More election stuff

Two items of note, from my perspective, today. First of all, at lunchtime, easily the biggest lie I've seen in the campaign so far, and not even from a politician. The Sun has rented one of the panels on the famous Piccadilly Circus illuminated advertising wall, and has had the effrontery to use the tagline, on a Union Flag background, of 'Fighting for an election win for Britain'. Total bollocks! Their sycophantic support for Cameron and his bunch of thieves has nothing to do with Britain, and everything to do with the greed of the fascistic robber baron, Murdoch, who owns the worthless rag and knows full well that his chances of making even more undeserved money from the sheeple will be far better under the Tories than any other shade of government. This evening, though, I've found some much better news - the constituency I live in, currently Tory held, was projected at the start of the campaign to be narrowly retained by the incumbent, but the most recent local opinion poll I can find now shows the Labour candidate 4% ahead. Still too close to call, but very encouraging, as far as I'm concerned.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Threescore years less five

So, here I am, arrived at the halfway point of my time as the eponymous quinquagenarian (don't worry, I've already got a revised title for the blog lined up, should it, or indeed I, last another five years - what a sad, pretentious bastard, eh!). Needless to say, I don't feel the least bit different from how I felt yesterday, and I haven't done anything different, either - I've been out and about, been treated to some (mostly touristy) eye candy, fallen in lust at least once (with a very cute boy by a bus stop at the Trafalgar Square end of Whitehall), and now I'm in my local. I hoped K would be well enough to come out for a birthday meal with me (not necessarily here), but it's not to be - she is feeling better than earlier in the week, but still a good way short of 100%. So, it's just me, the Kindle, and a few beers - and I'm determined to make the best of it. Happy Birthday to me!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Meanwhile, in unsurprising election news of the day....

....UKIP, apart from being homophobic, racist, xenophobic misogynists, are a bunch of would-be theocrats, too. And that's apart from the DUP wanting to make Northern Ireland an offshore province of the American bible bigot belt. Politicians are vile enough in their own right, but when they add religion to their platform, they venture into the realms of utter egregiousness.

Love & best wishes to all

Sammy B

Amusement

I've seen a couple of things while I've been out and about today which amused me. The first was a poster in the window of a card shop, bearing the logo 'Don't grow up, it's a trap' - a quick web search just now suggests it's pretty well known, but I hadn't come across it before, and it made me laugh, even if, on reflection, its humour has a rather mordant edge. There's certainly no escape from that particular trap, anyway. The second item was unintentionally funny, and then only, perhaps, to someone with my rather offbeat sense of humour - a job advert, in the window of a taxi office, which said 'Experience controller required'. Had the (presumably!) missing 'd' been in place, it wouldn't have raised a second thought, but the idea of an 'experience controller' struck me as being thoroughly Orwellian, or open to any amount of double entendre, or both!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Now or never?

It's my life 
It's now or never 
I ain't gonna live forever 
I just want to live while I'm alive 

I heard this song on Planet Rock earlier on. I'm not a fan of the song or the band, but the lyrics, on this occasion, did strike a chord with me. Tomorrow is the last day I'll be able to honestly claim to be in my early fifties. There's no doubt at all in my mind that I'm well past the halfway point of my life, probably even the three-quarter point. And still I haven't even come close to getting what I want the most. What, really, am I achieving by carrying on in this fashion? What have I got to lose if I finally shake off the straitjacket of societal norms and expectations I've voluntarily imprisoned myself in for so long? A few years of pointless life? That sounds like a feature rather than a bug.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Frustration

Not that it's of much interest to anyone else, or that griping is going to solve anything, but I'm thoroughly dischuffed with my lot at the moment. I've worked for the best part of four months with barely a day off, aside from the long weekend I took when my friend was over from Australia, and then, when I do finally book some time off, I end up ill. I felt a little better yesterday, and went out for a few hours, but, today, I'm feeling rotten again, unable even to drag myself into the shower, still less going out and doing anything. I've pretty much written today off altogether, in the hope that by staying indoors and plying myself with medication, I might be in some fit state to enjoy the rest of the week. I'm not holding my breath in expectation, though.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Cul-de-sac

