Author: David WISEMAN

It’s so easy to think after attending well on forty Prides that you know it all. That there’ll be a huge rainbow flag carried by thirty people: tick; A somewhat circuitous route that winds through side streets: tick; it’ll end up with a rally with disco hits you’ve heard far too many times: tick and (nowadays) there’ll be heavily sponsored floats that gratuitously overdo the self promo: tick.

Yet this was not the rally of the previous Tuesday, that I rather ungraciously bemoaned yesterday. This was the real deal. A ‘proper’ Pride march that I’d only learnt about hours before, as my friend Bea happened to catch it in an instagram post she had chanced upon. So firstly I owe an apology to Almerians, in that I’d thought the rally on Tuesday was it it. Wrong. So very wrong. This ‘manifestacion’ as they like to call such things here, was the real deal offering all the above and more.

The international press were full on about the huge Pride Rally in London yesterday, celebrating fifty years since the first was organised there in 1972. The old activists were wheeled out (no, I’m being both unkind and ableist: they are a pretty sprightly bunch actually), to talk about how it felt going on the first GLF (Gay Liberation Front) march all those years ago. The various internal arguments surfaced as ever (should the still quite homophobic police be allowed to march in uniform, the compromise- they marched with no uniforms and the Queer activist group, Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants, were allowed to halt the parade to protest against the presence of police at future London pride events) and Labour party leader Keir Starmer was able to march with a glittery face and a t-shirt that said ‘We make Camden Proud’. Well let’s hope so Sir Keir, yes. It too went on a circuitous route around London town for four hours, ending in a staged rally in Trafalgar Square with speeches from the great and good and performers from current pop worthies like Ava Max.

Reliable estimates suggested a million people had in some way been actively involved in it. Now that’s one big parade. Our little manifestacion was called Fiesta Diversidad (Party of Diversity) and featured ten white drag acts on the flier (I may be being a little unfair here as I’m not entirely sure of the chosen gender pronouns of them all..)

Reliable estimates suggested a million people had in some way been actively involved in .. the London march… Now that’s one big parade.

And yet, walking behind the two floats and around ten sponsored open top BMW minis (local recently wed lesbian and gay couples sat in them waving and looking a tad self conscious, since you ask) somehow I felt part of it in a much more intimate way than I guessed I would have in London and realised pretty soon I was going to have to eat humble pie on here. So our little group of seven sashayed our way down on the route from Puerta Purchena in the very centre of Almeria and through a few obligatory sidestreets as well to the Almadrabillas Park on the Paseo Maritimo. Though Bea, with freedom flags painted on her face too this time, said she quite liked the sidestreets ‘as we can get to show the locals eating tapas in bars a thing or too’. And she wasn’t wrong.

The local drumming band leading us kept up a fierce drumming all the time, the minis behind tooted their horns incessantly (engendering slight shadows of the right wing Vox party marches in my mind) and I yet again resisted the urge to toot my whistle (‘Whistles are for football matches here’ I was told). My friend Joe had seen the parade twice before whilst visiting in 2018 and 2019, before Covid put a lid on things in the following years and he said ‘I think its actually bigger than then but those floats look suspiciously like the ones I saw in 2018’. It’s true: I have noticed they do recycle in a big way here; the thinking goes ‘why ditch something that worked well about five years ago’? The christian floats in the Semana Santa (Easter) Procession have been carried around the city routes for literally decades and decades, though not by the same men, they are damned heavy to do a circuit on. Men can be seen at Ego (our local gym) in training for the event for months in advance. Or so I like to think.

So yes, these floats were relatively lightweight affairs, the crowd weren’t chanting much and there were clearly lots of friends here too offering support but here were the LGTBI (as the flyer had it) crowd in Almeria, finally, after two years wait, out to parade and party on down. And it did feel good to be a real part of it. In a flock of a million you are but a feather, in this crowd we were an important, organic part of its structure, as it picked its way through the Almerian calles and pasajes, with it’s various multicoloured freedom flags, (some old school, some new), flying out and away in front of it.

All about .. the queer revolution in the Middle East and how ‘one good song can do more than 5000 protests’.

‘Beirut Dreams in Colour’

When we arrived at the parque there was a small stage and a surprisingly large number of portaloos (budget blown anyone or maybe that was the freebie from the council?) and the rainbow flags were laid out in front of the stage as we all skipped to get our photo taken in front of them. Yes, the first song the DJ played was a tired cliche, ‘Its Raining Men‘ (or ‘Its Raining Men for the 101st time‘ as I think of it) and seemed a slightly ‘non diverse’ opener to me but as the drag queens came out, one by one, to perform Spanish favourites, interspersed with a few more club hits the crowd seemed relatively relaxed about it all. It was what I’ve come to realise, a very Spanish affair. As indeed it should be.

