Gay London

 An essential component of the London gay weekend is the London gay brunch which is normally undertaken at 2-3 depending on venue.

This allows all those other elements of the London gay weekend such as going to the gym to run the miles quota you failed to achieve during the week and to the dry cleaners to tend to that shirt you will not trust to the home ragamuffin.

And it also, if truth be told, allows the gays to unpeel their tongues from the roof of their mouths, send the take home trade out the door and have a light and healthy breakfast as if your liver is going to roll over like a contented puppy and business as usual.

Kitty says.

Lunch Saturday at J Sheekys was at the unseemly hour of 12.30 to accommodate metrosexual manfriend’s custody of his child that evening. Regretfully, he took at face value my assertion that the reservation was under the name of “Brutaltop”. Clearly not metrosexual enough to understand what that name entails – to the extent of producing a copy of the email – the gay maitre d’ got it and indeed looked somewhat disappointed when I turned up to the correct booking under my familial name.

The booking sorted we ate a very good though horribly expensive lunch. Exquisitely aware – as ever- of my green credentials I ate locally sourced asparagus – well UK anyway as they discourage asparagus growing in St James Park – and for the privilege was charged £23.50. I should mention the mention of lobster mentioned on the menu but the reference was clearly in the passing and the lobster was clearly in the hiding under the already scare asparagus – more Tamil Tiger in limited undergrowth if I was to pass a topical reference.

And equally brutally dispatched.

The London gay weekend always follows then with a meander around central London shops where interesting objects and age inappropriate clothes are generally a prelude to propping up one of the gay haunts in and around Old Compton Street. It is at this point the great gay divergence occurs. It is as if some of the Wildebeest suddenly announce that actually, they couldn’t be bothered with the Serengeti and if they never see the Ngooggoro (oh spell-check me!) crater again it will be too soon. The grass here is just fine, there is no wretched river crossing and the definition of fun does not include being corralled under a railway arch (my analogy is breaking down but you get the point and Vauxhall does include a river crossing so its quite clever to…oohh forget it…). Thus the Dinner Party Set and the Party Party Set will go their separate ways and while one will fall out of some East End dive bar of the fashionably studiously unfashionable, the Party Party Set will dance with the plastic fantastic until some ungodly hour on Sunday morning.

No judgment, just a note that in a work context each is equally unapproachable until Tuesday morning at the earliest.

The London gay weekend must occasionally involve gay events of a, perhaps, higher nature – arts or theatre darling – which apart from nurturing the soul ensures everyone at the dinner party is not having the same conversation. With this in mind one attended in company the Alternative Miss World at the Roundhouse in Camden some weekends back. It was an interesting divergence also between the gay London weekend professional and the gay London weekend amateur – to read the reviews of this show in the admittedly excellent venue is to understand how people can live in parallel universes. I have seen better performances at a two bit queer bar in a scary side street off alphabet city. The alleged presence of some Jagger ex (Binky, Bianca, Blackie?) and the hosts sepulchrally intoned assurance of “beauty…and…glamour” does not a fabulous London gay weekend make. We held our fairy dust and benedictions and took to the Black Cap in Camden where, provided you are under 50 and not a prisoner of your own body mass, you are, Beauty, and you are, Glamour, indeed.