Pandora's Box

I haven't eaten meat for over fifteen years. I don't have a problem with people eating meat - it's just something that I choose for myself. I know quite a few people who have been vegetarians and have gone back to eating meat after a length of time. I don't think that I will ever do that and as time goes by my conviction grows stronger. I still cook meat for Chris or guests and I have occasionally questioned this - particularly at key moments such as when your hand is inside a chicken and your fingers are gradually separating skin from flesh in order that the stuffing can go in.

I will still make a point of watching documentaries about animal slaughter and this is what sparked me off today - last night's television programme Could You Eat An Elephant? in which two chefs travelled the world sampling meat which in this country would be taboo. I have always maintained that if you are happy to eat cows or chickens there is some hypocrisy in refusing to eat cats or monkeys. The chefs in question ate snake's heart - still beating at the bottom of a glass of vodka, cheese which had been extra matured by maggots and the living maggots remained in the cheese and were part of the delicacy and dog amongst other meats - although they weren't particularly happy about meeting the dog livestock which were caged up in very tight confines. They refused to eat monkey, likening it to looking like a butchered baby, elephant and sewer rat - although free range rat as they termed the ones from fields did not disgust them to the same extent.

Another television programme that fascinates me is Kill it, Cook it, Eat it. in which - as the name suggests - animals are slaughtered then cooked and then served to the people who watched the slaughter. Until recently I had never seen the slaughter of turkeys or geese and it was bizarre to say the least - once the bird had been put in a cone and its head electrocuted its wings slowly and spookily rose up in the air behind its back as if still alive.

It was a documentary that finally convinced me to stop eating meat. It was called Pandora's Box and it was an expose on British abattoirs. It highlighted some of the malpractice that occurred in badly run slaughter houses in the UK. Included were cows that were not stunned sufficiently and were still conscious whilst being tethered up by their back legs and bled to death. Chickens which were still alive and badly mutilated in the head area whilst being dipped in boiling water in order that their feathers could be plucked more easily and then, still alive, having their feet chopped off. After seeing this documentary I knew that I couldn't be sure that the animals that I was eating had been treated correctly and processed humanely and therefore I couldn't eat them any more.

Chicken face

Everybody has awkward moments in their life. Take me this morning for example, I had to phone up Prowler and have a heated discussion about why my bottle of poppers and erm... magazines hadn't been sent through their mail order system despite my ordering them a couple of weeks ago and chasing it up with an unanswered email. The nice young man at the other end kindly informed me in gentle (camp) tones that my card had been declined, they had emailed me on my other address and if I cared to pay now they would dispatch the porn immediately.

Many incidents from yesteryear stick in my mind, such as the time at primary school when someone pulled my trousers down whilst I was standing on a chair at a high window thus flashing my bare bum to the entire class and the excruciating moment when I called Mr Melican, my second year history teacher, mummy. I am still cringing now...

That little anecdote, however, segues nicely into the queen of embarrassing moments - my mum.

There was the time at the post office when she felt something uncomfortable on her leg and shook it to try to alleviate the problem only to fling a pair of knickers out of her trouser leg and across the floor of the post office. Such tumble dryer mix ups were a source of hilarity in our house - I mean, who can resist laughing at someone with a sock stuck to the back of their cardigan by the awesome power of static electricity. Then there was the time that my parents were at one of my school's parent's evenings and she realised the importance, half way through the evening, of getting dressed with the lights on. She was wearing a lovely pair of kitten heel shoes, identical to each other in every way other than their colour. One was blue and one was green.

My favourite however was the heroic moment that she lurched to the rescue of a baby that was about to topple out of a trolley at Tesco only to realise upon successfully completing the heroic rescue that said baby was made out of plastic.

Maybe it's something about mums - my friend Janine's mum spent a couple of hours shopping around Chester with a substantial piece of chicken firmly stuck to her spectacles after putting them down on the table during lunch.

Buckley has made a few such faux pas in his time too. In a supermarket in Sale he picked up kangaroo steaks, started singing the song from Skippy the kangaroo and turned to me, steaks thrust forward and asked in a sing-song voice "Do you like Skippy?" Trouble was that I was a couple of metres behind him and he had just serenaded a stranger with kangaroo meat. My favourite Chris moment though was the train journey back to Manchester. He trotted off to the loo for - well let's call it a sit down - and dropped the loo paper on the floor. It was at the precise moment, whilst trying to retrieve it, when he was head to the floor bare bum pointed at the door that he discovered, much to his chagrin, that he had failed to lock the door - swoosh it opened. Chris remained in this position until the unwitting spectator had moved on, so as not to be recognised and then had to do the walk of shame back through the carriage to his seat.

My friend Janet... well there's potentially a whole other post about her. The tin of green paint on head, the man with the stutter that she offended and, as I remember, asking the customer at Habitat when her baby was due despite the fact that she had already had it. La la la la la la...

Samantha from Burnley

When we first moved to Preston we went to Chris's chairman's house for drinks one evening. He lives in a lovely house overlooking Stanley Park in Blackpool. As we were leaving one of his neighbours was shouting coo-ee and doing high kicks in the front garden. Turns out that this bloke was otherwise known as Betty Legs Diamond and was the headline act at Funny Girls in Blackpool. Chris's chairman tried to reciprocate and made a valiant effort to high kick back at him but when you're in your mid sixties and you've had half a bottle of red wine this can appear quite graceless. Betty put me in mind of a transvestite I met two August bank holiday's ago called Samantha from Burnley. Samantha from Burnley was a bus driver during the week and came down to Manchester at weekends to get all trashed up and drink pints of bitter.

