You find just one friend in a lifetime;
On your word I can always depend.
Where would I be
Without you as a friend?from Martin Guerre
As Indian restaurants go, the Shebab
is definitely a cut above the average. Even so, I would not have chosen
to eat there for two evenings running. But that is how it worked out.
On Tuesday we asked our visiting seminar speaker, as usual, what sort of restaurant he wanted to eat at, the choice being Chinese, Indian, Italian or indigenous Yorkshire. As usual, the reply was along the lines of "Oh, you choose. I don't mind what I eat, and you know the local restaurants better than me." And again as usual, nobody would take the lead and make a positive suggestion. Mathematicians are so self-effacing and indecisive. In the end it was left to me as seminar organiser to make the choice, and I decided on Indian. What I didn't know was that Mary and Christine had already decided that we should eat at the Shebab on Wednesday before going on to the theatre.
Christine is one of Mary's M.E. friends. She was supposed to have come with us when we went to see Martin Guerre a couple of months ago, but she was not feeling well enough. Now she is a bit better, and since Mary and I had enjoyed the show so much we decided to go again and take Christine with us. I liked it just as much second time round, and I found myself thinking about the nature of friendship. The story of Martin Guerre revolves around Martin's deep friendship with Arnaud, and the tragic set of misunderstandings that turns them against each other until their final reconciliation.
I have all sorts of casual friends, but I have never had the "one friend in a lifetime" that Martin and Arnaud sing about in the show. At school I had a "best friend" that I used to hang out with, but there was never any real closeness between us. I guess that Mary is the truest friend I ever had, and in a way our relationship is more like a friendship than a conventional marriage. Apart from her, my closest friend is Allan in Edinburgh, but I hardly ever see him except when we go on holiday together. But neither Mary nor Allan can share my gay side, and I am left with a friend-shaped hole in my life. Probably most people feel the same. You would have to be very lucky to find that once-in-a-lifetime friend, and I have always thought of myself as such an odd character that there probably doesn't exist a person who would be compatible with me to that extent. Maybe that is why I cultivate the lobo solo image: self-sufficient and not in need of other people. But it doesn't quite ring true.
That slightly melancholy mood was reinforced by reading Josh's journal this morning:
I feel like I've lost something and don't quite know what it is. I can run away - but it does no good - whatever direction I run in - it's still there looming in front of me. Call it what you want to - I can't call it nothing. for now i've lost all of something... and for that there is nothing but an incredible sense of loss. the depth of the hole is getting deeper. the amount of space is getting less.An indefinable sense of loss. I don't feel it as sharply as he does. But it's there. I guess we all feel that way from time to time for one reason or another.
After two dinners at the Shebab I have put on five pounds weight. It's just as well there is a walk planned for Sunday.
Wow, what a PERFECT day for the first hike of the year! The forecast said possible snow showers overnight, but there was no snow this morning, just a thick frost and a crystal clear sunny day. The plan was that everyone who wanted to go on the walk should meet at Arncliffe at 10:15, with a view to setting off at 10:30 to walk over the hills to Malham and back again. I picked up Michael and Georg from the University at 9:30, but I had grossly underestimated the time it would take to drive to Arncliffe. In fact, it's over 40 miles, and the last part is along narrow twisty lanes as you get higher up into the Yorkshire Dales. We arrived a couple of minutes after half past ten, just in time to see the others setting off up the footpath. I had to run after them and tell them to wait a couple of minutes while we put our boots on.
It was a mixed bunch on the walk, as usual in our cosmopolitan Department. There were two Australian visitors, 4 Brits and 4* Germans, the * being a baby carried in her father's rucksack. (Actually, one of the Germans is Austrian, but then Austrians and Germans are essentially the same, aren't they?)
I wish I had a digital camera so that I could show you how spectacularly beautiful the Dales are on a crisp winter's day. The hills are rounded and grass-covered, with outcrops of limestone, and the land is divided into little fields by centuries-old dry-stone walls. The ground was just sufficiently frozen to be easy to walk on. Most of the year the paths are very muddy, and they can be almost impassable in places, so the going is much easier when it's frozen underfoot. The only drawback was a fierce, bitterly cold northerly wind that blew all day.
We had the country completely to ourselves until we reached Malham Tarn, where we stopped for our picnic lunch. Malham is a real tourist honeypot, and even on a cold February day there were literally hundreds of people on the path from Malham Tarn to Malham Cove. Then we set off on another route over the hills back to Arncliffe, and once again we were in a totally empty landscape, apart from a few sheep huddled against dry-stone walls for shelter from the wind.
