It's Raining Love

There's no way to describe my grandparents' immense gift for loving without including one of the main reasons for that surplus of love.

Both my grandmother's and my grandfather's families were systematically beaten, robbed, starved, and eventually, brutally murdered by the Ukrainian militia and the Nazi death squads during the Second World War. In the space of three years, parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews, and cousins were murdered. All gone.

I would never have found the strength to carry on.

I would have died of grief at such a loss.

But they didn't.

Like unmilked cows, my maternal grandparents were so filled with love that they were almost bursting with it. And with nowhere upward or outward to spread that love, it rained down on us in floods. We were drenched in unconditional love at every opportunity. We could taste it in the food my grandmother prepared, and we could smell it in the geraniums that my grandfather grew in his garden. You could see the cloud of love floating above their heads.

You see, there was no past for my grandparents, only the future. And that future was us.

When I was a child, visiting grandparents was something we did every Sunday afternoon. One Sunday we would visit my father's parents, and the next one my mother's parents. My father's parents were like the child-catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but in duplicate. This, coupled with my grandfather's 'spare the rod' mentality, my grandmother's obsessive Roman Catholicism, and the fact that they were both chain-smokers, made them every child's worst nightmare. They believed that children should 'mind their P's and Q's', and be 'seen and not heard' (preferably not seen either), so rain or shine, we were always banished to the back garden to 'play nicely' and 'not get into mischief'. A strange thing to say to children, because as we all know, in order to play nicely, getting into mischief is a fundamental requirement. They may as well have cut to the chase on our arrival, smacked us soundly, and sent us straight to 'the other room' (as they called their formal sitting room) to sit in silence and 'think about our behaviour', because this is what always happened. My father's cold and formal parents were the product of generations of emotional icebergs, even touching was something they found uncomfortable, and hugging was considered to be only one step from full intercourse. My father would briskly shake hands with his father on arrival, and once again on departure, whilst my mother hovered uncomfortably in the background wondering whether she was also going to be smacked for some imagined transgression. My pious grandmother had almost certainly written her off already as the genetically-damaged off-spring of immigrant Christ-killers, and probably foreign spies as well.

Sundays at my maternal grandparents could not have been any more different. My grandparents would be hovering anxiously at the front gate ready to pounce on my sister and me. We would then be hugged,kissed, cuddled, rubbed, stroked, and tickled until the skin on our faces was almost raw and our ribcages almost shattered. From there we were swept into the house on this tidal wave of love, where we could be studied and admired in greater depth.

'Look Daddy, he's a feet taller already, I can see him growing in front of my eye. Oy, you must have mustard in your shoes'.

'Have you seen this little chicken Mummy, she's turning into a real beauty. The boys will all be after her'. Little did he realise that, from the age of fourteen, the boys were already after my sister in droves. And although she had been fully exposed to the moral rantings of my father's family, she was still, at the end of the day, half Jewish and therefore not naturally athletic enough to outrun them.

During our visits, there would always be a fairly constant steam of physical contact. If we were within arms-reach of either of my grandparents, which in their small house was most of the time, we were either going to have our cheeks pinched by grandad, or a sweet popped in our mouths by nanny. My mother had grown up with this and was perfectly comfortable, but for my poor affection-starved father, it was his worst nightmare. All that kissing and touching sent him rushing, rain or shine, to the garden where he would smoke furiously and contemplate the horror that was taking place inside. Even to this day, I can't think what brought my parents together when they came from such different worlds.

My grandparents always called each other Mummy and Daddy and frequently kissed, not only us, but each other. The kisses they gave each were the sweet, non-sexual kisses of couples who, despite being together for years, still absolutely adore each other. And they did. Even right up to my grandfather's death several years ago, they just couldn't bear to be apart.

If there's one thing I remember from my grandparents, it was the feeling of being totally and utterly surrounded by love.

I love you.........have some more cake!

A small boy arrives home from his first day at school and is asked by his concerned mother if he has made any friends.

'Yes, I've got a new best friend, and we played together all day' he tells her happily.

'That's wonderful news. What's your new friend's name?' asks the boy's mother, to which her son replies 'I don't know, I'll ask him tomorrow'.

The following afternoon, the boy rushes home again and tells his mother that his new best friend is called Babatunde.

'Oh' she says curiously, 'Is he black?'

To which her son replies 'I don't know, I'll ask him tomorrow'.

How was I supposed to know that despite being in Britain for over forty years, my thoroughly anglicised grandparents, Andrew and Betty Flower were as unmistakably Jewish as a hundred rabbis playing furiously on a hundred fiddles on a hundred roofs! They were still as Yiddish as pickled herring bagels .........................or beigels, as my grandmother still called them.

We didn't have any Jews where I grew up in Essex (except for us as it turned out!), so how was I supposed to spot the differences. There always seemed to be a perfectly logical explanation for the small things which made my grandparents slightly different (and far more fun) than everybody else's. What could make eating more enjoyable for a ten year-old than purple soup that stained everything it touched, or yellow chicken soup with spaghetti in it that splashed everywhere as you sucked up the long strands. Unlike eating at home, or at my father's parents, where meals were silent and functional, we were permitted and even encouraged to make frequent and positive eating noises. Oooohs and ahhhhs, loud slurping of soup, and even the occasional small burp (unthinkable at home) were met with joy from my grandmother who took that as vocal confirmation that her meal was a success. We were given funny slippery rolls with holes in the middle, which squirted cream cheese when you bit down on them, and huge square crackers that shattered into a hundred pieces as soon as you tried to eat them. How was I supposed to know that whilst we were happily crunching on huge, sour pickled cucumbers that made your teeth go numb and gave you mouth ulcers, my friends were licking fruit-flavoured, space-rocket ice-lollies on Sunday visits to their grandparents. While our friends were nibbling on one of Mister Kipplings exceedingly good (but exceedingly small) apple pies, we were about to burst after our third slice of cinnamon-laced, syrup-sodden Polish apple cake. It all seemed so normal at the time.

