This Blog Might Be Taking A Break...

 Please enjoy the interval music, a piece that has only gained in stature in the century or more since it was written, by Eric Satie. He was a man with a sense of humour who saw the future more than he realised when he wrote variations for piano like this....    ...who knows? Perhaps would also have appreciated the youtube adverts that occasionally interrupt the flow of the music.  

In A World Built On Mistrust

How close must I be to other folk
for me to know who my friends are
and give them the space for us to be themselves?

And how close must I keep my enemies,
both to disguise our mutual enmity
and let me know their plans for me
before they can carry them out?

Whatever the distances I keep
from different people, including family,
I have to think clearly about the difference
between being cursed and being a scapegoat.

In the former I live out other people's will
-seeing it as 'good for me to do what I am told',
as if passivity was good for the soul,
when what I am passive to may be poison.

In the latter I carry it knowing it is poison,
and without the choice of not carrying it.
But I carry it whilst protecting myself
from it, in so far as that is possible. 

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty Eight - I Am Named Where I Least Expect To Be

My biggest difficulty was explaining to myself what sex should be. I was explaining it to myself because I had nobody to talk with about it. My night time diary became a useful place to review my thoughts and evolve the arguments. I had nowhere else. The writing revealed how I was much nearer I was to being lonely, than contentedly alone. About once a month, the need for sex would become an issue to be dealt with directly. My playing of 'Relax' by Frankie Goes To Hollywood loud through headphones in my room was one way of attempting to deal with it. But many times that simply did not scratch where I itched. I would feel impelled to visit the near by public toilet in Lady Bay and hope that whoever was there was as handsome as they were anonymous. 10

My reasoning at the time was that going there was like buying a lottery ticket where the lottery was not actually gambling. But every lottery had a few winners who never need to enter the lottery again. If I could define what 'winning' meant well enough then I could be a winner, and not have to go to the public toilet for sex again. 14

I did not see myself as a gambler. But if I was, then this was my chosen way of gambling. I was not the type to go within 100 yards of a bookies with a view to entering and putting a bet on a horse or a football team. If I was gambler, then where was the form sheet to read? What were the calculations I could make that could improve my hand, so to speak? How was a meant to improve my odds against the poorer results? I felt okay with the hand I had to play. What I wanted was to have an experience that I would remember well enough after that I did not seek a repeat of it. If anyone had said to me that anonymity and memorability are totally opposite principles to each other, then I would still have wanted to try to combine them. Such paradoxes had been baked into my relationship with my father. Even with the form against my terms of winning being made much clearer to me I could see no other way to play my situation. 24

As it was I had three memorable experiences that year, out of who-know-how-many forgettable times. All the forgettable visits merged into one unmemorable blob of anonymity. Given that men did not introduce themselves with their names the trick, which it was mine to receive, but not mine to set up, was to meet somebody who was handsome, physically memorable, and organised enough that they recognised it when their physicality impressed itself upon me, and they knew what to do with that effect. The sexual act that I was 'good at' for want of a better expression was me giving them oral sex and asking for nothing in return. It had been something I had first done it at the age of twelve in circumstance that were murky enough that even circa 1990, eighteen years later, I could not put into words what had actually happened. What I could say for certain by 1990 was that what I sought was implicitly consensual sex where the implication came from where I looked for the sex rather than who I was or who my partner was. 37

A lot of what I expected was built on the implied ideals of masculinity that I grew up with. Aged twelve or thirteen these ideals were that dominant males enjoyed receiving oral sex and disliked giving it. The more well endowed the male, the greater their sense of their entitlement. Where a male sucked dick he was 'gay', but a male offering their dick for being sucked was 'not gay', more likely they were 'highly sexed'. Such obscure and selective ideas of what was sexual and what was masculine lacked any internal consistency, but they were what men acted out. Particularly under the influence of alcohol where masculinity and being influenced by alcohol seemed to amount to the same thing. One of the reasons I was writing the nightly emotional diary was to clear, misunderstanding by misunderstanding , the fog of inconsistency and expectation I had lived with, unaware of how inconsistent it was. 48

The best way out of this fog of inconsistency remained to find a person who I could trust enough to talk with in frank basic terms about my sexual experiences with. I had male Christian friends, but I knew better than to burden those friendships with anything that personal and that 'unchristian'. But I had learned enough to know that whoever I met in the singularly sexual setting of my choice to know there was a strong chance that the men I met were probably in heterosexual relationships. But even in the silence there was hope. The married men I met for sex in Gainsborough always looked shabby and were usually sexually inept. The men I met for sex in Nottingham may well have been married but took better care of their appearance and had a confidence about them that sort of rubbed off on me. At least I think it was confidence.58  

The first of the three encounters was with a well endowed bodybuilder who was very controlling and in a distinct hurry. I did not care whether he knew he was a living cliche, or did not reflect on his self image at all. I was too astonished at what a feast for the eyes he was. If he knew he was a narcissist then that seemed quite justifiable to me. He had an energy about him that was as pressing as it was brief. The second memorable encounter was with bearded and hairy fat man who lit up the dank surroundings we found each other in. I was happy to do whatever eased him, and to marvel at how at ease he was in himself. He took matters more slowly than the body builder had, which gave me time to reflect as he directed events. He gave me my first gay kiss. 67

