Saturday, 3 March 2012
For as long as I can remember, at least as far back as 1990, my grandmother had been telling me she was dying. I think she secretly got a kick out of it. Like the rest of the family, she was an attention-seeker, and it must have been hard for her, after a colourful life as a model and artist’s muse in Chelsea in the 50s, to grow old in a small house in Kent, with occasional visits from friends who reminded her of her old life.
Perhaps that’s why she liked the internet so much. She spent practically all day online in her last few years. We got her an iPad so she could read the papers in bed and she used to spend hours and hours on the Daily Mail website, emailing me gossip about X Factor contestants and “those awful people on The Only Way Is Essex” and telling me who she was writing an angry letter to that week. Towards the end, it was invariably David Cameron, for not being tough enough on benefit scroungers. I had to resist the temptation to point out how much her capacious kitchen cupboards full of opiates, blood-thinners and painkillers were costing the taxpayer.
Everyone says this about their own relatives, but Nana Petra was truly a one-off. Her friends spoke of her with the sort of affection and hushed reverence reserved for larger than life personalities. Chief among the topics of conversation when she was mentioned at garden parties was her modest house in east Kent, which was decked out with lavish tapestries, lace, marble, Parian ware figurines and lush fabrics. Except for the occasional colour refresh (“This isn’t burgundy, this is bordeaux, and I asked for burgundy”), the interior did not change in thirty years. Things were exactly – in some cases, to the millimetre – where she wanted them, and she saw no reason to fix what was not broken.
Nana had spooky levels of intuition about people, which made her a fearsome adversary. Her annual feuds with my mother were spectacular – as, on occasion, was her language when my mother’s name came up. Needless to say, it was she who emerged victorious from the skirmishes, dusting off her velvet cuffs and muttering “uppity cow” under her breath. (This was to become a favourite expression of mine.)Â As a child, I remember Nana sweeping magisterially through the house in layers of silk and brocade, archly passing judgment on the issues of the day.
But she was a deeply tender woman, too, who loved unquestioningly and unconditionally, and enjoyed expressing her affection through matriarchy. I can’t imagine what trouble I must have put her through in my late teens, when I lived with her after finding it impossible to co-exist with either of my then-separated parents. She was there, looking on with mild astonishment but never disapproval, when I dressed up as Cleopatra and rolled myself up in her carpet, drunkenly sobbing and yelling “Where’s my Rex Harrison?” (I was 19.)
We had one of those relationships in which an old-fashioned look was all it took to shut me up if I was putting my foot in it, or banging on too long. Sometimes it didn’t even get to that: her little finger would twitch slightly when she was irritated. That meant it was time to change the subject. For those three years when she put me up in her top bedroom – “as long as you don’t bring home anyone I wouldn’t approve of, Milo” – we cuddled, we laughed and we had a good bitch about some of the neighbours, whom she considered dull – a cardinal sin in her view.
As I grew older, and started working, I saw less of her. But, if anything, we got closer. When I got my first job in London and spent all my money in the first two weeks of the month partying (not for the first time), she was there to bail me out, albeit with a few choice words about personal responsibility. “This is the last time, Milo,” was to become a constant refrain in her weekly Sunday emails to me.
In 2010, she began obsessively checking my online activity to see what I was up to, who I was with, whether I was spending too much money “living it up” and whether I was being nice to people. She hated it when I picked on someone, whatever the reason, and if I got into a catfight I could rely on a sternly-worded email arriving within the hour. If she had been any less extraordinary a woman, I’d have found it oppressive. But it was wonderful. In twenty-eight years, my grandmother never let me down, and her watchful and loving eye was never far away.
Last October, I set her up with her own Twitter account. I thought it might be a fun way for her to feel involved in my life. People thought it was me behind the account, particularly when she almost admitted to an affair with Jimmy Savile (later calling him an “ugly bastard” and demanding that I apologise), but no. It was all her. She loved it, especially meeting the friends she’d heard so much about and being able to natter with them about clothes and her favourite television shows.
Around the same time, she began to explore the internet properly, looking up the websites of her favourite galleries and museums all over Europe. She adored this easy access to libraries and exhibitions, which fed her love of beautiful things and reminded her of her travels in earlier, healthier years, when she was a social butterfly on a grand scale.
That was the great theme of her life: an insatiable curiosity about other people. She was fascinated, among other things, by what drove murderers to kill, reading hundreds of books on the subject with grim titles like What Makes A Serial Killer Tick and Touched By the Devil: Inside the Mind of the Australian Psychopath. Equally, she loved holding forth on what possessed people to participate in reality television (one of her secret pleasures). That’s why she loved being surrounded by friends: it was a constant stream of new material for her.
She effortlessly drew people to her because everyone wanted to hear her stories, listen to her opinions and, perhaps, be rewarded with a compliment for their manners or their dress sense. She’d say things like, “Nice to see his wife has fixed that awful hair,” and somehow manage not only to further ingratiate herself with the woman concerned but to become an object of admiration for the husband. Though she never married (“I didn’t date below a Major, and finding people in the upper ranks wasn’t easy”), she was deeply and profoundly loved by a long line of friends who lived and died by her observations and aperçus.
