Skip to main content

Must Be Autumn

I can tell that Summer is over. Nothing to do with the cold weather, the rain and the wind we have had for the past week or so, nothing to do with the calendar, nothing to do with the students reappearing on the way to the university on my street, nothing to do with the fact that the guys have started to dress up and don't show so much flesh. Although now that you mention it...

What tells me that Autumn is upon us is amount of people joining my reading group this month. I am a founding member of the group. We had our first meeting in June 2001 and by September I had become the moderator of the group; creating the Yahoo! group for the mailing list and a website which I still update monthly. Looking at the record, we seem to be getting an average of two new member a month which means we built up a membership of over 70 now. Thankfully not everybody turns up at meetings and we are usually an ideal group of 4 to 10 people. Some members are I think just happy to get the reading suggestion and have never been to a meeting.

This month, we have had six new members, so far. We don't advertise for the group. WE are listed on search engines of course and Gay's Word (London's gay bookshop) link to us from their website but this is it. The only reason for this increase in new members is that people are turning to indoors activities. Must be Autumn....



Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Short History of the Elephant and Castle and Its Name

Last night I attended a lecture by local historian Stephen Humphrey who discussed the general history of the Elephant & Castle, focussing more particularly on what he called its heyday (between 1850 and 1940). This is part of a week-long art project ( The Elephant Project ) hosted in an empty unit on the first floor of the infamous shopping centre, aiming to chart some of the changes currently happening to the area. When an historian starts talking about the Elephant and Castle, there is one subject he can not possibly avoid, even if he wanted to. Indeed my unsuspecting announcement on Facebook that I was attending such talk prompted a few people to ask the dreaded question: Where does the name of the area come from, for realz? Panoramic view of the Elephant and Castle around 1960/61. Those of us less badly informed than the rest have long discarded the theory that the name comes from the linguistic deformation of "Infanta de Castille", a name which would have become at

Review: Park Avenue Cat @ Arts Theatre

As we are steadily reminded throughout the hour and half hour of Park Avenue Cat , the new play by Frank Strausser, which had its "world premiere" this week-end at the Arts Theatre, time is money. Most of the play takes place in the office of a posh LA therapist who charges $200 per hour. So, having sat through the play, I am wondering why the author spent time writing it, why a production team spent time putting it up and why I and any audience member are asked to spent time (and money) watching it. The play, said to be "a triangle with four corners" (!), brings together a therapist (Tessa Peake-Jones), who is probably not enjoying her job all that much), Lily (Josefina Gabrielle - the eponymous Parc Avenue cat) as well as Philip (Gray O'Brien - aka Tony Gordon in Coronation Street) and Dorian (Daniel Weyman), Lily's lovers. In an interview on the play's dedicated website, Strausser (who was in the audience) explains that he thinks comedy comes out of a

pink sauce | life, with a pink seasoning

As of tonight, my blog Aimless Ramblings of Zefrog , that "place where I can vent my frustration, express ideas and generally open my big gob without bothering too many people" which will be 6 in a couple of months, becomes Pink Sauce . While the URLs zefrog.blogspot.com and www.zefrog.eu are still valid to access this page, the main URL now becomes www.pinksauce.co.uk. There is a vague plan to create a proper website for www.zefrog.eu to which the blog would be linked. Why Pink Sauce , you may ask. It is both simple and complicated. For several years, I have grown out of love for the name of the blog. It felt a bit cumbersome and clumsy. That said, I never really looked into changing it, seriously. Tonight, for dinner, I had pasta with a special pink sauce of my concoction ; single cream and ketchup. I know most people while feel nauseous at the very though of the mixture but trust me, it's gorgeous. Don't knock it till you've tried it. After having had my platte