And Relax

Yesterday, a day after my birthday, I went out with Ms Narain, Mrs Monday and Mr Valentine to see Caravan Palace at Koko in Camden. I'd never been to Koko - it's a fantastic venue, occupying the old Camden Palace Theatre built in a wonderfully Rococo style in 1900 and now decked out in gold and sumptuous velvety red (actually the walls aren't velvety at all, and instead are painted woodchip, but look velvety). Caravan Palace, the pinnacle of electroswing, were promoting their new album, and while some of the tracks are veering more in the House direction than what I find particularly appealing, it was huge fun - even though our view of anything was blocked by security men of increasing girth as the evening wore on.

I looked down over the balcony at the mass of mainly young, mainly ordinarily-dressed people on the dancefloor below. They were happily bouncing up and down as Caravan Palace thumped away on the stage (in fact Mrs Monday bounced so much she felt sick). I've recently been dipping back into Richard Davenport-Hines's Sex, Death and Punishment which he wrote a few years before his great history of Gothic, and marvelling how, within the last half-century, we have ceased in so many ways to be the vicious, vicitimising culture we once were, wrapping ourselves in fear and lies and hitting out at queers and deviants in our fear and self-deceit. Or at least, we now deem it socially unacceptable to voice such opinions. A mass of young people being happy is not a threat, and how grateful I am to live now rather than then. It is a society from which the influence of the Church has largely been removed, and that's a good thing too. We Christians have connived at the evils society has inflicted on its minorities, and I am grateful that we are being flung to the margins: we deserve it. As all the bullshit about women bishops proves, we still aren't to be trusted, and God needs to purge us a little more yet.