One way to tell who was married with sex in public toilets was that such men never kissed; the implied rule was that kissing was something they kept for their wives. What they offered in the toilets in the way of non-procreative sex was with parts of themselves other than their lips. The profile of the person I wanted to meet there was that they had to be gay, and they were able to speak and listen. They had to be knowable and want, or at least be patient with, me. 72

In my diary I noted what I thought about married men who had gay sex. I wrote about how in their minds they tricked their way past all discussions about monogamy within marriage by implying that marriage was more about faith in property management than any demonstrable personal trust between two people. After implying their argument they would avoid the specifics of who says what, who does what, and how much what the partners say and don't say to each other lines up with what they each do within the marriage. 78

I still resisted the idea of 'being a gambler'. I accepted that I took risks, the irregularity of the laws about homosexuality gave me no other choice. If I were a gambler the following was the closest I would get to 'the form'. Married bisexual men divided their lives, including their sexual lives, by label/activity where different labels often evasively defined different sexual activities. A married man would reserve his kisses for his wife, and make them a prelude to full sex, where he assumed that only he knew that. But his wife might well predict his expectations from his behaviour. But away from the home how much the man was understood by how he divided his actions whilst hidden in the silences of the places he chose to go. The silences in these places came from every sort of motive, from common taboo to the fear of being openly seen as utterly selfish. 87

The most open reason for being opaque was to observe how the tone of the English language words for sexual activity made the conversation uncomfortable. Slang made the subject sound cheap and juvenile, whilst formal and correct scientific terminology made the subject sound detached and impersonal. In between those extremes many mechanical metaphors stood in for when the bodily specifics got too personal. E.g. the motions of crank shaft in a four stroke engine being described as 'suck, squeeze, bang, and blow', as my maths teacher described them to my late teenage self in the engineering workshop circa 1980. 94

And then the silence was broken. I was at the toilet one late summer Saturday night, being quietly generous my usual way to somebody I thought handsome where the only oddity in the situation was the tight lilac coloured ladies lycra swim suit that he wore. And then he said 'Thank you Malcolm'. With three words he broke what seemed like a spell that was over me. Before then I could not put words how much I felt invisible in the silence and such invisibility made me feel safe. 

Clearly, however much I felt that way at times, I wasn't invisible. I had reconsider how I calculated risk. I did not go back to the toilet for several months. 101 

A Warning, A Consolation

When you 'are not the sharpest tool in the box',
it does not mean that you won't get used 
by the hierarchies of the powerful,
and others keen to pull rank.

What it means is that whether you know it
or don't, you need to be doubly wary of who uses you and why. 

To be blunt, those who lack sharpness will take you up
to flatter themselves that they are sharper than you,
thus destroying whatever edge you had left.

The consolation is that being misused is survivable.
Being cast as 'a loser' happens to far more people
than many who are taught to see themselves as losers
realise, until they start to look around them.  

Thought From The Pew

One wet Autumnal Sunday.
The leader of the service was polite,
not very chummy and formal of tone.
How evenly he spoke during the sermon
made the point he was trying to make
harder to follow. The point at which
my ears pricked up was the phrase
'personal relationships'. Did my ears
detect a spontaneous repetition in that phrase?

Between the personal and impersonal
relationships can - and will - vary wildly. 

Signs Of Greater Age (60)

 1-watching far less television
than you have watched in the past
but enjoying watching detective series
for the location filming and the weather.
'Montalbano' for the Italian weather
and 'Shetland' for it's coastal scenes,
cosy small town life, and rolling heather. 

2-looking out for new films that star
the elderly actors who we liked in your youth.
Being reassured by how they age with us
where the script writers put humour and warmth
into the stages of life where people used to be ignored.

 3-reading books because they are the slowest
and most user-friendly way of being entertained,
and also because they are also a way of inducing
that afternoon nap that passes the day, the best way.

Sleep and dreams are what we live for, even electronically.  

When The Wind Blows

Over Gaza and The Lebanon
and other neighbours of Israel,
as Israel starts the third world war,
using the lethally over-developed modern weaponry
and state security apparatus it has developed
over seventy years, for spying internationally
on countries it secretly despises. Their first target is
the levelling to the ground of all the buildings
and the civilisation among Israel's neighbours.

The fallout does not need to be nuclear to be utterly destructive.

All the weapons need is a human/Jewish driver
 to do the job the weapons are for - destroying 
all neighbourliness and upholding an eternal enmity
whilst continually talking in smooth words.

In party politics, worldwide, it has been said,
'keep your friends close and your enemies closer',
without finishing with 'If you want a limited peace.'.
(It would be rhetorical to say peace is always limited.).
Nowhere was evidence of this strategy for politics
more played out than in the densely populated areas
that modern Israel has fought for its place in.

Lebanon, Palestine, Gaza, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt,
are all lands that have never had the character to be at ease
with each other. Like the Ottoman empire they were all once part of,
they had to be ruled by 'strongmen', where diplomacy
is always weak and late, when it is staving off emergencies.

To quote a once popular Jewish entertainer* 'You ain't seen nothing yet',
not that he was directly talking about the time scales of declining empires. 

*Said by Al Jolson at the end of in the first film
with a soundtrack 'The Jazz Singer', made in 1927.