One Day In Your Life

One day in your life
you'll remember a place
Someone touching your face
You'll come back and you'll look around you


One day in your life
You'll remember the love you found here
You'll remember me somehow
Though you don't need me now
I will stay in your heart
And when things fall apart
You'll remember one day...


One day in your life
When you find that you're always waiting
For the love we used to share
Just call my name
And I'll be there


You'll remember me somehow
Though you don't need me now
I will stay in your heart
And when things fall apart
You'll remember one day...


One day in your life
When you find that you're always longing
for the love we used to share
Just call my name
And I'll be there

Iran

Ten people dead in skirmishes protesting the allegedly crooked outcome of the Iranian election. Amnesty reports the flow of information from Tehran is seemingly being choked, from texts to the web, a shutdown is beginning. The people want the election annulled, the Ayatollah won’t permit it. The Revolutionary Guards are cracking down on the people’s right to peaceful protest and assembly. It’s a scary time for Iran and the world’s eyes have to be firmly on the country in the immediate aftermath. It will take one minute to fire off this email to the Embassy and remind them, one person at a time, that the world is watching. It’s the right to demonstrate that helps move the world forward.

(All photos are lifted from the Internt for inspirational purposes, I'm happy to remove any right away, just message me)

Texts are the new novels: Part 2

Well, it was time to empty the old Sony again and as ever I have been simply weeping with laughter and bemusement. This time these are ALL incoming messages so I take no credit. Thanks to the authors, you're all brilliant.


Eurovision! Wooo! *Waves flag*


Oh my fucking GOD. If you dont permit name-dropping i will explode...


Just met kim deal.


I don't think you realise how much i hate hazel blears. I'd love to slap her face really hard.


i look pretty much like a paper plate tied to a pillow anyway


Had random ace night but v poorly all day. Can't believe you pulled a trans!


Married, published, swine-flued, emigrated, or dead?


Aren't you with him for totty purposes?


Brilliant. A woman in leeds changed her name to Laura Madonna Vogue On The Cover Of A Magazine.


OMG i'm loving series 2. I laughed like a drain at the first cup of coffee in the face


hooray for prancing! I've pranced on and off all day, in public places


Your flat will smell of boys


Mandinka by sinead o connor? Are you mentally ill?!!


Your creepy. BUT I LOVE YOU


How are you managing not to touch it?


poker face by lady ga ga totally reminds me of new york. That was playing when you were getting chair fucked by that girl.


Really enjoyed the gig, woke up at 5 fully clothed with my contacts still in.


Omg it's nearly time. I haven't done a sausage!


Are you watching top 50 celeb meltdowns?


You're right. The sponges look like biscuits. It's the world's thinnest sponge.


There is a long unyielding log of medium thickness in the downstairs toilet. Was it you?


I liked moral turpitude


Unitedstatesofamericaniqua


Can i come over and do u now?


The only rational policy for me is to find a pub where no one knows me and drink whisky till i cant walk!


Too fat to wear an i pod?


I could prob give u tips, i've watched 2 episodes of how clean is ur house today


One of his friends is the biggest fucking tool i've ever met


I had to leave! I couldn't talk! I have your dog tags. Will the taxi driver accept them as currency?


I think you should fuck him. Clocks go forward love.


I played the trolley song to eddie this morning. He loved it but immediately changed the words to 'whack whack whack went the eddie I'm the brother MC in the place to be check it out yeeeeah'. I think he's straight.

Day Five in New York: “We’re gonna prove to you there are no faggots and no lesbians in heaven” (Black Muslims, Flatbush Ave, Brooklyn)

The Brooklyn Bridge.

The day more or less begins with iced tea on Fulton Street watching hotties coming out of Abercrombie & Fitch. People are obsessed with A&F in New York, the clothes are absolute toilet though, does nobody see? We approach the vast unshaded expanse of the Brooklyn Bridge in full anticipation of the heatstroke to come. But it really is so exciting to cross the bridge, even going in the ‘wrong’ direction as we are. Today we are ‘doing borough', spending the day in Brooklyn. (This will effectively be our third borough because I’m counting the Staten Island ferry).

Brooklyn through and through.

