organic chicken thigh delivered straight to your door, why risk getting your hair wet?

He loved this flat. He used to say he loved me, Barbra Streisand and the flat, mostly in that order, but Barbra and I were interchangeable if I’d forgotten to put the rubbish out or if she really hit that high D5 at the end of A Piece of Sky. It’s a recording, I’d say, she hits the same note every time. Yes, he’d say, but sometimes I just feel it more.

The flat is on the top floor of Ben Jonson House on the northern edge of the Barbican estate in London. It has two rooms, side by side, each with a barrel ceiling. From the inside the rounded white roofs make you think you have more space than you really do. From the outside I like to imagine it looks like two sleeping giants cuddled up under a duvet.

David started renting the flat when he was studying at the Guildhall School of Music, or Downstairs as he always called it. When the owner sold up in the early nineties David had to buy the place because he’d filled it with too many records to move. 1423 records line an entire wall of the living room in orange crate shelves. They are mostly original cast recordings of musicals in all the languages of the countries he visited. Only sixty-seven of them are by Barbra, but she does have her own crate. I got my own crate in 2006. Well, it was a drawer. David was twenty years older than me and everyone assumed I was more in love with his south-facing balcony in Zone 1 than with him, but I would have moved into one of his orange crates under the Hammersmith flyover if he’d asked. Me, David and 1423 records living happily ever after. Or, in the end, about twelve years.

The Barbican estate was built over the wreckage World War II left of this part of London. David loved that it was someone’s vision of optimal living realised on such a large scale, that from a bombsite they thought they could rescue the future. His balcony overlooks the entire complex, the terraces and tower blocks, the mewses and the museum, the Arts Centre and its plazas. From that angle all the odd shaped buildings and covered walkways form an insane Escher print. When I’d go out there to water the plants he would wrap his arms around me from behind, his chin resting on my shoulder, and let his hand trace a path for some new adventure across the cityscape. With all there is, he’d sing in my ear, why settle for just a piece of sky?

Even then I used to think it all depended on the piece of sky you were looking at.

I haven’t been out on the balcony since he died. I’ve barely opened the curtains. Half of the plants dropped their leaves over the side like desperate passengers jumping from a sinking ship. The half that couldn’t reach the edge just curled up on the floor. David left me the flat and the money and the records and the plants, but do you need me to tell you he took away more than he left? Because I can’t be bothered to go into it – actually, that sums it up: David died and I couldn’t be bothered anymore.

***

When anyone remarked on the twenty years between us, and anyone often did, David would rush his hand to his cheek as though he’d been slapped. I was born on the 26th June, he was born on the 27th. There were nineteen years and 364 days between us. It never mattered to me, but since other people seemed so keen on numbers he liked to make sure they got it right.

On my birthday, the first thing he’d do was fling the covers off and crow about how young he felt. On his, the morning after, he’d play the ancient crone. Of all the time we had together, those twenty-four hours in between were often our happiest.

Sometimes we never left the flat. Sometimes we never left the bed. Once, on the day I turned thirty and he’d failed to cook the chicken for long enough, we spent most of it in the bathroom. He claimed it was because he’d heated it on the dying embers of his forties. If you can find a man who makes you laugh after giving you food poisoning, he’s the one.

David’s warmth evaporated time. Today, those same twenty-four hours yawn with their lack of promise. I am now thirty-eight and I’ve woken up alone in our bed for nearly a year. The same bed that it felt so decadent to stay in as the turning of the world notched up another number for me then him. There’s nothing decadent about staying in bed all day when you have nowhere else to be. Or nobody to share it with.

I get up at 7am and shower. I realised quite early on that it was easier to get rid of time at the start of the day. Also, for all of the talk about optimal living, the walls between the Barbican’s flats are thin enough that I know when my bedroom-side neighbour Bianca has had an overnight guest – because I hear her shower going twice, not because she’s a screamer (though the guests sometimes are). With the noise of her, possibly plus one, and Pete and Soph on the living-room side all getting ready for work in the morning there’s really no point in trying to lay in.

I eat breakfast and get on with my Big Job of the day. There’s only ever one. If you don’t work or even leave the two rooms you live in, your To Do list is minimal. The art is to spread it out over the course of the week: one day for cleaning, one day for washing, changing the bed gets a whole day of its own because it usually takes everything I have. One day I throw things in a casserole dish. Everything tastes the same anyway and one bucket of stew will last me all week. That’s unless Soph is away and Pete comes over. But if it runs out I usually eat cereal for dinner. Or nothing.

By 9am everyone in bothering radius will have left the building. If I put on one of David’s records I’m either feeling brave or the exact opposite. Usually I stick to some quiet, measurable task: today I will knit fifty rows of this scarf or today I will read two-hundred pages of Persuasion or today I will open at least three of the letters that continue to get forwarded for David and try to forgive the writer for existing in a world where he is still alive.

At 6pm I heat up my dinner. If any of my neighbours are going to knock to check that I haven’t made their lives awkward by killing myself, it’s usually now. If they don’t, I put on David’s ancient headphones that are attached by a spiralling wire to a radiogram thing on a shelf above the bed. I lay down and listen to a crackling Asian radio station that could be broadcasting cricket scores or prayers, but that completely drowns out the sounds of Pete and Soph making their evening meal together or Bianca laughing into her phone on the balcony as she lights another cigarette. I’d take the sounds of endless morning ablutions over their easy early evening chatter and hopefulness.

It’s meditative, listening to a language you don’t understand. After long enough you can hear the music in it. Music that doesn’t remind you of anyone.

He would’ve been fifty-eight tomorrow.

***

My dad and I get on fine, thanks for asking, though we joke that he threw me out at eighteen. He just wanted me to want more than the generic comfort of middle class Bristol. He stays because it makes mum happy and he loves her. He’s a doctor who wishes he’d been a sculptor or a fashion designer or a maker of anthropomorphic miniature ceramics – it all depends on what documentary he’s watching at the time. I was quite happy pulling up weeds and laying turf for the housewives of Clifton Village, though I was well aware that I didn’t want to lay anything else for them. I applied to art college for him really. And, fair enough, to sleep with someone other than the barman at the Queenshilling.  

My mum was more comfortable with my lack of ambition. She called it being an old soul. When they dropped me off at Ravensbourne she gave me a backgammon set and enough tinned soft fruit for a lifetime of untroubled dentures. Following a succession of diabolical paintings and haircuts, a Duke of Edinburgh Award in navigating my way home from a different part of London every other morning -  before the advent of Google Maps - and absolutely no backgammon, I graduated and got a job as an estate agent.

The most creative thing I was doing was arranging the pictures of other people’s homes in the window. I told my parents I was having a fabulous time and they believed me. I told myself that too, but it was less convincing.  

***

Pete is on my balcony sweeping up rotting leaves and quite a few of Bianca’s discarded cigarette butts. He does this whenever he comes over for dinner since I never go out there now. He has a broom in one hand and his phone in the other, into which I hear him shouting to his wife Soph that he’s about to eat one of Dolly’s famous one-pot wonders. I am Dolly. I am microwaving a five bean chilli I made using only two kinds of beans and the entire last jar of fucks I had to give. I’ve barely moved from the sofa in five hours, but have only been trying to ignore Pete’s questions for the last fifteen minutes.

Pete was already David’s neighbour when I moved into the flat. At the time I had a quiff that my friends used to say was maintained by all the comments that flew over my head. I was twenty-five, I’d been passed around London’s vibrant gay Soho like a tray of unwanted cakes and I was finally getting bored of butching it up and dumbing it down. Maybe it’s different now that kids have to build a personal brand online before they’re old enough to drink, but back when I was fresh meat it wasn’t what came out of your mouth that guys were interested in. I met David in the toilets at the Green Carnation – don’t worry, it wasn’t as seedy as it sounds. We were standing side by side looking in the mirror wearing matching Joe 90 glasses; me tall and dark, him short and bald. He said we looked like Dolce and Gabbana. I looked down at my designer-imposter daps and his wide-fit loafers and said we were more like Dolcis and Garden Centre. When he laughed it felt like someone had heard my real voice for the first time. I came back to the flat with him that night and four months later I lived here.