With the exception of my father's strict, and oddly Victorian, parents who we thought were the exception, I never visited anyone else's grandparents, so I didn't realise that it wasn't perfectly normal to be cajoled, begged, and lovingly bullied into eating from the moment you stepped through the front door to the moment the car finally pulled away. My grandmother would prepare food for ten times the number of people present, and then insist that it would all spoil instantly if we didn't have another helping. There was no escape from being fed. Claiming not to be hungry was a sure sign of illness for my grandmother and would bring her rushing with the thermometer and cries of 'He needs soup, he's too thin!' Even leaving was futile. She would trot alongside the car as it pulled away, trying to push brown paper bags of food through the car window. So determined was she that we should 'have some for tomorrow', that it's a miracle she was never dragged under the moving car.

Although we children warranted an especially intense level of feeding, even my mother couldn't escape the food-frenzy.

'Oy! Tell her Daddy' my grandmother would say to my grandfather. 'She's nothing but bones already, doesn't eat enough to nourish a bird. Have some more, I made it especially for you. One more piece, you need the nourishment, it's almost winter' (even though it was May). It was like trying to get a limpet off a smooth rock with a cotton bud.

My grandparents were a well-oiled and time-tested partnership. It was like good-cop, bad cop. My grandmother would batter, and bargain, and plead, and threaten, and my grandfather would sit and watch silently. Then just when you though he was going to step in and rescue you by 'pushing his foot down', he would shrug and agree with her. 'Mummy's right, you're too thin, take the cake'.

We knew we were beaten, so we always took the cake.

The Long Journey Home

When I was growing up, my grandparents' life before they arrived in Britain was always a subject about which we just didn't speak. I'm not sure why we didn't speak about it, we just didn't, and nobody seemed too bothered about the fact that we didn't, especially my grandparents. So, it's taken me a long time to slowly piece together the tiny fragments of information into anything that makes any logical or chronological sense.

Although it wasn't something that I thought about very much as a child, I had always assumed that my grandfather was from Scotland, and my grandmother was from London............or maybe she was from Scotland too. I knew that my grandfather had a brother in Scotland, so he must be Scottish, and that my mother had been born in the East End of London, so I used the logic that you have as a child, added two and two together, and made four.

I can't really remember why, but when I was fourteen, my mother told me that my grandparents weren't Scottish or even English. They were Jewish and had come from Poland before 'The War'. We were exactly the same as everyone else around us, so this revelation didn't have much of an impact, and to be honest, I didn't really know what a Jew was. We didn't have Jews in my part of Essex. I knew from Sunday School that Jesus had been the King of the Jews, and that Anne Frank was a hidden Jew, and I knew that Jews has died in what we kids thought was called the Horror-Caused. But I didn't really see how that affected us because we were 'just the same as everyone else'. And my grandparents were 'just the same as everyone else' too. They looked the same, they spoke and dressed the same, they watched the same television programmes, and they only ever went to church for weddings and funerals, just like everyone else.

I started to become more interested in my family background thirteen years ago, when as part of a speech therapy study course, I was asked to write about the influences on my accent and the way that I spoke. It was really the first time I had thought about why my grandmother pronounced her 'd's and 't's in a funny flat way, why she said 'oy' and not 'Jesus' when she was surprised, and why we all said schlep instead of walk or run. I realised that the only reason I had never noticed these differences was that I just wasn't looking for them. And the more I found out, the more important it seemed to find out more.

My grandfather died of cancer almost five years ago at the age of ninety, having loved us all and guided us in the right direction for as long as I could remember. That was when I realised that with only my grandmother left, the last threads linking us to our Jewish past were about to snap. After almost seventy years married to my grandfather, during which they were only ever separated while he was away fighting during the war and she was giving birth to children, my grandmother's spirit visibly broke, and she changed almost overnight into a ghost of her former self. My grandparents had done absolutely everything together, and it seemed that like many couples who have been together for so long, she just didn't know how to exist without my grandfather at her side. She didn't know how to, and she didn't want to either. Since then, she has gradually been drifting away from us, and recently, we finally had to move her into a residential care home. With advancing dementia and rapidly failing health, it seems that her long journey home is almost over.

From Tough Stock

My parents were 'war-babies' from working-class families in the East End of London. My mother was born in Stepney, and my father in Plaistow. They were born during the Second World War, at a time when the rich were fretting about the dwindling stocks in their wine cellars, the middle-classes were tightening their belts and worrying about their front lawns, and the poor...............................well, the poor were even poorer than ever.

