grá agus síocháin

"Stop cringing – at your future, at your failure, at yourself in the mirror – and stand up and look directly at who you are. Not who you should've been, but who you are now. Let that person in. Let her be as mediocre and wrong and shameful and sad and miserable and brilliant and hilarious as she wants to be, because she knows exactly what you need to feel good. She has plans for you. She wants to show you what comes next. She wants to take you into the future you're dreading and say, "See? You never would've imagined this."

in happier pride news i actually found this deeply heartwarming

Further context: Durham city council (Reform UK) cut funding and support for Pride. The Durham Miner's Association and other trade unions raised enough money for Durham Pride 2026 to go ahead - a direct call back to when Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) raised money for mining communities when Margaret Thatcher seized union funding during the miner strikes of 1984-85.

LGSM helped us when our families were literally starving; now it was our turn to help them financially in return. 41 years later, I got the chance to help the same organisation that kept my family alive so I could even be born.

Also huge shout out to LAPC (Lesbians Against Pit Closure) a splinter group of LGSM as they provided the money to the Rhodisia Women’s Action Group in Worksop. It was only thanks to LAPC that there was money to buy the baby formulae that kept my older sibnlings alive.

“I felt we lived in an empty space with a long cry from him ramifying through it. At other times, it appeared to be as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it.”

I want you to know now, I never want you to know, I never want you to want to know, I never want to know if you do know.

And yet to talk about the [Miners'] strike as conspiracy, as plot, frequently gets you accused of outdated class warriorship and victim complex, of the politics of envy, bitterness and paranoia, of living in the past. (To which I say: guilty as charged. It’s hardly an irrational response.) What’s been good about most thirty-years-on retrospectives on the strike is the relief, when reading, that it wasn’t just you, that this stuff has been and is being documented, argued, quantified, recorded. You aren’t simply railing into the wind. First off, a confrontation of this kind was a foregone conclusion, planned at least as far back as 1977. The involvement on the government’s side of increasingly swivel-eyed anticommunist agitators suggests that the strike was invested with symbolic and strategic significance stretching far beyond the British coalfield. Yet at the time events were marked by mealy-mouthed denial and obfuscation. With few exceptions, the national media throughout 1984 cheer-led with wholesale misinformation and with a state-sanctioned demonization of the British working class.