Dolce having instantly become Dolcis then became Dolly. That’s how he introduced me to Pete. Say hello to Dolly. Pete had been a DJ on the rave scene in the early nineties and still shouted everything inches from your ear like he was trying to be heard over Josh Wink’s Higher State of Consciousness. He smelled so straight and alien, like weed and the hot plastic of a Gameboy. It was the forbidden smell of someone’s older brother’s bedroom and on reflex I stayed silent in case I got kicked out. He looked into the tops of my boxes and asked me if I played backgammon then, with no response from me, reached in and pulled out a Prodigy CD. He waved it triumphantly in David’s face, delighted to finally have a neighbour who might play something other than Color Me Barbra through the wall. David was unfazed. Neither then nor at any time since has there been a CD player in the flat.

Now of course we can instantly play whatever we want to hear on our phones, but Pete and I are both at an age where eating two bean chilli at Prodigy speed could cause intestinal woe for days. He comes in from the balcony and selects a record to put on. It’s Je m’appelle Barbra, the original 1966 Colombia LP. Side two, track six: I’ve Been Here.

We were going to knock on your birthday but the lights were out, says Pete. And on his too. Then, after a deep breath, he tells me that Bianca has told Soph who has told him that she’s been doing some PR for the promoters who put on summer concerts in Hyde Park and that she’s heard that this year Barbra Streisand will be doing one of them and she could get us all tickets and we should go. VIP entry, away from the crowds. It will be the first time she’s performed in the UK for years and might be the last. David wouldn’t have missed it. David would’ve been there in a Fanny Brice sailor suit.

Over on the record player Barbra is assuring us that she is not a frightened dove.

I say I’m not ready.

The record finishes and there’s only static to fill the silence. Pete takes our half-empty bowls and puts them in the sink, where he stands as the whispering record turns and turns and turns and turns.

I need to go Dolly, he says. And I don’t know if I can go without you.

David and Pete had both done a lot of drugs, though it was never part of David’s work like it was for Pete. David travelled – he’d been a singer and then an internationally renowned vocal coach – but when he was home, he was home. Ask Pete if he ended up with a drug problem because it’s hard for a DJ to draw a line between his professional and private life, he’ll tell you that he doesn’t know because he never even tried. He was having a brilliant time and getting paid a lot of money. He got a mortgage for the flat next to David’s in 1999 with the advances from a series of Millennium gigs that he wouldn’t end up playing. Instead he went on what he now calls the Bender Of Destiny. His bookings disappeared. He went from sucking MDMA off a model’s nipple to sucking fag ash from the footwells of Mondeos at a car valeting service. He could barely afford enough speed to get him through the weekend. When he finally got so desperate that he sold his speakers, David knocked on his door. This was years before I'd met David, years before Pete met Soph. At the time they may not have had much in common except a very thin wall, but David was probably the only neighbour in the world who had a problem if you weren’t playing music. Pete’s existence had descended to skirting board level and the flat was basically empty. The highest vantage point was a stack of unopened post. Recently Pete must have fallen off or into or in front of something or someone and there was a dried trail of blood weaving back and forth between the two filthy airless rooms. David sat down on the floor next to Pete anyway and put his arms around him whilst he cried.

David took Pete next door and ran him a bath. He washed his clothes and his bedding. He cleaned Pete’s flat, he cooked for him. He sat with him every night, made him tea whilst he opened all the terrifying post, sorted out his payment plans. He helped him find some furniture, a job at a friend’s recording studio, a reason to go on. He played him the 1964 Original Cast Recording of Funny Girl and the 1970 soundtrack to On A Clear Day You Can See Forever and every single studio album Barbra had ever released. When you can afford your own speakers again we can listen to what you want, David would say, until then let’s have something ageless and evergreen.

Pete gave the eulogy at David’s funeral. I couldn’t speak. He said that David had saved his life. He chose all the music too. People kept thanking me afterwards and telling me how perfect the songs were. I tried to say that Pete had chosen everything but he said it didn’t matter. He took me home and said I didn’t need to explain anything to anyone. I didn’t need to see anyone or speak to anyone if I didn’t want to.

Pete takes Je m’appelle Barbra off of the record player, returns it to its sleeve and its place on the orange crate shelves.

There’s seven months until the gig, he tells me, we’ll start small. He opens the balcony door and steps outside, then he turns back and holds out his hand for me to join him.

January-December 2019 - The Resolution Revolution

The front of Kelly's Christmas card displays a desert caravan and the festive phrase O' camel ye faithful. The message inside is even more heavily-laden than the camels: 'we've missed you over the last nine months!'

Kelly was my Slimming World leader. It's fitting that she should choose beasts of burden to deliver her pass/agg season's greetings, as one of the key tenets of her teaching was to always carry as much of your own food with you as possible to avoid temptation by non-regime-approved offerings. I absorbed this tip from her in January. By the end of February I was travelling everywhere with a steamer trunk full of brown rice and roasted vegetables on my back. By the end of March I was shuffling straight from the chiropractor to McDonald's. If there's one thing I hate more than being fat, it's carrying stuff. I never saw Kelly again.

The diet was the first of my 2019 resolutions to fail, but thanks to another one I reckon I ended the year on a zero-sum game. My friend Luka let me keep the FitBit I stole from him and I determined I'd do 20,000 steps, six days a week. That's about 10 miles-a-day for me. I managed it 202 times, which falls a bit short of the 313 I should have done, but is an enormous improvement on my previous exercise regimen consisting of raising my eyebrows if anybody suggested I might like to leave the house.

I even managed over 30,000 steps on the day I got lost in Edinburgh trying to meet friends to climb Arthur's Seat. I eventually found them. Then climbed Arthur's Seat. If anyone ever suggests this to you, be aware there's no pub at the top.

I'd also made a bargain with myself that I'd step away from social media and try to find some joy in the world.

The latter came mostly from MRSpride, a new LGBTQ network for researchers I helped start that made me love my job again and begifted me the dual highlights of hearing Reece Lyons stun a room into silence with her poem I Am A Woman And I Have A Penis and me finally getting to perform the your-lapel-mic-is-still-on mime to someone in the middle of a torrential wee. Scenes.

Speaking of streams of piss, I stopped posting on Twitter and joined a creative writing class. This led to me reading one of my own poems aloud at the wedding of some dear friends. They made me swap the word credenza to sideboard (it was a lesbian wedding) and I shook myself into a cannister of anxiety in advance, but it went down really well in the end. And I changed sideboard back to credenza when I had the poem framed for the happy couple, because Kelly hasn't cornered the market on pass/agg.

I deleted Facebook and Instagram and never looked back, but I missed Twitter almost immediately. I did manage not to log into my own primary account for the year, but I definitely started using the excuse of posting things to the work feed to keep an eye on my favourites - if you've recently found yourself inexplicably followed by @tweetMRSpride, it means I fancy you. Or, more likely, your cat. Congratulations.

The only resolution I maintained for the entire year was to stop buying books I wouldn't read. In fact, I didn't buy a single book, but I still read 52 thanks to a backlog of untouched Amazon impulse purchases, donations from friends, setting up a book swap shelf in the office and, crucially, joining Islington Libraries. One way or another I read almost everything I wanted. There were a few things I couldn't get hold of, and honestly tweeting a link to this blog will be my second online act of 2020 after ordering Amy Hempel's latest collection of short stories, but this plan also led to my favourite discovery of the year: Rose Tremain's Sacred Country, which I'd never heard of, but found via the library's LGBT History Month round-up and loved every page of. Whichever librarian put it there, I owe you a bottle of Wincarnis.

