Summer is already in full swing and we’ve only just had the solstice. Every weekend is busy, as are a lot of these long warm evenings. We’ve seen some great live music, theatre and comedy. It’s frighteningly easy to forget sometimes that awful shit is still happening out there.

Though June is generally considered Pride month, Bristol Pride Day doesn’t happen until 12 July. I am definitely expecting more serious protest vibes than the happy party atmosphere of recent years.

On the music front this month, our friend T managed to get us all tickets to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the Royal Albert Hall, which was amazing. They not only added a string section but also made use of the huge pipe organ behind the stage. They had rearranged a lot of their songs for the venue, to great effect. It was a little weird to experience songs that started life in tiny New York clubs played by a three-piece punk band, reimagined 25 years later as epic rock songs. But good weird.

As that gig was mid-week, Tim and I took a couple of days off work to enjoy London. We went to the Vagina Museum at its new home in Bethnal Green. Their current exhibition is about menopause and perimenopause – things very much on my mind for the past year or so. I learned a lot and I always appreciate their sense of humour and strong ethical focus. They are absolutely trans-inclusive feminists and are putting visible effort into representing the relevant experiences of people of all abilities from all over the world. I can highly recommend their social media too – they’re on BlueSky and Mastodon.

As we were walking to the tube, we stumbled across an indie bookshop that we could just tell from the window display would be our kind of place. The Scarlett Letters describes itself as “a radical independent bookshop in Bethnal Green, proudly platforming the writing, artwork and crafting talents of marginalised and under-represented communities”. Tim and I both picked up and put down several books before we found the perfect gem: a series of SF short story collections called Bikes in Space. Feminist bicycle-based science fiction with largely women and queer authors? Yes please! We bought two volumes, I’ve already read one and am looking into how to buy more from its tiny US publisher, Microcosm.

I’m watching Glastonbury highlights on the TV while I write this. I love Glastonbury Festival despite never having been. Maybe one day, but I will admit with the weather of this past weekend I think this is probably more enjoyable for me. We had a great weekend, which even included live open-air music and a drag show. Who needs to leave Bristol?! On Friday T and I went to see Texas, who were great and it was a perfect evening to be out on the Harbourside. Then on Saturday, as my brother Adam turned 40 last week, we had a day of fun with him. Our Mum came to take us to the theatre to see a matinee of How To Win Against History, which is a gloriously fun – and also touching – musical comedy based on a true story. Then after some local history and dinner, we went out to a board game cafe and drank too much but overall had a lovely time.

As well as all the above, Tim and I saw Rhys Darby do his stand-up show The Legend Returns, which was hilarious. Oh and for Father’s Day I took Beckett to the Forest of Dean for a barbecue and walk in the woods with my Dad. And that’s all in the last two weeks. We probably did fun stuff in the first half of June too but I have forgotten those far-off times.

I read some books too.

Books read

Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L Sayers
Somehow, this was my first Sayers novel. I had always thought I would love her, but I found Lord Peter Wimsey very annoying, which clouded my enjoyment of what was a perfectly decent classic crime novel. I’m open to trying more Sayers but not super keen.

A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers
Way way back in 2000 I read Eggers’ debut A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and loved it. At 19 I had never read anything at all like it. Since then I’ve read two of his other books and neither has especially grabbed me. This is the tale of a middle-aged middle-manager who is sent to Saudi Arabia to win an IT contract by speaking directly to the king. He is kept waiting for days and then weeks, in sometimes surreal situations. It’s an interesting set-up and avoids the racism I feared from a white man writing this story. But the dull, nondescript hero somehow gets multiple beautiful women throwing themselves at him – generally women do not come off well in this story.

What We Left Behind by Robin Talley
Another slight disappointment. Toni and Gretchen have been a solid couple for years at high school, so being a few hundred miles apart for university will be fine, right? Toni meets some trans and nonbinary students and realises that there might be a reason this group was such a draw. Gretchen meets a small-town gay guy who is delighted to have a new lesbian best friend. This YA novel is a thorough exploration of ideas around gender identity and what it might mean to a lesbian if her partner stops identifying as female. But it manages to both feel a bit like a primer on these topics at times and be worryingly tone-deaf on them at others. There’s some really bad transphobia that doesn’t get addressed and weird judgement of cis girls who dress femininely – like they can’t be intelligent or feminist or even decent people if they wear high heels and short skirts.

Trans-Galactic Bike Ride by various authors
This is such a fun collection. There are bikes that are human-propelled spaceships. There are werewolves. There’s a statue heist with a risky getaway. There are bike races and much more. Every story has a trans or nonbinary main character and the authors are all LGBTQIA+. In some cases gender identity isn’t a big deal, in others it is the thrust of the tale. For instance, in a post-apocalyptic landscape a cycle courier is trying to get hold of gender-affirming hormones.

There Lives a Young Girl In Me Who Will Not Die by Tove Ditlevsen
Translated from Danish by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith
This small book spans the career of a poet I had somehow never heard of despite her apparently being one of Denmark’s most famed writers. She led an interesting life; defied expectations and society; had an impressive trajectory from struggling against poverty to exceeding wealth. I wanted to love her. But I found the first half of the book a little dull. The second half definitely got better, with more variety of structure and far deeper subject matter.