17. PICKING UP LOOSE THREADS.

 

This chapter is to tie up loose ends, review the whole 21 year period George and I spent together and to include some incidents, character traits and so on not mentioned elsewhere.

 

Unusually for an epilog it comes some way from the end of this book, although at the end of our life together. The story continues, however, with George’s ongoing contact with myself and friends from beyond that barrier we call death, which is in fact merely a transition from our four dimensional universe to a parallel one existing outside of our space-time continuum.

 

The world in 1970 when George and I met was a very different place to the one he left in 1991. I was a die-hard Stalinist member of the Communist Party when I met him, and he had been involved in some revolutionary group which used hypnosis and left him paranoid about anything vaguely leftwing. Not only did we both change over the next 21 years, but so did the world.

 

George lived to see the seemingly impossible happen: the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, and this symbolized the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and beyond. George and I visited this post-Communist world on our last foreign holiday together six months before he died, when we saw Budapest and Prague newly liberated from dictatorship.

 

In the summer of 1991 the Yugoslav civil war broke out, so George lived to see the beginning of that terrible, senseless conflict which saw the destruction of a country we loved. We had visited it together twice, and I a third time with my mother. We loved not only the beautiful scenery, but the people and their political system, which seemed to be the best of both the Communist and capitalist worlds. I still feel the Yugoslav model is the future of Socialism in the 21^st century. The one thing they failed to do, however, was to transfer the pluralistic competitive nature of market socialism from the economic to the political arena: opposition parties and free elections never existed there. We now see why it would never have worked in that strange, artificial federation which has since been riven by bitter nationalism, but at least if they’d had a democratic political system the break-up of the Yugoslav Federation might have been far less violent. They may even have come together again as part of the EU.

 

George and I grew very close politically over the years. We were both very much against the European Common Market and voted against entry in the referendum, but in later years we were all for it. George lived to see countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia and Croatia demanding independence, and had little time or patience for these aspirations, being a Scotsman who felt  London where he lived most of his life was at least as much his home as Glasgow. He was no Scottish Nationalist, but we both wanted a British republic as part of a federal Europe. I was once all in favor of independence for Scotland, Wales, etc., but I too came to the conclusion that nationalism was a negative force, and that the future lay in the voluntary coming together of nation states into bigger federations rather than splitting up into smaller units. So George and I over the years became European federalists, strongly believing in a single currency, a strong European Parliament and Court with jurisdiction over national parliaments and courts. We actually wanted to be ruled from Strasbourg if the European Parliament could be made truly democratic and given ultimate power over the European Commission, which also needed to be made democratic.

 

We envisaged a federal Europe from the Urals to the Atlantic, from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, and saw this as a desirable thing. We were experienced travelers and knew that nanny-state Britain and her archaic laws and practices needed to be given a good shake and dragged into the modern world. Everything from public transport to laws on pornography and sexual freedom were better in most other European countries than in Britain, and we could not wait for these far more liberal laws and sensible policies to be implemented in Britain by decree of a European Parliament. Homosexuals were still a persecuted minority facing great discrimination in the UK, so a federal Europe could only bring about liberation for us. When we saw fares on public transport raised to astronomical levels whilst the service got worse and the industry starved of investment from public subsidy, and spent many Christmases marooned in isolation because public transport stopped in UK, then went abroad and enjoyed cheap, reliable public transport which runs 365 days a year, including Christmas, is it any wonder we said: ‘Roll on a federal Europe which would make Britain fall in line’. It was as if we were living in some Southern backwater State of the USA with repressive laws which the federal government in Washington, D.C. would bring into line via the Supreme Court. This is what we felt Europe needed - a Bill of Rights similar to the American Constitution, and a Supreme Court to enforce these rights in all member states. Similarly with public transport, we felt it was an essential service which must be supported by a large public subsidy and integrated throughout Europe.

