A post among posts

I was in Glasgow a couple of weeks ago, on 23rd March. In Bothwell Street. Number 215. Stayed at mum's the night before because she was coming with me and it seemed easier than any alternative we could think of. Had to get there for 0945 you see.

215 Bothwell Street is where immigration appeal hearings take place. Susan had taken all the documents, made copies of them, collated them, indexed them, sent them to the appeals bods and the Entry Clearance Officers who have repeatedly turned us down. She did a fantastic job; she's a brilliant organiser, my woman. I/we had spent a lot of time racking our brains to try and work out how it might go, what might be our top points, how to counter what we thought they might say to keep us apart. I was going to be there, Susan naturally enough not, as she has no visa to get into the country to do so. We had no lawyers supporting us. I had mum for company.

We got there on time. Fifteen minutes early actually; well it's not the sort of thing you want to take chances with. There was pretty tight airport style security to get in, which I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised by, but it helped to rack up the pressure. Most of the people there seemed to be strangely happy considering where they were and what they were there for: maybe they were all as confident as I was about the rightness and historical inevitability of their cases, or maybe they were past caring. I don't think either of those applied to the wee boy, about three I would guess, who was merrily going around the room high fiving everyone. He was the most popular person there, bar none. There were people wandering around who seemed to be lawyers or officials of the Immigration Bods, as I believe they're correctly known. I was sitting there feeling relaxed but tense (I know, I know, but believe me, it's possible). We had been told we might have to wait all day because they couldn't be sure how long each case would take, so they were doing their best to make us all feel as uptight as possible. But Susan and I had done everything we could and just this one performance was left to accomplish, in defence of a case we thought was unimpeachable and unanswerable, just as we had done the previous times we had been rejected.

As it turned out, it was only eleven when my name was called. I got up, being careful to need my stick, and followed the name caller to a door, which she opened and beckoned me inside. It was a proper little courtroom, with a judge's bench and everything, and up went the pressure again. I hadn't expected that. A few minutes later a white haired, white bearded man came in followed by a courty dude who shouted "RISE". He must have been smart, because he did not shout "ALL RISE", which would have been incongruous as there was only me in the room, but then, why did he think he had to shout rather than just speak?. By the time I got to my feet, the judge was motioning me to sit down, apparently not being one to stand on ridiculous and redundant ceremony.

When he spoke, he had a Northern Irish accent. Susan and I named him "the honourable right honourable Lord Ulster of the kempt hair". His hair and beard really were VERY well-kempt. When she told her friend Anthony about him he immediately said "or His Kemptness for short", so that's what he has since become. Anyway, His Kemptness asked me to explain the history of our case to him, and let slip that he had a bit of a downer on the Home Office for refusing too many immigration applications-- "some of them seem to want to stop all immigration". WE HAD DRAWN A LIBERAL!!! Guess what aspects I concentrated on? "Well they seemed to reject that without even READING the documents I sent...", "we had sent them everything they asked us for but they seemed to ignore that..." accompanied by an irritated shake of His Kemptness's head. At one point he asked why we wanted to live here and not in the States. I answered that with my medical history I'd have to be insane to live in the US. "Yes," he replied, "it says here you had spoken about your medical history but there was no evidence of it". With blank-eyed innocence I told him that was odd and there should be a letter from my doctor among the documents... "is it this one from Abbey Medical Centre?" His Kemptness asked. "That's the one ", I wearily answered. He started to read it out, I helped him pronounce "craniopharyngioma", and he shook his head again and made another note.

Well, at the end of it all, he told me, not that we had won or lost anything, but that he would have to go away, weigh all the evidence, that he sometimes had to literally juggle it ("Not LITERALLY literally...?" I suggested, feeling good by this time and imagining how difficult it would be to juggle pieces of paper). And as he was more or less leaving he said to me "good man". A Northern Irish colloquialism. Hell, I thought, if he's getting colloquial on me it MUST have gone well... Anyway, he also said it would be about two weeks before we heard anything, so it was to be another nailbiting fortnight.

We both felt we had done everything we could and that no reasonable mind could look at us and say we shouldn't be together, that there was no way we could be considered likely to be a burden on the state, or anyway more so because of Susan's presence. As I told the judge in my summing up spiel, by being here and supporting me, she's likely to reduce the need for professional assistance, so if anything she should SAVE the British state some money. I even told him "she will be" (WILL, not would; got to get that positive reinforcement in) "the first immigrant here since about 1793 to be looking forward to the weather". He answered laconically "God help her". Anyway, we knew there was no more we could do except wait to see what His Kemptness would decide.

