Local Dancing for Local People

Ah, the provincial gay club. I went out in Cheltenham last night, which is not a sentence I expect to write very often. The club sat, of course, at the far end of the high street, distinct and separate from the mainstream clubs and bars; this increasingly-lonely walk to the outskirts is always the first marker of a visit to a small-town deviant venue. Opening the front door, we were gazed at in surprise by the two women on the front desk, who both looked and sounded like the kind of figures you normally see scrabbling in the rubble of a post-apocalyptic wasteland in a dystopian SF film. It was a relief when they accepted our money as a means of admittance, rather than our wristwatches, or water, or meat. Their perplexity at the arrival of three people they’d never seen before was palpable, which is, of course, the other marker.

Once inside, what surprised was that the majority of those there were young lesbians, rather than the more-usual, wall-hugging men of a certain age and level of quiet desperation. What then appalled was that none of them could dance, choosing instead to shuffle morosely at, at best, half speed, while filling as much of the surrounding area as possible. This might have been less noticeable if the woman choosing the music on the laptop near the door (not, certainly not, please note, the DJ) hadn’t been careering inexpertly from S Club 7 to House of Pain to Queen to PJ & Duncan, like somebody who had got up late for their GCSE DJ practical exam, despite not having done even the most rudimentary revision, like, oh, I don’t know… actually listening to any music before. Any music. Ever.

Add to that an odd lanky chap dressed like Mark Curry’s younger brother who was grinding himself up against the back of anyone who’d let him, and someone else who’d stepped straight out of one of those X-Factor scene-setting montages of auditionees, who danced like someone pastiching Weird Al Yankovic’s parody of Michael Jackson, and you have the archetypal touring night out.

I hope that doesn’t sound like a cynical metropolitan sneer. I’m neither a city slicker nor a scene queen, but it always comes as a surprise how small-town so much of this country is, and the gay scene in a typical English town is, inevitably, even more so. Touring often takes you to places that you wouldn’t otherwise visit, and certainly places that you wouldn’t think of going out socially. I grew up in a couple of cities – small cities, but cities nonetheless – and they felt pretty confined at the time. To be touring the country twenty years on and coming across places that have that same rarified, claustrophobic feeling… I suppose there is a kind of ‘there but for the grace of God…’. And maybe that says more about me than the place itself. Nonetheless, I’m happy to be moving on. To Guildford.

IN SUMMARY: Taxi!

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.

Is there a word to explain the feeling of realisation that someone who you ambivalently accepted as a friend on Facebook has subsequently de-friended you?

These are the taxing moral questions thrown up by the advance of social networking.

I think the person who asked me to be their Facebook-friend was someone who, on joining the weird, embarrassing, personal free-for-all, went trawling for everyone they’d ever met, sending out Friend invitations scattergun. When I received their request, I felt resentful that they were forcing me into a decision; I’m not not their friend – we worked together once, and I enjoyed it, and liked spending time in their company, and would again, if the opportunity presented itself – but, equally, it’s entirely likely that we’ll never meet again, and I don’t know what it says about our relationship if I give it ‘official’ ‘friendship’ ‘endorsement’ in this way. Well, it says I’m happy for them to look at a picture of me in stretch-lycra, for one thing, and I don’t know that that would necessarily have come up in conversation otherwise.

Eventually, I thought it was making more of a statement to refuse than to accept, so, I accepted.

Cut to: yesterday. While avoiding doing any proper work, I was idling through Facebook, when I came across their name on a comment made to another tenuous ‘friend’. Their picture was blanked out, which was what piqued my curiosity, so I clicked on their name – and that was when I found out that I’d been given the heave-ho.

Now, in a way, this is great. We’re back to where we started i.e. being former colleagues with no other links. But, of course, I’m aware that at some point, they went through their Friend list, and chose to jettison me. They looked at my name, and little thumbnail photo, and thought ‘nah, it’s not working out’. Well, I’m only human. Of flesh and blood I’m made. And I’m a bit upset by that. Not a lot upset, not properly upset, of course, but it has registered, somewhere.

That, it seems, is my reward for accepting their request. That’s what you get for being nice and not wanting to seem rude.

