Paul in London

Scenes from Kew Gardens Sunday 17:23 - Chihuly's glass sculptures among the greenery... It was here in the the temperate room green house where this photo was taken A saw a man leaning over a pond about to take a photograph. He motioned to push the man in the pond for my amusement but he neglected to see the photographers two friends looking outraged behind. Obviously not Londoners... No sense of humour whatever. But the glass sculptures were very smart... All hand blown as well... It certainly made the visit to Kew (also known as the Royal Botanic Gardens) all the more interesting. It is such a vast green space that even after two hours one barely covered a kilometre of the site, but how much gardens and green space on a fine sunny day can one take? Interestingly there were a lot of gay men in the gardens. Fortunately unlike many of the parks about town they were there to take in the greenery and the glass...

Scenes from G-A-Y at the Astoria Saturday night / Sunday morning 01:50. Trip to Winchester was cut short as there was an Abba night back in London with Bjorn Again . Ok so the music wasn't live (note the absence of leads on the guitar and keyboard) but by 1.30am the punters didn't care and kept singing along to the tunes. Nowadays Bjorn Again have multiple groups touring the country as blonde and brunette singers accompanied by fat men with beards are a dime-a-dozen... The Astoria is for young boys and their admirers really and is a silly venue, but it is only a five minute walk home so it is rather handy...

Scenes from Winchester Saturday 15:52 - Bank Holiday weekend. If you are not travelling somewhere exotic, why not go to Winchester? They have a cathedral , some castle ruins and a flower market where young lads sell flowers... Winchester also seemed to be a lovely town to go if you were pregnant. There seemed to be pregnant women everywhere... Maybe they are all locals and there is a baby boom on its way... It was interesting to observe all of this. There were also more elderly persons in wheelchairs per able bodied person than I have seen anywhere else of late. As for the cathedral, it was a bog-standard.

Theatre: Henry IV (Part Two) After the awful trip to the theatre on Wednesday night I caught Henry IV (Part Two) at the National Theatre Friday evening to make up for it. While the story may be a little plotless the show has a fantastic cast that includes Michael Gambon as Falstaff. It was amazing to watch him, including in the second act when espousing the virtues of sherry he couldn't get the bottle open and made a few ad-libs. The play is definitely one of the highlights of the London theatre scene at the moment so it was good to catch it. Unfortunately the man sitting next to me had a bit of a bad breath problem. When he laughed a cocktail of saliva, cigarettes and bile wafted over to my seat. Oh well, when the tickets are only £10, these are the things you have to deal with. But it would have been handy to have had some chewing gum on hand to offer around... Or some noseplugs...

Shopping: Those Muscle Fit Polos A recent doco on the BBC chartered a man's attempt to go straight by hooking up with some evangelical outfit in Memphis. Apparently he found the gay scene a bit to superficial (he obviously had not taken the Eurostar or gone to my gym). In the end it turned out he stopped having sex completely so some conversion that turned out to be... Anyway the Guardian reported today more about the "going straight" therapy in Memphis, noting that Abercrombie clothing is banned. And who can blame them, as it is very gay. Arriving this week in the mail was several Abercrombie t-shirts and polos I bought online. My flatmate and his houseguest curious about the steady stream of packages arriving during the course of this week asked me to model one of the polos. They were impressed with the cut that accentuates one's v-shape even if one doesn't have much of that shape. And it's that sort of fit that goes down well with the boys...

Scenes from Regent's Park Open Air Theatre Wednesday 20:08 - A delay starting due to wet weather... Those in the know brought garbage bags and towels. Live and learn. As for the show, well HMS Pinafore in the damp cold night air wasn't the most pleasant of experiences - it seemed less of a production and more of an embalming of G&S. The last time I saw this show I recalled: It was funny and the actors had comic timing, The orchestrations were better, Buttercup also wasn't played by someone who should be in a retirement home. Ok Lesley Nichol is a wonderful actress but it was just wrong for her to be in this part... Also of note: Desmond Barritt seemed to have confused the role of Sir Joseph with his role as Vice President Dick Cheney in Stuff Happens at the National - he spent most of the time walking around looking pissed off. The hero (Simon Thomas) has his shirt off at the beginning and mercifully puts it on. Nobody needs to see a pasty white flat

One houseguest or two My flatmate R has a friend staying over for the week. He is English but lives in Barcelona as a lifestyle choice. He is a great houseguest however as already it has only been a day and he has cleaned out the cupboards and fixed the blockage in the bathroom sink. If only all houseguests could be so useful... Anyway, he brought with him some chorizo sausage from Spain which he left hanging in the lounge room. Sunday evening he awoke to hear the sounds of something chomp chomping into his sausage - and not in a good way. Our resident rat had found it and somehow managed to eat half the thing. Last night as the event was described to me as an unwelcome visitor I was wondering whether it was one of R's gentlemen callers that were quite interested in a bit of Spanish sausage. They have been known to come around for a bite at 3am and again at 5am. But when it was clarified it was a caller of the ratty kind it all made sense. I had thought it had been a case of all qu

News: The awful truth about the piano man The piano man mystery has been resolved. This was the man who appeared at a beach in a state of distress and purportedly could play the piano rather well. Well the truth is that he is just a gay German acting a bit odd . Nothing really out of the ordinary there. Even more ordinary was the fact that he actually couldn't play the piano. In fact his performance of chopsticks wasn't that great by all accounts... How he got to be the piano man from chopsticks is anyone's guess, but when you have Bavarians trying to drown themselves you shouldn't let the facts get in the way of a good story.