Month: November 2020

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Home

I know it’s very council estate but the other day I just left home and looked over my shoulder and suddenly realised just how happy I am living here with who I am living with.

Sure, I’d love a mansion big enough for all the family or, better yet, a large house with houses in the grounds for family so they all get their own space.

Home is just such a special space though, wherever it may be. It’s tatty and run down on the outside, the garden is overgrown and if anyone wants a meter reading I’m in trouble but, it’s where I live and love, it’s home.

Anywhere can be home though, it’s not so much a location as the place where we share love. There are many places I feel at home, places I can happily lay my head and feel safe.

Since having a house with my name on it I have totally up 4, two in Basildon, two in Northampton, probably lived here longer than any of them! We moved in this place in March of 2003, on Matt’s birthday as it happens and, not the best of birthdays for him. If it could have gone wrong it did. Let me fill this story out more. I guess a picture speaks a thousand words

Firstly, the safe bit … when I came out in … OK, I came out several times but I started living as a gay man in 1995 and I thought it would be really useful to set up an online group for other gay men around the country who were like me, married and with the realisation that they were gay. The group worked well, I helped thousands of men, literally saved some lives and improved the lives of many men and couples. This success had a twist I wasn’t expecting and wasn’t prepared for. I became saleable. To me all publicity was good publicity, it had to help people to get the message out there and so, at first I did some magazines.

The results were rewarding, membership grew and many more families were helped. I also got asked to do radio as well which I gladly did. Local radio at first then national and leading on to International with a guest spot on a radio show in the States somewhere. Again, the only impact this had was positive so, I didn’t see the harm. Then the TV offers appeared. This is where things went very wrong!

It seems like common sense now but my brain didn’t figure that there was a world of difference between appearing on low grade media to starring in an hour long C4 documentary! I was so keen to get the message out that it didn’t cross my mind that I’d be putting anyone at risk but this is exactly what I did.

Not only was there the documentary but the morning the show was aired we were in London filming a promo gig for ‘This Morning’. Yes, it is all kind of glamourous, expensive hotels and the such like, certainly an experience and then:

Brick after brick crashed through the windows, every window in the house
One after another, often quicker than we could get them repaired.
We’d see writing like this everywhere
The bricks kept coming
Writing such as this was all over the area
Doorbell was set alight in an attempt to burn the house down
I made the mistake of not putting the car in the garage so that was attacked. Friends supported us locally and their car was torched
More bricks, over and over they came.
The window on the right had only just been repaired an hour earlier
Of course, the local press took an interest too, more so than the police who made every effort to help those attacking us.

In desperation I opted to do more press, anything to try and demonstrate we would not be beaten, to try and show that this couldn’t be how people could be treated.

Sadly, this didn’t change anything.

The problem was, the adults behind the attack knew how to work the system, they got their kids and their friends to do the physical assaults, encouraged them heavily to do whatever they liked. Because the eldest, an Ashley Nestor, was just 15 at the time the police handled him very delicately. He was asked to go for an interview and treated to McDonalds first, they warned him over and over that if he didn’t stop they would prosecute him but they never did of course. At the request of our landlord they installed a camera and recording equipment then openly admitted they told this Ashley which area the camera covered (to avoid unpleasantness in the community). In other words, they’d rather sacrifice our family that deal with the crime and consequences.

After nearly 3 years we were moved for our own safety.

Honestly, I loved that house when we moved there in 1995, it was like a dream location compared to where we’d come from. The TV had a plus side in that it finally forced me and my wife into making a decision and divorcing. It wasn’t that we’d stopped loving each other, I really do not feel that was ever an issue, more that my sexuality was never going to make our marriage fulfilling for either of us.

I have skipped many details, some really nasty stuff, physical assaults, hospitals and so on.

Me & Matt did make an informed decision to do one last piece for ‘The Sun’, the money was good and on this one we were right, there was no negatives.

For some reason I was seen as an expert authority to advise Elton John and his Husband

Now it is just this blog and the usual social media that we all use. I have no desire to ‘go public’ again, we’ve done our bit and I can tell you something for nothing, likely not one of the thousands of guys and their family I helped ever give me a moments thought but, that’s fine. I can but hope that their home is as happy as mine.

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16½ Years Old

I suspect my blog was actually getting on a bit, that I’d started it some time ago so I went and took a look and was quite shocked to discover the first entry was actually from June 2004!

Somehow I have managed to keep it all in one piece despite numerous moves about from one remote location to another.

I’ve probably lost some images along the way which went with entries but, back then, the internet was really slow so, quite likely those pictures were poor quality and barely worth bothering with.

2004 was a really very busy and decisive year. It was when I decided to end the relationship I was in at the time and rediscover myself, so much has happened since. I am tempted to read it all through just in case I missed something fun!

You take care now

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Christmas comes early

I feel that each year Christmas has come that little bit earlier.

It might be nice to play this whilst your reading

There was a time when Christmas didn’t even think about getting going until two weeks before the day. Occasionally, for those of us old enough to remember, Blue Peter would encourage us to build our very own (burn the house down) advent crown with old coat hangers, tinsel and some tacked on candles! Anyway, they’d get us to make this and maybe some other little decorations would appear.

