No matter how permanent your weariness feels, life can become newly exciting. Which means that no matter how bad Pride gets, it can always become good again. Pride’s relevance is often spoken about in relation to wider factors – its commercialisation or lack of radicalism (both of which are important) – but whether or not you enjoy the day is probably contingent on who you’re with, the mood you’re in, what else is going on in your life. In the years since, I’ve enjoyed Pride a lot. But it doesn’t have to be it wasn’t for me. When you’re in the midst of it, being jaded feels like a permanent state. So why dwell on such a dismal moment? A Bob Dylan lyric springs to mind: “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” That Pride, I felt as if I was at the end of the line that nothing exciting would ever come my way again that I’d lost, irrevocably, the feeling of turning up somewhere and thinking you might have the best day of your life. Before it had seemed truly ecstatic now I could see the grubby, mercenary heart beating underneath it all. Brighton Pride had become more expensive, more closed off. Like Madame Bovary and her one evening at the chateau, I was doomed to be haunted for ever by a single moment of perfect happiness that could never be repeated. I was trying to recapture the fun I’d had two years before and failing spectacularly. I didn’t really know anyone in the city, so I mostly just wandered around by myself, hoping for a chance encounter that never arrived getting increasingly drunk in a dull, lethargic way. It started badly when I was falsely accused of shoplifting a bottle of beer from Tesco’s, and reprimanded for failing to respect “the spirit of the day” – as if the Christopher Street Day parade was an impassioned defence of the property rights of major corporations. So when Pride came around I was determined to have a wild time, in a defiant attempt at reclaiming my lost youth – I’d soon show those Italian teens! I would prove, once and for all, that even teachers can let their hair down and have a good time! But the day was a washout. ‘No matter how bad Pride gets, it can always become good again’ … James Greig. When I said I was meeting some friends to have a beer in the park, she frowned at me, with infinite sadness, and replied: “Teacher … you are very old to be drinking in parks.” When you’re working with kids there’s no escaping your own obsolescence. The day before Pride, a brassy 16-year-old Italian girl asked me what I was doing after class. I was working at a summer camp for teenagers learning English as a foreign language to them it didn’t matter whether I was 21 or 28, I was simply an “adult”. I’d just graduated and had no idea what I wanted to do for a job or where I wanted to live. My best friend had moved away, my ex and I had broken up. And it was one of the most miserable days of my life. Two years later, I returned to Brighton for Pride. It was like a heartwarming Netflix drama set across the course of a single day that changes everything for ever. My best friend was living in the city I met and fell in love with the man who became my first boyfriend and I was overwhelmed by a sense of communal warmth, in the cheesiest, most cliched way possible. T he first Pride I ever went to, Brighton in 2012, was one of the best days of my life.