Well, two weeks and three days later my phone rang. It was a tearful Susan. She garbled and yelled down the line "WE'VE BEEN ACCEPTED!!!" to which my thoughtful response was "YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!". Then she hung up. I called her back. She read the entire decision letter to me, and oh it is wonderful. Slams the Entry Clearance Officers for ever rejecting us, points out that you can't get much clearer evidence of employability than an offer of employment (which she has had from my niece and which point I had made at the hearing), and rules that they had disproportionately interfered with our right to family life under the Human Rights Act. I had a grin on my face by now to put the Cheshire cat into retirement. And then she read the bit that said the Home Office had five days to appeal. So we had even more waiting to do.

Five days later I called the number at the top of the letter and gave them our appeal number. I asked what we should do now, what was the timeframe, and so on. The first words I heard were "the Home Office has NOT appealed".

All we have to do is wait for the letter that Susan will receive telling her where to send her passport to get it stamped with her visa. There's no specific timeframe on that but apparently it CAN take up to twelve weeks. Which means if it takes that long something has gone terribly wrong. On past experience, that should mean maybe a couple of weeks.

It's over. The waiting and worrying are over. We have won. Susan's coming home.

Manhattan, chapter two.

Okay, okay, it's been a long time since Strawberry Fields: three and a half months in fact. My bad (as they say in the colonies). Was having such a wonderful time I just wasn't taking time out to write anything. But the Beatley feel continued for the rest of the trip. First of all, we went to BB King (no 's on the end of the name, oddly) for their Beatles Brunch. The food and drink were distinctly mediocre and the band didn't QUITE sound like the Beatles, although, who knows, maybe that's what the boys sounded like live. "John" and "Paul"'s speaking voices were spot on, though, and of course I got right into the music, and the occasion, and the atmosphere. Before long I was belting out song after song right along with them, oblivious to what anyone around me might have thought; although, as the band were nicely loud, I could barely even hear myself, so other people surely couldn't either! I almost tore my throat on Twist and Shout, which is as it should be, in honour of John's unrepeatable performance (literally; the version on the album was the first and only take, partly because it was utterly brilliant and partly because he couldn't sing any more after it and they only had one day to complete the entire album) on Please Please Me if for no other reason. Mind you, it feels electrifyingly good to throw yourself at it like that; left me a little breathless though. The whole occasion was Susan's treat, her Christmas present to me, and I felt almost tearily good afterwards and had Beatles songs flying non-stop through my head for days after. More even than usual.

The bad news was that the following day at the River Edge Diner, when we'd had our meal and I went to pay, I discovered I didn't have my debit card. It had got lost at some point and somehow during the Fab Four. Bad news as I didn't have any other card I could use. Checked my bank account as soon as I could and nothing had been taken, so no loss in that sense, but I called them and had it cancelled and a new one sent to me. The second bad news: they could only send it to my home address. So I got my sister to post it on to me at Susan's and we just had to have a frugal week while we waited. I tell you, it was a struggle to think of something we could do indoors other than watching commercials for medicine on TV. Fortunately, the cousin's wedding we were at the day of the discovery was a free bar all night and I'd had enough cash to cover our magnificent breakfast, so there hadn't been an immediate emergency, although I did eat too much at the diner and ended up unable to take fullest advantage of that free bar: I'm a disgrace to Scotland, I am.

ANYway, on 9th February, Susan had taken the evening off work because she said she had arranged a special date. And boy, she wasn't joking! It was a Wednesday matinee performance, at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, so spelt, on 47th Street, of Rain-- A Tribute to the Beatles. It's in a theatre, so it's a concert setting rather than a nightclub brunch. Also, they have set up a complete multimedia show, including giant sixties style "TV"s on the proscenium arch, where the performance was "broadcast" in black and white. The concert started with a reproduction of their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show-- which, coincidentally, was on 9th February 1964-- complete with a reproduction of the set and even a reproduction of Ed, as well as a reproduction of the performance, of course. I was very close to tears and was far from alone in that audience. Later they moved on to the Shea Stadium era (and a few days later I met a new cousin who was actually AT that legendary gig), and then of course Sergeant Pepper, before finishing with a short, partly acoustic set, which included a gorgeous rendering of Give Peace a Chance complete with the entire audience on its feet waving peace signs. Jesus, man, I'm nearly crying again sitting here typing this. What a show, and what a day. I bought some merchandise (no, really): a Rain t-shirt with a big peace symbol on it, a fridge magnet with the same and a CD called The Concert That Never Was which postulates a Beatles reunion in 1980 where they played old numbers they had never actually got to play live before as well as solo songs by John, Paul and George. And a programme of course. And a baseball cap for Susan.

