Buggers

After a glorious run in which we were introduced to more hot rugby players' bodies than any one man might reasonably wish to handle, last year Dieux de Stade went all coy and, dare I say it?, fey.


This year's calendar held out a promise that things had reverted to more usual form, and the early photos that are now leaking out from the just-published book-of-the-photoshoot are very, very promising indeed.


Nothing else to share with you yet, but I'm hoping to feature some rugby totty in a couple of days. Fingers crossed.

Who says all sport is boring?

Arty porn or porny art?

One of the joys of flickr is that it lets you discover photographers with a striking eye. Like this fine chap seen here in a delightful self-portrait:


You don't have to search far before seeing work like this:


Or there's this delightful pair of a delightful big-dicked boy:



In fact, this photographer seems to have something of a speciality in boys sitting around on a bed:


Which is not to say that he isn't versatile -- I love the cat-like grace of this image:


But let's end our glimpse into his world with this quartet of the same pair of models:



There's a quiet intimacy in these images, but also a sense of energy and joie de vivre:



And that's without there being a single dick visible in them.

Trains

Sorry I've been a bit tardy in posting hundreds of photographs from my recent holiday (I know how much you've all been anticipating them), and my apologies also to the reader who complained at the ridiculous recent shortage of railway-related posts. This is therefore a twofer post:


SNCF's "en voyage" sector is currently "between liveries" with the expiry of rights to use the old blue/purple "en voyage" look before the adoption of anything new. Repainted locos are therefore being outshopped in plain silver, like that rather fetching Bombardier number at Gare d'Austerlitz.

SNCF's glorious Bo-Bo electrics are still kitted-out in the silver/orange "zig-zag" livery, a fragment of which is seen on this brute at Nimes station.


Its bulk is further emphasised by the low level of French station platforms. That feature has been a failing until now, but has become a God-send as new technology enables double-deck coaches to be easily used -- here a TGV arrives at the same platform in Nimes, on its way to Paris.


I did this holiday entirely by train: I couldn't face the stupid airport security theatre (take your shoes off... empty your pockets... come here to be felt-up by some bored-looking guard); the long queues in what are actually cheap-as-chips but over-priced and very hostile shopping malls, full of screaming consumers bored out of their skulls or desperate to buy the latest designer label, arguing and bickering, secure in their relentless Narcissism... er. Sorry. Got off the point a bit.

The point is, I did London-Paris-Toulouse, but (perversely) not using TGV. The journey took about seven hours, and I arrived vastly, infinitely more refreshed than if I'd flown (in a total journey that wouldn't have been very much less).


The journey involving a change at Paris is an advantage: it enables you to break your trip in somewhere like this -- the famous Le Train Bleu at Gare du Lyon, which is possibly the most gloriously absurd OTT restaurant in the world. Dead classy.

We are all in thrall to airline travel, but I felt more relaxed after these journeys than flying for even a quarter of the time -- which is surely the point of being on holiday.


I returned to Paris by TGV, less than three hours from Nimes, with an absolutely delightful lunch at Terminus Nord (opposite Gare du Nord, and well worth trying), and then a Eurostar to London. Glorious.

One of my favourite holiday discoveries was the international railway that ran through the Pyrenees from Pau in France to Canfranc in Spain. The middle, cross-border section -- from Oloron to Canfranc -- was abandoned in 1970.


Constructed in the 1920s (and opening in 1928), heroic civil engineering works remain all along the vallée d'Aspe, the road running parallel (and largely empty) to the railway line for much of the way.


This was the scene of one of the most significant of the early environmental protests in the twentieth century, opposing controversial proposals to carve a motorway out of this route along with the construction of a massive new road tunnel at Somport.


As a result of the protests the plans were hugely watered-down: today, the new-ish 8km road tunnel is in use, but it is almost deserted. The roads leading to it were upgraded but never to more than good single-carriageway-standard with a crawler lane for lorries on lengthy uphill sections.


I drove through the road tunnel several times, and for most of them I didn't pass a single oncoming vehicle, or have anything in my sights ahead of me or in my rearview mirrors.


Part of the settlement with the protesters also involved a commitment to reopen the railway line, a commitment that has not been fulfilled. Deserted stations, like these at Urdos and Les Forges d'Abel, abound.


Canfranc, on the Spanish side of the border (no time for me to visit it so no photos, I'm afraid), was one of the largest stations in Europe -- a vast international station with customs halls and immigration offices. Today it stands abandoned, a vast hulk with a tiny modern station opposite it (which is the terminus today for Spanish trains).


On the French side, occasional local trains still travel south from Pau but terminate at Oloron.


I usually find abandoned railways rather melancholy places, but this one was especially engaging -- the remaining infrastructure is so well preserved it feels like little effort would be needed for trains to run again. But, given how little road traffic I encountered, it's difficult to see how an economic case could be made.


Unless and until then, we can all enjoy the majestic setting and engineering delights of this railway.

A question of sport

I just don't get it. My newspaper has a separate sports section, presumably inserted (wisely, in my view) so that the important parts of the newspaper are not contaminated with all this ludicrous nonsense, but today the front pages were all about some soccer match or other.


Apparently, the England football team was so completely shite that it was knocked out of the tournament.

I still don't understand why that qualifies as real "news". Presumably next in this topsy-turvy world they'll be publishing in the sports section in-depth reports on the diplomatic crisis over the allocation of waters from the River Nile?

