In Laws

My father Circa 1945

With a wedding in the offing, I have been giving some thought to the fact that my parents will never have got the chance to see me " tie the knot" so to speak.
Chris is young enough to have both parents standing by his side on the day.
He is incredibly lucky

My mother has been dead twelve years now. my father has been dead for twenty four.
If they had lived into auntie Glad figures, I now am wondering just what they would have made of it all.?
Of course the idea is a stupid one. People are generally products of their time. My father died In an unenlightened age, when aids advertisements scared the population and where a chaste gay kiss caused uproar in a popular soap. I think he would have initially experienced huge difficulties with the gay thing....
If I had come out then.... I would have had to walk a very precarious path
How things have moved on.

I like to think that my parents would have liked Chris.
My father would have been impressed with his quiet confidence and by his professional success. ( once he actually got over the fact that his youngest son HAD A BOYFRIEND! ) and
my mother would have tried to ply Chris with fags and gin and would have enjoyed a robust bout of verbal jousting where she would have convinced herself that  she would have come out the victor
I suspect they would have ended up liking each other.....in an odd.....dysfunctional  kind of way

Alas.......it was never to be.....

My mother Circa 1945 too

Mary Watching

TV Watching!

Bee Watching

Some dogs hate other dogs,

Others hate people,

More often than not postmen, cats and the odd rodent are disliked too

But with our William,

There is just one object of his wrath.....

now the ribus has started to flower in the back garden.

And he will stand like this for what seems like hours

Watching the flowers for signs of bees

William hates bees

With a vengeance 

Finale

Ok just a few hours to go

And I am pulling my hair out

Will carol, Judith and daryl survive?

Bloody hell

Priscilla Queen of Llandudno

In 1994 Priscilla Queen Of The Desert became a camp, flagship in gay movie history. Famous for its outrageous outfits,stunning visuals, snappy tunes and a stunning performance by Terence Stamp "doing" Veronica Lake with a potty mouth, the film became a vital milestone in gay culture

And so it was with a slightly heavy heart that I went to see the touring production of Priscilla last night over in Llandudno. I had several reservations about going.

1. The production started at 5 pm! Hardly a time to let your hair down with gay abandon

2. The audience's average age must have been around 75 with two old duffers in front of me looking as though they were on portable oxygen!

3  Touring productions are well known to be scaled down and potentially lacklustre versions of the original.

Well I need not have worried, for it was all  cracking mindless fun. Ok the lead Mitzi ( Jason Donovan) WAS pretty dismal ( he was out sung and out performed by a delightful seven year old boy on stage!)  but the rest of the cast were a delight to watch as they belted out their disco hits whilst decked out in a whole collection of glittering hot pants and feather boas.

The old bloke on his oxygen must have given himself an extra squirt of his O2 by the end for he was up and clapping and waving with the best of them as the elderly and normally slightly staid population of North Wales took a group of multicoloured drag queens to their hearts

PS.EIRLYS....READ YESTERDAY's POST......AND BUY A HAT!

Betrothed

 

There's alot of things that I dont know.
I didn't know until last week that gay marriage was "legal" in the UK from midnight tonight.
I didn't know that the word fiancée only referred to the bride-to-be and not the groom!
(I only learnt this one out at 6.00am this morning after Chris was bellowing
" there's a sloppy turd on the living room carpet!" 
and I answered with a rather pathetic
" what a charming thing to shout at your fiancée so early in a morning "

Funny what you find out when you look for it.

For a couple that have been blundering through their second decade together, getting "hitched" was always on the cards at some stage in our lives. .I just had to come to the conclusion that it was up to me to "organise"
Everyone has their own roles in a relationship
and I am the "organiser" at home
I am bred for the role as I love making out lists.

So the date and venue for the ceremony with close friends and family has been booked.
(It will a long awaited delight for both our families to get together at one time) and my sisters and sister in law have been squealing a great deal about hat wearing and will be conscripted to help organise some of a bigger bash in the village on the following day.
A gay civil marriage party in the Memorial Hall eh?
That wil be a first for Trelawnyd!
Anyhow dear readers, you won't hear too much about the nuptuals for a while. All the fine tuning bits need tweaking, overtime shifts need booking and winifred needs a drastic bout at weightwatchers before she can fit into that bridesmaid dress I bought for her last year, Suffice to say, the day has been set!

And do you know what?
Despite the vagaries of living with a man who bellows about stools on the living room carpet at some ungodly hour in the morning.
Getting Married is the perfectly right thing to do!
I would never have contemplated it with anyone else 

The Flower Show Shuffle

The Flower Show will be in its 42nd year this year. For most of those years the formidable Sylvia Evans was at the helm...running things with a rod of iron and a blood pressure through the roof. Last year Sylvia's niece rolled up her sleeves and helped out literally days after Sylvia's funeral, but she has now left the village, so the flower show is without a Secretary and  as these things tend to happen all together also now without a treasurer.
Last night we had an emergency meeting in Auntie Glad's kitchen.
Emergency scones had been baked for the occasion.
The treasurer position was filled easily enough, but as I suspected no one wanted the much harder and time consuming role of secretary. Sylvia's size 10 sling backs are big shoes to fill.
Anyhow, the upshot of the meeting is that I will now take on the secretary's role, and I have five bags of " Flower  Show" paperwork on the lounge floor to prove it.
42 years of tradition in five bags.
The committee agreed that we would purchase a quality silver trophy as one of the new prizes and it will be named The Sylvia Evans Memorial Cup. We also agreed that we would fund two new benches for the village green. The old ones have been rotting away for a while.
In my first job as Secretary, I have emailed the community council with the offer.
The meeting , finished as it always has done, with half the committee washing up the tea cups and the other half returning auntie Glad's old wooden chairs to the front room.
As always I thanked Gladys for her hospitality
And as always she replied with the same phrase
" don't thank me....thank The Lord"