I'm not suggesting that the war wasn't difficult for everyone, of course it was. The trauma of staring at half-empty shelves of St Emilion must have haunted the aristocracy for years after the end of the war. And the lack of genuine Belgian lace available for dress-makers probably left permanent mental scars on a whole generation of posh debutantes forced to 'come-out' in a dress that wasn't 'absolutely dripping' in 'oodles of simply divine lace'. Even the poor (and still considered at the time, semi-divine), hard-hit, royal family were forced to think seriously about their Champagne consumption, although thinking seriously was probably about as close as they came to actually being hard-hit at all. Well, apart from the small bomb that landed on Buckingham Palace knocking almost all the buds off of several azaleas and causing one of the dogs to pee on the hearth-rug. The poor Queen-Mother was probably still thinking of those azalea bushes as she tip-toed through street after street of bomb-flattened East End homes, tut-tutting, and smiling sweetly at people who had just lost absolutely everything in last-night's bombing raid. She must have been worrying herself sick about how she was going to pay the rent, and what she was going to put on the table for the kids' tea as, like a 1940s Marie Antoinette, she uttered that immortal phrase 'Now I can look the East End in the face'. But, of course, they were different times and the East End working classes 'knew their place'. In the same way that nowadays, celebrities like Madonna can buy children in developing countries and not call it people-trafficking, the aristocracy in war-time Britain could tuck into four-course meals and still consider themselves 'hard-hit'.

But in some ways though, I think the working-class poor, like my parent's families, found it easier than others to get through the war. Years of social evolution had made them as hard as old nails, and genetically capable of coping with just about anything that life could throw at them, including German bombs. It seemed that, like viruses or rats, the tougher life was, the stronger they grew. They were tough and resilient, could (and did) eat just about anything, animal, vegetable, or mineral, and had the mental and physical resilience to survive in an environment that would horrify, and almost certainly kill people of my generation.

Although he was most definitely present for the conception, my grandfather was away fighting for his country by the time my mother came into the world, followed a couple of years later by my uncle. My mother was born on 15th December 1940, and hit the ground running slap-bang in the middle of the London Blitz. For anyone who, unlike me, wasn't brought up on war stories or just has no interest in the war, this was the name given to a period of particularly heavy and sustained bombing. It began on 7th September 1940 and lasted until 10th May 1941. Fifty-seven consecutive nights of intensive bombing raids, over 20,000 civilian victims (a majority in east and south-east London), and a million homes damaged or destroyed in London alone.

So it was my 'tough as old nails' grandmother who had sole responsibility for dodging the bombs and ensuring that my mother and her brother reached adulthood, or at least adolescence, in one piece. It was my strong, resourceful grandmother who queued for food for hours with hundreds of other women, even though there was no guarantee of finding anything remotely edible, even by wartime standards, when you finally reached the front.

By 1940, just about everything except fresh air was rationed, and even that was in short supply in the densely-populated streets of east London. Every lungful came ready-mixed with a combination of dirt, chimney-smoke, and toxic factory fumes. Prior to the war, Britian had imported about 55 million tons of food, but as a result of the blockade by German U-boats, this had dropped to almost nothing by 1940. Rationing was supposed to ensure that everyone received a fair share of the limited food that could be produced on a small, chilly, wet island like Britain. But the reality was that it had the greatest impact on the poor, inner-city, working classes. The rich, and even the middle-classes, could afford to supplement their rations from the black market. People living in rural areas could illicitly grow food and keep animals to keep the wolf from the door. But what did you do if you lived in a crowded inner-city community where the only things which grew freely were the lice and the food queues. The answer was simple, you either starved, or you 'got creative'. My mother was seven years old before she actually knew what a banana looked like with its skin. Up until then, my grandmother would boil parsnips and then mash them with some banana essence. Having never seen a real one, my mother didn't know the difference. Although it wasn't actually rationed, the sea blockade meant that the only fruit that might be seen in shops were home-grown varieties, and even then this depended on supply and on whether you could afford what there was. So, with the exception of root vegetables and the occasional Granny Smith apple, fresh 'fruit and veg' were a rarity. Greengrocers weren't particuarly green-looking, and for East End kids, anything remotely healthy like spinach or tomatoes were as rare as hens' teeth or rocking-horse shit. The idea of five portions of fruit and vegetables per day would have been as remote at the time as the possibility of putting a man on the moon.

My mother is still able to horrify me with stories of how they lived on things that nowadays we wouldn't feed to starving battery hens let alone humans. Pigs' feet, cow's stomachs, hearts and lungs and brains, and an assortment of things that are only seen on organ transplant lists in Britain today. But if you were hungry and you wanted to survive, and you were given a slice of bread spread with a tiny amount of rendered animal fat, you ate it, and in some cases came to actually enjoy it.

Just about everything that we make 'with' something in modern times, was made 'without' it by families like my mother's during the war. Meatless roasts, butterless (and sometimes breadless) bread and butter pudding, fruitless bananas, and coffee-less coffee. Each dish was made up of 10% actual food, and 90% imagination. But this was like water off a duckless duck's back for the tough people of the East End.

It's reassuring to know that, even though I may not be used to such a hard existence, I have the same blood in my veins, and I'm proud to come from such tough stock.

Still just below the surface..................

Why are you so upset with James? my friend Serena asked. It will probably seem really silly to you, and you probably won't understand why I was so upset about what happened.

