(ADMIN: Post delayed/revised from Monday night, due to the lateness of the hour and the advanced state of decrepitude of the author.)
Flipping heck. Two full days after Saturday’s Last-Night-EVER-At-George’s-Bar Marathon Bender To End All Benders, and my brain is still like concrete. Which TOSSER was it who said “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”, anyway?
(UPDATE: Oh! It was William Blake! And the full quote actually reads: The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom – for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough. Whoops! Point taken!)
A great night, though – even if poor old K only lasted a bare hour, due to the crowds, the noise and the claustrophobia.
(At which point they put someone on the door, thus swiftly reducing the numbers to a more manageable level, as the mid-evening bridge-and-tunnel crowd moved on to ritzier pastures. Unfortunately, the new regulars-only policy meant that poor old Dymbel was refused admission. If this doesn’t convince him of the benefits of texting, then I fear nothing will.)
For me, the defining pinnacle moment came at around 2am, when Dolly Parton’s 9 To 5 got the whole bar on its feet – even the ones who “don’t dance, darling” – for a shared moment of delirious communion. Trannies on the tables, respectable elderly gentlemen in burgundy cummerbunds tapping their toes, gurning queens passing round the poppers, straight boys snogging gay boys snogging fag-hags, ashtrays spilling onto ruched silk, tables teetering (“careful darling, that’s champagne”), nice young gels hurling their guts up into the one remaining functional wash basin, while other nice young gels held their hair back … Hockley Babylon, it was. We shall not see its like again.
(Neil MovieBuff, another George’s regular, also writes about the night on his own blog, with his customary eloquence.)
I’ve also been corresponding, at some length, with one of my fellow Bloggies finalists – the lovely Siobhan of Tranniefesto – about perceptions of the whole cross-dressing scene, following a comment I left in this post. (Scroll past the rant about traffic in Lancaster, until you get to the section titled Whoo! Long hair!) Part of me wishes that we were blogging our conversation, rather than hiding it away in e-mails – although Siobhan does expand on the subject in this post. (Needless to say, the other part of me wishes that I didn’t spend quite so much time mining real life for blog posts.)
Anyway. To compensate for the break in service, have a couple of MP3s. Both of these popped up at random on my iPod during Monday, and both got me right THERE. The first is a bitter-sweet “farewell to all that” lament, full of wistful regret, which seems appropriate under the circumstances. The second is a heartbreaking soul ballad from 1970, which I found in one of the few crates that remain from James Hamilton‘s collection.
No multi-tasking when you listen to these, please. They both require your full attention.
Nightsong – Sidsel Endresen & Bugge Wesseltoft
(Buy it from Amazon UK.)
troubled diva 