Musings of an old bloke waiting for a train in Bolton with a
smile on his face in 2023.
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“Is this the face of concern?” A bloke and his wife in a pub politely told me the other day that I am a very strange old man, but that’s okay; I agreed with them, and I can’t really understand why they didn’t call me a cynical, unhappy old man as well. “Maybe it’s because my inner, hard-fought happiness shone through in the comments that follow”. |
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The bloke and his dear lady wife couldn’t understand how I could possibly be happy living alone for more than 25 years without a TV taking up space in my life. And, as a dyslexic person who’s never read an entire book except a small book of short stories by Charles Bukowski. Nor do I even glance at any books newspapers or listen to any radio (apart from the daily 07:00 am BBC Radio three, two-minute news bulletin).
But what really seemed to bother them was my total lack of concern or interest in ANY sports at all… or as I call them, “Children’s games played for money by power greedy adults”. They were equally gobsmacked when I followed this with my inability to name any so-called celebrities apart from a few British ones that I have time for, like Paul Merton, Stephen Fry, and Professor Brian Cox. I had the same response when I said I hadn’t listened to any folk, jazz, rock, or popular music since Billy Holiday, Jimmy Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, and Half Man Half Biscuit either died or ended their careers. And I have absolutely no interest or time to waste on listening to most other musical genres, especially ALL opera ever produced! (Or, as I call it, wannabe posh people’s musicals).
Then they looked a tad bemused when I said I hadn’t seen any films since I watched a little-known French film called Le Ballon Rouge in 1972 (this is now featured in my own film). Truth is. I have actually seen and enjoyed a few Fellini films, and I learned a lot in the 1970s about white American culture by watching Soldier Blue with Buffy Sainte-Marie singing about the atrocities committed by the emerging “gun culture” Americans... And, of course, I discovered the meaning of life, the universe, and everything sometime in the 1970s (42).
“Strangely”, they really couldn’t believe that I’d never seen or had any interest in seeing any other so-called blockbuster film productions whatsoever... And/or Internet porn.
Anyway, the bloke and his wife stopped short of calling the mental health nurses when I told them how artists and survivors of child abuse like me often reject a lot of what passes for normal behaviour in favour of finding positive, harmless ways to while away the days, weeks, months, and possibly years that I may have left on this planet. When I tried to tell them that I think I’ve learned how to live happily without ever eating any carcinogenic American burgers, drinking any cola-type drinks, or ingesting many other processed foods simply because I believe I’ve lost too many friends through cancer or diabetes-related problems and addictions that were brought on by sugar, salt, and chemical dependency from birth, they seemed to mellow a bit. They resisted calling for me to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
Like many others, they couldn’t stop themselves from telling me that I was missing out on so much by not reading or watching telly, etc. I simply responded with, “So far, i’ve led a life of learning, failing, and achieving without the influence of other people’s ideas or beliefs getting in my way, and I’ve never knowingly hurt anyone along the way.”
Talking with the bloke and his wife helped me to see how I’ve also learned to cope with quite a few more character-building experiences like accidental sudden deaths or the suicide of close friends, plus lost wives through my inability to understand the value of having a regular job, mortgage, 2.2 sprogs, and a sensible car parked next to a perfectly mowed lawn.
I have experienced more than one divorce and lived with a few alcohol or drug-addicted partners. I’ve somehow managed to survive years of severe depression, substance abuse, and alcoholism myself.
“All very character-building, indeed.” But three experiences that go way beyond simple character building are the brutal murder of a past partner committed by her mentally ill son (my stepson), the loss of my only true soulmate and wife who developed early onset dementia a few years after I found her in the arms of another in her early 30s, and the loss of my younger sister who I held hands with when she died from motor neuron disease in 2021.
In short, since the age of six, when I was first abused, I suppose I have led a very strange life, so it’s hardly surprising that regular, nice people might consider me to be a bit odd. But I must say that I’ve only survived all this by learning from my many mistakes accepting my inability to understand how to live with other people’s religious fantasies and/or obsession with possessions, money, and love. And by travelling the world while controlling my addictions to survive as an itinerant purveyor of buffoonery and mirth.
When I was a lad, most people in my world only had meat once a week or so, and fruit was a luxury etc., etc. However, in the 1950s, there were fewer people on what is now a very overcrowded planet, so we still lived by long-standing rules involving honour, honesty, and consideration for our fellow humans. Those days will never return, and my only hope is that my eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, plus all the millions more youngsters of the world, may one day find a solution to the 21st century’s problems.
I’m sure all this makes me appear to be a miserable old bloke in some ways, but the truth is, I’ve learned to keep moving forward by referring to the front cover of a little book that I’ve never read, but it’s right in front of my line of sight every time I sit at my desk. It’s titled “Shit Happens Get Over It”... And that’s maybe, partly why I’m so happy...
In the meantime, I have a train to catch, and it’s taking me to a very nice Lancashire pub, but before I board the train, I just say...
“The more obscure a life is, the more valuable it becomes.”
“So long, and thanks for all the fish”. Eddie Haworth FRSA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?V=ojydnb3lrrs
But what really seemed to bother them was my total lack of concern or interest in ANY sports at all… or as I call them, “Children’s games played for money by power greedy adults”. They were equally gobsmacked when I followed this with my inability to name any so-called celebrities apart from a few British ones that I have time for, like Paul Merton, Stephen Fry, and Professor Brian Cox. I had the same response when I said I hadn’t listened to any folk, jazz, rock, or popular music since Billy Holiday, Jimmy Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, and Half Man Half Biscuit either died or ended their careers. And I have absolutely no interest or time to waste on listening to most other musical genres, especially ALL opera ever produced! (Or, as I call it, wannabe posh people’s musicals).
Then they looked a tad bemused when I said I hadn’t seen any films since I watched a little-known French film called Le Ballon Rouge in 1972 (this is now featured in my own film). Truth is. I have actually seen and enjoyed a few Fellini films, and I learned a lot in the 1970s about white American culture by watching Soldier Blue with Buffy Sainte-Marie singing about the atrocities committed by the emerging “gun culture” Americans... And, of course, I discovered the meaning of life, the universe, and everything sometime in the 1970s (42).
“Strangely”, they really couldn’t believe that I’d never seen or had any interest in seeing any other so-called blockbuster film productions whatsoever... And/or Internet porn.
Anyway, the bloke and his wife stopped short of calling the mental health nurses when I told them how artists and survivors of child abuse like me often reject a lot of what passes for normal behaviour in favour of finding positive, harmless ways to while away the days, weeks, months, and possibly years that I may have left on this planet. When I tried to tell them that I think I’ve learned how to live happily without ever eating any carcinogenic American burgers, drinking any cola-type drinks, or ingesting many other processed foods simply because I believe I’ve lost too many friends through cancer or diabetes-related problems and addictions that were brought on by sugar, salt, and chemical dependency from birth, they seemed to mellow a bit. They resisted calling for me to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
Like many others, they couldn’t stop themselves from telling me that I was missing out on so much by not reading or watching telly, etc. I simply responded with, “So far, i’ve led a life of learning, failing, and achieving without the influence of other people’s ideas or beliefs getting in my way, and I’ve never knowingly hurt anyone along the way.”
