Categories
art

I Love Whitstable

I love Shoreditch too.  I love Soho.  I love rioting students.

I love (particularly) the paint splattered Rolls that the parasite Prince Charles and the hag Camilla were caught in the other day by the ‘off with their heads’ militant protestors.  hahaah.

I am really loving being home. It has settled something in me.

After my fuck session (which will do me for some time I might add) I wandered happily all over Shoreditch.

I stopped in at a number of cool looking shops:  like the funky Japanese run clothes shop that sold padded linen overwear, the odd man’s pop up shop that sold Swedish soldiers head-gear and ‘vintage’ socks.

A shop that sells second-hand mens socks.  Eww.

I dropped into White Cube and resisted calling Jay.  The show was spectacularly lame.   The entire space devoted to a 37 year old artist called Rachel Kneebone.  Lamentations 2010 is the name of the downstairs show.  Huge white porcelain tangled/mangled/reconstituted genitals on huge marble plinths set against slate grey walls..beautifully lit.  The usual soulless, inchoate nonsense you might expect to find in White Cube.  They reminded one..obviously of the Chapman brothers and their obsession with the dark, chaotic imagery of the unconscious.

White Cube

Jay is already showing new artists who cannibalize existing White Cube artists.  Apparently Kneebone is expressing the ‘trauma of death, loss and grief’ and shown differently these works might very well have achieved her aim but so elegantly displayed they had the guts knocked right out of them.  I went upstairs to see the rest of the show but was told to leave as I had the dog with me.  I wasn’t leaving the Little Dog outside so I left.

I wandered around.  I met a man in the street who offered to blow me but I hadn’t showered that morning after a night of sex… I declined more for his benefit.

I found a wonderful shop called Labour and Wait which can be found at:

Labour and Wait

This charming store is really worth a visit.  I thought, when I found the 1940’s lilac, enameled milk-boiling pot pictured below:  Oooh, I thought, my friend Marilyn Phipps would like this.

As if by magic..who did I bump into today?

Marilyn Phipps!

Marilyn has the most wonderful home in Seasalter called The Battery.

The Battery, a nineteenth-century naval building, is a huge, bright blue, wooden house that sits right on the Whitstable beach and faces onto a 120ft secluded sea-front.  The Battery is a shrine to Forties ‘utility’. The kitchen was put in during the Forties when the house was used as a holiday retreat for disadvantaged children.

Marilyn has carried on the Forties theme throughout the house. The two huge wooden doors between the dining room and kitchen were made in the Forties for Ramsgate post office. The kitchen walls are lined with teapots, sugar shakers, vinegar jars, and salt cellars.

A huge kitchen clock was bought locally and the chunky table was already there.

The Battery can be incredibly hard to keep warm. Marilyn solved her problem by installing an enormous wood-burner for the dining room. She painted it midnight blue, making it more abstract sculpture than functional heater…she calls it The Beast.

The Battery has a fascinating history and features in the book Wooden Houses. It was built as two big wooden sheds at the end of the nineteenth century.  The first housed two cannons, the second was a drill hall for sailors, and during WW1 it was a convalescent home for wounded soldiers.

Marilyn still get’s people visiting who remember it from their childhood holidays in the Forties, saying they had the happiest time of their life here.

Wait!  Did I tell you that they found a strangled woman in the room I was staying in at Soho House NYC?  I can’t wait to stay there again.

Categories
Gay Health

Shoreditch House

‎”During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” –George Orwell

Sitting high above Shoreditch listening to German film producers discuss the “Vest Village”.

A beautiful black girl is swimming in the pool.

I am drinking coffee, eating poached eggs and listening to Haydn’s cello concerto.

It is a beautifully gray London day.  The bitterness has vanished, no longer raw…swept out of the city northward to snowy Scotland.

As per all of the subscribe requests.  When I go private on the 21st I think you will be prompted by the site to apply etc.  I’ve no idea…does anyone else know?

Last night student demonstrators separated the royal cars from their out riders and scared the poor Duchess of Cornwall.  Good pictures on BBC website.  Nasty old cow.

I have spent the past few days in Worcester with Tim and my God daughter Immy.   Drove up North after a busy Wednesday in London.   I had lunch with Edward (a new collectible) and Andrei my young friend who is currently studying political science at Cambridge.  Andrei is not gay but has been voted his colleges GLBT representative.  How is that for inclusive?

I met Andrei on a train when he was 17.  Of course he wants to make film but has decided, very sensibly, to go to film school when he is 30-when he has something to say.

After our lunch we met Charlie in Soho who was very impressed with Andrei but not so with Edward who he had met three times before but Edward never remembered.

Edward flies to NYC today.  Startlingly handsome, intelligent, elegantly dressed and really enjoying his young gay life.

Edward has just turned 24 years old.

He is being flown to NYC by a rich American he met briefly at a party last weekend.

Remember those days?

Thank you Freddy for doing the same when I was a little younger than Edward.

After lunch/tea I drove to Chelsea to be formally charged with Common Assault.

The kids who I had the screaming fit with this summer after Jake’s iPod went missing (he lost it in a drunken black out)…anyway, those kids refused to drop the charges so I will have to go to court and deal with it.

Any fine I may pay I will sue Jake for half of.

Sex Rehab is showing on British TV so I am beginning to have people come up to me here.  It’s fun.  Not as intimidating as I thought it might be.

Worcester is a pretty cathedral town in the Midlands.  I am sure that it very pretty in the summer.  Nowhere in England looks that good on a miserable wet winter evening.  Had a great time with Tim.  He seems to be getting on very well after his triple heart bypass.

Andrei

Last night I met Edward for a quick drink in Soho and then manhunt date number 19 turns up.  A BEAUTIFUL french man with green eyes.  We quickly made our way to Shoreditch to his ex council apartment and fucked for a very long time.  One of the better parts of my inheritance from Jake.  My new-found ability to fuck.

We fucked and fucked and fucked.

I still think about Jake when I fuck.

We had a really amazing time.  This morning he asked if I wanted to see him again.  I said yes but I meant no.  He knew what I meant.

Hospital on Tuesday morning.  Not thinking about it.  9.45am.

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