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I always forget, between each one, how irritating I find London Mardi Gras. The less commercial, smaller Brighton Pride is always much better. Admittedly, though, this Mardi Gras was better than what I did last year, which was spent waiting for connecting flights in Bangkok and Taipei airports, but it’s the look-at-me attitude of the guys who feel they must spend every moment of the day without their shirts on, even when it’s cold and the sun has gone behind a cloud and the ones who absolutely must scream about their sexuality as though it is the only thing in their lives. The name, ‘Mardi Gras’, I find a little grating, too. For a start, Mardi Gras is a religious festival. And it’s supposed to happen on a Tuesday. At least when it was still called ‘Pride’ it was a description that gave purpose to the event.

To give the day it’s due, though, it was nice to spend some time out and about with Paul, Jon and Trevor.

I walked into town to meet Paul in Starbucks, and found a tenner in the verge on the way, which covered the coffees nicely, and we even managed to get the comfy seating at the back, which is a result. We met Trevor and Jon at the station and took a crowded and drunken train to London, and then the tube to Embankment.

Then it started to rain.

Jon had warned us it might, so we lunched in Cranks until it passed.

The march (or is it a parade - I always get them mixed up) was fun. Very noisy, lots of colours. The back of it is always so much better than the big floats at the front, most of which are just mobile ad banner for drink companies and bars. The back, though, where you find the unions, support groups and stragglers marching in little groups seems to capture the spirit of the thing so much better, with smiles and costumes and music they make themselves. We watched it until it had burnt itself out and went by way of a tube and the toilets at Charring Cross, to the main event in the park, which was its usual messy self hiding under a thick coat of litter.

We sat on the grass and listened to the bands until it got too boisterous. I had my arm kicked, and my tea went all over our mats. The guy who did it tried to argue that it was our fault until his friend pulled him back. Two piggy-backers fell over Paul and hurt his neck.

It always amazes me how you can bump into people you know at these events. They were expecting 85,000 people to be there, but that didn’t stop Paul, Trevor and Jon all seeing people they knew, us to end up sitting next to someone from the Army and Navy, and occasional lunchy-type friend Neil to spot me through the crowd.

Neil is a very smiley person and always fun to chat with, and he introduced me to his other half, and friend called Claire, who was a ‘compliance checker’ for Big Brother, which basically involves watching it for an 8-hour shift each day, fading out anything that doesn’t sit happily with broadcasting regulations. I admitted that I’d taken a cold-turkey approach to the show this time around, having got hopelessly addicted last time around. I’d still be interested to do a feature on the technology behind it, though, so she asked for my card and said she’d pass it on to someone influential.

We left before A1, the only band I really wanted to see, and fought our way to the tube, past people loaded down with four or five freebie bags each. I felt both irritated by them, for taking more than one when they should be shared among everyone there, and also a bit sorry for them that they got so excited by a plastic carrier or moisturiser trial packs and soft drinks nobody’s ever heard of before.

To give the police their due, they were very good about getting people safely onto the trains, and we even got seats in a half-empty tube back to Oxford Circus, which was a totally unexpected surprise. We ate at Soho Thai, which was stuffy but excellent, then trained it home.

I had a mamouth reading session to get to the end of my book. At 636 pages, I didn’t fancy carrying it all the way to Korea just to read the last two chapters.

Day rating? 7/10.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 30th, 2001 at 6:38 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.