Tuesday, 7 July 2026

Blank faces and barely perceptible nods

The boss of a company has informed staff of his intention to do an endurance challenge and received no follow-up questions from anyone.

When chief operating officer Nathan Muir, aged 49, asked for a moment of his staff’s time he expected cheers, awe and promises of vast sums but instead got carefully blank faces and barely perceptible nods.

He said: “I’d been building up to the moment I announced I was doing the Swansea Bay Ironman Triathlon next year, so convened a special lunchtime meeting.

“But the big reveal got me nothing. I can’t understand why. It wasn’t from any lack of enthusiasm on my part, or the quality of the PowerPoint and spiral-bound brochures.

“I outlined the course: a mile swim, then biking out through Mumbles into the hills of the Gower peninsula, then a final 13.1k loop along the bay. I invited them along to spectate, but they were staring at their shoes and checking their phones. This is 70.2 kilometres! It is a big deal!”

Team leader Oliver O’Connor said: “So that’s a year of training, boring on about his hydration levels and telling the girls to prod his calves, frequent absences we’ll have to cover and he’s asking us to pay him £50 each.

“Sorry, it’s for charity. Though he didn’t mention which one, presumably because that’s beside the fucking point.”

The Daily Mash

Of course.

Monday, 6 July 2026

I'd shout Hooray!

Aaaaaaarrrrgh!

After one of the loveliest of Pride weekends, the reverie is over - and reality kicks in again. sigh...

Never mind, eh?

On this Tacky Music Monday, we have some outrageous puppets to comfort us, as only they know how:

Have a good week, dear reader.

Sunday, 5 July 2026

Proud Pinkness!

We had an utterly fantabulosa time at Pride in London yesterday!

Having decided that in the absence of our old "home base" The Shaston Arms [formerly Our Sal's pub - RIP], our somewhat depleted gang [neither Sal nor Lou could make it, and others had alternative plans for what they were doing for Pride] we would meet up in The Kings Head pub in Mayfair close to our favoured spot on Piccadilly near the Burlington Arcade, we had a comfortable few snifters before assuming positions.

As ever, our completely OTT outfits outshone just about anything on the parade/march itself! And so it was, as always, that we had more of the corporate-branded t-shirt-wearing participants taking photos of us than we took of them. It's a shadow of its former self, more's the pity, nowadays. So many boring t-shirts and so few creative costumes.

Speaking of the parade...

...and - we made it into The Guardian!

We and more than a million people thoroughly enoyed it!

Roll on next Gay Xmas...

Saturday, 4 July 2026

Let the fun begin

By the time you see this, dear reader, we should be in a taxi - on our way to assume our positions, centre stage, for this year's Gay Xmas festivities!

Only one more thing to play now - as always, it's our traditional anthem:

Happy Gay Pride, dear reader! Don't do anything I wouldn't do [which isn't a lot, to be honest]...

Friday, 3 July 2026

P-A-S-S-I-O-N

Happy Gay Xmas Eve, folks! The "Big Weekend" is almost here, the Essex Boys will be heading to stay over at ours tonight (probably including a dress rehearsal), and the excitement is mounting...

To begin the festivities, how about a song from that poppers-dominated dancefloor era, the 1980s - when I first emerged onto the gay scene in an explosion of pink fairy-dust and started shagging my way through South Wales - in the company of everyone's fave "Red Light District scrubbers", the Flirts?! Thank Disco Hi-NRG It's Friday!

Happy Pride Weekend, dear reader!

Thursday, 2 July 2026

RIP-ping Yarns


RIP The Duke of York's Theatre, soon to be renamed the Tom Stoppard Theatre after the great playwright

It's another snippets post today, dear reader:

  • RIP: the Halifax Building Society, as its parent Lloyds Banking Group announced it plans to scrap the 173-year-old brand, and either rename its branches as Lloyds or else merge standalone outlets into one. Shame.
  • RIP: The World Tonight, one of my favourite news programmes on BBC Radio 4 at 10pm every weekday - which is being axed (after 56 years!) as part of sweeping cuts by Auntie's new Director General Matt Brittin, to be replaced by Newshour, currently only available on the World Service. Why not the other way around, I say? Let "Johnny Foreigner" listen to the kind of quality journalism that has made TWT the yardstick by which other news outlets should be judged, and is aimed at a British audience! Hint to Mr Brittin: "British" is in the name of your organisation, in case you didn't notice when you arrived in post fresh from fucking Google...
  • RIP: Humphrey Smith, patriarch of the Sam Smith brewery and pub chain - who ran the organisation in an eccentric, borderline draconian manner. No music, no TV, no dogs, no kids, no mobile phones, no swearing, coal fires, lots of dark wood, only "own-brand" drinks on sale - all this, and more, made any Sam Smith pub instantly recognisable. However, by all accounts, working for the man must have been a nightmare - he lost several tribunals on the grounds of unfair dismissal; he would often pay a visit to one of his many pubs and if he experienced anything not to his satisfaction, close it down then-and-there, with the result that his estate has many pubs that remain shuttered today. Let's see what happens to all this "Victorian values" stuff now Yorkshire's answer to "Mr Burns" is dead.

  • And, finally, RIP: Victor Willis, founder-member, lead singer and songwriter of The Village People, who has strutted off to the glitter-ball strewn eternal discotheques of Fabulon, just ahead of our own Gay Xmas (Gay Pride) in London this weekend. He made his name as part of an iconic camp band, yet he was such a paranoid weirdo that - regardless of the group's obvious references to 1970s gay stereotypes/Tom of Finland erotic fantasies, despite their name being a tribute to the then gay heartland of New York Greenwich Village where the recruitment of the band took place, despite the flamboyant gayness of their performances, despite the innuendo-filled song titles such as Cruisin’, Macho Man and so on - he threatened legal action against any media outlet that dared to call his and the group's biggest hit Y.M.C.A. a "gay anthem"! He even allowed that Tangerine Twat in the White House to shake his wizened senile carcass to the song at his rallies. Mr Willis, you were responsible for some memorable choons, but let's face it - nobody in the world could ever think any of your songs were actually about "straight black male solidarity" at all. I rest my case with this:

And the weather? Proper summer sunshine. I love it.

Wednesday, 1 July 2026

The True North strong and free


A Mountie always gets his man, they say!

Happy Canada Day to our chums across the water! And congratulations, too - the news has broken that at last, Deadpool has got his wish. Canada (joining fellow former colony Australia) will be entering the Eurovision Song Contest next year!

To celebrate this important occasion, I couldn't resist posting this again:

Mistress MJ will be breaking that rule as we speak...