I love trannies - not drag queens, just trannies - especially the ones who look like they've just come off the building site and put a frock on for the night. The librarian ones you see standing quietly in the corner on a Wednesday night on canal street talking to the teacher ones - all tweed skirts and cheap pearls. The cocky ones who've gone a shade mad with their human hair wigs and plumped for a shade of maroon that will show off their glittering cleavage enhancer and the married ones who are out for the night with their ever so understanding wives.

I can't imagine wanting to dress up like that - either as a lifestyle thing like a transvestite or as an entertainment thing like a drag queen. I did once wear a skirt on my head though when I was five years old.

Savick Brook to The Bamboo Take-away

On the far side of the roundabout, across the road from the old Victorian bus stop and the Spar corner shop is the Plungington pub. This marks the top end of Plungington Road and the main stretch of my walk to and from work. So far this is the most interesting part of Preston that I have found. This evening there was a large group of people in the Nippon yoga and martial arts centre, most of them looked quite uncomfortable. Perhaps they were about to take their first class. The Happy Haddock had also attracted a large group of people but this group seemed far more relaxed and jovial.

At one of the beauty shops a little girl sat grinning at a table in the window, hands outstretched, whilst the smiling assistant painted her nails. Her mum watched on, head crammed under a hair dryer. This evening, as I walked past, the butcher on the corner was bringing his sign in. At the bottom of the hand written sign read the legend 'Sausages on special offor!'

I suspect that there was an egging incident last night - I counted five of them broken on the pavement at various intervals down the street. Not sure what happened to the sixth - maybe it hit it's target. There are always lads bombing up and down the road in Novas and other such boy racers - I suspect the eggs emanated from one of these.

At the bottom end of the street, before you get to the university, the street suddenly gets busier with take aways, charity shops, food shops and student rental estate agents. I'm tempted by the doll with knitted dress loo roll cover in one of the shop windows. I turn left at the Bamboo.

Dover Beach

When Ray Bradbury wrote, in 1951, about televisions that covered an entire wall of a room in his novel Fahrenheit 451 do you think he thought that this would happen? And that the output from those televisions would be so consuming and pointless? When his character Montag questioned the misnomer 'living room' do you think he thought that what he wrote was more prophetic than science fiction?

Walking home from work recently I was being nosey and peeking in people's houses. It struck me that practically every house had an oversized television in the corner blaring out meaningless quiz shows and soap operas, that the viewers had more time in their lives to watch the events of fictional characters in a fictional landscape than to do something worthwhile with their own time. I am as guilty as most in this. I go home after a day of trying to convince strangers that they should buy my product rather than my neighbours and watch television - and not usually something that I choose to watch but just something - anything. I rarely learn anything from it and it never provokes an emotional reaction. I can't remember that last time that I questioned anything or had my thoughts provoked from watching television.

Is this a good use of my time? I don't think so. It concerns me more when I equate time with life and I ask the question - Is this a good use of my life? If I learned anything from my mother's death it was that you can't expect to live a long life - it just might not happen and so I should try to make more of my time / life.

In Bradbury's novel Montag provokes an emotional reaction from one of his wife's friends by reading the last two stanzas of a poem called Dover Beach which was written by Matthew Arnold. The poem was written soon after the author honey mooned on the south coast of England and begins with an air of optimism mixed with melancholy. This feeling diminishes as the poem progresses and he reflects on, amongst other things, the retreat of faith in the modern world (this was written in 1867 by the way.) I particularly like the final stanza which seems to be a call to his new wife to stand strong together in a bleak and dark world.

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

I Thank You

When our mum died my brother Robert, who writes songs and is a musician, wrote a piece which he sang at her funeral. This is it.

I Thank You

.

Whisper

I hear a finely spoken line

Though we'll miss her

She'll always be in our minds

Now I wonder

If things could have been changed

And I honour her

Till the end of my days

.

So mum, goodbye

Is all that I can say

And please thank her

For all the happiness she gave

Time gives memories

For all that we do

For this I thank you

I thank you

.

Till the end of my days

I'll honour her

If things could have been changed

I wonder

Though she'll always be in our minds

We'll miss her

And I say these finely spoken lines

In a whisper

.

So mum, goodbye

Is all that I can say

And please thank her

For all the happiness she gave

Time gives memories

For all that we do

Richard, Matthew, dad and I

We thank you

Girls Girls Girls!

In a previous life I kissed girls. Many and varied were they. Some hot, some not so. Some interesting, some not so. Some good experiences, some not so. 

There was Michelle who worked for the police and had a terrible reputation, there was Gillian who was a swimmer and an accomplished self harmer, Orietta Lorenzini was wonderfully naive and once did a naked dance around my bedroom about a day or so before she sought out the morning after pill. 

Kristel was a quarter German and had a terrible time with spirits bothering her at train stations. She was best friends with Shan until we split up and I started seeing Shan. Shanaz was, as I remember, a bit hairy and I occasionally helped her brother Shabaz with his homework. 

There was Rebecca - not to be confused with Becki who I did not go out with - who was lovely but short lived because she was the sister of my best friend who was not best pleased when he found out. In turn she was not best pleased when, before I ended the relationship, she found out that I had been kissing Phillipa. She found this out when she saw me kissing Phillipa when, by chance, she found herself sitting five rows behind us at the cinema. Terrible timing. 

There was Alison who I am still friends with now - I stole a crumpet from her parents' house and had a moment in the car park at the back of the dentist which resulted in gravel encrusted knees. Another one that I am still friends with now is Claire - she had the misfortune of going out with two people called Richard who both turned out to be big old gays. 

I seem to remember a rich girl who fell down the stairs and broke her arm when she stuck it through the banisters on the way down - perhaps Sarah? I can't remember. There was another one whose name I forget but I do remember that she was a Christian body builder.

As an aside I would like to post this photograph in remembrance of Eartha Kitt who died on Christmas day 2008.
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