OK, so watching this video clip has been on my ‘to-do’ list for a good few weeks now (oops!) – it’s a special short ‘film’ that’s been put together to help Manchester Pride celebrate its 21st year (hurrah!!)
A fab and very fun video, though not too sure about the slightly shaky QaF tribute at the start, but then I guess that, actually, Canal Street, and thus Manchester Pride, owe a lot to the show for kick-starting/refocusing gay culture back on Canal Street after the quieter times of the early 90s!
Also great to see the S.L.U.T.S. – Salford Ladies United Temperance Society - outside of the Parade! (oh how I miss them for the other 364 days of the year! heh).
Manchester Pride is, without doubt, my favourite thing in my calendar each summer – I absolutely LOVE it and can’t wait to be up for it this year – anyone else going?
As is seemingly traditional for me, I’ve left posting my Manchester Pride post until well after the event has passed – doh! In my defense life has been pretty hectic the last few weeks and I’ve been exhausted heh!
As I kind of pre-empted this, the Vimeo clip below is me vlogging my thoughts on the first few days of pride, up until the Sunday evening
(please turn the sound right up to hear)
I TOTALLY MET SIR IAN MCKELLEN! (this is still very exciting to me, heh!)
…On the Sunday evening I went over to David’s suite again, as most of the group wanted to go and see Kelis, who I thought I wasn’t a fan of, but having looked at Spotify since, it turns out that I would have liked three of her older songs. Not that I would have heard them anyway, we were towards the back of Bloom Street and all you could make out from there was a load of dull thudding, bah!
The adventure of Sunday night was definitely getting stuck in the lift at David’s hotel! Three others decided to jump in with us, causing the lift to be over-full and come grinding to a halt! Scary stuff, especially when none of us had a mobile phone reception at first! As you have no doubt guessed, we managed to get out of this situation relatively unscathed…
I came home on the Monday lunchtime and was home by 5pm – much preferred leaving early rather than trying to drag an extra day out of it as I’ve done in the past. Despite spending a fortune over the weekend, I still managed to justify spending a lot on a new jacket too!
As for the Parade itself this year, I was a little bit underwhelmed if I’m honest, but I still very much enjoyed it! I think they need something bigger at the end of the parade as otherwise it gets a little anti-climatic.
Below is a video that I’ve made of all my parade photos (you should totally turn up your speakers and get bopping along!):
(for those with access / people I chat to regularly – you can also check out my facebook page for full versions of these photos)
…. and here are large copies of some of my favourites (especially those Salford Ladies and now the Swinton Leathers )
So, I have FINALLY gotten around to sharing my Manchester Pride pictures!
I spent so long working on videos for them on several different platforms when I got back, I completely forgot to share them… then got sick of the sight of them, and now have remembered to post heh. I may post some of the originals up too at some point as they’re of high image quality – hurrah.
Loved the parade this year; enjoy!
(P.S. The animoto player takes a little while to load, please bear with it! Also, full screen is, naturally, the best way to view!)
Blimey, I’ve been back a few weeks now and have had very little time to get my Manchester Pride 2009 pictures on my blog!
It took me a whole day to create a video file for our friends and family, and another day to sort all of the pictures out before I could do that, and so I’m starting to get pretty sick of these pictures now heh!!
I had been planning a whole package of blogs to go with my trip, but at the moment, and considering the volume of content that I have, it really would be a huge draw on my time if I were to upload it all. I doubt I’ll get around to uploading all of the vlog posts that I did unfortunately, suffice to say, Greg and I had an amazing time, and absolutely loved our little trip away!
Most of my pictures can be seen on my Facebook page, though I have created a nice little video using Animoto (v. highly recommended!) for my blog!
Enjoy, and feel free to leave me some comments on your thoughts regarding Pride or the Parade etc!
Yes… I think that this is the third different version of people miming along to ‘Fuck You’ by Lily Allen that I have posted now, however without doubt, this one is the best!
Alas, I don’t think any of my friends were in a rush to get to the main stage to join in for this (they were more keen on Frankmusik!) so I missed it, but I love how it’s been put together!!
As much as I usually enjoy my job, I really cannot wait for the opportunity to take some much earned time off and go back home to Manchester for Manchester Pride.
So much so, that I have a countdown clock on my work computer’s desktop marking the (slowly) deminishing time between me and the end of shift on Tuesday!
UPDATE (17:15, 25th August 2009)
WOO!!!!
It even had the same klaxon as the Match.com ‘we’ve got too many men’ advert heh!
Yes folks, you heard correctly, I have four balls… in last Saturday’s National Lottery!
Very chuft, as it is £88 in my back pocket which will go towards fueling a great time at Manchester Pride later in the summer.
