Ode to San Fran

This Life column from last Friday's Day and Night magazine in the Irish Independent.

Right now, I'm moaning to anyone who'll listen to me that I just want a week lying on a beach in the sun. I don't want to see anything, learn anything or talk to anyone. I just want to lie there, baking and turning intermittently like a rotisserie chicken.


But I know that's just the stressed-out, washed-out side of me talking. I think anymore that I'd just go mad after a few hours of doing nothing. Maybe it's the nature of my job, or, more likely, that I'm just an atrocious time-keeper, but my free time has become very precious to me of late.
It's almost gotten to the point where I can't decide on anything to do because I feel I should be maximising every last second of my time off on something that really matters to me. That mentality has inevitably seeped into the way I approach holidays too.


So earlier this year, four of us decided to hit the States for a round trip to Vegas, LA and San Francisco. It was an amazing experience: cultured (kinda), mature (sorta) and sober (not at all). But for me, the last part of the trip was more than just a holiday. It was more like a big gift wrapped in a giant rainbow-coloured bow had been handed to the little inner Declan (not him again!) who had dreamed of visiting the City by the Bay for as long as he could remember.


One of my all time favourite books, Tales of the City (Armistead Maupin's 78% gay ode to San Fran) opens with the following line: "Mary Ann Singleton was twenty-five years old when she saw San Francisco for the first time."


I was also twenty-five years old when I saw San Francisco for the first time, and while I'm not a woman named Mary Ann (not anymore, anyway), I was a singleton when I got there. So I took it that the connections between me, the book that I've loved for years, and the city that I've always wanted to visit were all mystically aligning themselves. Not bad going for a holiday.

I loved every second in the place, and if holidays are supposed to rejuvenate you, a holiday that's also the fulfilment of a youthful fantasy is the energising equivalent of pouring a bag of Skittles into a bottle of Coke, shaking it and downing it one.


People love San Francisco for all sorts of reasons, but for me, like so many other gay men, The City is like the mothership. It's a city where a quarter of the population are gay, and probably the only place on earth where straight folk are a minority - spiritually, if not statistically.


What's more, the images of the city are intricately linked in my mind to the TV adaptation of Tales of the City, which I saw when I was 15 or 16, and of trying to sneakily watch it, with my hand on the remote, ready to flick over to the Oireachtas Report the second anyone came into the room, lest they rumble what you were watching and perhaps figure it – and you - all out.
Of course, the content of that show is harmless beyond belief by today's standards, but when you're young and have found something that makes a little more sense of your life for the first time, that can take you on its own kind of holiday, the likes of which you've never experienced.


So walking those streets, visiting those landmarks, throwing myself into that city's indescribable essence – that did for me what no seven days attempting to get a farmer tan on a packed beach could ever hope to do. I’d recommend that everyone ask their own ‘inner Declan’ where they want to go next year.

A Moving Experience

This Life column from Day and Night magazine in last Friday's irish Independent (17 August)

I don’t know about you, but I love nothing more than having a gnawing knot of despair lodged in the pit of my stomach, a fountain of sleepless nights and involuntary weight loss that shoots stress right up through the whole of your body like Old Faithful. If all that really gets your motor running, then moving house is just the thing for you.

Of course, the term ‘moving house’ is somewhat misleading. That would imply that there’s a house to move to. No, what I’m talking about is house-hunting, the most dispiriting, soul-crushing, heart-breaking experience that ever the invention of man contrived.

It has taken over every waking minute of my day. I’ve become a property zombie, barely registering anything in my brain that’s not to do with ‘all mod cons’ or ‘full fittings’. In fact, I might not even be entirely conscious writing this so you’ll forgive me if… viewing is highly recommended.

But, as anyone who is renting in the capital will tell you, an extra layer of misery has been piled onto the whole experience. If you weren’t aware before, you should know that rent in Dublin has shot through the roof, owing (so we’re led to believe anyway) to the fact that nobody is buying due to mortgage rate increases and uncertainty over the status of stamp duty.

I don’t care about any of those reasons. What I do know having viewed a lot of these places with their shiny new rent increases is that, while the price of them may have gone up, the quality most certainly has stayed static. Right now you could take any old grothole and charge basically whatever you want for it, and someone, somewhere will have to pay it.

I’ve seen places without an actual fridge, bedrooms without windows and, my personal favourite, the “double room” that was really just a converted alcove above the kitchen, accessed by a ladder stairs. Seriously, it was like a hammock hung over the oven, and all for the bargain basement price of E750 a month. I’m not making that up – you couldn’t make it up.

Then there was the place that ticked all the boxes: great location, in our budget, the right number of rooms. But upon viewing, we were told that instead of being a 2 bed with parking as the ad clearly stated, it was actually a 1 bed with no parking. Simple mistake to make I guess, but this is what you’re up against.

But, without doubt, the worst aspect of the wretched smorgasbord of horror that is house hunting is the waiting. Sitting around the phone, waiting for that person who could change your life to call you back with those three magic words: “It’s all yours”.

And when this doesn’t happen, you’re plunged into the pit of depression and naturally start blaming yourself. “Why didn’t he call?” you wail. “I thought this was the one” you cry, until a smart, supportive friend pulls you aside and firmly tells you, “He just wasn’t that into you.”