After finishing my latest story yesterday, I had a brief skim this morning through some of the others I've got in draft, to see whether any have sufficient merit to try and take forward. The results weren't encouraging. There is one, which in terms of its origins, is actually older than my blogs - I began writing it in an exercise book, mostly in quiet times in my previous Cornish workplace - which I'd really like to be able to finish, but I've been totally becalmed on one particular passage, which I know needs to be rewritten, because it simply doesn't work in its present form, but, even after three years of periodically revisiting it, I can't work out how to fix it. That story apart (in fact, that story included), though, most of the others are no more than variations on my normal theme, man/boy relationships, not all sexual, by any means, but all much of a muchness. I could definitely do with finding something completely different to write about, in the way I managed with Londoner, but what that 'something different' might be is the problem. For all I enjoy writing, I'm not the world's most imaginative person, added to which my own life experience is really not at all interesting. I could do with the proverbial '1% inspiration', but it's conspicuous by its absence at the moment.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Plague ward

Well, not quite, of course, but K and I have both been distinctly under the weather today, and confined to quarters. I'm still coughing, sneezing and sniffling for England, but it doesn't seem to be anything more than a bad cold, so I'm hoping it will pass in a few days. K, though, is probably more ill than I am - she's been complaining of a bad headache and dizziness, and has been asleep for virtually the whole day. If she's still the same in the morning, I'll take her to the doctors, although, from similar things I've had in the past, I don't know how much they might be able to do, because it sounds like it might be a viral infection.
At least my 'incarceration' has had one benefit, as I finished and published my latest story in Nephelokokkygia. It won't, as I said a few weeks back, be to everyone's taste, or, maybe, to anyone's taste, but as ever with my writing, I can only produce what's in my head at any given time. And no-one is forced to read it, of course.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Bugs 1, Sammy 0. And crisis management - I hope

I've had to ring in sick for my two weekend night shifts - I've had a cold coming on for the past couple of days, and it landed, as ever, on my chest this morning. I basically wasn't able to get any sleep at all, coughing as much as I was, the fatigue making me feel even worse. We're really short of staff at the moment, but all I could do was to be apologetic when I rang the duty shift manager this afternoon. After little more than four hours sleep yesterday, working last night, and then a restless day today, I'm simply not fit to go and do a safety critical job. If any of my colleagues think I might be skiving, they might like to reflect on the fact that by missing tonight's shift, and tomorrow's, which is classed as overtime, so I wouldn't be allowed to go back, even if I was feeling better, I'm going to take a hit of around £250 in lost wages. an expensive cold, and no mistake.
K has had a fraught weekend so far, too - her external hard drive, which has a lot of her AS Level work on it, has died. She has got a proportion of the work saved elsewhere, some on her laptop and some in 'the cloud', but there's quite a bit of stuff that she might lose altogether, as well as numerous personal photos. She took it to PC World this morning, to see if they could resurrect it, which they couldn't, and they then quoted her £700 for specialist data recovery, and with no fixed timescale for doing it. She was very unhappy, needless to say, and so was I, given that I bought her the device less than six months ago. I did come up with a suggestion, though, which might resolve the problem, given a little luck - my niece's new fiancé is a computer technician by profession, and, by all accounts, a pretty talented one, so K took an impromptu trip to Kent to hand the errant piece of kit to my brother. We should know by tomorrow whether the young man has managed to work the oracle - fingers, and everything else, are crossed in the meantime, needless to say.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

'You'll break it'