Above all else, Nana enjoyed keeping an eye on things. Not just because she enjoyed a good snoop – though she certainly did – but because she was a woman for whom duty and care were the pre-eminent virtues. Without her, I would not have developed much of a sense of right and wrong. “You can be a catty little queen at times,” she’d say. “But your heart’s in the right place.” If she was right, it was thanks to her own instinctive sense of morality and her uncanny ability to suss people out.
She was by far the first person to twig that I was gay. My mother was awful about it, my father was surprisingly understanding, but Nana showed just the right amount of acceptance and concern. “It’s not a happy life,” she would say. “But if you stay safe and away from drugs, you’ll be alright.” Dad and I always laughed at that. “Just look at your bloody cupboards,” he’d say. “You’re the biggest junkie I know!” She’d allow herself a smirk at this, now and again, in between puffs of the Nebuliser.
They put her on morphine towards the end. She’d have liked that, I think. She always said it gave her lovely dreams.
Wednesday, 1 February 2012
I’m delighted to announce two new roles I have this week agreed to take on in addition to my editorship of The Kernel.
Firstly, I am now The Catholic Herald’s Chief Feature Writer, focusing my efforts on a monthly interview slot for the paper. I’m looking forward to developing my interview technique and landing some big names, as well as writing more regularly for the paper.
I’ve helped the Herald out in the past with some digital work and written for it on-and-off for some years. It’s a wonderful paper with some brilliant people on its staff. I’m thrilled to have the chance to work with them more often.
Secondly, Adam Baker, founder of citizen journalism news service Blottr, for whom I have been a columnist for a while, has extended an invitation to join the company as an advisor. I’ll be helping the editorial team develop their content strategy over the next few years. I will also continue to write my Thursday column for the site.
Don’t worry, I won’t be losing my focus on The Kernel. But I’m really happy to have some fun projects running alongside it.
Sunday, 20 November 2011
Sometimes it helps to make a list of your friends and close contacts and rank them. I’ve been doing this for years. It really helps you prioritise. If you do it in a spreadsheet, you can colour-code them by friendship circle, which makes it easy to sort your friends for party invitations. I don’t know about you, but my personal friends and professional contacts are extremely similar lists. I guess that’s the case for most people these days. I actually use a database to manage this list now, so I can perform more complex sorting operations. You may like to consider that if you have lots of friends in overlapping circles. I can also categorise them by age, gender, sexuality, geography and income, which is also helpful for planning tables at dinner parties.
But recently I have been thinking about a more complex system that will enable me to define clusters of friends and their relative closeness to each other. A 3D rendering of my friend network would help enormously: I could pick particular geographies on the network for individual events. I imagine flicking between friend cluster view (in which I do not feature), which would appear like a spider web, and a flat spine-based layout with connections determined by, say, my ten closest friends. This isn’t another social network: more like a guest list tool on steroids. You’d have to enter a lot of data initially, but think how amazing the result would be. For example: when I fell out with someone, I could demote them or pull them from the network entirely and watch the whole map adjust in real time. Likewise, after a holiday that brought me closer to a particular person, I could up their ranking and the spine-based view would change.
This all sounds a bit high school, I know: but isn’t that how we all still operate really? And what a brilliant way of never forgetting important people, which those of us who plan lots of dinners and parties do all the time. Note that this web is created manually, by me, so I have control, unlike Facebook and the associated attempts which try to infer relationships and always get it hopelessly wrong. It’s more than worth my while to keep something like this up to date, and I’m willing to bet plenty of people would do it for the sheer hell of it. So why does this not exist? If it does, who’s building it? Do you want to help me put this together? If so, get in touch. The first network we build can be mine and I’ll happily publish it here as a social experiment.
Monday, 14 November 2011
I don’t normally bother with funding stories, but since the chief exec of Skimlinks is my best friend I don’t think she’d forgive me if I didn’t point out some happy news. VentureBeat reports that Alicia Navarro’s affilate marketing company, which has offices in London, San Francisco and New York, has closed a $4.5m funding round, let by Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments.
This comes hot off the heels of Skimlinks’s acquisition of Atma Links in October. I couldn’t be prouder of my Leithy and her awesome co-founder Joe.
Saturday, 12 November 2011
As with so many significant relationships in my life, my love affair with the white iPhone 4 has come to a juddering halt just as it was getting started.
I don’t understand how anyone can use an iPhone as their primary mobile phone. You can’t type on it, the apps are a hideous time sink, the call quality is dreadful (I like to phone people), the battery life is non-existent and iOS 5′s messaging service is a very poor imitation of BlackBerry Messenger. This bitch is going data-only.
Despite RIM’s recent and embarrassingly mismanaged service outages, at least I get a usable signal with a Bold. And BlackBerry remains the only credible choice for those of us who have to type thousands of words a day away from a computer: the keyboard is unparalleled. So there you go. Friends can re-add me to BlackBerry Messenger with the usual email address.