Some personal successes then, which given the continued general decline of humanity feel essential to not starting this year in a worse emotional place than the last. Kelly's card is laying on top of the recycling along with the one from my dear friends at Pizza GoGo. It's all still there now as naturally I missed the correct pick-up day during Chrimbo Limbo.

John has agreed to start the next decade on a canoeing mini-break in Norfolk, so by the time anyone reads this he may have drowned. He wishes you all a Happy Canoe Year.

December 2018 - Of Anxiety and Anchors

On a good day I think: at least I got another 24 hours closer to death with as few things going wrong as possible. I’ll come to the bad days shortly.

When I was a little boy I remember people describing me as a worrier. Later, because it was a grammar school, they used the word pessimist. Eventually I graduated to plain old negative. Even my friend Calamity Lou calls me a ‘negative ninny,’ and she can turn a cup of tea into a catastrophe. I prefer the term Considered Anxiety – not considerable, though sometimes it’s so overwhelming I can’t leave the house, but considered in the sense that a lot of thought has gone into it. Everything I dislike or fear is in the sin bin after extensive research, believe me.

To function, I’ve developed an advanced containment system for all of this, controlled by emotional anchors. If you’ve never created an emotional anchor for yourself, here’s what you do: relate a positive feeling to a touch sensation and in times of trouble recreate that sensation to recreate the positive feeling. My touch sensation started as pressing my thumbs against the front of my forefingers. Over the years this evolved to pressing down on them until my knuckles crack, it’s unpleasant for other people but not as unpleasant as me having a conniption fit. However, much like the Indominus Rex in Jurassic World, my anxieties will keep hurling themselves at different parts of their enclosure until they find a weak spot and no amount of knuckle cracking can stop it. That’s when they suddenly smash through a T-Rex skeleton and try to claw a hole in my stomach whilst I’m buckled inside a stranded vehicle and there’s no Chris Pratt to save me.

Those are the bad days and nobody, least of all Chris Pratt, wants to be anywhere near me. 2018 has had so many more bad days than good, which seems inevitable given the state of the world and the constant stream of updates social media now gives us access to. What’s the answer?

Three things happened:

1. I went to visit friends with two small children and finished my box of Phantom River Sauvignon Blanc as the credits rolled on our third viewing of CBeebies Thumbelina (Andy Day positively thrums with menace as Mr Marvellous Mole). I managed to wait until the kids were asleep before asking how terrifying it was to bring them up in a climate of rising hysterical nationalism and, literally, temperatures that have caused entire herds of Russian moose to die. They told me that being a parent actually makes you more hopeful - not that you necessarily believe your own offspring will change the world directly, but that amongst a new generation of little humans the power for that generation to somehow survive must also be born. They also told me their local pub was full of ‘coked-up scaffolders’ and that was absolutely not a way of dissuading me to pack up my negativity and go there ASAP.

2. I was reading Tumble Home by Amy Hempel and draining a box of Pheasant Gulley Chardonnay. The protagonist walks dogs for an animal shelter but the panic of not being able to walk every abandoned dog in need overwhelms her. The magnitude of the situation makes her actions feel pointless. Her therapist says: “The goal is not to erase the problem. You do it to make the choice, to give and get joy in this life.”

3. I had bagpiped the last of my box of Espanol Blanco! Spanish White Wine (only £13 for 2.25 litres at Asda, exclamation mark included) over a glass of ice, because I’m very much about What Would Joan Collins Do, when I saw my tiny cat chase a massive fox out of the garden. That fox is brazen - when the back door was open in the summer it bowled into the living room, which Mother B later told me was very worrying as it could’ve been a vampire. Daisy Mae is frightened of almost everything and, frankly, a lazy bitch unless food is involved. We’re so similar, I thought: if she can see off her fox, maybe I can see off some of mine.

John’s New Year’s Resolutions include stepping away from social media, trying to give joy and find hope (not by having a baby) and putting a stop to drinking wine by the box. If the world doesn’t implode in the meantime, he’ll be back in 2020 to let you know how all that panned out.

November 2018 - Of Diane and Diane’s Friend

Diane and Diane’s friend, The Man Magnet, think I’m a gentleman because I stand back to let them board the train first. They nod to each other approvingly. The truth is I heard wittering behind me on the platform and wanted to make sure I sat at the opposite end of the carriage. The 07.18 to Cannon Street would be a sacred silent space if it weren’t for Diane, whose unfortunate health problems have apparently limited her life in every way apart from the ability not to come up for air throughout her entire 35 minute commute. If she exhausts her own repertoire of maladies, Diane moves on to The Man Magnet’s romantic entanglements, which make the plot of Anna Karenina seem thin. Diane sees all the comings and goings at The Man Magnet’s house because they are next door neighbours. “You’re a man magnet,�� Diane always says. The Man Magnet is not required to reply.

Sometimes my plan works perfectly and I end up soothed to work by nothing but the snores of builders and groans of Southeatern’s tired rolling stock. Other times the only seat left is directly opposite them and by the time we limp from St Johns to New Cross everyone has been fully apprised of exactly how far both Diane’s psoriasis and The Man Magnet’s legs have spread - swathes covering roughly left armpit to navel and the northern slopes of Shooter’s Hill right up to the Wrong ‘Un (that’s a Wetherspoons in Bexleyheath for the filthily-minded) respectively.

The 07.18 is ordinarily a ten carriage train, so you have every right to wonder why I don’t just sit in a different one and the only thing I can tell you is that it’s just not the done thing. Also, there’s this ginger cyclist with a whiff of Greg Rutherford about him whose top rides up when he mounts his gleaming Bossnut before the Rochester Relief revealing a different letter on the waistband of his pants each day and I’m hoping to collect the full set.

Anyway, by sheer chance as I was coming home from the theatre the other night I ended up sat next to Diane and Diane’s friend, who was not The Man Magnet. I had the immediate sense that I’d stumbled across an infidelity and as we rumbled along the tracks it transpired that’s exactly what I had done. I joined them mid conversation.

“And she made a mockery of my cupcake party,” Diane was saying. “She knows that launching a cupcake business is my one and only hope of getting off the nail bar and finally running the cottage industry I’ve always wanted in my pantry.” The dubious wisdom of somebody with Diane’s skin complaints moving into catering aside, I knew instantly she was discussing The Man Magnet. She went on: “I had everyone on my decking: Terry, Toni, Tanya, Tony, Tony’s mum Terri. It. Was. Packed. You could barely wriggle down my side return and believe me I tried. Well, she was next door with her latest, on the job in the back bedroom with her Velux wide open. I’ve heard more decorous sounds from foxes. People were put right off my Red Velvet Surprise Pockets.”

She stopped to take a long slurp on the straw of her McDonald’s beverage. It sounded almost empty so she rattled the cup full of ice in the friend that wasn’t The Man Magnet’s face like the maraca accompaniment to a lost Gilbert and Sullivan patter song.

“I give the very model of the modern, major manicure. My overlays and refills are worth more than some department store. She’s well aware I want to woo the world with my patisserie - she knows I’ve baked until I bashed my skull in in my scullery. She’s barely said a word about my sponge cats full of funfetti, she-bears with jelly earrings and cream seahorses on one settee. She bares her bits - her tired tits defiled half my apron drawer - and in exchange she bought me that infernal nonsense pinny. For…”

SLUUUUUUUURP.

“…I’m the soul of sensitivity and send her samples regu’ly, her business is her business and I’m busy with my cupcakes, see? I ain’t bothered if she’s buggered whilst I’m round my bougainvillea or when her warbled orgasms wilt my whispering wisteria. I’d Terry, Toni, Tanya, Tony, Tony’s mum, a Terri too, Tyrel, Michelle, Raquel, Estelle - I’d hired in a Portaloo! I gave my guests a garden gala, got my guests a goody bag, for Noisy Neighbour’s Knocking Shop! Not that I judge, but she’s a slag.”