Yeah, my heart if you keep smiling like that. That little half-smile I saw first, not the toothy one of a minute or two later, that one doesn't set your beauty off remotely as well.
Who? Dylan. Yeah, I even found out his name, less than ten seconds after I'd set eyes on him for the first time in my life. How? The rest of the sentence that the title of this post is derived from. 'Dylan, don't, you'll break it!' Not sure what 'it' was, some possession of the maker of the statement. Who, in turn, was the 'new cutie' I'd first seen little more than a week earlier. He was there, obviously, the 'next door but one' cutie was there, too, along with a couple of the other local boys. But Dylan was, it was instantly apparent, in a different league from any of them. That first view of him, not even a proper profile, still less a full face - I was, as best I can describe it, looking diagonally over his right shoulder from above, standing on our balcony - was enough to establish that fact unequivocally. And when I did see his face properly, from my bedroom window a few minutes later, as he was standing directly below it with his friends, and he smiled that unbelievably alluring little smile (not in my direction, needless to say), my heart simply melted. He's too young, of course. The cutest of the cute always are. 10/11, something like that. I don't know if he's a new resident, or a visitor. I hope so much he has moved here, while, at the same time, desperately hoping he hasn't. Sammy's paradox. The delight of beauty I might see every day, but, potentially, temptation every day, too. A road to nirvana. Or madness. Or jail. Or all of the above.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Scary

I had a very unnerving moment at work at around 4:00 this morning. Nothing to do with the job - that was busyish, by night shift standards, but far from being overwhelming. Instead, it was due to a quirk of my metabolism. I suffer, from time to time, from gout, and now is one of those times. I usually keep the symptoms under control with ibuprofen, bought for pennies from the supermarket shelf, but there are occasions when the pain needs something a bit stronger, so I took a tablet of a prescription medication from a previous episode. A medication I've taken on numerous previous occasions, most recently just a couple of weeks ago. But this time, it all went wrong. I had an allergic reaction. One minute, almost, I was fine, waiting for the effects of the pill to kick in, the next my chest tightened up, I had what felt like an unswallowable lump in my throat, and I was itching all over. Luckily, I realised what had happened, and, equally luckily, I had some antihistamines in my bag, promptly taking one. Within an hour, the symptoms of the reaction had largely gone, even if the pain in my foot was as unpleasant as ever. Isn't evolution wonderful - a physiological reaction which developed to fight off environmental pathogens turning on its 'owner' causing, potentially at least, more problems than it solves. Not that I need it, but yet more evidence against the concept of an 'intelligent designer' - if humans had been 'created' in that supernatural fashion, side effects would be unheard-of - unless 'god' has a sick sense of humour, of course.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Unpopularity

A good word to sum up my life. I've never been popular, not at school, right from the beginning, not even five years old - I was the 'fat kid', when fat kids were much rarer than they are now, and, probably even more unforgivable, I was the 'clever kid' - not as a teenager, although I had a handful of friends, including two, at least, genuinely good friends, not now as an adult and a denizen of cyberspace. I'm not looking for sympathy, I don't even care. Certainly not anymore - maybe I did, somewhat, when I was younger, but now, I couldn't care less. To paraphrase a well-known UK football chant 'you don't like me, and I don't care'. I don't like myself, never have, probably never will, so why should anyone else bother? Even yesterday's dose of self-loathing has passed - I've read the story again today, and enjoyed it, preteen protagonist and all. It's fiction, after all. 'No boys were harmed in the writing - or reading - of this story'. Maybe I should feel guilt, shame, many would certainly think so. But I don't. Eventually, when you're poked and prodded enough, you assume the 'hedgehog position' - curled up so that only the spikes are showing. That's about where I am now.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Too difficult

There are days when the convolutions and contradictions of my life are almost too much to contend with. This shows signs of being one of them. When I first woke up, I heard a brief story on the radio news, following it up with a look at the BBC website. I wanted to write about it, but I found myself being bogged down by my tendency towards 'self-censorship', by worrying about what the faceless 'they' would think. So I read an online story instead, and while it had the desired outcome in a physical sense, it pitched me, in the aftermath, into a very dark place psychologically. Because of the effect one of the fictional characters had on me. In spite of his age being what I always call 'too young' when I write about real boys I encounter in my daily life. Like the cutie I saw in the back garden just a few days ago, who was the same age as the fictional boy, give or take a year. However much I try to deny it, even to myself, it's always been there, since I was hardly more than a little boy, 12 or so, beginning to learn about who I was, finding myself attracted to my brother's friends, two, three, four years younger than me. Always them. Never the boys my own age. I still cling to the hope that I can live in the way I aspire to, to never knowingly hurt anyone, to never do anything without informed consent. But would I be able to adhere to those principles, if the wrong set of circumstances came about? If, for example, that little guy from the garden and I somehow ended up alone together? I'd be lying if I answered with a definitive 'yes'. The honest answer is that I simply don't know. But the knowledge of even the possibility that one day someone will break down my defences is almost too difficult to live with. Hate me, if you like, but one thing is certain - you'll never be able to hate me more than I hate myself.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Reindeer shopping, and some nice news

