<b>Kishore Singh:</b> Like Alice in wonderland

For what had been hours, Oxford Street was closed for vehicles as well as pedestrians. I missed one appointment, delayed another, and when my wife called to ask where I was, I thought to lie, for it was probably illegal, back home, to admit that one was trapped in a particularly risque segment of a gay parade. But, in London, it was an all-family affair. Kids and grandparents applauded contingents of army, navy and police units, grannies hooted when gentlemen from the adult industry pirouetted in tiny shorts, volunteers distributed badges and wrist bands in support of the movement, and damn if they didn't pop bottles of champagne while parched spectators looked on.

That same day, across the pond, the celebrations were even more shrill with the court green-signalling same sex marriages. Having previously witnessed the same parade in New York, I was glad not to be in Manhattan where any hope of crossing streets or hailing a cab would have been impossible. New Yorkers block roads on any number of occasions - St Patrick's Day, when the Irish come marching down Fifth Avenue with bottles of beer, or the Puerto Rican Parade, which everyone warns may get a teensy bit out of hand, and the amazing Greenwich Halloween Parade with its extraordinary costumes sported not only by those participating in the procession but also those out on the streets. And, as you read this, Times Square will witness a July 4 parade with fireworks best viewed from barges on the East River.

Though they can be tiresome, especially if your hotel lies along the parade route, forcing you to walk blocks of NYC real estate, these celebrations - both organised as well as spontaneous - are a gathering of communities coming together to acknowledge diversity. The Puerto Ricans did no worse than strip down to their low-slung jeans and hip-hop in front of Central Park. Hyde Park was strewn with picnickers who'd come to cheer the Pride of London participants, many of them on wheelchairs. That night, Soho was jammed with the LGBT community drinking itself silly and policemen, somewhat hot under their collars, bending solicitously over those who'd drunk not wisely but well and in their cups.

"I can hear music," said my wife suspiciously, when I explained that I was stuck in traffic. "Yes," I said cautiously, "some kind of parade is passing by." "Really," said my wife, who delights in spectacles, "tell me what you can see". "There's a group of men," I shared, "in dresses, and false eyelashes, and wigs," confirming her worst fears that I was at a burlesque show instead of going about my business. "And women in sequins and feathers," I continued, "shaking their booty".

That those of the same gender were, er, smooching, I couldn't get myself to say over the phone without drawing contemptuous attention. The crowd was now elbow deep, and any attempt to go forward, backward, or sideways, had ceased as I found myself drawn into a slipstream to emerge at Marylebone, not quite the direction I was headed in. Here, a shouting distance from the parade, was a street fair complete with buntings and little tents selling everything from pottery to clothes, cakes and skewered meats. "I can see some sheep, or maybe they're llamas," I said to my wife, who was still on the phone. "Have you been drinking?" she asked. "No,"

I confirmed, "but I think I will now".

The parade and the celebrations having proved no less disorienting than Alice's adventures in wonderland.