So I guess you have to approach house hunting in the same way you do love. As I have stressed on these pages ad nauseam in the past, you have to stop looking, and not want the things you want in order to meet someone decent (that theory is still being scientifically tested).
I have been very needy with the landlords and letting agents I’ve spoken to over the last fortnight. Nobody is attracted to a Desperate Dan or a Needy Nora. It’s time to be mysterious, aloof, beguiling – just like I am when it comes to romance…

Lord, I really am going to end up on the streets.

You're So Vain

'This Life' column from the newly-designed Day and Night magazine in last Friday's Irish Independent(August 10)

Like all people who claim that they don't care about such trivial matters as their appearance or how they look, I really care a lot about important matters like my appearance and how I look. Of course, I would never have admitted that until very recently, when the full extent of my own preening vanity was laid bare for the neurotic freakshow that it is.


You might have noticed that there are new byline pictures on this page, which meant that new byline pictures actually had to be taken.The problem is I genuinely hate posing for photos. Years and years ofdisappointing and, frankly, disturbing snaps of myself have wiped out any scintilla of joy about the picture-taking process. I've even had friends return digital cameras thinking they were faulty after they saw how the pictures featuring me turned out.


So needless to say I had to pull out all the stops for OperationByline, seeing how I wasn't going to be able to avoid the pic for awhile. Afterall, my professional credibility was on the line here.
I should note at this point that every shallow and Bree Van DerKamp-esque thing you read from this point on, sadly, tragically, is in fact, true.


The first step was tackling the thick birds' nest that I call my hair.I went to get it cut three days before the shoot, so that if, by chance, there was some kind of catastrophic follicle folly, I would at least have a few days to engineer a back-up plan. Thankfully, it turned out ok, but only after 45 minutes of politely grimacing as thebarber made small talk, all while I silently screamed, 'Stop talking!Concentrate so that I don't end up with a cut like a GI from the1950s!'


Next up was carefully planning the shaving routine. I normally shave every 2-3 days, but if there's something involving a high degree ofself-consciousness on the horizon, then timing becomes even more crucial. If you shave the morning of the event, you end up looking like a man-child with chicken pox. So it had to be the night before, but early the night before, or else you're limiting the recovery time (have a headache yet?). Luckily, my skin's typical response to shaving – which is akin to an Agent Orange attack – was absent. I was in the home stretch.


Oddly enough, the outfit was the easiest part. I just kept it simple, like myself. My over-riding concern in this department was - how should I put this delicately - controlling my over-active glands in the arm pit area. Yes, it's been a long, sweaty summer (in name only of course), blighted by more than one snap of me sporting Lough Corrib under both arms.


Coming up with a plan to tackle this dilemma was when I really acknowledged just how vain I was. I wore one shirt on the journey down to the hotel for the photoshoot, knowing well the sticky state I'd bein by the time I got there. I brought two other shirts with me, and quickly changed in the hotel loo. But alas, my healthy glands beganworking their magic while I was waiting for the shoot to begin, necessitating another shirt change. Then I changed my mind a few minutes later, and changed back again, at which point the photographer, bless him, got some hotel staff to physically restrain me from any more costume changes.


I tell you, it was exhausting. But ever since that whole rigmarole, I've had a classic saying of my father's ringing in my head, a pithy piece of wisdom from a generation who wash with an old wire brush and shave with a sharp piece of roof slating: "After all that preening, you'd think you'd be good-looking at the end of it". Touché father, touché.

A Little Sumthing

From Day and Night magazine in today's Irish Independent

I hate maths - probably more than anything on earth. All through school it was the bane of my existence. I had the same maths teacher for my whole time there, and Lord, if I didn’t age the man prematurely. I can still see the look of despair on his face as he tried to drum what a cosine was into my innumerate skull.


But what got me through it was knowing that once I left school, maths would cease to have any impact on my life, apart from basic addition and subtraction (which I can just about pull off).


But new research from one Dr Clio Cresswell has blown that assumption right out of the algebra-free water. Cresswell is a numerical sexpert – surely a first – who claims that there are very deep connections between love, sex and mathematics.


She maintains that maths formulas can be used to detect patterns in our love lives, and so can be used to guide the search for our perfect partner (Up until now, the only way maths infringed in that area of my life was when I tried to pose in clubs from my most a-cute angles).


So for instance, Dr Cresswell argues that you should make a list of all the things you’re looking for in someone and test them on 12 consecutive lovers - and reject them all. You then pick the best one that comes after that – a formula which, apparently, guarantees a 75 per cent chance of happiness.


Pure hokum? Maybe. But it would make sense in the context of my love life. I barely scraped through ordinary level maths in the Leaving, ergo I’m destined to scrape through an ordinary level love life. And there I was wasting my time on English and History!


So maybe I should buck up now, and put in the hard work I should have done in secondary school in order to change my dysfunctional relationship with maths. With a little help from my unsurprisingly non-dog-eared copy of Less Stress More Success, I’ll soon be an A1 love student, right?


I wouldn’t count on it.