I don't really think that Austrians are the same as Germans. I just put that bit in as a sure-fire way to rile Rotti. In fact, Georg (the Austrian) is a delectable youth. He is a PhD student from Vienna, with some kind of scholarship from the Austrian government that requires him to spend a year of his studies abroad. He arrived a couple of weeks ago, and this was the first time that I had met him. With his prominent jaw, close cropped skinhead haircut and skier's headband, he looks drop dead gorgeous. And he's intelligent and sociable (guess whose company I kept for most of the day). Even Rotti would like this Austrian.
It was past 6 pm when I got home, having dropped off Michael and Georg at their houses. I thought that I would be ravenous after six hours walking in the teeth of an arctic gale, but I didn't feel any more hungry than usual, just extremely tired, in fact totally shattered. I just hope I can stay awake long enough to upload this entry. Zzzzzzzzzz
It is considered vulgar and tacky to talk about counters, but that is not going to stop me, on the day when the counter on my contents page reaches 10,000. I started it on 3 June last year, so that averages out at a bit under 40 hits a day. Not exactly in the superstar league, of course, but a good deal higher than I would have expected when I started. And if you click on the NedStat counter (the little graph logo beside the numerical counter) you will see that I have had visitors from no fewer than 59 different countries.
What's more, check out the stats for the Gay Diary Ring. I mean it: go and check that link before reading on---it is a very interesting site that records the level of activity of each site in the ring. Which is the "most active site" on the whole ring, apart from the ring organiser's site? That's right, it's good ol' lobo solo.
Okay, I admit it, I'm a real counters junkie.
Delve a bit deeper into what these counters reveal, however, and you will find a slightly different story. For a start, the numerical counter consistently registers more hits than the NedStat counter. I think this is because when someone comes to the contents page, goes off to one of the other pages and then comes back to the contents page, the numerical counter clocks up a new hit for each return visit, whereas the NedStat counter only records a single visit.
But something else is happening to boost the number of visitors to these pages. This is a GeoCities site, and as such it has a simple, re-usable address. The fact is, I am not the first occupant of this address. There was someone else at WestHollywood/5775/ before me, who had a site called "Leather's Home Page". How do I know that? Well, I put a NedStat counter on my front page too. One of the features that NedStat provides is its ReferStat option, which tells you where your visitors come from. More precisely, if someone reaches your site by following a link, it tells you the URL of the site that they linked from. It puzzled me at first that these URLs all seemed to contain words like "bears" or "fistfucking". But when I checked out these sites, I discovered that they contained links not to lobo solo but to Leather's Home Page. This seems to have been quite a raunchy site, that attracted a lot of visitors. My guess is that it was probably evicted by GeoCities for infringing their guidelines. But the visitors keep coming, from these obsolete links, and they must find my innocuous little site a big disappointment. At any rate, that seems to account for why so many people arrive at these pages. The rate seems to have slackened off a bit in recent weeks, but that may be partly because NedStat have been having problems (their server was out of action completely for the last three days of January).
But what about the evidence of the Gay Diary Ring stats? Doesn't that show clearly that this is the second most popular site on the ring? We-e-ll, yes and no. This site certainly generates a lot of activity within the ring. But you have to ask what is meant by the "most active sites". It turns out that the degree of activity is measured by counting the number of times that someone goes to the Gay Diary Ring banner on my front page and clicks on one of the links ("next", "skip previous", "random", etc.) in order to get to another site on the ring. In other words, the "most active sites" are those that people most want to get away from. Hmm.
Maybe counters aren't such a good thing after all.
Just about the hottest theatre tickets in Britain at the moment are for the West Yorkshire Playhouse's production of The Tempest, with Ian McKellen as Prospero. The entire run has been sold out for several weeks now, and since McKellen's Oscar nomination tickets have been even more in demand. But Mary's friend Christine was smart enough to make a block booking for the M.E. group back in November, and we went to yesterday evening's performance.
Forty years ago, I had The Tempest as a set text for A level English [translation for American readers: I had to study this play when I was in twelfth grade]. I have never seen it or read it again since then, and I thought that I had totally forgotten every word of it. But last Sunday something happened to make me realise that it is still buried somewhere in my subconscious. It happened as we were driving out to Arncliffe for The Walk (from which I have now recovered, though my legs were stiff for a couple of days afterwards). My German passenger Michael asked if I was an expert on Shakespeare. I modestly denied it, of course, and I asked him why he wanted to know. He said that he had come across a quotation that he thought was from Hamlet, but having read through the whole play he had been unable to find it. The quotation was "We are such stuff as dreams are made on..."
Without even thinking, I automatically continued "...and our little life is rounded with a sleep", and told him that it was from The Tempest. He was much impressed, and so was I. I had no idea I still had that stuff stored in my brain after all these years.
