Hi all - just to let you know I'm moving. In fact the van is here already, loaded with all the collected detritus of blogs gone past and heading off for a new home.
I'll be living at a new address - http://oberonuk.com - already been decorating, putting up curtains and so on. Its a bigger place though, with room to expand and somewhere I hope you'll come visit regularly. There'll always be a pot of coffee on the stove and a bottle of rosé in the fridge. Don't forsake me - please!
Saturday, 4 July 2009
Friday, 3 July 2009
I’m wet. Not moist, not even a bit soggy. Very very NOT dry. The sort of wet that would make Saint Swithin think, ‘Maybe they’ve had enough for now – perhaps, on hindsight, forty days and nights was a bit excessive!” (But he’s gonna have to wait until the 15th to condemn us to biblical amounts of persistent precipitation, and anyway, we’re doing quite well enough without his help, thank you!) Wetter than a wet week in Whitby. More moist than a bath full of nuns looking for the soap. Dank doesn’t come into the equation.
We’ve had a few days of blistering heat, high pressure, oppressive atmosphere and no air. I was starting to wonder whether we’d entered a phase of massive coronal discharge, with solar flares scorching our otherwise green and pleasant land. But following some astute scientific investigation, availing myself of one of the most tenacious and analytical minds of our time (well, Google) I can inform you that:
Today, by way of contrast, the manna from heaven is presented in liquid form. Which is typical. Today I needed to venture out. We have invited some friends over for dinner tomorrow and I needed to shop. Well, it is my way of showing I care – somehow getting Tescos to deliver seems to be cheating when it is for a dinner party. Besides, I like to fully examine the plumpness and quality of any breasts before committing – don’t like my breasts too big, my loins too lardy or my plums too pert. Buns have to be beautiful and grapes nicely bunched. A good broddle around in fresh produce is medicine for the soul. But therein lies the challenge, when the shops are separated from me by an excessive over-order of weather. We’re talking serious down pouring here; rain that pelts down with enough ferocity to drill holes in your head. Now I’ve never much been one for trepanning, even when it is meant to release evil spirits from the head - I surely have a few of those - and certainly not in the course of buying a stick of garlic bread! Protective headgear is required before venturing out. Where’s my pith helmet? Someone’s taken the pith!
So to the shops, cap on head shielding eyes and keeping specs clear, but in the process managing to channel all rain within vicinity into a single torrential stream running down back of neck. I feel assaulted. Nape Rape! Swiftly seek sanctuary in sweltering supermarket where suddenly steaming starts. It’s like walking through smog. You see, the supermarket hasn’t lost any of its heat accumulated over the last week and is now but a pine panel away from being a sauna. Mmmm, there’s a gap in the market: Sainsbury’s Sauna-and-Shop. Bring your own towel. Men and women only on alternative weekends and no canoodling in the bakery department – “Put those baps down Sir”, “No I don’t want to see your Italian sausage!”
I should have remembered that Friday in Salford is Rent-a-Muppet day, a fact that I was reminded about upon entering said purveyors of finest fruit, veg and groceries in the entire kingdom (and yes, I did actually check it out on MySupermarket.com!!! Have a look – I was quite surprised. You can do your online shop just the same as with Tescos or whoever; they compare the prices and let you send your order to whichever worked out to be the cheaper retailer! Well impressed. And Tescos WAS the best value for ‘my basket’ so ASDA can go stick that in their non-representative trolley!) So, back to Muppet-central anyway. Muppet is a particularly appropriate term for most of the people in there – they looked like they all had someone with an arm up their arses working them. Why do people decide that the middle of a narrow isle is the best place to park two trolleys, a pram and basket-on wheels, while they have a good natter about Betty and her recurring corns, or the questionable merits of Tenna Lady? Why do teenage mothers bring the pre-school brats along and then not keep them under control? We have leashes for that sort of thing! Muzzles. You’d not get away with letting a dog loose in there unrestrained, and dogs don’t sneeze all over the mushrooms or try to stick carrots up their noses. Geez, I know it’s hot but lock the buggers in the back of your daddy’s four-by-four; just remember to crack open the window a bit and teach them to not lick the cigarette lighter. It’s not like anyone is gonna kidnap THAT snotty-nosed cabbage-patch reject anyway. No, dear, it isn’t puppy fat when the droopy-nappy, germ-ridden, snot monster can’t survive more than thirty seconds without another, “me wanna sweety now!” Sweetheart, catch it, bin it, kill it. It’s what Darwin would have wanted.
Now I have limited stamina, not a lot of strength for hauling shopping baskets round (even if they ARE cheaper than ASDA’s) so the sight of a checkout with hardly any queue is something of a relief. Except its Mable and Eddie in the queue in front of me. You’ll have met them. They’re in their 90s, tartan shopping trolley, hearing aids, put the ‘less’ into gormless. Sweet, I’m sure, and we’ll all grow old one day, but how many coupons?! How can you have more money-off coupons than items in your basket? Here’s how: only every fourth one is still in date. So, Bekki on the checkout, has to scan every one, and you can tell she’s not happy about this, especially when one is devoid of bar code and she has to flash at the manager for assistance. “No love, that’s your ration book and you used up your allowance for powdered egg and spam in 1953”. Now Mable and Eddie only use cash. Mable’s purse has somehow made it to the bottom of her tartan ‘Speed Shop Deluxe’ basket-on-wheels, and into which have been stacked the several bags of shopping. So out it all has to come amid must frustration and the worry that she has either left the purse at home or had it pinched, probably by the snot-monster. But all is well and the purse turns up, a little battered from its adventure at the bottom of her ‘cart’o’convenience’ and happy to relieve itself of the bulging stash of coinage that Mable’s been secreting away since that nice Mr Churchill was Prime Minister – before he started selling car insurance, Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes!