 

Much more important than the liberation of gays and better public transport, a federal Europe would be a huge step towards world peace, uniting nations which had fought two world wars in the 20^th century. Our philosophy was that we are all people first and foremost, and nationality is of much less importance. We all need each other economically. We felt that the nations of Europe should join together in a democratic federation which would make war in Europe impossible in the future. I think we both hoped this trend towards democratic super-federations would occur elsewhere in the world too so war could eventually be eliminated, just as the establishment of the United Kingdom ended forever the tribal wars between the various kings and rulers who existed before.

 

George also lived to see the beginning of the break-up of the Soviet Union. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia had already broken away, and George used to say how ridiculous it was to imagine they could survive on their own without support from the old Soviet Union, on whom they depended for much of their infrastructure and trade. No-one could survive on their own in this day and age, so if the Soviet Union broke up something would need to take its place - perhaps the European Union in the case of the non-Asian former Soviet republics.

 

In August 1991 came the hardline coup in Moscow against Gorbachev, and George lived to see this coup crushed and Gorbachev return briefly to power. He never trusted Boris Yeltsin, and accurately foresaw he would become dictatorial and a disastrous leader. So when George died at the end of September 1991 the Soviet Union was well on the way to collapsing, which it did before the end of the year.

 

I remember a political discussion, which became a quite heated argument, early on in our relationship. We were visiting Andre and his partner Norman, who could be very argumentative. We were discussing nuclear weapons, and I was outnumbered three to one, being the only person in the room in favor of unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain. I fought my corner vigorously and confidently against the odds, but during our 21 years together George’s views changed dramatically. This seemed to happen after he started working at Amnesty International and came into contact with so many intelligent, left-of-center people who were at the same time fighting for human rights and against the kind of abuse which occurred under so-called Communism. There were many unilateralists working at AI.

 

Over the years George and I went on many CND demonstrations together, and we even both got arrested at the Upper Heyford USAF base on one occasion, and went to court together. During the Malvinas/Falklands conflict George and I went to a City of London church where Defence Secretary John Nott was speaking. We had protest banners concealed beneath our coats, and organized our own anti-war demonstration inside the church. I am so proud and happy that George and I fought together for peace in this way.

 

George became very concerned about the environment, particularly nuclear pollution. I was once in favor of nuclear power for peaceful purposes, but came round to the view that it should be scrapped. It has no future whatsoever because it is dangerous and produces so much nuclear waste which can never be disposed of safely. George was a more avid environmentalist than I was, and was totally against the space exploration program which he described cynically as ‘pigs in space’ after The Muppet Show skit.

 

I could never agree with him about this as the space program had already brought so many benefits with communications satellites, etc., and to me space was the next frontier. I strongly believe in UFOs and that once we reach out into space and contact other civilizations the world will become a much smaller place and will be forced to unite and forget its petty wars. Any civilization which has advanced enough to travel to other inhabited planets must have eliminated war, or they could never have survived. Our precarious nuclear age was evidence of that. We could use those rockets to explore space or destroy each other, but ultimately not both. I was of course against ‘Star Wars’ and the increasingly militaristic nature of the space programs of both super powers, but I suppose I hope advanced civilizations from other worlds will soon bring us to order if we don’t blow ourselves up first. In my view the dangerous nuclear age this planet is going through is the direct cause of the upsurge in UFOs sightings since the 1940s - they are keeping an eye on us at the very least, and governments have been covering up the truth. However, at the turn of the Millennium, more and more TV programs and printed matter are revealing the truth about UFOs. I am sure the general public is being gently prepared by the world’s governments to face the fact that we are already in contact with alien civilizations, that we have captured crashed UFOs which we have been unsuccessfully trying to back-engineer, and that we are, in fact, totally defenseless against aliens who come and go as they please, and who can neutralize all our nuclear missiles in their silos. (Could this be the real reason for developing ‘Star Wars’ technology, to try to shoot down UFOs?)

 

Take just one instance - the physical features of aliens. In the decades from the 1950s onwards there were as many ideas of what aliens would look like as our imaginations could conjure up. Today everyone knows what the classic alien ‘gray’ looks like - elongated egg-shaped face with no ears, with almond-shaped eyes, no hair. This is deliberate policy to acclimatize us to the physical appearance of aliens gradually. I believe early in this Millennium we will join the Inter-Galactic Community of civilizations, and open contact with these advanced civilizations will finally make war a thing of the past. More important, they are spiritually much more aware than us, and know that death is a merely a transition to another dimension.

