[01 Sep 2007|12:04am] My mother lives in a building full of ageing bigots, particularly homophobes. There is only a small number of truly pleasant-seeming people, but it’s a weirdly harmonious place. Whenever I go round and hear what everyone's been up to, I come away a little exhilarated and optimistic about the future prospects of the human race. I don't know why, though. The lady chief homophobe and her madly camp gay next-door neighbour are inseparable friends who know each other inside out. Every morning he brings her a Daily Mail and a bun from the shops in York Place, and they sit and talk about the Netsuke and 1940s pottery he has bought on eBay, and his shopping trips to Lidl. Or Lidelle, as he prefers to call it. They look after each other very carefully, and their relationship is not based on détente. It’s closer to love. He must know that come lunchtime she will be in the pub with a different set of cronies, denouncing the gays, the blacks, anything that looks funny or talks foreign. When he developed AIDS he explained it away as something else to almost everyone but her. She got the whole truth straight away. Some of the outwardly composed types are turning out to be alcoholic ex-sailors or traumatised prison warders in retirement, who have quite failed at living independent lives. One continuously sets off the smoke alarms by burning toast at three in the morning. My mum marched downstairs and confronted him last week. He answered the door in his underpants, holding a plate and a tub of margarine, denying all knowledge of a disturbance as the smoke billowed behind him in his hallway. In recent days a mystery resident has begun leaving thick lipstick kisses on the cleaning rota and the mirrored walls of the lift. "This would be an amazing place for a keen student of human nature to live,” she says to me, like she isn’t one. 7 comments|post comment

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