Categories
Tag: Christmas
Categories
Snow Day 2014
In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,In the bleak midwinter, long ago.
It’s snow day here in NYC. Me and the man are at his place in Williamsburg. It’s been 5 months now. Seems to be enduring. We are watching a neo-liberal straight man mock elderly Russians in Sochi for their old-fashioned views about gay people. He really didn’t have to go that far to find narrow-minded people with hate in their hearts for the gays.
He could have gone to New Jersey.
As for narrow minds… just because one’s a gay doesn’t mean that you have a naturally expanded view of the world… that you are more insightful, more agreeable, less prejudiced or liberal. Yet, the pro gay press wouldn’t dare reveal the dark side of the gay for fear of annoying their new pay masters.
Ask dumb gay people what they think about immigration, women’s rights, racism and laugh at their fucked up right wing views. Yes, do it.
What a delightful diversion the gays have become. Whilst we fight to be in the military the military fights illegal wars, whilst we demand benefits those same benefits are taken away in the name of austerity, whilst we line up to get married the divorce rate soars.
With that in mind I thought I might share my recent queer adventures with the gays.
Given that the gays in AA pretty much write their own rules… writing about them seems perfectly ok. After all, we are meant to keep what we see and hear in AA a big fucking secret. The gays rarely play by that fundamental rule.
They sit before meetings gossiping and cruelly discussing what they heard at their gay AA meetings. “My sponsor HATES him.” I heard some bitchy queen exclaim. So I asked what kind of sponsor hates people in AA and tells his sponsee? That didn’t go down very well.
Nope.
Gay AA is a cult within a cult.
The man just cooked me breakfast. He really seems to love me. Being loved is always a surprise. Whenever it happens. The delightful routine, the domesticity, the kissing. Taking the dogs for long walks in the snow.
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With a last moment, radical change of plan the boy and I found ourselves in Woodstock, two hours north of NYC.
An effortless drive with Amelia and Stephanie.
He had arrived from Toronto the night before… looking even more beautiful than I remembered him. His flashing green eyes, his perfect pale skin.
The house is cozy and beautifully decorated. The land around it manicured.
The kitchen well designed for making huge dinners for many people.
We drove into the quaint town of Woodstock for Santa’s arrival. We arrived too late.
There are very many, odd-looking people in Woodstock. This seems to be the place where hippies come to die. During their twilight years communing with the ghosts of Jerry Garcia and Janice Jopling.
We gawped in awe at the Hippy Alternative Santa with his bearded female companion.
We wandered the tiny shops that sell scented candles and argyle mittens.
In one of the curious hippy shops an old man wearing a black robe… playing a long flute asked Stephanie riddles. She looked askance. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She said.
It was a bit too Lord of the Rings for me.
A few too many gardenias painted on the clap board.
Christmas Eve we ate gigot, a traditional French Christmas eve treat. We sang Christmas tunes in the kitchen as Mary (our hostess) cooked.
A late night. The boy curled around me. The dogs at my feet. The night before Christmas.
We woke on Christmas morning to a light dusting of snow. Thrilling!
We ate toasted panatone and coffee for breakfast.
Later that Christmas night we scoffed roast turkey, roasted potatoes, sprouts in nutmeg and creme fresh. I made a delicious gravy/jus from the dripping in the roasting pan and a bottle of port.
The boy and Stephanie made cookies… they tasted divine.
After Christmas dinner we checked our tarot cards by a roaring fire. It caused Stephanie a certain amount of comfort and tears.
Amelia suggested that we celebrate the solstice with pagan rituals. We burned the past in the fire and toasted our good fortune.
Late last night we watched The Impossible which made us all sob.
Occasionally we (he and I) would sneak away from the party and… well you know the rest.
Here you go:
1.
It is dawn again. Dawn in the desert. The smell of the earth and the dew. The sounds of the chirruping birds.
The pervasive silence of the long black night coming to an end.
My night blindness is getting worse. I sat on my spectacles so am guessing, largely… where the keys are.
The days get hotter and hotter. The sun beating down relentlessly. The lawn toasting, the dogs roasting, the mountain tightens around us as it bakes.
Hot days in Dorset/ hot days in Malibu. Hot days on the sleepy ocean, lapping around me.