My friend Bekki (It feels we’ve known each other so long now that I’m sure we’ll feature on reciprocal Christmas card lists) has made the fatal mistake of asking if the wrinklies have a Tescos card. Frantic searching through purse, with vacant expression. “We don’t use cards, dear” explains Eddie, presumably thinking that somehow a credit card is required. “It’s for your points. Your clubcard points”. “Oh, no dear, we don’t do them. Just cash.”
Now I know I can be a little unforgiving, but if it is me being asked to pay £9.97, and I have a crisp new £10 note to hand (I suspect she irons them), then I would probably opt for handing that over and getting 3p change rather than counting out the full sum in bronze coins! I tell a lie – there were a couple of 50p pieces in there but you could tell she was parted with them only after much soul-searching and inner turmoil.
Behind me in the queue I now have two barely pubescent mothers who’s conversation seems to be largely about how fit someone called “Lozza” is and whether or not “Bethny’s a lucky cow to have been invited to his party”, which will be “well good, cos everyone’s gonna be there”. I’m not sure how valid, or indeed rare, Bethny’s invitation is if everyone is going to be there anyway, but I suppose it is nice to be asked. The snot monster, bored with queuing and already onto his second packet of ‘flumps’ is busy removing mars bars from the shelf and making a small construction out of them – maybe a fort, it is hard to tell. He’s avidly watched by second child, thankfully strapped into a push-chair (or buggy I think they are these days). Poor thing. Pig-tails pulled so tight it looks like she’s had plastic surgery and an expression of concentration reserved exclusively for the moments preceding the wafting forth of a green mist and the sure knowledge that Mummy will have more than just the shopping to unpack when she gets home. Remind me why I never had kids? Oh yeah, I’m gay. Thank fuck for that!
It might be pouring down outside, but it’s as hot as a blacksmith’s jock strap inside, and twice as humid. I can practically hear the pot of double cream curdling as I queue. Methinks strawberries and cream might end up as a cheesecake at this rate.
But at last my turn has come! Bekki looks at me with the glum disinterest of someone who has had the life sucked out of them and I notice Mable and Eddie now blocking the exit as they rearrange the contents of their ‘shop-o-matic turbo’. Thank heavens all my items scan without incident. I was worried that a missing bar-code might be enough to send Bekki over the edge. She already has the Samaritan’s number tattooed on her knuckles, but what is that I see, poking from her burgundy tabard pocket? Why, an invitation to Lozza’s party, no less! You see, there IS a god, innit!
Back at the car park, trying to straddle the veritable river that is now sluicing under my vehicle and with the distant honk from the horn of a barge that seems to have been misdirected from the Manchester Ship Canal and is heading this way, I load my bags of shopping into the boot. A few cars down I see Mable and Eddie talking to a large, skinny bloke in a black cowl, carrying a scythe. “No, we can’t possibly come now, you see, Friday she has her Bingo. You’ll have to come back another time...”
We’ve had a few days of blistering heat, high pressure, oppressive atmosphere and no air. I was starting to wonder whether we’d entered a phase of massive coronal discharge, with solar flares scorching our otherwise green and pleasant land. But following some astute scientific investigation, availing myself of one of the most tenacious and analytical minds of our time (well, Google) I can inform you that:
Analysis of Solar Active Regions and Activity from 01/2100Z to 02/2100Z : Solar activity was very low. No flares occurred during the past 24 hours. The solar disk was void of spots. The geomagnetic field is expected to remain quiet for the next three days (03 - 05 July).In fact, the darn thing looks positively spotless, not a black-head in sight. We officially have a zit-free sun! Bloody hell and we only bought that Clearasil at the weekend!
Today, by way of contrast, the manna from heaven is presented in liquid form. Which is typical. Today I needed to venture out. We have invited some friends over for dinner tomorrow and I needed to shop. Well, it is my way of showing I care – somehow getting Tescos to deliver seems to be cheating when it is for a dinner party. Besides, I like to fully examine the plumpness and quality of any breasts before committing – don’t like my breasts too big, my loins too lardy or my plums too pert. Buns have to be beautiful and grapes nicely bunched. A good broddle around in fresh produce is medicine for the soul. But therein lies the challenge, when the shops are separated from me by an excessive over-order of weather. We’re talking serious down pouring here; rain that pelts down with enough ferocity to drill holes in your head. Now I’ve never much been one for trepanning, even when it is meant to release evil spirits from the head - I surely have a few of those - and certainly not in the course of buying a stick of garlic bread! Protective headgear is required before venturing out. Where’s my pith helmet? Someone’s taken the pith!
So to the shops, cap on head shielding eyes and keeping specs clear, but in the process managing to channel all rain within vicinity into a single torrential stream running down back of neck. I feel assaulted. Nape Rape! Swiftly seek sanctuary in sweltering supermarket where suddenly steaming starts. It’s like walking through smog. You see, the supermarket hasn’t lost any of its heat accumulated over the last week and is now but a pine panel away from being a sauna. Mmmm, there’s a gap in the market: Sainsbury’s Sauna-and-Shop. Bring your own towel. Men and women only on alternative weekends and no canoodling in the bakery department – “Put those baps down Sir”, “No I don’t want to see your Italian sausage!”