Drop the curtain on the dancing sailors, raise it at 07.17 and 25 seconds the next morning. I barge my way on to grab the seat with prime cyclist views and Diane and The Man Magnet sit opposite. She gives me what I imagine she thinks of as one-of-her-looks and inhales to begin. “Hello again,” I say. “I was next to you on the train home last night when you were talking about your cupcake party.”

And they all travelled to Cannon Street in blissful silence.

John has just purchased his first Gold Card, which entitles him to an entire year of travel on the notoriously miserable rails of Southeastern. He expects to spend much of it working from home. Diane’s cupcake empire remains unrealised, but she is happy to meet with potential investors during her afternoon breaks from Nails Nails Nails. The Man Magnet has broadened her territory to Surrey Quays. The Ginger Cyclist wears B J O R N B O R G underpants.

October 2018 - Of Tales and Troi

On 13th March 1993, less than two months after I’d turned twelve and with the zip-up pockets of my Makro tracksuit bulging with pound coins found Sellotaped inside my birthday cards, I went to the Waterstones on Charing Cross Road all by myself. Maybe the rest of you were already in motorcycle gangs or hosting WI lunches by that age, but I was still refusing to wear my glasses - without which I only got to read the signs I frequently walked into seconds before impact - and I had no friends, so rarely left the house except to ricochet blindly to school. Even now it feels like one of the bravest things I’ve ever done.

What would motivate such a boy, one so intent on hiding that he thought not seeing meant not being seen, to lie to his parents and venture into the big city? I’ll tell you: cock. But don’t run away, this isn’t a story about ill-advised underage sex in ill-fitting 90s sportswear. It’s about books.

The previous weekend I’d read an interview in the Sunday Times Magazine with Armistead Maupin. He was publicising his latest novel Maybe the Moon, but he also mentioned the series he is much more famous for, Tales of the City, which apparently commemorated ‘hook-up culture, everyday drug use and gay bathhouse sex’ in 1970s San Francisco (there’s so much more than that, but the Sunday Times Magazine hasn’t changed its tune for decades). I honestly don’t think I’d ever seen the word gay in print before. I’d seen it scratched onto my locker by the business end of a compass, but this was pre-internet. Everything I knew about gay had been shouted at me in a playground, no bibliography was provided for further reading.

It amazes me when people say they don’t like reading. Reading is a super power that lets you hear other people’s thoughts and live other people’s lives. It must seem amazing to Millennials that at one time we didn’t have access to all of human knowledge in a device in our pockets. If you wanted to know about something, you had to ask an actual person or you had to find the answer in a book. As a baby gay trying to figure things out for myself it was impossible for me to ask anyone for the answers I needed, so I relied solely on books and they have been my greatest teachers ever since. 

Now that I knew this Armistead Maupin had written books about gays, I needed to read them. The library was not an option. That would involve being tracked and stamped – branded. I needed to go off grid. I turned to my guardian angel, Counselor Deanna Troi. 

Anything I haven’t learnt from a book I’ve learnt from Star Trek. In the early 90s that meant tuning into BBC2 ‪at 6pm‬ on a ‪Wednesday night‬ to watch Captain Picard and the crew of the USS Enterprise-D on their continuing mission to spread the gospel of bodysuits as practical workwear beyond the final frontier. If this post has drawn in anyone else from the Venn diagram of gay fiction and space sagas, I’ll just state that I am totally on board with Troi eventually embracing her full rank, uniform and hair straighteners, but back then her plunging necklines, vaguely Mittel-European accent and mindreading powers seemed like exactly what a pre-teen homosexual from South East London should aspire to. She sensed my desperate need to find a tribe and helped me lay in a course to the gay and lesbian fiction section of a national book chain. 

Alongside the TV show, there was a series of Star Trek novels and at this exact time Peter David’s Imzadi had been released. It’s not one of the cool ones with the Borg as a thinly disguised cipher for communism, it’s just your standard tempestuous time-travel romance, but it was on the New York Times best-seller list for six weeks so save your sneers. As it had only just come out I made a very convincing case to my parents that I needed to go to a West End book shop to get it. I may have been blinder than Geordi La Forge without his VISOR, but the promise of finding out what gays got up to in something called a bathhouse had made me sneakier than a Romulan. 

The particular branch of Waterstones I went to closed years ago and is now a Superdrug, so you’ll have to take the sketchy 25-year-old memories of a petrified partially-sighted kid on the store’s layout for granted. Up some steps in a corner section there was a low freestanding shelf and the gay fiction was on the side facing away from the rest of the shop. I crept around the other shelves and flung myself to the floor. All six Tales of the City books were there as well as dozens of others with terrifyingly tasteful male physiques on them, but after my train fare and buying Imzadi too I could only afford one. I felt sick. I might never get the chance to come back for the others, but what could I do? 

It is a testament to the shame I felt that I took my two books to the till with the actress who played Troi, Dame Marina Sirtis (forgive my cosmic ordering on a Galaxy-class scale), staring out on top in Mills and Boon-ish soft focus glory. I held my breath whilst both of them were scanned and then I paid with my change.

I could have taken my new treasure out and read it in the middle of Old Compton Street and half the queens wouldn’t have known there were gay characters in it, never mind anywhere else, but I kept the Waterstones carrier bag folded tightly closed until I got home to the safety of my bedroom. There I opened it and ceremoniously wrote the date on the inside front cover. 

On 13th March 1993, less than two months after I’d turned twelve, I read Tales of the City for the first time. It changed my life.

Tales of the City was first published in book form 40 years ago and has just been voted one of America’s 100 favourite novels. Expect a handsome anniversary edition and a glossy new Netflix adaptation soon. Meanwhile, used copies of Imzadi are available on Amazon ‪from 1p‬. John recommends both heartily.

September 2018 - Of Max and Men

Max Verstappen, the Dutch dynamo of Formula One, turns 21 today. To celebrate, we revisit some highlights from my criminally under-appreciated (and unpublished) 2016 novel My Heart is Racing.

***

He was just 18 when it all began. Red Bull's Team Principal Christian Horner, in his 40s but firm and fatherly, finally gave him what he'd always wanted - and it had more pull than a Space Shuttle launch. None of them expected that his new teammate Danny Ricciardo, only a few years older but with that easy Australian confidence that made him seem so much more experienced, would be bringing up the rear. Max came first.

"I'm sorry Danny," he'd stuttered. "It was my first time at the front - Christian said I should always defend approaches from behind."

"Not always," Danny had whispered, grasping the younger guy's gleaming helmet and leading him into the unknown.

***

"Silverstone separates the men from the boys," Danny had said, with his usual mix of Aussie/Italian charm. Max was still just 18, but he had out-performed the older guy again. "Which one am I?" He'd asked, tentatively. The thunderous rain on the garage roof drowned out Danny's response, but his eyes said it all; they moved things up a gear.

That's why Max couldn't help sniggering when the interviewer asked about Danny "pushing hard from behind." He caught the older guy's eye across the pits as he answered, coyly, "I'm still losing a lot on the straights, but I make up for it on the bends."

Danny knew the younger guy had bested him again on the track. He was already planning on getting even when Christian, as firm as ever, said, "I don't want to see you two embarrass me out there like those Mercedes boys. Take it out on each other in private, if you must." And Danny always followed orders.

***

"Hungaroring?" asked Danny, but Max already knew what awaited him was hotter and blacker than anything he'd mastered so far. "Barely a straight in sight," he whispered back to the older guy. Today he would take no prisoners.

***

Max had heard the older guys laugh: "Everyone loses their Hocken-hymen eventually." Well, he was in second place now, and he always made damn sure nobody laughed once they got behind him.