Coffee, editing, read the daily news. It sure looks bad in Syria.
We cruise down to the beach and play in the surf. We are tangled at night in the white linen sheets. We read side by side in silence. A familiar smell, a beating heart, the man I want but do not need.
He asks what we are. Nothing. We are nothing, I say. He struggles with ‘what it means’ to love another man.
My struggle is over. I am too old to give love a second chance.
He sees me thinking. He will read this and tell me to talk to him as if talking will solve everything. Just shut up and make love to me. Stop asking me what it means. Don’t expect me to know anything. Work it out yourself.
I don’t really care.
For all the terrible, meaningless cruelty I am still besotted with him. And, like the parent of a missing child, I wonder daily about his safety. Even though he is undeserving of my worry and considers my concern an intrusion..
I continue to fret about him, however violently I have tried to expunge the memory.
2.
I am mostly happy. I know you don’t believe me. I know that you think I am lying to you about my happiness.
Well, if you could see me… if you were the one laying beside me… you would understand.
Island Wall. The tiny cottage there. It was enough. It was perfect.
Now I lay my head down and it is enough.
Perhaps, you say, you could be happier? How much happier?
Facelifts, apparently, make women happier.
Then I realize that you are confusing your own thoughts about getting older with what you think happiness is. How can anyone be that old and be happy? How can anyone have so little and be happy?
Then, you try convincing me that I should want to be young again. Forgetting, of course, that I was never young. Always old. Always.
I have a spectacular ability to get on with what I have and be happy with it.
I don’t want more. Even in the jail. I found comfort. I found solace.
So, you think I am unhappy because you do not know what happiness is.
Could you imagine a happy person killing themselves? I could.
Come death.
3.
I had another dream about the DA. This time my thumb was in her mouth. She was sucking my thumb. Pressed down on her tongue. Like a calf. Her big brown eyes looking up at me.
Whenever I dream about her, her cheap gold jewelry tinkles like ice cubes in a crystal glass.
4.
I am writing my screenplay. Finishing it. I am enjoying a social life. I let the man beside me massage my neck.
I understand that I am in love with struggle. Struggle is sustenance. It feeds me everything I need to live. I am alive when I fight to survive. I am alive when I feel myself emerge victorious. Even though you could not imagine what I experience as victory.
I dream that I am walking by my primary school in Whitstable. The black, tarmac playground is always empty. The lawn is green. The classrooms, I assume, are full.
I remember the boy who ate coal, the butcher’s son. He looked like a pink pig. Fat, pink, bespectacled. He drowned you know. You knew that… didn’t you? When he couldn’t take it anymore.
5.
Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives.
Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrogered sea.
And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wet-nosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.
For those of you who have this blog emailed to you daily I just want to remind you that after I post my blog I usually spend an hour or so editing it and making additions. Just to let you know. You may be missing essential details. Ha!
It is raining today. Can you believe it?
Yesterday I pickled some beetroot. I cleaned out the drain at the back of the house. I spent another day happily in the garden…weeding. Moving pots of rare shrubs. The strawberries are producing. Delicious. Pottering, just like my maternal grandfather. Picking at weeds amongst the cacti. I like that I might be like him as I get older. For all of his faults he was a good man. From what I can remember.
Perhaps my Mother might remember him differently.
He was useless with money, a real dreamer. I think it drove my Grandmother to distraction. He had asthma and died during an asthma attack beside her in bed. A terrible way to die. Choking to death. She never really recovered. Catholicism unable to calm her. She wasn’t a very happy woman.
I remember visiting my Grandfather in hospital, he was sitting outside in the sun surrounded by huge apricot coloured roses.
There was also a sick clown from Billy Smart’s Circus. He was sewing diamonte buttons onto a silk costume. The clown told me that he would be on television the following Christmas. I held onto that memory for six months. My parents hated watching the circus on TV but I insisted. I didn’t see the clown. He must have died…or lied…or both.
The clown gave me some spare diamonte, I still have them.
http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=62917
Listening to David Bowie. The boys are subdued. There is a huge cloud hanging over the canyon. The weather is most peculiar.