And that music was important especially here in this Southern Med city. If you want to appreciate quite how much so, there’s a sobering BBC documentary online ‘Beirut Dreams in Colour‘ (see Beirut Dreams in Colour) about the queer revolution in the Middle East and how ‘one good song can do more than 5000 protests’. It tells the story of how Mashrou’ Leila were one of the biggest bands in the Middle East, their lead singer, Hamed, being the most prominent openly gay rock star in the Arab world. However, an event at a concert in Cairo in 2017 changed all that. Whilst playing to 35,000 people, the band looking out at the many swaying flickering lights saw it happened to include an Egyptian fan flying the infamous rainbow flag. It was a simple act but (perhaps incredibly to us) it would be later described by Egyptian authorities as ‘inciting debauchery’, and ultimately that simple act catapulted the band, the fan and others into an important (but also tragic) series of events. The flag representing the fight for freedom: freedom to choose and live out your own sexuality, a fight that is so very far from over. Using sensitive music and waving flags still represents that ongoing fight.

So the carrying and laying down of these flags at the Parque both here and many other places really does represent something very profound, such a simple gesture and yet so very full of meaning, of strength, of solidarity. And I humbly submit my apology for the tirade in part one; and with a request for a tad more publicity next time to the great and good who arranged it all I concur: Almeria, you do know how to throw a fiesta. A powerfully important fiesta. Not that I ever really doubted it. Muchas gracias por la invitacion.

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Dave Wiseman

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I went to my first Spanish ‘Pride’ event a few days ago and we marched down the main drag. But boy, was I disappointed! It should all have been a drama in my mind. Sequinned drag queens in stillettos would run out in front of cars and give them an index finger. The normally strictly unsmiling guardia would lead us, a phalanx of happy smiling cops in sexy uniforms proudly holding up their ‘Pride’ banner. People on the streets would stop and wave, smiling, slightly aghast but also secretly in awe of the pageant and colour, as their kids shouted, laughed and drank in the positive vibes. Cars would honk their horns in greeting, like they had done loudly and often when Almeria FC went up into the premier league a few months back.

But no, none of that actually happened. No drag kings or queens, the police watched unsmiling as they held back the traffic, seemingly unaffected in any way by the procession. Nobody was that all that bothered on the streets and those in cars just looked a tad annoyed at having their journeys home curtailed.

Did I see any homophobic abuse? No. Did I feel threatened that our relatively small group of around five hundred people was going to be arrested . No, not really, (though there’s an important comment I’ll return too). Nothing bad happened, at least as far as I’m aware.

‘In seventy countries relations between persons of the same sex are penalised with physical punishment or imprisonment, in eleven you could expect the death penalty’

Amnistia Internacional flyer

My friends had spent the afternoon making banners. There was Beccie, glammed up and ready to sashay with a variety of home made cardboard signs. ‘There’s no Pride in Prejudice’ one read. Nice that! Jennie had had two rainbow hearts drawn on her face by Steph and wore her hair in pigtails decorated with multicolored Pride ribbons, hastily cut from our vimpel streamers, using a house key. We were up for a vibrant march.

Yet at the end of the short distance we went, (about a mile maybe) Steph clearly wasn’t satisfied. Where was all the music, the singing, the dancing she bemoaned? I agreed. Like her I’d been expecting something a little more… well, maybe a little more like the previous forty or so Pride marches I’ve been on in my life.  Yes, there was chanting, though it was with the thick andalucian Spanish, I’ve found so difficult to pick. up. There was a big, slightly scary woman with a megaphone too, exhorting us to shout and sit down a couple of times too on the road as she recited some stats about oppression. There were plenty of rainbow flags being held & some even waved aloft. And so many varieties now too. What exactly does the grey mean in the flag? It feels a little confusing, even to me. Yet the energy seemed muted somehow. It was if we were seeing the ghost of an experience that had been seen fleetingly, then run away, escaped.

Now, I’m only too aware that we were the outsiders here. Almeria actually has a tiny resident population of Brits (incredibly, in fact just about 200 the latest census data suggests out of 200,000 people). And clearly there were different cultural norms happening. I had a whistle on a pretty rainbow string and was planning to happily toot along as we walked. But I started and people looked uneasy. I saw that no one else was blowing or even holding whistles. I realised that whistles are associated with the civil police here, they tend to whistle when you’ve done some wrong, something bad. It’s not a good sign.  So it’s another culture and clearly it’s right to respect that. But I’ve seen happy marches here with a lot of life to them and this wasn’t even especially happy, it felt subdued. I’d asked a gay professional South American expat couple I’d met a few weeks back about going to such events like this but one of them told me, no, we just like to mix with everyone, not go to political events and stuff like that. Fair enough. Maybe that’s just what just young people feel nowadays? Honestly, it felt like a cop out to me but I respect the decision.

Maybe, in fact very likely, I’ve been spoilt by decades of big noisy fun prides in the past in the UK. Specifically in London & Brighton. Bands, floats, dancing, cheering, clapping and chanting. Well yes, very likely, these are huge events attracting nearly a quarter of a million people. Five hundred on a small city street simply wasn’t going to match that. Yet is ‘spoilt’ the right word, shouldn’t that be our ‘right’ if we wished?

