So far, my niece's name is Ella {undecided} Powell - strangely I 'suggested' this name to my sis on Wednesday, and it turned out she and Ed were already considering it. I say 'suggested' as I guess Ed mentioned it to me earlier and I just forgot. As soon as I get any more pics of the little bundle of gorgeousness, I'll post them here.

Welcome to the world, Ella Powell.

posted at 3:51 PM •

My niece arrived 2 days ago - 26th of January, 2004. Happy birthday sprog - may your life be filled with every joy and happiness. Love Uncle Steve.

posted at 10:20 AM •

A little lesson in gay social politics for you all...

You would imagine that what with the status of gay people in society, and the fairly universal difficulties we all experience in "coming out", that gay people would be generally a little more understanding of their fellows. You would maybe even go so far as to think that a certain level of self-awareness, compassion and good-nature would be evident through this common struggle.

Yeah, yeah, of course this is all total fucking fantasy. Why is it that the instant people shed their closets and the silent oppression of being gay in a straight world that they turn on their own? Why is it that the kid who was bullied all the way through school, once he goes down the gym and earns his muscles feels the need to create a new order of social stratification based on attractiveness?

You see it all working in a pub, I tell you. The King's Arms is a fairly friendly, open place - to a certain sort of guy. Women are barely tolerated, as is anyone who doesn't fit the "butch, straight-acting" mould. I am tolerated to a point there - I've been there six months now, but I don't hide the fact that I can have a laugh and a giggle like a right queen, and I don't fit within the narrow brackets of physical attractiveness that seem to be somehow ingrained in the place.

I was explaining this to one of the other barmen yesterday - a good-looking, intelligent, very emotionally mature 21 year old black guy called Peter. He was having similar experiences to me when I started. I pointed out that actually there may be a fair few regulars that fancied him, but because he didn't fit into the hallowed "bear" standard, he would generally not have guys come on to him.

The opposite of Peter is Matt - a self-centered, neurotic, vain, conceited, thick-as-pigshit 32 year old who is hefty, tattooed and bearded. Despite being a fairly tawdry example of humanity, he has no end of guys cooing over him. Fairness is something I always have issues with, and it just gets under my skin that someone with so many personality defects should be adored so much.

Anyway - another symptom of the elitism and politics rife in a culture based on physical attractiveness and sex has been smacking me in the face lately.

Quite often I can be introduced to someone, and straight away there's a current of "I don't fancy you, and have no use for you". The other person will be evasive and avoid all eye-contact with you - avoid any contact at all - purely because they don't find you attractive. And the amusing thing is that actually, when you see someone acting this way, you suddenly see how damn ugly they are.

posted at 6:44 PM •

Unsurprisingly, finding out my 'ex' has 'moved on' and found himself a new 'love interest' had a negative effect on my psyche. My mood went from bad to worse to better, and finally I've got to a state where I'm getting over him.

OK, so you've moved on, you vain, self-obsessed, corpulent, small-dicked loser. You feel you've found happiness and an emotional equal in the form of some 21 year old piece of eurotrash - who probably looks about 15 and is bowled over by how big and strong and clever and worldy-wise you are, and doesn't stop to question why such a seemingly intelligent man is spending time with a boy almost young enough to be his son.

Because if there's one thing I've learned throughout this tawdry experience of a breakup it's to embrace my defects, love my baggage. I've learned that facing your demons head-on is the surest sign of maturity - not running away and trying to forget there was ever a problem. I've learned so much through this last year - and the learning still continues...

posted at 10:12 AM •

Mercenary bastard that I am, I've done an Amazon wishlist. Actually I made it a year ago, I've just not linked through to it yet. Here it is - do what you like with it - preferably buy me things. Things make me happy.

posted at 6:22 PM •

Mood swings.

Having a quick fling around the land of blog, and I realise how crap mine has become...whingeing on and on and on and on about some fat arsehole who in all likelihood never loved you, and anyway - pfffft - love.

What is this emotion you humans call wuv?

I could suddenly see all the cool kids standing in a corner murmuring about me, turning to look over their shoulders and snorting. But - but...I used to be funny! People used to link to me - and leave comments...People used to laugh at the things I said.

That was us all along, the cool kids reply - we were paid to add a laughter track to your blog - remember this one? A-HAAA-HAAAA-HAAAAA! Or this - Uhhheeeheee-hurrrrr!

Now get back to your snivelling...

posted at 6:17 PM •

OK, so - things have been a little one-track here lately. I know what I've been doing, and at one level of my self-awareness I've been pleased that I've reached this point where I can start to analyze and dump and hmm, hoom - cathartisize.

...and bend and stretch and scream, two three...

Now, shake all the hate out, come on Dads...

At another level of self-awareness I've been thinking - oh hell, this is exactly what I didn't want this blog to become - this is exactly why I didn't blog in the early part of 2002, because it would have been an endless stream of sadness and grief and poems about dead kittens. Or something.