Wednesday, 9 November 2011
Not everyone – including some who arguably deserve it even more (I’m more grateful than I can say to a handful of people who have supported me through the ups and downs of the last twelve months) – gets this sort of treatment. But since I found out, before the event, which is atypical, that it’s my adored buddy’s birthday today, and given how kind, generous and, dare I say it, indispensable, Constantin Bjerke has been to me over the last year – man, it seems absurd that I’ve known Constantin for such a short time – I felt moved to once again break my rule about public congratulations to say bravo, and thank you, to a dear and cherished friend. Happy birthday, dude.
Friday, 21 October 2011
… but I’ve signed my grandmother up to Twitter. She’s @NanaPetra.
I’ve filled out her bio (I am @Nero‘s grandmother. I’m here to keep an eye on him. Former model, now a house-bound invalid) and uploaded the picture but the tweets are all hers.
Monday, 19 September 2011
This post incorporates a few paragraphs from an earlier one, published here, about gay fatherhood. It originally appeared as a Blottr column (read it there).
No one would choose to be gay. You’d have to be mad. It’s almost the perfect recipe for misery. Just look around you: the feelings of alienation and rejection it engenders are responsible for the sorts of repugnant tribal posturing you see on the streets of Soho on a Friday night, as bitterly unhappy queers engage in degrading and repulsive behaviour, because they want to feel a part of something after a lifetime of marginalisation; the empty, pointless, vacuous, self-destructive behaviour that religious types are so often ridiculed for calling out.
Gay men, at heart, see themselves as faulty, so they exaggerate their imperfections in the company of others they see as similarly defective. Ironically, it’s precisely that profound feeling of being somehow broken by it that means a gay man’s sexuality often comes to be the defining characteristic of his personality. Really, you wouldn’t wish such a harsh sentence on anyone. Hardly a sound basis for a sacred union under God, is it?
And yet gay marriage is on the news agenda again, because the Government has launched a consultation on making it legal by 2015. The word “consultation” is only being used in its loosest sense, as the decision appears to have been made already. At the risk of coming across as hyperbolic: why is no one pointing out what an offensive parody of a precious institution gay marriage would be?
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Monday, 11 July 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbBtNVFjeDA
I know no one rash – or arrogant – enough to claim they know the answer to the nature vs. nurture question, nor the proportional effect each has on a child’s sexual development. But the thought that I might influence my child towards a lifestyle choice guaranteed to bring them pain and unhappiness – however remote that chance may be – is horrifying to me. That’s why, quite simply, I wouldn’t bring a child up in a gay household and, if by some chance I were to end up having a child with a woman, I would seek to insulate that child from inappropriate situations and influences until they were old enough to understand the principles, ramifications and, yes, the mechanics surrounding such an enormous decision.
I’d describe myself as 90-95% gay. I would never have chosen to be this way. No one would choose it. You’d have to be mad. Yet there’s a view, promulgated by the mostly socially liberal media, that almost any lifestyle choice is alright these days. It chimes with, and to some degree emerges from, that vacuous milieu of bien pensant chat show psychology that says everything’s OK, as long as you’re OK with it. “Live your best life,” says Oprah Winfrey. “It’s OK, if it’s OK for you.”
But everything isn’t OK.
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Monday, 30 May 2011
Kotor, Montenegro.
He holds my damp, ragged passport. “Big problem,” he says, with a thick, Slavonic-sounding drawl that under other circumstances would have been somewhat thrilling.
His deputy turns to me. “Boss says big problem.”
Yeah, thanks for that. I glance nervously at Nick and Isobel, who are sat, wide-eyed and anxious, in the car I’ve just been ordered out of. They’re starting to panic.
We’re at the border between Montenegro and Croatia, one of the few places in Europe where anyone gives a crap about paperwork, because neither country is a member state of the Union yet, on the way back from a truly magical wedding.
But apparently you’re not allowed to travel, whether fortified with hymeneal joy or not, on a passport so sodden that the pages have fused into a sort of ropey mulch.Â
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Tuesday, 24 May 2011
It’s not every day you wake up and discover you’re disabled. And to tell the truth I didn’t really either, because my eye has been getting worse for a while.
When I was about seven, I had corrective surgery. Nothing too serious. A little snip to a muscle on one side, aimed at correcting my wandering left eye. It’s fucking grotesque when you have eyes that cross: you look like something from a cartoon or a horror film. Luckily my mother noticed the first signs of it and I got it fixed.
But, as is the case for about 20% of patients, it’s coming back – and with nasty complications. I won’t bore you with too much detail. But, essentially, when I put on my glasses and look into the distance, my left eye goes nuts, shooting over to the right, because my eye can’t readjust normally and symmetrically like it ought to. This causes intolerable headaches and double vision. That, and I look a spastic. (Calm down. We’re allowed to use ‘spastic’ now. I checked.)
Close friends may have noticed me squinting a little recently when I look at them from a distance. I’ve become very self-conscious when on panels and giving talks, constantly taking my glasses off and putting them back on again. It’s become like a nervous tic, further complicated by the paranoia that I’m somehow exacerbating or accelerating the problem.
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