Manchester Pride

I promised to blog a bit about Manc Pride, so here goes.

Manchester Pride was very very busy.

The end.

Okay... a little more. We set off for Manchester on Saturday Lunchtime. We queued through the roadworks on the M6. We queued in the traffic jam snaking it's way through the city centre. We queued to turn our tickets into wrist-bands to get into the cordoned-off areas of pride. We queued to get down a heaving Canal Street. We queued to buy drinks. We wandered around and saw some of the sights until we got bored and headed back to the hotel to relax before heading out again for the evening.

The evening was like the day, but with more queuing.

It was too busy. It was about 45 minutes before I managed to get a drink, in the upstairs bar of AXN, which for some reason seemed to have decided it was going to be a quiet night and only put on 2 bar staff. Everywhere else was the same. All the outdoor entertainment stopped at 11pm, which caused the bars to fill up with even more people looking for entertainment.

Eventually we found sanctuary on the boat-bar outside Eden, and the evening started to look up. After a few drinks and a relaxing time there we elected to head back to the hotel bar, where drinks weren't cheap but were rapidly forthcoming. It was Summer's first night out en-femme, and her first experience of the GLBT community, which was a bit of a shame, as it left her and her wife with the impression that "gay nightlife = queuing". But they say they had fun!

We headed back into the gay pride area on Sunday and had a much nicer time. Well, apart from the moment Jess and I suddenly shot 200 foot into the air suspended only by two thin bits of elastic...