Danny's smile could dazzle the crowd, but Max knew what a 'double podium' really meant. Maybe they both had trophies, but whoever had the bigger one still took the lead; and after all, there was a three week break for his rear suspension to recover.

***

Max nervously ran his hand through his naturally-blond hair, thinking of all the guys getting up for him first thing in the morning back home. "Don't worry," whispered Danny. "I reckon you Dutch boys are pretty good early risers..."

***

The Malaysian heat brought out Danny's dominant side. He took the lead in every corner until the other boys were all desperate with thirst, then he made them drink from his boot.

But maybe Max wasn't as submissive as Danny thought. That day he had turned 19. Instead of closing his mouth and letting it run down his chin, he opened wide and swallowed. "Happy birthday," said Danny, unable to keep that insatiable, Aussie grin off his face. "Looks like we're both winners."

***

Max heard the engineer's words in his ear and knew exactly what he wanted: "TIGHT, TIGHT, TIGHT." Danny could surprise some other backmarker up the inside; this time Max imagined the glint of Lewis's earring behind him and, shuddering with excitement, whispered: "Chase me, champ."

***

His smile had gotten Danny a lot of things, including his Mexican nickname. "La Boca, La Boca, La Boca," chanted the crowd. It meant The Mouth, and today The Mouth wanted to go mano a mano.

***

Although they'd started slow, now Max's grip was slipping. "Go easy," urged Danny, "go easy!" But they were too wet, too close and going too fast. Max, gasping, almost lost control and then the spray hit the older guy's face.

***

"I told you there'd be new rules this year," Danny had said, shrugging Max's hand from his broad Australian shoulder. But Max, still just 19 but bolder and blonder than ever after their summer practising in the sun, wasn't scared of the distance; "You'll get back to me," he whispered, "even if you have to lay rubber in the dirt of every guy they've put between us."

Danny had barely recovered from getting t-boned by Seb and now Christian wanted his turn: "Lewis is never going to roll over for you," he said, as firm as ever, "but you should have made better headway into the back of Max." But Danny just smiled his easy Aussie smile. If only you knew, he thought.

***

Maybe it was the heat, but Max went from soft to super soft and then just couldn't finish. He looked on, helplessly, as Danny forced his way behind all the other lads one by one.

***

It was the last race of the season. Christian, always firm around his boys, wondered if he could have been harder. Well, they were in each other's hands now. All he could do was watch. The climax he was waiting for was not to be. As the fireworks lit up the sky over Abu Dhabi, there were no trophies for Max and Danny. But after all the fumbled exits, the times they'd hastily pulled away and gone deep, deep into their breaking zones, hadn't they won a greater prize?

***

Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo both got their power boxes ripped out at the Russian Grand Prix. John is open to offers from publishers, publicists and publicans.

August 2018 - Of a Fiend at the Fringe

They call me the Frinch because I’m the Grinch of the Edinburgh Fringe. It wasn’t always this way. Three weeks ago I was just another theatre fiend, riding to Scotland side-saddle on an LNER trolley of drinks and light refreshments, eager to begin an adventure at the world’s greatest platform for creative freedom. Then I ran into my first Walking Silent Disco. What follows are the diary lowlights of a man falling out of love with the arts.

1 August

So it’s been raining since your train passed Berwick-upon-Tweed, so Su Pollard changed carriages because you drank four white wines and sang the theme to You Rang M’Lord at her, so Lothian Buses have imprinted the Ridacard you’ll be brandishing for the foreseeable with the ugliest vision of yourself since curtains were a thing and your dad called you Pugsley all year: you’re at the biggest arts festival in the world, the nexus of performance, the global focus of culture for the next month! “Excuse me,” you ask a passer-by, “where do I catch the 47?” “Awa’n’shite ya mangled fud,” he replies. Welcome to Edinburgh.

2 August

Today you pay £6 for a toasted cheese sandwich.

3 August

Flirting, you think, with an attractive young barman in the courtyard at the Assembly Hall before seeing a play about growing up gay in the 80s, you say: “looks like you’ve lucked out, this is one of the quietest bars I’ve been in yet.” “Yeah,” he replies, “only lonely old queens seem to be coming to see this.” You drink six gin and tonics with a couple on day release from their retirement home and end up crying to a Eurythmics song at 4.10pm. 

4 August

Weaving towards you in a kind of shambolic unison like the villagers from Beauty and The Beast on their way to set fire to the castle, they come. Twenty, maybe thirty of them, clutching at their temples. There seems to be a leader of sorts, a rabble-rouser, guiding them now in a menacing semaphore: arms flung to the sky, to the head, swinging wildly to the side, pitching back up. It looks like… it is, it’s the YMCA. The leader turns and his T-shirt reads: ‘Walking Silent Disco.’ You run.

6 August

Today you and four other people watch a one-woman musical about Ruth Kelly.

8 August

Your parents arrive today for a visit. They bring their own milk and toilet roll ‘just in case.’ Just in case you’ve been eating dry Cornflakes and wiping your arse with newspaper? Just in case the Morrison’s that you’ve told them is a five minute walk from your flat only sells Irn-Bru and tartan-wrapped sheep’s pluck? JUST IN CASE YOU’RE INCAPABLE OF PROVIDING BASIC NECESSITIES EVEN THOUGH YOU’RE 37 AND HAVE ORGANISED EVENTS WHERE HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE GET FED SIMULTANEOUSLY AND LEAVE WITHOUT THEIR BUM CHEEKS SMEARED WITH SHIT?

10 August

You and a few determined comrades stand at the crest of the Royal Mile. This time you will get through. This time you will win. You have nothing for weapons, only a few handfuls of fliers snatched from nearby performers. They’re hardly Ninja throwing stars, but the corners are sharp and surely the artwork is bad enough to distract the enemy? A pitchy acapella rendition of 500 Miles heralds their approach: the zombie hoard of the Walking ‘Silent’ Disco. You raise your fliers, ready to make a stirring Braveheart speech but the line is already faltering. “There’s too many of them,” cries a frightened face quivering inside the hood of a cagoule. “There’ll crush us all!” screams another. You run.

11 August

Today you get hit in the face by some artificial feces.

12 August

The lesbians arrive and make you go to a night called Comedy Queers above a filthy Wetherspoons that looks like it is on its tenth day of 24-hour service. In retrospect you should have stayed downstairs and licked the floor. The worst act in the line-up does a bit where she intimates she made her repressed ex-girlfriend a ‘Chinese menu’ of sex acts so that she only had to ask for numbers rather than say the words for what she wanted. She then gets the audience to call out numbers – “19,” they say. “NUMBER 19: EGG FU YUNG RIMMING,” she shouts back. Surely this should have at least been “NUMBER 19: CHOO YUNG THONG” or something? This goes on for TWELVE MINUTES. Nobody saves you.

13 August

Today you pay £12 to watch a man eat a hand of bananas.

14 August

Today you visit the creme brûlée van in Bristo Square for the ninth time in a fortnight and they suggest you write a review for their website.

15 August

Today you shart.

16 August

Today you see a musical that rhymes ‘shameless’ with ‘anus.’

17 August

The final showdown. No more cowering in closes and winding stairways. No more walking miles around this bastard rock to avoid the inevitable. Maybe you’ll have to take them on alone, but you will take them on. You settle on the portion of Victoria Street where it’s already narrowed by the alfresco cafe tables on one side and the railing overlooking a precipice on the other. It’s steep and narrow and neither side will be able to turn back. The Walking Dead Silent Disco approach from above, already at an advantage. You charge. Gyrating shoulder after gyrating shoulder pounds into your chest. An assault of amateur hairography follows. But it’s the out of time clapping that finally finishes you. Maybe if they hadn’t been doing Crazy In Love you would have made it, but nobody can beat Beyoncé. Pausing only to tell the human statue beside you to get a job, you take a swan dive down to the street below.

