Diary

COVID-19: The end of gay life as we know it

March 17, 2020 by Mo Fanning 1 Comment

Thanks to COVID-19 – aka Corona – the world is on a massive duvet day, albeit one with the added risk of a slow, lingering death. Alone, eaten by a cat.

Literally the only thing anyone wants to talk about these days is self isolation. It’s like when people at work show you pictures of their children. I can’t find a way to care less. I’m an introvert with OCD tendencies. Being told to stay indoors and wash my hands every few minutes is bliss.

We’re supposed to club together and remember the blitz.

Any gay man old enough to actually remember the blitz is a Brexit-voting, property-hogging panic-shopper who lies about their age.

During the blitz, people went to their beds not knowing if their house would be standing in the morning. I lie awake worrying I paid too much for hand sanitiser in that frenzied eBay auction that got out of hand.

COVID-19 is anti-gay

They say a virus doesn’t discriminate. That’s not true. COVID-19 hates the gays and could mean the end of LGBTQ life as we know it.

2020 Grindr has become a shirtless LinkedIn.

There’s talk of cancelling the Eurovision Song Contest. We’re nothing without gay Christmas.

Single gay men will retreat behind closed doors, only to emerge blinking into the light come August, holding up an arthritic claw and declaring they’ve completed Pornhub.

What matters most is losing contact with our straight friends. Without your Primark mistakes to mock, we become empty vessels. Spare a thought for your Gay BFFs. Send selfies and demand feedback.

We’ll meet again.

Age before beauty

March 10, 2020 by Mo Fanning 1 Comment

Age before beauty makes no sense. If our society valued growing old over looking young, magazines like Best would carry adverts for wrinkle cream not anti-wrinkle cream. Grey pride would be a thing. Paris Fashion Week would major on fleece fabric and loose-fitting slacks with elasticated ankle cuffs.

The other day on a bus, a girl took my breath away. She said, ‘Would you like my seat?’

I’m at that age where if there isn’t gravy, I haven’t had my dinner. Half of my emails offer vouchers for money off thermal nightwear or gadgets to open jam jars. The drugs I take are no longer recreational and I take naps after a challenging sandwich.

Friends insist that with age comes wisdom and serenity, but with each passing year, the urge grows stronger to call local radio shows and moan about parking.

I no longer recognise the music being played in Tesco. My go-to aisle is the one where they sell dented tins, and nothing excites me more than bulk buying. I already own 16 spare toilet rolls and six extra bags of pasta. I was panic buying before it became a thing.

Genuine joy

When stuff falls on the floor, I leave it there. Being able to perform gravity-defying athletic sexual acts is great, but there’s genuine joy in putting down your car keys and finding them straight away.

With online forms, I scroll so far for my year of birth it’s causing hard skin to form. Parts of me have sagged. When I get out of bed, my scrotum hits the floor before my feet.

I don’t get social media. Twitter is like someone put Mein Kampf on shuffle.

Kind people tell me the best is yet to come, that I’m middle-aged. There’s no way I‘ll live another 54 years. Even if I could, I wouldn’t. I’ve bought sticking plasters, and that’s a slippery slope.

Plasters – carpet slippers – death.

Weight loss – simply the BEST

February 25, 2020 by Mo Fanning 1 Comment

Have you ever stumbled upon a magazine called ‘Best’? You’ll find it in every low-grade supermarket next to the crossword puzzle books. They’re designed to sharpen the mind. ‘Best’ sets out to ruin it.

Reading ‘Best’ is like having your nasty aunty Pat round for tea. It’s sixty pages of fat-shaming, miracle diets and Meghan Markle bitchery, interspersed with motivational stories of women who lost weight by eating tar. Two dry heaves and a dizzy turn later, they’d lost a pound. There’s a problem page. Written by Vanessa Feltz. Who in their right mind takes advice from Vanessa Feltz?

‘Best’ is addictive. I have two settings. Worried for the world and craving cheese, and yet ‘Best’ has me convinced I’ll lose ten pounds in ten days by committing to their good sleep diet. You swig half a pint of Night Nurse before each meal. By the time desert arrives, you’re face-down in a plate of spaghetti.

Most mornings, the man in my mirror looks like something the dog slept on. My body isn’t a temple. It’s a phone … on emergency battery.

Lose weight … change everything

I know I should change my diet. Healthy eating involves more than an ability to refuse doughnuts. We’re talking serious lifestyle changes. Much as I’d like to fit 32-inch jeans, I’m not getting up two hours early each morning to turn a head of cauliflower into couscous for an exciting weekday supper.

I refuse to follow any diet plan where breakfast is two almonds and you get to lick an apple for lunch. You skip dinner to cry at photos of yourself aged 17 in Speedos.

I’ve tried a Fitbit. It was like having the bitchiest of gay best friends on my wrist. Most days, I spend my time counting down the hours until I’m allowed to eat again.

Meditation appealed. I loved being able to call lying down a lifestyle choice. I downloaded a class and put it on, before promptly falling asleep. At three in the morning, I woke starving and ate a whole bag of oven chips. Still frozen.

