He will (most likely) not be English

It is widely held amongst gay brethren in the immigrant community in London, and by 'widely' I mean 'nearly to a man,' that the best way to confuse, frustrate and perhaps even self-flagellate the living daylights out of one's self - while earning a constantly diminishing return on social investment and losing faith in the general good of humanity - is to date Englishmen. I was not afforded the luxury of tasting the wisdom of these grapes through the generosity of the vine: Unfortunately, I came into this most saddening and perhaps ultimately defeatist piece of vital information empirically.

I've lived in London a shave under eight years, and I've attempted to date several gay Englishmen. I've also studied, from a fairly sturdy North American point of view, the social culture of this country shaped like a sitting person facing to the left (England, not the UK). All I can say about it is that I've never been more consistently dumbfounded by such consistent misbehaviour. And, like a kicked dog emulating a boomerang, I'm still gathering data but learning next to nothing.

Even so, out of moral obligation to anyone who may wish to know, or need to commiserate, I feel I should share the evidence. How you prosecute is up to you. So grab a bottle of red, a score card and sit somewhere comfortable.

Of all human realities, the one whose execution dogs the civilised and polite more than any other is that it is painfully difficult to reconcile the need to let another down. When I have had to do it, I have as a rule listed alternative compensatory actions that I'd rather undertake, simply because they'd be easier: Nailing my hand to a desktop, eating a box of razor blades, stepping on a mewling kitten with golf shoes, e.g. But the act of disappointing another by natural law accompanies socialising of virtually every stripe, and therefore must be acknowledged, accepted and swiftly but surely - but most of all kindly - carried out. I have, to the best of my ability, always tried to do so.

The reasons are twofold: The first is that it's a despicable crime against the self to continue an association that affronts inner harmony (i.e., the alignment of feeling, thought and action). And the other is that stringing someone along is simply a lousy, selfish thing to do. However, it is the ingrained, inexorable, infuriating way of, in my experience, better than 97% of gay Englishmen to ignore these two simple truths in their entirety, especially the latter.

Here's a typical scenario: Meet an attractive Englishman. They're socially very tolerant, often polite to a self-immolating fault and more falsely amiable than any American bidding you 'Have a nice day.' So approach with caution, but be fooled by their charms anyway.

Next, ask him out on a date. He'll say 'yes,' in my experience, about 99 out of 100 times, even if he'd rather step on a mewling kitten etc. It's what he's been trained to do in his childhood home, at school, at the office, in his granny's parlour, at the side of his granddad's death bed and in every other waking, and no doubt many sleeping, moments. It would require hypnotic, drug-enforced, Nazi-sponsored re-education in order for him to respond as he would genuinely prefer, if only he were still able to entertain exactly what it is he does prefer.

Then go on the date. It will most likely be pleasant, if not better than that, and you may arrange a second date at the end of the first. You may even go on the second, and third and fourth and many, many other dates. All will seem to be going swimmingly.

Eventually, however, the water will vanish beneath you as though someone had opened a plug hole the size of Surrey in a riverbed. You will ring to arrange your sixth, or tenth, or twenty-third date, and his voicemail will answer. In most cases, that will be the last you hear of his voice, if he had been thoughtful enough to record an outgoing message.

My American friend M turned up one night at a pub to meet me several months ago. M is in his late 30s, has an MBA, a great job, a physique most gay men dream of achieving and/or getting next to and a wonderfully understated wit. He is, by most measures, a catch. He is a good friend, although the rigours of his work have kept him from getting out much. Even so, I am normally aware of his significant life developments.

He sat down that night and wore a face that signaled either that he'd lost his job or that someone had stolen his bicycle.

"What's up, M?" I asked him.

"I just got dumped," he said, "by this guy I'd been dating for the past four months."

This is a good time to point out a wonderful adaptive mechanism many of us use to try to cope with the rocky waves that dating a Limey kicks up. It is akin to a strategy embraced by many pregnant women, who, for at least a trimester, withhold the good news of their pregnancy in case they should tell everyone they know, only to see the worst happen. Fortunately for pregnant women, the odds of their carriage going beyond the first three months are about 1,274,988 times greater than reaching the same milestone when dating a gay Englishman.

And God bless M for trying.

"I didn't even know you were dating anyone!" I blurted. "So who is this guy? What happened?"