McKellen plays Prospero as a tired elderly magician who only occasionally shows any passion at all. Some people have been disappointed by his low key interpretation of this role, but I thought it was very effective on the whole. The reason McKellen has decided to give up the international stage and come back for a season in his home town of Leeds is that he likes the intimacy and audience contact of a smallish local theatre. Admittedly, he sometimes overdid the intimate approach, and there were times when we could scarcely hear him in Row J. The rest of the cast were excellent, especially Stephano and Trinculo in their scenes with the 'monster' Caliban.
The thing I found most striking about this production was the way the producer emphasised the magical aspects of the play as though it was a computer fantasy game. Prospero exercised his magic from within a circle of large stones, and whenever he summoned up Ariel and his other sprites to do his bidding there was the same spooky electronic music and dim blue lighting that you see in the temple areas of Riven. I knew I was not treating Shakespeare with the respect he deserves when I suddenly realised that I was thinking of Prospero's magic book as a 'linking book'.
But then I wouldn't be surprised if many of today's fantasy stories and games weren't inspired by this story of a magician controlling spirits and monsters on an imaginary island. Shakespeare was just four hundred years ahead of his time.
I had meetings in London on Thursday and Friday, which meant an overnight stay. I suggested to Mary that she should come too, so that we could take in a show on Thursday evening. But she has been short of energy recently, with her M.E., and she did not think she could manage it. That meant that I was free for that evening, and I had been planning a leisurely visit to Chariots. But it occurred to me on the train that I ought to do something different for a change. After all, London is one of the world's great capital cities, with a huge variety of cultural activities and entertainments, and yet every time I have some free time there I end up doing the same thing. I thought, just because Mary's not with me, that's no reason why I can't go to a show this evening.
The train arrived in London an hour before the meeting was due to start, so I checked in to the hotel and then walked down to the Shaftesbury Theatre to see if they had any tickets for Rent that evening. Sure, no problem. Thursday evening, middle of February, seats available in all parts of the house. I chose a mid price seat in the rear stalls, £26.
The meeting did not finish until after 5 pm, which did not leave enough time to fit in a visit to Chariots before the show started at 7.30, so I went to the Covent Garden Health Spa instead. This is a sort-of-gay sauna, much more discreet and reserved than Chariots, on Endell Street, just a few minutes' walk from the Shaftesbury Theatre. I used to go there at one time, before discovering other, more lively saunas. It is several years since I was last there, and it is not nearly so prim and proper as it used to be. I guess the Metropolitan Police have become a bit more tolerant of gay establishments in recent years. I met a nice guy called Tom there, but could not spend much time with him before having to leave for the theatre.
What shall I say about Rent? Well, it was okay. I suppose. If you like that sort of thing. Certainly it was better than sitting in the hotel room watching TV. No, actually, I have to admit that it was a disappointment. After Mickey's enthusiastic report on it when he saw it last August, I was expecting something better. The couple sitting next to me left at the interval, and I wondered if I should have done the same. But the second half improved quite a bit, with the only memorable song of the whole show ("Seasons of Love"). Maybe I would have enjoyed the whole thing more if I had not been on my own. But Mary certainly wouldn't have liked it. Too loud, my dear, altogether too noisy.
Rent is described as a rock opera based on La Bohème, and the story line does follow Puccini's opera fairly closely. Except that, instead of Mimi dying of consumption, this version has Collins's transvestite boyfriend Angel dying of Aids. In La Bohème, Colline doesn't have a boyfriend, as far as I remember. Maybe it would be a better opera if he did. But my verdict on Rent is: give me Puccini, any day of the week.
When I made some critical remarks about the historical accuracy of the film Shakespeare in Love last month, Mickey wrote to say that it is a pretty kewl film (his spelling, not mine :) ). So when Mary said she wasn't well enough to go to a show in London last week, I suggested that we should see this film at the weekend instead, and go out for dinner afterwards.
We went to the new Warner Village multiplex, one of those places with seats more like armchairs, and arm rests incorporating a cup-holder big enough to hold the largest tub of popcorn. I loathe the smell of popcorn. Why do they always have to sell it in cinemas these days? It's one of those pernicious American imports that we could do without.
Since writing that entry last month, I had seen a few reviews of Shakespeare in Love, and it was clear from them that this isn't meant to be a serious film. It's more like a satire on Hollywood movie makers, set in 16th century England, and isn't intended to tell you about the real life of Shakespeare, any more than you would go to see the Life of Brian to learn about the historical life of Jesus. So the message was: lighten up, Chris, don't take this thing seriously, think of it as Monty Python's Life of Will. If you watch it in that spirit then it is certainly a very funny and clever film, and we both enjoyed it a lot.
