We need to talk about Rainbow flags.

It's getting messy

Any newcomer to contemporary western civilisation is unlikely to pondering the miraculous steel structures of Victorian suspension bridges, development of anaesthetics or the invention of the internal combustion engine, but instead will be wondering what the fuck it is with all the rainbows. They are everywhere. On police cars, corporate websites, M&S sandwiches, trains, and even buildings. In fact, the only place there’s no rainbows is where they should be and left there: in the sky. When did the world stop looking like a Smiths song and appear like a creche?

Rainbows are either represented by the best PR agent in the business, or the country appears to be in the care of 6 year old girls with unlimited access to crayons. Not that there’s anything wrong with young girls drawling rainbows, but how have they jumped the kindergarten walls into what was once an adult world? Where has the propriety gone? Considered composure and muted reflection has been vanquished by compulsory childishness. Perhaps it started when children were allowed into pubs. There was a time when a child entering a pub was likely to leave it with 40-a-day cigarette habit, strong political opinions and a perchance for profanities putting merchant seamen to shame. Talking of seamen…

Pride month is the apex of rainbow proliferation, where every sexual orientation and now proclivity is represented by the increasingly hardworking rainbow. At the current rate of addition, the alphabetti people flag will need to be 10ft wide. Yet, there’s not one minority group suffering more right now than iridophobics. With their overwhelming and debilitating fear of rainbows. the authorities have declared war on their state of mind.

We were traumatised once or twice in springtime, where we could run for cover before the dreaded arcing dispersion of light in water droplets resulting in a spectrum of light (AKA a rainbow) spread across the sky. Now there’s no escape. We sprint from bush to shadow, heads down, although even that’s traumatising, as pedestrian crossings are now fucking rainbows too. I have no idea how the zebras and pelicans feel at being so marginalised and displaced by the forced fun of rainbows, but at this rate they’re gonna need a hashtag or flag of their own. Although flags aren’t exempt from compulsory rainbowifcation: the UN has now replaced all its 193 country flags with rainbows. One world, one flag. A fucking rainbow flag completely ignoring the fact that the rainbow is supposed to reflect a unification in a community that simply doesn’t exist.

For iridophobes contemporary living is like locking an arachnophobe in a garden shed. Those silent screams are us. It’s impossible to leave the house without NHS rainbows in house windows revealing where the good people live. Crossing the road risks freezing as the noses of articulated lorries, cheerful pictures of rainbows robbed from primary school corridors, bear down on you like charging bulls. Pride month is a relentless bombardment of a soft play area upon public spaces.

If we unfortunately are run over then hospital are no longer safe spaces. The Princess Royal University Hospital, in Bromley, south London, last week opened a new link-bridge which is wrapped with a giant three-sided “intersex-inclusive flag” showing the LGBT+ rainbow. Yes, the cash-strapped, on its last legs, National ‘Health’ Service has taken a break from choreographing tik-tok dances and buying overpriced toilet rolls to purchase a rainbow bridge because the message hasn’t been hammered home firmly enough yet. It’s unclear if heterosexuals are allowed to use the bridge yet, but either way it inadvertently manages to celebrate such excessive government funding that they need to build idiotic bridges to get rid of the cash. Its ‘designer’ Valentino Vecchietti, an intersex campaigner, whatever that is, evidently regards himself a pioneer by using a rainbow, and has said it will “provide a gentle and uplifting space”. Well not to bloody iridophobes it won’t mate. They’ll be the ones afraid to cross to the other side. For us it’s not pots of gold at the end of the rainbow, but unreachable day surgery. Besides, aren’t rainbows are bit passé?

I’ve not yet met a gay man who likes rainbows. And why the fuck should they? They often adore hard male bodies and cocks, rather than an infantilised hackneyed symbol of unity that increasingly welcomes peoples with whom they have nothing in common. Putting gay men and asexuals on the same flag is akin to foxes and chickens sharing a cab. The infantile rainbow is a sanitisation of a vibrant, energised scene; it’s saccharine, Disney-like sentimental dross, probably intended to dilute and erase the sexuality characterising masculinity; it used to be compulsory pink, now it’s a rainbow. However, it’s the gay iridophobes who deserve the most sympathy.

The country is beginning to look like Mario Kart’s rainbow road that blasts the senses with what feels like a hailstorm of skittles - you know the ones, where you can actually taste a rainbow, yes, they now even have a flavour - until you’re reaching for a red shell. There’s no thought to iridophobes, their feelings don’t matter, the most marginalised in society have no voice and no flag.

Mind you, I guess we should be grateful, because Nick Watts, the NHS Chief sustainability officer recently declared NHS staff’s biggest issue is climate change. In fact, as anyone who’s worked in the NHS knows, the greatest issue is always finding a pen that bloody works, oh and those pesky waiting lists after it shut itself down during covid.

The book on Writing - Idle Thoughts of an Idle Writer is available on Amazon.