I should have remembered that Friday in Salford is Rent-a-Muppet day, a fact that I was reminded about upon entering said purveyors of finest fruit, veg and groceries in the entire kingdom (and yes, I did actually check it out on MySupermarket.com!!! Have a look – I was quite surprised. You can do your online shop just the same as with Tescos or whoever; they compare the prices and let you send your order to whichever worked out to be the cheaper retailer! Well impressed. And Tescos WAS the best value for ‘my basket’ so ASDA can go stick that in their non-representative trolley!) So, back to Muppet-central anyway. Muppet is a particularly appropriate term for most of the people in there – they looked like they all had someone with an arm up their arses working them. Why do people decide that the middle of a narrow isle is the best place to park two trolleys, a pram and basket-on wheels, while they have a good natter about Betty and her recurring corns, or the questionable merits of Tenna Lady? Why do teenage mothers bring the pre-school brats along and then not keep them under control? We have leashes for that sort of thing! Muzzles. You’d not get away with letting a dog loose in there unrestrained, and dogs don’t sneeze all over the mushrooms or try to stick carrots up their noses. Geez, I know it’s hot but lock the buggers in the back of your daddy’s four-by-four; just remember to crack open the window a bit and teach them to not lick the cigarette lighter. It’s not like anyone is gonna kidnap THAT snotty-nosed cabbage-patch reject anyway. No, dear, it isn’t puppy fat when the droopy-nappy, germ-ridden, snot monster can’t survive more than thirty seconds without another, “me wanna sweety now!” Sweetheart, catch it, bin it, kill it. It’s what Darwin would have wanted.
Now I have limited stamina, not a lot of strength for hauling shopping baskets round (even if they ARE cheaper than ASDA’s) so the sight of a checkout with hardly any queue is something of a relief. Except its Mable and Eddie in the queue in front of me. You’ll have met them. They’re in their 90s, tartan shopping trolley, hearing aids, put the ‘less’ into gormless. Sweet, I’m sure, and we’ll all grow old one day, but how many coupons?! How can you have more money-off coupons than items in your basket? Here’s how: only every fourth one is still in date. So, Bekki on the checkout, has to scan every one, and you can tell she’s not happy about this, especially when one is devoid of bar code and she has to flash at the manager for assistance. “No love, that’s your ration book and you used up your allowance for powdered egg and spam in 1953”. Now Mable and Eddie only use cash. Mable’s purse has somehow made it to the bottom of her tartan ‘Speed Shop Deluxe’ basket-on-wheels, and into which have been stacked the several bags of shopping. So out it all has to come amid must frustration and the worry that she has either left the purse at home or had it pinched, probably by the snot-monster. But all is well and the purse turns up, a little battered from its adventure at the bottom of her ‘cart’o’convenience’ and happy to relieve itself of the bulging stash of coinage that Mable’s been secreting away since that nice Mr Churchill was Prime Minister – before he started selling car insurance, Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes!
My friend Bekki (It feels we’ve known each other so long now that I’m sure we’ll feature on reciprocal Christmas card lists) has made the fatal mistake of asking if the wrinklies have a Tescos card. Frantic searching through purse, with vacant expression. “We don’t use cards, dear” explains Eddie, presumably thinking that somehow a credit card is required. “It’s for your points. Your clubcard points”. “Oh, no dear, we don’t do them. Just cash.”
Now I know I can be a little unforgiving, but if it is me being asked to pay £9.97, and I have a crisp new £10 note to hand (I suspect she irons them), then I would probably opt for handing that over and getting 3p change rather than counting out the full sum in bronze coins! I tell a lie – there were a couple of 50p pieces in there but you could tell she was parted with them only after much soul-searching and inner turmoil.
Behind me in the queue I now have two barely pubescent mothers who’s conversation seems to be largely about how fit someone called “Lozza” is and whether or not “Bethny’s a lucky cow to have been invited to his party”, which will be “well good, cos everyone’s gonna be there”. I’m not sure how valid, or indeed rare, Bethny’s invitation is if everyone is going to be there anyway, but I suppose it is nice to be asked. The snot monster, bored with queuing and already onto his second packet of ‘flumps’ is busy removing mars bars from the shelf and making a small construction out of them – maybe a fort, it is hard to tell. He’s avidly watched by second child, thankfully strapped into a push-chair (or buggy I think they are these days). Poor thing. Pig-tails pulled so tight it looks like she’s had plastic surgery and an expression of concentration reserved exclusively for the moments preceding the wafting forth of a green mist and the sure knowledge that Mummy will have more than just the shopping to unpack when she gets home. Remind me why I never had kids? Oh yeah, I’m gay. Thank fuck for that!
It might be pouring down outside, but it’s as hot as a blacksmith’s jock strap inside, and twice as humid. I can practically hear the pot of double cream curdling as I queue. Methinks strawberries and cream might end up as a cheesecake at this rate.
But at last my turn has come! Bekki looks at me with the glum disinterest of someone who has had the life sucked out of them and I notice Mable and Eddie now blocking the exit as they rearrange the contents of their ‘shop-o-matic turbo’. Thank heavens all my items scan without incident. I was worried that a missing bar-code might be enough to send Bekki over the edge. She already has the Samaritan’s number tattooed on her knuckles, but what is that I see, poking from her burgundy tabard pocket? Why, an invitation to Lozza’s party, no less! You see, there IS a god, innit!
Back at the car park, trying to straddle the veritable river that is now sluicing under my vehicle and with the distant honk from the horn of a barge that seems to have been misdirected from the Manchester Ship Canal and is heading this way, I load my bags of shopping into the boot. A few cars down I see Mable and Eddie talking to a large, skinny bloke in a black cowl, carrying a scythe. “No, we can’t possibly come now, you see, Friday she has her Bingo. You’ll have to come back another time...”
Thursday, 2 July 2009
What’s in a name?
