Devonian

I fucking love this!

Happy birthday to me, happy ... etc

This is the first birthday where I have had no cards or presents or phone calls from family.

That said, it is the first birthday that I saw in while drinking Bollinger champagne, sat next to a pool at a luxury hotel in Los Angeles.

You win some, you lose some.

I don't believe in God, but I can't accept that there's nothing. I don't particularly like the current Pope or what he stands for, but I'm ambivalent about the Catholic church and I can't blame people for wanting to have faith. I am not very well educated on Islam, but I don't believe that all Muslims are experts at flying planes into buildings.

All that aside, I genuinely don't think that it was the Pope's intention, when he quoted the Byzantine emperor, Manuel II, who described Islam as "evil and inhuman", to make some kind of Catholic first-strike against Islam. He may be misinformed and naive, but I don't think that he's stupid. Or at least not enough to think that he could imply that followers of Islam are homicidal maniacs and get away with it. I actually think that he knew that his words would carry some resonance, but not in the way that he intended. In the speech he said that Manuel i's words were "startlingly brusque," and apparently made certain that the audience understood that he was reading a quotation.

Of course what he failed to do was allude to Christianity's history of violence, such as the crusades or the Inquisition. In every religion there are always people who take the "word" too literally and end up landing outside of the rational. Islam is tarnished by violence right now, but Christianity has been just as violent in the past.

But what do I say to my Mum when she says that she just watched the news and thinks that those who follow Islam might actually be homicidal maniacs, after all? I want to tell her off and encourage her to be open minded. But to my Mum she feels justified in saying this and thinking this, because Christianity's violence is in the past and Islam's is happening right now.

Because to her, the Pope's references to Islam's purported disposition for bloodshed caused some Islamic followers to become so enraged that they went out and killed a nun by shooting her in the back.

How can I argue against that logic?

Whenever I read a critics review of a movie that tells me that it is actually my "responsibility" to watch it, I end up feeling fairly resistant.

An Inconvenient Truth is a movie currently receiving such an accolade, but this time it didn't put me off because for quite a long time now I've had a secret crush on Al Gore.

Having now seen the movie, last night, I can reliably inform you that it is indeed everyone's responsibility to see it.

The movie is actually a combination of a keynotes speech where Gore addresses a lecture hall full of people using graphs, photographs and representations to demonstrate the key points about global warming and climate care - all to great effect. To break up these scenes and, I suppose, to lend a greater cinematic impression, the filmmakers have dropped in archive footage of Gore as a child, as a young man, at home, at work, as a younger and then elder statesman. There are also clips of him campaigning for his presidency and then clips of him losing. Gore narrates, or rather muses, over the top of these clips, but in a way that cleverly brings what we are seeing into context. For example, the scenes of his family consoling him after he loses out to Dubya, are there not to make us feel sorry for him, but to explain to us why he is here talking to us. Well, sort of.

I left the movie thinking two things:

The first was about the effect of global warming. Even at the one of the least dramatic levels, which in the movie is cited as being the partial melting of Antartica and / or Greenland, the sea level could rise about 20 feet (and if we carry on polluting the atmosphere they way we currently are, then this is almost certainly going to happen in my lifetime.) The repercussions would be gargantuan, resulting in the deaths of millions of people, not to mention the displacement of hundreds of millions of others. Put into context it makes other "important" issues such as the War on Terror and immigration seem like trifling irrelevancies (which they arguably are, anyway.)

The second is why-oh-why did Al lose out to George? What went wrong? Visually, the contrast between Al's handsome older-man "thang" and Dubya's gurning mug is really quite striking. George Bush Jr. almost always looks like a simpleton. Although I have no doubt that this was the intention of the filmmakers, as they trudged through the archives: to find the least attractive representations of him.

But what really comes out of the Gore / Bush comparison is that Gore clearly understands the war that he's campaigning for, what the positive effects will be if we win it and what will happen if we don't. This is in stark comparison to Bush, who probably understands very little, if anything.