 

George supported the work of Greenpeace, and we both faithfully recycled as much of our rubbish as we could even though it involved carrying bags of newspapers, cans and bottles on a bus to the nearest recycling center. I kept the practice up after his death, but now they have introduced collections from the door of the apartment block which makes it a lot easier.

 

George was a keen supporter of the Palestinian cause, and was a subscriber to Medical Aid for Palestinians. We had no time at all for Israel and both felt it was a big mistake to establish the state of Israel on the soil of Palestine. It was in the same category as  South Africa, former Rhodesia, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand where white colonists had also ethnically cleansed the local population. The difference was in Israel’s case the racist state was established in the middle of the 20^th century when colonialism was already taboo, empires were being dismantled, and after a terrible war against the racist Third Reich. To us the Israeli flag was simply the other side of the Nazi swastika flag. We both felt that the Zionist and Nazi philosophies were complimentary. Some conspiracy theorists suggested that Zionists dissuaded countries like the UK and USA from accepting Jewish refugees from the Third Reich because they wanted as many Jews as possible to perish in the Holocaust in order to justify establishing the state of Israel. Whether or not this was true we found it quite plausible, and certainly the Holocaust was used time and time again to win sympathy for Zionism. Any state based on race is undemocratic and wrong, so a Jewish state is by definition racist.

 

Both Nazi and Zionist philosophies are blatantly racist, the Nazis talking of ‘the master race’ of Aryans and the Zionists of the Jewish ‘chosen race’. Nothing would have suited the Nazis better than for all Jews to settle in the State of Israel, therefore the aims of Nazism and Zionism were very similar - basically a racist system of apartheid. Moreover, both the Third Reich and Israel invaded all their neighbors to make more living room for the ‘master’ or ‘chosen’ race. Of course Israel has security concerns - not surprisingly since it plonked down affluent American and other West European colonialists on Arab soil, exiling much of the poor local Palestinian population to make room for them.

 

However, Israel is now a fact of life and we have to live with it. Obscene as it is to see American, British and other Jewish colonialists living on land stolen from Palestinians, it is simply not possible or practical to do what should be done - ship them and their families back where they came from and give Israel back to the Palestinians. The important thing, both George and I felt, was for the Palestinians to be given a country as they were currently stateless, and I am glad to say that slowly, at long last, a Palestinian state is being born. It will be a long way off, but hopefully all the states in the Middle East can eventually come together in a federation of the kind that some of us envisage for the European Union. But Israel will always be an oddity, for like South Africa, Rhodesia, New Zealand, Canada and Australia it has a huge colonial population of settlers and their families and the indigenous population of the area has suffered greatly as a result.

 

Few people mention the fact that gipsies and homosexuals also suffered and died under the Nazi holocaust, yet these groups don’t keep raising it in order to win sympathy, and neither of these groups have been given their own state to avoid future persecution. As a homosexual I would certainly not wish to live in a land stolen from the indigenous population, and how any conscientious Jewish person can live in the state of Israel I can’t understand. Quoting ancient Hebrew texts is simply not good enough - we could all claim lands where our ancestors used to live or quote from ancient and irrelevant religious texts to justify claims.

 

Why can’t Israeli Jews be content to live in Palestine on equal terms with the local Arab population, or else return back home to where they, their parents or grandparents were born? Does Nazi ethnic cleansing of the Jews justify Jewish ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians? I think not. All religions and races should have equal rights, but none should be allowed to suppress the rights of others. As to a homeland, that is just another word for a ghetto or apartheid. If minority groups really want to live in such an artificial environment I would suggest there are plenty of uninhabited areas in the USA, Australia, Brazil, Canada or Russia to set up homelands for Jews, gipsies, homosexuals, etc. under mutual arrangement with those countries without displacing the local population.

