Should have just had the salad

I had a steak tonight at the hotel's canteen (it has very stark lighting and you order at a counter and carry your food to the table on a tray so it's not glamorous enough to be a restaurant - my fella would refuse to eat there). I ordered a steak (to make up for all the Subway sandwiches I've been eating) and had a bizarre conversation that went like this:

Woman: How you want it? Well done? Medium or Rare?
Me: Well done.
Woman: Well done?
Me: Yes.
Woman: Well done?
Me: Yes well done.
Woman: Well done?
Me: Yes.
Woman: Well done?
Me: Well done. Yes.
Woman: well done?

She then turned to a man who was also serving and asked him to ask me if I wanted it well done. He did.

She then checked with me again, just to see if I wanted it well done. When the meal finally arrived, 20 minutes later, the man who brought it to me said "Well done! Well done! Hahahaha!" I laughed too, but it came out a bit hysterical and some of the westerners sitting nearby looked round at me.

I think I need to go home.

Basic Lubin

I have been in Hong Kong for over a week, and feel a bit like Alan Partridge in the episode "Basic Alan", where he's bored out of his mind in a Travel-Lodge that's equidistant between Norwich and London. My life has been reduced to a repetitive series of routines. At least I get to go home tomorrow.

The people who work at Subway, where I eat most nights, could have been in Alan Partridge (if he ever went to Hong Kong). They seem fascinated by my lovelife and comment on it in a way which would be unheard of in frosty Britain.

Subway Woman: Oh you have wedding ring on. You marry?
Me: Yes
Subway Woman: To Chinese girl?
Me: No
Subway Woman: To Phillipino girl?
Me: No
Subway Woman: English?
Me: Yes

I wanted to say "Actually love I'm married to a 6 foot tall man" but didn't have the nerve or energy.

The next day, there was a teenage girl in front of me, who let me go first as she couldn't make her mind up. The people behind the counter charged her for my meal, and then informed us that they thought we were "together". "We were just saying, that she seemed a bit young for you..." the Subway Woman told me as she took my change. That's the problem with being in a country where you don't have the first language. They could be saying anything about you. And as I've suspected, sometimes they are.

I walked to the cinema to see if there was anything playing (there wasn't). On the way I passed endless fashion billboards showing perfect depictions of young, haughty, blonde, pale-skinned Caucasians, looking down on the Chinese people below, as if saying "Even if you wear these clothes, you'll never look like us, suckers!" I hate fashion at the best of times, because even the models themselves don't look like the pictures on the billboards once they've been airbrushed and had their proportions altered. But it seems an especially cruel trick to play on a whole ethnic group - so that you don't have the slightest chance of resembling a corporate idea of "beauty" and "glamour".

The "West is Best" message comes out in all sorts of odd ways. I looked at a few local gay websites while I was here and kept seeing adverts like this: "GAM seeks GWM only". Here G=Gay, M=Man, A=Asian and W=White. I also saw a few from westerners who specified "Sorry, but I don't like Chinese guys". Now I've never in my life seen an advert from an Asian guy who said he didn't like white guys, and I don't remember seeing any from white guys who don't want white guys either. And I keep bumping into white-Asian pairs of people (both gay and straight) while I'm here - where in almost all cases, the Asian person is younger and better looking than the white person. I think there's a lot of things wrong with the UK, but to be marginalised in the advertising and romantic domains in your own country... well that's pretty fucked up.

I have my own swine flu mask



Another Hong Kong trip (my 6th). It's giving my poor hands a chance to recover from two weeks of decorating work that they're completely unused to. The blisters and cuts are finally being erased away, while the general pain is starting to subside.

I'm here on my own and feeling more like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation than ever: I'm an insomniac, isolated giant. I've made no pretence at trying to come off British time, and simply stay awake all night, watching DVDs, like a sulky teenager. Some of my colleagues who came out here, have gone on about how great the night-life is - but that's not really my thing.

Introverts have a lot of internal resources to keep them going, so I'm 90% dealing with having no-one to talk to. I'm nearly finished the Zadie Smith book on Beauty, which appears to have shamelessly ripped off the plot of Howard's End (I think I may go out and buy that book afterwards). I take Zadie everywhere - she's especially useful in restaurants. None of the characters are especially likeable, but the writer is pretty observant - and there are some points of connection in the book that I can make regarding academia and social class. I've also been wearing headphones while outside. It helps cut down on the number of times hawkers try to sell you "copy watch", "fake Rolex" or "hand made suit sir". I like seeing how much westerners get angered by the continual pestering, and realising that six years ago, that was me. The trick is to give off no response at all, don't even acknowledge their presence and they usually stop immediately.

