You Don't Live Like I Do

About 9 months ago I joined UTAW, the tech worker's union (technically a branch of the CWU rather than a union in its own right). Recently I left it.

I joined because I was hoping to find a group of like-minded people in the tech industry, to take action on AI/LLM technology, and on the pandemic and Return To Office mandates. I didn't see anything like that on UTAW's website but I was told it'd be like "pushing at an open door". So I signed up, and joined the official Discord.

( Details )

Rather than pushing at an open door, I felt like I was in a maze full of open doors, leading nowhere but twisty circles. Nobody ever told me I couldn't do anything, but nobody explained what I could do instead. it was opaque to those not in the inner circle or not familiar with trade unions. I briefly considered standing for election as comms officer to try and fix some of these problems but I felt the union as a whole was institutionally hostile to improving, and my minimal level of engagement was already sucking a lot of my energy.

Resigning was also a farce; the CWU website wouldn't let me log in or reset a password using the email address via which they sent me communications. So I just cancelled the Direct Debit for my membership payment, and they were right on top of that - a few days later I got a letter confirming my membership had been cancelled.

I do think it'd be good to have some kind of organisation working in the interests of the tech sector and tech workers. But UTAW isn't it - it's something co-opting tech workers to serving the interests of the trade union movement. At least I only wasted a relatively small amount of time and money finding this out.

Tonight, me and cosmolinguist drove over into Wales to visit Park in The Past for a performance of Beowulf. This was in the dirt-floored Earth House, a large building of wood with wool thatch and a fire in the middle. Guests sat at long wooden tables on a mixture of wooden benches and plastic chairs.

"Oswald the Great" told the story in English, from memory, and adapted it a little to the environment, including pointing out how Hrothgar's mead hall in the story didn't have an illuminated fire exit sign. There was a good amount of audience participation, including chanting Beowulf's name when he appears in the story, and some mild heckling, not least from the "high table" of staff reenactor blokes who were cast by the bard as Hrothgar, his wife ("with fulsome beard") and two advisors.

The story highlighted Beowulf getting naked to fight Grendel, and we assumed we were getting the monsterfucking version. Especially when Grendel's mother straddles Beowulf on the ground and starts choking him... but no, it remained mostly PG rated.

There was a bar in the hall, and we had some flavoured mead - elderflower for me, and chestnut for E. The story was told in three acts with breaks between featuring music performances from a talented mother-daughter folk duo. During one of the breaks, I grabbed a very tasty boar burger. It's a shame there wasn't any vegetarian hot food, but E survived with crisps and peanuts.

All in all we had a great time, cuddled up listening to the story, thumping tables and clapping to the music. The drive back through thick mist was fine, fuelled by Radio 1 dance music, and now we are knackered and in bed.

(this is a counterpart to cosmolinguist's entry here)

We left our intrepid trio unexpectedly still on the Scottish mainland after a last-hour ferry cancellation. The closest place I could find to stay was in Strathpeffer. It turns out that our hotel was a lovely Victorian pile. Our 3-person room was right up in the attic, presumably old staff / servant's quarters. It was called a "mountain view" room but our view of Ben Wyvis was rather obscured by chimneys.

We'd crashed out pretty early after arriving, which is just as well as we were awoken at 7am by a fire alarm. Fortunately this gave me a chance to catch up with correspondence about our ferry journey. Following the Wednesday evening cancellation, CalMac had rebooked our sailing for Saturday morning, cutting our time on the islands in half! But I managed to re-rebook for the Thursday evening, so we'd only be delayed by a day... if the ferry wasn't cancelled again!

The giant breakfast room contained the best breakfast haggis I've ever had. After we checked out we went for a nice stroll around the steep grounds, admiring the old lichen-covered trees and mossy lawns, before heading back inside for a restorative pot of tea, sitting on comfy old couches in a once-luxurious, empty lounge with huge portraits on the wall.

Strathpeffer itself is an old Victorian spa town and the Victorian-era terminus station is still standing, and now houses the Highland Museum of Childhood. This was a weird little museum - it has a collection of children's toys from the last 100 or so years, including some I remember from my own childhood, and the obligatory creepy dolls. There's also history of children's education in the highlands and islands over the last couple of centuries, including how the curriculum expanded from basic 3Rs to include cooking, handicrafts and farming as kids started to learn these less from their parents. There's a story about schools being so poorly funded that children were expected to bring a lump of coal or slab of peat into school with them, so between them the class could keep the fire burning for warmth all day. It was small but surprisingly dense and we spent a good time there.