When K went to Finland on a language exchange trip four years ago, she came back raving about, amongst other things, one particular item of the local cuisine. Reindeer meat. Despite some fairly extensive research, though, it seemed to be pretty much unobtainable over here. Until I went past a butcher's shop not too far from where we live a couple of days ago, which, as well as supplying the usual pork, beef, lamb and poultry, has a sideline in 'exotic' meats. And in their window was an advert for reindeer steaks. As soon as I told K, she was ready to make a beeline for the place instantly, but other commitments meant that it was this morning before we actually got there. As it turned out, 'steaks' was an exaggeration - they had exactly one in stock! It was purchased, of course, and I pan fried it with my own fair hand this evening for my girl, who thoroughly enjoyed it. She kindly allowed me to try a morsel, and it was rather nice, albeit not that much different to regular venison as far as I was concerned, perhaps slightly less dense in texture, but similar in taste.
I'd barely finished the washing up when K rushed out of her room excitedly, bubbling over with the news that her cousin (my niece) had just got engaged. My brother's daughter has been, ever since she was a toddler, very close to my heart, so I'm just as thrilled for her as K was. It's her 21st birthday today, and her boyfriend (now fiancé) had taken her to California as her present, proposing to her at the gates of Disneyland. Through the joys of social media, everyone knew within an hour, and were even able to admire the ring! I spoke to my brother shortly afterwards, finding him a proud father, needless to say. A good day, all round.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

What is this 'day off' of which you speak?

A little gentle plagiarism of Douglas Adams, but I hope his shade will forgive me!
But yeah, a day off. My body clock wasn't in on the secret, though - despite a late night (the muse cocked half an eye at me 24 hours or so ago, and it was too good an opportunity to miss), I woke at 4:30 this morning, even in the absence of an alarm. I did manage to get back to sleep, but the circadian demons couldn't be kept at bay for that much longer, and I was definitively up and about by 7:15. Distinctly to my surprise, though, K wasn't all that far behind me - she's still on Easter holiday, not back to school until Tuesday, but was up by 8:00 - bemoaning the fact that she hasn't been able to sleep into the afternoon even once during her break. I could have scored a cheap point by saying something along 'welcome to the real world' lines, but, being the soul of diplomacy that I am, I resisted the temptation! Her earlier than expected appearance worked to her advantage, though, because we went into our local town centre together, and she ended up with her Oystercard doubly refreshed, with a new monthly bus pass, and £20 of 'pay and go' credit for her to use on the Tube, as well as some extra cash in her purse. As I said to her a couple of days ago, when she asked me for some money for new clothes (which she hasn't had yet, but will get in due course), what's the point of me working all this overtime if no-one benefits from it!
Once we'd gone our separate ways, my day progressed in a rather predictable fashion, some meandering, including one or two new, to me, bits of the Metropolis, and ending up here, in my local. There were some nice sights en route, too - many London schools are back in session again, but others, as in K's case, are not - but the nicest of all came on the bus up here, a cutie with dark, curly hair, and very kissable looking lips, who was obviously either on his way to or from playing table tennis, given the TLC he was lavishing on his bat (or is paddle the right word?) while sitting opposite me. It was one of those 'near miss' kind of moments - I looked at him, he looked at me, he half-smiled, but both of us, for our different reasons, his caution and my paranoia, probably, fought shy of actually initiating a conversation. The walls we build between us, especially in the 'big city'.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Beer garden sunshine bunny, and (maybe) another local cutie

