Almost Home, My Love!

Grandad was waiting patiently, immaculately dressed as always. Shoes polished, hair slicked back, and sporting a jacket and tie.

"I've been waiting" he said, smiling. "I thought you'd be here sooner".

"Sorry, but I wasn't sure if I should leave the girls, they still need us", she replied.

"They'll be fine" said grandad. "And besides, I've got something to show you".

He took her hand, as gently and lovingly as he always had, led her through the open door, and out into the bright morning sunshine. Instinctively, she closed her eyes against the sudden glare. But she could feel the warmth on her face, and smell the fresh, familiar breeze. Someone must have just cut their grass.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"Home" was his simple reply.

"We're going home Bet".

Through My Fingers

My nanny finally passed away this evening.

In the same calm, dignified way that she lived her life. Without any fuss or drama, she just closed her eyes, and slipped quietly away from us.

How can the people we love so dearly be gone so easily. After almost 93 years of giving so much and asking so little. Shouldn't there be something, a soft roll of thunder, or maybe the lights should flicker for a brief moment? Just something small to make people realise that the world just lost something precious. That Elizabeth Lavender is gone forever.

The tears that come aren't just because she's gone. They're because I've suddenly realised that it's too late for so many things. I wish that last time I saw her, I'd held her hand for just a little bit longer, and squeezed it just a little bit harder. That I'd let her kiss me one more time before I turned and left. And that I'd told her how incredible she was, and that she could never be replaced.

The tears are because even though we loved her so dearly, we have to say goodbye.

Elizabeth Lavender (1918 - 2011)

A Moo-less Cow

Along with cleaning behind the cooker, I've been meaning to write something about this since Christmas......................... or was it Chanukah? 'How is a body supposed to know these things', as my grandmother would probably have said. I'm using a past tense here (well, present perfect to be exact), not because she's dead, but because Aloysius Alzheimer has left her unable to know or say anything. A silent Jewish grandmother, now there's a first. And silenced by a medical condition with a German name as well, an irony which would have had my poor nanny choking on her own chicken soup ('Oy! So many nice Jewish diseases, and God gives me a German one!')

The head of my department at work gave me quite a hard time for decorating our office (Christmas) tree with Stars of David. Not a hard time in an anti-Semitic way, but a hard time in terms of questioning my motives.

He asked me if I was Jewish (which I'm not), and I said, no, but I have a Jewish heritage (which I do). He then asked me why I celebrated Chanukah if I wasn't Jewish. And again I said because I have a Jewish heritage. It almost seemed as if he were suggesting that I was some kind of religious fraud (there's probably a German name for that condition as well).

Is it me? (Oh no! I just shrugged my shoulders, a sure sign of Jewish blood). Am I imagining something that isn't there? Because for me it's very clear that Judaism (or Yiddishkeit) is something both religious AND cultural. It's like being English. You don't have to be born and live in England to have an English heritage. Just look at how many of our extended antipodean family still celebrate St George's Day with far more enthusiasm than the residents of Cheltenham, or even deepest Bermondsey.

He seemed to be suggesting that I was just some kind of Judophile..............or should that be Yiddophile? But for me it's so much more. Am I missing the point? Or am I really just some kind of freakish Hebe-obsessed, Yiddophile Jew-stalker?

My Polish/Ukrainian-born maternal grandparents (just in case you haven't read any of my earlier blogs) didn't bring up their children in 'the Jewish faith'. They didn't convert, they just stopped................ well, stopped shrugging their shoulders, talking in riddles, and going to schul. But culturally there is such a strong identity that I'm not sure there's such a thing as an 'ex-Jew'. It's a bit like being a cow.


Just because you stop mooing, it doesn't mean that you stop being a cow. You still eat grass and fart all day, and people still look at you and say 'Oh look, it's a very quiet cow'.

Throughout my childhood, I just never realised how (stereo)typically Jewish my grandparents were (especially my grandmother). And of course, like many immigrants from that wartime period, they were never particularly eager to talk about it, or advertise it. I think a lot of the secrecy was partly fear, and partly the desire to be accepted in Britain and not be 'foreigners'. Remember that they came from a land where, before anything else, you were always 'A Jew'. Not a Pole, but a Polish Jew, not a banker, but a Jewish banker, and not a man, but a Jew. And of course, not forgetting that classic, anti-semitic eastern European favourite, 'A Dirty Jew'.