Last night Tom and Anna came to dinner. We grilled chicken, sautéed kale with garlic and I made a huge salad with Out of The Box produce. Tiny new red potatoes, green beans, free range eggs, olives, a tiny gem lettuce, golden beets. Delicious.
It was a chilly evening so we built a huge fire and gossiped. I felt oddly insecure knowing that Tom was so incredibly successful. I was tongue-tied and felt a bit foolish. For someone who has done so well he is just about the most humble person I have ever met.
Tom brought chicken, Anna brought a huge fruit salad and ice cream.
Finally, a friend of mine called to tell me how much I have changed these past few weeks.
“It’s like being with a different person.” She said.
It’s true. Without the demon penguin possessing me I am just my happily old self. Nothing to prove. I must just tell you…I forgot to mention it before: I had a treatment from a Dutch friend of Jennifer’s. She did this deep tissue massage/healing and made a rasping sound every time she touched me. It was amazing. She said that I was so full of poison she began coughing. Hacking.
The combination of her treatment (I was skeptical) and actually seeing him has done the trick.
Only now when I am out of it I can see clearly just how in my addiction I was. The demon drink, the demon opiate, the demon corn chip, the demon penguin.
It’s all the same.
Categories
Tudor Tea Rooms Whitstable
You know how much I love Whitstable? That would be one of my ‘weak tea‘ successes: my relationship with Whitstable.
I love it there. I know everyone. We really know each other. For good and for bad.
Well, today I received some very, very sad news. My Mother‘s friend Carol who owns the Tudor Tea Rooms on Harbour Street…well..and this is terrible…her son Tony died.
Known affectionately as Wally to everyone who knew him, he was only 40 years old, tall, gentle, ran his mother’s business with aplomb.
When you order a pot of tea at The Tudor Tea Rooms you get a pot of tea made with loose tea and a strainer. Quality.
We used to say that they served school dinners at the Tudor but we loved going in there. Fire burning in the hearth all winter. Closed on a Wednesday. Real steak and kidney pudding with a thick suet crust.
Wally was killed during the day on the train tracks at the end of Glebe Way. Struck by the coast-bound 11.22am Victoria to Ramsgate train just before 1pm. I have no idea if he committed suicide or not. That’s what people are saying but I really don’t want to believe it.
He was such a nice man. Wally and his sister Sue had run that Tudor Tea Room since they were kids. Since we were all kids. Serving Steak and Kidney Pudding…opening the tea garden. He was the sort of bloke you’d see in Prezzo Pizza Place with his young family.
As every Whitstable pub and every other shop front became yet another super chic gastro pub or seasonal/organic eaterie…the Tudor kept the same decor, the same menu, serving the same Whitstable us who didn’t want the bother of seared scallops or poached samphire.
My Mother and I saw Wally just a few weeks ago when I was home for Christmas. He served us a good old-fashioned English roast. My mother mocked me for drinking tea with my lunch…like ‘some one from a council house‘ she said.
He stood at the till and asked after my life in LA. I felt embarrassed to tell him what my life was like in California. What he didn’t know…what he could never have known…was what I was thinking that cold December day a week before Christmas: that I would have quite easily traded my life in Malibu for a chance at running the Tudor Tea Rooms.
From where I was standing…his life looked perfect.
When I was a kid we would sit in the Tudor Tea Rooms and spy on Peter Cushing eating his poached eggs.
Poached eggs on toast. Every day.
My mother accidentally pushed Peter Cushing off his bike one day when she was getting off the bus from Canterbury.
Anyway, Wally was killed on the railway lines. The third person killed in the same spot in less than two months. What’s happening? What a waste of a good life, a sweet family man. I feel for his wife and children, his sister Sue and his lovely mum Carol.
If you get the chance listen to this Jellybotty’s track, Peter Cushing Lives in Whitstable.
It mentions the Tudor Tea Rooms.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wpGPqWrjeQ].
Goodbye Wally.
I am sitting at my architect friend Keith’s house in the most unlikely location – Deptford. An unruly, charmless, largely destroyed by Nazi bombs area of South East London. His tiny terraced house a laboratory for the work that has defined his career.
After 10 years of messing about with the house…it is finally finished.