John actually loved every minute of the Edinburgh Fringe, he just wanted to use the word Frinch. He saw 49 shows in 17 days and can’t wait to go back next year. He does, however, really hate every single person who took part in that Silent Disco.

July 2018 - Of Good Bears and Goodbyes.

I have been mauled by the White Bear for the last time. That’s not the first line of a country song about my latest failed romance, though it is about the end of a love affair. One of my favourite pubs closes today and, though in time a damaged liver can recover, a damaged heart is scarred forever.

She was legendary amongst the drinking holes of Clerkenwell, with her red brick and gently-bowed front window, like a kindly Victorian ginger pot-bellied granny waiting on St John Street to take care of you after work. She had been there for 120 years, for almost the last 20 run by the same family and for at least the last ten known to me. I’ve drunk through celebrations and commiserations there, birthdays and break-ups, funerals, christenings, Christmases and Christ-knows-whats, and that was all last Wednesday. The building is being ‘developed’ and, whilst a campaign by all of her fans means that the ground floor will have to be refurbished as some kind of bar, Granny is getting a facelift and she just won’t be the same. 

Clerkenwell is like a little Central London oasis. There’s not much for tourists to see and no big corporations, so the streets don’t throng with as many arseholes as the rest of the city. It’s mostly a rag tag bunch of small businesses and people who work in designer office furniture showrooms (known locally as ‘wankles’ for their easily identifiable short trousers), but these plucky lunchtime drinkers have kept a wide variety of boozers going over the years. 

Aside from the Hat’n’Feathers (RIP), known as The Spittin’ Feathers for the amount of time it often took to get served there and which was the first to close, we have: The Crown, where you only sit outside, and The Green, where you only sit inside; there’s 19/20, which has some nice pavement benches for the summer months but nothing inside except pool tables that they get very sniffy about you dancing on; I’ve never been a fan of The Slaughtered Lamb opposite because you can’t hear anyone thanks to the terrible acoustics and the bar staff can’t hear you over their orders from the Mother Ship; The Old Ivy House is now in its third age, sadly as a bit of a generic Shepherd Neame Pub, but way back Dixie Dave used to play his Bontempi on a small carpeted stage and even when Ivan was in charge he’d let you run a tab till midnight on payday soundtracked by a playlist ricocheting from All Saints to Van Halen to Shirley Bassey; The Three Kings sells scotch eggs that you won’t be able to go back to shop-bought after eating and a cloudy Breton cider that you won’t be able to go back to work after drinking; The Horseshoe, AKA The Secret Garden, has the cheapest eats and the meanest service, whilst the Betsey Trotwood has the exact opposite; then there’s the faithful Sutton Arms, like your teenage boyfriend who you continually try to leave for something more exciting but end up banging every Christmas or whenever you can’t be bothered to walk that far and secretly know you’ll eventually marry anyway. Christmas is actually when it’s at its best and you should definitely pop in to admire the decorations, though you’re as likely to get a slap around the head from the owner Mick for not finishing your food or moving the furniture without permission.

But none of these burned bright enough to become their own verb. In our office, the phrase “did you get White Beared?” is common parlance for “are you piecing your night together from the receipts in your wallet and the shape of the bruises on your body?” or “did you get home at 4am with no recollection of why your blouse was wringing wet/your ear was swollen to twice its usual size/you can smell burning/there were scratches all over your arms?” These are just hypothetical examples of how somebody might get White Beared, and in case it ever happens to you the hypothetical explanations might be: because you lay on the bar whilst the barman hosed you down with the soda gun; because you let a colleague try to pierce your ear with a safety pin; because you set your own hair on fire whilst lighting a stolen cigarette; because you wanted to dance with somebody, somebody who loved you, and that somebody was definitely not Bud The Belligerent Pub Cat.

Imagine a cross between Cheers, Coyote Ugly and the Mos Eisley Cantina, then picture me in the middle of it charging behind the bar to line up my next Bette Midler number on the stereo. Everybody might know your name, but can you remember it yourself? Who needs to fight the moonlight when you seem to fast forward straight through the hours from 10pm to 3am? And is that really a bunch of bald debt-chasers from Morton Smith in the corner or a band of dome-headed aliens tinkling out their otherworldly jazz? Where’s the cat? I want to dance with the cat! 

I have truly never known a pub with more power to turn ‘going for one’ into ‘going for the Guinness World Record in chucking Jägerbombs down my screech.’ It’s not the building of course, though the Grade II listed facade is lovely, it’s the family who run the place - and I’ve now begged three generations of them for one last Bacardi (only the baby relented) - who made everyone feel at home. And of course the community who went there. 

It’s a sad day for all of us, so raise a glass of whatever you’ve got handy - or minesweep something from a nearby table - to the White Bear. There’ll never be another one like her. 

The White Bear shuts its doors on 31 July 2018. John wishes all the M-Hs the very best in the future and feels it’s only fair that they spend the next decade barging into his kitchen, changing the music and helping themselves to whatever. If you stand in St John Street at 2am and listen very carefully, you might still hear the echoes of From a Distance in the air - or is that Bud the cat attacking another victim?

June 2018 - Of Chums in the Chunnel

Karma turned on Betty and I when we said bad things about the baby. “It’s called Ésmé with an accent over both e’s,” I told her, using the same disgusted tone with which you might announce an outbreak of lice or the release of a new Keira Knightley movie. “So every time they say her name it sounds like a cat retching,” said Betty. We were really saying bad things about Ésmé’s parents, who were the kind of people to leave their child on a filthy Parisian pavement before putting her in the boot of a car, but it was too late. We were awful and our luck had run out.

Whilst we have known and loved each other for fifteen years, my friendship with Betty is like the anti-Megazord. Our powers do not combine to make us stronger, only meaner and more shambolic. Alone we are self-sufficient, young (yes, young) professionals, winning at work and living life abundantly: she’s got great hair, I can carry five full wine glasses at once. Together, we fall apart.

We have attempted co-habitation twice: the first time ended after six months when I found her attacking the skylight in our bathroom with a broom handle because the seagulls were haunting her dreams. When we moved out I tried to lower an armchair down the front of the house from the fourth floor with a washing line and smashed all the windows below. We told out landlord some youths had thrown rocks at us. The second time lasted three months in a building that had unfortunately been previously occupied by Chinese prostitutes. Despite a very clear note on the door in Verdana, the politest of all fonts, we were hassled day and night by gentlemen callers.

Our few attempts at international travel have also been fairly eventful. There was the festival in Spain where we almost drove off a cliff whilst listening to Bon Jovi, the New Year in Amsterdam where we carried other people’s bags around for two days chased by trams and the wedding in Slovakia when we flooded our hotel room. That last one was years ago though, and surely we’d made enough good deposits in our Karmic piggy banks since then to warrant one tiny uneventful weekend degustation mini-break to Paris?

It started so well. We didn’t even get through half of the two litre bladder of Pheasant Gulley Chardonnay we’d bought for the journey out, proving how mature and sophisticated we’d become, but it’s surprisingly difficult to maintain being a good person in the City of Lights, especially when you’re staying in one of the trendier districts. Little things started to chip away at me: the cool café where the waitress only carried one item at a time, the bar with the framed poster of Phil Collins, the Afrobeat night in the bowels of a barge. By the time we sat down opposite the Japanese boulangerie, next to a boutique that only sold fluorescent raincoats, for our aubergine pannée and Ésmé’s mummy and daddy walked past, I was ready to seek and destroy.

Our bad Karma caught up with us in a 4G black spot on a downward slope outside Amiens. The Eurostar ground to a halt at 45 degrees just as the England-Panama game was about to kick off in Nizhny Novgorod. All power, including the air conditioning and wifi, went off. The train manager, Davide, was not optimistic: “I am supposed to inform you that we will be here for 20 minutes, but, meh…” He had a look of Jacques Rivette and his expression said that we were about to experience something longer and more pointless than the very best Nouvelle Vague cinema.