I'm not entirely sure if An Inconvenient Truth was intended not only to be a call to arms, but also a presidential manifesto for a future Gore administration. It probably was. And while I don't pretend to be an aficionado on the intricacies of American politics, I do know that many people in 2008 will vote on a single issue.

Therefore whoever ends up running for office, I'm now convinced that the individual who is committed to the war against global warming, above anything else, is the one who should get the most votes.

After all, every issue - the War on Terror, the economy, human-rights, immigration, education, health - each of them pales into insignificance when you really look at and think about this ...

Itinerary

Now, I'm not normally one to boast (um?), but ...

In just over a week I'm jetting off to LA where a bike journo and I will ride along the Pacific coastline to San Francisco and then back again in just under five days.

In two weeks I'll actually be steering (for a small part of the journey) this very yacht ...


... to Spain from Monaco. I'll then be racing against the yacht, back to Monaco, in a luxury 4x4.

In four weeks I'll be in New York hanging out with The Strokes, who'll be driving publicity for an event that I have been helping to oversee.

In November I'll be in Morocco driving a brand-new 4x4 offroad with a bunch of lifestyle journos.

Finally I've begun to see a return on those turgid, corporate rivers of blood, sweat and tears.

The downside is that there's nothing like the opportunity to do things professionally that you will never, ever do in your private life to make you seriously question your reality and priorities.

An eventful date for an un-eventful day

Every morning, when I get to my desk, I change my voicemail message so that callers know my whereabouts and whether or not to try to get hold of me on my cellphone. As usual, this morning I re-recorded my message, beginning as always with today's date.

Ella, who sits in my team, turned to me and said, "That sounded really strange. When you read out the date."

It did sound strange, but only because today's date is no longer just "any old date". I think it was because I was using it in such mundane circumstances.

Used in similar commonplace contexts, I guess it will continue to sound strange for a long, long time. I wonder if it will never again be just like any other unremarkable date in the year. I know that it shouldn't be, but at the same time it feels sad that it won't be. But most of all that it ever had to become remarkable at all.

Wardrobe malfunction

I keep seeing this poster all over London and it has been bothering me. Am I imagining it, or does it look like Gisele is, er, "pleased to see us"?

Another gem from Mr. Lagerfeld:

About Pete Doherty: "His music - the look - is over now. There is nothing to think about. It is too late."

Utter dismissiveness. God, he's fabulous.

This evening I had a conference call with a client in Atlanta. The call was at 8pm, so at 6pm I decided to grab a newspaper and go to a nearby restaurant to have supper, before I came back to work for the call.

I sat in a quiet corner of the restaurant and just above and infront of me was a small television which was showing BBC News 24. At one point my attention strayed from the Evening Standard that I was reading to a news report about John Hogan, the man who recently jumped from a hotel balcony with his two children, an action which resulted in the death of his six year-old son.

The news report featured extended clips of this both literally and metaphorically broken man, crying uncontrollably as he was charged with the murder of his son and with his own attempted suicide.

During the report the waitress came over to take my order. She saw that I was looking at the TV and looked up to the screen herself. "Such a tragedy," she said. "How could he do it?"

I've heard a lot of people say similar things about this man over the past few weeks and while I can see why it is only natural that they should ask that question (after all, how many people, with complete sobriety, jump off a fifth floor hotel balcony with a child under each arm) I can't help but feel some kind of empathy for him and affinity for where he must be right now.

It was dazzlingly apparent to me, watching the news report, that John Hogan is a man deeply and desperately in remorse for what he has done to his son, his daughter (who survived with only a broken arm), his wife and the rest of his family, not to mention himself. Infact all of the objective news reports seem to all agree that John Hogan was a loving father and that what he did was completely out of character. While my circumstances are entirely different from his, I know what it is to wake up in an intensive care unit to be told that you have tried and failed to take your own life and as a result have your world completely fall apart.

I don't, and most likely will never know, what it is like to lose a child, let alone at my own hands. But I do know what it is like to experience something akin to insanity, regardless of what caused it. Each of us are passionate and often irrational creatures capable of wild and spontaneous actions that can last mere seconds, but have consequences that change everything and last a lifetime.

