Togetherness with Skype

We love Skype

As I write this, my partner (life/civil/husband – you choose) is flying back from a business trip abroad. It’s a long flight across several time zones. It’s something he has done many times. Once we did it together.

Experimentation, and a hint from the internet, has taught him that the best way to minimise jet-lag is to switch his eating routine back to UK time, and then stay up all night on the last night so that he can sleep on the plane.

On this trip he bought a new 4g hub which makes internet communication much easier. Text charges to and from the UK can quickly mount up so we use a messaging system called ‘Line‘. It runs on desktops and mobiles, which means we can keep in touch at any time, and it gives you icky stickers to send so you have a virtual branch of Clintons Cards at your disposal for those moments when words are just not enough. It means that no matter how busy our days are, we can feel that we are together.

We also use Line to set up Skype calls. I’m old enough to remember red telephone boxes that you put old pennies into with buttons marked A and B (press button B to get your money back if the operator failed to connect you). On the phone, you were acutely aware that time was money and you had to get your conversation over before the pips went and you either had to put more money in or face being cut off. That was in Enfield, where we had one of the last surviving manual telephone exchanges. Now, it’s possible to maintain a video connection from one side of the world to another with no thought about cost.

That’s how we found ourselves connected last night. He was packing in his hotel room, while I played tracks from my Spotify collection to keep him awake until it was time for him to walk round the corner to pick up the airport bus in the early morning.

There weren’t any deep angst-ridden moments. It was basically the same-old same-old: I busied myself doing a couple of things while he got ready for a trip. We just exchanged the occasional word. And it was wonderful.

Swivel-eyed loons and aggressive homosexuals

Wedding Cake Topper by http://www.magicmud.com

I have been in a civil partnership for nearly seven years. It’s my second ‘marital’ relationship. I was first married in my late twenties. It lasted for 25 years and I have a lovely adult daughter. So my approach to the gay marriage issue is nuanced. I haven’t always seen things in the way that I see them today.

I’d like to say that this puts me in a special position to understand the different points of view in the gay marriage debate. But that’s the problem. It isn’t a debate; there is very little thinking going on, or if there is, it is hardly ever expressed.

I have only the vaguest idea about why being ‘married’ (again) is going to make me better off than being in a civil partnership, and even less of an idea why people think that my changing my status to ‘married’ is going to undermine the special nature of the relationship they already have with a partner of the opposite sex.

For some years in the UK we have been moving towards a position where same sex relationships are normalised. Now we have a situation where some people are trying to fight a rearguard action to reassert their idea of normal. You might call their values ‘conservative with a small c’ or reactionary.

What alarms me is that they are in danger of giving legitimacy to those people in society who aren’t very articulate, don’t feel they have much power and actively seek out others that they can depict as inferior to themselves, and then subject them to abuse and violence. There really are swivel-eyed loons out there who have nothing better to do than pick on other people and are looking for an excuse to do so.

Even worse, there must be many gay people, who spend much of their time in the rather dull and sometimes worthy suburb of Enfield instead of the self-referential world of gay bars and clubs, who begin to feel isolated when intellectual pygmies like David Burrowes MP (SEL) can get time on the BBC Today programme to spout unthinking drivel.

There are people who think there should be a place for a centre-right political party in this UK (even if they might not vote for it). It is now clear that Mrs Thatcher attracted entirely the wrong kind of person to the Conservatives; people who rightly belong on the fringe in UKIP.

If we are subjected to much more of their nonsense, politicians like Burrowes might suddenly discover that there are more than a few gay men in this country who can express opinions much more intelligently and attractively than they are able to. It wouldn’t take much to divest fearful fools like him of any legitimacy they cling on to in the eyes of the mainstream electorate.

Articulate gay men of a certain age would not need to be aggressive. The vicissitudes of life will have taught them to be assertive. And they would be heard.

As I finished writing this the BBC announced: Gay Marriage: Commons passes Cameron’s plan. But I don’t think I’ll be going back to sleep.