South America : Day Seven : Arrival in Antarctica ...

Yesterday our flight from Punta Arenas to King George Island was mercifully smoother than the storms and turbulence clearly visible below us in Drakes Passage. Despite the flight delays we were so glad we’d flown -  taking just two hours - rather than the two days the sea voyage would have. 

King George Island is part of the South Shetland Islands and just off the coast of mainland Antarctica. Having descended through the thick clouds our plane skidded to a stop along the makeshift gravel runway and we climbed down the metal ladder to not snow, but mud. This being summer down here the snow wasn’t settling here at the moment so we trudged for 20 minutes through the mud to our waiting Zodiac boats on the shoreline. 

Zodiacs are black rubberised motor launches and where to be on main method of transport on water for the next week or so.

The boats took us out to our waiting vessel, the Ocean Adventurer. Dinner was waiting for us and a very warm welcome it was too. We got to meet some of our fellow passengers many of whom seemed to be as excited as we were to be on the White Continent. After dinner we had an evacuation drill (a mandatory thing to do on these vessels). 

Overnight the ship motored through the choppy seas of the Bransfield Strait eventually anchoring in the morning at Cierva Point and Cove. 

After breakfast we boarded Zodiacs again, this time to cruise around the cove and take in the scenery. 

We saw snow, snow and more snow! Oh and sea ice, stunning white and blue icebergs, penguins, leopard seals, a minky whale, and a humpback whale.  

We also saw the Argentine summer research station Primavera with its bright orange buildings that stood out against the glaring white background snow.   

In the afternoon back onboard we enjoyed wildlife presentations on seals and penguins to help us identify what we were seeing. 

While we were being educated the vessel steamed due south towards the famously narrow Lemaire passage. A short-cut to get further south. 

The Lemaire passage is only 800m wide at its narrowest point, 7 miles long with 300m mountain peaks on each side. The peaks are covered in thick ice, glaciers, and deep snow. It was some sight and seemingly too narrow to pass through. 

But we trusted our captain. 

The passage also serves as a funnel for the sea, the floating ice, and much wildlife. 

So as we navigated the icebergs in this thin stretch of water we saw minky whales, humpbacks, and leopard seals alongside us also squeezing through.  

Once safely through Lemaire we then headed through Martha Strait out into open ocean. The plan was to head still further south - straight towards the Antarctic Circle. 

As write we are out here at sea far from land, the swell is increasing - 3m so far - so I shall sign off to baton down the hatches and strap myself in for a rough night. 

See you tomorrow. 

South America : Day Six : "I am just going outside and may be some time" ...

The day started with a delay. Bad weather. But we have been given the all clear with a ‘good enough’ weather window to make the crossing in the next few hours. Antarctica here we come. 

Just before we left our hotel earlier, a huge rainbow appeared. A good omen I think. 

South America : Day Five : Punta Arenas ...

It was a fairly bump-free flight down over the Andes and we arrived safe and relatively sound in the south Chilean port of Punta Arenas mid-afternoon. 

We then transferred to a local hotel where we had our luggage weighed (a strict 15kg limit allowed each) and were treated to a flight briefing, a Zodiac briefing (the orange motorised rubber boats, not the star signs), and a mandatory IAATO Antarctic guidelines briefing. 

We were then issued with thermal boots and a bright yellow insulation jacket. It gets cold in Antarctica apparently!

We finished the day with a “last supper” to meet our vessel’s crew. 

All being well and weather permitting (a big if in this neck of the woods) we should be making our trip across Drake Passage tomorrow onto the White Continent. 

And then a radio silence for 9 days. You’ll be pleased to know!

South America : Day Four : Santiago ...

We drove back in-land to the Chilean capital today for a bit of a pit-stop.

We love Santiago and took the chance to revisit some of our favourite haunts.

Tomorrow we are flying again, following the Andes to the southern tip of Chile. 

South America : Day Three : Valparaíso (the painted lady) ...

Today we spent the day relaxing and re-exploring the Bohemian seaside town of Valparaíso. 

Valparaíso is a lovely place, packed full of history, and covered in the most beautiful graffiti. If a city could every be described as tattooed this is it. 

We wandered up and down the narrow steep streets, drank buckets of coffee in the many cafes, took an historic walking tour, and finished the day off by drinking a beer or three in a few of the funky bars.

We have been here before, and no doubt we'll come here again. Love it here. Highly recommended. 

South America : Day Two : Santiago -> Valparaíso ...

Bumpy flights are no fun. Nor is having a glass of red wine spilled over you mid-flight. But all this fades into insignificance as you start to descend from a 14 hour flight down over the Andes and spot your Chilean destination, Santiago in the distance. 