And yet. And yet..there are big Pride events in Spain in almost every large city here each year (when covid doesn’t rule the agenda). Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia Prides are justifiably infamous for being kick ass events. Yet here it’s all more low key. There’s one -relatively small- gay bar (‘Babilon’ since you ask) and not much else really. Of course it’s pretty well known that queer bars are closing at the rate of knots anyway, even more widely. The clubbing scene has been decimated too, by Covid, by rising rents and expenses, by the recession and by the resurgence of right wing councils being heavy handed on licences.  We’ve just had a local election and Vox, the ultra right wing party here did well in it, with three members on the council here now along with six from the Partido Popular, a right wing party broadly in line with the Conservative Party back in the UK. The death of two dozen people in the Spanish enclave of Melilla, a hundred and seventy kilometres (one hundred miles) due south of us, on the North African coast a few days ago, whilst trying to get into it by scaling the fences en masse was widely reported and seems very local to us, with the port ferries chundering back and forwards from here to there every day; in fact there was another demo here to protest about that the following day.

Since Covid things haven’t felt quite the same either, it’s as if we all now realise just how thin the veneer of ‘normal society’ is, and it’s a bit of shock, that any sudden movement will bring it crashing back down on us. Just how easy it was to get us to all to stay inside for months on end by declaring a health emergency. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disputing the necessity for caution then; the curfew seemed right at the time. But it’s a scary time again, when much seems to be uncertain in our world and little seems like it can be taken for granted. People are simply more cautious. Jobs are no longer given things, for a lot of us Brits (well about 48% in fact), Brexit was a system shock we are still floundering over. Travel we took for granted in the past is uncertain, no more free movement, airlines are no longer remotely sexy, they are understaffed, carbon polluting affairs & their schedules are in shreds; and we still wear masks on all public transport. It’s not been an easy ride.

Despite all this though I recognised that things would still have been different here in south east Andalucia. Growing up in London (well ok, I mean whilst I was in my twenties and thirties) it was easy to forget I was at an epicentre. People came to London from the ‘berbs to go clubbing in Soho et al. I was on its doorstep. I was young with the money & energy to go out and get -well, frankly -wasted.  Yes, I cheered when down in Cornwall, where I’d readily left at eighteen, having spent most of my youth there, lesbian & gay clubs opened in places like Truro & St Ives (Saddletramps: I loved you!). But then they closed again.   

Yes, I cheered when gay programmes like ‘Out in the UK’ begun in the early eighties, when soaps got real gay characters (nod to Micheal Cashman) and civil partnerships then marraige suddenly became an option for same sex couples in the UK and other liberal countries around the world, like Spain. It was all good. But that was then and this is now. Freedoms are eroding, being swept away. In the States gay marriage could be swept away as the (black) judge on its supreme court Clarence Thomas suggested recently, in the same way as the rights of women to have an abortion have been. And in places like Afghanistan, gay men are being murdered as always for being gay. And that’s by the State not single homophobes. As the Amnesty International flier they were giving out at our Pride said: (in spanish)’En 70 paises las relaciones entre personas del mismo sexo son penalizadas con castigos fisicos o carcel. En 11 de ellos podran suponer la muerte (‘in seventy countries relationships between people of the same sex are penalised with physical punishment or imprisonment, in eleven of them they could expect the dealth penalty’).   

Orgulla de Ser : www.orgulladeser.org

Amnestia Internacional website

So I guess people are uneasy. When things become less certain people often retreat into their own lives to protect themselves as much as they can. Generally, they do not poke their heads up to be targets above the parapet. So whilst all this change personally makes me angry, fires me up, I realise I am one of the lucky ones who can afford to be so (although something about my current status here as a resident simply by the grace of the Spanish authorities makes me flinch too). I love Spain and the Spanish and don’t particularly want to leave, to return to that inward looking country of the dreary 52% again.  

Ok. So what’s your point you say. Cut to the chase then and I’m saying I realise my expectations are very high, at a level they have no real right to be at. Yes, living in big cities here in western Europe is generally a liberal relaxed affair, yes in a lot of my homeland people generally are now pro LGBTQI+  rights. And yes we have big noisy well attended Prides. But- and it’s a big but- as has been shown in the States in the last week with the abortion decision (technically the repeal of Roe v Wade) those freedoms can change, opinion can change (28% of Americans in a poll in the last month say they would take up arms against their own government if necessary) and in many places things aren’t getting better- they are getting worse. You think things can go only one way but history shows us, time and time again, that things can and do get worse. One step forward. Two steps backwards. Now is the time to get out there and protest against these changes. It feels unsafe, it feels a little dangerous, it feels exposed.

So, yes the march was  small, it was subdued, it was less than I’d expected but the important thing I think is that we were simply there.  And that it happened at all, in the confines of (relatively little) Almeria. We all brought our widely different experiences to the march yes but we all marched together. ‘El gentes unido jamás se dividirá’ (‘The people united will never be divided’) they chanted. And yes, I did get that one! Bravo: well said Almerians!   

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A short story..

I think I was on my bike when I first saw her . It was a rather bleak Almerian day when the skies are covered with an overcast grey, a wind whips off the sea and you could swear there were even a few spots of rain in it. She was, shall we say, distinctively undistinctive: a thick black coat on her, which -to be perfectly honest -could have benefited from a deep clean. Not small it’s true but her frame seemed a little shrunken, her best days were clearly behind her. She was ambling along the Paseo Maritimo to one side of the cycle path but I knew this story well and was wary, slowing down well in advance, to be on the safe side.