Then I asked my new standard form question number three: "Was he English?"

You bet he was, and four months later, the voicemail hex was cast. In this case, it was even more egregious: he ended with M via text message. No matter the form, the terminus is always unexpected and painfully disappointing, like the day the gene that controls a debilitating hereditary disease you didn't know you were carrying suddenly switches on, and you're left to deal with whatever horror until it kills you - and that's that.

I've dated the Englishman who, for three months, enjoyed every second of our physical relationship until one afternoon, when it simply all stopped. I didn't realise it had stopped until he turned up at my birthday do three hours late, then left an hour later. Sometimes people lose interest. That's fine. What is not fine is being intimate with someone for 90 more or less consecutive days, then not being kind or strong enough to say "I'm sorry, but something's changed, and I don't want to do this anymore."

I've dated the Englishman who seemed keen as Christmas for two months, and with whom I thought I was falling in love, who told me in the end that the timing was off. I found out a few months later when I stumbled upon his profile on a dating website that I was neither equipped with the physique in which he was interested nor in tune with his sexual proclivities, both of which he'd neglected to mention anywhere along the way. Timing indeed.

I've tried to date the Englishman with whom I had one whirlwind 24-hour date, during which he indicated in every manner of word and deed that he was as comfortable and happy spending time with me as I was with him. (He did, after all, spend the night and the next eight waking hours with me in my flat.) When I sent him a text message asking about anything other than getting together again, he replied. When I sent him a text message or left a voice message asking about getting together again, he didn't reply until I sent the next text message about something else again. I couldn't determine if he wanted simply to pursue a light epistolary relationship, or any relationship at all, and gave up after the third try. Communicating with many species of lower vertebrates is easier and often more fulfilling.

Etc.

There are times of course when I wonder if I've become unfairly jaded towards an ethnicity of men in particular while ignoring the sheer difficulty of being human generally. But I don't think so. I've not faced the same issue with Welshmen, Scotsmen or Irishmen, whether Northern or southern. Europeans have generally also let me know where I've stood.

All that I can potentially deduce from my experiences with Englishmen is that actions, and even inactions, speak more loudly than Englishmen are permitted to. So if I have any useful advice, it would be this: Take an Englishman's deeds at face value. If they don't engage, leave them alone and go date someone else - or strike up a conversation with a cat. If an Englishman does engage, you're in there until he doesn't engage. But never, never ever should you expect a straightforward, spoken affirmation or refutation. You'll not hear from an Englishman's lips any of the following simple statements:

"That would be nice, but not with you."

"This just isn't going to work for me."

"I do like you, but not in that way."

Or most simply of all,

"No, but thank you all the same."

When dealing with Englishmen, there is only one reliable truth: "nothing" actually means "no." Vacuums are in fact empty spaces. Silence is indeed the lack of sound. Accept this, and it might just get you through.

I'd like to invite Englishmen to prove me wrong, but waiting for that Godot will all but ensure I have no social life at all.

Happy-Go-Lucky, Damn You

Say what you will about Mike Leigh ("miserablist," "tetchy," "past it"), his films, especially the more realistic, subtly-or-sparsely-plotted ones, nearly always reach into what sometimes feels like the vacuum between my mobile-phone toting, wi-fi addicted, materialist Western lungs and grabs hold in a way that leaves me wide awake, full of renewed emotional capacity and transformed.

Poppy, the protagonist in Happy-Go-Lucky, is a lot to deal with. Yes, she can be irritating, but in a country - and, arguably, hemisphere - full of pessimism, angst, self-doubt and mistrust, she is not a breath of fresh air so much as a splash of clean, ice-cold water in a deeply furrowed and rather dirty face. That's what people don't like about her: she dares to feel good about being alive as often as possible. She's almost too 'American' for the England she lives in, which may be the other reason people find her so bitterly annoying. Get over it.

Happy-Go-Lucky is not, like any good film, 'about' its protagonist. There is little in the way of full-on plot. There are just glimpses of character-led stories, which contribute to its painstaking realism. We don't get a big cymbal crash at the end; we don't get to loathe ourselves as senselessly as we normally might; and we don't get to go home with the satisfaction of believing in some cockeyed tenet as simple as 'smile, and it will get you through.' At least that's what I hope we don't get.