Talking with the bloke and his wife helped me to see how I’ve also learned to cope with quite a few more character-building experiences like accidental sudden deaths or the suicide of close friends, plus lost wives through my inability to understand the value of having a regular job, mortgage, 2.2 sprogs, and a sensible car parked next to a perfectly mowed lawn.
I have experienced more than one divorce and lived with a few alcohol or drug-addicted partners. I’ve somehow managed to survive years of severe depression, substance abuse, and alcoholism myself.
“All very character-building, indeed.” But three experiences that go way beyond simple character building are the brutal murder of a past partner committed by her mentally ill son (my stepson), the loss of my only true soulmate and wife who developed early onset dementia a few years after I found her in the arms of another in her early 30s, and the loss of my younger sister who I held hands with when she died from motor neuron disease in 2021.
In short, since the age of six, when I was first abused, I suppose I have led a very strange life, so it’s hardly surprising that regular, nice people might consider me to be a bit odd. But I must say that I’ve only survived all this by learning from my many mistakes accepting my inability to understand how to live with other people’s religious fantasies and/or obsession with possessions, money, and love. And by travelling the world while controlling my addictions to survive as an itinerant purveyor of buffoonery and mirth.
When I was a lad, most people in my world only had meat once a week or so, and fruit was a luxury etc., etc. However, in the 1950s, there were fewer people on what is now a very overcrowded planet, so we still lived by long-standing rules involving honour, honesty, and consideration for our fellow humans. Those days will never return, and my only hope is that my eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, plus all the millions more youngsters of the world, may one day find a solution to the 21st century’s problems.
I’m sure all this makes me appear to be a miserable old bloke in some ways, but the truth is, I’ve learned to keep moving forward by referring to the front cover of a little book that I’ve never read, but it’s right in front of my line of sight every time I sit at my desk. It’s titled “Shit Happens Get Over It”... And that’s maybe, partly why I’m so happy...
In the meantime, I have a train to catch, and it’s taking me to a very nice Lancashire pub, but before I board the train, I just say...
“The more obscure a life is, the more valuable it becomes.”
“So long, and thanks for all the fish”. Eddie Haworth FRSA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?V=ojydnb3lrrs
(First published Oct 2013 - updated Oct 2022 & May 2025) |
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For those who don’t know, I work as a professional performance artist specialising in slapstick comedy, much like Mr. Bean. Over the past four decades, I’ve performed my buffoonery lectures and shows worldwide. I’ve spent more than half of my time in the Far East and India, and I’ve also performed at the only Moulin Rouge French Cabaret in China, as well as high-class hotels, international schools, universities, and for countless country ambassadors, diplomats, and even royalty. My walls are adorned with accolades from ambassadors, prime ministers, dozens of Rotary Clubs, and all the major schools, including Harrow, Shrewsbury, Berkeley, and numerous other international schools. Additionally, I am the founder and director of a Thai-registered charity honoured as a Member of the League of Foundations of Thailand under the Royal Patronage of the late His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej. I am also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London, Eddie Haworth FRSA.
Hypocrisy.
I feel compelled to share my thoughts after hearing a recent radio report about how men in Britain are increasingly hesitant to work with children. It’s truly disheartening to realise that some people still hold preconceived notions about men who engage in charity work with vulnerable children or even teaching. I’ve been aware of these reports since the early 1990s, when, along with my then-wife, I began working with vulnerable individuals, including both children and adults, in the deprived areas of Liverpool, Manchester, and other northwestern English towns. These areas often had high numbers of unemployed parents, some struggling with addiction issues, most struggling with finances, leaving their offspring to often fend for themselves, in turn opening the children up to all manner of vulnerabilities. Although these types of preconceptions are not new, they remain deeply concerning and disheartening.
First written by me in September 2013, here’s a quote from a lady who was the chairperson of a large women’s organisation: “We cannot support your cause because you are a ‘MAN’ who is often in contact with vulnerable children.”
That was said directly to me a few months after I had spent an afternoon with some of the ladies’ fellow committee members at an extended lunch aboard a floating restaurant anchored by the riverside close to the famous Bridge over the River Kwai, near Kanchanaburi, Siam. I had been booked to perform by the Australian Chamber of Commerce in Bangkok, as I did every year on ANZAC Day, at a small school close to the Hell Fire Pass, Burma Railway site.
That year, the show was attended by the British Queen Elizabeth 2 representative, Dame Quentin Bryce, who served as the 25th Governor-General of Australia from 2008 to 2014, plus the British and Australian Ambassadors to Thailand, a whole bunch of diplomats and the Australian/New Zealand Woman’s Group members. During the extended lunch, some of the ladies maybe had one sherry too many and started to become very keen on supporting the children’s charity that the funny guy who made the kids so happy had founded and worked passionately with. Which, I thought, was, in turn, good news for the thousands of needy children that the charity supports in Thailand.
However, following a long period of not responding to emails and calls after that tipsy meeting, the hypocrisy of all their high-flying offers started to show its ugly face when it turned out that some of those (now sober) women had some unworthy preconceived ideas about men working with vulnerable children. It’s quite remarkable how these ladies conveniently forgot about their own eagerness to support needy people when they were in a more enlightened state of excitement at the prospect of supporting my charity. It appears they also apparently had no idea that, apart from my well-documented accolades and high-class reviews, I was employed, undercover, by an organisation set up to seek out child abusers in Southeast Asia. The organisation I worked for is run by and made up of respected, serving, and retired male and female police officers from the UK, Australia, and the USA. You can be very sure they don’t employ anyone without the most stringent background checks being done before they even approach a prospective employee. (Unlike the ladies from said organisation?)
Pitfalls.
Here’s a more detailed guide to what I could have achieved to help hundreds of poor children. If those ladies had bothered to check my background, they would have learned a great deal about what led me to become a charity worker committed to helping vulnerable children. They may also have been able to do so much more to help those children themselves if only they hadn’t fallen into the pit of judgment without trial.
It’s probably important to know I was then, and still, now, a single man who’s been married a few times with grown-up children and a whole bunch of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. But the ladies didn’t seem to look beyond their well-established belief that any single man over the age of 50 who lives in Bangkok must be considered a sex-patriate, not an ex-patriate like their executive husbands.
As already mentioned, a few years ago, I was privileged to be invited to work as a volunteer operative with an organisation set up for the sole purpose of catching the bad guys, getting their victims into safe hands, and then helping with recovery from their ordeal. I have so far reported quite a few potential abusers, and to my knowledge, some of them are now behind bars, where it’s hoped they remain for a very long time.
Even with such a respectable history, I am still a ‘MAN’ working with some not-so-vulnerable and some very vulnerable children in Southeast Asia. I am proud of my profession, and I’ve dedicated my life to ensuring that my work always benefits people without strings attached. I know this because I have spent many years studying and practising my chosen profession, just as doctors, lawyers, or any other professional must do to succeed.