At the far end of the bridge the sign reads ‘Welcome to Brooklyn. How Sweet It Is!’ Brooklyn is where the real famous and brilliant New Yorkers are from: Woody Allen, Lauren Bacall, Mel Brooks, Harvey Fierstein, George Gershwin, Rita Hayworth, Harry Houdini, Danny Kaye, Carole King, Barry Manilow, Arthur Miller, Joan Rivers, Mickey Rooney, Phil Silvers, Neil Simon, Paul Sorvino, Barbra Streisand, Mae West, Walt Whitman, Shelley Winters …

How sweet indeed.

The famed ice cream factory which I promised to take Joff to is closed on Mondays, gah, so we troll inland and pass the lovely Muslim gentlemen quoted above. We never did find out why we’re hell-bound but if it’s any hotter than this I’d be surprised. Beer as soon as possible in an Irish Bar and then to beautiful Fort Greene Park where I do some writing and Joff snoozes and a beautiful girl nearby sings and plays her guitar. We walk around the Park Slope neighbourhood, which is about the eighth neighbourhood in which I can imagine living. Stop for drinks at the beautiful Union Hall bar and then the Excelsior.

My little fixer-upper on Park Slope?

From Park Slope we head to Williamsburg, home to the Hassidics and the hipsters and which, despite popular opinion, hasn’t yet disappeared up its own arse as far as I can tell. This makes nine neighbourhoods where I wish to live. Rents aren’t too crippling in W’burg yet either, according to flyers you can share a house here for $700 dollars a month, that can’t last forever surely, it’s only one subway stop from Manhattan. It would be quicker to pop back to the island than wait the hour it takes for my (albeit gorgeous) sandwich to arrive in the Vietnamese diner on Bedford Avenue but since the three best looking men in Brooklyn, possibly the world, are in here tonight we’d quite happily sit around and eat serviettes.

Williamsburg Bridge at dusk.

Dream line-ups at the Music Hall.

Next it’s up the road to the Williamsburg Music Hall to see Mogwai play and during their set, for the first time this week, I literally forget where I am. Profound and stellar and sad and wonderful they are. Great ramshackle venue, devoted crowd, the sound is excellent and best of all it’s being filmed which means I’ll be able to buy a live DVD as a memento. I’m not going to turn this bit into a music blog, suffice to say live is the best place to appreciate what Mogwai really are. They’ve been on my radar for years but I only really fell in love with Come On Die Young about five years ago (although no tracks from there tonight), plus ‘A Cheery Wave From Stranded Youngsters’ (from Young Team) ranks as one of the greatest instrumentals, well, ever. Read a gig review here.

Mogwai, "international band from Glasgow". Postrock is all about the laughs.

And play the setlist for yourself here, in headphones, under blue light. If you really can’t get into Mogwai, start with ‘Friend of the Night’, pay attention to the gorgeous Nymanesque piano and take it from there. Magic.

Forgetting where I am.

Drunk on generous Stateside vodka coke measures, hot and sticky in the Williamsburg night, what bliss is this. More beers outside the Metropolitan with the gay borough boys and later a cab ride back to the island. This is our last night in New York. I begin to feel happysad already, some amorphous mass of postrock hums through my head as I try to stay awake over the Williamsburg Bridge.

The bridge boys.

Day Four in New York: “Move it you bitches or I’m gonna call immigration and shake this fuckin’ place up!” (Head trannie at Lucky Cheng’s restaurant)

Sunday. Joff and I have planned to spend the day apart then meet up at the hotel later, change for dinner and trade New York stories. I head out armed with sunglasses, camera and most importantly my pre-prepared New York City Streets playlist on my new dinky Creative Zen. The songs are not necessarily New York in origin, most have been chosen to give one the essential oomph needed for pacing the streets, so we get ‘Sir Duke’, ‘Into The Groove’, ‘Decepticon’, ‘He’s On The Phone’, ‘I’m Coming Out’, ‘Queen Bitch', ‘Don‘t Stop Till You Get Enough' …

It is hot out. Have I mentioned that? Phew. I head down to Greenwich Village and sit in Washington Square Park where a fantastic swing band are in full, er, swing. It is a quintessential New York scene, the music is straight out of a Woody Allen movie, women are dancing, everyone applauds. The band leader introduces the players in turn then says, “But the most important member of the band is Philip - Philip the bag” and so everyone throws money into his guitar bag.

