Impolite



	Previously, on "GAYS OF OUR LIVES"...

	Our hero, Gattino, pretty as ever, has established 2 separate sets of friends and social contacts. The "common as muck" category includes Andy, the gregarious but wholey unreliable social worker and his current beau, James - star of the classic Horror movie "Curse of the Queerwolf". Despite living in a grand home and being loaded you'd be hard put to find anyone as capable of working the words "back passage" into as many innocent conversations in one night as he is. On the other side of the divide in leafy and elegant Chester there is Ben - the romantic lead in most episodes of our esteemed saga - who we love dearly for his ability to get nosebleeds in the presence of smelly people. There's also Phil, Mark, and "Simon with the edible arse". Ben had fallen madly in love with a German called Alex who our hero has never met. Finally the time came for the two worlds to collide. The saga continues....

	IMPOLITE SOCIETY

	All I said to Andy was "if in the meantime I arrange to do anything with Ben in Chester, would you and James be..." "O YEAH!" "..interested?" I took this as a yes. The fame these emails have given to Ben & Co precedes them and clearly Andy was starstruck at the idea of meeting a legend. And since I had no other excuse to visit Ben after such a long time, a meeting was arranged with the usual attention to detail. On Wednesday evening, Andy, James and I were to go over to Chester. And so it came to pass...


	The tension over whether this social soiree would live down to past efforts was heightened by the mystery of what Alex the German would be like. I'd been warned on several occassions not to mention the war. Yes, that is a line from Fawlty Towers but it isn't a joke. Apparently he was sensitive to any german remarks. I should ask no questions about him following orders, having ways of making us talk, or indeed anything relating to sausages. Naturally I tried to cleanse my system of any such outbursts in advance when writing to Ben - so as to be free of any temptation when we actually met. As a consequence I was asked by Ben to refrain from "racism". I was naturally outraged at the suggestion. He explained apologetically that he had simply become hyper sensitive after being accused of it himself. "38 anti-german comments in one day. He counts." He counts? OK. Then, in his last email before the night itself Ben added as another cautious after thought "Alex is rather formal". I had no idea what this might mean. I had images of him clicking his heels as he wiped his monocle. Certainly I decided we weren't about to meet Germany's first succesful comedian.


	And so on Wednesday evening, Andy and I took the train across the river to Birkenhead, where James lives and from where he was to drive us to Chester. James doesn't work in the traditonal sense , in that the traditional sense involves working. He spends his time building and adding to his large house. As we walked there Andy told me out of mischief to NOT be impressed when I saw inside his home. So I wasn't. From the outside it loomed like an old castle and was not somewhere I'd knock at the door if it was a dark stormy night. I've seen that movie. His likeness to a wolf seems more apt by the minute. But I didn't see much else, we left straight away.


	And so we arrived in Chester and spent more time trying to find a way into Ben's home. We - by which I mean I, but I like to share responsibility - initially found ourselves trying to break in the back way, which provided James with an endless number of ways of telling anyone who'd listen - and pretty much everyone who wouldn't - that we'd been in Ben's back passage, up his rear entrance and any other variation you'd rather not think of. Ass and class do not go together. It was going to be an interesting evening.


	And it may well have been, were I in a position to make any coherent account of it, but sadly for you - if happily for me- I got very, very drunk very, very quickly, on very, very little. So I'll have to confine myself to half conversations I remember, even if they make no sense. When we got into Ben's home Alex was there with Phil, the rotund bespectacled chappy of past adventures. We were to meet Mark and "Simon with the edible arse" later in a pub. I had no idea there would be so many of us. Alex was not as I had pictured him, principally since I hadn't pictured him, and also because he smiled a lot. Which was a relief. "So - what do you do, Alex?" "I'm a lecturer at Durham university." "Really? In...?" "Mid-18th century English poetry" "Uhuh...nice weather we've been having.." Which pretty much summed up the only exchange I had with him. I did later ask where in Germany he was from and, on being told Frankfurt, ventured that if I knew anything about Frankfurt we'd be able to have a conversation. He commented that the English are all alcoholics. I'd have resented the implication, but at that stage I couldn't even pronounce the implication. He struck me as perfectly pleasant, but I might have been missing something....


