Entry #23: Nothing Can Stop Us

After a delirious night of interrupted sleep I had Wednesday off work and slept most of it. Feeling generally groggy, if overdosing on vitamin supplements over the weekend didn't sort me out then at least the bottles of wine consumed numbed the awareness of my ailments.

Can I get a rewind? We'll go back from Saturday. Alex stayed over, I proudly witnessed her improved drinking stamina and she reached Marsha Klein status ranting and staggering around my living room. I dare say I did some ranting and staggering myself. We entertained her “friend” Richey via the medium of movement on Web cam and later danced shamelessly to Vengaboys. She posted drunken rants on Facebook and MySpace and had Kodak moments with Sushi, one of my sister's cats.

Earlier on Saturday Mark told me his girlfriend Sarah is pregnant. Congratulations! Although they've only been together a short time they are going to see it through. Everything changes now eh? I want to go to Creamfields 2007, the music festival which will be in Daresbury, Cheshire, on the August Bank Holiday. Hannah's up for it and I found Mark and Sarah are too. Tickets are £57 so I figure that's a few weeks saving a twenty a week.

I've never been to a music festival before, in fact I've been absolutely rubbish at going to see live performances. I saw Steps at the MEN Arena in November 1999 and The Streets at Brixton Academy in May 2005. I recently missed Paolo Nutini and The Cinematic Orchestra playing in Manchester — perhaps I should start a gig fund and get booking some tickets!

The idea for Creamfields came to me when I booked a ticket for Queer Question Time on Thursday (International Day Against Homophobia) as part of QueerUpNorth festival, the annual festival celebrating Manchester's gayness. The debate was led by writer and more Amy Lamé, and I was particularly interested in the event with the panel having Peter Tatchell, a prominent gay rights and human rights activist.

The debate was fuelled by the questions audience members posed, and opportunity was given for us to raise our hands after the panelists' responses. Issues explored included civil partnerships not being classed as marriage, homophobic atrocities in other countries, and the final question true to the format of the real Question Time programme was “is Eurovision becoming more gay or are gays becoming more Eurovision?"

Amy Lamé held the debate together with tact but mainly humour, carrying it through objections to panelist Johann Hari's views on more than one occasion. I appreciated the representation on the panel as Reverend Colin Coward communicated his viewpoint as both a gay man and a Anglican priest. It's a small world, I'd actually been emailing Peter Tatchell for advice on the previous Sunday and at the end of the debate swiftly seized the opportunity to introduce myself in person and shake his hand.

I'd been emailing for advice about enquiries I've been making regarding a teacher's terrible handling of homophobic bullying at a north-eastern school. That experience has led me to ponder over a possible project. I'm thinking of starting a Web site to collate schools' anti-homophobic-bullying policies to encourage them to be developed and enforced, somehow gathering statistics and perhaps recording incidents. It would be no small project with over 30,000 schools and colleges in the United Kingdom. The pondering continues.

Last Tuesday marked one year of being single. As I've said before, I don't really do relationships. However, recently I've been thinking increasingly more of how it would be nice to have someone. Maybe it's like when I really want to go out, but once I've had a few drinks and a bit of a dance then I've got what I really wanted. Maybe it's not actually a relationship I'm lamenting but perhaps I just need a good seeing-to to set me straight. Or as straight as this man could could go.

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Entry #23, published on Tuesday, 22^nd of May 2007 at 00:19 local time (Swatch Internet Time @008 .beats)

Returning in 2008 ;-)