Another reason for this article started in 2013. Any British people reading this will know about the well-known UK millionaire and third-rate TV personality Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris, and others who have managed to double the uphill slog that many others must climb to convince people that not all men who work with children are raging paedophiles.
Though I have never been abused by Jimmy Savile or any other high-profile paedophiles, I am nevertheless a survivor of child sexual abuse and rape from the age of six to thirteen. Most of the predators were Cubs or Scoutmasters and their friends. Plus, some complete strangers spotted my vulnerability as a latchkey child/victim (no family members).
Quotes from my TV documentary focusing on what happened to me: “I was an innocent child -- Those men who abused me were not!” I have learned that with the right kind of therapy and help, victims of such heinous crimes are sometimes able to learn how to become good, honest, and caring people themselves eventually. The cycle of abuse can be stopped. We survivors must get used to the idea that what happened to us was not our fault. That’s why it’s called ABUSE!
Many people think that abused children automatically become abusers themselves. I also believe that’s true of a large percentage of victims of child sex, violence, or mental abuse. I only hope that now there’s less taboo surrounding this subject, more of those children can talk about what’s happened to them before they do become adults who keep the cycle rolling.
In my case, it took me until my early 40s to realise the profound impact of what had happened to me. I lost all the innocence of childhood when I was just learning to string sentences together and spell my own name. When my wife left me at 42, I couldn’t understand why she had stopped loving me. I was left devastated and suicidal, which led to a long period of drug and alcohol addiction, psychotherapy, and rehabilitation. It was during this time that I finally came to terms with the loss of my childhood.
I understood that I had become an angry (never violent), possessive, and dismissive husband to the woman I loved the most, and that’s why she left. I’m now pleased to know that, at least, she settled well and happily with a new husband and two children. Sadly, she suffered from early-onset Alzheimer’s in her late 40s and is now lost to the world. I was ‘lucky’ because, had she not left me, I might never have faced what had made me so deeply depressed, angry, and dismissive for most of my adult life. Details of what happened to me will soon be published in another article/book aimed at helping survivors of child sexual abuse.
Now, I am finally free from depression, drug and alcohol addictions, and the constant search for love with numerous potential partners. All the miserable feelings and suicidal thoughts that many survivors must fight off are no longer part of my life. I am genuinely content and happy with life.
Along with many others in teaching, nursing, and other professions that involve working with children, we are still profoundly affected by the revelations about Savile, Harris, and several others who have been charged with crimes of abuse against children. Unlike Savile and his associates, I have always made it a point never to be alone with any child in my care, and I always have all the correct, verifiable CRB certificates required by law to work with children. Despite this, I still find that some people’s preconceived ideas about ‘MALES’ who work with children have turned my personal struggle to establish and maintain my own good name into an uphill and time-consuming task.
I’m getting tired of having to justify my existence as a single man who works with children simply because I genuinely enjoy seeing innocent little human beings appreciate all the years of hard work I had to go through to become good at what I do for them. “If I were a woman, I’m sure no one would give it a second thought.” But I’m a ‘MAN’, so I suppose I just have to accept that some people are always going to read something nasty into whatever I do when I’m in contact with children.
As already hinted, I’m now finally happy and settled with the new love of my life. She’s not a woman or a man, a child, a god, a fast car, or even a pet. My total dedication is now the love of giving something I’m good at giving. I simply provide essential needs to poor children and their parents if they have any. I receive more pleasure from sharing this than I could ever have imagined when those nasty perverts were doing their best to destroy any goodness that could have developed when I was a child myself.
Indeed, my life has become a nonstop mission to provide essential moments of joy to those great little kids who otherwise receive very little joy in their lives. So, no amount of backstabbing comments about what I may be up to when giving my heart and soul to those poor little blighters is ever going to stop me from doing what I do best. Quite simply showing them that men can be good guys sometimes.
Now, it’s entirely up to readers of this article to decide how to think of me as an honest Joe or just another lying, sad little paedophile trying to cover his own tracks. In the end, I am the only one who really knows the truth. And being that person, I know that while I am alive and when I’m dead, No one will ever be able to call me another one of those sub humans that deserve the title of ‘Child Sex Abuser’.
The whole point of this statement is to try and show whoever reads it (and some ladies) that not all men are paedophiles just because they work with children, and even we survivors of child sex abuse don’t all end up doing the same as our abusers. In fact, some of us end up making sure that children we have the privilege to know and work with are all given the opportunity to see that not all ‘MEN’ are after their innocent little bodies or minds!
So, please spare a thought for those of us who have survived being abused without becoming offenders ourselves. And consider that some of us have even made it our true mission in life to help, protect and make happy the innocent children of this world.
Despite those morons we read about, I genuinely believe that men can and should work with children - Really!
Finally, I can’t leave this without saying. Thanks for nothing, Jimmy Savile, Gary Glitter, Stewart Hall, Rolf Harris and all the other sad little celebrity child abusers! -- You had wealth, fame and power. Why did you need to take those children’s innocent lives as well, you selfish little worms?
“And remember, folks, if you ever find yourself in a room full of diplomats and dignitaries,
just make sure to keep the sherry flowing, it seems to be the secret ingredient for world peace,
at least until the hangover clears!”
just make sure to keep the sherry flowing, it seems to be the secret ingredient for world peace,
at least until the hangover clears!”
Newt Su Queer as Folk. (By a neuro diverse travelling Buffoon)
I am a bloke of a certain age, born in Manchester before it became Manchusta and schooled in the '50s and early '60s in Bolton, Lancashire, then a county of cotton and coal. There, I learned about grown men who loved Scouting for little boys and how to stand in Victorian-built classroom corners, a Dunce's Hat perched atop my Dyslexic head.
I've been tossing around the phrase "There's Newt Su Queer as Folk" for nigh on 50 years. A proper northern saying, right up there with "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now", slipping effortlessly off the tongue of any suitably baffled northerner. Or at least, the mindful sort, the ones impervious to tabloid nonsense, badly acted TV soaps and the hypnotic lure of popular sports.
It's the remark of choice when confronted with those more than a touch eccentric, those teetering on the brink of being sectioned under the Mental Health Act. The sort who willingly surrender their evenings and weekends to watching grown men play children's ball games beamed through an electrically charged plastic rectangle that reigns supreme in every living room and so-called sports bar.
Ee-by-gum "There's newt so queer as folk," and if anyone's qualified to say so, I reckon it's anyone with a touch of artistic neurodivergence, like me. Or anyone else who has no telly has never seen a blockbuster film and couldn't tell you who the hell any so-called celebrities are, except for Billie Holiday, Ian Dury, Robin Williams, Ken Dodd, Douglas Adams, Stephen Fry, and a few others who are mostly now long gone, never to be replaced.
Since May 4th, 1979, the day life in the UK was struck by a privately guided, terminally malignant asteroid that crash-landed in central London. The same day, I crash-landed, comatose, with life-changing injuries on the tarmac of a Scottish road. Yes, since that grim day in UK history and soon after, in the USA, I spent nearly five years relearning how to walk, how to exist in a life of abandonment and desperate loneliness once the money ran dry and my future ex-wife took our children to live with a non-disabled, well-paid new breadwinner.