Santiago is such a beautiful place and our love for it must have shown on our faces as once on the ground we positively hopped, skipped, and jumped off the plane towards immigration and customs. A smartly dressed official caught our eye as we cantered down the slope to. arrivals area. He beckoned us over. "Where are you from?" he asked in perfect English. Answering with all the joy of a Brexit Remoaner "Er... sorry... The UK. Is that ok?" He beamed back at us. "Of course!" and waved us through bypassing the usual queues. And then waved at us again. What's he doing that for? Oh, he's waving goodbye. Anglophiles? Gotta love them. 

Our transfer agents Paulina and Maximo met us on the other side of the gate and we were soon in a limo heading into town. Although for us the joy of seeing Santiago was going to have to wait. For we had decided first to spend a few days out of the city to begin our South American adventure. In a hilly place on the coast known locally as "Little San Fracisico". It is a Chiliean port town with steep funiculars, colourful clifftop homes, and seven universities. The place with more graffiti than a rundown New Town underpass. A magical place. A place we had fallen in love with on our last trip to Chile. The beautiful UNESC World Heritage site that is Valparaíso. 

We had taken a chance and were due to be staying in a hotel we hadn't been to before, the Casa Higueras - perched on a hill overlooking the historic old town. Luckily it turned out to be everything we had hoped it would be - an old historic house on five levels, beautifully converted rooms, a private balcony, and views to die for. 

Once checked it, we fought off our jet lag by talking a little walk around the local area, thinking we could just reminisce about places we had visited before. But we soon discovered that there was a big event going on in town. A noisy one at that. An urban downhill cycle event. Complete with outside broadcast TV cameras, huge crowds, and a thumping DJ set. 

The steep streets of the city made for a perfect downhill course for such an event and we joined the crowds and oohed and aahed as the riders raced down from the hills. Once at maximum speed the riders launched themselves at the makeshift ramps, and jumped down the narrow streets with that bonkers mix of bravery and idiocy that young daredevils so excel at. 

It was a suitably entertaining end to what had been a very long day of travelling. 

A day of spills, hills, and crazy breakneck thrills.

South America : Day One : Heathrow -> Madrid -> Santiago ...

Today we are starting our adventure going back down to South America. 

This time we are hopefully making it as far as Antarctica. Last year we tried, but failed. There was a typhoon in our path, stopping us making that final step onto the icy continent. 

We are first flying to Madrid and then picking up a flight to the Chilean capital before heading to the coast for a few days to acclimatise. 

Chile is probably our favourite South American country. Friendly people, great food, and a cheerful outlook on life. 

Vamos! 

When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other "it's explicit but hardly shocking - saved by it's stars" @NationalTheatre

Last Thursday night Stuart and I went to see Martin Crimp's When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other at the Dorfman Theatre on London's glitzy South Bank.

Short review: Hollywood stars Cate Blanchett and Stephen Dillane add some heft to this uninspired exploration of modern sexual mores.

Advance reports of a person fainting in the stalls suggested we might be in for something shockingly sensational. The blunt truth, however, is that Martin Crimp’s play – subtitled "12 Variations on Samuel Richardson’s Pamela" – proves to be a diagrammatic exploration of modern sexual mores shorn of any social context. It's not shocking. Just a bit boring.

The stage is the garage of a suburban house, evocatively built by breezeblocks and beams, filled with all the trappings of family life including an Audi car. Role-playing dominates from the offset: characters enter with tape over their mouths, dress up in costume, wordlessly, while a pulse-raising score makes you feel immediately anxious.

Those who come to see one of these Hollywood stars up close certainly get their pound of flesh. We see Blanchett garishly girlish in a French maid outfit and blonde wig, ferocious in skimpy basque and suspenders, mansplaining in a suit, buttoned up in a frothy wedding gown, strapped into a large black dildo. She crawls across the floor for a punnet of cherries and groans orgasmically inside a car.

And it is certainly left to the admirably uninhibited central performances of both Cate Blanchett and Stephen Dillane, to literally put some flesh on a drily cerebral text. Richardson’s 1740 novel shows a 15-year-old serving girl resisting a predatory master before finally marrying him.

Fortunately, the two actors are highly watchable. Blanchett has an extraordinary capacity to shift vocal and physical registers. As a woman, she seems wily, guileful and undefeated: when she strokes the man’s thigh with an elegantly stockinged foot she invests the gesture with irony and even makes her fetishistic assumption of a wedding dress feel like an act of protest. However, when she becomes the male tormentor, she makes expressive use of deep chest-notes without ever lapsing into vicious caricature. As we know from her previous work in film and theatre, she is a consummate actor.