I’ve become an organ donor. It’s one way to make sure I get to wear slim-fit coffin jeans.

Whatever ‘Best’ wants me or its target market readers to believe, dealing with grief is hard when I can’t even drown my feelings in food.

I’m sorry you’ve lost your mother: they make it sound like I’ve left her in another room

February 15, 2020 by Mo Fanning Leave a Comment

My mother has passed away. At 1.30 this morning, I woke. My husband, too. He trailed downstairs to her temporary bedroom, and I listened for the rattle of laboured breathing. Seconds later, he appeared and asked me to stay calm.

Storm Dennis is due in her part of the country any time now, already raindrops ricochet off the industrial-strength window shutters I always judged OTT. My mother lived for the seven-day weather forecast. To know her death coincided with headline-making winds would bring tickled pink pleasure.

First the 2am district nurses, and then a funeral director who carried out low-key choreographed manoeuvres under cover of night offered sympathy. ‘I’m so sorry you’ve lost your mother,’ they each said and made it sound like I’d left her in another room.

Loss doesn’t cover what I feel, even though this death came after two months of decline. Nursing her through the last four weeks of her illness was so intense, it’s overwhelming to suddenly find her gone.

What have I lost?

Until today, whenever something monumental happened in my life, I told her. For once, she was aware of the shifting sands before I was. Who do I tell stuff now?

Having lived with the soundtrack of her favourite radio phone-in shows, I’d expected to find relief in silence. The tumbling away of the ground was unexpected.

Without pain

Together with my wonderful, patient and caring husband, I brought my mother home, and obeyed a series of often irrational demands. A bigger television even though she was blind, new garden furniture and a 42-point master service of the car she hasn’t driven in a year.

She died without pain or anxiety (thanks to class A drugs) and with dignity (thanks to Damart thermal nightwear).

She was too fond of jam, French fancies, Lucozade and supermarket whisky. A bag of sugar with a bus pass. My mother had reached that glorious age where social norms no longer mattered. She’d cheerfully point out someone fat in a voice too loud, slam her front door in the face of anyone with a clipboard, and openly bought the Daily Mail.

I’ve been with the same man for 22 years. She still thought it a phase; like selfies, fidget-spinners and casual racism. It took until last year for her to accept that when answering the phone, it was no longer the law to recite her number.

All of this I have lost, but I will never lose the woman who somehow scraped together money to make up a shortfall in the deposit on our first house, who accepted my husband like another son and who spent her last days repeating how sorry she was not to found not at her best.

Nothing good comes from the death of someone adored, but the scale and bottomless pain I feel surely signals shared love. This I haven’t lost. This I never will.

Rest in peace, Pauline. I love you.

Death: Don’t try this at home

February 8, 2020 by Mo Fanning 3 Comments

My mother has been dying for 47 days and yet everyone who visits insists she looks better. They hover by her bedside and make impossible promises about things they’ll do together when she’s back on her feet.

Sometimes she manages a smile. Sometimes I do too. We both know we’re lying.

In the early years of the 20th century, 85% of people died in their home, surrounded by their family. Today, most find death in a hospital, care home or hospice. When I learned my mother wouldn’t get better, the hope for dying well became important. I made a deal with myself. She’ll end her days with dignity and in as much comfort as her catalogue of illness allows.

Most people get money in Christmas cards. Ten years ago, my mother slipped a copy of her living will into mine. This is what she wants.

Change

She’s always hated change. The Jif to Cif transition years were hell. Despite being confined to a hired hospital bed, she keeps control of the heating. I’m living in a sauna with scatter cushions.

On days when a nurse comes to change her dressings, my mother moans in pain. Afterwards, her mind melts, and sends her to wander through a mumbling, muttering maze as it mends.

Living out of a suitcase in a box room has taken its toll. Most mornings, the person staring back from the mirror looks like something the dog slept on. On the plus side, she’s now blind, and no longer knows for sure when I put on weight. It doesn’t stop the jibes.

My mother won’t get better. These are her final days and weeks. Each day, someone else dressed in blue arrives to remind us of this and hand over death-themed permission slips. When the time comes, a trained medical professional gets to dip into a stash of powerful drugs with a street value twice that of our car. Another signed document lets the same person pronounce her dead, freeing us of the need to ring around for a rare-as-hens-teeth out-of-hours doctor.

The unspoken rules of death

As this grim circus plays out , we ignore the elephant that’s not such in the room, as juggling balls and doing tricks for money.

An unspoken rule insists the living avoid saying the wrong thing to the dying. Like her visiting friends with their cards and flowers, those closet to my mother speak in positive terms, and never dare show frustration or exhaustion.

I sit next to her bed and drink tea, listening for any change in her breathing and trying to make sense of the words she cries as she drifts in and out of sleep. Late into the night, I watch TV and marvel at the self-confidence of the young and chiselled gods who populate reality shows.

Death forces you to reflect on what matters. I think it might be sex with 25-year-olds.

My mother how she should be remembered in death — Riding a camel in the 1980s, as you do