Some old friends of mine arrived last Saturday (James and his wife Karen), and had invited me to go with them to visit some friends of theirs on Sunday afternoon. James said that I'd met these friends last year at the drinks they had had at their hotel, although I really couldn't remember them (James loves to collect interesting people, a bit like exotic cooking ingredients). They are a very nice couple, my age, Steve's in broadcasting, Maria's in publishing, three children, large house in Archway etc etc etc.
Karen's cousin the lawyer was going to be there, and his (very bubbly) wife.................basically a whole mob of successful, pretty well-off, middle-aged, middle-class people who I barely knew.

I didn't want to turn up and discover that James and Karen were late as usual (in fact as always), so picked them up from their hotel.

But the bottom line was that the whole thing was way out of my comfort zone. Nice people, but not people I would normally hang around with, and not people I had anything in common with. I don't want to talk about children and how difficult it was when little Jack wouldn't eat his organic Jerusalem artichokes, or about how impossible it was to find an architect who could redesign the guest bathroom. I just don't have those things, and for the most part will never have the sexual inclination or budget for them. So, I threw a few glasses of wine down me and smiled, and waited for 'the question' which I knew was coming.

'So, what do you do Andy?'

I'm not ashamed of who I am or what I do, I made my choices and that's fine. But I did feel really insecure and very, very self-conscious. They were all very nice people, I'm not saying that they were a pack of spiteful, snobbish, laughing hyenas who ridiculed me, quite the opposite in fact.

That role was filled by James, which is why I was so upset about it.

He decided that he would make his central theme for the afternoon, 'Andy's Reception Job'. To take the one thing about which I was very self-conscious, in a situation in which I was feeling extremely shy and isolated, and then just keep going on and on and on about.
What uniform do you have to wear? (ha ha ha)
What colour is it? (ha ha ha)
Is it a horrible polyester uniform? (ha ha ha)

So he sat there, laughing at me in front of all these people and going on, and on, and on about how ridiculous I must look, and how funny it was and laughing this humiliating uncontrollable laugh. I wasn't laughing, and I wasn't smiling, and I tried to ask him to stop and I thought he would. But for whatever reason he was on a roll. So in the end when I finally couldn't bear any more and thought I was going to burst into tears in front of all those people, I got up, told James that he was a arsehole, and said I was leaving. I actually wanted to run, but forced myself to smile and thank my hosts for a lovely afternoon.

Then finally he was all apologetic...................What did I say? What did I do? I'm sorry, please forgive me................but I just wanted to run away. It was like being back at school and James was Peter Raymond, the guy who used to pin me up against the wall with his gang and call me a queer and tear the pages out of my books, and throw my shoes over the school-fence, and stretch the neck of my jumper, and try to write poof on my face except that we used biros and it just used to scratch my skin.

If you've ever been bullied, you never forget that feeling of absolute terror when 'they' get you. When you realise that the complicated plan you'd made to try to avoid them has failed and that there's no escape. Sometimes if you were lucky, there would be a more attractive victim to hand. That's the thing with bullies, they're greedy and they will always go for the biggest, fattest, ripest victim they can find. But they never forget about you. You know they'll be back, waiting for you after school, marching behind you on your way home chanting 'queer! queer! queer!'.

It's horrible to know that those memories are always there, still just sitting there under the surface waiting for another Peter Raymond....................or in this case, a James Katzen.

I suppose it was the fact that this time it wasn't coming from the school bully, it was coming from someone who was supposed to be a friend. All I could think was 'Why did you invite me? Surely it can't have been ridicule in front of all these people?

I'm not trying to make it more that it was, but I can't even explain how upset and betrayed I felt.

I got my jacket and left the house, and he did come after me trying to tell me he was sorry and that he valued my friendship and all that. But to be honest, I didn't want to hear it, I just wanted to get back home and shut the door. Because this time, unlike school...................I could!

Proudly Essex

It's amazing how much some people can remember about the early years of their childhood. I've always been slightly skeptical about the people who say 'I can remember being a baby as clearly as if it were yesterday'. Maybe their mothers just took more vitamins during pregnancy, or maybe their childhood was just more eventful and therefore worth remembering


Personally, I can just about remember yesterday as if it were yesterday. But then, I did grow up on one of the many council estates along the Thames estuary in Essex, the result of generations of good, solid, work-class inbreeding. I was probably related not-so-distantly to almost every other working-class family from Stepney to Tilbury, and from Romford down to the slimy shores of the estuary in Grays (with the exception of course of the small number of black or asian families brave enough at the time to venture into the post-war, Cockney heartlands). It would be a scientific miracle if we hadn't had at least a couple of wonky genes as a result, and a severe deficiency in something that wasn't abundant in either saturated animal fat, or Wall's Viennetta.


But hey, it was the Essex estuary, it was the 1970's. Some people still thought that the earth was flat and that if you didn't stop when you reached Southend, you simply fell off the edge of the world into a boiling vat of Spry Crisp n'Dry, one of the first 'designer' cooking oils (or 'chip fat' as it was commonly called).


Absolutely everybody thought that our council estates were somehow better than those in the rest of the country, especially those in Kent. Particularly Kent in fact, which was spoken of with the same curled lip and disdainful tone as we used when we spoke about 'The Germans'. Although the people from the council estates on the other side of the estuary in Kent weren't personally responsible for bombing our grandparents' East End two-up two-downs, they were guilty of a far greater crime....................they were almost exactly like us!.................only different!


Despite the fact that many of us couldn't actually find Essex on a map of Britain (or spell it for that matter),we had a crystal clear idea of who we were and where we came from. Our world was vast and tiny all at the same time. And seen through our eyes, we had everything we could possibly want or need.