 

A number of things upset George, and he would sometimes voice his criticisms loudly to the TV when the news was on, as in the case of a Jewish clan in the Conservative Cabinet he had read were of Lithuanian extraction. Other times he took more direct action, such as the last letter he ever wrote in his life, which was to Wandsworth Council drawing attention to an illegal car repair service being conducted in our street by an obviously unemployed guy probably claiming benefits. This letter was sent anonymously because George feared a brick through our window or similar intimidation if he gave his name and address.

 

Failing to get interviews for most of the jobs he wrote off for (only one ever gave him an interview, and he didn’t get the job) George felt that everything worked against him. Ageism, which he felt consigned his job applications to the wastepaper basket as soon as they saw he was in his late 40s, and so-called positive discrimination which he felt sometimes went too far in weeding out white males for even very mundane jobs. Surely this positive discrimination on the basis of gender or race should be concentrated on the high power jobs where white males dominate?

 

Although essentially left-of-center, we both felt that State benefits were often incorrectly targeted and should be means-tested. We believed family allowance/child benefit should be abolished and a child tax introduced instead, at least for every child after the first two. Having a child was a privilege, and we didn’t see why everyone from duchesses downwards should claim money for adding to the population explosion. Income support would act as a safety net for those in genuine need. Similarly with middle-class students claiming grants to go to University, often with no intention of studying anything which would eventually get them a job. We felt student grants should definitely be means-tested in favor of working class and unemployed people, and that frivolous studies for degrees in subjects not likely to result in jobs should not be supported by state grants. I now fully support the idea of student loans, and these should only be granted if there is a good chance the subjects being studied will result in careers which will enable the loan to be repaid. There is something to be said for a scheme where organizations/companies taking on graduates sponsor the loans for specific numbers of students, and deduct the repayments from salaries when these students get their degrees and are employed. Neither I nor George, both denied University education, saw why working class people like us should subsidize middle-class students so they could go to University to waste time for a few years studying useless subjects, or indeed to get degrees which would lead to high paid careers in later life.

 

George did a lot of voluntary work and supported causes for helping the deprived and starving in the Third World. He would come to the aid of anyone being abused by authority (as in the case of the black woman being intimidated by police at St Thomas’s Hospital Casualty department about a month before he died). On one occasion he came home with a black eye after a visit to the off-license. I eventually gleaned he had been punched by a black guy for verbally defending the Asian woman behind the counter. The black guy was apparently being abusive and aggressive towards her, and George couldn’t stay silent and watch her suffer. He was vigorously on the side of ethnic minorities as victims of constant police harassment, corruption, prejudice, violence and frame-ups and watched nearly all TV documentaries on such subjects. He had no time for the police at all, and neither did I, despite my grandfather and two uncles being policemen. As gay men both George and I had been victims of police malpractice ourselves. In my case I was threatened with violence by officers in a police station after being arrested for an offense in a public convenience, and in George’s case he and another man were arrested in a public convenience for no reason at all. When George protested he hadn’t done anything the policeman accompanying him in the police car said: ‘No, but you would have done if we hadn’t come in’. They then fabricated the verbal evidence to convict for this ‘crime’ which on their own admission never happened and according to George never would have. On another occasion they accused George and Rose of being in a public convenience in order to have sex together, a suggestion which was absolutely ludicrous - they had been platonic friends for years and had in any case plenty of opportunity to be alone together without going to a public toilet.

 

Moving on to more light-hearted matters. George and I had our own fantasy world, and we told each other humorous stories based on an array of eccentric characters, mostly based on real people we had known in the past. We put many of them into a series of scripts we wrote for TV sit-coms which were never accepted, but in at least one case the idea was used without acknowledgment or payment, and with an inferior script.

