Liverpool Pride

This weekend, it is Liverpool Pride. There are plenty of activities and many businesses and our local authority support the occasion. For many years, my hometown didn’t have a Pride event and we were very much in the shadow of the capital and even our seemingly more sophisticated sister city, Manchester. I remember Liverpool’s first Pride event back in the early 1990s which was more of a village fête. I won a first aid kit for guessing the correct amount of condoms in the glass jar! I think there can’t have been more than 100 people there and it was so low key that few people remember it today.

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World AIDS Day 2012

So, World AIDS Day (1st December) is upon us once again. This year, I think there is a record level of media apathy, despite some scary statistics being published this very week about rates of infection.

When I started working for the NHS in the late 1980s as a graphic designer, I spent a lot of time devising localised public awareness material around this issue. Some of it was picked up nationally and ended up on TV – often seen in the national press competing with multi-million pound campaigns run by the government. We all remember “Don’t die of ignorance” don’t we?

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