Back in December 2007, I had a 3 consecutive draw run whereby I got 4 numbers in each draw, so I am hoping that this starts up again… the lottery is drawn again tonight, so fingers crossed heh!!
Pleased that I won a decent amount too, as sometimes matching four balls can get you a prize of around £40 which is a little poor given the odds against you managing to do it!
Well… you know me – I love to do geeky techy things, especially where social media is involved, and this seemed to be the natural step forward (even if people have already been doing it for years!).
I recorded it via my Nokia N95 8GB as my old eye-toy-hacked-into-a-webcam would have given a far poorer resolution. Alas the lighting is slightly off on the clip. You may also be interested to know that it was filmed perched on a loaf of bread (that’s the phone… not me…! )
Anyway, if you have any feedback, please do let me know. I may explore this medium further if folk think it adds some merit to things – possibly to enhance the textual content on my theatre/gig reviews (which usually take 1-2 hours to write and ‘media-up’!), and to cover most of my personal updates to the blog – i.e making them a little more human. Also, I rather like vimeo, so wanted to find a way to connect with that platform a lot more too, especially now that wordpress.com support it.
I’m already rather planned for this; I sorted my hotel and whatnot way back on Boxing Day 2008, and am sorting myself out with Big Weekend Tickets over this holiday weekend. Excitement took over I think heh!
Hopefully this year, whilst they’re giving out all of the stickers, cards and fun stuff at the parade, I won’t only get targetted by the STD people…! Oh, the shame!!!
The Early Bird tickets for this year’s event went onsale on 1st May.
Big Weekend Tickets are currently priced at £12.50. Daily tickets are also available in advance at £10 per day.
(NB - prices will go up to £17.50 for Big Weekend after 1 July 2009, and prices for all Adult ticket types at the Box Office on the day will be significantly higher)
Although tickets do not ‘sell out’ per sé (there’s usually unlimited quantity), the hike in price is a good enough reason to buy them early if you already know that you’ll be going is it not?!
In my opinion, you’re best off buying the tickets in person at the usual outlets in Manchester so as to avoid the booking/delivery fee, though if that’s not possible, or if you want to book online, you can do so via See Tickets.
Can’t wait to be back home and partying like anything once again! Manchester Pride is definitely one of the highlights of the year.
As regular readers of my blog may have been aware, I was immensely looking forward to this year’s Pride event back in my hometown of Manchester. Held over the August Bank Holiday weekend each year, and currently in it’s 18th year, it truly is the social highlight of the year.
This year’s event was held between Friday 22nd and Monday 25th August – I was up in Manchester for the Friday and Saturday, before traveling home on the Sunday. Didn’t want to stay until the Monday as I knew that I’d be exhausted so wanted to factor in for a day snuggled up in bed too before heading back to work hehe.
I went up and took Alex with me, with plans to meet other London friends from our group in Manchester once we were up there. Really weird to see people that I associate with London hanging around in Manchester!
So anyways, getting to Manchester on the Friday was a little bit of a nightmare – the Virgin train that we were on managed to get as far as Watford Gap before being turned back due to there being a freight train on fire in front of us which had closed the track. Consequently, we had to turn around and go all the way back to London. Instead of taking the West Coast Mainline, which would have taken two and a half hours, we had to go up via the East Midlands from Kings Cross, to Derby, Derby to Sheffield and Sheffield to Manchester Piccadilly – which took around six hours! To say the services were busy would be an understatement! The train from Derby to Sheffield was a really old East Midlands Train service whereby you actually had to lean out of the window to open the door! It was also rather funny to watch people’s faces when they saw the Sheffield to Manchester train was only two carriages long (local service) – Londoners don’t seem to grasp the concept of trains that are shorter than eight carriages long hehe!
We arrived in Manchester at 19:00 and headed over to our hotel – the Travelodge on Blackfriars Street, just off Deansgate. Not too badly priced at all – £30 pppn. it worked out as. We also came across the most remarkable object:
We also had some really cracking views from our 7th Floor room (though admittedly not as good as our friends who were staying on the top floor of the Ramada on Piccadilly). Views included The Edge and Lowry Hotel:
Whilst out and about in Manchester in the evening, I also had the chance to take a few cool snaps of the modern architecture which has recently sprung up in Manchester, especially around the side of the River Irwell and Spinningfields:
We dined in a restaurant called “Strada” on the Irwell on the Friday evening which I have since found out is a chain of restaurants across the country. I must say, I would rate that as the BEST dining experience in my life! Absolutely delightful and I really can’t wait to go back to them! Even better news is that their ‘London’ restaurant is in Kingston – which will be right on my new doorstep!