Then, around 1985, armed with metal implants in my limbs, two walking sticks, and a rucksack strapped to my once-broken back, I set out. Four decades of roaming far and wide, surviving in homeless shelters, rough sleeping, and hard labouring work while honing the skills gifted to me by the British health system's rehabilitation programs as a musician and, later, a street entertainer.
I unwittingly embarked on what became a deeply immersive study into the art of buffoonery, wherever it dared to rear its ridiculous head. Over time, that knowledge shaped my evolution into a professional buffoon because if I didn't gather, hold, and entertain an audience, I didn't eat.
There's no social security, no pity for a disabled British busker in Istanbul or anywhere beyond the wreckage of my 1980s newly privatised, dismantled homeland. In learning how to survive and, eventually, thrive as a world-travelling buffoon, I regularly found myself saying, "There's Newt Su Queer as Folk."
From backstreet bars teeming with Bangkok bullshitters, self-proclaimed sages drowning in their own alcohol-fuelled delusions, to the Shanghai Lilly's trading their bodies for a pack of real US ciggies, I've encountered the full spectrum of human absurdity: the baffling, the bizarre, the nerds and the downright bonkers.
No corner of the world is immune to the peculiarities of folk. Some are daft as a brush. Some possess a wisdom that defies logic. Others remain so gloriously unaware of their own eccentricities that they turn everyday life into an unintentional live-action-comedy sketch, unwittingly teaching neuro-diverse buffoons like me the finer nuances of the art form.
So, here’s a few of the places I learned to discover a fact that has been my mantra for several decades past; we all laugh in the same language.
Yes, for years, I wandered Europe, tasting rich red sausage, cheese, lager, and wine aplenty. Glittering clothes adorned make-believe plastic bodies, designed with hedonistic flair, prancing like show horses around Milano, Torino, Venice, and Rome, surrounded by the unseen dark-skinned slave survivors, their begging bowls polished clean. The stylish Swiss, Austrians, French, and Germans basked in classical art, their conversations circling yachts, Ferraris, and screaming fat ladies breaking the sound barrier on glittering stages, watched by penguin-suited men and diamond-studded, fruit bowl-headed ladies. Northern Europe where climate and pimps encourage inside activities as advertised in red-framed shop widows, in cities where everyone is a street entertainer from birth and never fill a busker’s hat. "Oh yeh, There's Newt Su Queer as them folk!”
East Germany, tank roads lined with white-striped trees, no petrol without a 12-hour queue, roasting pigs turning in medieval market village squares, a grim prelude to the journey west. Berlin with Hitlers Reichstag till shattered, and pop marked with a million bullet holes and the newest building proclaiming Aeroflot as the best airline in the world, so long as you can read it in Russian. Passing under the Brandenburg gate standing proudly without its quadriga rampant horses that would have once looked down on a wall of death.
Yet nothing compared to a life-changing bus ride from the remains of the beautiful Gothic city of Krakow to the heavily industrialised smog-covered town of Oswiecim. Followed by a long silent walk out of town to find myself alone under an avenue of 50-year-old full-grown poplar trees where no birds dare sing and dogs won’t bark. An Avenue built for Gestapo camp-guard’s families to enjoy walking with their children picking flowers between the newly planted trees, from 1940 until the truth killed them as well. A sad, long, cold Avenue whose name translates to; Auschwitz Prisoners Street, but known to millions as the Avenue of death, leading to the gate: "ARBEIT MACHT FREI."
Now, in 2025, the mind recoils at the thought of fascists twisting time backwards, ready to begin again. 'M guiltily grateful, that I’m so old now, I may not witness the final act. Yet my heart aches for all grand-sprogs and their new-born's. I'm sorry my generation let you down, I whisper, head bowed, heavy with sorrow and abject shame. We should have stopped the wicked witch of greed and power before she bought the press who did the rest.
As a wandering minstrel, human cement mixer, and fruit-picking labourer, I drifted to the warmer, musty green lands of olive-soaked Peloponnese. This was a place where Spartans once ruled, and tortoises bred in hiding from bearded, mitre-headed Orthodox titans. Those troubled men in black robes consumed reptiles and songbirds while sullying the minds of new-born peasants and their ancestors with their ancient, dark, satanic fairy stories. It was a time where time itself had stood still, while olive trees and orange groves blossomed, and withering-bodied peasants crawled before their high priests in hopes of being reborn into a better existence as sewer rats. Alas, no more old ladies riding side-saddle on donkeys, no more dreams of happier rebirth, just raped virgin olives, Uzo, Metaxas, Retsina, and the ritual smashing of plates, all catering to tourist needs. The once vibrant traditions and hopes of the locals had been reduced to mere spectacles for the amusement of visitors.
The polluted streets of Athens thick with desperation and danger, where a gangster ship owner sent his men to shove my buffoon's body into a big black car, its tyres rolling toward the smoky steamship port of Piraeus. In exchange for a seaman's job on a vessel bound for Peru, Mr. Big had set his price. He would take the busker's British girlfriend but not her young son, a nightmare deal sealed at gunpoint in the dimly lit swaying hold of a listing ship. But the buffoon, a master of illusion, conjured his greatest trick yet, making the girl vanish with her child before the bargain was fulfilled. Little did I know that thirty years on, that same boy would grow into a man, only to brutally murder his own mother. A grief too heavy to bear, an anguish beyond words. And in this instance, there's Newt Su Queer as Folk is far too hollow to be spoken.
My alcohol and drug-soaked lonely life in Athena was soon rescued by a young goddess from Lapland. At first, I couldn’t be sure if she was real or just another one of my substance-induced hallucinations. In her search for work as a busker's bottler (cash collector), she found me semi-conscious, with my head in the makeshift urinal of a rat-infested flop-house basement bar, located within sight of the Parthenon. The sight and sound of her perfect Inuit persona caused me to abandon my basement hiding place and clean up my image so much that the shipping mafia henchmen couldn’t recognize me. “We Westerners all look the same to them”. Then, with my Lappish “future-ex-wife,” we set about making enough busking money to escape. Just a few weeks after she saved me, we boarded the midnight express to Istanbul.
A year or so later, I ventured to Lapland's far north, led by my precious Sámi Inuit bride-to-be, surrounded by cloudberries, lingonberries, moose, and beavers. Beneath red, yellow, and green skies, breath-taking beauty stretched across the tundra, where sunlight is a rare gift. Her Joik, a traditional Sámi song, was a haunting melody that echoed through the vast landscapes. Now, the echoes of her beautiful Joik, her incredible ancient-cultured mind and soul have faded into my deep-felt sorrow, lost within the haze of her early-onset Alzheimer's mind. Oh, it's all such a blur, oh, still so hard to bear, oh there’s no point in trying to replace her.