Over the next two-and-a-half hot, stationary hours, the captives of carriage 11 got increasingly irate with every text informing them another goal had been scored that they couldn’t see. Mrs Brexit in seat 31 complained more and more loudly that the useless locals were going to make her miss her daughter’s wedding and the sooner we got out of Europe and filled the Chunnel with rocks the better. The French teenagers across the aisle humped and slurped. Davide said meh. Goal Chunnel honk slurp meh, goal Chunnel honk slurp meh.

And then the buffet car ran out of rose.

I knew the moment would come. I’d been fashioning a coffee stirrer into a shiv. I got ready to brace myself against the back of the chair and leap towards Davide. It should be fairly easy to snatch his pass key and then bounce sideways onto the necking French teens (using them as a crash mat) and spring forward at Mrs Brexit. One quick stab to the neck should finish her off. Then I’d open the door and throw myself from the train, barrelling through the scrubby countryside of Hauts-de-France towards freedom or the nearest vineyard.

Betty took my hand. If our years of codeine and co-dependence have taught us anything it’s to spot when the other is about to have a conniption fit. She gave me the rest of her rose and the train began to move.

Eurostar 9021 got into St Pancras International three hours late. Davide was found in the goods wagon with three crates of rose and a reel to reel projector showing Celine and Julie Go Boating. England beat Panama 6-1 and went on to win the World Cup (JOKES!). Mrs Brexit made her daughter’s wedding in time to find the groom was Polish and nobody had missed her. John and Betty are planning a trip to the Cologne Christmas markets in December. Stay well away from them.

May 2018 – Of Noël and the Night Bus

“You can get on the night bus or you can sleep with that old guy sitting next to you,” said The Vegan, “either way you’re riding an 89 tonight.” We were approaching the home stretch of an eleven-hour theatrical event and, it being a Sunday and my train line being operated by Southeastern (“Travel your way… when we feel like it!”), it was becoming increasingly apparent that I might struggle to get home.

Like it’s road race namesake, a successful theatre marathon requires three key things: physical stamina, mental stability and someone to thrust a fresh bottle towards you at carefully timed intervals. The Vegan has been my friend long enough to know what replenishes my electrolytes: 750ml of what he calls Secretaries’ Favourite – that’s the cheapest Pinot Grigio on the menu – served with ice cubes and a smattering of aspersions about the male chorus. Our training programme had seen us survive eight hours of Angels in America (five intervals, twelve wines) and ten hours of The Inheritance (four intervals and a pause, twelve whines), so we entered the Jermyn Street Theatre for Tonight At 8.30 in peak condition.

If you ever get the chance to watch these nine one-act Noël Coward plays back-to-back in a single day, I highly recommend it. The characters’ clipped speech makes their petty judgements and constant grasping seem like the way we were, but those conversations are happening somewhere right now. Probably Putney. We ricochet from farce to melodrama via the occasional song and dance number and Celia Johnson provides the internal monologue. Imagine this…

I looked across and saw the elderly gentleman who had been sitting next to me re-enter the theatre. He had worn a reversible bucket hat with its soft brim turned down all day, so I hadn't even seen his face, but his rather ordinary cardigan was somehow instantly recognisable. He bought a small plastic cup of red wine from the stable door-style counter where Kurt served drinks under the watchful eye or Mrs Front (of house) and turned. Then I did see his face. It was rather a nice face. He passed my seat on the way to his.

Mrs Front was going on as usual. “Whipe down that bar, Kurt! I can see rings from ‘ere!”

“Yes Mrs Front!” said Kurt, flicking a seasonal serviette around.

It was then, whilst peering closely at one of the ensemble’s bios in the dim light, trying to determine whether I recognised her from the RSC, that I poked myself right in the eye with my own programme. Later The Vegan would remind me that I’d never been to the RSC and I recognised her from a Philadelphia advert, but in the moment I got quite the shock.

“Please,” I said to Kurt. “do you have a tissue? I've poked myself in the eye and I’ve a terrible feeling I’ll miss the last act.”

“Would you like me to look?” asked the elderly gentleman.

“Oh, no, don't trouble yourself. I’ll just fashion an eye patch from this seasonal serviette.”

“Peering too closely at the programme, was you?” said Kurt. “A man I knew lost the sight in one eye once looking for Sarah Harding’s credits when he went to see Ghost The Musical in Wimbledon.”

“Nasty, very nasty,” said Mrs Front.

“Please let me look,” said the elderly gentleman. “I’m home all day and I never miss Doctors.” He took my face in his papery hands and angled my chin towards the light from the halogen bulb above Kurt’s careful display of quietly-chewable snacks. “It doesn’t look permanently damaged, I should say you’ll make it through to the end.”

“Oh, what a relief. It was agonizing!” I said. “Thank you very much, indeed. How lucky for me you happened to be here.”

“My flat’s just round the corner, in Piccadilly, so I see most things here. Anyway anybody could've done it.”

“But you did and I'm ever so grateful.”

“There's the lights,” he said. “We’d better take our seats.”

That's how it all began, just through my terrible lack of depth perception. I hardly noticed the rest of the play. The prospect of the life I might live with the elderly gentleman, my very own Noël Coward, consumed me utterly: Fortnum and Mason being our corner shop, sailing for Malaya in matching cardigans, drinking madeira, frantic searches for that bucket hat accompanied by Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and his adorable wheezing. Of course it would be beastly when he died in eighteen months and left me everything, but I’d soldier on.

Midway through redecorating the Piccadilly flat (or perhaps I’d just sell it - handy for theatreland but awfully noisy), the lights came up and he stood to leave. “I must go,” he said. “Good-bye.” His hand touched my shoulder for a moment and then he walked away, away and out of my life forever.

I turned to The Vegan and watched his mouth form soundless shapes as the noise from the departing audience crashed over me like waves ravaging a deserted beach. “Yes, dear?” I said. “Did you say I’d been a long way away? Did you thank me for coming back to you?”

“No, I said I know some dancers in Ku Bar and if you get your shit together we might just make last orders.”

John got the night bus home next to a girl whose ringtone was Shola Ama’s Imagine, UK Garage remix circa 1999. The Vegan made last orders. Noël Coward wrote dozens of plays and somebody says somebody’s beastly in every single one of them. Jermyn Street Theatre turns 25 this year and completely funds itself from ticket sales and private donations. You should definitely pay them a visit.

April 2018 - Of Heritage and Hairy Old Ball Bags

When she told me they had joined the National Front I wept in my mother’s arms. How could my own parents choose a future in which angry old white people would bar my way and tell me where I should and shouldn’t be, whilst ranting evangelically about the superiority of British heritage? Not to mention the grossly over-priced cakes. I knew she meant the National Trust - the closest Mother B gets to fascism is asking Alexa to play ‘Pencil Full of Lead’ by Benito Mussolini - but Sundays would be changed forever. “It’ll be a nice thing for us to do as a family,” she threatened, “and you will love the animals.”

Like most Baby Boomers, Mother and Father B keep themselves constantly busy so that they can moan about how lazy younger generations are. They realised early in retirement that they would need to expand on their existing hobbies – for her, writing lists; for him, being left lists – and took up some new ones. These included swimming without getting anyone’s hair wet, sleeping through Madam Secretary (variously known by Mother B as American Secretary, Madam President, The President’s Secretary or American Madam), spreading the Gospel of Lidl and, now, withholding roast dinners from their only child until he’s poked around some ancient racist’s crumbling pile.

I was lured to Knole with the prospect of baby deer (in the grounds, not to eat) and was promised that George Bernard Shaw’s house had a live-in cat called Molly. Sadly I didn’t get a sniff of Shavian pussy, but there is an impressive painting of a cock in the hall. Most recently I was taken hostage at Smallhythe Place, country residence of the Victorians’ favourite Shakespearean actress Ellen Terry and subsequently her raving lesbian daughter Edy. “You had me at raving,” I said. We set off at 9am on Sunday morning.

