I’ve certainly known Melissa for a long time. In fact when I first met her she was Miriam rather than Melissa which was the name her parents gave her, mostly on the insistence of her mother who was keen on Biblical names and had already named her first child Isaac. These days Melissa likes to Skype maintaining it’s more intimate than old fashioned telephoning because you can see the person you speak with. She likes to move with the times but there are definitely times when I would rather just be heard rather than seen and heard.
A day or so ago when she and I were discussing my undeniably tardy attitude towards total acceptance of a certain strata of social change on which sits gay marriage, third party reproduction for same sex couples and gender choice for six year olds she actually described me as blinkered and indulging in affectation. I will admit to being a bit hurt – blinkered? affected? – moi? I had been simply mentioning that I was sick to death of settling down with morning coffee and the paper only to have the mundane lives of joyfully cohabiting same sex couples regularly shoved in my face and the woes of parents whose sons had become daughters thrust upon me on a regular basis all before 8am. It was tedious I said and furthermore why was it those in same sex relationships were free to comment upon their Husbands or their Wives in media interviews, fearlessly describing them as such whilst other decent citizens/ratepayers such as myself for example were expected to just have a Partner? Where was the fairness in that?
Melissa said it was because the media was doing a sterling job of educating we who did not fall into the category of those about whom they wrote and I said that I objected to being educated and what’s more it would have to be a very dense individual who did not actually realise what they were supposed to believe. How many of us really need all this media direction? It was as if, I pontificated, the fortunate few who were strangely free to have Husbands and Wives must be placed on a more elevated level than the rest of us and we left floundering below should strive to be like them. As for myself, I had no wish to be like them because I rather liked being what my quaintly old fashioned Husband described as Normal. There it was - the N word, used unashamedly. I knew she was just a tinsy bit shocked because there was a little silence.
But you have to hand it to Melissa. After a sharp intake of breath and a second or two she simply said well that was Life and I should make an effort to get my head around it and I retorted that thrusting such matters into my face on a daily basis was responsible for any lethargy of approval I might feel. It looked as if we would shortly agree to disagree but then she drew my attention back to what we generally call the Good Old Days when we both worked for Danny la Rue in his club in Hanover Square. In those days, she said, I wasn’t nearly as judgmental and there was some truth in that. But it was me who reminded her that back in those days we lived a far more simple life and in any case it was not possible to be hypercritical about Danny who was an employer quite unparalleled in that shady nightclub world as well as a supreme entertainer. We were all a little bit in love with him.
The difference between then and now I told her was that somehow or other situations that once happily occupied the fringes of society have been hurtled into near vision and alongside all the associated Education is a great deal of virtue signaling. Melissa said neither of us knew whether those back then in the situations felt all that comfortable and happy in the place they occupied. We reminded each other of the cigarette girl Jody who was desperately trying to be noticed by Danny’s dresser Toni who seemed oblivious of the heartache she was causing. We laughed a bit about the Cloakroom woman Roza who tried to sit firmly on the fence in all matters concerning sex and viewed Jody’s fixation with horror commenting lamely from time to time that when she was young such love affairs simply were not fashionable – at least not in her Spanish village.
Melissa said again that I’d been much less of a red-neck in those days and I wished I hadn’t told her that I would like to see hanging re-established. Later when repeating some of the conversation with my Partner (can’t bring myself to say Husband yet again) he said that perhaps over the years I had become more Normal. There it was again – the N word!
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