Just a stone's throw north of the estuary out past Brentwood, we had rich green farmland with its woods and country parks. To be honest, we kids were the first ones to actually feel comfortable and really enjoy the countryside. It wasn't an obvious habitat for people like our parents who had grown up among the grey streets and bomb-craters of the post-war East End. Like rare species reared in captivity, I'm not sure most people actually knew what you were supposed to do with so much open space. There was too much of it to build a rockery, or a conservatory, and it wasn't flat enough to put down jumpers for goalposts and make a football pitch. There was even too much of it to build another council estate!


Then there were the glorious miles of stony, bottom-numbing beaches, their shoreline beautifully decorated with a vast and varied collection of plastic cups and bottles, string, plastic wrapping, and the other assorted shit which, like the people, could never bring itself to leave the estuary. So it just floated in and out year after year washing over the tar-stained pebbles and seagull carcasses. But because nobody else could see the glory of it, it had become our very own Costa del Sol, long before we discovered the real Costa del Sol and proceeded to pollute that as well. At the end of the estuary was Southend-On-Sea, the paint-peeling Saint Tropez of the Essex riviera, fish and chip capital of South Essex. It sat on the estuary, a shadow of its former Victorian, beach-resort self with a long promenade of benches which my parents called 'The Front'. My family would often drive down to Southend seafront early on a Sunday morning (going to church wasn't big in our community, two visits during your lifetime, and one at the end of it were considered sufficient) where my parents would march my sister and I along the seafront and back again with the incentive being that we could collect the pennies which people had dropped. I don't know why there were so many. It wasn't because we were all so rich that we didn't have a use for 'copper' (1/2, 1, and 2 pence coins), and it wasn't because we were generous either. But for whatever reason, those walks usually yielded enough for something nourishing like candy floss, or a toffee apple.

I grew up in a time before huge, out-of-town shopping centres like Lakeside had even been thought of. We spent our leisure shopping time, usually Saturday mornings, in the crowded, exotic souks of Romford and Basildon where you roasted in summer, got drenched in autumn, and froze in winter. The West End, or the 'Other End' as my family called it (being from the East End) was too far away, and too much trouble, for more than an annual visit at Christmas to see the windows of Selfridges. It was only 30 miles away, or half an hour on the train, but we had no need of it, you could find everything you wanted in the busy markets which could still be found in Grays, Romford, or Basildon. I remember there being what seemed like hundreds of market stalls in Romford selling everything the 1970's had to offer; from furry steering wheel covers for your Ford Capri, to twenty different types of seafood. Washing-up bowls in all the colours of the Essex rainbow, pick and mix, packs of big knickers, and cheap toys. You could spend hours being dragged around Romford Market with nothing but the promise of a 'wimpy' to keep you going.

I wouldn't say it was a sophisticated lifestyle, because it was actually quite the opposite. But looking back, it was simple and straighforward. We were working-class, our neighbours were working-class, and our friends were working-class. Kids made up games that only needed a brick, a piece of rope, and a cat, and everyone voted Labour......................and then along came aubergines and life was never the same!

The School Sissy

I live in on a rather pretty estate in a small block comprising of five flats, built by the rich for the poor around about 1900. Working-class dwellings they were called in 'the olden days'. Quite a nice block where we're all still poor, still pretty much working-class, and all know each other. Some of us even like each other, and some of us don't. The structural division between the flats means that I can smell what my neighbours are cooking, and I can usually hear when they have sex (and whether it was good sex, average sex, or just a mutual unloading of pent up sexual frustration).


The small group of children who live in the flats in the surrounding blocks tend to congregate on our stairwell because the leader of their small gang lives next door to me. They're nice, polite kids. Noisy, but a bit like a kind of modern, working-class Famous Five.................without the dog.....................and without Aunt Fanny of course.


So, back to the point.

I arrived home one afternoon last summer and met two of the kids on the stairs. Mandy had obviously been given a 'Fairy Princess' dressing-up outfit complete with accessories and make-up. Who knows whose idea it was, but the outfit wasn't on Mandy, it was on Duncan, the ten-year-old from one of the surrounding flats. Complete with pink dress, make-up, tiara, and the all-important fairy wand. 'Look at me', he cried 'I'm a fairy'.

All I could think of was...................... I wonder if your parents have realised that already? I wonder if they realise that they are looking at another generation of school sissy?

Being the school sissy is something that I consider myself to be a semi-expert on. Because of course, I was one of a small, but select, group of school sissies in my school year. Every academic year has them. We're eternal, a bit like the chewing-gum under the desks. As soon as one lot is gone, it's replaced by another lot.


We're the ones who love drama in every sense of the word, use new and unusual words, and hate sport in almost every shape or form. The ones who never have the right football boots, the ones who don't even know what the right football boots are or why they're the right ones. We hang around with the girls, and each other, and make funny or bitchy comments to avoid having our heads 'kicked in' on the way home from school (which usually still happens at some point to the less-street savvy sissies).
It really is a skill to be a school sissy and survive the journey to emerge from your cocoon ready for adult life. At this point you can manage your own path. Unlike your school years, you're not obliged to share space with people who dislike who you are and vice versa, and you can decide where is safe for you to go, and where isn't. And of course, you can legally wear what you want, and shag who you want (which often turns out to be those same boys who wanted to kick your head in at school. The closet-larvae are always the meanest).