The very first of the decorations in my mind were always those we picked up from Hainault Forest in Essex. It was always bitterly cold but we’d go and explore to see if we could find some decorative items, ideally mistletoe and holly (with berries) so mum could make her yearly arrangement with the never were alive fake Robin’s on. There was something magical about that. Magical and not a little cold, muddy and damn right miserable being told not to bring the mud into the car so boots had to be removed and put in the, erm, boot I assume. It was wet, uncomfortable and, back in the day, every part of the car was really, really cold and, no seat belts of course.

Indeed, my first memory is as a baby of me looking up at the ceiling decorations from my pram. Of course, it puzzled me for years that memory as there were no words. It was only when I described what I could see to mum she worked out I couldn’t have been more than 6 months old, which fits considering I was born in June! I remember the feeling, even now 57 year later I can tune into that feeling I had back then. Like I say, I cannot put it into words because this was a time when I didn’t think in words, only feelings. I wish you could feel that just now.

Christmas to a child is just magic in an emotion

It doesn’t take much to get a child excited about Christmas, it’s a natural thing to see colour, sparkles and smiling faces and it’s just pure joy.

But, we are all children, the sooner we accept that the better our lives become.

We do have this idea of Christmas of course, no real basis to it seeing as it was effectively a glorious time, thousands of miles away and somewhat hot and yet, our idea of a typical Christmas looks more like this:

Typical British ideal of Christmas.

Of course, it’s rarely ever like that, for the most part it is overcast, likely drizzling rain and neither cold or warm, just a nothing so of day but, we have our dreams of the weather we expect so, let’s put it into pictures …

As you can see, lovely and ideal but, rarely anywhere near Christmas! Far more likely to be February or March for snow and some years we don’t get it at all.

Sharing Christmas

Christmas is, of course, never the same on our own and sharing it with the person or people we love makes it that special time. But even strangers if we give them a friendly smile, ask them how they’re doing and make them feel wanted can share in the season.

What we will miss

Part of it also is heading to the stores and seeing the displays, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

This is me

I am about to take my second Covid test, hopefully it’s negative but I am feeling rather poorly if I am honest but, there are tons of things it could be so I am not worried but … it does make me think. Life is so precious, so short and if we get a feeling we want to do something and we can do it, shouldn’t we?

Those who, of course, we won’t share another Christmas with give us all the more reason to make this time the very best it can be.

So, here is to Christmas to defrosting Michael Bublé, buying the gifts and slicing through family politics and, perhaps, a time to pray for how lucky we are for having such amazing memories.

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The Queen

I personally think we are all the better as a nation for our Monarchy. They do represent us as a country worldwide and that they’re unelected makes it all the better, they never have to follow party lines, stick to a popular trend or offer bribes to get elected, they just uphold our dignity.

When someone attacks our monarchy they attack us, when they ignore etiquette they are insulting us.

Something we often forget is that the Queen (or King) represents the Commonwealth and not just ‘England’. She is head of state to all of these countries:

Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, The Bahamas, Belize, Grenada, Canada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Lucia, Solomon Islands, St Kitts and Nevis, and St Vincent and the Grenadines. Jamaica is considering removing her but it’s by no means certain, Barbados will let her go in November of 2021 (their loss).

Is the Monarch perfect?

No, far from it and this is why they represent us so well. There was a time when suggesting the Monarchy was fallible would have been treason and punished accordingly, thankfully we’ve moved on since then!

In recent years and by that, I mean the last century, we have seen some huge changes. Some for the better, others not so much.

Edward the VIII abdicated the throne in 1936 to marry a divorced woman, an American no less. The Church of England and Parliament made it abundantly clear that such a union was incompatible with the role of Monarch. The new King made his choice to go with love over duty.

In contrast, Prince Charles admitted publicly to an affair with a married woman whilst married himself. Despite both being divorced he married her in 2005 and it remains a controversy to his day with many hoping he too will abdicate and never take the throne. Whist constitutional experts still debate trying to find a way forward it remains a constant that the country is uncomfortable with the union and against her becoming Queen.

Many also believe that his ‘son’, Prince Harry, isn’t actually his at all but rather the son of James Lifford Hewitt who had an affair with Diana, Princess of Wales. Such is the nature of the monarchy this will never be disclosed. Prince Harry himself sparked controversy when he married an American divorcee. She did not conform to establishment expectations and as such, we lost the Prince to populism. The couple left the country to lean more to her persuasion of celebrity.

The Queen once referred to a period in her life as her ‘Horrible Year’ though in line with the educated minority, she said it in Latin ‘Annus horribilis’. Many of our citizens do not understand why an educated elite feel the need to revert to Latin when there are perfectly good English alternatives.

Whilst we will not always agree with the Monarchy they do raise more revenue for the UK than they consume in public funds, they are our long term investment in ourselves and, in what other job is a person still working full time into their 90’s?