Mostly, the rest of the cast has very little to do, though there’s a great turn from Jessica Gunning as the man’s vulnerable/seductive housekeeper Mrs Jewkes – even if some of Crimp’s lines about her weight are profoundly hard to love.

The twelve scenes (signalled with lights switching on and off) are rigorously repetitive, vacillating around the same violence and sex without developing into anything more. You begin to give up even bothering to decode the discourse, and feel relieved when it’s over.

Clearly this is a play that is supposed to be unsatisfying and challenging. But if you invest two hours in something and still struggle to distill any sense of significance, it inevitably feels pretentious. And considering the almighty talents and huge expectation surrounding this show, it’s especially disappointing to endure something so flat.

It does feel like a bit of a missed opportunity and I can’t help but wonder what might have been if Blanchett had decided to say screw it and do Hamlet or something. As it is, we have one of the greatest actors in the world using one of her occasional stage outings to star in an oddball S&M play that doesn’t quite work.

FootballvHomophobia 10th Anniversary at City Hall...

Great FootballvHomophobia 10th anniversary event at City Hall. Lou Englefield is one amazing woman. Great panel discussion to featuring Piara Power, Natalie Washington, Di Cunningham and ref hottie Ryan Atkin led by Sky hottie Jon Holmes.

A Tale of Two Gregs... by jingo, the @FA has changed - for the better! @LGBTHM @StonewallUK @prideinfootball @MarkMcAdamTV @GayGooners @LouEnglefield @FvHTweets @WembleyStadium #LGBTHistoryMonth #LGBTHM19 #StrongerTogether

Back in 1991, I was on telly sitting opposite a man called Greg.

It wasn't the first time I had been on TV, or was it to be the last. But it was certainly the most confrontational. I appeared on Channel Four's feedback show Right To Reply a few days after ITV had televised the WBO super middleweight title boxing match where Michael Watson fought Chris Eubank. With its terrible consequences.

Watson had collapsed in the ring in the twelfth round. There was no ambulance nor paramedic at the event. Apparently, doctors wearing dinner jackets arrived after some eight minutes, during which time the fallen fighter had received no oxygen. A total of 28 minutes elapsed before Watson received treatment in a hospital neurosurgical unit. He spent 40 days in a coma and had six brain operations to remove a blood clot. He couldn't hear, couldn't speak, couldn't walk for 8 months.

I had called Right To Reply after the match to complain about ITV Sport's coverage; the frenzied hype beforehand, the slow motion replays of the punches to the head with all the blood, the fact that afterwards we didn't know whether Michael Watson was dead or alive. Had we just seem a man die on live TV? There were no updates on the ITV News. They just cut to commercials and then showed a film. ITV were acting as if it didn't happen.

The following Friday I went to the C4 studio to have a head to head argument up against Greg Dyke (then Head of ITV Sport - later BBC Director-General - then later head of the FA) about the coverage. I think I gave a good showing (avoiding the easy trap of "we need to ban boxing" mantra.) Dyke is/was/always will be a worm though. He said ITV Sport was blameless. They took no responsibility for what happened on the night and said, "People could read about it in the papers the next day if they wanted." He went on to say he'd show bull-fighting on ITV Sport if he could and would bid for screening live capital punishment if hanging were to be made legal in the UK and would get good ratings. For some time after the screening people would stop me on the tube and congratulate me on my stance of taking him to task.

Last night, almost 28 years later I got to meet a second Greg. Not on TV this time, but face to face at an event at Wembley Stadium.

This Greg was Dyke's successor at the FA, Greg Clarke. And what a different Greg he was. After three years in charge, Dyke had left the FA in 2016 as he had struggled to reform the organisation. In his three years at the helm, Greg Clarke on the other hand has been transformative.

The event was the FA Chairman's LGBT History Month Reception. I got an invite as Secretary of the Arsenal Gay Gooners Supports Club and attended along with Chris, Basil, and Joe, our Gay Gooners Campaigns Officer.

We got to hear about multiple initiatives that Clarke has championed tackling homophobia, transphobia, and biphobia in the Beautiful Game. There was then a panel discussion run by Sky Sports hottie Mark McAdam with Craig Donald (FA Chief Information Officer), Kirsty Clarke (Stonewall Director of Sport), Danielle Carter (Arsenal FC), and Douglas Edward (Stonewall FC Captain and Global HR Director AON.) There were questions from the floor on a number of topics including issues about reporting homophobia, and Joe got to ask a couple of questions about homophobia at International venues and emerging fan support for the women's game.

The FA now work closely with Stonewall, support the Rainbow Laces campaign, co-ordinate with grassroots organisations on LGBT+ issues, visit and seek concrete assurances from countries ahead of International competitions (most recently Russia and Qatar), and they now host LGBT+ events and matches at Wembley Stadium.