We drove to Shoreditch for another wander around the back streets and do a little Christmas shopping. The shops are heaving with customers. There is NO evidence of a recession here. I bought a huge Christmas pudding from St John’s and some great socks. Everything else that we wanted to buy, like a sweater in All Saints, was irritatingly sold out.
We had lunch at Shoreditch House where I bumped into Robert. I knew I would. Very handsome.
Ate gorgeous traditional Sunday roast beef. Dog in a bag under the table.
Last night Carol and I walked to our local labour politician’s Christmas party. It is amazing how they, like so many local Whitstable people, read this blog. I am delighted! Our host and his wife are good, old-fashioned socialists..the sort McCarthy and now Sarah Palin HATES.
Surely I couldn’t possibly be surrounded by so many devilishly intelligent left wingers who were, like me, excited by the wholly unexpected political reinvigoration of the young we saw last week in London? This, after so many years of inertia from our traditionally vocal students.
We salute you British students and urge you to continue to daub, poke, shout..etc. I give you permission to make this government as uncomfortable as you possibly can.
Apparently the mad, bad Duchess of Cornwall was ‘poked with a stick’ by a demonstrator. It was positively revolutionary! Tim’s great friend David Gilmour‘s son was photographed hanging off the cenotaph (our national war memorial) great! Polly and David are very embarrassed, the son, apparently…isn’t.
The Duchess of Cornwall poked with a stick..like something dead in the road.
What else have I been up to? Good God…the most beautiful man in Wheelers last night. A cabby from Essex. 29 years old, navy blue eyes and the reddest lips. I resisted taking his number but I know for sure that once a path is crossed it will cross again. He was beautiful. We chatted on Whitstable High Street and you know when a man looks directly into your eyes…you know that feeling.
What else? Went to local farmer’s market and bought a shoulder of goat for dinner this week.
Keith, when we got home this evening, gave me a pot of Medlar jelly that he made with fruit he found at a friends country house..it had a wonderful taste. Another strange coincidence ? Only this week I learned what a medlar was. Now I have a pot of it.
We ate stilton and delicious Christmas cake made by his boy friend of six years.
Driving to Paris tomorrow to get rid of car as the hospital treatment kicks in on Tuesday. Can’t say that I am looking forward to it but hey ho.
Categories
Bully For You
Woke up at 4am. Bugger. Spent a little time online then went back to bed. Fell into deep sleep.
A knock at the door at 9am. I had meeting with a writer from a popular TV show who had read my blog and wanted to meet to talk about her new TV show. Kathy.
A charming and funny woman who is currently dating a very beautiful ‘A’ gay director friend of mine. What a gorgeous couple! The meeting was meant to last an hour but ended up lasting 3 hours. Ashley joined us at the end.
Whilst we were talking I remembered one of the fabulous Whitstable gays I met as a child who totally shaped my idea of what it was to be gay.
Firstly, he taught me that being gay could be WONDERFUL. That man, an antique dealer from Thanet, was called Christopher Stocking. He drove into Whitstable weekly to search for antiques and that’s where he found me, sitting at the back of Zoe’s antique shop one cold winter’s afternoon playing with her kittens by the fire.
The shop used to be on Harbour Street opposite the harbour entrance which was rather sadly demolished in the 1970’s when all that grubby Georgian architecture seemed to bore town planners. Thankfully, Whitstable was largely ignored by Canterbury Council so there was little to no ‘urban regeneration’. No wholesale destruction of our old homes and shops. Whitstable was left to decay. Thank God.
Jake and I went to Whitstable…he loved it…that was a nice moment.
Anyway, Christopher Stocking found me in the back of the shop and realized IMMEDIATELY that I was a trainee homo and took me for a spin in his pink Jaguar. I remember his sweet and unusual smell. He asked a bunch of questions and I remember being so ashamed of where I came from that I think I lied every answer.
I really looked forward to Christopher’s weekly visits. He taught me what was what without ever mentioning the word gay.
He’d say, “He’s gorgeous isn’t he?”
And I would get all red-faced and nod my head.
He was a perfect role model…consequently I never had any difficulty being a gay.
It all seemed perfectly natural.
A couple of years after we met Christopher told me that he wanted to tell me something. Seriously. We sat in the Tudor Tea Rooms, he held my hand and told me very gravely that if I was going to have a good life, any life..he stressed the word life..I would have to leave Whitstable. That this small seaside town wasn’t going to be big enough for me.
