Getting Older

I had a weird thought this morning.  Okay, this happens quite a lot to me, but this one actually prompted a blog.  The thought was this: I compared an average life span of say 80 years to a calendar year.  It occurred to me on this basis, that I was in June.  That's an odd thought, but not an unpleasant one.

Then I decided to be a bit more precise about this.  If we take a good life span as 85 years, and spread that across the year, I'm actually on 29 June (day 180 of the 365 of the year).  My Mutti is on 5 October.  My boyfriend (still unacceptably young) is about to burst into blossom.  He's on 31 March.  But here I am, in the "summer of my years".

Hitting 40

Like everyone I have fretted about my age at various times.  I remember thinking that I wanted to stop the clock forever at 24: the perfect age.  30 is of course a big milestone, though to be honest it wasn't one that bothered me particularly.  40, hung over me, however, like a giant circling vulture looking for a tasty sheep carcass to feed on.  From every birthday 35 onwards I feared it's approach.

For a gay man 40 is particularly significant, you see.  In "gay years" (akin to dog years) you're dead at 30.  At 40 you're a zombie, who has been dead, buried, exhumed and then cremated.  So in fact you're zombie ashes.  You don't really exist.  At least that's the perceived wisdom out there.  When I got to 40, was I bothered?  No, it was wonderfully liberating to stop worrying about it.  I just thought "meh, I look great, feel great and who cares".  And of course shortly afterwards I met my devastatingly dashing boyfriend just to prove what nonsense all of this is.

Celebrate Every Stage

Every stage of my life has had something wonderful to commend it.  I had the most ridiculously fortunate, happy childhood.  I was nicknamed the "Cheshire Cat" because I permanently had a happy grin on my face.  It was a childhood full of love and joy and huge amounts of travel.  We moved house 12 times in my first 12 years and I'd been to 20 odd countries by the time I was seven.  Being an "army brat" meant for me that my family was a constant source of stability, and we were used to being outgoing, making friends rapidly and settling in quickly.

Cheshire Cat (Centre). Ugly/Annoying big bros (R/L)

Let's skip over my teen period, because let's face it no one wants to hear about living in a bungalow in Cowplain (aka "Cowpat") in Hampshire and being a spotty youth who spent hours torturing himself over being gay.  I soon snapped out of that, and from sixth form onwards things improved rapidly. 

University (Cambridge: get me, first from Cowpat Comprehensive to get in!) and law school were all good, with loads more travel at every opportunity.  I found the constant moving of my things in and out of rooms frustrating though and longed for a place to call my own.  That came when I moved to London, my first proper job in a big law firm, and moving in with my then boyfriend.  I could start to put down roots, and it felt fantastic!

Living in Amsterdam, late 20s

Since then, well things have just got better and better, despite some bumps along the way.  I'd say I've never been happier than right now.  It's the summer of my life: the garden is planted, it's coming into full bloom and life will pan out (baring any unexpected disasters) on the course that all that hard work in the earlier months of the year have set out.  All the angst of wondering what I will do, where I will be etc are long gone.  I'm blessed to be incredibly healthy and I take good care of myself.  I'm materially well off, and I'm so lucky to be able to travel crazy amounts still.

I've experienced people I've loved dying and this was not something I'd known before.  Even people of my own age or younger, which is a huge shock to the system, and truly brings home the reality of mortality.  Of course there might be storms and dark, frightening times (who knows what lies round the corner), but in general there should be long, light, sunny days to look forward to for many months to come.  Late June is a great time of year!

Enjoying summer! Me with my loved ones

Time Speeds Up

Life definitely speeds up as we get older.  At least our perception of it certainly does.  Apparently it's to do with new experiences: if we want to "slow time down" we should expose ourselves to new things.  If you're doing things you're not used to, time seems to pass more slowly.  I was thinking about one day I had on holiday in Switzerland recently: we packed an impossible amount of things into one single day (a cable car, scooter bikes, driving along lakes, husky trekking and fondue on a mountainside) and I remember virtually every minute.  I compare that to one day at the office, when week after week merges together and I can't remember a single thing that stands out.  

Where there is monotony, contrary to what you might instinctively think, the years fly by.  Consider it this way: when you were 7, a year seemed an incredibly long period of time.  Everything was new and fresh, and you perceived it in a different way, full of exploration.  Nowadays the months merge into each other and the years "fly by" - unless you're doing lots of new things and trying out experiences you never have before.  If you've been on a long motorway journey it can seem to go on forever, but often when you arrive you can't remember any of it.  Apparently we go into a different type of consciousness (similar to a trance) and that's why we don't register the time in the same way.

In any case, doing new things is apparently how to slow time down, if you wish to.  If you're used to lots of travel and each trip merges into the next, do something different for a change.  I went on "Go Ape" recently: where I was hanging from a zip wire up trees in Thetford Forest for 3 hours.  It was amazing and something I'd never done before.  Again, I remember every minute of it.  If you're used to hanging from trees, go the theatre.  If you go to the theatre weekly, take a Japanese cookery course.  Etc.