Clarke said he was especially proud of the suburb rainbow mosaic at Vicarage Road, the Stonewall FC win at Wembley, and the work of Lou Englefield of FootballvHomophobia.

There is still much to do, of course. But things seem to be going very much in the right direction.

Change has come from the top at the FA. 6% of the FA workforce are LGBT+, they have an out gay man on their board, and talking to their LGBT staff last night they genuinely say how supportive an environment the FA is now.

Things have indeed changed. Dyke was not only a worm, but a dinosaur. A dino-worm. Whereas Clarke is a progressive. Who says all Gregs are the same?

Amazing news that #AlanTuring has been voted #Icons 'Greatest Person of the 20th Century' by BBC viewers #GayHero

He was the father of modern computing, helped crack the Enigma code that contributed to winning World War II, but wasn't treated like a hero in his lifetime due to his sexuality.

As a gay man he was chemically castrated and abused - finally taking his own life.

An absolute hero who did indeed save millions of lives and I'm glad he is finally being celebrated now by the British people.

Passionate People #Tesco #TescoFinest

9 to 5 The Musical "with a couple of jars down your neck beforehand, it becomes reasonably watchable" @9to5MusicalUK ...

Last Friday night Stuart and I went to see Dolly Parton's 9 to 5 The Musical at the Savoy Theatre in London's glitzy West End.

At the end of the show, Dolly appears on a video screen:

"If you have enjoyed the show," she beams, "tell your friends! If you haven't, keep your mouth shut!"

...

Well, we 'quite' enjoyed it.

The show takes the 1980 Hollywood film 9 To 5, in which three city secretaries get even with their chauvinist boss Mr Hart, and runs with it.

The song '9 to 5' that, the show starts and ends with, is of course fantastic. The other songs are forgettable though. The three female leads are all very good but the material they have to work with is rather weak - which is odd, as Dolly is such a good songwriter. There is in fact a Dolly Parton character in the show who gets the best songs but the bonne amie soon peters out as the jokes start to fall flat.

It is not much of a surprise that the show fails the Bechdel Test so spectacularly in the first half - 1980s office, sexist boss, and female workers treated like serfs - but as the women take their revenge things do improve. The second half is better, partly because it is shorter, and relies less upon the plot and more on the song and dance routines.

There is much fun to be had in Bonnie Langford's repressed office manager stripping to her suspenders although Brian Conley as the egotistical supervisor plays it excessively broadly. He comes across as a moustache-twiddling pantomime villain rather than the evil, bigoted sexist he plainly is. We are meant to hate you, Brian, not laugh at you!

However, with a couple of jars down your neck beforehand, it becomes reasonably watchable, particularly for those with a taste for cheese.

3/5 (for that song.)

A Slight Ache / The Dumb Waiter - "funny, unexpectedly odd, unsettling, and cleverly staged" - @JamieLloydCo #PinteratthePinter @HPinterTheatre #PinterSeven

Last night Stuart and I went to see the first night of a brilliant pairing of Harold Pinter one act comedy plays at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London's glitzy West End.

Billed as part of the Pinter at The Pinter season, this night was called "Pinter Seven" being the seventh and final collection. Superbly directed by Jamie Lloyd, it was stylish double-bill by the great man.

Both plays explore Pinter's favourite theme - the political machinations of the powerful and the powerless.

The night started with A Slight Ache (1958), a tragicomedy, that sees the lives of Edward (John Heffernan) and Flora (Gemma Whelan) turned upside down when a mysterious figure, an old non-speaking Matchseller, enters their elegant country home. English xenophobia and paranoia run throughout as things take a darkly funny turn. Minor domestic insecurities soon snowball into out and out terror.

Produced as a radio play it was funny, unexpectedly odd, unsettling, and cleverly staged.

The other play was one of Pinter's most famous pieces, The Dumb Waiter (1957). Two hit-men, Ben (Danny Dyer) and Gus (Martin Freeman), are waiting in a basement room of a derelict building for their next assignment. The building used to be a restaurant and on one wall is a dumb waiter - a hatch with a small lift - that contains a plate. Next to the dumb waiter is a speaking tube. Everything is set for the orders to come.

And, as the men wait for their instructions as to who to kill next, they bicker over nonsense. Biscuits, items in the paper, and the semantics of "light the kettle" and "put on the kettle". We get to see the dynamics of power and the nature of a partnership.

In some sense, it is an absurdist comedy about two men just waiting. Waiting in a universe without meaning or purpose, like Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Only the twist here is that when the orders do come - neither of them expect it.