It would be very easy to start this text with a note that today marks the death of Nostradamus in 1566 (I wonder if he saw THAT coming?), especially as he was contemporary - just - with the main subject of today’s entry. But I won’t. That would be too easy. Instead I intend to digress from any previous format (you know, where I take inspiration from events in history, my latest encounters with the medical profession or the proliferation of pants that plague my neighbourhood – two pairs again today and what appears to be either a bra or a small hammock) and for a change I will bow to a theme that has been encroaching on my life over the past few days. There have been a few points over previous weeks when this theme has tried to assert itself, but I knocked it back. Midsummer’s Day/Night was one of them, but we were only just back from Hungary then and anyway, the News covered all things Druidic at Stonehenge for me. Perhaps a blog about lay lines and standing circles another day? At the start of the week, when I was in hospital, the Globe Theatre burned down – well, if you take a temporal skip back a fair few hundred of your Earth years. However, the final straw that prompted this thread happened yesterday on Twitter, where, in a reply to a Tweet, I noted that ‘discretion is the better part of valour’. My observation was re-tweeted by none less that Shakespeare himself. I kid you not. @shakesp if you don’t believe me!
The exact Tweet went as follows [certain details removed to protect the guilty]:
Shakesp RT @OberonUK @xxxxxxxxx I'm saying nothing! Discretion is the better part of valour! http://bit.ly/XXXXS5:19 PM Jun 30th from Tweetbots
I am curious to know which part of the Tweet was picked up by the bot, the quote from Shakespeare or the Oberon part of my name.
For anyone who doesn’t know, and shame on you, Oberon appears in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and it is from that reference that I draw my web-name. I’ve used the name since 1994 when I started working at Durham University (on the 4th July to be exact). That was back in the days when the internet was more the plaything of boffins and researchers, predominantly text based and used mostly out of educational establishments. The University granted access to JANET – the Joint Academic Network ISP backbone which even today is responsible for the .ac.uk and .gov.uk domains. Windows (like the original USS Enterprise) didn’t even have a number let alone a fancy name like Vista!
Now, being gay in those days was a very different kettle of cod. There were none of the methods of contact that the yoof of today take for granted. No internet dating sites (let alone ones dedicated to gay men), very few bars or clubs and certainly no mobile-phone-based apps like GRINDR for hooking up with like-minded pooftahs within reasonable travelling distance. The most we had was a couple of pages on CEEFAX/TELETEXT (GL GWM 27 seeks GWM 20-30, GSH for chat & FSHP), personal ads in the ‘free paper’, or the local pub which ran a ‘gay friendly’ night on a Sunday once a month, played YMCA on an endless loop and came with a pretty good chance you’d be queer-bashed when leaving. But JANET, and subsequently a home PC, gave me access to the internet and such wonders as IRC – Internet Relay Chat, text based, but real-time, where you could chat with actual people. They even had a North room! OK, so that covered an area from Leeds to Newcastle via Manchester and Carlisle, but the point is it WASN’T London. So what, that you got disconnected every hour?! So what, that it could take just as long again to get back online?! So what, that phone bill totals were often so high they were indistinguishable from the actual phone number! It was a revolution. And it demanded an online persona, a name, something to allow others to identify you but that wasn’t linked directly to your actual real life. (Heaven forbid that any straight person should find out about your double life!) And so OberonUK was born, with tongue in cheek and a wry poke at the world. Oberon, you see, is the King of the Fairies. It seemed somehow appropriate.
So with a name borrowed from Shakespeare, the Bard has had a number of impacts on my life. I studied The Dream for O-level (back in the days when examinations had currency and it actually meant something to get an ‘A’ grade), so I have a love for that particular play. My school motto was borrowed from Hamlet: “To thine own self be true” – a quote from Polonius who gave us few other phrases still in use today such as "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" and "brevity is the soul of wit."
Shakespeare is credited with many phrases which remain in common use today, and is widely believed to have coined quite a few new words too:
I’m sure many will recognise the title of this blog entry, “What’s in a name?” as being a direct lift from Romeo and Juliet, where the ill-fated and ‘star cross’d’ heroine contemplates the fact that Romeo belongs to the Montague family, with whom her own relatives, the Capulets, have been feuding:
All this said I will confess that aforementioned lecturer did teach me one interesting fact: Newspapers were originally available only in the broadsheet format and were traditionally set without columns, just lines of fully-justified text that spanned the whole page length. When the tabloid format was introduced, the style changed to include the use of columns. In type, where you have two or more columns, or a gap between facing pages, the space between the columns is known as the ‘gutter’. It is from there that we get the term, “The Gutter Press” although the term has somewhat changed in meaning to be synonymous with sensationalist and poorer quality reporting. I seem to be off on a tangent. A tangent, a tangent, my kingdom for a tangent! I must stay focused and stop this tangential thinking.
Sorry, that was a terrible misquote from Richard III, “A horse, a horse..” but does remind me of another story where my brother-in-law, who was a manager of a country house-cum hotel-cum-restaurant and, as the nights began to draw in, was in charge of organising an enormous marquee to be erected in the grounds for forthcoming events, such as a proposed November 5th fireworks party, Halloween all-nighter and various wedding functions leading up to Christmas. He was not happy, and his mood was not improved when I offered another Richard III misquote: “Now is the winter of our disco tents”.