What I got was a firm and founded reminder of a recurring truth: you are the single largest contributor to your satisfaction with your life and accountable for your own happiness. As the characters say in the end, rowing a boat blissfully around a park lake on a summer Saturday afternoon,'being a grown up' is difficult, and 'being lucky' is rooted in attitude, not in some objective reality. There's nothing easy, resigned or fluffy about it.

Now, brush your teeth and go to bed. When you wake up in the morning, try to remember that old British maxim: "Keep calm and carry on." And it wouldn't hurt you to smile a little, either.

Passed Out in a Shoreditch

On the Rocks is a club in Shoreditch. It looks as though a junior property developer on a budget bought, for the price of a doner kebab, a stretch of decommissioned city street that had once provided access to an oil refinery just off Kingland Road, and built a small structure on top of it made entirely of recycled, Luftwaffe-loosened brick that he or she found heaped behind Chariots Roman Spa. It is a squalid, sticky dump with filthy, uneven floors. Standing in the middle of a hog path is gentler on the Eccos.

Even so, it is a hot item in the not-quite-Hackney fashion world, and the beers gush from the kegs, even at £4 a pop. Last Friday night, the place started filling up with victims by 11:30 faster than the Ivy fills with trumped up egos post-theatre. The fun kicked in about an hour later, and I don't mean the drugs. Those had already clearly been flowing in every direction.

Speaking of drugs, I'm not going to. But On the Rocks knows its market, and the two stalls in the men's toilets seem to have been intentionally designed for indulging in the romance of powders in privacy and relative peace. They are, of course, large enough to accommodate two at a time, a trait that would facilitate rather unfortunate acts as the evening progressed, if that's the right word. But first the crowd.

I was the oldest living being in the place that night, and, frankly, I've never had my age so apparently sprayed in my face. On the Rocks causes in people of my generation - and I am of a generation different from the one that generally surrounded me - apoplexy. Let's just say that, had my public manners and sense of space not been quite so liberally greased, someone would have had an eye out, or several. Kids do not behave well when they get together in crowded rooms, or, perhaps more at it, they've grown up in a more crowded world than I did and realise the only way to get anywhere is to Panzer a path directly to wherever it is you need or wish to be.

Girls are the worst. Girls will just assume kill you as get to the bar or the dancefloor or nowhere to rally round each other and their mates in anything over the strictly allotted time, a quantity for which only they and god seem to understand the calculations. To be sure, the time frame lies somewhere uncomfortably between 'immediately' and '10 seconds ago.'

Girls will ram into the backside of you forcefully enough to spill your drink and theirs on your shirt simultaneously. Your shirt, not theirs. I spent the evening with wet sleeves and so much splashed lager dotted about my pullover that, had I been a building, I wouldn't have passed rising damp inspection.

Yes, my dears, you're terrible, and please listen as a gay man breaks the news. In gay bars, young ladies, please, PLEASE be aware, you drive us and our homo-sensibilities absolutely, certifiably round the bend with your unearned and unfair sense of entitlement to our space. Stop it before we outlaw fag-haggery, and stop spilling lager on my shirt.

Fashion is very, very important, and I'm now old enough to see it recycle itself. I've not seen, since the early 90s in New York, so many faces stocked out in Gok Wan spectacle frames with no lenses. At one point, I had to resist the urge to go round poking my finger through the backs of people's 'eyeglasses' just to confirm.

I also spent a hell of a lot of time ducking and dodging mobile phone photography and video recording sessions. My theory was that younger people must experience a lot more 'Madonna syndrome' than people my age do, even though we've had to put up with far more of her than they. I'm not talking about fake English accents: I'm talking about Warren Beatty's assertion in Truth or Dare that, unless she was performing or there was a camera pointed at her, Madonna's reality didn't exist, never mind that it wasn't real. But then, it isn't a stretch that her pop-cultural legacy is the foundation for most of youth culture now. So hey ho.