Autumn and Winter

My summer will eventually come to and end, and autumn will loom.   What's the point in regretting that you're no longer as young as you were?  Autumn offers warm evenings in front of the fire, interspersed with still many sunny days, and perhaps changing the pace of what I do.  I have a feeling I'll be just as happy then as I was then.  Perhaps I'm essentially just a dog (click on the link for an explanation) and every time of life is my "favourite thing".  It's not a bad philosophy.

Winter will follow, and there's no changing that.  Winter too has much to commend it.  There is nothing more certain than the cycle of the calendar year, and the fact life will at some point end for us all.   If you make it to the end of December I think it's fair to acknowledge that this is of itself a wonderful blessing, and far from everyone has this opportunity.

Oscar (11) is nearing his winter days. What a great life he's had.

So, whatever date you are on in your life (see below), I hope it's a good one for you.  There's no winding the clock back, and gay boys... you don't die at 40, or even 30.  There IS life after death!

Peter x






To find out your day, divide your age by 85.  Then multiply the result by 365.  Google for example "200 day of the year" and the exact day will appear as a result. 

Sam Bailey - X- factor UK

If you have not heard her sing, you should!

It made me tear because it was amazing.

Link: http://youtu.be/mCylXy-IRGU

I had a new haircut yesterday. It cost 5 pounds only and the hairdresser was a pro!

Bank holiday weekend

This weekend was all about exercising the brain with chess and scrabble. The two games which I never get bored of and suitable for the rainy London weather. Yesterday was the first day since I was here that it rained heavily the entire day. Its a sign the summer is almost ending!

I have to admit that I am more confident in chess than scrabble. I played four games of scrabble with my brother yesterday and I lost all four! On a positive note, my loss was probably because I was a bit rusty. This morning I played three more games with random opponents and won two out of the three games. I am waiting for a rematch with my brother :):) 

Suddenly I realised how useful it is to have a brother. When I want to play tennis or ping pong, he plays with me. When I want to play chess, he does not mind playing too. He was also all gamed for scrabble too. Even when I ask him to cook food for me, he will do it!

The one thing he will not do with me is ballroom dancing.... Geli geli

For lunch I made something so simple but it turned out to look artsy-fartsy.

I showed my brother this picture of the egg I made:

My bro was saying he does not like eating eggs and he said my egg looked like it didnt like itself too because it was puking all over itself.

So I edited the picture:

Happy Bank Holidays!

Brothers Cider

Another pink coloured cider which taste awesome. It is a pear cider mixed with berries. It felt like I was drinking a fruit juice. Drink cider if you dont like the bitterness of beer. 

No, I did not finish the whole bottle alone.

On another note, its annoying to see people draw their own conclusions on someone else, especially when its fabricated. Just shows your own stupidity.

Absence and Loss

If you follow me on Twitter, you'll know that on Monday I went up to Liverpool to spend a last evening with my boyfriend, Ste, before taking him on Tuesday to Heathrow.  At 8pm I waved him goodbye and off he flew to China, for his year abroad studying in Beijing.

I anxiously followed his flight to Hong Kong, got a text from there, and then another when he landed in Beijing.  He was dropped off with his suitcase by a taxi driver in the middle of the night on a random street, because the driver couldn't find his hotel.  He eventually found it himself, at gone 1am, after a lot of walking around.  He must've been terrified: it was his first long-haul flight and has only been studying Chinese for two years as part of a joint honours degree. 

Ste

He hasn't had access to the internet properly, he's behind the great firewall of China (where Twitter and Facebook are banned) and texts cost 40p a shot.  Calls are £1.50 a minute.  He's almost as far away as it gets in the modern world.  He's gone for a year and I'm going to have to get used to it. All that said, we did manage to iMessage, and by using a proxy server we FaceTimed this morning for an hour.  So far, he pretty much hates it there. 

We've been together 16 months and "China" has been looming the whole time.  We knew he'd been going.  How do I feel about it all?  Well, his departure was quite surreal.  I cried, quite a lot.  Since then I've been expecting to be really down and upset.  Instead, I've been oddly at peace and oddly, I've felt quite happy.

"Happy" you say?

Is Ste that bad?  No, he's fucking amazing.  I love him.  We just click in such a natural, relaxed, wonderful way.  We haven't had one shouting match since we've met.  I admire and respect him, and he says I calm him down and support him.  He's a highly intelligent, feisty, confident young guy, and he's got some serious guts doing what he's doing.  I love, love, love the time we spend together.  I look forward hugely to his getting back, and our getting on with the rest of our lives together.  He's for keeps.

But I'm not feeling miserable.  Absence is such an abstract concept.  It's very much what I allow it to be.  As I touched on in my last post, I believe that life is chaotic and we can control only a very small proportion of what comes across our paths.  We can, however, control (or try to control) how we react to those obstacles.  I can let upset in, or I can look at the situation and see the good aspects.