Be that as it may, I was dimly aware of the existence of this team:


In fact, I was commiserating with an Italian waiter of my acquaintance only the other day about how bitterly unfair it was, that a team so stylish should have been knocked-out of the tournament.


Admittedly he thought I was referring to their style of play rather than their underpants, but we must each try to confine our comments to those fields in which we are expert.

As it happens, I like this iteration of the advert better:


That chap 2nd from left is attracting my attention. As, indeed, is the chap in the middle. But as you know by now, I have very Catholic tastes and a warm and very accommodating bosom.

Again, again, again

I was intending to post a wad of exciting holiday photos but, luckily for you, I discovered another batch which now have to be flickr-ised so, instead, you get yet another (and possibly final) installment from this year's WNBR. Starting with this bushy-pubed, small-winkied, geeky lovely:


The next chap features in a pair of images, starting with this -- an angelic beginning to the Ride:


By the end he's doing that delightful thing that very, very small boys do -- protectively pulling on their winkies as if their lives depended on it:


Some of us never stop doing that.

Here's a new geeky lovely for us to admire:


While here's the return of red hat boy -- although I am now rather smitten with grey cap boy, whose winkie really is a treat:


This exuberant geeky lovely is demonstrating why bicycle seats can be so damaging to a man's best bits, while also displaying a delightful shrub of bushy exuberant loveliness:


And let's now finish with this lovely chap, all metrosexual masculinity and manly gorgeousness:


This year's WNBR appears to conclusively demonstrate that it's only porn stars that trim and pluck and shave their manly bushiness (thank Christ for that), and that the male genitalia remains as reasonably-sized as it always has (ditto).

So we can all sleep easy tonight, then.

Me old mucker

Harry Brown is a vigilante thriller, the twist being that our eponymous hero is an apparently mild-mannered pensioner, played by Michael Caine.


Harry lives on a run-down public housing estate in the feral reaches of London, the community taken over by entrepreneurial drug-dealers who, in true Thatcherite style, know where the money is to be had.


Harry's best friend, another mild-mannered widower, is hounded into a confrontation with a drugs gang which, of course, he loses, thus setting the scene for Harry to rediscover the skills he was taught as a trained killer in the Royal Marines, skills he apparently put to use in Northern Ireland.

Thus the way is cleared for us to see Harry using torture to extract a confession (this film has nothing on reactionary telly series 24), while also saving the drug-addled girl and taking her to hospital.


The Police are portrayed as being either corrupt or incompetent, more interested in bureaucracy than in the reality of policing. Their one honest cop is a female inspector, though the film sets her up to be little more than a useless patsy, another weak female who's got above herself in what is (in the logic of the film) a man's world...


I'm not a huge Caine fan. His very early work (Zulu, Ipcress File, Get Carter -- all rather good fims) used his clinical personality well, and in Harry Brown he takes advantage of those cold, dead eyes to make the sentimental killer-pensioner an emotionally plausible figure.


Caine is another of those loud-mouths who assured us back in 1997 that he would emigrate if a Labour government was elected but, apparently not having the courage of his convictions, he disappointed us all by remaining here.

Or maybe he saw very early on how Labour had in fact become just another neocon party, one which, ironically, pursued a vigorous and utterly ineffective "law'n'order" agenda that created the cess-pools in which his latest, failed film is set.


You can probably tell I didn't much care for Harry Brown -- the pensioner or the film.

Loyalty

A number of magazines run an annual feature they describe as their "naked edition", although I have to say the amount of cock they show is, well, pretty near zero.


Hotty soap "actor" Ryan Thomas is a regular in these features (as is his equally hot brother), showing off his bum but never his dangly bits (just like his brother).


In this latest feature, he even keeps his lovely chest covered (which is a shame, because in its natural state it's lightly dusted with rather fetching hair, in neat contrast to his boyish face).


Somehow, despite all these disappointments, I keep holding a torch for Ryan.

I dunno why.

Reader's wives

An immensely kind reader has sent me a selection of photos he took in my absence from this year's London World Naked Bike Ride, starting with this very jolly and manly-looking fellow:


[I've taken the appalling liberty of cropping some of them to fit better with the blog format (hope he doesn't mind), and interspersing them with other people's work capturing the same guys.]

This next chap has already featured on this blog but he is here presented in a bigger series -- starting with pre-Ride preparations:


As in all the best porn, the partially-clothed shot helps build our expectations, teasing us about the glories yet to be revealed.

The wait is worth it, and I love the apprehensive expression he appears to be wearing at the start of the Ride:


He still seemed quite tense in this next shot, but he has one of the most delightful cocks I've seen in a very long time -- maybe a little tense from his nervousness, although that may add to its allure:


And in our last shot of him, some way into the Ride, he seems finally to have relaxed:


Utterly lovely.

Let's finish with a quartet of this fabulously hunky man, seen here in close proximity to a taxi:


I have no idea what's going on, but in my imagination he has lost his chum, whom he frantically phones here:


Having been told of his whereabouts he races off, desperate to find his Lifelong Soul-Mate and One True Love:


The tension is unspeakable. Will he find him? Will they be reunited in their easy love?

As in all the best rom-coms, we already know the answer:


How exciting was that?

And with thanks again to my very generous reader.