Sure enough, as I drew closer, without looking she seemed to change her mind and walked out right in front of me, looking straight ahead. Braking sharply enough to just miss her I was nevertheless rattled. ‘Leer’ I shouted, perhaps a little too loudly, leer! Just briefly she looked around and with the slightest flicker of her head nodded acquiescence before moving off towards the Dia supermarket, where she seemed to have clearly suddenly decided she needed something urgently: milk perhaps, biscuits more likely, even plain water, who knows? I couldn’t be mad for long though as there was a certain charm about her, something of a ‘devil may care’ attitude that struck a chord in me as well. She was a bit of a loner it seemed, doing her own thing with no one to have to answer to, making her own decisions about her life as she saw fit.

Then for a few weeks afterwards I didn’t see anything more of her. She seemed to have disappeared to other paseos, other plazas. However on one sunny, much warmer day in mid Spring as I was racing along the Paseo, coming back from a park ride with a following wind there she was again, that distinctive black coat on, despite the sunny warmth of the day. She was alone again, shuffling along the paseo, seemingly uncaring about all the other pedestrians around her..they had to divert around her if they were to avoid a collision. I rang my bell well in advance this time, just in case she might cross over without warning, as she had before. She just briefly glanced up towards me, her face puckered a little, as if to say ‘I’m really not bothered by a whippersnapper like you’, and this despite my own advancing age.I looked more closely this time and could see her hair was tinged with white, her face wrinkled in a lived in, a loved in way. And still I thought: what character she has: she knows her own mind, gives off a sense of purpose in the world and despite her gait, inside she feels she owns her world, she owns the world. I felt a pang of something deep inside me, though I’d be hard placed to tell you exactly what it was now. A touch of envy perhaps; even though I’m aware it sounds faintly ridiculous; jealousy? You’ll laugh at me for even admitting it but there was a sense of freedom that she had, a sense that she had stopped worrying about the world and its problems and was living for the moment. Yet again she was alone and yet again she seemed quite content with her lot in life.

I saw her a few more times in the following weeks, always alone, she was hard to miss with that thick black winter coat on, despite the ever strengthening Andalucian sun. She never walked in front of me again when I was on my bike, such that I was able to relax, chill out when I saw her. I caught myself wondering what her name was, where she lived in the city and how long she had been a loner. What was her life story I wondered? Were there any relations of hers in the city, anyone to care for her in her old age. I was reminded of the story I read where an old lady in a city in Germany had been found sitting at her table dead for two years by police, her neighbours thought she had moved away to be with relatives during Covid. That was no way to end a well lived life.

And then just a few weeks ago, I had occasion to walk through the built up streets behind the Paseo, to meet a friend at a much loved cafe she had recommended to me. As I walked into the cafe and looked around the unfamiliar seats and tables for my friend I realised I was a little early, I sat down to wait, idly flicking over the pages of the menu. Two ladies were sitting at the next table chatting away and as I gazed in their direction I saw her again, still in that thick black coat. She was tucked away by the table, quiet but perhaps alert to all around her. As a pampered white poodle came in she growled a little. ‘Lady’, her owner scolded, be quiet or I’ll take you home right away, you’ll see!. She was patted and given a treat and resumed her patient waiting game under the table, with a gentle sniffly grunt. I fancied she was dreaming of her paseo walks, of freedom and biding her time, until her next great adventure took her off someplace close by the sea.

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Dave is just thinking about writing the second part of an autobiography (‘Sex Love & Life’ the first) and trying to get his head around how it will all fit together and wondering if ‘Fear of failure’ might be too honest a title to use… and this writing is perhaps just a start on those musings.

I saw an quote somewhere on the net the other day that really cheered me up.  All about failure. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.”  It sounds like Winston Churchill and yes, it is. You can almost hear him saying it, can’t you? Or if you’re slightly cynical , imagine him saying it to his War Cabinet to justify carrying on with a manoeuvre or operation that has begun badly.

But then you see another quote and you think hmm, I think that’s taking it all a little too far. Thomas Edison famously once said, “I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.” Yeh right Thomas, that’s just you not thinking straight. You could fairly easily spend half your life finding 10,000 things that don’t work but there are a lot of counselors, books and bloggers ready to convince you that failure is a good thing, or to be fair, on how to put a positive spin on failure. There are even manuals telling you things about failure, such as ‘six reasons why fear of failure is positive’. (You’re wondering how and why? See https://www.theperformanceroom.co.uk/fear-of-failure/ )

Yet despite my professed pessimism, I think they have a point. I do think that personally I’ve always been haunted by a fear of failure and as such ‘stressed out about it’ many times. And yet, despite the many things I’ve tried and failed at in a half century of ‘experimentation’ shall we call it, I have learnt not to be so afraid of it at a personal level in that time. Yes, I failed but the world didn’t implode around me, I got up, dusted myself off and walked on. Of course this is not to say that failure, failure per se, is a good thing. On a wider level for example, consider the failure to prevent a war in the Ukraine, failure to tackle Covid properly, failure to manage a country’s economy well, such that millions are forced to live below the poverty line? These are clearly not good things.