The weather around here has been stunning for the last couple of days, clear, warm and sunny. It's a bloody shame we don't get weather like this in the summer! When I left work yesterday, I was taken with the idea of using the sunshine to best advantage, and, as such, travelled slightly further afield than usual to visit a Wetherspoons branch I've used a few times before, and which has a rather nice beer garden. And it wasn't long before the endorphins were flowing - I found a table where I could position a chair in the full sun, but put my beer glass in the shade to keep the contents as cool as reasonably practicable. Nirvana!
When I finally managed to drag myself away, and headed back to the flat, the positivity was reinforced by a new - to me, at least - addition to the cast of 'back garden footballers', a very cute little Asian boy, who actually smiled and said hello - I responded in similar vein, needless to say - when I ventured onto our minuscule balcony to survey the view. Much too young for anything beyond 'eyes only', but, as I've said before, any pleasant interaction with a boy is most definitely not to be sneezed at.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Tired, and heartstrung

If heartstrung is even a word. Tired definitely is, though, and I fall firmly within its definition. My seventh consecutive early turn today, and I've still got four more to go, to round off a run of 22 days worked out of 23, by the time I finish on Thursday. If I haven't melted into a puddle of pure fatigue before then. I have managed to stay sufficiently compos mentis to go shopping on my way home and cook K and I rather a nice Sunday roast, if I say so myself, though, as well as dealing with some overdue but relatively simple domestic tasks - the cleaning is very much behindhand, though, so I hope the landlord doesn't decide on a impromptu visit!
And those heartstrings. In a moment, outside Charing Cross station on my meandering way back this afternoon. A boy at a bus stop, who took me a good distance away, in both time and space, to another boy. DBJ. Today's boy wasn't really a close lookalike, but there were enough resonances to churn the emotions more than a little (and he was very good looking in his own right, too). In an ideal word, that beautiful boy in a small Cornish town would've been mine, and me his, forever, but ideal worlds, of course, don't exist, and, even more pertinently, beautiful boys do the one thing that boys inevitably do - become men. Handsome men, many of them, but not what I desire. As I've said before, the hallmark, above all others, above even the hatred and contempt of 'society', of being a boylover is to embrace transience. The perfect, but evanescent moment.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Outing

I went out for drinks with some of my work colleagues yesterday afternoon, around 'worktown'. From my point of view, it certainly went better than the previous version I'd attended, last autumn. Not least of the reasons was that the one person at work that I genuinely consider to be a friend rather 'just' a colleague was there this time, as well as a couple of others whose company I find more than averagely congenial. Perhaps the most interesting, and in many ways unexpected, attendee, though, was our newest recruit, who's only begun his training in the past few weeks after moving from a different part of the industry. He's a youngish guy, mid-twenties, and - he's openly gay, living with a long-term (considering his age) partner. Given one or two who were there, including the 'archbigot', I wondered what sort of reception he might receive, but, on the whole, it was surprisingly, and encouragingly, positive. I asked him (albeit couched humorously) whether he was being brave or foolhardy in seeking out the company of those who were there, to which he answered, quite reasonably, that he thought it was a good way to get to know some of his new workmates. As the afternoon progressed, and people became more 'mellow', there was even a kind of 'Q & A' session when he was asked (in some cases with almost childlike naïvety) about  'being gay'. I didn't, of course, say a word, but, not for the first time, one question in particular made me think about my own situation, namely the 'how old were you when you knew' question. His answer, 12 or 13, is exactly the same answer I would have given had I been asked. It almost, for a few seconds, made me feel like I wanted to throw off the mask, and say 'yeah, me too', but that second, unforgivable clause in any honest 'coming out' statement I might make - 'but I've never been attracted to a man in my life' - strangled the impulse at birth. For the squillionth time, I was left to ruefully ponder how vastly simpler, and almost certainly happier, my life would be if I was 'just gay'. Never going to happen, though, so, as ever, I've simply got to deal with it.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Electioneering