Turkish, white-bearded male dolls stacked inside minarets, their prayers spilling through cheap tin-pot speakers. Bubbling baby-dummy pipes exhale empty steam into a city where Turkish delight is Noh but a myth. But fishing the Bosporus and sharing food with fishermen are the only pleasures found in a land where possessions belong to the fastest hands. The essential buffoon's escape to the West was a three-day bus trip, but oh, what a joyful ride when, in Constantinople, two men with long knives lay waiting in shadows, eager to bag a dead buffoon's passport and his new future bride.
Arabic saffron deserts, thick with camels, black gold, and greed. Women still trapped, ashamed when they bleed, afraid when they breathe the men's polluted city air or drink desalinated waters. Veiled and silenced in a brand-new world of wealth, shaped by grandfathers who once roamed the sands as nomads. But I knew old Arabia. A long drive from Dubai as it clawed its way into rebirth, while Abu Dhabi remained a mere speck of desert dust, baking in fifty degrees. Now there's a Newt Su Queer place if ever there was one.
The Manhattan Park, with its Lennon star, where fast-food high-rises are standing tall. Twins, both gone, yet sub-humans still linger in Birkenhead's copied oasis, while midnight cowboys die unseen just beyond its green, where Hispanic hookers spread std's. Super-fast elevators take buffoons high as clouds atop a man-made small Empire looking down on big yellow taxies weaving through steamy sewer covers absorbing gun-shot noise while listening out for NYPD sirens. All the while eggs-over-easy enough to feed a nation, given to temporarily shut-out the noise of individual N-Yurok mouths while they fill morbidly obese bellies with Dollar-print-fast-poisons. Still a buzzing City of non-stop drama backlit by ten-million lights, world-class graffiti art, Marvel Comics, the sounds of world-class Jazz, the screeching sounds of broadways all-American musicals and the Met’s fat ladies screaming out the over-ripe fruit songs of Carmen Maranda. “Oh, my Buddha, there’s really Newt Su Queer as that-lot!"
India plagued with poverty surrounded by untold wealth that goes unchecked behind well maintained cast-structures. Yet, generosity knows no bounds amongst untouchables eager to feed Western buffoons who simply grace their presence with just a smile. A smile they’ve never seen on their own cleanly oiled, gaunt human face’s. A smile repaid with a humbling share of their precious few grains of rice, dashed with a little cheap opium. India, a land where survival amongst the poor folk depends on carefully measuring the hallucinogenic offerings needed hide an alien mind behind the sights of empty mother’s breasts heavy with desperate hanging infants. India, a place where anything goes for those who board overloaded train’s going to places only seen by few Western travellers. A place for secret adult encounters where a British buffoon learned to unwinding Indian saris wrapped around perfectly shaped women in forbidden places where fathers cannot cast their unyielding gaze. India, where crazy menfolk wield Kalashnikov-cricket bats, poised for the deadly match against partitioned neighbours they need to beat without an umpire's call. Ahh, India taught me buffoonery at its worst and its best, leaving a myriad of stories I may always suppress, or maybe I'll just say, Newt Su Queer as Folk, where eccentricities and tales so bold may never unfold.
China red with blood of toil, leaders grow fat as minions boil in foundries, sweatshops, mills and poisoned fields. Firecrackers erupt day and night as Shanghai's skyline fades into the smog. Old women walk backwards to balance their minds against the world's weight. Young men battle to carve their claim, selling trinkets the West never tyres of. While Shanghai-Lilys, lost souls, and pickpockets lurk in the shadows of neon-lit streets, whispering offers of anything and everything for just a dollar or little more. Aye, a place where Western buffoons like me risk learning too much by glimpsing the queerness of folk pressed beneath the Chairman's rule.
Siam smiles at royal gods, brown robes, bent leaders, and hell's-teeth-food that burns both ends. The nights run wild, wise girls and boys blissfully milking old western men with their feigned joy. Drink and drive, just pay the cops who pay their sergeants, who pay their generals, who pay their governors, who pay their politicians, who pay the heads who hide their wealth from those who cannot be named. It just costs more when a life is lost, but lives are cheap in far-eastern lands. Hence, they attract unloved western men who buy, then discard the pretty young lives when looks start to fade. Little do they see their illusions drowning slowly inside their cheap bottled cheer until the last drop of fortune leads them to their final leap from Bangkok’s concrete heights, leaving their broken dreams to continue feeding bargirls' families in red-dust hovels where rice once grew. I escaped all that in favour of learning more buffoonery for my neuro diverse mind to polish and use to make poor people happy. More than two decades of learning from Bangkok bulshitting buffoons has helped me survive a vast collection of Newt Su Queer experiences that may eventually be told, but for now, I will move on with a few more places that have shaped my survival on our speck of universal dust.
Burmese lives, squandered to fatten a junta, sad ethnic voices muffled like distant thunder. Oh, the sorrow buried within this once treasured land, now filled with dead children, some I once knew. All sacrificed for tin-pot Generals to be adorned in gold, not a thought that such pointless trinkets are destined for the furnace to melt with their bones.
Laos is a third-world land where tribes live literally beneath American bomb shells, scattered across tiny islands in an inland sea where a sinister, secret Alcatraz lurks in the depths. The mainland brims with water, rice, and buffalo, yet families scrape by, starving while their mafia bosses parade gold chains and hollow promises.
Cambodia, world-wonderous ancient temples and little infrastructure, with what's left to walk on being made of human bone, and a school turned prison in what's left of Phnom Penh. For those who like it, ten dollars gets you a few shots with an old Yankee gun, and 50 dollars gets you a rocket launcher. All to be had just a mile away from the killing fields where skulls look down on fat western tourists roaming with rubber necks amongst the saw-blade cactus that once cut off heads of babies.
Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos once suffocated beneath Nixon's metal. Pol Pot's sickness is now a ghost of history. Yet resilience flourishes, setting sail to conquer the armadas of cruise ships, each vessel swollen with the offspring of fat-bellied Vietnam vets, catching their own 22.
Yes, North, East, Centre and back to West, plus so many other places filled with Newt-Su-Queer memories where I’ve certainly lived the best.
Now, home's a land I’ve lost its track. A land of Celtic patterned Ink-stained bodies, Botox lips, precious metal-studded skin posing boldly and brightly like peacocks-flared, desperately craving the spotlight's gaze. Bare knees in frost for her and him. What ghastly sights I can't unsee. Fashions and Fascism sold on screens, and all sense is lost to online dreams.
Oh yes, I’ve seen a few. The ones who praise flat earthers spouting their cosmic craze should be locked securely in a global cage. God-botherers, gazing skyward daily, wailing faith's lies loudly repeating mental slavery, heard by bewildered real-life scholars facing facts, not crazy. Conspiracists scatter doctored theories like green-weed-seeded rain, spouting paranoia, riding the wind of lies again and yet again. Coins clink in halls of shame, echoing greed's relentless call, where brass is weighed with ruthless hands to build empires that rise and fall. Mercenaries chase fortunes bright as fiery hell, blind to hunger, deaf to plight, feeding their sick desires with gold while hope fades slowly into night. No thought is spared for weary souls lost beneath ambition's tide. Only riches rule their hearts, no mercy, shame, love, or guide.