Yet at a more personal level failure is at least managable. Thinking of my early fear of failure growing up I’m reminded of Neil Tennant’s wonderfully concise lyrics to the Pet Shop Boys song ‘It’s a sin” released in June 1987, just as I turned thirty (and celebrated with a huge party, and by playing the track at least two or three times during the night):

When I look back upon my life it’s always with a sense of shame

I’ve always been the one to blame For everything I long to do

no matter when or where or who has one thing in common too

It’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a sin..

Oh yes. Thirty up and tick, tick, tick Neil – of course I recognised I wasn’t the only one it resonated with by a country mile (partly why it was quite so successful). Hell, Russell T Davies even made a BBC series titled after it last year. Some things have changed, but many things remain much the same. Guilt is one hell of a trip. So when I left my little village in Cornwall to come up to London I was already carrying much of that baggage around, as well as the huge red suitcase I alighted from the train with at Paddington station.

And yes, I worked through it but the scars are still there. I still tear up when I see a soppy coming out story (Heartstopper anyone?); my heart doesn’t stop but yes, it skips a beat, simply because I’m still relating to it and the underlying internal /external crap, that usually goes with it, is still there inside somewhere; locked up yes but it’s in there somewhere. No amount of counselling will ever remove that.

Then there’s the many things since then that I’ve tried and failed at. Maths and Physics at an advanced level? Big fail. Film production company? Eventual fail. Outdoor adventure group for gay men? Fail. Three way relationship? Fail. Open a business in Ibiza? Fail. Keep a educational company open, to train up Erasmus funded European teenagers in Brighton, UK post Brexit? Fail. Love and forgive my Dad. Yeh well that’s a big one. A really big one. A few years ago I would have said ‘fail’ but maybe, just maybe, I pulled that one back before he passed away last year. Thank god. (No really, thank God but it’s a longer story than this piece has time for).

So many times I am aware that I have not come up with the goods. And yet. I suppose the getting of wisdom is what you really get in older age, after personal failure. I still see far too little written today about wisdom. Of course being a ‘Wiseman’ I’ve always had it thrown at me. ‘Wise man?’ said my third form music teacher. Let’s see how wise you are shall we? Fail. Cue internal shame that lasted far longer than it had any right too. But wisdom is maligned. How many songs do you know with wisdom in the title. No, I couldn’t get past two or three either. Nevertheless, some of my favourite songs are about the getting of wisdom. Christian ‘Halo’ James in his one hit wonder in the eighties (‘Could have told you so.‘.) sang

Could have told you so,

Could have told you Dreams would come and go

Could have told you so,

But you were young  .. How would you know?

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Could have told you so.. Halo James (1986)

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So let’s hear it more often. Yes I failed but I became wiser. I understood more about life. I realised how to let people down so they bruised less, I realised how making mistakes is part and parcel of human nature, I realised that no-one really holds all the aces, even if it might seem so at the time. That there is a way to fail (and we will all fail at some things, however golden we are) but to at least fail well. To come out of the other side of failure head held high because you are wiser, (and not sadder, as the cliche goes), because you at least tried, you at least had a vision, you at least now understand why it didn’t work out (and I think that’s quite important , there’s nothing wrong with examining failure retrospectively to better understand it).

In fact, I think an understanding of failure is critical to be coming wiser and yes, whilst I realise that statement is hardly rocket science I’ve sometimes been surprised how many people fail and assign blame (to others, to themselves) without really understanding it. It’s perhaps natural that we want to escape from failures as soon as we can but they really do deserve some introspection on our parts so we can move on more comfortably and make changes if they are necessary.. to our lives, our relationships, within our community and our friends. The getting of wisdom is really less about accumulating all the knowledge in the world, it is about learning to understand ourselves better, when and why we succeed and why we sometimes fail.      

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Dave muses on how world events can reshape our personal thinking about our own lives and what we want to get out of them.. and give to others whilst living them..

‘For the greater good’ I read in a news article some months ago about the covid pandemic. Now, there was a phrase I hadn’t seen for some time. But then, just the other day, I read it again in an article about the Ukrainian war. Like buses suddenly the phrase is back again and coming at us repeatedly in a short time. But I found myself idly wondering, what exactly does it mean, for whose greater good?

Some quick and dirty searching on Google, told me that it is a saying usually attributed to Jeremy Bentham, (1748-1832), who, in 1789 presented the world with an ethical position that became known as utilitarianism. It is usually accepted that there are, or rather were, three key principles that served as the basic tenets of his position. Simply expressed, these were that pleasure or happiness is the only thing that truly has intrinsic value; that actions that promote happiness are right but wrong if they produce unhappiness and finally that everyone’s happiness counts equally.

..the social contract theory, suggests that we should all try to live in a way that is essentially ‘for the greater good’ of the security of shared life ‘in a community’.

You could of course, spend all day picking holes in these statements: their benefits, as it stands, are that they are pretty clear, simplistic notions, that can be easily understood, their problem being that they offer pretty clear simplistic notions, that can be easily mis-understood. How do we relate it to non-human activities for example, (should animals strive for the greater good as well?) and external issues, like the environment? The shareholders in a large oil company may be very happy with its profits, even when it’s despoiling and polluting the planet, for the rest of the other animals living on it.