But the toilets. Oh, the toilets. The standing queue length ran to twenty feet, up the stairs, out the bathroom door and onto the former roadway/dancefloor. One time I reached the stalls and realised that one of them hadn't opened for quite some time. I pointed out to the man in queue in front of me that nothing appeared to be happening in there, although I could see an anthropomorphic shadow on the floor. Just then, the poster on the stall door began to shake, steadily and deliberately. Groans emanated from within. I knocked on the door insistently. A minute later, two men came out, and I went in. Mid-business, I noticed spunk on the wall. Maybe I'm just lucky enough to have never found that sort of thing personally appealing; or perhaps I'm just very, very happy that I've got my own place and can have sex there anytime I wish.

The best chat I had was in the outdoor smoking area (where, ironically, one had to go to get some fresh air) with a 33 year-old Frenchman who has lived in London for 10 years and used to be a DJ at the club. I don't remember most of what we discussed, but, when I pronounced his age correctly enough in French, he seemed pleased. He then told me that French doctors ask you to say 'trente trois' when they examine your chest with a stethoscope. He was a nice garcon.

But was he gay? And did it matter? And how old were those kids squatting in the smoking area? Were the rumours true that 14 year old posh gay boys were inside and trying it on with their elders, i.e., anyone apart from the bacteria on the men's room wall? And is this civilisation's last gasp?

No. I've just been around a lot longer and suffer from context. Even so, 43 years old or not, I had a cracking time, mostly because scale-model anarchy is always more fun - for a short time, in a controlled environment - than higher civilisation. Rock on, kids.

9-9-Nein

Four days ago, my friend Stefanie Schmidt signed the lease on her new restaurant on Clapham Common. Last night, 14 of us went round for an informal dinner to christen the place. It was a lovely evening filled with delicious schnitzel, gallons of prosecco and brilliant company.

About 1:15 a.m., I grabbed a night bus from Clapham High Street and jumped off at Kennington Road. I walked towards Kennington Cross and turned into the side road at Cardigan Street. There in the bicycle lane, face against the tarmac, motionless, lay a small black woman.

I rang 999 and decided I was after an ambulance. This was not an easy decision to make after dinner and so many drinks, even though there was clearly a woman, who, on further inspection, may or may not have been breathing, lying with her face pressed against the road at 1:30 in the morning in Kennington, South London.

'Is she breathing normally?' the operator asked me. 'I can't tell. There's very little if any move-- Hang on, her head moved the tiniest bit!' And indeed it did, but the motion was simply upward a couple millimetres, very slowly, and back to the original position. She was alive. This is much easier to manage, I thought.

'Can you put your ear near her mouth and listen for breathing?' Can I what now? 'Errm... I'll try,' I answered. 'But I'll have to put my face against the road as well.' 'Please get as close as you can and see if you detect regular breathing. It's very important.'

I wasn't sure if he meant it was very imporant to detect regular breathing or the fact of regular breathing itself. I tried to move in as close as I could, but it was impossible to get my ear anywhere near her face without pressing my cheek into the pile of white paint, twisted into the shape of a bicycle, stuck to the surface of Cardigan Street.

I put my extended fingers in front of her mouth. I felt the tiniest bit of warmth flowing from her lips. 'She seems to be breathing, although it's very light, very faint, and I wouldn't call it "normal."'

'Ok. Next, could you try...' - at this I nearly put the phone down, threw it into a grate and ran home. I didn't want to know what comes after 'Put your ear next to her mouth.'

'...rolling her onto her back?' 'Why?' I asked. 'It will make it easier for her to breathe.' I put my hand on her shoulder and gave her a push.

Like a pixie sprinkled with magic dust, she popped to full consciousness in seconds, leapt to her feet, said she was fine, thanked me for waking her and trundled up Kennington Lane towards the Elephant. I stood with the phone to my ear, dumbfounded, trying to explain what was going on to the emergency operator.

I apologised for ringing in a waste of time. The man on the other end reassured me I had done the right thing. And, yes, of course I had. It's part of the contract human beings have with each other: we don't leave one another unconscious or dead in the middle of the road, or anywhere, because dignity is more important, at the end of all things, than any other thing.

As I hung up, I realised I'd tried, although it seemed involuntary, to sound as English as I could during the 999 call. I can't sound properly English, but I did my best. I suppose I thought it would keep things simple, perhaps ensure my credibility. I wanted to be taken seriously in what was, I was certain, a serious situation. The last thing I wanted was to sound like an hysterical, neurotic North American who rings up the emergency services on a whim.