Some of the incidents could have come straight out of Monty Python, like the scene towards the end where Queen Elizabeth leaves the theatre. As she walks towards her carriage she has to cross a muddy puddle. Walter Raleigh and the other courtiers start to fumble with the clasps of their cloaks so that they can lay them down to make a path for her, but she snarls "Oh forget it, you're too late", and strides through the puddle. (Of course, the whole scene is wildly impossible. The Queen never went to the theatre. If she wanted to see a play then she summoned the players to her, to give a command performance at one of her palaces. But that's just me being pedantic again.)
Unfortunately, we went to a matinee performance where the audience was stolid and unresponsive. I would have preferred a late night student audience that would have reacted raucously to some of the one-liners, such as when the Thames oarsman says "I had that Christopher Marlowe in the back of my boat once." Or when Will and Viola's lovemaking is interrupted by her nurse, and he says "Stay but a little, I will come again" (in the play, that is Juliet's line, but Joseph Fiennes gave it a whole new level of meaning *G*).
But now let's get back to the real Shakespeare. I tried very hard not to be annoyed when the film made out that his most famous sonnet, no. 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"), was written for his girlfriend, when the fact is that it is one of those that he wrote for his young man. You can see that clearly if you read it together with its companion sonnet, no. 19, where the poet pleads with Time not to deface the boy's adolescent beauty:
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,And if that's not enough to convince you that these poems are written for a man, look at the next sonnet, no. 20, where the poet addresses the young man in explicitly sexual terms:
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,
And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood;
...
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:
O, carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.
Yet, do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
A woman's face, with Nature's own hand paintedIn other words, Shakespeare would love the young man in the same way that he loves a woman, if it were not for the fact that Nature had carelessly endowed him with a "thing" (a "prick", to be precise). He seems to be saying that because of this, only women can have the physical "use" of the young man's love. But in some of the following sonnets, as his relationship with the young man deepens, he leaves some hints that maybe they did have a physical relationship.
Hast thou, the Master-Mistress of my passion;
...
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure.
You'll have gathered by now that I love Shakespeare's sonnets. I'll probably come back to them from time to time, and inflict some more of them on you.
The past couple of days have been frustrating, though not in the way I had expected.
Once every two years the Council of the London Math. Soc. holds a two-day meeting to review its activities and plan new developments. This year the meeting took place in the Palace Hotel, Manchester, from Friday lunchtime to late yesterday afternoon. The paper that I had to present, on publications, was the first item on the agenda, and it went very smoothly. After that I could sit back and relax. But the reason I thought that this was going to be a frustrating occasion was nothing to do with the meeting itself. It was just that here I was, staying overnight in Manchester, the city with the best gay scene in Britain (including London), without any opportunity to take advantage of it because I was closeted in meetings all the time.
The Friday afternoon session went on well into the evening, followed by dinner (a very good dinner, I have to admit). It was about ten thirty by the time we had finished, and most of the others adjourned to the bar. I took the opportunity to slip away, and I don't think anyone noticed that I had gone. At any rate nobody commented on it the next day. If they did notice, they probably thought I was tired and wanted an early night. I went to my room to change into something more casual, and then set off for a little walk around the town.
The Palace Hotel is only a couple of minutes' walk from Canal Street, the heart of the gay district. It's amazing how that district has changed since I lived in Manchester twenty years ago. Then, the whole area was more or less derelict. Now, the canal has been restored, and the old warehouses alongside it have all been converted into restaurants, bars and clubs. Canal Street has been pedestrianised, and was full of people on Friday night. I wandered among the crowds for a bit, then went in to the H2O sauna club, which stays open all night at weekends, and was quite busy.
After I had been there for an hour or two, and was beginning to think it was time to go back to the hotel to get some sleep, a young guy (couldn't have been older than 20) got in to the hot tub, sat beside me and kind of edged up close. It was obvious that he wanted a bit of a cuddle, and I was happy to oblige. But that was all he wanted. He didn't want to talk ( I didn't even find out his name). He wouldn't even make eye contact, just sat there looking ahead. He seemed glad enough to have my arm around him, enjoyed a neck rub and massage. But that was that. He just sat there, unresponsive. Eventually I gave up and left.
That's what left me feeling frustrated. It wasn't that I had no opportunity to make contact with gay Manchester, it was the contact I did make that was so frustrating. It left me wondering what makes this kid tick. What did he really want? What's the matter with me that I couldn't get through to him? I'll never see him again, but I know I will always wonder whether I could have got to make some human contact with him, other than the brief physical contact in the tub. It has happened before on several occasions that I have met someone fleetingly like that, and somehow failed to get to know them. Once the opportunity has been lost, it doesn't come back again, and you are left to regret the missed chance.
Sometimes a lantern moves along the night,
That interests our eyes. And who goes there,
I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?Men go by me whom either beauty bright
In mould or mind or what not else makes rare;
They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.Gerard Manley Hopkins