Bentham’s utilitarianism however went hand in hand with a concept usually called the social contract theory, which suggests that we should all try to live in a way that is essentially ‘for the greater good’ of the security of shared life ‘in a community’. So then we need to define how we are going to interpret the word ‘community‘. On the whole, it’s an ideology which became less popular in the last century, as concepts like the development of self help rose to greater prominence in the dominant western world order.

After some musing I still feel that Bentham’s ideas above seem ‘reasonable things’ to strive for in the long term; whilst I accept that others seem to feel that it is more important to prioritise the things you have a direct responsibility for, such as your family, your job, your own future. However, it is nevertheless a phrase, that I had noticed some people had started using again recently, during the recent covid years about looking after others around us, ensuring we carry out social activities, such as mask wearing and following other practices that might help to limit the spread of the Covid virus in your locality or indeed, the world. And as befits the difference of opinion about it more widely, there was vocal disagreement on the idea as it related to Covid prevention too. It ‘takes away from our personal freedoms and liberty’ people argued, to be ordered to wear masks. ‘Whatever next in our increasingly ‘Big Brother’ orientated society’?

One thing we can probably agree on at least, it’s been a difficult few years for us all..

When I was younger, collective responsibility meant everything to me and I tried to find positions that allowed self help to integrate with this constructed responsibility; positions within the social construct. But I wondered if I too had drifted away from that, almost without realising, into something more personally orientated, more, dare I say, selfish?  Is selfish always a dirty word?

One thing we can probably agree on at least, it’s been a difficult few years for us all. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) compilers decided, when looking for its usual ‘word of the year’ that there had been so many new words during 2020 and 2021 that we were using to describe our changed circumstances, they wouldn’t pick one at all. It seems a slight cop out. I think Pandemic would probably have done. This is a word that has been a part of our history for a long time; it first appeared in 1666, the year the Great Plague ended; likewise self quarantine was also recorded for the first time in relation to the events in the ‘plague village’, Eyam, in Derbyshire that year, where the concept of quarantining all residents, to escape infection, was first introduced in the UK.

Yes, pandemics have been living with us for a long time and it should be no great surprise when another comes upon us. And yet it usually is, and it’s no easier to live with, to struggle against, each time it occurs. We are reminded of our own mortality, as we see others around us, relatives, our loved ones, good friends, struggling to overcome infection caused by the virus, which seems to particularly affect the eldest amongst us. And yet, and yet: for some of us, it took us back to a beginning again. To the days when another pandemic was making the headlines. In the early eighties a ‘dreadful new disease’ was roaming the streets, as the actor John Hurt told us in sombre tones. The TV showed us huge gravestones, reminiscent of some B movie zombie horror flick and, for some, this narration was both cliched and distressing. AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) and HIV, (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) the virus that causes the related symptoms, had already been a talking point within the gay communities scattered pretty much around the globe, for some time. Where was the targeted government action to combat the disease, which like the Covid virus initially had no vaccine or cure, (in fact it still hasn’t) and was already killing hundreds, soon to be thousands of gay and bisexual men (along with certain other groups)?  

There was talk of a greater good then as well. Some right wing MP’s and red top newspapers (Ok, I’m pointing my finger at The Sun) were suggesting that all those afflicted should be locked up and left to fend more or less for themselves. Naturally, those afflicted tended to disagree. A rather more caring, compassionate view prevailed, whereby society accepted it would care for those afflicted, though honestly it felt like it was touch and go at times.

So I am always wary of these phrases which it is very easy to trot out, as a kind of simplistic ‘catch all’. On the whole if we really must use them I hope that they cause discussion and mediation on the subject and recognition that such circumstances are rarely simplistic enough to warrant such broad brush notions. That people have the right to be treated as individuals with their own human rights and dignity. And whilst I would be the first to admit it is a complex subject I suspect such catch all phrases are not helpful from those who may utter them (politicians, I am looking in your direction). Whilst it is sometime easier to side with simplistic notions I suspect that to stand up for the complexity that is often necessary when mediating on such subjects will serve us all, and society in general, better in the long term.

Soho, centred as it is pretty much right in the middle of London has long been a place where people gathered to socialise, drink, plan, plot and sometimes plunder. Soho has also been at the heart of London’s sex industry for the last two centuries. Along with this, it has also catered for a clientele with a preference for, shall we say, more transgressive encounters. On its western edge Piccadilly Circus has long been a location that rent boys frequented (as in the expression ‘going down the Dilly’). Both the literary wit  Oscar Wilde and the painter  Francis Bacon used the area to (illegally, of course) meet ‘rough trade’ until online dating services in the mid 1990’s replaced the rent boys lined up on the Piccadilly railings, known as the ‘meat rack’. Much of this era was documented by Jeremy Reed in his 2014 book ‘The Dilly’.

In Judith Summers History of Soho (1989 pp190) the areas inherent tolerance has always offered the unconventional, the eccentric, the rebellious and the merely different the chance to be themselves. And yet, and yet, as Stephen Fry puts it so well in a forward to Berne Katz’s Soho Society (2008) ‘Soho’s public face of  drugs, prostitution and seedy Bohemia.. has always hidden a private soul of family, neighbourhood, kindness and connection‘.  Every so often it has a clean up, most notably recently before the 2012 Olympic Games in London and slowly small businesses have been forced out by the ever increasing rents charged on commercial properties in the area.

