The Thoughts of Captain Autumn

Flicking around the proverbial '30 channels and nothing on' late the other night, I stumbled across the last few minutes of Richard Curtis's wretched 'Love Actually'. I first saw it a few years ago. I've seen plenty of films in my time which did little for me, but 'Love Actually' is one of very few to make me so angry I wanted to kick the television in. I really, really loathed 'Love Actually', to the extent that even now when I see it in a listings magazine I feel like getting a biro and scribbling over it until the paper gets all mangled and torn. It wasn't just that it was trite, facile, witless, sentimental pap; it was that it was insulting to the viewer to suggest that they were so shallow that they could be emotionally manipulated by stories that were so vacuous and devoid of heart. Seemingly dozens of characters, not one of them fleshed out to the extent that you might genuinely care about them, trotting through a succession of paper-thin romantic plotlines designed to tug at the heartstrings in a manner which even the most compliant Mills and Boon reader would find mechanical.

Having now seen the end of the film again, I have discovered it is possible to hate 'Love Actually' even more than I thought I did.

Goodness knows how I missed it last time - I can only presume that I was by this stage so thoroughly nauseated by the dialogue that my nervous system had opted for temporary deafness - but over the closing montage of all of his characters getting together one final time Curtis chose to play The Beach Boys' 'God Only Knows'. 'God Only Knows' is one of my favourite songs, albeit one to which I listen very rarely because it always - and I mean always - makes me cry. I have no idea why, because it has no specific emotional attachment for me. I think it is simply that it is a song so beautiful in every way that I go through a small breakdown whenever I hear it. And here it was, shamelessly grafted onto the end of one of the most shallow, meaningless excuses for a film ever perpetrated in the name of entertainment. And yes, it did make me cry, and I thanked the stars that nobody was there to wander in and misapprehend the situation by inferring that it was Curtis's abomination that brought me to that state.

I am not a homophobe. Which has nothing whatsoever to do with my feelings towards homosexuals. Let me explain.

Classics scholars (of which I am not one) will be aware that the word homophobe has its origin in two Greek words, homos meaning 'one and the same' and phobos meaning 'fear'. As a word, homophobe appears to be a lazy 1970s offshoot from homosexual, some etymological anarchist simply adding the phobia suffix without bothering to think about the derivation of the original word. As such he or she created a word which means not fear of homosexuals, but fear of things which are the same.

This is where I come in. I have a great deal of time for things which are the same. I am a big fan of symmetry. It borders on obsession. The lengths of shoelaces, that sort of thing. You know, when you're tying your shoelaces and the amount you have in one hand differs from that in the other? That's intolerable, is it not? There are other, myriad examples I could present. Most of them are extremely trivial, although there's a part of me that thinks it is not coincidence that I have an even number of children. Anyway, my point is that anomalies are anathema to me, which by my understanding makes me about as far from a homophobe as it is possible to be. In fact I'd go so far as to say that I am a homophile, and am toying with describing myself as such in the future. I'm tired of getting nonplussed looks from people who are not sure how to react when I tell them that I am mainly interested in the apparently incomprehensible combination of jazz and football, so from now on I think I will declare myself openly as a keen homophile and see how far that gets me.