Next door to the museum was a cafe where we had a nice lunch and fed a very good dog called Fudge who seems to live at the station. There was also a hippy shop where V and E bought a few knick-knacks. Finally we admired a carved wooden trunk with a potted history of Scotland, from Christian missionaries and Viking invasions through to space rockets and satellites! We then tried to visit the Pictish Eagle Stone but got the wrong directions and drove up a farm's drive. We saw the stone from the back and also some Valais Blacknose sheep, V's favourite breed.

We'd had a lovely time in Strathpeffer, but the prospect of a second ferry cancellation had been hanging over our heads, and it was time to get back on the road to Ullapool to discover our fate. This time things went pretty smoothly - we checked in at the ferry terminal, had a bit more of a potter around the town, including V and E checking out some local shops while I played Pokémon Go. I bought a present for sarahseamonster in the local bookshop. We loaded onto the ferry and stood on the deck to watch it pull away from the port. The journey was fairly uneventful - we gave E a tour of the ferry (which didn't take long), grabbed dinner from the onboard restaurant, and then napped in the front-facing lounge. It was dark by the time we pulled into Stornoway, but our AirBnB was only a few hundred yards from the ferry terminal so we arrived very quickly, unloaded our bags and once again collapsed into bed...

Recently, I went away with mother_bones and cosmolinguist to Scotland. This is a roughly annual trip to see V's son L who lives up there. He works in a hotel in Stornoway, and can only get time off out of season, so we usually go up in mid to late September after most of the cruise ships have stopped. Between the last ferry sailing from Ullapool to the island being about 5pm, the 8-10 hour journey and V's difficulty with mornings, it takes us two days to get up there and two days to get back.

On the way up, we planned to stop off in Stirling, in a hostel which had a room for 3 adults. We got stuck in a very long tailback after a lorry had shed its load, so I can now say that I've had a nap in the fast lane of the M6. This meant we got to Stirling later than planned, and had takeout delivered to our hostel. E and I went to explore the town, making our way up to the castle despite the late hour, enjoying the dark hilly streets. We stopped off for a pint in The Portcullis at the castle, and spotted the looming silhouette of the Star Pyramid which deserves a future look.

The morning after, we drove out of Stirling past The National Wallace Monument but didn't stop there. After a couple of hours driving we broke for lunch at the Ralia Cafe, a traditional haunt for us. I took a photo of E standing by the metal Highland Cow statue outside. I picked up a leaflet for the Highland Folk Museum in the next town, just off our route, and we stopped for a while to inspect a number of rebuilt and recreated buildings in a field, including a traditional Hebridean blackhouse. Weirdly, we ran into some Mancunians who recognised me and E from the Queer Kiki drinks on Thursday which we've only attended twice!

We hit our big snag as we were on the road between Inverness and Ullapool - the evening ferry was cancelled with about an hour's notice. This left us stranded with nowhere to sleep, along with a few hundred other people. We tried phoning around hotels and B&Bs in Ullapool itself but everywhere was booked out. Eventually I found a hotel in Strathpeffer, almost as far back as Inverness, where we could stay for the night. We grabbed fish and chips and a pint in Ullapool, then doubled back for an hour's driving before collapsing in bed...

Bit of a diary catch up here. Before last weekend, on Thursday 21st August, I spotted an advert for Women's Rugby World Cup 2025 matches in Manchester. I looked this up at home and learned that there were two matches that Saturday 23rd at the Salford Community Stadium near the Trafford Centre - Australia vs Samoa, and Wales vs Scotland. I knew that cosmolinguist, angelofthenorth and P would all be interested, so after work on Friday I tried to make the logistics work. I finally got everyone to agree a plan... and found out that the tickets were no longer on sale! I swore a lot and went to bed, grumpy.

On Saturday morning, the tickets were back on sale. It was too late to make the first match so we watched it on iPlayer instead. It was a drubbing for Samoa and probably wouldn't have been much fun anyway. Once it was over, I drove our gang over to the stadium. There were a couple of logistical snags but nothing that stopped us getting to our seats. I've not watched a sporting match in a stadium before, and it was good fun to be part of the crowd and watch the game up close. For £25 each we got decent seats near the centre line, which was very reasonable for international sport. We were yelling support for Wales, and behind us were a group of Scottish fans, but we never felt threatened or intimidated. Sadly Scotland rather handily beat Wales at the actual rugby, but it was an exciting match all the way and it was good to lean into the energy.

Not something I'd do all the time, but definitely a good experience.

