I decide I want to be part of this march, so I take the train to my home town the day before. That night, there’s a fund-raising disco in the student’s union at Queen’s University. Over the course of the evening I keep meeting friends and acquaintances I haven’t seen in a year. I have the same conversation several times over:

“So, you going on the march tomorrow?”

“”Oh god no. I can’t go on the march. Somebody might see me.”

I’m crap at estimating crowd numbers, but I’d say there are a couple of hundred of us setting off on the Saturday afternoon. We’re nearly outnumbered by protesters from the Free Presbyterian church, and they certainly have more placards (and better hats).  One lone voice among the marchers cries “We were all made by the same god, you know!” but mostly we just grimly ignore them. They don’t follow us for long. Maybe they think they’ve made their point, or maybe they need to take their Leviticus placards to Marks & Spencer to protest against prawn sandwiches and cotton/polyester mix.

The press and TV cameras disappear pretty quickly too. They’ve got the shots of a couple of drag queens. Besides, the actual Queen is in Hillsborough today, so we’re not going to be the main story.

Royal Avenue. We’re just passing the Central Library, and among a family of shoppers going in the opposite direction is a girl of about 12 or 13. She sees the banners and says “GAY!?” She is consumed by laughter. Gay people don’t occur in Belfast! They’re only on the television! And now there are people walking down Royal Avenue – plain people, handsome people, old people and young people – claiming to be gay! Her uninhibited laughter is, to be honest, the only piece of gaiety I’ll see that day.

And everybody else? Well, they’re ignoring us. As I walk along, on this march that might better be called a trudge, I keep my eyes on the passers-by. Nobody meets my eye. Their glances bounce off the banners, and the Pride teeshirts some of us are wearing, and focus on the middle distance. They are willing us not to be there. They have decided not to have seen us, or at least not to be seen to have seen us.

I’m walking up the middle of the road, and I’ve never been more invisible in my life.

March over, I head back to my parents’ house to pack and go back to Dublin. But I’m keen to see how the event was reported, so I turn on the BBC Northern Ireland evening news. It’s all about yer actual Queen, of course. I know we’re going to get less than a minute out of a ten-minute bulletin. Are we just going to be an “and finally” with a shot of a drag queen and a quick soundbite from one of the organisers?

We’re not mentioned. Not at all. The people at BBC NI news and current affairs have decided that the first ever gay pride march in Belfast isn’t news.

2011: I’m going to march today. I don’t always: did last year, didn’t the year before. For one thing, they don’t need me to make up the numbers. My presence or absence won’t be noticed. I’m going today for selfish reasons, really. I’ll enjoy not being invisible. I’ll enjoy the contrast between that dismal ignored trudge of twenty years ago and the more celebratory aspect of Pride today.

There will be straight people on the march, too: some there because they want to support their gay siblings, or children, or parents; some because… well, because they just know that fair is fair, and that equality is A Good Thing. And that’s the biggest difference between 1991 and now. Straight people’s support for LGBT equality is, I think, the biggest social change I’ve seen in my adult life. It took the support of straight people to make civil partnerships possible (not enough, but that’s a subject for another time) and to pass anti-discrimination legislation. But that change in attitude on the part of teh straights happened because of the gay and lesbian and bisexual and transgendered people who decided that they would, for example, walk up Royal Avenue and Great Victoria Street and not care who saw them. Pride.

I have such a vivid picture in my mind of that girl reduced to breathless laughter at the sight of gay people on a Belfast street. She must be in her thirties now. I’ll bet she has a gay friend or two. Or six. Maybe she now knows that a brother or a cousin or an aunt is gay. She’s probably OK with it: most people are. I’ll think about her when I march today.

When Lis Sladen arrived in Doctor Who, the stereotype of the “Dr Who girl” or “assistant” was – not entirely fairly – of a miniskirted screamer. As Sarah Jane Smith, Sladen didn’t scream a lot. Instead she did something that I don’t recall anyone else in Who doing so well: she gave a committed and convincing performance of someone who is scared out of her mind but determined NOT to scream. She whimpered, she gulped for air, and she kept on doing whatever it was that had to be done. When the peril is represented by a man in a rubber suit, it’s all the more important for the actor to commit to the emotional reality of the scene. She delivered every time. Sarah Jane Smith was not fearless, but she was courageous. Also determined, curious, loyal…

When Sladen returned to Doctor Who in School Reunion, I would be lying if I said I was on the edge of my seat. I couldn’t sit down at all, so exciting was it to see her back. Older, of course, but there she was again. Still brave, still curious, still capable of demolishing the Doctor with a single word.

“Aberdeen!”

I’m not exactly in the age demographic for The Sarah Jane Adventures, but I watched and enjoyed it anyway. And how fabulous that there should be a kids’ show whose main character was an energetic, independent, smart woman of 60!

Tom Baker wrote: “Sarah Jane dead?  No, impossible!  Impossible.  Only last week I agreed to do six new audio adventures with her for Big Finish Productions.” How cool would that have been? So sad that she’s gone. So sad that never again will Matt Smith, or one of his successors, turn a corner and say, with pleased surprise:

“Hello, Sarah Jane!”

In the title story, Colby’s friends decide that he has “gone too far” and must be hanged. It’s all very civilized on the surface: Colby is consulted about the music, there’s a discussion about whether to serve drinks, and about whether an indoor or outdoor hanging would be preferable. The comic tension between the awful act and the committee-style way it’s carried out sustains the humour of the story till the last full stop – but only just.

The second story, The Glass Mountain, just perplexed me. A weird allegory in 100 numbered statements (I nearly said 100 sentences, but number 80 is a full paragraph, perhaps to break the monotony), it left me wondering whether I should carry on reading. Fortunately, I did carry on.

The next story, I Bought a Little City, was the one that clicked. An impossibly rich man buys the city of Galveston, Texas, and tries to change it for the better. Maybe you can imagine how well that works out, but probably you can’t predict the ways it fails to work out in Barthelme’s telling. By now, I suppose, I was tuning in to Barthelme’s comic mode. Certainly I was starting to enjoy the stories. The Palace at 4 A.M. is a weird, funny and sad parable. Chablis is probably funny if you have a baby (or maybe it’s only funny if you don’t); The School is a great black comedy in which the pupils’ gerbils, fish, grandparents etc keep dying.

And so on. Lovely comic-serious playfulness.

Jings, my “to be read soon” pile is getting top-heavy already.