I leave the park and put my headphones back on and right away ‘Everybody Dance’ by Chic comes on and I get a lump in my throat, it‘s my favourite Chic song by a city mile and one of my favourite songs period. (Yes, I said ‘period'). I walk the length of Bleecker Street to it, including past the legendary Bitter End, stop on a shady stoop for a dollar slice of pizza which I could happily live off, then walk the length of Christopher Street in my tarty vest and get thoroughly sunburned for my troubles. Christopher Street takes you all the way to the Christopher Street Pier which is chocablock with ripped shirtless men as well as little kids with their fingers stuck together with melting ice lollies running in between them. The breeze off the Hudson River is like being kissed all over. I sit on the boards and Ryan Adam’s ‘New York, New York’ comes on. Second lump in the throat.

Then I start walking walking walking, it’s my absolute favourite thing to do in New York, besides drink Martinis. If I could do both simultaneously I’d be made up. From Christopher Street I walk all the way (via ‘All The Young Dudes’ and Soulwax on Seventh Avenue, powered by Starbucks, I never go there at home) to the Rockefeller Centre at 50th Street. For $20 dollars I take the speedy lift up to a breath-taking glass-fronted viewing platform, ‘Top Of The Rock’, on the 70th floor. The views, to my mind, are superior to the Empire State because you can look at the Empire State itself. I would go again at sunset to watch the shadow stretch to Queens, it is my new ambition.


Central Park on the other side is speckled with the white dots of thousands of people basking in the sunshine. You can see for miles, the whole of New York. I feel momentarily sad there’s nobody to gasp at it all with. No matter. I take the most amazing photographs from every direction, and then the memory stick in my camera crashes. Seriously. It explains the dearth of good pictures on the blog. Sob. I really don’t want to talk about it. It’s with the manufacturer now. My hopes aren’t high. I sink into a bit of a sulk but drag myself out of it because I am missing the holiday. A page in my New York notebook says ‘I am writing this on top of the Rockefeller Centre!’. I stayed chipper.

Back on Fifth I see a group of models waiting for a photo shoot with the most amazing sculpted hairdos, all of them smoking like navvies while a gaggle of make-up and wardrobe queens flutter at their edges, preening. They are very young and so skinny and they look rich and famous and ill and completely Bret Easton Ellis. Fabulous. I get a cheese pretzel (ha, models! carbs!) and head to 238 East 72nd Street. For those in the know it’s the outside location for Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment building on Sex and the City. It actually looks not quite right when I get there and it turns out they’ve used a few different locations for filming. In any case I am a bit giddy. Here is me sitting on the stoop:

“You can drive down this street all you want, because I don’t live here any more!”

Time is ticking so I decide to walk all the way back downtown along a single avenue, in this case Second. I watch the neighbourhoods change a few blocks at a time. Frighteningly young couples leave very swish apartment blocks with minuscule dogs (New Yorker’s are so into teeny rat dogs) and I feel an utter financial failure. I happen upon my favourite New York picture of the week so far though as the Empire State makes a sudden unexpected appearance over an otherwise non-descript street. Imagine seeing this every day …



My shoulders look like two quarters of Edam by the time I get back to the hotel. I am bright red. Joff actually screams when he sees me. I am badly burned but in a surprisingly small amount of pain. We change and head further downtown to Lucky Cheng’s (First Avenue at First and Second). It‘' a Chinese restaurant staffed entirely by drag queens, mostly Chinese and Japanese. It’s not for the faint-hearted. I am one of those people who seriously lives in mortal fear of crowd participation and they are on me like a rat up a glittery drainpipe. There is a mike in my face before I’ve even sipped my first cherry martini …
“Oh we have a couple of handsome boys over here. What are your names sweetie?”
“Greg and Jonathan.”
“I love your accent, where are you from honey?”
“England."
“But you have such nice teeth!”
Cue laughter. Fortunately I can’t get any redder because of my chronic sunburn.
“Whereabouts in England?”
“Manchester.”
“Oh, say it again!”
“Manchester.”
“AGAIN!”
And so on.

Food eventually gets ordered somehow while various overdone and fabulous trannies stalk the restaurant abusing all and sundry. It’s hysterical. A large party of fierce black girls dressed to the nines hog the main table in the centre awaiting the arrival of the birthday girl.
“She’s black and it’s her birthday? We’re gonna be waitin’ all fuckin’ night. If that girl rolls in in sweats and sneakers I’m gonna fuckin’ slap the bitch!”
The birthday girl is Star, she arrives looking amazing with her friend Shanaynay (seriously) and they get straight up on the stage and speed bogle for the cheering crowd with their two inch Teflon nail attachments waving about while various drag queens speed around the room with steaming Chinese entrées, all the while hurling racial epithets at one another’s overdone faces.

