London is still muggy and warm in just the wrong way.
Last night: start to make my way to a press screening of a new western starring Russell Crowe (3:10 To Yuma), but then feel rather ill and have to turn back home. I’m not sure how much of this is down to the heat, and how much down to my lack of interest in both westerns and Russell Crowe.
On the bus back, I bump into Aurora, a nice French lady from Archway. Well, she says she’s French, but her accent is closer to that of Kristin Scott Thomas in Four Weddings And A Funeral; a friendly brand of aristocratic English. What does give her Frenchness away is the occasionally uncommon turn of phrase. Or her subject matter – a sudden Sartre-like observation about Life, right out of the blue at the No 43 bus stop.
Similarly, I think of my experiences with Swedish friends who speak perfect English with no trace of an accent. One forgets their nationality entirely, until the use of swearing comes into it. Or alcohol. Talking to someone who’s drunk in a second language can be a very odd conversation indeed. A kind of accidental aggression, full of rudeness that isn’t rudeness, faux pas that are not faux pas. Or whatever the Swedish is for faux pas.
Of course, the real faux pas is being a near-monoglottal Englishman (my French and German are shamefully rusty). At the Fosca gig last Weds, Rachel Stevenson muses that we should just move to Sweden and have done with it, given the Fosca fan base over there is several times the size of our UK one. She’s joking, but if I were to move there, I’d have to learn an acceptable amount of Swedish. Otherwise it’s just so rude. Deliberately rude.
***
Two evenings out in a row are spent in the company of Charley Stone. On the Thursday she invites me along to the National Portrait Gallery for a free tour called ‘The Queer Gaze’. Essentially, it’s two tour guides’ selection of works in the permanent exhibition which have a gay interest slant. Or, as they put it, just people in paintings that they fancy.
The guides are Shaun Levin, a writer from South Africa, and the artist Sadie Lee. Though I know her also as a DJ at a rather good club night in Stoke Newington called Lower The Tone. She has wonderful hair: a kind of Suzi Quatro feather cut. And her lecture style is refreshingly informal and honest.
‘I like her,’ whispers an elderly lady behind me to her friend. ‘She’s funny.’
What’s important is that she gets the degree of humour just right for an art lecture: witty and engaging rather than flip or facetious.
The tour includes an outrageously effeminate portrait of George Villiers, Duke Of Buckingham, much-favoured courtier and rumoured lover of James I. It was said he had the nicest legs in the land, and the painting enhances them to the point of caricature.
I’m mindful of those manipulated photos of women on current magazine covers and film posters, their legs and other attributes artificially exaggerated by a computer. Men’s legs get less of a look-in.