When we were on FaceTime this morning, his face was on the screen, just as it would be if were talking with me at home and him at university up in Manchester.  Okay, we both blubbed a bit, but apart from the fact we were talking all about his experiences so far in China, if I take a step back this is still my Ste talking to me on the screen in exactly the same way as usual.  I can think "oh my god, he's on the other side of the world" or I can realise that it's incredibly fortunate we can communicate so easily.  When he gets his proper internet connection, it will be even better.

Somewhere in that strange city of 20 million... there's a Ste

My Mutti moved to England from Germany in December 1963 to marry my Dad, because he was due to go with the army to Kenya, accompanied.  A week after their wedding, the army changed his plans.  He went instead to a war zone in Aden, unaccompanied, for a year.  She was stuck in England with schoolgirl English and got a job in the local Smiths crisps factory.  They didn't have any internet, Twitter, FaceTime or iMessage.  It was letters that took weeks to deliver.  He was literally nearly killed.  An attack on the truck he was driving missed by one vehicle.  Mutti stuck with it and refused to run home to her own mother.  They were married 36 years.

It's more than just realising how comparatively well off Ste and I are, though.  It's about a feeling inside me that is joyous at the fact that his absence actually means so much to me.  I'd much rather be missing him, than not be in love with him.  It sounds mildly unhinged, but I guess we can say that I'm happy that I'm sad.

Grief is the price we pay for love

There's that quote on the British victims' 911 memorial in Grosvenor Square.  It has the words "Grief is the price we pay for love" on it.  It's a quote from a speech made by the Queen after the attack.  If we didn't love, we wouldn't feel the pain when our loved ones are gone.  There is so much truth in this.  It resonates inside me.  It's like that other much more hackneyed quote "better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all".  Fortunately it's not been worn out in the same way.

The Memorial to the British Victims of 911

Now, Ste hasn't died of course (!) but it has me thinking about the bigger picture of those whom I have loved and who are no longer alive.  My Dad is the big one.  If you have a moment, I'd love you to read these two very short pieces by me: telling your parents you love them and how he reacted when I put a dress on as a kid. I loved my Dad and have so much respect for him.  He was a phenomenal man.

My Dad died in March 2000.  I still have dreams where he's alive - not in some weird "he's the Messiah and he's come back to life" way, but just as if he's still there and never left.  You can't really control your sub-conscious, but I find this fascinating.  It's that thing about absence being abstract again.  I can't interact with him, but he is still there in my memories, in pictures, in my dreams, and I can hear his voice if I want to.  He's gone, but he's still with me.  His absence is real, but also not real at all.

My Dad (Davy is far right)

When I think about Dad and his beautiful funeral (his coffin was carried by 6 soldiers from his regiment into a medieval church by the sea, for the most perfect service, on a glorious April day), I start to well up a bit.  But then I'm also phenomenally glad that he existed and that I knew him.  I had him right through my childhood and into my adulthood.  Plenty of other people didn't have this.  Here I go again... I'm happy that I'm sad when I think about him.  I grieve because I loved him.

Collies and Grandmothers

Davy, my childhood dog, was born 27 years ago today.  I remember crying so hard it hurt when I got the call that he'd been put down.  I was in my law firm's office in London and my poor colleague didn't know what to do with me.  Talk about awkward for the poor sod.  When I lose Oscar, my incredible companion since 2003, I will be inconsolable for some time.  But I know I will be bursting with gratitude that he was in my life.  The pain will be worth it.

It's no insult to throw the only grandparent I knew into the same thought chain as Davy and Oscar (you have to be a dog person to realise, it's quite the opposite!)  My grandmother (Omi) died relatively recently, in January 2011.  Her death was the reason I started writing this blog and the story of her life was my first ever post.  When I think of her, my heart is full of happy thoughts, mixed in of course with the sense of loss.

Oscar and Omi.  I'm glad they met.

It's the same for anyone who means anything to us.  We are all temporary creatures on this Earth.  We will all experience loss and we will ourselves depart at some point.  We will mourn people we love, and there will be intense, sometimes crushing pain.  I may be an unbearable optimist, but I can't control the fact that for me, mixed in with the pain is also that huge gratitude and happiness that we had the chance to love them at all. 

Back to Ste

So, it's back to where we started.  Ste is in China.  Until July 2014.  I, quite frankly, would rather he were snuggled up on the sofa next to me.  He's not, and I can't change that.  I can, however, acknowledge what an incredible presence he is in my life and how fortunate I am to have him. 

Adorable cheeky monkey. What's not to love?

I can mope through the next year, or I can look forward to my trips out there (first one booked in two months' time!) and understand that his absence is part physical and part abstract - it's to a large extent how I view it in my head.  His being gone is pretty much what I want it to be.  Reflecting a little, I actually want it to be an opportunity to be joyful and grateful... and that's I guess why I wrote this piece.  Thank you for reading it.

Flying off

Goodbye.

Hello.....

Cool!

Feels so cool to know I'm living in the same postcode as Victoria Beckham's office and its less than 10 minutes walk.