The Festival

I write a lot about places, and then I fit the people into those places. It should probably work the other way round.

For now it’s Saturday evening and we are at the harbour festival. It’s a glorious evening of the kind that we’ve been experiencing all this summer and there’s an old-style reggae band playing on the stage in front of twenty thousand or so people to a backdrop of tall ships and dockyard cranes, while a procession of hot air balloons passes overhead. My partner turns to me and says that she can’t believe that there an event like this could happen in many cities. I look around, at the young and old, the black and white and brown people, who are talking in a dozen different languages, and the gay couples, the men and women and those in transition and I find that I sort of know what she means. “Maybe London or Brighton” I say, “but probably nowhere else.”

I can’t claim that I was ever at the centre of any kind of 1970’s or 80’s radicalism. I wasn’t there when Bob Marley played the Hammersmith Apollo, never saw The Clash or the Sex Pistols, and as far as I can recall I was never at a Rock Against Racism event, but even living as I was in a midlands city with a young family there was still a feeling of being part of something positive as the country launched itself into the modern world and began to embrace what we now call diversity.

As I look around I feel pleased with what my home city has become and then I feel a mounting anger towards those who are trying to steal this from us; to take us away from the rest of the world - out of history and back into some fantasy past. Just leave that to the writers, I think, and anyway none of the people at this festival would believe in that kind of thing.