In retrospect, I think I was a rather accomplished school sissy. It's not just about 'being a sissy', there are talented sissies and talentless ones. It's a bit like assuming that because someone is black they have a natural ability to sing and dance. It just doesn't work like that, just watch the X-Factor auditions (along with all the other sissies!) and you'll see what I mean.


Luckily for me, I was the proud owner of a tough, rule-breaking older sister called Linda, or Lynne or she re-branded herself. She hung out with the kids who smoked, pierced their own ears, had the latest hair-styles, and allegedly 'did it' with each other. This meant that for the first few years of secondary school, when we all start becoming more aware of the opposite sex (or the same sex in my case), sissiness, or any kind of differentness, became a bigger deal. Somehow, my sister's street-cred was off-set against my total lack of it, and instead of being way down at the bottom with the rest of the bullying material, I was elevated to a rank slightly above the swots, nerds, and common-or-garden sissies, queers, and homos (their words, not mine!).

It didn't make me any more or less sissy, but it did give me an opportunity to form a cunning survival plan to avoid having my head regularly either kicked-in or pushed down the toilet. Although, saying that, mine wasn't a particularly violent school, and bullying was pretty second-class as bullying goes. It usually involved having the contents of your bag scattered across the playing fields, being subjected to circle-taunting, or maybe just having your tie yanked downwards so violently that you had to be cut out of it by a 'grown-up'.


To get through my school years, I learned the art of 'being the funny one'. This meant that as long as you kept the bullies and the hangers-on laughing, you were safe. You had to ridicule yourself, teachers, and other sissies, swots, and nerds. I became an SWA, a Sissy With Attitude. Attack really was the best form of defence, and my defence was to create a smoke screen by playing up to the ones who were my biggest threat. I was one of the lucky few, I ranked in the top 10% of a complex hierachy of potential victims. I was a sissy, but I was a working-class sissy who lived on the council estate. I was cheeky to the teachers, and my greatest achievement was that I was once caned for throwing water. As sissies went, I was practically untouchable. Way below me were the posh sissies from the outlying villages who 'spoke proper English', the middle-class, violin or piano-playing nerds, the blazer-wearing swots ................ and of course our teachers themselves. Our teachers were just as scared as we were of the bullies and their gang, so expecting any kind of protection from them was futile. They were far too busy 'watching their own arses'. So thankfully, the bullies had far too many ripe alternatives to bother with me and my girlie ways.

Being a successful school sissy leaves you both well-prepared in some ways for adult life, and crippled in other ways.

On one hand, like fist-fighters' knuckles, it toughens you up. You have to build up a thick, protective shell to protect you from all those sticks and stones. You have to be able to cover up the feeling of sheer terror, and walk into a room with your head up and a smile on your face without appearing to care what people think or say. Perhaps that's why we sissies make such good actors, we have to learn from an early age to convincingly be someone we're not. Like a rattle-snake, you have to be able to taste danger from a long way away, function whilst in a constant state of 'attack-mode', and defend yourself at the smallest perceived threat. Maybe that's why we often run out of emotional energy and burn up or break down before other people.

But it's not all doom and gloom folks! The upside to having that tough exterior is that it protects a sweet, soft, and truly deliciously-worthwhile interior. If you can weather the journey through that spiny shell and have the patience to allow us to learn to trust you, the reward is worth the effort. We have the rare ability to love unconditionally, and that's hard to find in this life.

American Politics: Interest Level.............limited!

The second item on the radio 'news update' yesterday was that President Clinton....................ooooh sorry, ex-President Clinton was rushed to hospital and underwent heart surgery.

Firstly, the fact that the newsreader had forgotten that Clinton stopped being 'The President' at the end of his term says it all. Along with Kennedy, he's really still the only American politician whose name most people can be bothered to remember, especially I suspect, the American electorate. The 'other' politicians fleetingly register in several of our brain cells and then, like human waste, are magically flushed away and never thought of again. I think it's one of our human defence mechanisms, we simply shut out what is too upsetting, annoying, or just plain boring to remember.

I vaguely remember a news story the other day about Senator (or ex-senator, who knows!) Jonathan Edwards having a love-child. I had to rack my brains and finally recalled that, that's right, he was the one with the very rich wife (or was that John Kerry?) and who looked slightly like a much younger Robert Wagner (AKA Jonathan Hart for the over 40's, Doctor Evil's number two for the under 40's).

The conclusion I have to come to is that we only really remember politicians for their sexual exploits.

Who can name one thing Kennedy did for the US economy (apart from my friend P*** who could almost certainly remember everything he did for the economy)? Any takers? No? What about education? Oh fuck it, who can even remember whether he was a Democrat, a Republican?
But we all remember that he was slipping it to Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy in a variety of locations not recommended by the Catholic Church.

So, back to good old Bill Clinton (and all who sailed in him!). Was he President during the Iraq War, the Vietnam War, or the Hundred Year's War? Did he make any significant improvements to the day-to-day lives of Hank and Betty Buttschneider of Boise, Idaho?
Hmmmmm, hang on, I know this one................. no really, it's on the tip of my tongue, it was.......................'. No, I thought not.
What do we remember? Yes, of course, that he got sucked-off on the desk in the Oval Office and shot a load down Monica's blue dress.