Membership of the National Trust was a big investment for a man who has been known to drive from one supermarket to another to save 4p on milk, but Father B has a patented plan of attack to maximise value from any visit to a stately home. As we pulled up outside the sprawling medieval manor, he switched off his compilation CD of 70s TV themes and reminded us what to do: interrogate the guides until they crack, collect every piece of reading material which is not superglued to a Foamex board and use the toilet facilities as fully and rigorously as possible. We entered.

The rooms were low-ceilinged and crammed with theatrical bibelots; programmes, posters, stage shoes and jewellery, here a buckle worn by Fred Terry in the Scarlet Pimpernel, there a coin token for the pit at Covent Garden from 1762, everything strung with dried wreaths from some long ago production of Romeo & Juliet. On one side a mannequin gowned in Lady Macbeth’s famous beetlewing costume, on the other a life-sized bowling pin wrapped in a tartan pelmet… no, wait. The bowling pin moved and revealed itself to be a shiny-headed man in a kilt. He leaned close to Ellen Terry’s death mask and said in an American accent, “hello dear.”

She didn’t respond and, fearing that we would be expected to, I hustled my parents towards a steep narrow staircase in the corner. “This is like the fun house at Peter Purves’ Playground,” said Mother B, taking each step as laboriously as Queen Victoria re-entering her bathing machine. “You mean Peter Pan’s Playground,” I said, “and hurry up before-“

King Pin approached to make his ascent. “What have we up here?” he asked Queen Victoria’s bum. “I’ve been touring the British Isles to connect with my past and I’m constantly surprised by how small everything is, you know?” The bum did not know. I abandoned the foot of the stairs and tried to engross myself in a small wooden box once owned by David Garrick.

“You must keep following the arrows,” said a guide, with all the customer engagement skills of a guard at Bergen-Belsen. “But this was made from a mulberry tree planted by The Bard himself,” I said, “perhaps you could tell me a little more?” She reached for the box as though to use it as a weapon and repeated, slowly, “you must... keep… following… the arrows.”

Trapped between the advancing guard and the ascending American, I span. Within seconds the true horror of the situation became clear. Every step King Pin took up the vertiginous staircase raised the hem of his kilt closer to my eye line. Penned in by the narrow walls and compelled to look up, as he took one last lunge to gain the landing I beheld the curve of something pendulous, as heavy and dream-stealing as a tax-collector’s purse.

Ignoring the heckling guard, I fled against the arrows, scattering little white-haired visitors as though I’d dropped a tub of cotton buds, every hanging gewgaw seeming to swing scrotally towards me, gasping for air.

Later my parents found me in the cobweb-strewn cafe. Mother B said it looked like I was taking tea with Miss Faversham, though it was coffee as I couldn’t look a teabag in the face.

Smallhythe Place is open from April to October. Ellen Terry died there in 1928 after an illustrious fifty-year stage career. Mother B refers to her as Helen Terry. Helen Terry was a backing vocalist for Culture Club. Father B bought four pints of semi-skimmed in Lidl for £1.05. John just flinched away from a sack of satsumas.

March 2018 – Of Soullessness and Soho

The first time I heard the phrase ‘soulless hole’ in Molly Moggs, I was receiving the closest thing I’d ever get to a compliment from Dame Julie Paid: landlord, legend and lady of song at the tiny Soho boozer where I spent many a Wednesday night I’d never remember. Now Molly Moggs itself is the soulless hole; a shiny cocktail bar where the brass gleams in the unglazed eyes of the matinee crowd having a pre-show ‘infusion’ or against the glossy hair of the local guerrilla marketers, no longer troubled by the haunted gaze of the caryatids that once framed Julie’s stage. Warren and I had already been moved on from The Yard for daring to smoke outside and turned our backs on Village having discovered both the verdejo blanco and the go-go boys were off that day. “And this is the final straw,” I said, clawing my way out from Julie’s freshly renovated basement. “I remember a drag queen forcing a man with an especially lumpy forehead to prove that Klingons have curly cocks on that staircase and now it leads to a unisex toilet.” I’m being unfair. The Compton Cross, as she calls herself now, still has cabaret a couple of nights a week and even I’m not drunk enough on nostalgia and Diet Coke to bemoan the refurbishment of the Hobbit warren of latrines where I once concussed myself dancing to Baccara’s Yes Sir, I Can Boogie. But still, it’s just too much. “Everyone has their own moment when they realise Soho as they knew it is dead,” said Warren, removing one of my duffle coat toggles from his Russian Spring Punch. “It sounds like you’ve had yours.” Warren gives an historical tour of Soho on Saturday afternoons. He tells me how the aristocracy gave way to Huguenot refugees who gave way to (or became) prostitutes; how the silk industry gave way to the sex industry which never gave way to anything but made space for the media types; how crime and vice gave way to wine and unpasteurised ewe's milk cheese boards; and how under the tarmac that Westminster City Council hose down every night there are coal holes sitting on plague pits sitting on the royal park of the Palace of Whitehall. “At every point in Soho’s story it’s been pulled in different directions by performers and reformers and sixth-formers,” Warren reckons, nodding at a group of youths who’ve just spied a chainmail bikini in a window on Greek Street, “and at every point I imagine the incumbents resenting the incomers.” Except the prostitutes, I think, who managed to ride most of the waves of change. That’s the advantage of having strong thighs. Georgian prostitution is Warren’s Mastermind specialist subject. Of particular interest is the site of one Soho Square venue which contained a ‘skeleton room’ where, upon entering, you would be attacked by a skeleton and fall onto a sofa with a naked companion of your choice, only to find the sofa was hanging from ropes, which would then be loosed so that you, the sofa, the naked companion and, presumably, the skeleton would all fall through to the floor below and land on a bed of sawdust. An acquired taste to be sure, but enough to make my pining for Dame Julie’s battered old caryatids a bit unambitious. Warren shows me the building where Hazlitt’s just-dead body was hidden behind the sofa whilst his housekeeper guided prospective new tenants around, then we stop for a drink. We see the club where Christine Keeler posed on the fake Arne Jacobsen chair, then we stop for a drink. We pick some of the Seven Noses of Soho, Rick Buckley’s 90s installation protesting CCTV surveillance, then we stop for a drink. “And now what do we have?” I slur outside the House of St Barnabus, “PIZZA EXPRESS!” I punctuate each word by forcing coppers into the penny chute that has been tinkling coins into an alms bucket since the building became the House of Charity in 1862 (it’s now a private members’ club). “Is there anything even still down there collecting these?” I shout. “Or is it dropping straight into the pockets of some Social Media Capability Architect?” “Actually, all the money they raise here still goes to helping the homeless,” says Warren, “and the Pizza Express on Wardour Street is their first ever branch. It opened in 1965 and is kind of a landmark in the history of ethnic cuisine in the UK. Maybe you could do with one?” It’s too late for a Fiorentina to save me, but I find a righteous soulmate in a sour bottle of Soave. Warren leaves me at the door to G-A-Y Bar, barely the only place in Soho you can get a late drink anymore. Within 30 minutes they’ve thrown me out through the fire escape for something and nothing. As the doors close, security watch me tramping towards the mobile pissoir on the corner of Old Compton Street, swaying like a sex sofa suspended above a pit of dirty old sand, muttering to myself, “some things never change.” John found Warren through CityPals. He gives private tours all over London but has suggested they might both feel more comfortable in a group setting in future. Dame Julie Paid AKA Alf Short exploded in a cloud of fag ash and glitter on 31 March 2017. The staff at G-A-Y Bar reserve the right to eject any patron displaying anti-social behaviour, which includes repeatedly demanding that the DJ play Baccara’s Yes Sir, I Can Boogie.