Marriage

This piece, written in November, is apt for today.

I went to a marvellous party on the weekend. Well, more like a wedding really. A marriage of two friends we have all considered a unit for as long as we have known them. Two friends that, had they split, it would have knocked the wind out of us and hurt us deeply. Two friends that, when they announced their intention, we all embraced and cheered and celebrated their impending union with a few muttered asides of “About bloody time!”

But though it was like a wedding, it wasn’t actually a wedding. Not for my two male friends here in 21st century Sydney. And though I have always be in favour of legal recognition of gay marriage, mainly because I couldn’t see it affecting me one way or the other and because those who wanted it seemed to want it quite badly, I have never really though about it at all.

Coffee

Yesterday I found a place in the UK that makes coffee and I nearly wept.

Since arriving in the UK I have paid good money for cups of liquid purporting to be coffee. Some so offensive they were thrown away. Only once did I do it in the shop looking the 'barista' in the eye, who seemed so unmoved it was as if I had conformed precisely to his business model - order and pay at counter, collect from bar, taste, grunt in disgust, deposit in bin, leave.

Comedy

The problem with comedy, my wife regularly reminds me, is that it's not funny.

This aphorism is oft repeated as we trudge home in the rain at the end of yet another desultory evening, through the ill-lit illicit back streets of one of the more affordable suburbs, having missed the last train home.

The Shower

Pitifully pleading absolution
I huddle in frigid morning air;
Tepid rivulets dribble down my back
Like a quiet evening in with R. Kelly.

“Hot water” inscribed in comic sans
On your plastic carapace by Lucifers’s scribe;
(The same that daubes “Research”
On Japanese whaling vessels)
Rips my retina with blinding lies.