OK, dear reader. I have hidden Who I really am from you for too long. I thought I knew Who I was. Oh yes, we all know Who we are,don’t we? Do we? Really?
Yesterday evening, I have just been watching on my iPad mini, Laing’s last major present to me, a rather soupy programme with really dreadful (and inappropriate) music about the start of “Doctor Who” 50 years ago, which starred the wonderful William Hartnell as the eponymous Doctor. I have no idea how the stars were aligned, but they forced me to cry and I have no bloody idea why, and I am fighting back the tears as I type.
Laing never understood my enjoyment or interest in Science Fiction. He could not see what I did in “Doctor Who” nor in “Star Trek”. Even as an adult, maybe having a brother 10 years younger helped, I could still find “Doctor Who” scary, disturbing, stimulating. I also remember episodes where I felt the normal standards didn’t apply.
Earlier yesterday, I was thinking about my future. I realised I had been one happy homo to have shared my life with a partner who had his own defined personality. I could never have married or lived with a doormat, and yet, where our interests overlapped, we were hand in glove. Which of us was the hand and which the protecting glove I can’t say, though probably we shared and exchanged those roles as and when the need and the situation arose.
I realise from my recent trip to the Far East, that I took bugger all images this time round. Together, I would fired off image after image, though I would have been using an SLR, but this time I was working mostly with my Leica and using only 50mm and 35mm lenses. That is one hell of a discipline. I also felt I saw things differently with those rangefinder images I brought back. Following, yet again, a route we had traversed before, I was aware I experienced everything very differently. Our Berlin walk was always both very familiar and yet unfamiliar as things changed or we took a different turning to find ourselves somewhere unexpected. This time, I was retracing our footsteps in Bangkok when we went on a three week holiday to commemorate our 35 years of friendship. Yes, I do mean friendship, We met and were friends instantly. Everything clicked, square pegs and round holes were not to be seen in close proximity with us. The walk in Bangkok I did, I varied somewhat, and temples and shrines we went inside, I could not bring myself to enter. It was also an amalgam of two walks, both really nearby the hotel.
At the time of organising that celebratory holiday, Laing said (how prescient he was, did he have some premonition or feeling about it?) that we should do a big blow out trip as we may not be able to do for our 40th anniversary what we could do now for our 35th. Bollocks, that hurts. The tears are here again. As ever, Tim pooh-poohed the idea, playing Pollyanna, or, even worse, Doctor Pangloss, seeing the best in everything in this, the best of all possible worlds. What utter rubbish. The pain of bereavement cannot be the best in the best of all possible worlds.
The tears have dried up a bit now. The point I was intending to make is that Laing and I did so much together. Not only were we “a couple”, but we enjoyed similar musics - stimulating and interesting, if not actually engaging, the other in respect sound worlds - we enjoyed travelling, and especially we enjoyed taking our cameras, to record not, “this is me/him/us” standing outside tourist attraction A, B, C etc, but to record what we wanted of the trip, the time or the place, or the sense of the place or to take a quirky photo that did not say Bangkok (e.g. anything other than a tuk-ruk) to anybody else. We shared so much. I was bloody lucky.
Now I realise I am unlikely to find somebody like that ever again. I will probably have to have separate friends who like to do travelling, photography,concerts, etc, but with whom there is no sexual chemistry. They may be possible husbands or not.
I reckon the duet between Katisha and Ko-Ko from “The Mikado” by Gilbert and Sullivan has some relevance here (I don’t care if you don’t, I love the music and the lyrics and the context), though of course the context is wildly different, as I shall explain. As before, this is from Act 2 of ‘The Mikado‘ (my stage debut in musical theatre as Ko-Ko’s sword bearer). The story so far.
The MIkado has decreed an execution has to take place in Titipu, and Nanki-poo (heir to the throne who is disguised as second trombone) has volunteered to be executed as he couldn’t marry Yum-Tum, for whom Ko-Ko has the hots as well. But they have got married as Nanki-poo preferred to be married briefly and then executed than face marriage to Katisha (The Mikado’s daughter-in-law elect), and he isn’t executed although his execution has officially taken place (the Lord High Everything-Else, Pooh-Bah will explain for a bribe), but the trouble is that the penalty for executing the heir apparent is something lingering, with boiling oil in it, and the only way out of the predicament is for Ko-Ko to marry Katisha, who is an acquired taste. He manages to break through her icy exterior to the gentle core, since she is just a little teeny weeny wee bit bloodthirsty.
Katisha:
There is beauty in the bellow of the blast,
There is grandeur in the growling of the gale,
There is eloquent outpouring
When the lion is a-roaring,
And the tiger is a-lashing of his tail!
Ko-Ko:
Yes, I like to see a tiger
From the Congo or the Niger,
And especially when lashing of his tail!
Katisha:
Volcanoes have a splendour that is grim,
And earthquakes only terrify the dolts,
But to him who's scientific
There's nothing that's terrific
In the falling of a flight of thunderbolts!
Ko-Ko:
Yes, in spite of all my meekness,
If I have a little weakness,
It's a passion for a flight of thunderbolts!
Both:
If that is so,
Sing derry down derry!
It's evident, very,
Our tastes are one.
Away we'll go,
And merrily marry,
Nor tardily tarry
Till day is done!
Ko-Ko:
There is beauty in extreme old age--
Do you fancy you are elderly enough?
Information I'm requesting
On a subject interesting:
Is a maiden all the better when she's tough?
Katisha:
Throughout this wide dominion
It's the general opinion
That she'll last a good deal longer when she's tough.
Ko-Ko:
Are you old enough to marry, do you think?
Won't you wait till you are eighty in the shade?
There's a fascination frantic
In a ruin that's romantic;
Do you think you are sufficiently decayed?
Katisha:
To the matter that you mention
I have given some attention,
And I think I am sufficiently decayed.
Both:
If that is so,
Sing derry down derry!
It's evident, very,
Our tastes are one.
Away we'll go,
And merrily marry,
Nor tardily tarry
Till day is done!