While I believe that anyone who breaks the law, in what ever way they have broken the law, should be prosecuted, I also believe that there always needs to be some kind of "human" factor to take into account what that person is going through in terms of remorse for their actions. I know that this does happen in some cases, but I don't think that it happens in all.

I hope that whoever decides upon John Hogan's ultimate sentence takes into consideration the massive apparent remorse he seems to be experiencing. This is a man who no doubt will suffer as a result of what he has done for the rest of his life.

But more than that I wish there was a way that I could tell John Hogan that not everyone is asking "why" and that not everyone despises him for what he has done.

Harry

Say, "Hello Harry!"

Joy

It's like all my Christmases and birthdays have come all at once!!!

Ruined

Just over a week ago the owners of my company took all 150 of us to Oxford for a couple of days. During that time we generally indulged ourselves in much surreptitious, drunken, bawdy behavior.

A great time was had by all, especially at the mock-Woodstock type festival that was set up, with real stage and real bands, all in one of the gardens of one of the college houses. It was a fairly noisy affair.

A tad too noisy, perhaps.

Crack

I have succumbed and joined the MySpace revolution.

Can I just point out that I have been rabidly against doing this, because:

a) I didn't want yet another thing to distract me away from my work duties

b) when people talked about their MySpace profiles I wanted to be able to gloat that I didn't have one. You know, because I'm so fucking cool.

However, the reason I succumbed is because I am doing a project for work which requires me to join MySpace. Very irritating.

Despite that, please feel free to add me as a friend. Please! Because, um, I don't have very many at the moment ...

On Monday night I went to dinner with my ex-boyfriend, Will, and his new boyfriend, Jason, who were stopping off in London on a trip. The last time I saw Will was over two years ago, just before I left New York to come back to the UK.

Despite some obvious worries about seeing him, we had a really great evening. I met them at their friend's apartment in Baker Street, we went for a drink, my friend Sam (who had met Will before in NYC) met us, we went to dinner and then we went to the Shadow Lounge. Will was as I remember him: still cute, still funny, great company but I was relieved to find that my heart wasn't doing somersaults all over the place, the way it used to when we were dating.

Jason was also really great and I didn't feel in any way threatened by him. He's just a really nice, funny, interesting, really cute guy, but we're obviously very different people. He and Will made a great couple and I felt comfortable in their company.

It wasn't until I'd said goodbye and I got in a cab to come home that I began to feel absolutely dreadful.

I'd been worried about seeing Will, only because I thought that there was a chance that I would fall in love with him all over again. That didn't happen. I think I'd be lying if I said that I don't feel anything for him anymore, but I think the feelings I have are really just feelings of fondness. I felt myself kind of just wanting to hug him and muss up his hair, as opposed to wanting to make out with him, if that makes any sense?

Having now had a few days to think about it, I realise now that what spun me out was seeing my ex-boyfriend with his new boyfriend, seeing them so happy, seeing them play it out with each other. The way that Will would squeeze Jason's shoulder, touch his face, smile at him ... made me think back to the time when he would do the same things to me. And it wasn't that I wanted him to do them to me again, instead of Jason. I didn't even feel jealousy. They just served to remind me of something that I had kind of tried to put to the back of my mind.

I really want a boyfriend. And not (as I said to my friend Bill, yesterday) in the manner of (say it like a teenager), "I want a boyfriend!"

I want a partner. I want someone to share my life with. I've gotten past the point in my life where I just want to hook up with hot guys (note the operative word: "just"). I want someone to make me compromise my selfishness. I want someone to come home to when I finish work.

And while he might be lovely, Jamie, my straight house mate, doesn't really count.

God is in my iPod

This morning I felt a bit, but not a whole lot, better.

In my continuing funk, when I got to the gym, I couldn't decide what music I wanted to listen to. So I let my iPod do all the work by putting it on shuffle.