And then we went next door to the Edison Cafe, where I devoured a large matzo ball soup, a reuben and a sundae of some kind. And, miraculously for me, did not finish the reuben but took almost half home with me, where I finished it later. And while we were there, Olympia Dukakis came in and ordered a takeout or a delivery or something. I didn't pester her, but silently thanked her for her Mrs. Madrigal in Tales of the City. Mind, she was dressed all in black and so could not possibly have looked less Anna-like. Oh, and Estelle Parsons, who played Roseanne's mother in, um, Roseanne, was at the next table to us. End of starfuck.

End of post.

Love, peace and slippers.

On Wednesday evening, I took me down to Strawberry Fields, where everything was real. It was the thirtieth anniversary of John Lennon's murder, and Strawberry Fields is the memorial area of Central Park, right across from the Dakota Building in 72nd Street (or ON 72nd Street as US English has it), where he lived and was shot down, and where his widow Yoko Ono still has apartments.

Susan was working, so I went on my own, riding up on the subway on the A Train. There were hundreds of people there, some lighting and holding candles, all singing Lennon and Beatles songs. The age range was from teens to seventies: John and his band have universal appeal. There was a minute's silence at 10.50pm, the time he was shot, and another at 11.10pm, the time he died, or anyway round about the time he died; a couple of people had turned up by then whose idea of fun was to disrupt things by yelling. There were those who wanted to do some damage to the people shouting. I thought "right; if they won't give peace a chance, split their heads open..." and a woman behind me said, surely rightly, that John would have been with the disrupters. But more or less a minute of more or less silence we eventually got, which is an achievement in itself in Manhattan.

People were relaxed, calm and peaceful, talking to one another about John, the Beatles, what the lyrics meant (I know, I know, but it's inevitable), the history of it all; and singing, always singing. Everyone seemed to know all the lyrics and we were all singing along with great gusto. We sang Imagine (of course), Strawberry Fields Forever (of course), A Day in the Life, which was the moment I choked up-- well, okay, one of them-- and many others. It was at that point that I looked down at my feet and realised that I hadn't changed out of my slippers before I left the house. Well, do you know what? My feet never felt cold or sore, so they must be damn good slippers, well worth the twelve quid I paid for them, so that's a result really. I'm glad I went, glad now that I was there, glad that from now on I can say I was there, that after thirty years I've finally been at a Lennon memorial at Strawberry Fields. And that I have a fine pair of slippers.

Not long now...

It's Friday evening. On Monday morning in the middle of still Sunday night really, I will be off to the airport, where I will board an aeroplane bound for New York. And when I get there, I will see my Susan, hold her, and spend eleven wonderful weeks with her, her family and friends.

She's been writing list after list, of things to do, things to eat, things to see, things to buy, things to cook. She's a list maker, and also a folder user, which will benefit me greatly in the years to come: no more wondering where the hell that electricity bill has disappeared to! No more panicking because I can't find the prescription the doctor gave me just that morning! I will learn to live with her organisationalism (don't care, it's a word NOW), she will learn to live with my scatterism (ditto), we will reach amicable accommodations together. We do so already, mostly without rancour or unpleasantness, although there is on both sides the occasional dropped jaw or raised eyebrow, and sometimes both at once. But most of the time there's only ONE side, called Us; Cameron and Susan; Susan and Cameron.

We're an And now. As in John AND Yoko, Romeo AND Juliet, fish AND chips, bagels AND more bagels. I have never been more certain of anything in my life, and I know, not just feel or think but know, that nor has Susan.

They say that relationships, marriages, take work. They're right. And we're working on this one, out of a shared Love and a shared determination to succeed. Sometimes it takes surprisingly HARD work, and when that's the case, there's a satisfaction of enormous proportions in it when we come out on the other side of it knowing we've done a good job together and put another potential obstacle behind us. We joke and laugh often, talk about films and art and culture, and language, often; discuss serious issues frequently and share always. We don't always agree about everything, but we have a set of shared assumptions that means major conflicts are rare to the point of non-existence.

