Skip to main content

Home From Home?

It is all shrunk! Or have I grown again? It wasn’t like that last year. When I walked into my parent’s kitchen, back in France, last Sunday afternoon, it was not the right size; not the size I remembered it anyway. The rest of the house seemed more or less fine though. I felt like Gulliver in Lilliput. And a rather strange journey it had been too.


The train journey to Paris had gone fine and is not really worth dwelling upon. Soon after departure, I had open my laptop and switching on I-tunes had started to read the script of the next Chorus’ show in details. I am now (since the elections) in charge of promoting the thing and I have worries about its content and the appeal it will have to the wider audience we need to fill the venue three times (that’s 2400 people to attract). Anyway, I felt really chuffed to be able to use my laptop on the train and to be able to listen to my music. I-tune, by turning my PC into this jukebox, has given me new appreciation of my music. Sounding like a kid talking about his new toy, I would say it is like a radio but better. You do not have to worry about changing CD and what you will be listening to next (and considering my eclectic tastes in music, the next think could be almost anything!), just as wonderfully, this radio channel has no advertising breaks in its schedules and plays only music you like… what more can one ask?

Why is this bag so heavy?

The transfer from Gare du Nord to Gare du Lyon was also quite painless. I managed not to take the metro in the wrong direction this time, as I have been known to do on previous occasions, ending up in banlieue (the suburbs) before I new it because the train was a fast one with fewer stops. I had an hour and a half between the two trains and I had to sit in the station for a while, feeling exotic munching on a packet of Walkers salt and vinegar crisps (a flavour no one would dare to dream up in France) and watching the men walk by. The weather is having one of its now frequent mood swings and it feels like summer in France at the moment, everyone dressing accordingly of course…. Nice!

Perhaps my gaydar is out of order or in need of tuning but I must say I spotted disconcertingly few of my fellow poofs. It was nice to think, however, that, in another part of town, some of the members of the Chorus were already there, ready to take part in Various Voices in a few days time.

How easy must life be for a pigeon trapped in a train station. You just have to look to find all sorts of food on the floor. Like it grows there or something.

The second leg of my journey (Paris to Dijon), proved more awkward than the first. When I got on the train, the only available baggage rack was already full. The other one had been replaced by a huge, and probably much more profitable, vending machine. My seat was on the first row after the door. As I was checking my ticket, I notice that the guy in the row in front was reading a magazine with an ad showing a male torso with that extra something telling me it was not directed at your average straight guy or even girl. Sure enough: heads turned to see what was that tall dark presence looming. Target locked!

At first glance I thought that my neighbour was one of us too. Dressed with a crisp pink shirt, tanned, and with a gold ear ring, he would not have looked out of place in a gay bar. His “I would have preferred a girl” as I sat next too him, proved once again that my gaydar needed tuning. I tried to make a good humoured answer to this. As I was going to discover during the hour and forty minutes of the journey, it turned out that the guy was straight (“I have a girlfriend and she would not like me saying that I would have preferred a girl.”). During the course of a rather intermittent and confused (as well as confusing) logoreah, I also found out the guy worked for one the cités universitaires on the Campus, had just attended a “dame” world championships in Brussels, had done several marathon all over the world (which gave him a runner’s mental strength to face life) and that he had a problem with the way girls dressed these days. Although I was trying to discourage him but making very short answers and even by taking out a book, he insisted on telling that he had actually been, wrongly, accused of rape by one of the students where he worked. Although he “didn’t know me”, he told me how he had been convicted and had gone to jail and how his “directrice” had supported him together with his mum and his running mates. Followed a few considerations on the cruelty of life and the unfairness of the justice system. I must say I was rather relieved when the train arrived and I exchanged a meaningful look with one of the guys in front who had obviously had the benefit of the whole conversation, together with a good number of the other passengers, I should think.



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

Rev. Peter Mullen's Blog

Rev. Peter Mullen is the chaplain to the London Stock Exchange and the rector of St Michael's Cornhill and St Sepulchre without Newgate in the City. Rev. Peter Mullen was also until recently a blogger. Sadly the result of his cyber labour seem to have been deleted but Google has thankfully cached some of it and I have saved a copy for posterity, just in case. The deletion of Rev. Mullen's writings might just have something to do with the fact that last week, the Evening Standard and then the Daily Mail published an article (the same article actually) about some of those very writings (even though the elements of said writings being quoted had been published in June this year, at the time of the blessing ceremony which took place between two members of the Church of England in St Bartholomew the Great - picture ). In the article, we learned what the Rev. thinks about gay people and what should be done to them: We ["Religious believers"] disapprove of homosexuality

Liam Messam and Tamati Ellison Swap Jerseys

I am having a bit of a vacuous evening looking at images of pretty rugby players. Addidas, with its latest viral campaign, Jersey Swap , seems to be squarely aiming at the gay market with a selection of five antipodean rugby players, visitor to the website can select and see take their tops off and... well... swap jersey (those interested can create posters too). My favorites of the bunch are Liam Messam and Tamati Ellison . The pictures of their pretty faces and bulging naked torsos (excuse me while I sit down for a second!) included to this post should tell you why. A job well done for Addidas. This will go round the Internet for a while, I think.