I remember talking about this to an old work colleague quite a few years ago. Although she was (and still is) terribly, terribly middle-class, her surname was Kastner, so I'd always assumed her family were 'of German descent' (or 'foreign' as some people still insist on saying in England). Then one very drunken evening on a balcony in Venice, we got on to the subject of 'who had the oddest family'. It turned out that her father's original surname was Cohen, and that he'd been smuggled out of Czechoslovakia to Sweden as a small child just before the outbreak of the Second World War. From there he was brought to England, and for some unknown reason ended up with the surname Kastner. But in exactly the same way as my grandparents, he had turned himself into what he considered to be the most English of English.

Now, despite the fact that my family are right up there with the Munsters when it comes to oddness, naturally, she won the competition hands-down. After all, who in their right mind would try to assimilate themselves into post-war England by taking a German surname at a time when Germans ranked second (just below bed bugs) on the list of things that the English hated.

But back to my odd family.

I really didn't know they were either Jewish or eastern European until I was 14, and I didn't grow up in an area with any Jews (dirty or clean!). So, with the exception of the year I spent in Israel when I was twenty, I'd never really been around Jews in any number. Even in Israel it's very different. The modern Israeli culture has very little to do with that classic old-world 'Fiddler On The Roof', 'schlap my tukhes, und call me Moishe' Yiddish kind of thing. It wasn't really until I started visiting New York in my thirties that I was introduced to the whole Yiddish/Jewish thing, and in particular the idea that it was something to be celebrated as our cultural heritage. Anyone who's ever been to New York will know that 'being Jewish' is a big thing, almost as big as the Americans themselves.

I know that most people probably don't understand how I can consider myself to be even remotely Jewish if I have a foreskin, short sideburns, and don't go to schul . But that's just because they don't come from Jewish family. I'm not Jewish by faith, but very proudly Jewish by heritage.

And for those alter cockers like my head of department who still don't get the picture. There really is only one answer................kish mich in tukhes!

Only Ginger Rogers Escaped The Wrecking Ball.

'It's a vunder (wonder) she never slung you kids out too' was the answer my grandmother always gave when my sister and I demanded that she 'tell us about when we were little'.

This was our favourite question, way ahead of 'Tell us about the olden days nanny', 'Have you got any sweets' and 'Is Grandad dead?'.

This final question wasn't as brutal as it sounds in retrospect. It was asked by we children as a result of his habit of taking long, silent afternoon naps, during which you couldn't tell whether he was breathing or not. And Nanny's concerned response was always the same 'Daddy! Daddy! Stop it! You're scaring the kinder (children)'.

But back to the whole point..........................

My mother, for all her many good points (and there are many), has never been what you'd describe as sentimental. In fact, she's the human equivalent of a wrecking ball slamming into a beautiful, but no longer practical, Victorian building. Unlike me, she doesn't feel the need to hold on to things for the sake of having them, or because they hold fond memories, or even purely because they're pleasing to the eye. She likes the 'working surfaces' of her life to be clear of clutter and ready for action. Unnecessary obstacles only hinder her ability to sweep down like a vast Sioux war party, armed with a duster and can of furniture polish, onto the unsuspecting covered wagons ambling across the prairie, scattering bonnetted women and children in her wake, and emerging with bloodied scalps ready to be cleared out to make 'more space'.

However, we could never work out what she wanted this 'more space' for. As children, the idea of more space meant that it could be filled with precious things, or at least things which were precious to us. But, unfortunately for we treasure-hoarding children, the only thing precious to my mother was empty space. Shelves, stripped naked and polished daily to an almost scientific shine, and cupboards whose emptiness echoed every time they were opened or closed.

Things fell into only one of two categories 'used' and 'not used', usually the latter.

In order to be classified as 'used', it was necessary for something to be touched by a human hand (ideally ours) at least once every week, even more for some things. I'm not sure how she achieved it, but throughout our childhood, my mother used some kind of sophisticated detection system which could tell when a much-loved toy had last been played with, or when that poster of David Essex had last been gazed at. Anything failing 'the test' would be immediately and mercilessly stripped from the wall, or would just simply 'disappear'. So efficient was her system of removal, that it was almost as if they'd been beamed up into space by aliens in front of our eyes. One minute they would be there, and the next.............vanished into thin air. At a rough guess at least half of all sentences uttered during my childhood began with 'Has anyone seen my.............?'

Unless of course, it happened to be an old musical video, or more recently a DVD.

They say that every man (and woman) has their vice, and my mother's one weakness is musicals from the 1920's an 30's. To this day, the only thing guaranteed to make my mother go weak at the knees, apart from sheer exhaustion, is the sight of the perma-tanned Howard Keel, gazing at her longingly from across the span of time. Teary-eyed Anne Margaret, tinkling yet another corny love song about her bloody 'poor broken heart'. And of course, at the head of this grainy black and white army. Ginger fucking Rogers!

