Solderer Of Fortune

    One Year After, and it's been a long year.

    One year after what, you say? Last year I came back from the BornHack hacker camp in Denmark, to find that my family were making me homeless out of the blue. In the middle of the second wave of a global pandemic, and going into the UK's second lockdown.

    I never knew how unpleasant my family could be until last year. It's difficult to write about, because I have no frame of reference. Sure, some family members have their moments, but to have them all conspiring to be as nasty as they were through those few weeks last autumn is something else.

    So with the help of some friends I got my stuff together in a storage unit, and disappeared. Since then I've been functionally homeless, without a permanent place to live until now when I'm pleased to say I have something lined up. I slept on a friend's sofa for a few weeks while I sorted out what I was going to do, since then I've rented some spare rooms of other friends. I've now found a nice town to live in, and I'll put down some roots. I am very worried that my family will still try to come after me so I'm not going to reveal where, suffice to say that I've put a reasonable distance between myself and Oxfordshire.

    Sadly there are some effects that will not be fixable in the same way. With a diagnosis of complex PTSD and severe depression along with severe insomnia, I'm a wreck. Maintaining my work has been a struggle, and I am very lucky to have secured appropriate therapy. Getting out of this will be a long road.

    I'm left wondering what the hell happened. I realise that living as I was prepared to be around for my dad in his final years they've probably relieved me of the huge amount of stress that would have caused, but it's hardly something to take pleasure in. Even though he signed all the papers that ruined my life I don't think he was the instigator of the worst things that happened to me, and that I realise I am unlikely to see him again is hard. I'm probably disinherited and whatever other legal crap they can dream up - they had a serious case of power tripping because they could get a lawyer to write lots of letters I never bothered to read - and the thought of not seeing the rest of my family again is not a problem at all, but still, I've lost a lot more than the place I called home.

    So it's a mixed bag, really. In one sense I'm having a second childhood, no ties, no family, able to do what I want without having to take anyone else into account. I've travelled this summer to hacker community events in Denmark and Belgium, staying with some of my friends in the Netherlands on the way, I've gone wild swimming, danced under the moon in a forest bathed in laser light through the mist, cycled halfway across the country, and hung out in a load of interesting hackerspaces along the way.

    But behind all that I'm a mental health wreck, relying on medication to sleep properly and perpetually stressed at trying to keep up with my life. I've lost everything and survive as a solderer of fortune on the London Underground, and sadly there's no A team to swoop in to help. I am lucky enough to be able to support myself, but I can see climbing out of this is going to be difficult.

    There's nothing like a crisis to move you on from transition woes and get you working on life, is there.

Risotto Finire

   I lost something today. My sister.

   That's not a statement that will of necessity be followed by an obituary, because she's as far as I know in rude health.  Instead it's a statement of sad fact, that I don't think I want to associate with having more than one sister any more.

    I've not really talked about it here, there's an air of washing your dirty linen in public. But over the last few years my relationship with my eldest sister has not been easy. A ramping up of hostility and a series of incidents best described as outright slander, in which she has tried very hard to discredit me in very nasty ways to family members and other people. I'm not prepared to say it's as a result of my transition, but it's definitely been a feature of these last few years.

    This last weekend over Christmas has seen some particularly bizarre manifestations of it as she's gone out of her way to be verbally nasty to me, instantly rubbishing things I've said, and coming out with more than her usual quota of spiteful remarks. All in front of other family members, so at least they're now seeing something's amiss. Funnily enough though it was a risotto that pushed me over the edge into seeing that it's no longer worth my while acknowledging a relationship.

    It's a family tradition of ours, to make a risotto with left-over turkey. I did ours today, the slow way. Caramelised onion with lots of oil, add the turkey and then fry the risotto rice with it all for a while to cover it with the oil, then add some cider (Italians use wine, I didn't have any but since I make cider it makes sense!), then hot stock bit by bit over about twenty minutes. Finally some cream and cheese, soya cream and feta here because of a cow's milk allergy, and you're done. An amazing risotto, though I sez it myself.

    So I had a big pot of risotto with a ladle poking out of it, and I brought it to the table to serve. As I am lifting the ladle, my sister wrests it from my hand, barges in and pushes me out of the way. In front of the rest of the family, so rather obviously. Perhaps it was wrong of me to ask if she'd like to seize the piece of bogroll from me to perform the task when I wanted to wipe my bum, but I felt something appropriate was called for.

    It's not every family that is cloven in two by a ladle covered in sticky rice, but there has to come a moment at which a point of no return has been reached.

It never goes away

    Another month goes by. Another end-of-month total, another accountant's bill, bills for various recurring business services. Slightly longer days, unseasonable flowers appearing in what should be the depths of winter but this year isn't.
    Another month on my own. Which isn't very good, to be honest. In a few more months it'll be a couple of years since Mrs. J moved on, and another summer will lie ahead of me. On my own.
    Maudlin? Yes. I kinda expected by now it would somehow have faded or something, but it hasn't. It's a new experience for me, having never run through a string of partners I've never been through this before.
    It's something that often happens when a trans couple part, onlookers never look beyond the trans part. In truth though there is always a lot more to this than meets the eye. There are times when I wonder what we were supposed to be doing, for my expectations of settling down and starting a family seemed to differ sharply from hers. I am sad that I wasted the decade and a half during which I could have had that family waiting for her when that evidently was not on her agenda.
    So what next? Evidently can't move on yet, wouldn't have a clue where to go if I was. So many "LGBT" media for meeting a partner seem to have little understanding of what the "T" means, I have no desire to be hassled by TERFs anyway.
    Just keeping on getting older, one month at a time.