 

George’s characters were based on people he had known when doing skippers (sleeping rough) and on the game in Glasgow, London and Paris. My characters were mainly based on childhood neighbors and my Greek-Cypriot relations, with a few stereotypes thrown in, like the upper-class Lady Snobbo and her aristocratic family. (Lady Snobbo went up in the world from her original incarnation as Mrs Posh O’Bean, taken from my mother’s description of anyone with a middle or upper class accent as a ‘posh old bean’). I used to tell my brother stories based around these characters, imitating all the voices, when I was still a teenager or even younger. I also amused kids at school with an imitation of our headmistress at Junior school, Miss Parish. I later related stories featuring my characters to George, and committed some to audio and video tape. At parties in our various flats George and I dragged up and Lady Snobbo and the brass (prostitute) was a favorite sketch which we varied. We called ourselves ‘The Slagqueens’ but only made it on to home video and our own parties, we never actually tried our act out in a pub. I did, however, introduce the Lady Snobbo character to an AI Christmas pantomime and it went down very well. I have the ability to produce an amazing falsetto, upper-crust woman’s accent which sounds nothing like my own voice. I once rang the answering machine of a place I worked at night time, and the man I worked with didn’t recognize my voice. I had to stifle the giggles when he told me some mad duchess had left a message on the machine!

 

Occasionally we did a Joe Orton/Kenneth Halliwell type joke and rang people in the telephone directory, with me putting on my aristocratic woman’s voice. Usually it was to protest at something, but always for a laugh as well. I remember ringing someone important, at St James’s Palace I believe, when Fergie became Duchess of York and saying in my indignant posh voice that it would have been more appropriate to call her the Duchess of Clapham Junction since this was the area she used to locate. This posh accent was also used to ring one of George’s former employers and play a hoax on her, with George egging me on and trying not to laugh till I’d put the receiver down. Another of my favorite accents was the Greek-Cypriot granny who spoke in very broken English, and I rang a few people using this weird accent whilst George tried to stifle fits of laughter. Of course I now miss this fun we had together, with our imaginary characters and funny voices. When George crossed over, a whole world collapsed, the world of ‘Snoozy and Porky’, our nicknames for each other. A large part of me died with George.

 

Another of my characters, and a favorite of George’s, was Noreen, based on the first West Indian neighbor of my grandmother’s back in the late 1950s/early 1960s. She came from Barbados and was known to us simply as Mrs Camp (I have no idea what her first name really was). My grandmother, although a first very apprehensive about her black neighbors, and very prejudiced about other races and nationalities in general, became very friendly with the Camps and was soon baby-sitting for them and swopping cooking recipes. It was the same when my mother met my father, a Greek-Cypriot. My grandmother was prejudiced against him because he was a foreigner, till she met him then found him quite charming. He only got into her bad books again when the marriage went sour, then of course it was a case of: ‘I told you so, marrying a foreigner.’

 

Many of my own characters were foreigners, whilst most of George’s were down and outs, prostitutes or bitches in drag with ridiculous names like Cross-Eyed Clara and Bottle Nosed Mary. This reflected our backgrounds - I was used to being surrounded by foreigners, whilst he was more used to what was then referred to as the low-life.  Many of both his and my characters were depicted in rather badly drawn cartoons I drew to amuse myself, George and sometimes my mother.  A lot would be regarded as politically incorrect nowadays since they depicted various stereotypes, some ethnic and some British, but it was always the upper-crust British aristocracy who were the butt of all the jokes and the ethnic minorities and working-class who were the heroes.

 

My Greek-Cypriot father and his relations had inspired a lot of this, he actually used to boast about how easy it was to pull scams on the ‘stupid British’. I had heard many stories of how he and his relations fiddled their way to prosperity, and they cheated each other as well as the British. Being part Greek-Cypriot myself I felt I had the right to expose what my fellow-countrymen and women made little secret of doing, and which they tried to encourage me to do. My dad selling horse meat for beef in his restaurant when meat was on ration and successfully persuading the government health inspector it was only ‘eaten by the staff because they like it’ was just one of these hilarious scams. Another was when my penniless aunt and her screaming brat (additional noisy children were borrowed later to increase the pressure) daily harassed council officials into giving her a fully furnished flat, sub-let most of it and became very rich indeed, owning houses worth over half-a-million. My dad said the English were stupid not to do the same.