This week I saw two films as part of Scene Festival, a queer film festival that's run alongside Manchester Pride. The first was an outdoor screening of To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar, the other classic mainstream 90s drag film that isn't Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Me and cosmolinguist hadn't seen it before. It was an outdoor screening, which was great pandemic-wise; we got there just after the screening started, and most of the deck chairs facing the screen were occupied, but we grabbed a picnic table behind them which was better for holding the pints we grabbed from the bar at Home.

The film's plot is reasonably simple - three drag queens are driving across country from New York to LA, and their car breaks down in a small town. They must stay until a spare part arrives, facing hostility from some of the locals, including a murderous sheriff. It includes threatened and actual sexual assault and domestic violence. But it's a light-hearted comedy, and a fantasy - it doesn't try to be realistic or gritty, and is based around how the locals are inspired and have their lives turned around by the queens. Despite for being a comedy, the girls themselves are never the butt of any queer-phobic jokes. And it's actually really well shot, and acted - Wesley Snipes and Patrick Swayze were known as an action hero and a romantic lead at the time, but they play their parts well. John Leguizamo was a bit more experienced in drag through his stand up comedy at the time and that shows.

There's a description of the difference between cross-dressers, transvestites, transsexuals and drag queens which doesn't stand up well, but was not a bad explanation for mainstream audiences in the mid-1990s. It's definitely a period piece in other ways too - the cops can be the butt of jokes and manage to be a threat without being too dangerous or over-militarised, and there's no mobile phones for a break down or sat nav for the road trip. Definitely worth watching though, with enough camp and kitschy moments to spice it up.

The night after, me and P went to Cultplex to see Bottoms, a high school sex comedy with several twists. The first of which is the queerness - our protagonists are two lesbian virgins, about to graduate high school and both crushing on popular cheerleaders. As they make clear, people don't hate them because they're gay, they hate them because they're "gay, ugly and untalented". They live in a small town where high school football is worshipped to a ridiculously over the top and camp degree, including the football team having a one-sided table at one end of the school cafeteria where they sit like The Last Supper.

After an incident at the start of term, bolstered by some runaway rumours, our girls set up a women's self defence class at the school, run like Fight Club, with the ultimate goal of getting laid. The club takes off in an unexpected direction and the girls ride their success for a while before it comes crashing down, right before the Homecoming Game. Can they get the gang back together, save the football team and get the girls?

This was a "party screening" where audience participation was encouraged, which meant people whooping whenever people beat each other up or girls made out. I was sad to have missed this film in cinemas but seeing it for the first time among a group of noisy queers was actually brilliant fun. It's not a subtle film - the girls' teacher asks on the blackboard "who invented feminism? Gloria Steinem, some other woman, or a man?" and there are lots of snarky inside jokes for queers and feminists alike. I can't recommend it enough if you want silly, over the top and surprisingly gory fun.

This weekend was Trans Pride Manchester. I'd been looking forward to this for a while - it's a very different occasion from the big corporate Manchester Pride, and there's something very cool about thousands of trans and nonbinary people (plus supporters like me) marching around Manchester. It's a low-budget affair, lots of home-made banners and placards. This year cosmolinguist and I were marching with Not A Phase, who organise the trans gym sessions. The idea of marching as a bloc fell apart pretty much before we left the rally area, but there were still a bunch of relevant T-shirts scattered throughout the parade. P was there with roller derby people, and I gave her a little flag I'd made at Queer Club for her to wave.

Before the march started, there were some good speeches, including from both the outgoing and new directors of Trans Pride Manchester. There's been a changing of the guard at the top, which is a good thing - the old crew did their best but were swamped by the commitment and weren't great at either seeking or accepting more volunteer help. I'm hoping that under new leadership the event will go from strength to strength (and they'll put the events on the website rather than locked behind an Instagram login, and I'll actually get chased up when I volunteer to steward the march!)

Much like last year, fascists happened to pick the same weekend to have their own little shindig in the city centre. On an organising group, somebody from the Socialist Worker's Party was claiming that Trans Pride Manchester should cancel itself and everyone should go join the SWP (Stand Up To Racism being an SWP front) protest against the fascists. And if we didn't, and went to Trans Pride instead, then we were enabling fascism which made us fascists ourselves. This is the kind of bonkers nonsense the SWP usually come out with, but I intended to go from the end of the Trans Pride march to a non-SWP counter-demo anyway. So the message on my placard was "No TERF, No fash, No SWP, Trans Rights" in coloured bubble lettering. Lots of people commented positively on my placard, particularly the "No SWP" bit. They're not actually popular among the communities they claim to represent; just well funded and obsessive.