What is true, and always will be, is the fact that I am a foreigner here. No matter how much I wave my British passport, nothing can ever change that. Something reminds me of it every day.

Broadbandly speaking

I wanted to impress a new client. Customarily, there are two ways to do this: first, write well enough or a little better. Second, deliver on time. If the gods like you, the amount of time you'd like to spend writing and the deadline are balanced. Often, that's as good as the weather can get for a copywriter.

The brief was simple and sketchy enough that I could assume a few truths. I didn't exactly have free reign over the correct form the draft was to have taken, but I had a previous example to follow, or 'cheat from,' as it were. In short, what was required was to tidy up, sharpen up, and 'sales' up the 22-page manuscript. I had more or less two days to do it.

I really knocked this piece of work on the head. I did it without stress. I wrote at home on the couch in shorts and neglected my personal hygiene well into the early evening. I turned a downbeat brochure into a sales piece that was really going to move those apartments in Eastern Europe. And I did it without exclamation marks! A triumph all round.

What's more, I was satisfied with the copy fully 45 minutes before the deadline. This gave me time to read it through two more times and get it really, really tight. I even read it aloud the second time and tweaked anywhere I stumbled. I actually looked forward to sending the delivery email.

Then my broadband blew up. I over-dramatise: It simply stopped working. No warning, no fanfare, no on-screen gremlin, no virus. Like the sun, it simply and uneventfully went down, as though that was exactly what it was supposed to do at the end of the day.

I rang my client to apologise for what was surely to be a late delivery. He was understanding and had heard news that my service provider's servers were down most of the afternoon across most of the UK. You could almost hear 'the sound of chests being beaten up and down the country,' as he skillfully put it.

Still, I knew he wanted it on time. Every client does. I weighed my options, took a shower at long last, scooped up my laptop and headed down the road to the German pub. If there was a place in longest Lambeth guaranteed to have a working wi-fi connection, it would be an establishment run by Teutons.

I flipped open the computer, ordered a 'milchkaffee' and zapped the document through the air and down the phone line in seconds. Gott sei dank.

I went to bed that night certain that not even my crap ISP could screw me two days in a row. I clearly didn't give them enough credit.

What struck me most was the thoroughness with which the ongoing outage ruined my entire attitude towards life - not just modern life - for the next seven hours. I sat crippled on the couch for the first two hours, my brain scrambling to devise a plan that would accommodate all I wanted to achieve that morning and afternoon. Every timeline I concocted became perforated, a gap developing somewhere along the way that only a working attachment to the internet could fill.

Time was flying, and I was paralysed and helpless because I couldn't check my bloody email for edit requests or new work queries. (And before you ask, 'Why not just pick up the telephone?', let me say that you've missed the point if you so much as consider such an absurd solution.)

My first attempt to leave the house at 11a.m. ended in disappointment: the Germans wouldn't up tools until noon, so I came back home and sat on the couch some more. The cleaning lady was coming at 13:00. My carry bag with everything in it was just too heavy to lug around town all day. I was already sweating from stress. My head couldn't sort anything out. Eventually I bit down, packed my gym kit and laptop and made myself lug it all from the flat.

I took the 59 bus to Southbank Centre. Le Pain Quotidien, the French (or is it Belgian?) sarnie chain would have wi-fi, I was certain. And I was right, except that their service provider, I discovered after ordering a £7 sandwich, was also my service provider. I slowly shut the laptop, moped through my ham and sourdough and skulked next door to County Hall.

My gym is in a five-star hotel in County Hall. Surely a posh bloody hotel on the South Shitting Bank could accommodate my perceived need for wi-fi. They did have a wi-fi lounge, but it was hired out for a private business function. I tried connecting from the corridor just outside the room, cradling my laptop in my arms, but no luck. Pissed off, I went to the gym for a 30 minute aerobic grind, which made me feel marginally better.

I still hadn't connected to the internet.

I walked along the Thames and back to my neighbourhood. It was just after 3:00 p.m. A bowl of 'suppe' and a diet Coke later, the Germans had saved me once more. But it was a hollow victory: no edits, no work offers, no nothing except the usual shit Facebook wall posts and a dozen or so pieces of spam from my friends at the finer penis pill manufacturers of, I assume, greater Europe.

Then my battery died.