Sound idyllic? Does it? Well, sorry, but it is. I am hugely happy. It's odd being so happy while still being aware, inside my head, of suffering from depression. Most of the time the depression is fairly distant, more than a memory but less than a spectre. Sometimes it looms larger, when I become aware of still living on a different continent from her or when we have a fight (they're inevitably about really silly little things, all sound and fury but signifying nothing, but they hurt terribly). On occasions like that there are still clouds above my head; but they're little grey ones, not at all the thunderous black devils that used to be there.

Wow. I started this post just because I wanted to write something and wanted to tell you all how exciting it is to be me, here, now. It's taken itself in unexpected directions. Probably not unpredictable ones though. I love it when a piece of writing does that, when I start with a vague idea of what I'm about to write and then the words themselves take over and I end up writing something completely different. Sometimes comedy turns into tragedy or whimsy turns into nostalgia, or nostalgia into feminism. Sometimes even the form changes, and a poem becomes a fairy tale. Once, a poem about a paragraph long got sculpted down to four words, while on another occasion one which felt just not quite right was studied and worried over for two days before I realised that what it needed was to start with a comma. With the comma in place, I felt like baby bear.

I think this post is done now.

It's been a long ole time...

My puter blew up. It has now been buried with full honours, but the new one has four times the memory, twice the disk space and cost less than half the full price of the old one. So, onwards and upwards, dodophobics.

But my, things have been happening! In the United States, Repuglicans have taken control of the House of Representatives because millions of Democrat voters, sick of the timidity of the Obama government, stayed at home rather than voting, and as a result have convinced themselves that everyone loves them. And their plan for power is to do absolutely nothing other than shut down the government of the country they profess to love, purely to try to ensure that Obama is able to get nothing done. They have nothing new to offer, nothing but the old, tried, tested and failed policies of giving as much as possible to the rich while preventing the poor from ever having anything. "Trickledown" has never worked before, but they still promote it as though it were a startling new idea that they've just this minute thought of. Americans will suffer for it. In the end, we all will.

And on the Cameron front, things are also moving on. On the small scale, I am finally rid of TalkTalk, the phone and broadband company which is totally unbeatable if price is the only criterion but which has frighteningly bad customer service. Within a week or so, I will have my broadband with Orange, who also supply my mobile phone service and whose customer service is (almost) beyond reproach; and within a week or two after that, I will also have my landline with them. The phone service will be about three pounds dearer but, as just over a year ago I had got so pissed off with TalkTalk's customer service that I switched my broadband to Sky (at a cost increase of first £10 and more recently £12.50 a month), I will actually save money. I'll also be getting half price Sky TV for the next six months for a total saving of £72. So I'm pretty happy.

Visawise, things have not been as great. I got together all the stuff that had been demanded and sent it off with guaranteed 48 hour delivery. Parcelforce promptly lost the lot. That caused us to miss our deadline and even though they had been told what had happened, the visa bods slapped us with another rejection and told us we will have to go to an appeal hearing in the UK (but no idea exactly where yet). We already have everything they told us we needed to get the visa, so we'll have no problem there, especially when we turn up with a sheaf of letters and affidavits promising support and pointing out that Susan's presence will if anything EARN the British state money. The hearing itself will cost the government quite a few pounds, which they could have saved by waiting a week or so before issuing their hasty decision. And of course, it puts the wedding date in more doubt; we may have to postpone it for a second time. None of this is going to stop us finally being together as husband and wife, but it is very irritating. It has already been almost seven months since we saw one another, and it's hurting.

BUT...

I got a letter from the Inland Revenue recently (if you're American, you won't be remotely surprised to hear that this is the British equivalent of the IRS). It informed me that I had paid the wrong amount of income tax in 2008/09; uh oh. But reading on brings the discovery that in fact I had OVERpaid, because my employer at the time, Hilton International, had put the wrong tax code by my name and taken more than they should have throughout that tax year. In a separate envelope, they therefore also sent me a cheque for £1211.62, which will be put to very good use indeed. Once it clears I will be booking a flight to New York, where for the second year in a row I will be spending Christmas and New Year with Susan, her friends and family. New Year's Eve Susan and I will spend in the Sheraton Hotel at JFK Airport, my birthday celebration will be at an Italian place in Manhattan called Carmine's which I believe is quite famous but in any event sounds wonderful, and who knows WHAT we'll get up to for Valentine's Day, shortly after which I'll fly back to the UK a couple of months older and personally happy and sated. Of course, on 2nd January we will repeat last year's trick (or should that be this year's trick?) of getting up at 6am and taking a cab to The Blue Room to watch the Rangers-Celtic game complete with early morning beer.