Our mate Bill can also lay claim to inspiring any number of modern classics, not least of which is West Side Story, a re-work of Romeo and Juliet where the Tony, the leader of the Jets gang falls in love with Maria, the sister of rival Sharks gang leader. If you recognise nothing else, you’ll have heard “America” :
And less obvious are the many Star Trek stories that have taken inspiration, or at very least their titles, from Shakespeare:
What you might not know is that Hamlet was NOT an original work and that Shakespeare is widely believed to have stolen it from the original Klingon text (speakers of Klingonese will recognise the beginning of the famous To be or not to be soliloquy) :
By now you will know I’m a huge Blackadder fan, with the second series being my absolute favourite, and littered with Shakespeare quotes. Also there was the actual meeting between Edmund and Bill in Back and Forth:
The choice of Oberon was further influenced by the fact that Will was himself of somewhat ambiguous sexual persuasion and scholars still debate the degree of his bisexuality. For me the evidence lies very firmly in his sonnets and in particular No 144:
Even with any potential linguistic differences I’d say that is pretty conclusive stuff. Buggery bollocks, Bill the Bard was a bloody bender!
And if any final affirmation is required about the suitability of the name Oberon for a (somewhat dysfunctional, but still surviving) gay male, consider this: The name Oberon was chosen for a moon of one of the solar system’s planets; Oberon can be found in perpetual orbit around Uranus! But it is such stuff that dreams are made on!
It would be very easy to start this text with a note that today marks the death of Nostradamus in 1566 (I wonder if he saw THAT coming?), especially as he was contemporary - just - with the main subject of today’s entry. But I won’t. That would be too easy. Instead I intend to digress from any previous format (you know, where I take inspiration from events in history, my latest encounters with the medical profession or the proliferation of pants that plague my neighbourhood – two pairs again today and what appears to be either a bra or a small hammock) and for a change I will bow to a theme that has been encroaching on my life over the past few days. There have been a few points over previous weeks when this theme has tried to assert itself, but I knocked it back. Midsummer’s Day/Night was one of them, but we were only just back from Hungary then and anyway, the News covered all things Druidic at Stonehenge for me. Perhaps a blog about lay lines and standing circles another day? At the start of the week, when I was in hospital, the Globe Theatre burned down – well, if you take a temporal skip back a fair few hundred of your Earth years. However, the final straw that prompted this thread happened yesterday on Twitter, where, in a reply to a Tweet, I noted that ‘discretion is the better part of valour’. My observation was re-tweeted by none less that Shakespeare himself. I kid you not. @shakesp if you don’t believe me!
The exact Tweet went as follows [certain details removed to protect the guilty]:
Shakesp RT @OberonUK @xxxxxxxxx I'm saying nothing! Discretion is the better part of valour! http://bit.ly/XXXXS5:19 PM Jun 30th from Tweetbots
I am curious to know which part of the Tweet was picked up by the bot, the quote from Shakespeare or the Oberon part of my name.
For anyone who doesn’t know, and shame on you, Oberon appears in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and it is from that reference that I draw my web-name. I’ve used the name since 1994 when I started working at Durham University (on the 4th July to be exact). That was back in the days when the internet was more the plaything of boffins and researchers, predominantly text based and used mostly out of educational establishments. The University granted access to JANET – the Joint Academic Network ISP backbone which even today is responsible for the .ac.uk and .gov.uk domains. Windows (like the original USS Enterprise) didn’t even have a number let alone a fancy name like Vista!
Now, being gay in those days was a very different kettle of cod. There were none of the methods of contact that the yoof of today take for granted. No internet dating sites (let alone ones dedicated to gay men), very few bars or clubs and certainly no mobile-phone-based apps like GRINDR for hooking up with like-minded pooftahs within reasonable travelling distance. The most we had was a couple of pages on CEEFAX/TELETEXT (GL GWM 27 seeks GWM 20-30, GSH for chat & FSHP), personal ads in the ‘free paper’, or the local pub which ran a ‘gay friendly’ night on a Sunday once a month, played YMCA on an endless loop and came with a pretty good chance you’d be queer-bashed when leaving. But JANET, and subsequently a home PC, gave me access to the internet and such wonders as IRC – Internet Relay Chat, text based, but real-time, where you could chat with actual people. They even had a North room! OK, so that covered an area from Leeds to Newcastle via Manchester and Carlisle, but the point is it WASN’T London. So what, that you got disconnected every hour?! So what, that it could take just as long again to get back online?! So what, that phone bill totals were often so high they were indistinguishable from the actual phone number! It was a revolution. And it demanded an online persona, a name, something to allow others to identify you but that wasn’t linked directly to your actual real life. (Heaven forbid that any straight person should find out about your double life!) And so OberonUK was born, with tongue in cheek and a wry poke at the world. Oberon, you see, is the King of the Fairies. It seemed somehow appropriate.
So with a name borrowed from Shakespeare, the Bard has had a number of impacts on my life. I studied The Dream for O-level (back in the days when examinations had currency and it actually meant something to get an ‘A’ grade), so I have a love for that particular play. My school motto was borrowed from Hamlet: “To thine own self be true” – a quote from Polonius who gave us few other phrases still in use today such as "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" and "brevity is the soul of wit."
Shakespeare is credited with many phrases which remain in common use today, and is widely believed to have coined quite a few new words too:
- bedazzled (The Taming of the Shrew)
- coldhearted (Antony and Cleopatra)
- dauntless (Macbeth)
- to drug (Macbeth; first use as a verb)
- gloomy (several, "to gloom" was a verb)
- to humour (Love's Labour's Lost, first attestation as a verb)- regular readers of my blog may recall my thoughts on the four humours from last week.