He told me urgently,
“You have to get out of here and make something of yourself.”
I knew that he was right but I didn’t think it was possible, plausible…mine to have.
Heroes are never quite who you expect them to be.
A man and a boy holding hands in an English Tea Room talking about the future. About the future. He was saving my life..and he knew it. He knew that there was no one else in that place who could possibly tell me what I needed to know.
That my life could be assured if I left Whitstable. That I would be valued, validated, loved. Sadly, his dream and my dream for enduring happiness diverged as I grew older.
The disease of more. Who could have foreseen that outcome?
For those of you who think bad thoughts..no..we never did anything inappropriate. He was a very appropriate man. I was 10 when I met him and 14 when he vanished. If he had made a move would I have let him? You betcha.
That afternoon in The Tudor Tea Room I saw my future reflected in his face and knew instinctively that it was essential for me to listen very carefully and remember every word he said.
Amongst the shop owners there were other gays. There were the gay twins who ran the antique shop on the corner of Albert Street and Harbour Street which is now an elegant tapas bar. Johnny and Jimmy. Clones: checked shirts, full moustaches and tight denim jeans. They scared me a bit but they were kind to me.
Everyone was.
They guessed, they knew, they never made mention, they saw the bruises, they held out their hands just in case I needed to hold on.
The years passed.
For a few weeks I moved in with Michael the gay tax man.
Our local gay bar: The Guinea on Island Wall. Florence, the very grand landlady, was always throwing people out for no good reason. She had thick red lipstick on her lips and teeth…a crow black bouffant.
When the boys got too hot and bothered in the snug she snarled, “Darlin’ you’re barred.”
The kissing boys would feign outrage, throw their scarves over their shoulders, theatrically deliver a particularly vicious bon mot from the threshold of the pub, slam the door and scamper out into the night..until tomorrow of course when they would sit in exactly the same spot nursing pints of thick, warm beer and kiss each other as Florence was serving out of sight.
I remember when you could be thrown out of a bar, a gay bar, for kissing another man.
So, this morning, Kathy and I talked about gay men and the community. Our community that existed around the bar. Every community has a bar. THE BAR.
When the Guinea closed we headed to The New Inn, Margate. I didn’t drive and God knows how I did it but I got there and back 30 miles every Saturday night. Compelled by the need to meet other gay men.
I rarely went home with anyone. They were all so pig ugly. When the pub closed at 11.30 my very camp friend Mark and I went to a ghastly Margate club which was always half empty..called Skids. Ew.
The men there knew I was different from them. Somehow. They urged me, like Christopher had years before, to take my big ideas elsewhere. In their own way they let me know how much more of a world there was than the one I had chanced upon in Margate.
We talked about being bullied and I told her that I was bullied at school and life was pretty miserable for a few years but I just knew that high school was not the sum of my life. I knew that Christopher and men like him were out there somewhere. That I could and would be like them.
I knew that my time at boarding school would eventually come to an end. Anyway, as I mentioned before..bullied by day, blowing by night. Usually the same boys.
All these bullied kids killing themselves. I know it’s hard to be singled out to be gay by your peers, but you can’t be so sensitive. Get tough! Fight back. Ask for help! The sad fact is, when I was being bullied I rather enjoyed the attention. I learned to fight back. Ruthlessly. I knew the people who bullied me were simply appalled by my difference. It scared the shit out of them. I learned that to be different you had to seek out your own kind.
I have searched and searched.
So…I went to Paris and New York and I ended up here.
Thank you Christopher Stocking..wherever you are.
I owe you my wonderful life…when I can remember that it is wonderful. I owe you my Malibu view. I owe you my aspirations. Thank you Christopher, thank you the boys..thank you the girls..where ever you are…thank you for reading…thank you and good night.
I found a book of photography called Chaos by Josef Koudelka at my house in Malibu that Kristian gave me for my birthday some years ago. In it he wrote:
“I thought this book was very apt. Life is never black and white yet always flowing with chaos. I feel this book goes some small way to prove that even in chaos there is beauty.”
It was lovely to find his note. A message from Kristian, from the past. The past, where we must leave him.