If you're a politician and you want to be remembered for more than 60 seconds, use your most influential organ. Most people aren't interested in what's going on in your brain, and certainly not in your heart. But we are intensely interested in what you do with your....................how can I put it? Cock? Manhood? In fact, cut out the middle man (or woman) and save us all the fuss and bother. Just call a press conference, and shag whoever you want to in front of the gentlemen (and ladies) of the press. Then we, the general public, can get all the gory details of who did what to who, and you can save being pushed and jostled every time you leave your own home ('Senator Rafferty, is it true you like to be tied up while you watch Will & Grace?') and get on with either:

a) Leaving your apparently devastated spouse for whichever man or woman you've been shagging.

b) Apologising publicly to your spouse and using every opportunity during your 15 minutes of fame to demonstrate your devotion to each other........................'We're stronger than ever!' Yes, of course you are dear!

c) Separating amicably claiming that you want to 'Get on with the important job of running the country'. Which most of us weren't aware you were actually do.

Of course, if you're a female politician, you're at a massive disadvantage. Not having the same political 'tools' as your male counter-parts. Whilst the boys can shag their way to notoriety, your only option seems to be to either make the public think you have a tool, like old Maggie T), or get shagged by a male politician.

Sorry, I don't make the rules.

So, ask yourself. Who can I remember?

Dinner Guest From Hell

I kept saying to everyone 'You know what, I really should have more dinner parties, they're such a great way to keep in touch with people'...................especially those people who never have dinner parties themselves!

I love to cook (and eat), and like Monica (yes, the pretty but manic, OCD one from Friends) I love to be 'the host'. So I finally got around to it and decided, as a contribution to social experimentation in the 21st century, to invite people whose only link was me. I kid myself that I'm a good 'chooser-of-friends' and a good 'people-gauger', so mine are usually educated with some kind of interesting quirk, although I admit that some of them are just plain freaks. But I naively thought that this would provide a strong enough link. Well, we all make mistakes, and mine was a fucking whopper, and not the flame-grilled kind either.

I was very proud of how my lunch turned out. It was delicious; roast chicken with ricotta and fresh herbs (each leaf lovingly hand-harvested from the Peruvian slopes at dawn), dauphinoise potatoes with parmesan, carrots, asparagus, green beans, sauteed courgettes. My friend Catherine made a huge tiramisu, and I bought some fabulous cheeses from the new deli shop around the corner (the smart one that sells individual chanterelle mushrooms and thrice-filtered glacier water).

And for the guests, I invited along three tried-and-tested friends, Rachel, Karen, and Stavros who I hadn't seen for a long time( one of who even kindly brought the dessert). Sorry Stavros.....................if you read this, I didn't want to use your real name and just couldn't think of another Greek name.
But I made a terrible error with the final invitation. I invited a guy I had met through a friend who visited from Spain. The original plan was that we would 'hit it off' and 'get together', but that didn't happen. He was a smoker (a heavy smoker) with not very nice teeth. He looked a little bit like the evil farmer from Fantastic Mister Fox with a generous blob of Middle-Earth. But I met him with a group of people and remembered him being rather fun.

Jesus, what a colossal fucking mistake! What was I thinking that night when I met him, I don't remember being on drugs.

He totally dominated the conversation to the point that nobody else could really get a word in edgeways, had really strong opinions about absolutely everything, and just shouted everyone down. Now I like people with something to say, and I know what you're thinking .................... Oooooh, that sounds like Andy! Well, multiply me by a hundred, add rotten teeth and glasses, and you've got..........well, I suppose I shouldn't really use his name, so let's call him 'Guest From Hell X'. Fucking tosser!
On top of that, he was a real greedy glutton on an olympic scale. He shamelessly stuffed his Roald Dahlesque face with three platefuls of food, and I'm not talking delicate nibbling, I'm talking major oesophagus-busting scoffing. It was like something from a medieval feast, huge forkfuls of food combined with glugs of wine and shouting. I'm surprised he didn't throw the chicken bones into the fireplace and piss on the rushes in the corner of the room.

So, after the three large platefuls of my lovingly prepared food (eaten like the world was about to end). I brought out Rachel's tiramisu which looked fantastic. There was a large bowl of it. Well, he was a bit behind because he went to smoke and was in the middle of lecturing everyone on exactly how the pyramids were built, telling Karen (a very successful marketing executive) how to do her job, Stavros (a flight attendant with a zillion years experience) about air safety, and Catherine about dope-smoking........................talk about coals to fucking Newcastle! So, the rest of us had a bowl and then another spoonful, and as there was only a little bit left I said I was going to keep it for my dessert the next day. Talk about throwing your toys out of the cot. He moaned and grumbled, and complained about how everyone else had had a second helping and he hadn't. Fucking glutton! I wasn't going to give in, I wanted that tiramisu. It was, Tiramisu Wars, The Wars of The Tiramisu, the Bay of Tiramisu..............well, you get the point. So he took his revenge by stuffing himself with cheese and continuing to tell poor Stavros exactly what to do in case of an emergency sea-landing and the best way to get ice into a glass during onboard service. I'm surprised he didn't run through how I could have improved the meal, bloody cock-sucking know-it-all!

