Pink Sauce

Life is apparently very much like the sea. It sees tempests and gale force winds, lulls and quietudes. It ebbs and flows, creates and destroys. People, like the pebbles on a beach, come and go with the flow, are united and scattered. Tonight, I bid farewell to a Petr, about whom I wrote a few weeks ago and for whom I designed a website , on his last night in London before his flight back to the Czech Republic tomorrow. While on our past few meetings we had seemed to have grown apart (perhpas in preparation of his departure), the strange and fragile bond we seem to have was back in full force tonight. This made the last good byes (almost on the platform of a train station) a little bit awkward. After I posted about his present (see link above), another friend of mine from the Chorus, by the strangest of coincidences, recognised who I was talking about and sent me a few photos to confirm that we were talking about the same person. He had met Petr about two years ago at a party organis...

You may have noticed a new blog appearing in my blogroll on the sidebar. This is the brainchild of a new friend who is now also my latest blogchild. Diary of an Addict will probably be quite different in tone to Slightly's efforts (Slightly being my first blogchild) but I hope you will find yourself coming back to it regardless.

This is gist of the somewhat confusing piece of advice I received from Slightly this morning. We were discussing Shrove Tuesday (that's today) and the fact that the Brits have pancakes whereas the French, who call the day Mardi Gras have sweet fried dumplings usually served as 5cm wide, 20cm long strips of dough, one extremity of which is passed through a slit in its middle. Of course the French also have a pancake day. It is called Chandeleur (the Brit's Candlemas ) and is celebrated on 02 February. As I felt a sudden, and mostly unheard of, urge for cooking this morning and because dumplings would have been to complicated to do (I don't have the frying bits), I decided to follow the aforementioned advice and make pancakes. Well, not pancakes really but rather, going halfway between total aculturation and French stubbornness, crêpes . Since I don't cook (while the Brits may do so, a self respecting Frenchman (and in light of this factoid I must be one) would not con...

I received a piece of rather sobering news today that, if I wasn't already such a cynic, would probably have made me one. Last night's excitment, related in my previous post, is all but dead and I am back to my usual stupor. Gone is the fairy godmother, back is the spinsterly old bitch. TH just told me that nothing would be happening with SC for the very good reason that he (TH) already has a boyfriend. They have been going out for three or four weeks apparently and things are going well. SC has apparently been made aware of the impossibility this creates. TH has apparently committment problems which lead him to do things "unconsciously" that will endanger his relationships. I was apparently one of these not so unconscious things. He said he was going to cancel, had I not said we were only meeting as friends. We were chatting on MSN about that so I don't have much details. I know that lots of people show that type of behaviour. I have met such people before and I ...

I am feeling quite excited and chuffed tonight, which is admitedly something you will rarely get to read on this blog. Enjoy the feeling! I certainly do. (I know I used this pic last year already but it appeals to my cynical nature.) As chance would have it, I meant up with two guys, today of all days. Both were met on the Internet, in one of THOSE websites. The first one, let's call him SC, I had actually already met several years ago at a dinner party held by a mutual friend. We had not been in touch after that, until he spotted my profile a few days ago. After lots of chatting online, and since we seem to get along nicely, we had decided to test the water in the "real" world, choosing Valentine's Day without much purpose other perhaps than a slight post-modern thought. The second guy, TH for you, I also met a few days ago and similarly, upon seeing how great we went on online, we had decided to meet up "for real". Today's meeting with TH actually no...

I have attended events (and helped organise some too) since the inception of LGBT History Month, three years ago. I am a big fan of what it does and what it can acheive. This year, however, going to History Month events have had the extra benefit of getting me out of doors and out of my funk. The first event I went to this year was a two hour guided walk around the West End (Soho to Trafalgar Square and back). The walk is organised by Kairos In Soho as a fundraiser for their other activities and they run them all year round. I had meant to take part for quite sometime now but I never got round to it. Perhaps because of my long held breath in this respect, I was slightly disappointed, especially after having shed £5 for the privilege. They have four different guides for these walks and perhaps I was just unlucky. Our guide claimed he had been doing this for seven years. The walk was mostly a succession of stops with a few tidbits and facts thrown at us without much background on the ar...

GP (doctors) are supposed to be eductated and intelligent people. They spend about seven years at univeristy learning complicated things by heard, having drugs, lots of of sex and drinking too much (that's the reputation of French medecine students anyway). They have huge responsibilities over people's lives and should they not be percieved to be made of a better cloth, people would perhaps hesitate to trust them. So I am wondering which part of the word "No", Dr John Lockley from Bedfordshire is finding difficult to understand. Dr Lockey has asked Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt to provide an avoidance clause for GPs similar to that in abortion legislation. Section 4 of the 1967 Abortion Act give doctors the right to refuse to be involved in an abortion if in doing so they would be forced to act against their own conscience or ethics. He said he had a "very good relationship" with gay patients on his list but if asked to provide detailed information about...

As people grow older they tend to complain that time goes faster. Is it because, as we grow old we become aware that life is a one off chance, not a rehearsal for something grander and better? Is it because time actually does go faster as we grow old? Or is there a psychological reason for the feeling? I don't have the slightlest idea. If you were starting to expect an answer, please accept my apologies for not coming up with the goods. Not knowing the reason for this, does not stop me from experiencing it myself. The fact that my days are spent doing mostly nothing and certainly nothing intellectually challenge could suggest expension rather than constriction of the space-time continuum but this actually compounds the impression as each day blurs into its borthers into an unrecognisable mass of hazy meaninglessness. Slightly more worrying (if possible), is that whole days seem to be disappearing from my life. For the second week running, my thursday has disappeared. Here I was on ...

My earlier mention of the first day of LGBT History Month brought me to ponder on my long lasting interest in History and by extension my just as long lasting love of reading and Literature. The easy and obvious explanation stands in one single little but seminal word: escapism. Using all those stories I tell myself to fly from the grim reality of life. To sore towards pastures new. To an extend, I suppose it is true but not entirely. I think that this need to loose myself in other people's stories is in fact almost the opposite of escapism. It is, I think, a way for me to actually have a life, rather than fleeing one. It is a way to fill the emptiness, to feel and experience, to live. People reading this will probably think that I am being melodramatic. And they would be right. This is exactly the point: I absorb stories to feed on the drama I don't otherwise get. Others could call me miserable. To be fair, I probably am too. But as it happens nobody cares enough to bother and...

Today is the first day of the third edition of LGBT History Month UK. To find out what is going on near you to celebrate LGBT lives, please visit the calendar of events on the LGBT History Month website .

A few weeks ago, I wrote and posted a slightly fictionalised story of a Christmas present received from a Czeck friend, Petr. In the post, I mentioned that he is an artist. He is an illustrator and sculptor to be precise. In order to help him find more work, I have designed a very simple website which he will be able to use as an online portfolio. Hopefully many people will see the site and commission Petr. Feel free to commission me too if you need a website (other examples of websites I designed are available by clicking on "do" in the right side menu)... Click on the image above to visit the site yourself.