Something old, something new... and it's all gone blue too!

I'll begin with some updates:

* My porn-watching upstairs neighbour: Yes, after having lived here for three months and having never bumped into him in the hallway, it had to finally happen three days after I was subjected to the sounds of the cheesiest music I'd ever heard providing a backing track for lesbian orgy noises coming through my living room ceiling. My shoes suddenly became very interesting. So interesting that I couldn't break away from staring at them long enough to make eye contact with my neighbour who was asking me how I was settling in to the building.

* By Thursday mid-afternoon, I'd not yet had a direct conversation with a stupid person: Well, this is me, I couldn't go through a whole day without meeting someone that could prove Darwin wrong. I had a gig in Newbury on Thursday evening, and I was on in the second half. Sure enough, in the interval the most patronising person in the room singled me out for "Are you taking part in the show too? Oh, isn't that marvelous!" I simply turned to one of the other comedians and said, loud enough to be heard by most people in the bar area "Oh. I don't think my material about people saying stupid things is going to go down too well." Funnily enough - it didn't.

* What's going on?: Yes, the layout of this page has changed. Deal with it. The commenting pages have completely changed to, hopefully they'll be easier to use, less temperamental, and comments won't go missing once they're about two months old. It does mean that all old comments have been lost though. Feel free to replace them! And, can I point out to the people that comment on the LJ feed, that, if they do, the comments will be lost after whatever time period it is that makes the posts vanish from LJ forever. But, if they comment on the blogs main page, the comment will now be permanent!

And now for the shiny new things. Or something.

There's a child in my building that I want to kill. Two problems with this.

1) I'm incredibly passive.
2) I don't know which child it is.

Despite the fact that I live in the flat nearest to the entrance, so I don't spend much time in the hallway, I do occasionally pass people in the 8 feet I have to travel to get from my front door to the exit of the building. In these short journeys, I've gathered that two small children of about the same age live in my building. Neither appears to be owned by the same set of parents, so we're talking two (literally) unrelated children.

One of them I think spends 24 hours a day sitting on the incredibly echoey stairs with his fingers in his ears screaming "LALALALALALALALALALALALALA!!!!!!!!!!!!!" as loud as he can muster. I don't know how he can bear to spend that much time in the stairway - the stench of rotten everything and complete lack of cleanliness coming up from the waste disposal room in the basement makes me want to vomit. Literally. Every time I make that 8 foot journey from my door to the main door I can feel the bile rising. The fumes must've killed off his sense of smell already. Which is probably a bonus for him, growing up in Central London (or more specifically Somers Town, which I think should be renamed Dog Shit Central).

But, I don't know which one it is. Though, I do have my suspicions.

As for the me being passive thing, it's one of my traits that I'm most proud of - you know that this child really must be called Damien and have a birthmark in the shape of 666 somewhere about his person for me to be thinking evil thoughts. I'm so lazy that he must be a demon child for me to even be bothered to think evil. Being the devil incarnate myself (if you don't believe me, stalk me. Check out my National Insurance Number... the 666 is right there in the middle of it) you'd think I'd have some sympathy for the thing, but, being woken up first thing in the morning and kept awake half the night by his screeching, as I pull my pillow over my head trying to drown out the noise I can't help imagining that I'm actually using the pillow to smother him.

I mentioned being "proud" of being passive in that last paragraph. Well, it's been a day for pride - London Pride in fact.

I'm usually proud of every aspect of me, being gay included. But there's something about the big Pride event that I find so depressing. Everywhere I look there's happy couples showing off their happiness, diverse families showing off their, well, families. And I just find myself sitting in a corner of Trafalgar Square, on my own, hissing like a cat at the happy people.

I'm well aware that I'm a curmudgeon, but the only thing I could find to be proud of today was eating ice-cream so publicly despite being a fat munter. I think pride is a day for happy couples. It's like a wedding, or a high school reunion - everyone is keen to show off that they're better at living life than you are, and if you haven't got someone beautiful hanging off your every word, you're fucking up somehow.

As Sir Bob Geldof announced that today would be Live 8 day, after Pride had already been planned, it was interesting to note the global acceptance theme of the speeches at the Pride Rally. Everyone spoke of an end to homophobia (obviously!), racism, sexism, poverty, etc, etc. Except for disablism. I only heard one speaker on the main stage in Trafalgar Square mention anything about exclusion on the grounds of disability, and she was a wheelchair user herself. Funny that. Even the partner of one of my friends went through a list of how we should tolerate everyone regardless of their sexual orientation, race, etc, but didn't mention disability. You'd expect better from someone that had ever met me, wouldn't you?

The sense of community is OK, I guess. The moment that made me smile most today was when someone I only know vaguely grabbed me by the ponytail to stop me to say "hello." It made me smile because in what other environment could someone do that to me, without me at best giving them and evil glare, but more probably bitching about them on the internet?

I did also, of course, run into several friends of mine, whom it was lovely to see. Being a wheelchair user and at roughly the same eyeline as a baby in a buggy, I did spot the daughter of some friends and recognise her, before I looked up and saw all her parents (they're all lovely people, but sometimes I just think polyamory is just so unfair. How come some people have plural people fall in love with them when I can't even find one?). While 'community' can be a fuzzy, fluffy sentiment, I've been a bit cynical about the word ever since I saw a sign in my local hospital saying "community gynaecology this way..." What the fuck kind of community is that? If I'm ever invited to a community coffee morning in Hampstead, remind me to just say "no."