So yes, I confidently say: "There's Newt Su Queer as Folk" to all of them and more; I tip my hat and bid them adieu with a quietly spoken "Ah-well, Newt Su Queer" muttered under a crinkly lip of smugness and sadness as my travelled mind surely sees the lie.
And me? Well, I’ve found a happy place to while away my time. It's a little nook of laughter, props, and memories that houses more than forty years of Buffoonery art, which, yes, is a little museum made straight from my heart. Oh, what joy! What a blessed time. I pass on jokes and pantomime to those who may not know the art of delivering belly laughs, pathos and mime.
Yet as I await the guests by my shopfront wide, mug-o-tea in hand, I watch outside, seeing uniforms of all ilk pass by, like reflections of the times when I wore mine. I see camouflage-clad lads topped off with fake design shades askew and backwards-facing baseball hats, too. Grown men donning footy kits stretched tight over beer bellies. Yet, proud and loyal to millionaires promoting children's ball games, they once did play. All hail the beautiful game so pointlessly played by semi-literates, so very well paid. I'll wager a bet that each little ball landing inside their hallowed net delivers another million towards their boss's yacht. I'd further bet that their big net could be better used to catch fish enough to feed a small country.
As for the young-uns, uniformly struggling to be cool and world-savvy, much like I did once when it was mods, rockers, and tie-dye flower power. Their uncertain future seems thin as air, with AI feeding war-mongering billionaires. Add climate change to their innocent lives; well, it's just so unfair that we grownups just stood and stared at humankind's madness since that May day.
Still, the town's full of folks around my age, all uniformly waiting to meet their chosen maker to whom some pray. Women already made up with a fresh blue rinse, grandly strutting fake designer bags, toy doggies and sensible shoes. Men with white manicured beards, blue jeans, important strange handshake club lapel pins and brown sensible shoes that slowly walk them around their chosen God's waiting room.
Yet, before I go, what's this plastic uniform seen far and wide? Mobility scooters glide by, carrying young and old alike, all with a serious eye to any judgmental passing sigh. Some disabilities can't be seen, so my judgment may be mean. Thing is, there's no telly for me, so an advert ever gets past the off switch on the wireless or TV. But I’ll bet my hat; they'll not be advertising; walking prolongs active life while sitting only makes for a comfier final path. I hear them say with a sadness-in-tone, “You Only Live Once”, but I think I know a little different, cause I’ve seen a few. “You Only Die Once!”
Anyroadup, young and old, I’ll ponder thy ways until my own queerness fades, in the firm knowledge, There's Newt Su Queer as Folk these days...
I am a bloke of a certain age, born in Manchester before it became Manchusta and schooled in the '50s and early '60s in Bolton, Lancashire, then a county of cotton and coal. There, I learned about grown men who loved Scouting for little boys and how to stand in Victorian-built classroom corners, a Dunce's Hat perched atop my Dyslexic head.
I've been tossing around the phrase "There's Newt Su Queer as Folk" for nigh on 50 years. A proper northern saying, right up there with "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now", slipping effortlessly off the tongue of any suitably baffled northerner. Or at least, the mindful sort, the ones impervious to tabloid nonsense, badly acted TV soaps and the hypnotic lure of popular sports.
It's the remark of choice when confronted with those more than a touch eccentric, those teetering on the brink of being sectioned under the Mental Health Act. The sort who willingly surrender their evenings and weekends to watching grown men play children's ball games beamed through an electrically charged plastic rectangle that reigns supreme in every living room and so-called sports bar.
Ee-by-gum "There's newt so queer as folk," and if anyone's qualified to say so, I reckon it's anyone with a touch of artistic neurodivergence, like me. Or anyone else who has no telly has never seen a blockbuster film and couldn't tell you who the hell any so-called celebrities are, except for Billie Holiday, Ian Dury, Robin Williams, Ken Dodd, Douglas Adams, Stephen Fry, and a few others who are mostly now long gone, never to be replaced.
Since May 4th, 1979, the day life in the UK was struck by a privately guided, terminally malignant asteroid that crash-landed in central London. The same day, I crash-landed, comatose, with life-changing injuries on the tarmac of a Scottish road. Yes, since that grim day in UK history and soon after, in the USA, I spent nearly five years relearning how to walk, how to exist in a life of abandonment and desperate loneliness once the money ran dry and my future ex-wife took our children to live with a non-disabled, well-paid new breadwinner.
Then, around 1985, armed with metal implants in my limbs, two walking sticks, and a rucksack strapped to my once-broken back, I set out. Four decades of roaming far and wide, surviving in homeless shelters, rough sleeping, and hard labouring work while honing the skills gifted to me by the British health system's rehabilitation programs as a musician and, later, a street entertainer.
I unwittingly embarked on what became a deeply immersive study into the art of buffoonery, wherever it dared to rear its ridiculous head. Over time, that knowledge shaped my evolution into a professional buffoon because if I didn't gather, hold, and entertain an audience, I didn't eat.
There's no social security, no pity for a disabled British busker in Istanbul or anywhere beyond the wreckage of my 1980s newly privatised, dismantled homeland. In learning how to survive and, eventually, thrive as a world-travelling buffoon, I regularly found myself saying, "There's Newt Su Queer as Folk."
From backstreet bars teeming with Bangkok bullshitters, self-proclaimed sages drowning in their own alcohol-fuelled delusions, to the Shanghai Lilly's trading their bodies for a pack of real US ciggies, I've encountered the full spectrum of human absurdity: the baffling, the bizarre, the nerds and the downright bonkers.
No corner of the world is immune to the peculiarities of folk. Some are daft as a brush. Some possess a wisdom that defies logic. Others remain so gloriously unaware of their own eccentricities that they turn everyday life into an unintentional live-action-comedy sketch, unwittingly teaching neuro-diverse buffoons like me the finer nuances of the art form.
So, here’s a few of the places I learned to discover a fact that has been my mantra for several decades past; we all laugh in the same language.
Yes, for years, I wandered Europe, tasting rich red sausage, cheese, lager, and wine aplenty. Glittering clothes adorned make-believe plastic bodies, designed with hedonistic flair, prancing like show horses around Milano, Torino, Venice, and Rome, surrounded by the unseen dark-skinned slave survivors, their begging bowls polished clean. The stylish Swiss, Austrians, French, and Germans basked in classical art, their conversations circling yachts, Ferraris, and screaming fat ladies breaking the sound barrier on glittering stages, watched by penguin-suited men and diamond-studded, fruit bowl-headed ladies. Northern Europe where climate and pimps encourage inside activities as advertised in red-framed shop widows, in cities where everyone is a street entertainer from birth and never fill a busker’s hat. "Oh yeh, There's Newt Su Queer as them folk!”