As a result of its reputation- and perhaps inspiration- people have been writing songs about it for decades now. For a period in the late sixties and early seventies the mod scene decamped to Soho as its central playground and for a dozen or so years after about 1965 David Jones (aka Bowie), had already been on the scene there, gathering inspiration and writing songs in tribute, such as his December 1966 release ‘London Boy’, and playing gigs in the area, such as at the infamous Marquee Club (69, Wardour St) with his band The Lower Third,

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^{A Bowie Mixology Reworked, remixed, rethought songs by Bowie}

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“London Boy,” documents a young guy, new to the city, who is trying to work his way into the scene: drink, pills, getting high. The song builds and he becomes part of the pack, dressing sharply (mod imagery) getting pilled up but he then finds that his triumph leaves him feeling more alone than ever he was before. There must have been quite a few who also identified with that:

Bright lights, Soho, Wardour street
You hope you make friends with the guys that you meet
Somebody shows you round
Now you’ve met the London boys
Things seem good again, someone cares about you

A London boy, oh a London boy
Your flashy clothes are your pride and joy
A London boy, a London boy
You’re crying out loud that you’re a London boy
You think you’ve had a lot of fun
But you ain’t got nothing, you’re on the run
It’s too late now, cause you’re out there boy
You’ve got it made with the rest of the toys
Now you wish you’d never left your home
You’ve got what you wanted but you’re on your own
With the London boys
Now you’ve met the London boys

[London Boy, Bowie; released December 1966, Deram Records]

The song has a surprisingly melancholy feel and perhaps echoes his disillusionment with the relatively rigid confines of the London mod scene as much as anything, for he would soon cast it all aside, make Bromley in SE London his centre and experiment with the burgeoning hippy scene. However, by the early seventies, reborn as David Bowie, he was back in west Soho (The Furriers ‘K West’ at 28, Heddon St to be precise) posing for that famous shot on the cover of the Ziggy Stardust album cover in 1972 (and fast gaining a legion of gay fans).

Bert Jansch & John Renbourn also wrote a song about Soho in 1966 inspired by the sixties folk scene in the area, as there used to be a folk club in Greek Street called Les Cousins. Long gone now of course.

The best Soho song though, in my opinion (although, somehow, Time Out, the recently deceased London listings magazine left it out completely of their Top 100 London tunes.. but hey, what do they know?), was penned by the writers for the sixties band Dave Dee, Dozy Mick & Titch, Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, with something of a minor classic in 1968, when they wrote ‘Last Night in Soho”, recently recreated as a film directed by director Edgar Wright .

You came into my life like rain upon a barren desert
One smile and I was born again
I felt sure it wasn’t too late
I’d find strength to make me go straight
I had love and threw it away
Why did they lead me astray?
For last night in Soho I let my life go..

Last Night in Soho, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Titch, June 1968 Fontana Records

Listen to it and for my money there’s nothing else around that sums up the feel of Soho in the late 60’s and 70’s. It reeks of smoke, dimly lit clubs, shady deals and letting yourself go: doing things you wouldn’t normally think of doing in the bright of daylight.  It went to number 8 in the UK charts at the time and it still packs quite a punch listening to its grooves today. Nevertheless, it seems again to sum up Soho as a bad influence though, as its protagonist, a gang member, is led away to jail by the end. It was Dave Dee’s personal favourite of all their hits (and they had many) and in a later interview Ken Howard, noted  that “I had grown up, living not far from Oxford Circus, so as I child I knew Soho quite well, wandering on weekends alone through its streets… in the fifties it was quite a rough place, full of pimps, prostitutes and petty criminals, porno cinemas and sex clubs. Not the ideal milieu for an impressionable kid’! It is certainly my favourite of all their hits.

Yet again in 1986, the Pogues were singing about ‘A rainy night in Soho’, (yes, yet another one..) which, let’s face it, you’re going to regularly experience if you’re a local there but again it portrays Soho in a rather negative way, although Shane Mac Gowan does meet the love of his life there, to be fair. Then a decade on, we get Pulp’s location specific (and classic) Bar Italia from 1995, about the infamous bar that all late night Soho kids of that time knew, gay and straight, as a cheap hang out joint after the clubs closed, in Frith St.  

You might not realise it’s about Soho but you’ll know it: the classic, much loved, 1996 track Born Slippy by Underworld was all about Soho, as it was literally assembled from snatches of a conversation heard on a night out in Soho, according to writer Karl Hyde. He recalled: ‘In truth, the song was me -literally- asking for help. I was describing a progressively despairing state of mind. I was using alcohol to numb the senses and thus arrived at the point where “Born Slippy” was written. I was saying, “I’m going to describe a typical night; does anybody else think that this is no way to live, and could somebody throw me a lifeline?”