Karen and Stavros left around 7 o'clock, and after a small allergic reaction requiring a ten-minute nap, Catherine left around 8 o'clock (it seems she's allergic to mould) ...............which left me and Mister 'I Can Hardly Talk Because There's So Much Fucking Food In My Mouth'. I wanted him to go because I wanted to get my pyjamas on and put my feet up.......................but he decided that he needed a cigarette and then a short nap. I can't believe he thought we were going to sit around chewing the fat when all I wanted to do was club him to death with the nearest heavy object.

He finally got the message and left about 9.30pm once I had put on my pyjamas, hair-curlers, and face-cream. It was like trying to get Aung San Suu Kyi out of Burma! I thought I was going to have to call the police.

Please tell me I'm not like that!

Apart from that, it was lovely.

Straight men and personal grooming.

I thought the days had long passed when 'real men' didn't really care about their appearance. When real men were not only oblivious, but even proud to walk the earth without designer clothing, smelling like an ashtray or a brewery, and with hair in all the wrong places. They walked around saying things like 'that's for girls', and 'you wouldn't get me wearing one of those'.



Men's appearance wasn't the responsibility of men, but of their mothers, wives and girlfriends. Women were the ones who chose new clothing, did the sniff-test, threw out the items not fit for public viewing, and bought aftershave at Christmas. Women were the ones who used phrases like 'I'm not going out with you looking like that Brian!', or 'Oh for God's sake throw that rotten old jumper out Derek!'

Left to their own devices, men would wear underwear until it rotted and fell to pieces. They would open the drawer and take anything that didn't smell too rank and could be held up with a belt or braces.



Are we supposed to believe that things have changed completely?



Well, maybe. Men have discovered fashion, and even personal grooming and hygiene. We have our own industry showing us what to wear and how to stop our hair turning grey and dropping out (or even just skipping the grey phase and jumping straight to fourth base). Department stores and shops have a whole section of 'Men's Products'................in fact we even have things called 'a range of products'. Who'd Adam and Eve it, a whole range of things just for little old us. Not just soap, shaving foam, and anti-dandruff shampoo, but hundreds of things. Things that many men still don't know whether to drink, or polish their hub caps with. We can actually manage our skins by exfoliating, scruffing, popping and squeezing, mud-masking, cleansing, and moisturising.....................you could actually spend a whole weekend just pampering yourself like the lassies. Start with a manicure in public.............yes, in public.............without onlookers assuming you must 'bat for the other team! It's actually okay to be distressed about the terrible state of your cuticles. Fuck the state of the world and global economy, but don't ignore your cuticles boys! And then off to have your hair, not cut but styled, by a stylist in a salon..............or at the very least 'barbered' by a gucci-wearing, modern-day barber who can do more than just a short back and sides and 'something for the weekend Sir'. They can offer a huge variety of styles requiring very little hair to work with, or give you a 'scissor-cut' for a bit extra. Men have colourists. Yes, pass the word on, you don't actually have to keep the colour your were born with.........................you have a choice. Ash-blonde is the new grey!



There just seems to be one small problem.



Do straight men have some kind of grooming filter on their bathroom mirrors? Why is it that so many straight men are resistent to all of these new opportunities?

A short intro to............

You should write a blog...........you should write a blog! Why do people keep telling me I should write a blog? Especially the ones who don't write one themselves.
I'm not particularly funny, and anything involving a lot of typing makes me break out in a pre-RSI sweat. I never thought typing would become so much a part of life and now I find myself learing at people wishing I could touch-type like them. I'm probably going to end up with eye-strain as well from staring so hard at the keyboard trying to pick up my typing errors.
That's important, because being a real pedant, the price I pay is that people take great pleasure in pointing out my typing mistakes. I suppose they deserve their revenge because it is actually true, I'm a terrible pedant (and for those of you not familiar with the word, no, it's not the same as kiddie-fiddler! That's a pederast!). I don't think it's patronising, but people get so touchy about being corrected on their spelling and grammar and general lack of general knowledge.
At the age of 43, I'm wondering if I've finally discovered the reason I was put on this planet. To piss anyone under the age of 30 off by constantly pointing out the massive, gaping hole in their general knowledge.
Just the other day, I discovered that one of my colleagues didn't actually know that Judas betrayed Jesus.


The poor girl got confused and thought that it 'had something to do with that brother..................oh you know, the brother. What was his name?..................you know that one............Kane? The pedant in me wanted to slap the nose off her face. Not only for not knowing, but for not realising that it really was quite fundamental.
Now I'm not at all religious (although I do have moments), but honestly, it's pretty common-knowledge..............isn't it? I promised I wouldn't swear in this, but for fuck's sake, how can you not have picked up that piece of trivia at some point in your 25 years on the planet. And then to claim that there's nothing unusual about that is just shocking. It's a bit like laughing about the time Chandler did the Cher impression in the restaurant in front of Cher........................no, you fucking idiot. That wasn't Chandler, it was Jack.................different cult soap comedy! Call me an old fart, but at least have the decency to admit that there's a huge, massive, gaping hole in your basic knowledge. And yes, the earth is round!

Why is it that people (and not just kids) don't worry about general knowledge?

Maybe there really is no value in knowing the difference between mucus and strawberry jam, or what the capital of South Africa is. But whatever you do, don't draw attention to the fact.
If poor IdiotX (sorry, can't use her real name) hadn't called me a Judas, I would never have known that she didn't actually know who Judas was, or that she was devoid of the most basic general knowledge.

Just one word of warning.....................don't accept her invitation to breakfast, and don't let her book the plane tickets for your mediterranean mini-break!