East Germany, tank roads lined with white-striped trees, no petrol without a 12-hour queue, roasting pigs turning in medieval market village squares, a grim prelude to the journey west. Berlin with Hitlers Reichstag till shattered, and pop marked with a million bullet holes and the newest building proclaiming Aeroflot as the best airline in the world, so long as you can read it in Russian. Passing under the Brandenburg gate standing proudly without its quadriga rampant horses that would have once looked down on a wall of death.
Yet nothing compared to a life-changing bus ride from the remains of the beautiful Gothic city of Krakow to the heavily industrialised smog-covered town of Oswiecim. Followed by a long silent walk out of town to find myself alone under an avenue of 50-year-old full-grown poplar trees where no birds dare sing and dogs won’t bark. An Avenue built for Gestapo camp-guard’s families to enjoy walking with their children picking flowers between the newly planted trees, from 1940 until the truth killed them as well. A sad, long, cold Avenue whose name translates to; Auschwitz Prisoners Street, but known to millions as the Avenue of death, leading to the gate: "ARBEIT MACHT FREI."
Now, in 2025, the mind recoils at the thought of fascists twisting time backwards, ready to begin again. 'M guiltily grateful, that I’m so old now, I may not witness the final act. Yet my heart aches for all grand-sprogs and their new-born's. I'm sorry my generation let you down, I whisper, head bowed, heavy with sorrow and abject shame. We should have stopped the wicked witch of greed and power before she bought the press who did the rest.
As a wandering minstrel, human cement mixer, and fruit-picking labourer, I drifted to the warmer, musty green lands of olive-soaked Peloponnese. This was a place where Spartans once ruled, and tortoises bred in hiding from bearded, mitre-headed Orthodox titans. Those troubled men in black robes consumed reptiles and songbirds while sullying the minds of new-born peasants and their ancestors with their ancient, dark, satanic fairy stories. It was a time where time itself had stood still, while olive trees and orange groves blossomed, and withering-bodied peasants crawled before their high priests in hopes of being reborn into a better existence as sewer rats. Alas, no more old ladies riding side-saddle on donkeys, no more dreams of happier rebirth, just raped virgin olives, Uzo, Metaxas, Retsina, and the ritual smashing of plates, all catering to tourist needs. The once vibrant traditions and hopes of the locals had been reduced to mere spectacles for the amusement of visitors.
The polluted streets of Athens thick with desperation and danger, where a gangster ship owner sent his men to shove my buffoon's body into a big black car, its tyres rolling toward the smoky steamship port of Piraeus. In exchange for a seaman's job on a vessel bound for Peru, Mr. Big had set his price. He would take the busker's British girlfriend but not her young son, a nightmare deal sealed at gunpoint in the dimly lit swaying hold of a listing ship. But the buffoon, a master of illusion, conjured his greatest trick yet, making the girl vanish with her child before the bargain was fulfilled. Little did I know that thirty years on, that same boy would grow into a man, only to brutally murder his own mother. A grief too heavy to bear, an anguish beyond words. And in this instance, there's Newt Su Queer as Folk is far too hollow to be spoken.
My alcohol and drug-soaked lonely life in Athena was soon rescued by a young goddess from Lapland. At first, I couldn’t be sure if she was real or just another one of my substance-induced hallucinations. In her search for work as a busker's bottler (cash collector), she found me semi-conscious, with my head in the makeshift urinal of a rat-infested flop-house basement bar, located within sight of the Parthenon. The sight and sound of her perfect Inuit persona caused me to abandon my basement hiding place and clean up my image so much that the shipping mafia henchmen couldn’t recognize me. “We Westerners all look the same to them”. Then, with my Lappish “future-ex-wife,” we set about making enough busking money to escape. Just a few weeks after she saved me, we boarded the midnight express to Istanbul.
A year or so later, I ventured to Lapland's far north, led by my precious Sámi Inuit bride-to-be, surrounded by cloudberries, lingonberries, moose, and beavers. Beneath red, yellow, and green skies, breath-taking beauty stretched across the tundra, where sunlight is a rare gift. Her Joik, a traditional Sámi song, was a haunting melody that echoed through the vast landscapes. Now, the echoes of her beautiful Joik, her incredible ancient-cultured mind and soul have faded into my deep-felt sorrow, lost within the haze of her early-onset Alzheimer's mind. Oh, it's all such a blur, oh, still so hard to bear, oh there’s no point in trying to replace her.
Turkish, white-bearded male dolls stacked inside minarets, their prayers spilling through cheap tin-pot speakers. Bubbling baby-dummy pipes exhale empty steam into a city where Turkish delight is Noh but a myth. But fishing the Bosporus and sharing food with fishermen are the only pleasures found in a land where possessions belong to the fastest hands. The essential buffoon's escape to the West was a three-day bus trip, but oh, what a joyful ride when, in Constantinople, two men with long knives lay waiting in shadows, eager to bag a dead buffoon's passport and his new future bride.
Arabic saffron deserts, thick with camels, black gold, and greed. Women still trapped, ashamed when they bleed, afraid when they breathe the men's polluted city air or drink desalinated waters. Veiled and silenced in a brand-new world of wealth, shaped by grandfathers who once roamed the sands as nomads. But I knew old Arabia. A long drive from Dubai as it clawed its way into rebirth, while Abu Dhabi remained a mere speck of desert dust, baking in fifty degrees. Now there's a Newt Su Queer place if ever there was one.
The Manhattan Park, with its Lennon star, where fast-food high-rises are standing tall. Twins, both gone, yet sub-humans still linger in Birkenhead's copied oasis, while midnight cowboys die unseen just beyond its green, where Hispanic hookers spread std's. Super-fast elevators take buffoons high as clouds atop a man-made small Empire looking down on big yellow taxies weaving through steamy sewer covers absorbing gun-shot noise while listening out for NYPD sirens. All the while eggs-over-easy enough to feed a nation, given to temporarily shut-out the noise of individual N-Yurok mouths while they fill morbidly obese bellies with Dollar-print-fast-poisons. Still a buzzing City of non-stop drama backlit by ten-million lights, world-class graffiti art, Marvel Comics, the sounds of world-class Jazz, the screeching sounds of broadways all-American musicals and the Met’s fat ladies screaming out the over-ripe fruit songs of Carmen Maranda. “Oh, my Buddha, there’s really Newt Su Queer as that-lot!"
India plagued with poverty surrounded by untold wealth that goes unchecked behind well maintained cast-structures. Yet, generosity knows no bounds amongst untouchables eager to feed Western buffoons who simply grace their presence with just a smile. A smile they’ve never seen on their own cleanly oiled, gaunt human face’s. A smile repaid with a humbling share of their precious few grains of rice, dashed with a little cheap opium. India, a land where survival amongst the poor folk depends on carefully measuring the hallucinogenic offerings needed hide an alien mind behind the sights of empty mother’s breasts heavy with desperate hanging infants. India, a place where anything goes for those who board overloaded train’s going to places only seen by few Western travellers. A place for secret adult encounters where a British buffoon learned to unwinding Indian saris wrapped around perfectly shaped women in forbidden places where fathers cannot cast their unyielding gaze. India, where crazy menfolk wield Kalashnikov-cricket bats, poised for the deadly match against partitioned neighbours they need to beat without an umpire's call. Ahh, India taught me buffoonery at its worst and its best, leaving a myriad of stories I may always suppress, or maybe I'll just say, Newt Su Queer as Folk, where eccentricities and tales so bold may never unfold.