Having eaten, we headed down to the Pride Site to go and pick up our wristbands (sparkly green this year) and have a mooch around. I must say, Manchester City Centre was terribly quiet on Friday night! We ended up in Spirit, and boy was it great to hear the sort of music that they play in Mancunian gay establishments as opposed to the tat that is played in London!!! Carlos and co. joined us and so we had a few drinks in Spirit before heading off to Cruz 101. Getting folk to go there was easy as none of them really knew what to expect from it, and by the time they’d seen the carpeted floors, it was too late hehe!! Rather weird to see people I know from, and associate with, London against the Manchester backdrop though.
Cruz was a rather good night – we all had a good ol’ boogie upstairs, and then Edd, Carl and I went downstairs to check out the dance music floor – which was deserted. Not wanting to let that stop us, we started dancing and pretty soon the room had filled up - hurrah! We’re crediting ourselves with the success of the dance floor on that night hehe.
Urban Cookie Collective did a PA with her song “The Key, The Secret”, which I really enjoyed! Wasn’t too keen on the rest of her songs though.
We got back to the hotel around 03:30, which wasn’t too bad, though getting up at 9am the following morning was a bit of a chore!
We went for a bit of a shopping trip, and I went to H&M to purchase a few bits and bobs. We also went shopping for a watch for Alex and I came across a watch that I rather liked. Didn’t get chance to purchase it in Manchester and so I think I shall be purchasing it when I get chance to later this week. It’s the one with the green face.
We also went onto the big wheel that we’ve had in Exchange Square for a few years now. I’ve wanted to go on it since it first arrived, however this was the first time I’d been able to. The height and wobbliness scared me a little at first, however by the second time round, I was fine hehe.
After that we headed off to watch the parade – which was absolutely marvelous!!!!
We encamped over by the art gallery on Princess Street and I managed to take quite a lot of great photos (modesty should kick in soon… hmmmm… hehe). I’ve posted a selection of by favourites below, however I did take around 200 pictures of the Parade alone! The full photo set can be found on my Facebook page as it’s too large to host anywhere else.
I really love how we all march up to the village once the parade has passed, it really does make it feel a lot more powerful and emotive. It’s always great to see how much support the community has up in Manchester, from the local council who facilitate so much (they even have the rainbow flag flying over the town hall every year) to the people on the streets who line the route cheering and celebrating with us.
It’s especially nice to see the emergency services being applauded, they really do deserve recognition for all of their hard work and it seems that Manchester is the only Pride which continuously does this, which is a huge shame!
After the parade, we had a quick mooch back to the Pride site, however didn’t hang around too much as it was so busy – very hard to get around as always due to the masses of people!
We met up with Carlos and co. again in the evening and went to Wagamama for dinner, before heading back to their hotel for a few drinks prior to going to Poptastic Under The Arches. At £17 to get in, I really was hoping for something decent. Having worked for Poptastic, I was sure I’d really enjoy it, but I had no idea just how much I would! Amazing – the venue itself was the best I’ve ever been in. A carpark by day, they really did manage to transform it into a fab place by night! At times, if you stood in the right place, you could hear the backing music but all of the crowd singing as opposed to the artist, which made it really uplifting. The usual mix of camp classics, coupled with plenty of Glo-Sticks, glitter and studenty types. Really made me start to miss living in Manchester. The highlight of the evening for me was dancing along to Whigfield’s Saturday Night at about 2am hehe. I danced my lil heart out (bless me hehe) and if I looked stupid, then at least I was happy looking stupid and camp hehe!!!
We stayed until 03:30 before deciding to call it a night – which was a good thing really as my train home was at 11am the morning after, and so I wanted to get at least an hour or two of sleep first hehe!
The train home was via the same route as we’d come (although at least this was our planned route!), though took 7 hours and involved 3 trains and a bus – not bestest!
The one good thing about the journey home was the hour stop-off in Sheffield which we had whilst we waited for interchange on the trains. Outside the station there is perhaps one of the best sculptures that I’ve seen. There was a huge water sculpture which when you looked at it up close, made it seem as though you were looking into yourself in another world. Very “through-the-looking-glass”-y!
As previously mentioned, these are but only a VERY small selection of the couple o’hundred pictures that I took whilst in Manchester – Facebook carries the full selection over around 6 different galleries. Feel free to check them out, some really memorable moments have been captured and I’m really pleased that I managed to get so many of them on ‘film’.
I had an absolutely spiffing Manchester Pride this year, my thanks go to everybody who has helped to make it so unforgettable. Cartainly my best Pride ever. The only thing that would have made it completely perfect would have been if Mister Greg’s employers had given him the time off so that he could have attended, though I’m sure that he will definitely be with us next year – hurrah!
