My week in bullet points

• Bigger smile than usual today because not only it’s Friday, but Monday is a Bank Holiday here! (Then no more until Christmas)
  

 

• Tonight we have invited Neil and Bobby round for dinner; it’s the second small dinner party of the week: on Monday evening Martin and Elio were our lovely guests.
  
  We have developed a fondness for mid-week dinners with local friends. The advantages are that I/we don’t feel guilty if we provide only a 3-course dinner and it doesn’t turn into a very late night.
  
  (Adrian has to work tomorrow and Bobby too; so despite being Friday it’s officially a ‘school night’).
  

 

• Last night we went to see ‘Mrs. Pettigrew lives for a day’ at the cinema. It was good fun: amusing and sentimental. A paper described it as ‘Mary Poppins meets Marilyn Monroe’ and in a way it’s true.
  I walked from work to the cinema on Fulham Road (about 3.3 miles) and on the way I passed the Royal Arcade in Mayfair. It was funny to recognise it in the movie (with the addition of a shop selling gas masks!).
  

 

• On Wednesday I met up with my friend Michael who I hadn’t seen for a long time. I use the word friend loosely, as sadly our acquaintance cannot really progress any further.
  
  Michael and his (male) partner of 23 years do not have any gay friends at all. He’s not ‘allowed’ to because his partner would get jealous. Or at least this was true years ago: now he goes out to ‘play’ occasionally but he still doesn’t feel that he can introduce any gay friends in their life or it’ll have to justify how he has met them.
  
  We ‘met’ years ago (on-line) but I/we have never been to his house. His other half doesn’t even know that I exist. Needless to say Michael is always unhappy and the only think I can do is to listen to his woeful tales. 
  

 

• Yesterday I was contacted – through Galop (the ‘London's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community safety charity’) – by a gentleman who is doing a research on ‘Homophobic victimisation’ for his PhD with regards to the effects of such crimes and the response/help received by the police and other organisations.
  
  I have agreed to be interviewed about my experience on Tuesday evening.
  (For the record, despite Galop passing the report of what happened almost 2 months ago to the police, I wasn’t contacted by the LGBT police liaison officer. Just as I expected: I hate being right all the time! LOL!)