 

They didn’t just cheat the British but also each other, and when my mother told my dad that his sister-in-law was swindling him over the restaurant takings he just said: ‘That proves what a good business woman she is. Why can’t you be the same?’ My dad and his own sister also swindled each other, and the parents swindled the children and vice versa, it seems to be a way of life. It may not be politically correct to mention such national character traits, but I’ve had to live with them all my life, and George and I found them quite hilarious, and amused ourselves with these stories, cartoons and dramatic sketches. Noreen, the woman from Barbados, had a deep, lazy voice and was always snoozing. I had imagined her as quite thin, like the original Mrs Camp, but George insisted she was of very ample proportions. Dear Noreen, how we both loved her and all the other characters in our private little fantasy world.

 

We also had our own private language, mentioned earlier, quite separate from the polari, or gay slang. Most of the words originated from George.  ‘Cozy’ or ‘picturesque’ became ‘shnorky’ and a cute, sensitive young guy would be referred to as a ‘little snoozler’, for instance. There were also various phrases and nicknames he used, but this little private world or ours came cruelly crashing down one Sunday in September 1991. On that day I lost not only George but all these characters and familiar but quaint expressions, our shared ideologies and interests all disappeared overnight and left me stranded in a strange, frightening world where I was all alone. Only our little cat, Tibby, saved me from going mad or worse when I was otherwise alone in our little flat, all that was left of our little private world.

 

Memories remain like photos in an album - George asleep on the couch in his gray jersey, and whilst half asleep he’d take his spectacles off and put them on the back of the sofa as he turned over and sank deeper into his snooze. Then he’d suddenly stagger up in the early hours, and totter to bed with bleary eyes like a little child - a sight so endearing I feel in love with him all over again every time I saw it. Another sight I loved was when he was laying on the same sofa watching TV with his glasses all crooked on his nose. For some reason the old spectacles he wore in the house always sat crooked on his face, and this often prompted a peck on the forehead from me for looking so sweet.

 

He hated it if I called him ‘Georgie’ or ‘darling’, but we had other nicknames and expressions we used for each other.

 

George disliked big meals, and always told me that a lot of food on his plate or in our cat’s dish would put them both off their meals, as they were small eaters. George preferred lots of little snacks, often late at night. He sometimes said he’d be quite happy with a few pills instead of all the bother of shopping, cooking, eating and washing up. My mother and I were big eaters who enjoyed our food. I had told George about my childhood and how we never had a TV set till my dad brought us a second-hand one from his restaurant in the late 1950s. George’s family by all accounts was poorer than ours and living in quite squalid conditions in a Glasgow tenement block, but they had a TV since the early 1950s and the days of ‘The Grove Family’ which they watched avidly. George made up this charming and far from flattering song about my family set to the theme tune from the original ‘Addams Family’ TV series:

 

‘The Papard Family

They’re stinky and they’re smelly

They can’t afford a telly

They only feed their belly

The Papard family’

 

I hope the first line was only for poetic effect. At any rate I thought it was brilliant and loved it.

 

This was one George, the happy George I knew and loved. There were many other facets of his character. On ‘the sweeties’ or amphetamines he was distant and cold, but very efficient and a profuse writer, sitting up two nights in succession typing away. The only warning I would get of the arrival of this stranger into our house would be when I asked George what he would like for his meal that night and he would say: ‘I’m not eating today’. This meant he was going to take amphetamines which took away his appetite for food, gave him an appetite for sex, kept him awake for two nights and gave him the energy to do all the creative things (like writing, applying for jobs, working on his collage, making up audio tapes for friends and relations) he had no enthusiasm for the rest of the week.

 

Once he was in this state I had lost him for a couple of days, and I went my own way. I’d often make myself scarce and go cruising up Hampstead Heath. Sometimes George had one of his regular friends round who shared his interest in bondage and S&M, sometimes I’d run into him on the Heath in the early hours, for he never got there till then. Even years later whenever I went up the Heath (not so often as there were so many other places to go later) I half expect to run into George down the leather end by the big dip near the leg of mutton pond. If he met anyone up there he’d either go back with them, bring them back or just swop phone numbers. He couldn’t do much up the Heath itself evidently. It was the people he gave our phone number to which caused us to invest in a telephone answering machine.