The march itself was good fun. Positive vibes all around, friendly faces from trans gym, Queer Club, UTAW and other places. The vibes were excellent. My favourite chant was "We're here, we're mad, we're gonna trans your Dad." I'd planned to meet up with a couple of the young queerlings I know from the Internet but neither of them managed to make it and were terribly apologetic. At the end of the march we sat and chatted with friends in Vimto Park, before heading up to Piccadilly Gardens. By the time we got there, we couldn't see any fascists or counter-protesters. So instead we went for a drink with a friend at Mala in the Northern Quarter. Turns out that the fash had marched off to St Peter's Square which is why we missed them. The drink, food and associated chatter was lovely, but I was soon flagging and we had evening plans, so we headed back towards the bus stop.

On the way back through Piccadilly Gardens about half a dozen fash had returned and several of them approached me on seeing my sign, asking to interview me for their shitty fascist YouTube channels. I'm pretty good at being boring, and I didn't rise to their bait or give them any "content". Some other people had come over to make sure I was OK and they said they appreciated the way I handled the fascists. Sadly the buses were screwed up and it took us a long time to get home, and we were both too tired to go out to the trans show at Contact we'd planned. Still, it was a good day!

The next day, I saw pictures of the fascist march. A smaller group, all waving the same flags, looking miserable and practically outnumbered by their police escort. Of course they got all the press coverage again. But we had the better day, the better cause, and the better lives.

This weekend, me and cosmolinguist went to Goths on a Field 2025. Long-time readers will remember last year, my first GOAF, where I drank too much and spoiled the weekend for myself. This time I had an emotional support boyfriend with me, and it was in the middle of a heatwave so the prospect of drinking lots didn't appeal anyway.

This year I was a bit more prepared than last, or so I thought... ( length )

It's a weird little event but it's great fun. It was good to see people, and to banish some of the ghosts of the year before.

This evening, me, E and V went to the "Levy Night Market". Levy market used to be a regular weekly thing in the car park by Levenshulme Train Station, but the council upped the rent on the organisers so it shut down. I don't know what arrangement the new organisers have in place, but it seemed very much like the old one - a mixture of craft and food stalls, lots of seating, and some entertainment (something for the kids, and a DJ playing music).

E and V picked up some artwork while I chatted to the guy behind Brid's Cross Brewing. We took home some cans of their German Porter and 80 Shilling Export, both of which were very tasty! We also grabbed food there and ate out in the sunshine. E and V had burritos, and I had a "bit of everything" box from a South African street food stall, which was very tasty and almost too spicy for me (I should have asked for the mild variant!).

After food, I picked up a "Scotch Egg bhaji" to take home, which seems like my kind of fusion cooking, along with some samosas. E and I had very tasty ice cream, one of which had miso to cut into the sweetness of the ice cream. We weren't out for long but it was great to spend some time together outside in the sun!

Last weekend, the stars aligned a little bit - trans gym was cancelled because our trainer was doing the Great Manchester Run with their kid, and I realised it was the last weekend before school half term takes us into June, both of which make going anywhere more expenses. So I did some shopping around and found a place to stay in Chester on Vrbo for me, E and V. We'd been talking about going away just the three of us since Gary died, but this is the first time we actually managed it between other commitments, lack of spoons etc.

The place was just a terraced house in Hoole, outside the city centre. It clearly once housed chronic smokers, because all the modern renovations hadn't quite rid it of the stale smoke smell. It wasn't a problem for us at least. We settled down with Korean burgers takeout and had a fairly early night.

On Saturday we went into Chester for lunch. Chester has two car parks which are only for Blue Badge holders, one of them right behind the Cathedral, so I parked up there. The weather was glorious. V was in their powerchair, and we pottered around a bit, finding some cute tchotchkes at an indoor market and exploring the multi-layered city centre. Outside the town hall, we found Ed Alleyne-Johnson of New Model Army busking. It was great to hear him play! We found a nice restaurant, Cosy Club, with outside seating. The food was great, our waiter was a lovely ebullient twink, and we saw many good dogs. Afterwards we had a proper explore of Chester Cathedral, investigating the artwork and the exhibitions and the architecture. On Saturday night we watched the last episode of The Residence, a White House comedy murder mystery which we've been enjoying together, with Greek takeout.

Sadly on Sunday morning V wasn't feeling well enough for Chester Zoo, so instead we headed home slowly via the back roads, stopping near Lymm to admire a canal. We went to a Cheadle garden centre for a nice lunch and several plants for the garden.

Still, it was a lovely weekend. Very tiring but so nice to get away.