Well, know this – from today, I’m a little bit older and a little bit wiser.

IN SUMMARY: I can’t wait to un-follow them on Twitter.

Ka-Pow! Hee hee!

I was woken at 4 o’clock this morning by someone kicking a gate. I think that’s what he was doing; he might have been hitting a gate, or trying to climb over it in a slapstick manner. I don’t know precisely what he was doing with the gate as it was 4 a.m. and I was trying to pretend that I hadn’t just woken up.

I live in a block of flats in the city centre, so there’s a certain amount of noise throughout the day, though we do quite well at night. You get idiots who show their delight at the amount they’ve drunk by screaming at the tops of their voices, of course, but that’s usually around midnight or so. I can live with that. 4 in the morning is a bit off though.

I heard a bloke shouting at the gate moron, and I imagine that he must have gone soon after that, as I managed to fall asleep again. Before that, however, I was lying in bed, concocting all manner of elaborate tortures for the empty-headed fool. This is the kind of situation where I’d love to have super powers. If ever the question gets asked, people usually reply that they’d like to be able to fly, or become invisible so they could walk into changing rooms and see other people naked, but I’d like to be able to inconvenience idiots.

The gate moron had no other desire than to let people know he existed, in the most irritating way possible, so it would have been a joy, just by thinking it, to make him disappear and pop up 30 miles away, far from any kind of public transport. And in the spirit of sociability that he extended to the residents of this block of flats, I’d also make his clothes vanish, and write on his chest, in glitter, the legend ‘I am a silly twat’. Let’s see whether gate-kicking would be a priority for him in that situation.

I’ve always thought that being to magically vanish clothing would be a fabulous power to have. Not for the obvious abuses you could make of it, no – rather because if you found yourself embroiled in, or witness to, any kind of violent incident, you could simply click your fingers and, poof!, the aggressors would find themselves suddenly at a very silly disadvantage. Nothing would dissipate violent tension as quickly as seeing someone realise they were exposing the paucity of their, um, arsenal to the world. You can’t seriously threaten someone if your bits are swaying in the breeze. And, at the very least, barefoot, they’re going to be risking a stubbed toe. Chances are that they’d run off, to look for a convolutedly-secretive way home, everyone else would have a good laugh and civility would be restored. It would be a wonderfully farcical response to some very nasty behaviour. Enforced nakedness, it’s a crime beater, take my word for it.

IN SUMMARY: I’ve never been in a fight. Don’t make me.

“Would you mind awfully if I – ” THUD.

My arms are shaking. Not wildly and madly, like I’m on children’s television. Just continually, like I’m coming off heroin. I had a ‘personal trainer taster session’ at the gym today. Thankfully, that description wasn’t taken too literally.

I’ve recently joined the gym and the chap who inducted me, John, was keen for me to take advantage of this free session, despite me making it clear that personal finances (lack of) made it highly unlikely that there’d be subsequent bookings.

So, today I’ve been holding weights at angles above my head that I could barely sustain, pulling things that didn’t want to be pulled, pushing things that didn’t want to be pushed, and getting myself into odd positions on large bouncy balls. At one point, he was talking to me, after having made me walk in a line with a kettle ball – kettle weight? kettle drum? kettle? – in each hand that I was holding above my shoulders, alternating with – oh, this is too difficult to describe. Look, I’d been carrying some weights, and then he wanted to explain something to me, and I seriously thought I was going to faint. And I had that lovely English feeling, of not wanting him to notice that I was going slightly cross-eyed, of not wanting to cause a fuss, as his voice faded out while his lips kept moving, and I started to wonder how unseemly it would be for a man in his thirties to be carried out of there by paramedics. I did recover, a minute or two later, at which point he was asking whether I wanted to do another set of the indescribable weight-walking thing, and I had to admit defeat. The memory of PE lessons of yore flooded back at that moment, and my adult self coalesced in a puddle round my trainers.

Oh, and at one point, I was performing core-stability exercises next to Bruno Tonioli from Strictly Come Dancing, which was a first for both of us.

IN SUMMARY: I’m knackered, but I saw a man off the telly.