- mimic (Midsummer Night's Dream)
- new-fangled (Love's Labour's Lost / As You Like Itpuking (As You Like It)
- uncomfortable (Romeo and Juliet)
I’m sure many will recognise the title of this blog entry, “What’s in a name?” as being a direct lift from Romeo and Juliet, where the ill-fated and ‘star cross’d’ heroine contemplates the fact that Romeo belongs to the Montague family, with whom her own relatives, the Capulets, have been feuding:
JULIET:You will, of course, also recognise “A rose by any other name” – Shakespeare is unavoidable and pops up to shake his ruff in the most unlikely of places. I remember at Art College in Carlisle we had a lecturer in print technology who could bore the socks off even the most stalwart student and was blessed with the most obvious and unrealistic hairpiece. Made from the best nylon money could buy - we knew it was nylon: you could see the M&S tab! It all but hovered just above his head and never seemed to quite keep up with him when he changed direction. He turned up late one day to a lecture, and delivered his monotone monologue for a full hour without noticing (or maybe just not acknowledging) that some whit had written on the blackboard behind him: “Toupee or not toupee: that is the question!” but more of the original version of that particular speech later.
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
All this said I will confess that aforementioned lecturer did teach me one interesting fact: Newspapers were originally available only in the broadsheet format and were traditionally set without columns, just lines of fully-justified text that spanned the whole page length. When the tabloid format was introduced, the style changed to include the use of columns. In type, where you have two or more columns, or a gap between facing pages, the space between the columns is known as the ‘gutter’. It is from there that we get the term, “The Gutter Press” although the term has somewhat changed in meaning to be synonymous with sensationalist and poorer quality reporting. I seem to be off on a tangent. A tangent, a tangent, my kingdom for a tangent! I must stay focused and stop this tangential thinking.
Sorry, that was a terrible misquote from Richard III, “A horse, a horse..” but does remind me of another story where my brother-in-law, who was a manager of a country house-cum hotel-cum-restaurant and, as the nights began to draw in, was in charge of organising an enormous marquee to be erected in the grounds for forthcoming events, such as a proposed November 5th fireworks party, Halloween all-nighter and various wedding functions leading up to Christmas. He was not happy, and his mood was not improved when I offered another Richard III misquote: “Now is the winter of our disco tents”.
Our mate Bill can also lay claim to inspiring any number of modern classics, not least of which is West Side Story, a re-work of Romeo and Juliet where the Tony, the leader of the Jets gang falls in love with Maria, the sister of rival Sharks gang leader. If you recognise nothing else, you’ll have heard “America” :
I like to be in America
OK by me in America
Everything free in America
For a small fee in America
And less obvious are the many Star Trek stories that have taken inspiration, or at very least their titles, from Shakespeare:
- Star Trek VI – The Undiscovered Country
- Dagger of the Mind
- By Any Other Name (see above)
- Thine Own Self (see above)
- All Our Yesterdays
- Remember Data asking, “If you prick me, do I not...leak?”
Picard/Oberon: Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.
Carmichael/Titania: What, jealous Oberon! Fairies, skip hence:
I have forsworn his bed and company.
What you might not know is that Hamlet was NOT an original work and that Shakespeare is widely believed to have stolen it from the original Klingon text (speakers of Klingonese will recognise the beginning of the famous To be or not to be soliloquy) :
taH pagh taHbe'. DaH mu'tlheghvam vIqelnIS.
quv'a', yabDaq San vaQ cha, pu' je SIQDI'?
pagh, Seng bIQ'a'Hey SuvmeH nuHmey SuqDI',
'ej, Suvmo', rInmoHDI'? Hegh. Qong --- Qong neH ---
'ej QongDI', tIq 'oy', wa'SanID Daw''e' je
cho'nISbogh porghDaj rInmoHlaH net Har.
By now you will know I’m a huge Blackadder fan, with the second series being my absolute favourite, and littered with Shakespeare quotes. Also there was the actual meeting between Edmund and Bill in Back and Forth:
Blackadder: [punches Shakespeare] That is for every schoolboy and schoolgirl for the next 400 years. Have you any idea how much suffering you're going to cause? Hours spent at school desks trying to find one joke in "A Midsummer's Night Dream", wearing stupid tights in school plays and saying things like, "What ho, my Lord," and, "Oh, look, here comes Othello talking total crap as usual."
(He quoted it wrong of course, it is "A Midsummer Night's Dream" not "A Midsummer's Night Dream)
The choice of Oberon was further influenced by the fact that Will was himself of somewhat ambiguous sexual persuasion and scholars still debate the degree of his bisexuality. For me the evidence lies very firmly in his sonnets and in particular No 144:
Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend
Suspect I may, but not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell:
Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.
Even with any potential linguistic differences I’d say that is pretty conclusive stuff. Buggery bollocks, Bill the Bard was a bloody bender!
And if any final affirmation is required about the suitability of the name Oberon for a (somewhat dysfunctional, but still surviving) gay male, consider this: The name Oberon was chosen for a moon of one of the solar system’s planets; Oberon can be found in perpetual orbit around Uranus! But it is such stuff that dreams are made on!
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
July duly descends and we enter the second half of the year with gusto, or a grimace, depending on how well you are coping with the heatwave. Yesterday was a humid, muggy day, too hot to handle. But what am I doing talking about the weather when there is so much else to cogitate? So we mark the passing of the first six months of 2009 and welcome the sextet which stands before us. As apparently has been the custom in many years past. For the first day of July seems to be a day for new beginnings: Way back in 1916 the Coca-Cola company introduced the coke formula that is still used today. Makes you want to start singing, “I’d like to buy the world a coke...” That said, some may recall that on April 23, 1985, Coca-Cola, amid much publicity, attempted to change the formula of the drink with "New Coke". Follow-up taste tests revealed that most consumers preferred the taste of New Coke to both Coke and Pepsi, but Coca-Cola management was unprepared for the public's nostalgia for the old drink, leading to a massive backlash and the company gave in to protests and returned to the old formula under the name Coca-Cola Classic on July 10, 1985. Coke is also widely credited with creating the contemporary imagery of Santa Claus, but I guess that thoughts of Christmas need to be locked firmly away for a few months yet.