I also was a bit hesistant to put this stuff out here and possibly get people commenting on my breakup/down - but you haven't been - did you sense that, or were you just terrified that I'd track you down and cry at you?

Time now for a little pat on the back for me, because you know I've managed to get through an incredibly tough year and I'm still here, still relatively sane, and only mildly addicted to coke and Over-The-Counter medicines.

Despite the many trials of last year, I managed to find a new job. I guess I don't want to jinx that at the moment, because I'm still not feeling secure in it, but I'm doing Flash Development for a small company in Clerkenwell. I dropped salary a little bit from the last place, but it's still good money, and the important thing is that the work is enjoyable and the people are a lot better than the last bunch.

I was never unemployed, as I started working at the pub before my redundancy period was up (ha - ya bastards) - and I got all my meagre redundancy money without really having to do anything for it as I'd promised.

So - it's not the end of the world - maybe just a new continent...

posted at 10:45 AM •

"I'm 90% certain the relationship is over"

And so he went away for the weekend, and he thought it over. He saw my 90% and raised me another 10%, he called my bluff and announced that he no longer loved me. From the moment he got back he had changed, and there was nothing I could do or say that would convince him to give things a second chance.

After all, a second chance depended on him changing, depended on him telling me how he would like me to change, and well, it seemed like he had had enough. A few days later he heard from his ex-workmate Gwyn that a job had been secured for him in Surrey. If there had been any doubts in his mind that he was on the right course, they were buried as he saw that his way forward was to leave and start a new life for himself.

It didn't matter that I had supported him through one of the hardest times of our relationship, he bailed out.

"I'm scared and hurt and tired and I need to take a break and I need you to see how hard the last eighteen months has been for me - the death, the grief, the battles, the struggles - I can't do it any more, and I need you to be the responsible one"

That's what I should have said - and maybe I did, I can't really remember any more. The words were out, the play was made and as John switched off his love to me my mind shattered, my emotions imploded. I kept going through my emotional breakdown - I coped, I always do. I functioned, because the alternative was shutting myself in a dark room for months. The immediate problems of finding a job, sorting out the mortgage kept me going, but now there's some semblance of stability and I find that I can't enjoy it.

I still love him - no matter what he's done, I still love the man - and the thought of him turning his back on me is a knife in my heart.

posted at 7:40 PM •

January 12, 2002
Joan Kathleen Powell, my mother, died.

January 12, 2004
John Fraser Chisholm sent me an email severing ties with me, and hoping I will leave him to get on with his new life with his new boyfriend, Dror.

You've got to admire the man for his incredible timing - if he was actually trying to be hurtful, he couldn't have managed a better job.

posted at 12:05 PM •

We grew up waiting for the bomb to drop.

We collected special coupons from the back of Kellog's Frosties, sellotaped them to a piece of our Mother's typewriter paper along with our name and address, and sent them off, 28 days for delivery.

We never had shopping malls to watch the apocalypse from. These consumer palaces were futuristic luxuries that happened far away from BFPO. We had the NAAFI and german hypermarkets. We went to schools named after fighter aircraft named after indigenous british birds of prey named after arthurian legends, lived in two up-two down married quarters and we imagined the mushroom cloud blossoming high high above our heads, filling the air with the heat of a thousand summers' days.

We prayed for the bombs to go away, we prayed for them to land somewhere else - but instead they remained safely frozen in submarines, and the world ended in a different way. A quiet microwave turntable defrost that gently cooked and grilled and reheated as it thawed.

We were timid chidren, and the world we inhabited was too harsh, too angry with itself, but too scared to push the button. So we watched from behind half-closed doors, peering out from the darkness in our pyjamas and nighties, waiting for the bomb to drop.

posted at 12:56 PM •

You probably saw this coming didn't you? Didn't you?

My head is a total mess after this fight-or-flight year. I felt sure that after last year, nothing could get any worse - but it did, and it doesn't feel like it's getting any better.

But of course, silly me, of course, you've just got a spot of heartbreak - it'll go away, everything will be fine, you're a strong person. You don't really miss him, you just miss somehim - after all, you weren't happy with him were you?

Things are all over the place at the moment, and there's no roadmap for where I'm heading. Sometimes I'm enjoying the journey, or at least I'm enjoying the potential of the start of the journey. Then at other times I want it to stop, quantum leap and make right what once went wrong. I want to explain everything to you, but then I start and I realise that there's too much for me to tell you, too much to try to make sense of allatonce.

So I give you pieces of me, screengrabs from the edge, and I hope that I'm not totally disappearing up my own arse. You'd let me know wouldn't you?

posted at 5:48 PM •

I really did love him.

I never knew how much I loved him because there wasn't really a benchmark or a high water gauge to compare my love to. I loved him more than soft spring rain, more than autumn thunderstorms. I loved him more than ripe gooey cheese, more than runny scrambled eggs sprinkled with cayenne pepper. I loved being around him, I loved feeling his presence in the house, I loved his self-assured nature, and his quirky anachronisms.

