Clubbing at Christmas

The Cowgate is glowing and grimy and there’s a freezing rain pelting optimistically bare legs and bare faces. My friends are crowded beneath the ledge of a doorway, passing around a surreptitious drink as people rush by, some nights ending, some only just beginning. Somebody I love is behind the DJ decks, their face cast in a neon glow, looking so utterly like they belong and pulling us along with them, that I can feel the muscles of my heart contract and then grow, like a glitter-soaked Grinch after four shots of tequila. It’s New Year’s Eve and every single queer I know is stacked five deep at the bar, and I’m holding my friend’s face in my hands and the tipping point of the year feels, for the first time in a long time, like the rush of the future rather than the loss of the past. I wrap a big coat around a small dress and stumble outside to my friend, pulling a lit cigarette from his hand and taking a drag. “I see how it is,” he says.

The festive period has always been oriented around pleasure – overeating, gift-giving, sprawled in front of the third film of the day picked out from the TV guide. But there’s a lethargic wholesomeness to it that has always felt so out of step with how our lives can be the rest of the time. But out on the streets of the city, drenched in rain and frost and wind and the longest nights of the year, there’s a pursuit of pleasure that is just as hedonistic as the time-honoured traditions, but infinitely less proper. Amidst the crush of the Christmas markets and garish lights of the high street stores, its indecorousness feels subversive, and so impossibly alive – a sparkle in the air that you want to chase and chase. I wish I could capture it; wrap it in brown paper and a bow and give it to everyone I love.