	Other than telling us of how he had been barred from a local gay pub for indecency - ie he kissed someone(and someone else was barred for holding hands under the table! Nice place Chester.), Ben never said much and both he and Alex looked distinctly bored, if not uncomfortable as Andy and Phil gabbled away about working class things. We moved on to the pub - "Telfords Warehouse", where downstairs there were 2 or 3 long tables lit by candles in wine bottles. But before we settled down there and were still at the bar, I noticed James had been gone a hell of a long time when he disappered to the toilets. "What was his name..?" I ventured suspiciously when he finally returned. "I've just a had lovely Eartha Kitt" he explained. For Foreign readers who don't get that, the words "rhyming slang" will cover it. The word "elegant" will not. This may or may not have some reflection on the lack of conversation between one end of the table and the other, I barely spoke to Ben all evening, and he seemed totally subdued. He did tell me that Alex was a jealous type, which he claimed to like, and that he was rather intimidated by him since he was not used to his partner being the more intelligent one. What the evidence of this was I do not know, beyond his expertise on 18th Century poetry. But if a depth of knowledge on an obscure subject is the measure of intelligence you may as well feel inferior to a train spotter.


	As for me I had a lovely time finding myself at different places around the table every time I looked up, with little recollection of how I got there, being privvy to everyone there bitching about everyone else behind their backs, in the homosexual fashion (most of which I will gloss over since half of them will get to read this), and being more inebriated than I've been before. I was certainly atrociously indiscrete. Poor Simon, who strikes me as painfully shy (and who incidentally gets further away from my initial description of him every time I see him), was the primary victim of this as I revealed to him that he is known to the outside world as "Simon with the edible arse". I then proceded to torment the boy for the rest of the night, to the extent that he went to the toilets backwards so we couldn't see his behind. I then told his boyfriend Mark about my nick name for him, and he informed me, from the horse's mouth as it were, that Simon has the BIGGEST behind he'd ever seen on a man. Which has put me off - clearly he only seems to have a nice bum because there's so much mass packed tightly into a confined space.


	I measured Andy's nose - which I've astutely never drawn attention to before - as a means of establishing his penis size and declared it must be enormous. (And of course, so must his penis) And from James I discovered that "girth" is the word he would associate with Andy's prize possession. Ben thanked me for controlling myself vis-a-vis german remarks in front of Alex. "Oh ..so if I started goose-stepping aro.." "NO! Don't!" I've never seen such panic. He realized I was joking (?) and said that Alex was bigger than me and might hit me. Well no offence to Alex but, as they might have said in the war, Limp Wrists Don't Form Fists. Only one other person seemed on the way to inebriation and that was chubby Phil who, after staring at me endlessly, declared "I think you're a lovely person Lawrence, but I don't want sex with you". This was not the reassurance he appeared to intend as it had never occurred to me that it was a matter under consideration. I thanked him from the bottom of my heart, not to mention from the heart of my bottom.


	Now I know I was pissed but how each side came to the conclusions they did about the other I just can't work out. Ben told me he noticed how flirty Andy had been with everybody, from the moment he arrived. Eh?? I didn't see that! He just chatted to people. Andy and James both claimed there was a terrible atmosphere when they walked into Ben's house, like there'd been a fight. Later this became how snobby they'd been. I didn't see that either! What are they talking about - there was just a natural lull that comes when strangers meet. Maybe they'd all had conversations I'd missed. Ben and Alex left first, tellingly. James said his goodbyes and as soon as they'd gone told us - repeatedly - how he's said to the german "It must have been a great pleasure for you. Thank you for your warm wonderful hospitality!" and how both remarks went straight over his head. "Zank you - it Vos" he apparently replied, or would have done if he was a spy in a comic book. Well I'm glad they all got on anyway. When it was our turn to part I put my arms around poor Simon and told him when he leaves his boyfriend to come to me. He's either having nightmares or wonderful fantasies that will never be fulfilled. My last words were shouting across the wide boulevards of Chester at night - "Look! There's his arse! Everyone look!"


	We're all doing it again next week...


	In the next episode....Gattino has finally, if not officially, been granted an audience in Glasgow with Attila, who is clearly weakening and desperately wants to see Gattino's nakedness. However on the same dates he's been invited on a Gay camping weekend in The Lakes by Stephen from Edinburgh. What will our hero decide to do? Everyone says go for a wild weekend of wet shorts, hiking boots and endless grass. But I'm tempted to go camping instead. How will this dilemma be resolved ??? Tune in and find out..