We have plans to catch up on some of the things we missed last time. Ground Zero is top of that list, and the Stonewall Inn is not far behind it. We'll also catch the Olympic Diner and the very famous Sylvia's in Harlem, as well as at least one bus tour and at least one Broadway show (suggestions welcome). We'll get to see Susan's sister's new place in upstate New York, at a place called Highland Mills, and most importantly get to spend one hell of a lot of serious quality time together (how's THAT for a euphemism?). And at just over two months, it'll pretty much let us see what married life is going to be like.

Not too shabby, eh?

PS the spellchecker on this thing has just gone mad and highlighted words like "get", "which" and "taking". Most bizarre.

The beliefs of a right wing repuglican.

I believe all life is sacred. So doctors who do things I don't approve of deserve to die. And "life" doesn't include anyone who is a criminal, unless they believe in my god and my holy book and shout it loudly enough, in which case they aren't really criminals but tragic, good people who have been corrupted by Democrats.

I believe absolutely in freedom of choice. Except for pregnant women. And poor people. After all, God will provide, so if they were better Christians they wouldn't be poor. And the women would have penises, because Jesus had a penis.

W is a genius. I mean Hell, I can't even SPELL misunderestimate.

If you said "Hell" like that, it would make you a blasphemer.

I believe every word in the bible is literally true. Now, there are lots of bits I haven't read, like that one that says pi=3 (whatever that means) or the one where God says insects have four legs and bats are birds. And there might be something about slaves having to obey their masters and the rightness of raping female prisoners of war. But my pastor hasn't told me about any of those, so they don't exist.

I believe in freedom of religion: everyone is perfectly free to believe all the things I do.

I believe in freedom of speech. So if I say something it's my right and if you criticise it you are denying me my rights. And when I criticise the stuff YOU say, well obviously it's my right under freedom of speech.

Everyone should speak English. If it's good enough for Jesus it's good enough for everyone else, and I know Jesus spoke English because I've read what he said in my bible.

All men are equal. But women aren't men. So they're not equal to men. And Jesus was white (I've seen the movie) so really it means white men.

Love thy neighbor. All my neighbors believe exactly the same stuff I do, so of course you don't have to love anyone who doesn't believe exactly the same stuff I do, in fact if you do you're a pervert.

You're probably a pervert anyway.

Allowing people who aren't like me to get married to just anyone they want to marry would mean millions more people getting married, and obviously that would destroy marriage.

Getting shot never did anyone any harm.

Sarah Palin and Dr. Laura are honorary men.

THOU shalt not.

Raoul Moat

Raoul Moat was a human being. He is now dead.

I have no sympathy for him, but an awful lot of empathy for a mentally ill individual in whom the switch got tragically flipped. I felt the same way about Thomas Hamilton after the Dunblane massacre. Predictably, there are now large numbers of people shouting and wailing about what a monster he was, how he was a beast, an animal, not human. And they are all spectacularly missing the point. Something has gone disastrously wrong for these people, something massive and, fairly literally, mind-blowing, in order for them to do the things they do; and it is something for which the potential exists in every one of us, because we are all human beings just as they were. The same is true of the Nazis in Germany in the thirties and forties, from Hitler down. They were not subhuman in any way (and how ironic that people sometimes use that particular word to describe them, showing their complete obliviousness to what was wrong with Nazism).

The human mind is enormously complex, perhaps the most complex thing in the Universe, certainly one of them. And cases like Raoul Moat's, or Thomas Hamilton's, should encourage us to try and find out what went wrong in theirs, not simply to condemn them and try to distance ourselves from them by pretending it couldn't happen to us. The whole, tragic point of these cases, and of that of the Nazis and many others, is precisely that they ARE human, that they are exactly like us, and that therefore the potential for that behaviour exists in each and every one of us. We ignore that at our peril.