Just another false alarm...

The Guardian today confirms that Brighton is Britain's gay Mecca, something which most of us knew anyway. However, having been to Brighton, I really wonder why. The gay scene is tacky, over-expensive and up its own arse. The Londoner's playground? Too right! But then, I am more the Hebden Bridge sort of woman, and the knowledge that I'd be annoying Bernard Ingham if I moved there is just icing on the cake...

A friend of mine was writing a thesis recently on why Birmingham didn't feature highly on the gay map, despite being a big city (it has a much larger gay 'scene' than most of the cities which are featured in the article above, but doesn't feature there). Among many other things, his research confirmed what this most recent census has shown, which is that most of the big cities have a gay scene and a gay holiday resort - London/Brighton, Manchester/Blackpool etc. - so perhaps Birmingham suffers from being so landlocked.

This, even despite the wonderfully bizarre initiative nearly twenty years back, in which Birmingham's children and parks were treated to annual touring sandpits and Punch and Judy shows, packed into one of the city's old open top buses. It even had its own theme tune -

"Birmingham by the seaside/ Birmingham by-y the sea"...