the life and times of the lesser spotted packet jockey

This weekend was Trans Pride Manchester. I'd been looking forward to this for a while - it's a very different occasion from the big corporate Manchester Pride, and there's something very cool about thousands of trans and nonbinary people (plus supporters like me) marching around Manchester. It's a low-budget affair, lots of home-made banners and placards. This year cosmolinguist and I were marching with Not A Phase, who organise the trans gym sessions. The idea of marching as a bloc fell apart pretty much before we left the rally area, but there were still a bunch of relevant T-shirts scattered throughout the parade. P was there with roller derby people, and I gave her a little flag I'd made at Queer Club for her to wave.

Before the march started, there were some good speeches, including from both the outgoing and new directors of Trans Pride Manchester. There's been a changing of the guard at the top, which is a good thing - the old crew did their best but were swamped by the commitment and weren't great at either seeking or accepting more volunteer help. I'm hoping that under new leadership the event will go from strength to strength (and they'll put the events on the website rather than locked behind an Instagram login, and I'll actually get chased up when I volunteer to steward the march!)

Much like last year, fascists happened to pick the same weekend to have their own little shindig in the city centre. On an organising group, somebody from the Socialist Worker's Party was claiming that Trans Pride Manchester should cancel itself and everyone should go join the SWP (Stand Up To Racism being an SWP front) protest against the fascists. And if we didn't, and went to Trans Pride instead, then we were enabling fascism which made us fascists ourselves. This is the kind of bonkers nonsense the SWP usually come out with, but I intended to go from the end of the Trans Pride march to a non-SWP counter-demo anyway. So the message on my placard was "No TERF, No fash, No SWP, Trans Rights" in coloured bubble lettering. Lots of people commented positively on my placard, particularly the "No SWP" bit. They're not actually popular among the communities they claim to represent; just well funded and obsessive.

The march itself was good fun. Positive vibes all around, friendly faces from trans gym, Queer Club, UTAW and other places. The vibes were excellent. My favourite chant was "We're here, we're mad, we're gonna trans your Dad." I'd planned to meet up with a couple of the young queerlings I know from the Internet but neither of them managed to make it and were terribly apologetic. At the end of the march we sat and chatted with friends in Vimto Park, before heading up to Piccadilly Gardens. By the time we got there, we couldn't see any fascists or counter-protesters. So instead we went for a drink with a friend at Mala in the Northern Quarter. Turns out that the fash had marched off to St Peter's Square which is why we missed them. The drink, food and associated chatter was lovely, but I was soon flagging and we had evening plans, so we headed back towards the bus stop.

On the way back through Piccadilly Gardens about half a dozen fash had returned and several of them approached me on seeing my sign, asking to interview me for their shitty fascist YouTube channels. I'm pretty good at being boring, and I didn't rise to their bait or give them any "content". Some other people had come over to make sure I was OK and they said they appreciated the way I handled the fascists. Sadly the buses were screwed up and it took us a long time to get home, and we were both too tired to go out to the trans show at Contact we'd planned. Still, it was a good day!

The next day, I saw pictures of the fascist march. A smaller group, all waving the same flags, looking miserable and practically outnumbered by their police escort. Of course they got all the press coverage again. But we had the better day, the better cause, and the better lives.

Last week, P and I went to a Pitchblack Playback event this evening to hear Joy Division's "Closer" album played in full in the dark, at Cultplex in Manchester. The cinema PA was good - not oppressively loud like a nightclub, but bass you can feel and quality good enough to really appreciate the music and the production. They have to keep fire escape signs on for legal reasons, so you get given a little blindfold to keep the last of the darkness out.

I'm not really used to Joy Division as an album band. They only released two in Ian Curtis' lifetime, and their most famous track "Love Will Tear Us Apart" doesn't appear on either of them. There's about a billion releases in their name though, from live gigs, various scraps left around the recording studio, and other ephemera to feed the obsessive fanbase. So listening to this from start to finish was an odd experience. It covers a lot of ground musically, definitely anchored in post-punk driving guitars and basslines but embracing some of the electronic / dance vibes which would later be explored by New Order. If you're sitting in the dark with no distractions your brain certainly makes a lot of connections with other things.

Everyone sitting down was weird, but me and P tapped our toes and jiggled along to the music happily. Which made it a more communal experience than just doing it on my own, which I think would have been a different vibe again. But most people there were in small groups, with only one or two solo adventurers.

Due to P's broken leg we left shortly after the playback concluded - they had a second album listening party that evening, and the accessible exit is through the listening room, so we couldn't stay without essentially being trapped for the duration. It was an interesting experience and I'm glad she suggested it as a date idea.