My life while here, has shrunk to a small number of streets, coffee shops and restaurants. I've done all of the touristy things on other trips, and it's less fun to sight see anyway when you're alone, so it's easier to stick to a routine. I had been wondering whether my hotel would be placed under lockdown due to Swine Flu. So far, apart from a few more people than usual wearing masks (and they love their masks in Hong Kong - I was given one at the airport but haven't put it on yet), there's not been much to report. Some schools have been closed, but everyone seems to be going about their lives as usual. June is the worst time of year to come to Hong Kong - it's notoriously humid outside, while indoors there is a distinction between "rich" places, that have air conditioniong (usually on too high so it's like being in a fridge) and "poor" places - often corridors or stairwells that don't get used much - which seem to have no oxygen and induce instant sweating. British weather isn't that bad really - rather like the British themselves - it's not very glamorous or extreme - but it very rarely becomes intolerable.

On repetition



I've spent the last few days stripping wallpaper, taking up carpets and flooring, and removing wardrobes and doors from the new house. Most of the jobs have been incredibly repetitive - scrape a bit of wall, take out a screw, then do it again X 1000. I sometimes wonder how people who work in the building profession cope, but then they would probably look at my job, which often involves repetition of a different sort (except it's on a laptop) and think the same thing. My job might be mentally tiring at times, but at least it's not physically tiring. My hands ache and are covered in tiny cuts. I've stopped noticing when my fingers bleed but just continue - the bleeding stops after a few minutes so I just pour Dettol on them at the end of the day. I forgot to wear my face mask yesterday and noticed that when I sneezed, I produced black stuff...

We have removed most of the traces of the previous owners now and have a blank slate with which to improve on. Every hour results in new discoveries. In the main bedroom, a piece of flooring had been "mended" with a flattened baked bean can. The area around the toilet in the bathroom had been boxed in with some cheap looking plywood which had a sticker on the back, proclaiming it to be a "telly cabinet". We have found old coins - some dating back 80 years. There are also bits and pieces of other people's lives - a photo of a child found under a stinking carpet in the attic. A man's blue polo shirt (size XL), still in its packaging at the back of an inbuilt wardrobe. A bit of 1930s newspaper stuck to the bottom of the floor - hidden away for years. An old Stork margarine lid - probably from the 1950s. After I'd taken up the horrible wee-stained parquay flooring in the hall, I found a hatch. Lifting it up, there were stairs going into a previously un-mentioned cellar. Sadly there were no dead bodies or hidden treasure. Just some sacks of bricks. At least it wasn't damp.



The dog wee smell is sometimes overpowering - a couple of times I have had to run out of a room and retch. I have developed a hatred of little dogs over the last few days, which I suspect will now remain with me for my entire life. They have come to represent a cluster of traits that annoy - yappy, easily excited, silly and incontinent.

Fixer-upper

Yesterday we got a new house. Me and my fella move house quite a lot - this will be number 7 in 17 years. We always say "this will be the last time", but it never is. This place is quite different from our usual purchases. We normally live in flats (now annoyingly rebranded as "apartments") which have had a weird tendency to be ex show-homes or at least have been renovated in some way. Usually we've been able to move in immediately - although, being typically wasteful and extravagant, have often redecorated just for the sake of it.

This new place is a proper house - with a garden - something which we haven't properly had for a long time (communal gardens don't count - nobody uses them). This garden is secluded and gets the sun. It's the sort of place where you could enjoy a gin and tonic without having anyone look at you. Also, the house is about as far from show-home as you can get. It was built in the 1840s and the previous owner doesn't seem to have done any decoration since the 1970s. Sadly, a lot of the original features have been removed. Some new features - rather reminiscient of Abigail's Party have been put in instead - there's a rather pointless, tiny hatch from the kichen to the dining room. There are home-made book shelves in the lounge, which have been painted in white gloss. There is bad taste wallpaper everywhere. Upstairs the bedrooms have a variety of home-made fitted wardrobes. They'll all have to go. The bathroom has uninspiring white tiles. Even worse, two little dogs have been using most of the house as a toilet for god knows how long. We spent yesterday pulling up carpets to reveal urine that had soaked through the underlay and pentrated into the floorboards. I'm hoping bleach will get rid of the worst. I don't want to be cruel about the previous owner - she's getting on a bit - and the house had clearly become too much - but I wonder how she managed to live there with the stink. There's also rising damp, possibly woodworm and the electrics look like they need a rehaul. So this looks like a long-term project. Fortunately we don't have to move in until we're ready, so we'll try and get as much as possible sorted out over the summer. Tonight we got the carpets taken away. Tomorrow we're going to get the fitted wardrobes out.

