European Gay Pride

I know that I went to this event in Manchester *before* I started this journal, but seeing as how the next one will be held in some other European country next year, and (rather confusingly) in Canada, I thought I’d mention it. It was a balmy Bank Holiday weekend, and whilst staying with a friend in Manchester, she took me along to Canal Street to see the gay pride parade.

It was really good and we enjoyed it, expect for the part where Canal Street was cordoned off and it cost £10 to get in and look at the stalls. So, clutching hot dogs, we instead wandered over to the huge street on which a seemingly never-ending carnival was taking place. Float after float after float of weird and wonderful displays went past, followed by fire-eaters, gay representatives for the police and fire departments. The atmosphere was wonderful. Manchester has really opened up in the last few years; it has become more fully integrated with the European Community, perhaps even more so than London. There was no hate, no prejudice; just a city having a great time and celebrating all walks of life. It was a curiously sentimental yet feel-good day, and this is from a straight woman.

The highlight of the day? When my friend pointed out an exceptionally grey-haired man—his hair almost white, in fact—in an open-topped limo. We puzzled over what was so amazing about this fellow when he turned around and we saw Ian McKellen looking at us. The crowd surged forward with cries of “Ian!” and, inevitably, “Gandalf!” and he turned and shook hands and shouted his best wishes and added a special touch to the day.

Blaine-Baiting

I was in London over the weekend, visiting friends. Somewhere in between the pubs, the Lifehouse concert, and the firework display, my friends decided to take me along to Tower Bridge to behold the spectacle of David Blaine in his box. En route, the underground attendant urged us to “throw a rock for him” because, alas, he couldn’t get down there that day for the nation’s newest sport: Blaine-Baiting.

“I can’t believe how mean-spirited people are,” sniffed Blaine’s girlfriend, “we never got this in New York.”

If she hoped this would shame the nation into relenting, she was deeply wrong. What she was saying was that in New York people gasped and oohed and aahed at Blaine’s attempts for self-publicity. He advertised his latest stunt on television for weeks; look out Blighty, he said, I’m coming here for my latest stunt. And oh, how grateful we should be that he was gracing our island nation.

In the words of so many commentators, *the smug git.*

Soon, the “mean-spiritedness” began. A hotdog van parked up near the grass verge. It couldn’t be moved on, because, as visitors have pointed out again and again, he is on public land. You can’t close down Tower Bridge for one magician in a box. Then came the sausages. And the rounds of golf, where the target was the plexiglass cubicle where Blaine currently resides.

Blaine should be grateful for this aside, because it’s brought extra publicity to The Dullest Television Event of the Year, and that includes the curling championships, thank you. Sitting on the grass verges nearby, the sun pounding relentlessly on us, my feet aching from the walk to the site, my suspicions were confirmed. It was a man. In a box. And he’ll be there for 44 days, and he’ll make £5 million in lucrative TV rights for it. Who can begrudge the sentiments of the golfers, or the teenager, armed with a drum, who decided to invite Blaine to see the dawn rise over the Thames? Mean-spirited, maybe. Rather eccentric and perplexing and amusing, definitely.

I truly feel that the British are inherently good people. We don’t (as a nation; there is a loony fringe everywhere) believe in capital punishment, or guns, or injustice. We are foolishly sentimental about animals—and I say that gently; I myself am foolishly sentimental about animals—we will march in our *millions* on London to register our disgust with the war, our belief that an Iraqi life is valuable as our own; we mock and argue and snipe, but in times of crises pull together, because we believe we’re in it together.

And yet—if you’ll allow me to take my rose-tinted glasses off for a moment—we are also unrelentingly mean-spirited at times. We will build someone up and up and up, until we’re sick of them, then we’ll gleefully watch them fall. I don’t know what it is in the British psyche that makes us like this, but we could do with collective therapy.

Hmph.

My journal says I'm 66% masculine.

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