1 July 1937 is also a date of note as on that day Britain started using the 999 emergency phone number. In the UK you can also use the pan-European version, 112. So why 999? Well, this was mainly because of the design of public coin-operated phone boxes, which already allowed you to dial 0 without inserting any money (0 for operator services). It was relatively easy to convert these boxes to also allow the preceding digit, 9, to be dialled for free. Also, at the time, the digits 2 – 8 were used somewhere in the UK as the first number in a subscriber’s code. I remember as a child I was shown around the telephone exchange in our home town, Newmarket. I think it was on Station Road, where it intersected the High Street. I guess this will have been somewhere round 1974. Our phone number was just Newmarket 3554, my Grandparents were 4038. The exchange was, as per any vintage film, banks of plug-boards with flashing lights and teams of operators, all women, with headphones, mics and remarkably big hair-dos. The depths of the building contained acres of clicking machinery, cogs, wheels, miles of wire; a long way from our wireless network and digital exchanges these days. I have very few nostalgic memories of Newmarket, but that is certainly one. Remind me later and I’ll tell you some others. But I must just mention the fact that I lived next door to the National Stud! (And THAT is a guaranteed route into an inferiority complex!)
Today also marks the anniversary of the introduction of the Sony Walkman. I think I had a cheap equivalent, the size of a brick, guaranteed to chew up and spit out any tape you cared to feed it, with a battery life slightly less than the average cassette album and sound quality so poor that people for yards around benefitted from better acoustics than the person wearing the headphones. I remember making mix tapes and recording the top 40 off the radio. There was an art in pressing STOP a millisecond before Jimmie Saville or whoever jumped in with “That was Black Lace sliding down the charts to number 11 with ‘Agadoo’”. I had no means to edit, beyond actually splicing the tape (and yes, I DID do that, with a razor blade and special cassette-wide sticky tape). We had none of this digital malarkey, no graphic equalisers and pitch control. You sat there with your C60 tape in your Mum’s recorder with a plastic microphone banged up against the “music system’s” speaker, watching the cog-driven counter and hoping that you’d been clever enough to zero it at the end of the tape. Stereo? Yeah right! We were pleased to get the same mono signal coming out of two speakers! I remember nearly wetting myself with joy when I bought my first casset
te player that had a 5-pin DIN socket and meant that I could connect it straight into the ‘gramophone’ and record “LPs” straight to tape without the need for a mic. This was high-end, high-tech, hi-fidelity! I remember one of the first albums I bought was “The Sounds of Star Wars” by The Sonic All-Stars (Nothing to do with a blue hedgehog, I promise). I still have it in the loft!
Which brings me neatly to a quick birthday mention for Dave Prowse – in my early youth he was the Green Cross Code man, reminding children everywhere to cross the road when they saw a little man flashing. He is probably more widely seen as the chap who played [the physical] Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy – see the link there? You’d almost think I planned this crap! That was back before episode IV was renamed “A New Hope” and all nine instalments of “The Journal of Whills [the Whills eventually turned into The Force]” were planned. I make the ‘physical’ distinction because Mr Prowse was indeed the man in the black mask, but his voice was never used. He was over-dubbed by James Earl Jones on account of DP having a distinct west-country accent. “Luke, you are my son, my lovely”... Attacking the rebels on an Imperial Combine Harvester whilst drinking Cider?
Happy do-dar-day to dead Di (did Di Die with Dodi?) who would have been 48 today. I could write pages about Di and the events leading up to the funeral, which I found absolutely fascinating, not least of which being the public reaction and subsequent out-pouring of imagined grief. To digress for a moment though, my best friend at the time, Malcolm, who is sadly no longer with us, was in hospital at the time of the ‘incident’, having open-heart surgery. I’ll never forget his fury when, still pumped full of morphine, he woke up after the op and heard about the deaths and plunged into a massive sulk, proclaiming, “Today was supposed to be about ME! Nobody’s talking about ME! They come into my room and they don’t ask, ‘How are you, Malcolm?’, they say, ‘Have you heard the news about Di?” I don’t think he ever forgave her for stealing his thunder. Now I like a good conspiracy story as much as the next man, in fact I’m quite enjoying all the ones surrounding Wacko Jacko at the moment. But Di did, and does, seem to offer opportunities for such questions to be asked. Let me ponder a couple of things. How was Di recognisable? Her hair and her fashion. Put her in a frumpy frock, dye her hair brown and cut it differently and she would not stand out from the crowd. Stage a tragic accident and whip her off to a remote chalet in Switzerland, with e
nough cash to keep her quiet and a promise that she could see her kids whenever they holidayed in the Alps. No conclusive photos of the crash. Sealed coffin. Discredited driver. The power of one of the richest families alive. Just a thought. And my second consideration is that of the parentage of young Harry. James Hewitt? You tell me!
My final thought for the day, as I wilt in the heat (I was going to say ‘melt’ but will restrain myself in deference to 20% of the Jackson 5, who must, by now, be looking decidedly waxy) is that on this day in 1997 we returned Hong Kong to China. Britain gained control of Hong Kong at the end of the First Opium War in 1841 – gotta love those opiates! Actually, when I was ill in hospital, morphine did nothing for me. The nurses kept saying things like, “we’ll give you a double-dose and you’ll be asleep in seconds” and I just lay there for hours waiting to feel any benefit at all! So Hong Kong is no longer a British colony. How’s that for a Chinese Take Away?