The campaign for next month's general election is now in full swing, with politicos and pundits on TV and radio ad nauseam, and the press, especially the right-wing tabloid end of the market, shamelessly lying on a daily basis, according to the fiats of their paymasters. Now that I'm re-enfranchised, having a permanent address once more, there's no doubt who I'm going to vote for - the constituency I live in is a Tory-held marginal, and 'my' MP is a smug, worthless 'backbench-warmer' who I wouldn't have recognised if I'd tripped over him in the street, until he, or, almost certainly, one of his minions, sent me his election leaflet (in a House of Commons envelope, no doubt at my, as a taxpayer's, expense) a few days ago. It went straight into the recycling bag, needless to say. Interestingly, there's no UKIP candidate in our constituency, suggesting to me that there's been some kind of 'under the table' arrangement not to challenge the sitting fascist, and thus split the vote, in a place where the most recent opinion poll I've seen only projects the incumbent to win by 3%.
The other thing that's struck me over the past few days is that Cameron seems unnaturally 'young-looking' in his recent TV appearances. Style over substance goes without saying in this 'media age', but our glorious leader looks as though he's had plastic surgery, or, at the very least, some serious make-up 'assistance'. I think the electorate should be told!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Easter mix

The absurdity of our Sunday trading laws, and, in particular, the far more draconian restrictions in place on Easter Sunday, enacted as a sop to the small minority of noisily active Christianists when the current legislation was passed in the nineties, was very obvious as I meandered earlier today. While it's illegal for supermarkets to open, making it difficult to buy a loaf of bread (although not around here, admittedly, because smaller '7-11' type shops, which London is awash with, are exempt), all of the betting shops were open. Along Oxford Street, all the shoe shops were open, but the clothes shops were closed. A perfumery was open, while the jewellers next door was shut. Sunglass Hut was open, but opticians were closed. 'Shambles' doesn't seem to be a strong enough word. Logic and reason ought to suggest that consistency would be far better, either (for preference) everything open or everything closed. Given that the mess is down to religion, though, it's a vain hope indeed to expect either logic or reason to come within a country mile of the situation.
As things have turned out, I'm on my own this weekend - K was intending to go and see her mother at some point in the school holidays, but she didn't tell me until Friday that she'd arranged to go yesterday, and duly did! It's no great issue, except that I'd already shopped for the makings of a posh Sunday roast (which, fortunately, will all keep until tomorrow, when my girl will be back), and haven't got anything much else in to concoct a meal for myself with (not helped, of course, by the aforementioned shop closures today). My Sunday dinner might well end up being a takeaway! So, surprise, surprise, I've 'found myself' in my local again. And received the biggest treat of the day, too - a couple of smiles from a very cute boy, in for a meal with his parents. Not quite on a par with the original 'smiling boy' who so lifted my spirits the first time I came in here, but not far short.
Anyway, Happy Easter to those of you that celebrate the occasion, and happy Sunday to those who don't.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Left behind

In my local, last orders have just been rung, and, for the first time in a long time, I fancied a short. So I asked for a spirit that virtually every pub, even the grottiest backstreet dump, used to sell. But not my local, evidently. In fact, my server, cute Daniel, had pretty obviously never even heard of it. So I've ended up with another beer. I've never been any sort of follower of fashion, but it seems that even pub culture has left me behind! I'm irremediably old, apparently!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Back to front

I've just read a blog post containing a quote that really caught my attention, one that unfavourably compared '12 year old boy shaped (female fashion) models' to some version of 'real women'. I can't conceive of how it could possibly be a problem. 12 (-ish) year old boys are the most beautiful creatures on earth. What's not to like?

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

April already

Many people, at work and elsewhere, commented about how quickly last year seemed to pass, which was very much my perception, too, and it appears that this year is going the same way. It hardly seems any time at all since we were seeing in the New Year, but now, all of a sudden, it's April! And it's not, certainly from my point of view, as though anything much has happened - most of my 2015 so far seems to have been spent at work. In part, that's why my blog posts have been rather short and thin on the ground of late - there are only so many ways that you can say 'went to work, came home, went back to work again'! - but, over the past couple of weeks, my 'writing time' has been substantially occupied by a different 'project', which, hopefully, is within sight of completion. It isn't nearly on the scale of its almost two year older brother, and probably won't be to many people's taste, apart from mine, but, ultimately, I'm selfish enough, largely, to write for my own amusement anyway, so if, as is likely, it sinks without trace, that's the way it is, and no hard feelings.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B