Kitty Empire, the music editor for The Observer, once wrote that she thought that God was the shuffle facility on her iPod. I think I agree, because the very first song to play was this.

Ok, it's maybe a tad fromage-tastic, but somehow apropos and the lyrics really did make me feel sooooo much better.

Ah, iPods.

Is there anything that they can't do?

I'm still here.

Lots of things have happened in the past two weeks that I can't even begin to tackle in a single post. I guess I'll have to make a concerted effort to write about them individually over the next few days.

I've written a lot about how over the past two years I've come a long way from where I used to be. But every now and then I have a day where I feel that a touch of that blackness that I used to feel so frequently. Yet however bleak things might seem in a single day, somehow I'm now always able to pull myself back up and soldier on.

I'm feeling that bleak darkness now, but I'm telling myself that tomorrow I'll wake up and I'll feel better. Even if it's only slightly better, it'll still be better and a long, long way from where I used to be.

I have such a charmed life with so many wonderful friends who add so much colour and fullness to everything.

I don't know where I'm going with this.

I'm feeling sad. But at the same time I can't help but feel incredibly lucky to be here.

Ever questioned a gay mans credentials for dictating women's fashion? Well then, read this.

And who'd have thunk that Karl Lagerfeld would become my new hero? I must use the line "But I don't think you are well informed enough to make a discussion with me about this," ASAP!

Ibiza

I love this! That comment pretty much epitomises the slightly obscure views that many of the elders at home have.

When you put that next to this, you'll start to understand why I tell people that I come from Bath (which is, incidentally, only 10 miles away and the nearest city.)

"Don't be ashamed of your roots," someone who didn't come from Trowbridge once said.

Chevy Chase

On Friday Helen emailed myself and a few other people with a question.

She has been researching schools for work and the results included a school in America called Chevy Chase. The name sounded familiar to her, so she plonked it into Wikipedia and it came up with him.

Her question had been: why had a high-school named itself after a comedian who had performed so unspectacularly in his own education?

This prompted a few of us to do our own Chevy Chase search and there are, in fact, a few things, people and places named Chevy Chase. One might assume that it was one of them that provided the inspiration behind the naming of afore mentioned internationally famous comic genius.

Helen's brother presented us with this place. It occurred to me, from the banality of the website (and my overactive, salacious imagination), that behind the normalcy of the white picket fences, ornamental street lights and flag-flying would be a veritable hotbed of incest, bisexual partner swapping and a touch of slavery.

But then I realised that the same could be said by someone visiting the website of my own home town.

An open letter to straight men

Hello straight men! How are you? Me? Oh, I'm good, thanks for asking.

Hey, so I know that our conversations are usually fairly awkward, with you saying things like, "You probably aren't interested in football are you, mate?" and "That's so gay! Er, I don't mean it like that. I know loads of gayers," with me then responding with a much-practiced faux laugh and grin which hides a lifetime of pained despair ... but listen up, because I actually have some advice that may help the World become a more beautiful place help you pull birds more.

Now, I did make my thoughts on this subject quite clear some time ago, but just to refresh your memory ... three-quarter length trousers (also known as Capri pants) - so not a good look. No. Not even when you accessorise them with cheapo camouflage flip-flops from H&M, a too-tight beige T-shirt with "Sit on my face" written over your moobs and a lukewarm can of Holston Pils, deftly wedged in between your pudgy fingers and thumb.

Now come on. Don't be like that. It's not just because your loosely toned legs have the complexion of downy-haired chalk ...

Er. Ok. It is because of that. I'm not saying that us gay men are any better, because we have also been known to wear them as well (well, not me, or at least not for a very long time). But when we do at least we've recently gone to the effort of visiting a tanning salon or even Selfridges beauty hall to buy a bottle of St. Tropez.

So, I'll cut you a deal. If you promise to stop inflicting us all to the sight of your pasty, hairy pins in those bloody horrible, nasty trou-shorts then I promise that I'll never, ever tell anyone that when you were 14 you licked it. You know, just to see what it tasted like.

Lots of (platonic) love,

Christopher
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