I arrived home five minutes later, plugged charger into laptop, turned on the broadband and everything was, as if by evil, ironic magic, back to normal. The service seemed to work even better than it had before the blackout. But that's what doing without will get you.

I poked Molly, Kevin, Adam and Matt on Facebook, and then I watched the Simpsons.

Vision Depressed

I don't mind getting older in principle. I'm prepared for it as I am prepared for the eventual breakdown and collapse of every electrical item in my home. Inevitability blah blah blah, entropy yadda yadda, and as Tom Yorke sang it, gravity always wins. Amen.

Most collapse is, mercifully, barely noticeable. Had I not squatted over a mirror recently to gauge the progress or decline (it was fortunately the latter) of a hard, nuggety thing that suddenly appeared immediately adjacent my anus, I never would have discovered the one centimetre-long skin tag hanging off me.

My GP, a very heterosexual, unsentimental, near-retirement NHS type who probably steels himself when he sees my name on the schedule, said there was really nothing to be done about it.

'You mean, you can't freeze it off?' I asked.

'There's no point' he sighed, confirming (a) that my body is simply and surely growing older and (b) that I could expect more small tentacle-like growths from god knows where.

It makes me envy those people who enjoy surprises. They must look at that piece of pinkish skin dangling from their earlobe one morning and cry 'Well, how about that?! Hey, Margaret! Come meet the newborn!'

I go to sleep every night fantasising about snipping the thing off with nail clippers. And I swear I would, but how do you dress that wound?

Thankfully, I neither smell, taste, hear nor see with my anus, so I don't think about it all day, every day. I do, however, look at things and read every day, and this is where my goat is convincingly getting got.

Last year, I was introduced to a new kind of spectacle called the varifocal. One prescription per pair of eyeglasses is no longer sufficient to satisfy all my 'seeing needs.' There are in fact three prescriptions tucked into the varifocal lens, and I must now remember to tilt my head up or down depending on whether I wish to see, say, the TV eight feet away or the soprano on stage eighty feet away.

What's really annoying is that, like most people, I prefer to wobble my head in any direction I please at any time I please. However, if I flop it back while watching television, the whole box goes foggy. Tilt downward while reading a magazine, and everything in frame stretches, without regard to proportion or the laws of physics as I (barely) remember them, in all directions. If I nod my head to indicate agreement, I feel as though I just stepped off Space Mountain.

The aesthetic is also compromised. Varifocal lenses don't fit just any old pair of frames. A huge plastic pair (think Jewish women, Long Island, 1970s) is the preferred nesting spot of the varifocal. So convert to the chosen faith today and save yourself some hassle and embarrassment.

Now, big spectacles with three prescriptions in each lens may sound bad enough, and it is. But last month, my optician told me that the reading prescription needed doubling in strength. So I had to pick out another bloody pair of giant, New World Ashkenazi frames and slap down £250. Last year's prescription has been relegated to a brownish 'distance vision' pair with a reading 'layer' that will no doubt cause extreme dizziness at the next roundabout.

Which brings me to the reason I'm really happy I moved away from Elephant and Castle a couple years ago. I remember back when ivory was bought and sold in velvet sacks...

(At least it won't be my hearing that goes next.)

Take this job and: A love correspondence between Frank and Molly

Molly
Today at 7:41pm

So, I quit my job last week. I went down to 50% time this week, and I am set to phase out by the end of March, although I am tempted to just turn that into 2 weeks notice and move on. I consider your strange desire for employment to be an inspiration.

Frank 
Today at 7:49pm

Ah, now I see the gap.

I'm not interested in employment AT ALL. I am only interested in MONEY. For without money, I cannot drink to excess, put things other than fingers up my nose or sleep in this lovely little box of a flat in which I've been waking for the past couple years.

I'm considering alternate routes: crack dealership (local demand is rather worthy), hanging a shingle in the red light district (would have to lose five pounds first.....next!) or getting in on the ground floor of the ultimate criminal activity of all time: banking.

I am, in any event, so happy to see that, after all these years, neither of us has changed much. I'd rather cut off my own leg, eat it, shit it, roll it in gravel and eat it again than work. And I'm sure you'd grab a spoon and join me.

Molly 
Today at 7:54pm

I love you so much, Frank.

Frank
Today at 7:55pm

I love you more than my mother loves Bingo.