I assume my moment of shame is over. Oh no no no. I’m to be the recipient of a lap dance in a mortifyingly slutty competition. I am coupled with a very nice Park Avenue-ish lady, who seems clean-living but is currently fairly liquored up, lucky for her. The first couple are up and the girl dances like a seasoned whore and I am already terrified but can’t stop laughing. I take the chair as my lady warns me “I’m wearing a tight skirt and I have no idea what I’m supposed to do."
“It’s alright, I’m gay, we’re onto a winner.”
She bumps and grinds for two minutes and we come a triumphant last. I neck my next Martini like it’s luke warm tea.

We haemorrhage money into the place, eat our desserts, and are eventually kissed goodbye by our gorgeous waitress ‘London’. I fall about laughing in the street when I read the receipt which says that we were served by ‘Jap Bitch A’. I’ll always love you New York.

Day Three in New York: “Oh my god, I want to shave all my hair off!” (Long-haired girl stepping into the sunshine on Third Avenue)

A little lie-in after last night’s boozing and we wake up starving so we (literally) hotfoot it to the famous Ess-a Bagel where the bagels are made fresh right there and the queue is indicative of how amazing they are. I have an onion flavoured bagel with vegetables and walnut and scallion cream cheese with a vat of gorgeous coffee. I’m officially smoking in New York so I’m perpetually wired on caffeine or nicotine or both, it’s the perfect kind of fractious energy to negotiate our sticky way down Second Avenue where I make an appointment to have a little something done later in the day …

I have a hundred dollar splurge at Urban Outfitters which is ten times better than the one at home. They’re playing Morrissey on the stereo which is drenched with significance. Eventually we’ve slummed it enough down the Lower East Side so we decide to go upmarket and cab it to Chelsea. I change into my new shorts in the back of the cab which inevitably stops at the traffic lights as soon as I’m down to my boxers.


In Chelsea we get a table in the shade at a nice little bistro and drink iced tea and lager and read the Village Voice. They have tiny little free cakes on the table with jam to go on top, it’s all just so civilised. We picked a good day for Chelsea, Eighth Avenue is closed off to traffic and there’s a huge outdoor market running for several blocks jammed with food, live music, cheap clothes and beautiful men. I buy a twelve dollar hat that may or may not suit me but which prevents my head from overheating.



When we’ve done the market we walk to the neighbouring Meatpacking District, a small, sexy, industrialised area by the water which is no longer up and coming but has up and come. Boutique hotels and swish bars share pavement space with BEST VEAL and PORK BEEF LAMB outlets in that cheek-by-jowl way that New York does so well. It’s gentrification with iron doors and meat hooks, Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney are here, things move fast in New York.


We stop for another beer, Dutch courage for my little procedure, which in the end goes off without a hitch. I feel fantastic afterwards. Home, shower and change, then, once the sun has mercifully gone down, a cool walk down the Bowery, through Soho and into Little Italy which is teeming with people and life and the feeling that we are in just the right place. We eat at Il Cortile, one of the seemingly last Italian restaurants surviving the crush from Chinatown and NoLiTa which are elbowing into the neighbourhood. Little Italy marks its turf proudly though with beautiful lights in the colours of the Italian flag the length and breadth of the streets.



We decide to head back to Chelsea for drinks but we do the bars in the wrong order. Rush turns out to be a club so is too quiet when we get there early. The music is dire, the boys aren’t a patch on the East Village set, and people are dancing in shorts and flip-flops (!!??). No. So, despite the $20 dollar cover charge we've already paid, we head to Barracuda which is much more fun and sexy. We get embroiled in some kind of drunken bar dare where Joff has to swap shirts with someone and I have to give someone my phone number, which I fake of course (I give them Joff’s). I seem to be able to get very drunk on two drinks in this heat, it’s fantastic. Then we go to another bar. It’s busy. In fact it’s the busiest bar I’ve ever been to in my life. It’s hot. There’s a pool table in the back. The toilets are tiny. We are literally cheek by jowl with the other punters so everyone can hear our English accents as we complain about the schvitzing like a pair of old bobes. Neither of us can remember what the place was called. Mists of time now love, mists of time …