China red with blood of toil, leaders grow fat as minions boil in foundries, sweatshops, mills and poisoned fields. Firecrackers erupt day and night as Shanghai's skyline fades into the smog. Old women walk backwards to balance their minds against the world's weight. Young men battle to carve their claim, selling trinkets the West never tyres of. While Shanghai-Lilys, lost souls, and pickpockets lurk in the shadows of neon-lit streets, whispering offers of anything and everything for just a dollar or little more. Aye, a place where Western buffoons like me risk learning too much by glimpsing the queerness of folk pressed beneath the Chairman's rule.
Siam smiles at royal gods, brown robes, bent leaders, and hell's-teeth-food that burns both ends. The nights run wild, wise girls and boys blissfully milking old western men with their feigned joy. Drink and drive, just pay the cops who pay their sergeants, who pay their generals, who pay their governors, who pay their politicians, who pay the heads who hide their wealth from those who cannot be named. It just costs more when a life is lost, but lives are cheap in far-eastern lands. Hence, they attract unloved western men who buy, then discard the pretty young lives when looks start to fade. Little do they see their illusions drowning slowly inside their cheap bottled cheer until the last drop of fortune leads them to their final leap from Bangkok’s concrete heights, leaving their broken dreams to continue feeding bargirls' families in red-dust hovels where rice once grew. I escaped all that in favour of learning more buffoonery for my neuro diverse mind to polish and use to make poor people happy. More than two decades of learning from Bangkok bulshitting buffoons has helped me survive a vast collection of Newt Su Queer experiences that may eventually be told, but for now, I will move on with a few more places that have shaped my survival on our speck of universal dust.
Burmese lives, squandered to fatten a junta, sad ethnic voices muffled like distant thunder. Oh, the sorrow buried within this once treasured land, now filled with dead children, some I once knew. All sacrificed for tin-pot Generals to be adorned in gold, not a thought that such pointless trinkets are destined for the furnace to melt with their bones.
Laos is a third-world land where tribes live literally beneath American bomb shells, scattered across tiny islands in an inland sea where a sinister, secret Alcatraz lurks in the depths. The mainland brims with water, rice, and buffalo, yet families scrape by, starving while their mafia bosses parade gold chains and hollow promises.
Cambodia, world-wonderous ancient temples and little infrastructure, with what's left to walk on being made of human bone, and a school turned prison in what's left of Phnom Penh. For those who like it, ten dollars gets you a few shots with an old Yankee gun, and 50 dollars gets you a rocket launcher. All to be had just a mile away from the killing fields where skulls look down on fat western tourists roaming with rubber necks amongst the saw-blade cactus that once cut off heads of babies.
Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos once suffocated beneath Nixon's metal. Pol Pot's sickness is now a ghost of history. Yet resilience flourishes, setting sail to conquer the armadas of cruise ships, each vessel swollen with the offspring of fat-bellied Vietnam vets, catching their own 22.
Yes, North, East, Centre and back to West, plus so many other places filled with Newt-Su-Queer memories where I’ve certainly lived the best.
Now, home's a land I’ve lost its track. A land of Celtic patterned Ink-stained bodies, Botox lips, precious metal-studded skin posing boldly and brightly like peacocks-flared, desperately craving the spotlight's gaze. Bare knees in frost for her and him. What ghastly sights I can't unsee. Fashions and Fascism sold on screens, and all sense is lost to online dreams.
Oh yes, I’ve seen a few. The ones who praise flat earthers spouting their cosmic craze should be locked securely in a global cage. God-botherers, gazing skyward daily, wailing faith's lies loudly repeating mental slavery, heard by bewildered real-life scholars facing facts, not crazy. Conspiracists scatter doctored theories like green-weed-seeded rain, spouting paranoia, riding the wind of lies again and yet again. Coins clink in halls of shame, echoing greed's relentless call, where brass is weighed with ruthless hands to build empires that rise and fall. Mercenaries chase fortunes bright as fiery hell, blind to hunger, deaf to plight, feeding their sick desires with gold while hope fades slowly into night. No thought is spared for weary souls lost beneath ambition's tide. Only riches rule their hearts, no mercy, shame, love, or guide.
So yes, I confidently say: "There's Newt Su Queer as Folk" to all of them and more; I tip my hat and bid them adieu with a quietly spoken "Ah-well, Newt Su Queer" muttered under a crinkly lip of smugness and sadness as my travelled mind surely sees the lie.
And me? Well, I’ve found a happy place to while away my time. It's a little nook of laughter, props, and memories that houses more than forty years of Buffoonery art, which, yes, is a little museum made straight from my heart. Oh, what joy! What a blessed time. I pass on jokes and pantomime to those who may not know the art of delivering belly laughs, pathos and mime.
Yet as I await the guests by my shopfront wide, mug-o-tea in hand, I watch outside, seeing uniforms of all ilk pass by, like reflections of the times when I wore mine. I see camouflage-clad lads topped off with fake design shades askew and backwards-facing baseball hats, too. Grown men donning footy kits stretched tight over beer bellies. Yet, proud and loyal to millionaires promoting children's ball games, they once did play. All hail the beautiful game so pointlessly played by semi-literates, so very well paid. I'll wager a bet that each little ball landing inside their hallowed net delivers another million towards their boss's yacht. I'd further bet that their big net could be better used to catch fish enough to feed a small country.
As for the young-uns, uniformly struggling to be cool and world-savvy, much like I did once when it was mods, rockers, and tie-dye flower power. Their uncertain future seems thin as air, with AI feeding war-mongering billionaires. Add climate change to their innocent lives; well, it's just so unfair that we grownups just stood and stared at humankind's madness since that May day.
Still, the town's full of folks around my age, all uniformly waiting to meet their chosen maker to whom some pray. Women already made up with a fresh blue rinse, grandly strutting fake designer bags, toy doggies and sensible shoes. Men with white manicured beards, blue jeans, important strange handshake club lapel pins and brown sensible shoes that slowly walk them around their chosen God's waiting room.
Yet, before I go, what's this plastic uniform seen far and wide? Mobility scooters glide by, carrying young and old alike, all with a serious eye to any judgmental passing sigh. Some disabilities can't be seen, so my judgment may be mean. Thing is, there's no telly for me, so an advert ever gets past the off switch on the wireless or TV. But I’ll bet my hat; they'll not be advertising; walking prolongs active life while sitting only makes for a comfier final path. I hear them say with a sadness-in-tone, “You Only Live Once”, but I think I know a little different, cause I’ve seen a few. “You Only Die Once!”
Anyroadup, young and old, I’ll ponder thy ways until my own queerness fades, in the firm knowledge, There's Newt Su Queer as Folk these days...
A friend smuggled this out for me!"