 

If George had taken his ‘sweeties’ on the Friday and stayed up the next two nights, by the Sunday he was on the big come-down and starting to get very depressed. He’d then sleep for much of the following week, just waking up in the late afternoon and part of the evening. He dreaded someone he’d met the weekend ringing him up as he just couldn’t handle it. He’d let the phone ring unanswered rather than risk talking to someone he’d cruised when he was on the ‘sweeties’. This problem got worse towards the end of his life, and he just got palpitations and panicked if sex reared its ugly head when he was not high on amphetamines. So we got an answering machine and left it on all the time. George would only answer if he recognized the voice leaving a message as a platonic friend or a relation, whereupon he would pick up the phone. Our friends and relatives eventually got used to the fact they could never get us on the phone unless they started to leave a message on the machine.

 

I have mentioned George wasn’t a big eater or particularly fond of food, but one day he actually lost his temper when I served up some chump ends. He sawed and sawed at the tough, awkwardly shaped lamb chops with their big bits of bone, and suddenly jumped up and hit the plate with his hand sending chops, potatoes, vegetables and gravy flying over me, the table and the carpet, saying something like: ‘I can’t eat this muck’. It was the only time he ever did this, and it became a bit of a standing joke, the day he ‘threw his dinner at me’. The chops were very difficult to eat and he just lost his patience. He was a very fussy eater and quickly tired of things.

 

He liked so few foods that when I found something he liked I tended to overdo it and buy it too often, so he would then quickly tire of it and say: ‘Never buy that again, you’ve overdone it once more, Porky’, which meant I had to strike that item off the menu for at least six months.

 

When we both neared the age of 40 (he reached that dreaded figure two years before me) we started putting on a little weight around our waists. In actual fact it soon stabilized, and I ended up about a stone heavier than I had been previously. George may have put on a little more weight, but neither of us grew very fat.

 

We panicked, however, and George got books on how to flatten your stomach and looked into all sorts of cranky diets. One was a high protein one which consisted of cutting out all vegetables. George loved this as he hated most green vegetables and loved meat, and we were delighted to find we lost pounds in one week. We were disappointed to discover it all came back on the minute we came off the diet and started eating vegetables again.

 

At one time George had an exercise cycle machine, but I don’t honestly remember him using it much. Eventually he sold it and a nice young man came round to collect it after seeing the advert. Another contraption George got was an ultra-violet lamp with which he used to top-up his suntans after we’d come back from various holidays.

 

One day he suggested we both go jogging in Battersea Park. He had a track suit but I didn’t. I felt self-conscious jogging round in my jeans and ordinary clothes, and made some remark about this. George was furious, saying he’d hoped it would be something we could to together but I had ruined it. I did feel it was a bit silly, but if I’d bought a second-hand tracksuit from Oxfam I’d have felt more comfortable. Sadly, it was the one and only time we tried jogging together.

 

We had many happy times though, such as when we were buying ornaments and things for our flat. Nearly always it was George who spotted these things. Sometimes he would just buy them and bring them home, but other times we would go together, like when we went up Lavender Hill and brought back two white-painted sets of wicker shelves to display ornaments in our kitchen, and the large china cat which we placed on the floor between these two sets of shelves. On another occasion we bought a Japanese lady with a parasol in a shop in Kilburn, and a duckpond complete with ducks in Hastings. We also bought ornaments in Hawaii, Spain, Yugoslavia and other places we visited. We went to a shop in Walkers Court, Soho, right by Raymond’s Revue Bar, where they sold all sorts of art deco stuff, and bought an art deco globe lamp with a white female figurine which stands on our TV. From a mail order catalog George had chosen a central three-globe light fitting with white metal ornamental leaves and a standard globe lamp to match. After George’s death, when someone who had briefly known George visited our flat he remarked that ‘George had taste, didn’t he’. He certainly did, which is why I value so much the little touches he gave to our flat, and why I could never drastically change anything. It is part of our little world which I can still keep alive. Not long before he died George spotted a rather large, expensive looking ornamental piece in a window of Peter Jones’ in Sloane Square. I can’t remember now what it was, but when we passed the shop one day he pointed it out to me. We couldn’t afford it, but perhaps we should have splashed out anyway. He very rarely bought anything which turned out to be an eyesore.