In nearly six years of being with him, I bathed in his benevolence. He was always good to me, although sometimes needed a reminder that I needed to know how he felt. He never had doubts about us, that much I knew. I was the one with doubts, with insecurities and fears - but the one thing I never doubted for long was that he loved me as much as I loved him.

I should, in hindsight, have seen it coming. Like so much of life, all the clues were there right from day one - but then, I was never good at whodunnits. I always get to the last page, and there it is - broad as daylight, *gasp* it was the dowager aunt all along.

John had cut other people out of his life before me. In fact it seemed hard for him to keep anyone in his life after he had deemed the relationship no longer useful. At the start of our relationship way back in the distant past in Stoke-on-Trent, there was his ex, Will. Well, actually Will wasn't his ex when I first met John - they had a kind of relationship based on Will living with his Grandfather and not having much time for things of a relationship nature.

We met at work, and I was entranced by this big nerdy bearish intelligent fella. After weeks of simpering over him (yes, I used to simper very well, though nowadays I've managed to defer it to a more dignified bluster) - John actually noticed me.

Our courtship (this is back in the old days - 1997) consisted of me occassionally plucking up the courage (dutch or otherwise) to talk to the object of my adulation, and him despatching girls to analyze my each and every response and reaction to his nonchalant regard for me. John weighed the situation, and made a tactical decision that he should cut his losses with Will and pursue me.

And so Will was gone, chucked away and never really thought about again.

posted at 10:35 AM •

posted at 12:14 PM •

Got really tearful this afternoon for no apparent reason. I was watching Steve Job's keynote speech from the Apple Expo, and all of a sudden, the gung-ho free spiritedness got the better of the reality of voracious capitalism, and a lump caught in my throat.

I've just had another day of feeling ground down by the fucking lot of you. Staring at my Powerbook display with it's faulty stripe running the height of the screen, staring at a cctv snapshot of me riding my bike in a bus lane and wondering whether I will be charged the discounted fee of £50 or the full fee of £100, and wishing to god I didn't want to run down to my dealer and spend that money on coke. Staring at lines of code swimming in front of my eyes, nod, nod, nodding - no I can't fall asleep at work again as the pressure gets turned up a notch and I realise that something somewhere eventually has got to give.

The lodger tells me he's probably going to move out by Easter. It's too far to travel to college. What he means is it's an extra twenty minutes each way he could use either in bed or chasing gaydar strays to bring back to his pathetic rose-tinted fantasy life where he's a brilliant artist struggling for recognition and sleeping his way through the brass section of the LSO, who all happen to be hugely muscled stocky swarthy fuckers with lips like camels.

Well, it's not such a bad thing really - except for the fact that I can only just afford this place by myself, and I have to remortgage to pay off this bastard of a man who broke my heart and left me in a city that hates the heartbroken.

Maybe it's time to run away, stick a pin in a map and leave. I feel surrounded by death and dust and pain, and I want to feel alive again.

posted at 10:30 PM •

Christmas has been and gone - I'm back at work and the sisyphean feelings have returned. It's not the work that's getting me down, it's all the day to day problems that I just don't have time to sort out. So much has slipped over the last two years, and since John left it's all coming crashing down around my ears.

I'm struggling to find a way to solve the multitude of problems with the flat and the mortgage...John left with the mortgage two months in arrears, which I didn't find out until the damage was done. Since I found out the problems, I've been trying to sort them out, and I got to a solution with the Halifax that I would make six months payments and they will recapitalise the arrears. That was the solution, but they neglected to put this into effect properly on the account, so I kept getting warning letters from them every two weeks telling me about the debt.

Once I get through that situation, I've got to find some way of paying John off the mortgage, and pay the whole amount myself - with the help of the lodger. I think I can do it, but the problem is going to be convincing a lender I can do it - plus releasing some of the equity so I can pay John off. I don't know how much he should be entitled to, as I paid the entirety of the deposit, and I don't have the time to talk to someone about it (or the money to get it done). Oh, and somehow I have to find the time to have three valuations done on the property.

In the meantime while worrying about this, situations have arisen with a load of other things...

The flat itself needs several repairs:

• Windows need replacing/repairing
• The lighting ring is faulty, and two lights don't work
• The bathroom is leaking into the flat below, so I can't stand up to have a shower
• The washing machine is broken and leaks whenever it's too full
• The oven door has a broken hinge, and needs replacing

My bike has a number of problems:

• The tax ran out 5 months ago, and I now have to pay a fine - I can't get it taxed because...
• I have to get it MOT'd, which means I have to find time to find somewhere to do the work, and I know it will fail as...
• I have a slow puncture in the back tire which needs repairing

The display on my Powerbook went tits-up this week, so that needs repairing.

I've got two chipped fillings, and several cavities, which are all starting to get quite uncomfortable.

I just don't know where to start, it feels like I'm unravelling.

posted at 12:27 PM •