I had to make some huge and grown up decisions today. Decisions and about romance and finance. The two are unconnected yet have been hideously intertwined as I grappled with one or the other for the past few months.
As my fear of financial ruin overwhelmed me I turned to him to deliver me from the truth. Today, I just had to face my unfortunate situation head on.
My financial insecurity is undoubtedly connected to uncomfortable feelings of self-worth, prestige and power. The romance I want but cannot have. Some things are just not meant to be. It is challenging to come to terms with these sorts of truths but as I have written here in this blog on many occasions when I do make decisions they are swift and sure. Something, actually, Drew Pinsky taught me whilst I was on the sex rehab show.
I have deliberately avoided talking about either the romance or the finance on this blog but more importantly I have kept it secret to those who love me best. Fuck, it is exhausting keeping secrets. I really hate it. I have no intention of going into any specific detail about the romance or the finance right now. All you need to know is that I sat with John after the cake was cut and the presents were opened and told him everything I had been hiding for the past few months. Phew.
As we all know: the truth will set you free.
I let go of a secret I was determined to keep. Everything I have ever let go of has been relinquished unwillingly. With claw marks all over what ever was finally gone.
Deep down I am as sure as I ever was that everything will turn out just the way it was meant to be. I believe in my fate.
My relationships burn like super novae in the cosmos then shrink and die. I have an opportunity right now to make a different set of choices: taking contrary action, living in acceptance and handing over what ever gives me pain to my higher power.
Just a few days away from my trip to Europe where I will celebrate a hefty milestone. I have chosen to travel with a close friend. Someone I love but not a lover. We (and The Little Dog) will explore London and Paris. For the sake of The Little Dog we will once again visit the wallabies in the Jardin des Plantes that my darling, loyal pet found utterly spell binding when we visited Paris last Autumn. I am sure he must have thought that they were the biggest squirrels he had ever seen.
Am I prepared to walk away with dignity? From people, places and things?
What I own is not who I am. Who I love cannot define me. Of course I would love to be in love with a man who loved me as much as I loved him.
I have come a very long way this past year. The road to serenity, self-love, sexual sobriety is littered with the corpses of those who could not.
I must have buried 30 people during the last 12 years, killed by addiction. Overdose, suicide, etc. Every one my hero for keeping me sober. Each and every one.
This evening I celebrated my friend’s daughter’s 5th birthday. I sat with his family and watched his happy little girl blow out the candles on her cake. After supper I wandered into Soho House on my own and found people I knew to take my mind off of the grueling aloneness. I am not lonely, I just can’t be bothered to make the effort to accept the invitation nor get in the car and drive to people who genuinely love me.
On my way home, as if by magic, friends called me. Emails arrived, text messages appeared on the screen of the iPhone and I was wrenched away from the promise of a night of self-pity. I can be such a pig at that particular trough.
I said to him the other night that what I found so hard to let go of was the promise of enduring love. The door had been opened then slammed shut. I am the wise uncle, asexual, decrepit yet ultimately willing to be of service to those who need me.
Without the crutches of objectification, intrigue and seduction I can some times flounder. I can sometimes fall. Late at night, when all hope is gone I wonder who will catch me? Who will catch me when I fall?
For a moment back then, I thought it might be you. I thought, foolishly, that it might be YOU. I thought it was you when I was 20, 30, 40 and now. Being in love with Richard in my twenties. I was heartbroken when he would flirt with girls. At my birthday party on Island Wall, Whitstable my Mother saw the pain I was in and tried to reach out to me but shame got in the way.
The legacy of shame.
Love has always been my goal. To be loved. I crave love the way most men crave sex.
I told him: I’m really scared that I will never love again. That I will never be loved. How could I have got this so wrong? To believe that love was possible, enduring and could be one day mine?
From out of the chaos comes beauty. It will give me succour when all else fails. I am going to Europe to fill my heart and soul with art and architecture. To walk the streets and parks of two great cities. To explore what it might have been like to be loved. I know that when I get back he will be gone. It is our swan song, our last hurrah. But before I write the end I must enjoy the journey. I must not fear the future nor have unrealistic expectations, I must set aside my shame and feel the sun on my face, in my heart.