1 July 1937 is also a date of note as on that day Britain started using the 999 emergency phone number. In the UK you can also use the pan-European version, 112. So why 999? Well, this was mainly because of the design of public coin-operated phone boxes, which already allowed you to dial 0 without inserting any money (0 for operator services). It was relatively easy to convert these boxes to also allow the preceding digit, 9, to be dialled for free. Also, at the time, the digits 2 – 8 were used somewhere in the UK as the first number in a subscriber’s code. I remember as a child I was shown around the telephone exchange in our home town, Newmarket. I think it was on Station Road, where it intersected the High Street. I guess this will have been somewhere round 1974. Our phone number was just Newmarket 3554, my Grandparents were 4038. The exchange was, as per any vintage film, banks of plug-boards with flashing lights and teams of operators, all women, with headphones, mics and remarkably big hair-dos. The depths of the building contained acres of clicking machinery, cogs, wheels, miles of wire; a long way from our wireless network and digital exchanges these days. I have very few nostalgic memories of Newmarket, but that is certainly one. Remind me later and I’ll tell you some others. But I must just mention the fact that I lived next door to the National Stud! (And THAT is a guaranteed route into an inferiority complex!)
Today also marks the anniversary of the introduction of the Sony Walkman. I think I had a cheap equivalent, the size of a brick, guaranteed to chew up and spit out any tape you cared to feed it, with a battery life slightly less than the average cassette album and sound quality so poor that people for yards around benefitted from better acoustics than the person wearing the headphones. I remember making mix tapes and recording the top 40 off the radio. There was an art in pressing STOP a millisecond before Jimmie Saville or whoever jumped in with “That was Black Lace sliding down the charts to number 11 with ‘Agadoo’”. I had no means to edit, beyond actually splicing the tape (and yes, I DID do that, with a razor blade and special cassette-wide sticky tape). We had none of this digital malarkey, no graphic equalisers and pitch control. You sat there with your C60 tape in your Mum’s recorder with a plastic microphone banged up against the “music system’s” speaker, watching the cog-driven counter and hoping that you’d been clever enough to zero it at the end of the tape. Stereo? Yeah right! We were pleased to get the same mono signal coming out of two speakers! I remember nearly wetting myself with joy when I bought my first casset
te player that had a 5-pin DIN socket and meant that I could connect it straight into the ‘gramophone’ and record “LPs” straight to tape without the need for a mic. This was high-end, high-tech, hi-fidelity! I remember one of the first albums I bought was “The Sounds of Star Wars” by The Sonic All-Stars (Nothing to do with a blue hedgehog, I promise). I still have it in the loft!Which brings me neatly to a quick birthday mention for Dave Prowse – in my early youth he was the Green Cross Code man, reminding children everywhere to cross the road when they saw a little man flashing. He is probably more widely seen as the chap who played [the physical] Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy – see the link there? You’d almost think I planned this crap! That was back before episode IV was renamed “A New Hope” and all nine instalments of “The Journal of Whills [the Whills eventually turned into The Force]” were planned. I make the ‘physical’ distinction because Mr Prowse was indeed the man in the black mask, but his voice was never used. He was over-dubbed by James Earl Jones on account of DP having a distinct west-country accent. “Luke, you are my son, my lovely”... Attacking the rebels on an Imperial Combine Harvester whilst drinking Cider?
Happy do-dar-day to dead Di (did Di Die with Dodi?) who would have been 48 today. I could write pages about Di and the events leading up to the funeral, which I found absolutely fascinating, not least of which being the public reaction and subsequent out-pouring of imagined grief. To digress for a moment though, my best friend at the time, Malcolm, who is sadly no longer with us, was in hospital at the time of the ‘incident’, having open-heart surgery. I’ll never forget his fury when, still pumped full of morphine, he woke up after the op and heard about the deaths and plunged into a massive sulk, proclaiming, “Today was supposed to be about ME! Nobody’s talking about ME! They come into my room and they don’t ask, ‘How are you, Malcolm?’, they say, ‘Have you heard the news about Di?” I don’t think he ever forgave her for stealing his thunder. Now I like a good conspiracy story as much as the next man, in fact I’m quite enjoying all the ones surrounding Wacko Jacko at the moment. But Di did, and does, seem to offer opportunities for such questions to be asked. Let me ponder a couple of things. How was Di recognisable? Her hair and her fashion. Put her in a frumpy frock, dye her hair brown and cut it differently and she would not stand out from the crowd. Stage a tragic accident and whip her off to a remote chalet in Switzerland, with e
nough cash to keep her quiet and a promise that she could see her kids whenever they holidayed in the Alps. No conclusive photos of the crash. Sealed coffin. Discredited driver. The power of one of the richest families alive. Just a thought. And my second consideration is that of the parentage of young Harry. James Hewitt? You tell me!My final thought for the day, as I wilt in the heat (I was going to say ‘melt’ but will restrain myself in deference to 20% of the Jackson 5, who must, by now, be looking decidedly waxy) is that on this day in 1997 we returned Hong Kong to China. Britain gained control of Hong Kong at the end of the First Opium War in 1841 – gotta love those opiates! Actually, when I was ill in hospital, morphine did nothing for me. The nurses kept saying things like, “we’ll give you a double-dose and you’ll be asleep in seconds” and I just lay there for hours waiting to feel any benefit at all! So Hong Kong is no longer a British colony. How’s that for a Chinese Take Away?
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