Of course, arguably, the Pet Shop Boys iconic first hit ‘West End Girls’ is more or less all about Soho. The watering ground for the West End girls (and boys) meeting those East End boys. Its writer Neil Tennant has noted:

When I first moved down to London, we used to get all dressed up in our David Bowie imitation clothes, and clatter down the staircase at Seven Sisters tube station on to the brand new Victoria Line, (blimey Neil, it opened in 1963, are you that old?!) and go down to Shadowramas on Neal Street. And that whole thing of being a northerner and coming down to London: I always had that feeling, and still do, of escaping into the West End. I don’t even know why really, but it’s the difference between day and night – people go mad at night, and they go mad in Soho. For me, Soho symbolizes that, although it’s a much tidier place these days. I love London and I’m inspired by it. It’s what we write songs about.’

Which is more or less where I come in to the conversation too. My own use of the area as a socialising centre goes back to around early 1977, when I would journey into the city from the south western suburbs to go to establishments such as Spats at 38, Oxford St, BANG in Tottenham Court Rd and pubs such as the Salisbury on St Martin’s Lane and sometime later in 1986, Comptons on Old Compton St. So by the time I reached Soho, I was travelling on a culturally pretty well worn path, albeit one that was at times rather bittersweet. Nevertheless I always regarded it as something of a wonderland in all the senses of the word; perhaps that is the clue to Soho’s success: it is often a bittersweet experience. It’s gives and it takes, pushes and pulls you. Excites and then dismays. It is, at least, almost never boring.

Excerpt from the biography ‘Sex Love and Love’, David Wiseman (unpublished)

This is a passage from about a third of the way through the book about an early gig by the band ‘U2’ I saw in a music pub in North London around 1981, the details of which remain indelibly stained into me to this day. I was living in a legal squat in Kilburn with five or six others at the time and much of the narrative is informed from my diary at the time..

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There really was a lot going on in those days, for us all. We lived vicariously day to day and packed a lot in, without spending any money. Money that we didn’t have anyway. A week later I was watching one of the greatest gigs of my life, ‘U2’ at the Moonlight, a gritty pub with a music stage over in West Hampstead. ‘An excellent set’, I’ve written in my 1981 diary, ‘especially the last encore, Father was an Orphan’. The band had just released their first album ‘Boy’ on the 20th October, two weeks before the set they played there and it was already creating quite a stir. This gig really stays with me still; yes, the details have faded but the overall impression of a band with so much energy, so many inventive ideas, stays. I watched it from the front row, about three feet away from Bono, determined to be right up there ‘in the action’, since the previous one I’d seen at the Marquee in Soho, I had been much further back in the crowd and so had felt less involved. I knew from that gig that up there in the front, once the group came on stage, it would be impossible not to pogo-dance all the way through the set, as by this time there were a band of U2 groupies who simply went apeshit from the start to the final encore and to survive you had to more or less submit to the will of the crowd, becoming one living entity. Up there the music, the sound, the raw energy was such that it thrilled you to your core. 

So there I was. Those whom have had similar relationships with up and coming bands, seen them performing live in a small setting will understand what I mean, There’s a rush of pure adrenaline that comes from the band, often the lead singer, that hits you in the gut: a wave of sound that carries you to a place that’s not entirely rooted in this world; a euphoric combination, where you became at one with the band, the band became at one with the audience, feeding from the energy: one giant feedback loop of love, for it is all similar to a love affair really, between the performer(s) and audience. At the Moonlight on that night, there seemed to be a particular vulnerability to Bono, his voice at times pleading, asking us for reassurance, unsure of himself, especially within the songs ‘Into the heart’ and ‘I will follow’. ‘How can man do this to fellow man’ he seemed to plead with us. Why do I have to grow up and understand, take in, all of this.. and yet I must’. 

The cover of this first album ‘Boy’ was slightly controversial at the time, in the way that it had used the innocence of the very young boy, his large eyes, his vulnerability (indeed the cover was deemed too risque and changed for the album’s American release). And that one gig at the Moonlight stands out for me still, decades later, as something of a masterpiece. 

Of course it can’t last: if the group is that good, generally they play to larger and larger audiences and it changes the dynamic of the group live into something that’s less intimate and personal. It’s no wonder that bands burn out. I can’t imagine what giving off that energy must feel like year in and out. I must have really loved U2 then, as by November 27th I was back at the Marquee to see them again, ‘another excellent gig by U2’ I wrote ‘but tinged by Bono’s ‘machoness”. This is an interesting comment, as I’ve put machoness in inverted commas. It is hard to recall exactly now but there was something about his performance on that night that jarred slightly, obviously; perhaps what I was seeing in Bono, was the realisation that he knew by this time that ‘Boy’ was going to be successful, as indeed it eventually was; critical reviews were good.. Paul Morley of the NME had called it “honest, direct and distinctive” whilst Betty Page of Sounds dubbed U2 the “young poets of the year”, though it only reached 52 in fact on the LP charts on its first release in the UK), and that he was going to be ‘big’.

The world was his for the taking. And of course, it was. By March 1987, they would be iconically performing ‘Where the Streets Have No name’ the opening track from The Joshua Tree album, for a legendary rooftop video shoot in LA, next to the infamous Hotel Cecil. But perhaps at the price that that special vulnerability had been lost?