I suspect I may be making a big deal of the problems. My parents and sister came round today to have a look at it. They liked it - my mother liked all the things that I have complained about above. She said she would keep the wardrobes and the floral wallpaper. She loved the hatch. She couldn't see what was wrong about the bathroom. "From the way you were talking about it, I was expecting it to be like a condemned property." They couldn't even smell the dog wee (though I had gone on an insane bleach blitz this morning). I don't care. I suspect the house has never been occupied by two difficult-to-please gay men. It isn't going to know what hit it...

Smell my cheese!

After one Alan Partridge moment too many, Jonathan Ross is losing his "live radio show" status and will now have the suffer the indignity of being recorded and then having any offensive bits taken out before the show is aired. Last year it was the business with Russell Brand, and a couple of weeks ago he said that boys who ask for a Hannah Montana MP3 should be adopted before they brought their gay partner home. The BBC simply can't trust him.

I sort of like Ross - in the late 1980s he did a series about cult films which influenced me a lot. I remember he interviewed people like John Waters, Russ Meyer and Herschell Gordon Lewis. He was even on the set of Hairspray when it was being filmed. I listen to his radio 2 program occasionally, and often like the eclectic mix of music.

One thing that does make me cringe about Ross's tv show is his house band - 4 Poofs and a Piano.

"Puff" was the only word for homosexuality that I knew until I was about 12. My father would sometimes talk about people he worked with, saying "He's a puff." He was always quite friendly to these people, but there was something about the way he said "He's a puff", that wasn't very nice. It was the 1970s and almost everyone was homphobic. But part of me takes a spiteful glee in the fact that his own son ended up as one, and eventually he found the "puff" comments of his workmates so hurtful that he had to tell them to shut up. I love helping people to learn to improve, especially if they get to suffer a bit in doing so.

Here are the Poofs in action.



I guess there are a number of reactions to them. You could say that they're unashamedly camp and have "reclaimed" the "poof" identity. This might be a good thing - the internalised homphobia of many gay men who claim to be "straight-acting" and not interested in "fems" is so dreary. The 4 puffs are unapologetic about their effeminacy, and show that they are good sports by using the word on themselves. They use it first, and perhaps that takes away some of its power to wound.

On the other hand, some would argue that they are "Uncle Toms" - simply pandering to existing prejudice, and being complicit with homophobia in order to obtain a small amount of power from it. Their "poofiness" is their gimmick - and it's the reason why Ross has them on the show. They're not going to threaten his masculinity. And while some people may view them as brave or engaging in a reclaiming project, there are bound to be television viewers who do not "get" the potentially post-modern or ironic reading of the group. Instead, they will engage with the band in a much more straightforward way, having their own prejudices validated. The media doesn't really go out of its way to show representations of gay people who are NOT camp, funny, harmless etc, and the four Puffs contribute towards that stereotype. In the context of Ross's Hannah Montana comments, they start to appear a bit more like something to be laughed at rather than laughed with. Would the BBC countenance Four Pakis and a Piano?

So.... I don't know where I stand on the Puffs and Ross. I want to give Ross the benefit of the doubt, but he's starting to push it. It's for the best that his show goes to recorded status rather than live. As for the Puffs- maybe it's time they rebranded. Maybe they could call themselves "Jonathan Ross's Dildoes" or something like that.

Retro

For my birthday I've asked by fella for this.



I've been wanting a record player for a few years now - a lot of the music I listen to was made before I was born. While I love the convenience of things like MP3 players, I sort of miss the connection with the past that you get when you take an LP out of its sleeve, place it on a turntable and watch it start to spin round and round. That's the way that people in the 20th century used to listen to that music, and I like the idea of reappropriating those behaviours, as part of the experience of listening to old music.

Steepletone is the company which makes these retro products. I did consider buying a proper authentic old record player, but in the end decided to get something which had the advantages of being new (and working) but worked in the same way as something old. And if I really want to, it has a USB port also.

Now I just need to find some old jazz LPS to play on it.

Why isn't everyone dead yet?

Wasn't "Swine flu week" exciting? Did you think that everyone was going to die? Did you hoard canned food? When my leaflet from the government arrived, telling me what steps to take if I got the sniffles, I felt like I was living in chapter 2 of an exciting post-apocalypse novel. It's one of my favourite genres.

So I was expecting by this point to be one of a handful of sole survivors in a post-plague Britain. I've seen "Survivors" and "The Stand" and have spent ages rehearsing "brave" facial expressions, and had fashioned a "Mad Max" costume out of an old 1970s fleece coat.

Now it's all wasted. I get up and people are going about their business like nothing happened.

I feel cheated and next month, when the media decide we're all going to die of something else, I'll ignore them and play Fallout 3 instead.