Pushing Boundaries

As a 'homosexually-orientated' man, I've never really thought of myself as particularly raunchy or adventurous when it comes to 'bedroom things'. In fact when asked to describe myself in five words, vanilla is usually about the third one on the list, directly below intelligent and infuriating (I can actually talk for 15 minutes without hesitation, deviation or repetition on the origins and interpretations of the missionary position. You probably aren't aware of this, but in 3rd century BC Mesopotamia, in what is now modern-day Iraq.................... well, maybe another time, eh?).

When it came to anything out of the ordinary sex-wise (by gay standards), I always felt very much like one of those rather dull, middle-aged, home-counties, cake-baking, Women's Institute ladies. They spend almost 30 years being gently and predictably penetrated vaginally (apart from one slight slip) once a month by a mild-mannered accountant with haemorrhoids and striped pyjamas. Then suddenly, they find themselves widowed, divorced, or separated at the age of 50, and on a 'foreign' holiday in Turkey for the first time with their friend Margaret, confronted by a 25 year-old Turkish waiter with a rock hard, throbbing, 8 inch boner squashed into his fake 501's. And like the plate of freshly-caught, chargrilled baby squid in its own ink that he's holding out, they have absolutely no idea what to do with either, and just sit there like a 'rabbit in headlights', jaw resting gently on their large, securely-brassiered chest.

But then, before you can say 'Kamal Ataturk', there they are, shrieking up and down the beach at 3 o'clock in the morning on the back of the waiter's scooter! Clad in a bikini top, sarong, and ankle-chain, clutching a glass of Raki & Diet Coke, sucking cock and 'doing anal' as if they were born to it.

We think these lusty Shirley Valentines are the exception, but it seems that we all have boundaries which move quote easily with a some gentle persuasion (and a bit of Aegean spit!).

I realised just how far my own boundaries have shifted quite recently when I read an advertisement on one of those Internet sites that people claim never to use, you know, the ones packed full of sad and lonely losers desperate for sex. The advertisement was written with impeccable grammar by a guy who wanted nothing more than to be kicked in the balls. I read the two sentences through twice just to be doubly sure that he really had said 'I want to be kicked in the balls', and yup, he definitely wanted a ball-kicker.

My first reaction was to tut tut, roll my eyes, say something like 'Shiver me timbers, what a fucking freak', and move on to the next advert.

But I didn't.

Something caught my imagination and made me wonder what it would feel like to intentionally kick someone in the goolies. Would it feel sexual? Or would it just feel odd? And how would it work? Would he just stand there with his legs apart and shout 'Come on you fucker, kick me where it hurts!'. And surely it would hurt, in fact it hurt me just thinking about it. But I did more than think about it, I emailed him back.

I was still thinking 'Shiver me timbers, what a freak' and wondering if I could go through with it several hours later, when Mr 'Kick Me Hard In The Balls' rang my buzzer.

I've discovered that the thing about pushing your boundaries and doing something that you could never imagine doing usually, is that at some point you find you have an alter-ego who is more than happy to do it. It's a bit like being an actor and walking on stage in a play. You stop being yourself and become someone else, which in my case was a ball-kicker. My shy, mild-mannered, cake-baking facade melted away and before I knew it, I'd turned into a kind of sadistic, truncheon-stroking prison-officer and had this complete stranger's nads in a vice-like grip. And the more positively he responded (which he most certainly did), the more comfortable I felt and the more pleasurable it became. He had come fully equipped for his ordeal, and had brought a pair of beautiful, yellow leather boxing gloves, which I needed no encouragement to slip on. After instructing my victim to strip down to his underwear (which rather surreally was a pair of Union Jack boxer-briefs), I gave him what I thought was a pain-inducing tap.

This is the point at which, without exception, every man I have told the story to, has turned rather pale, broken out into a cold sweat, and asked not to be told any more. Consider yourself warned.

My idea of a pain-inducing tap was met with a groan of sexual pleasure (and a serious woody), and so my taps became harder and harder, gradually turning into full-blown punches (complete with an arm-swing and a three-step run-up). This 'ball-beating', which turned out to be extremely enjoyable for both of us, lasted for well over half an hour, and would have left even the Kray Twins feeling pleased with themselves.

My point is not to see how quickly I can bring tears to your eyes or to change the way you look at me forever. It's to demonstrate the ease with which, even someone like me, can take something that we imagine to be beyond our capabilities, and turn it into something which is perfectly acceptable. I found it exciting, but at the same time frightening to think how far I was capable of pushing my boundaries.

How far could you push your boundaries?

(This blog was written from the comfort of my padded cell).