Evacuated

The husband was away last night, so I had bottle of beer and too many Pringles. I fell asleep while watching tv, so decided to have an early night. At 10.50pm as I closed the curtains I noticed a big police van parked outside the house. I ignored it. Men have been resurfacing the road nearby and they've been closing off access, so I just assumed it was to do with that. When you live in a town centre you quickly learn to ignore a lot of things. Or you move to the countryside.

At 11.30 there was a loud knock at the front door, waking me up. It was the police. I remembered something my mother said years ago "If the police knock at your door at night, it's never good news."

"How many people are in the house?" asked the policeman.

"Just me." I said.

Things then went surreal. "There's a car parked up the road from you and we suspect there's a bomb in it, so we're asking all the residents to leave their homes for their own safety until we've been able to disable it."

I am naturally stroppy and difficult. "Are you forcing me to leave my house?" I asked.

"No, but we are strongly advising it."

"Oh alright." I grumped.

I dragged on my clothes and went outside. The street was full of bustle, with police and army running all over the place and communicating on walkie talkies. Someone had cordoned off the area with that plastic tape stuff. I had to duck under it to get to the "evacuee zone". Which was my local pub.

My area is mainly occupied by respectable elderly folk, so it was hardly suprising that I was the first one to arrive. Gradually the pub started to fill up. There was a jovial atmosphere. I exchanged emails with the husband and drank beer. At 1.30 am the policeman came back and said we could leave.

"Was there a bomb then?" I asked him.

He looked embarrassed. "No, but we had a lot of evidence that there was."

The bomb disposal robot traipsed down the hill. It looked a bit like a giant version of WALL-E. I took a photo of it and went to bed.



Turned out it was a car battery

Pope off!

Child abuse is a terrible thing - and the Catholic church is guilty on two counts - acting as a paedophile ring for decades, and filling impressionable young minds with absolute nonsense about an invisible superbeing who can read your mind and will send you to hell when you die if you don't do everything his so-called representatives on earth tell you to do.

As you can imagine, I am hardly taken with the Pope's state visit to the UK. As Stephen Fry and others have argued, he's welcome to fork out for an EasyJet flight himself and pay for a National Express coach up to Scotland and back to London if he fancies - there are plenty of people who I don't like, but as long as they're spending their own money, there's not much I can do about it. But I do resent having my own tax money spent so he and his entourage can get gold star treatment. In fact, I took half an hour off work this afternoon as a protest.

I would much rather the money be spent on giving out free condoms to people. Or towards youth services for LGBT people. Or counselling for people who were abused by members of the Catholic church.

And as for your sidekick, Cardinal Walter Kasper, who compared Britain to a 3rd World Country - someone give him his own reality tv show. He's Secularism's new Best Friend. With people like that speaking on behalf of the Pope, atheists like me can put their feet up and have a Kitkat. Cardinal Kasper has been bumped from the visit, although the official story is that his gout is playing up. Gout? Are people still getting that? (Are people still using terms like "third world" for that matter?) I guess if you're stuffing your face so much that you have gout, then even a relatively rich country like the UK will look a bit "third world" to you.

I'm Just a Disco Baby

In the camply amusing film Throughly Modern Millie, Carol Channing sings the song "I'm just a Jazz Baby", where she describes how her parents where jazz musicians. However, as the film is set in the 1920s, and Carol is at least 80, she has clearly misrembered her childhood - she should have sung a song called "I'm just a Brahms Baby".



I, on the other hand, was born in the 1970s, and I am a Disco Baby. My favourite LP when growing up was this one.





I don't know why my parents bought it. They hardly ever listened to it. It had all the hits of 1977, and I played it endlessly. I thought that Baccara sounded impossibly sophisticated, glamorous and foreign, a bit like the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp.



I had an early homosexual awakening when David Soul sang Silver Lady. I had no idea what the "Indiana wind and rain" or "seedy motels" were, but he sounded so angst-ridden and down on his luck that I wanted to give him a cuddle and tell him to forget all about his silver lady.





And me and my sister used to run up and down the sitting room, dancing to The Brotherhood of Man's "Angelo". It was probably just as well that I didn't understand that it was about a suicide pact.

When the 1980s happened, I fell out of love with pop music. I didn't get electopop and all of the men either looked like Lady Di or had dour Scottish accents and seemed so cross.




It was like Margaret Thatcher was the Queen of Narnia and had taken all of my disco away. I think I spent the entire decade in a depression.

But thanks to the magic of the internet, it's possible to download the entire Disco Fever album onto my Iphone, one song at a time. Disco never really Died. It was just having a nap.

Nothing has been proved

This new government has only been in power for a few months, and there have already been three (yes three) "homosexual scandals". You can count on the Tories to be all repressed and hypocritical about sex, and after all those years of unimaginative, dour and shameless New Labour types, it's like a flashback to the 1980s. As the Pet Shop Boys lisped "Thcandal! Thuch a Thcandal!"

First was David Laws, who is technically Liberal Democrat. He resigned after three seconds when it turned out that he had claimed £40,000 expenses for renting rooms from his male partner. Then, it was Crispin Blunt (a name which sounds like a fictional flamboyant 1950s Cambridge spy) who has dropped the BOMBSHELL that he is gay (turns out his niece is Emily Blunt who was so camply wonderful in The Devil Wears Prada - I wonder if she can get him Meryl Streep's autograph?).



And even as the ink was drying on the Daily Mail over Blunt, there were onimous rumours that last Sunday's papers were going to reveal another huge gay Tory scandal. It was pretty easy to learn online that it was William Hague. I won't repeat some of the gossip I read about him, but it did raise my eyebrows (and as Divine said in Hairspray - I won't have to take my appetite suppressant tonight).

Today, the scandal unfolds. It turns out that Hague (49, bald) and his "special advisor", Chris Myers (25, attractive, thin, full head of hair) have been sharing hotel rooms together during campaigns. Here's a recent photo of them together. Do you think they make a lovely couple?

I must say, from a distance it almost looks like a picture of me and my husband (OK, so I haven't seen my 20s in a long time, but I said from a distance you bitch). I have no idea if either of them are gay, but Myers posture pings my gaydar (as does Hague's jeans - not very 49 year old Tory MP). They look like two A-Gays on their way to Waitrose to buy oranges for juicing for a fabulous dinner party (see my last posting).

Stranger still, Myers has resigned his position, citing "untrue and malicious allegations". Now, if the allegations are untrue, why would you feel the need to resign? Surely, you would hold your head up high, demand that the scurrilous rumour-mongers come up with proof, perhaps talk about suing them, and continue as normal. To resign... well it only raises further questions.

Hague has released a statement denying an "improper relationship", and pointing out that he and his wife Fion are doing very well, and have been trying for a child, despite her miscarriages.

There seem to have been a spate of stories about closeted men in the public eye recently - most of whom are in their 40s and 50s. As I said before, I have no idea if Hague is gay or not. But I wish these stories would just go away. If you are a closeted gay man in the public eye - for Chrissakes - just come out already. It's 2010. You are being very dreary. There is NOTHING to be ashamed of.