Black or white

    Things have kept me away from the news of late. One or two depressing stories including a deplorable Daily Star piece, and a lot to do in the real world.
    One story you'd have to be on Mars to miss would be that of Rachel Dolezal. An American black civil rights activist who turned out to be a white woman with a deep tan and an Afro haircut who had reinvented herself as a black woman. So many ways to put a foot in it, where do I start?
    I look at this story from an odd position. I'm white. Pasty white, the way you get with several decades of British winters behind you.
    But my ancestry? In the 1790s a woman from Jamaica appears on a marriage record in London, she's one of my ancestors. You can't tell by looking at me, but maybe you never met my grandmother.

    Well, there goes the country, doesn't it.

    It's interesting, contrasting the Received Opinion view of Black British history with my own family history. Mass immigration since the 1940s has now largely erased the pre-existing Black British communities, but there have been Black Britons since the Middle Ages and before. Received Opinion has appropriated the American story of slavery and a welter of racism, but the unexpected truth on this side of the Atlantic is that while there was institutional slavery in British colonies in the 18th century it was not legal on the British mainland. We have the case of Somerset v. Stewart to thank for that in 1772.
    So small Black British communities existed in cities across the country. Port cities, Liverpool, Cardiff, Bristol, and London, my ancestor's city. These people lived normal lives, some were poor and some were prosperous, and some of them became part of the emerging Victorian middle classes. Their experience was not necessarily the same as the greater numbers of Black Britons who came to the country in the later half of the twentieth century.
   This isn't a romnaticised view of the past, it's my family history. I have little idea what life was like for my ancestors beyond those that were known to people alive in my lifetime, but I do know where they lived and who they married so I can tell they did all right in life.
    So it's odd for me, looking at Rachel Dolezal. A white person with black ancestry, looking at a white person with no black ancestry who pretended she had some. My life experience has as little in common with my 18th century Black British ancestor as it does with their counterpart today, but despite sharing that with Dolezal I have the ancestry she evidently craved.

    It doesn't tell me why she appropriated something as little hers as it is mine, but it does tell me that ancestry alone does not give you life experience.

Tripe and onions

    It's about 18 months since my mother died. It's funny, the way sometimes you'll happen upon something she left behind and it'll be so typically her to be as though she never went away.
    My mother came from the north of England. Yorkshire. God's Own County. And in a sense she never really left it. Yorkshire people are like that, they have a lot to be proud of. She impressed Yorkshire on me and my sisters as we grew up, my sister confided in me after the memorial service that she was in her twenties before she came to terms with the fact that she was from southern England and not Yorkshire. Funnily enough I had a colleague at my previous employer with a similar story, growing up in Germany with her German dad and Sheffield-born mother.
    So we grew up with Wensleydale as the King of Cheeses, heather honey and Whitby kippers. It didn't bother me in the way it did my sister, going to university up there allowed me to be at peace with it all. I know Yorkshire from all four corners, I've walked its fells and moors, bathed in its seas, sailed its rivers and driven its roads. But I'm at home in the lower greener hills of my own county.
    My mother's Northern tastes appeared yesterday, in the form of a pack of tripe I found in the bottom of the freezer. Dated 2011, but frozen solid and still good. Another taste from childhood, tripe and onions. My dad doesn't like it, so yesterday I was alone with my tripe and onions on toast. Probably not something I'll have that often these days.
    There we are then, another little piece my mother left behind, gone. It's stupid, being sentimental about a pack of tripe, of all things.

Goin' home

    My sister thinks I'm regressing into my childhood.
    She's come to this conclusion because I've moved back to my parents house, a place she detached herself from about thirty years ago by moving up north but which I who have always stayed in this corner of Southern England have retained a connection with.
    It's odd, moving back in when you're in your forties. It's not the same place of course. My mum's gone, it's just me and my dad. Plenty of small farm stuff to do, same trials of rural existence on the edge. At times it can seem rather isolating. Rather important then that I can escape to my local hackspace when I need a peer group.
    Meanwhile, bashing away at the startup. Sometimes working on a startup can seem a pointless task when you're developing a product without customers yet. I have a fairly hefty computer upstairs that is completely maxed-out processing text, the odd thing is though while it's doing the job I am at something of a loose end except for maintaining my political corpus. I can only wait for it to finish its mammoth task.
    Data-mining huge bodies of text for a living can sometimes produce unexpected diversions. Remember the Enron scandal? As part of the legal aftermath of one of the biggest corporate frauds in history the company's emails were subpoenaed and are thus in the public domain. The resulting corpus is of huge value to social and linguistic researchers because it offers a rare chance to study relationships and language at a large corporation. When I added it to my pile of text I found myself reading the mailboxes of some of the main players. Like stage magicians spinning plates on sticks, desperately trying to preserve the image of stability as the whole ship went down. Uncomfortably familiar to me, at several points in the past I've worked for companies going under, though fortunately not due to fraud.
    Moving has in a way brought closure; no longer having the flat in town with all its comforts but also its spectres. New doctor with whom I'll have my check-in appointment next week, though I'll be lucky if I've received a note from my endocrinologist by then.
    So yeah, childhood. The past is another country, and not one I want to return to.

We plough the fields and scatter

    One of the great rituals of rural life in England this past weekend, the Harvest Festival. A church service to give thanks for the year's produce, a display of prize marrows, grapes, and a sheath of corn in the church, and donations to the food bank. And old familiar hymns, like the title of this piece: "We plough the fields and scatter".
    It was a gorgeous warm day, and I'd been outside for most of it picking blackberries. Sunlight streamed in through the church windows and the door was open. Afterwards we stood around and had tea and cake while the children explored the gallery. Yes, our church has a gallery. I remember doing the same thing about four decades ago when I was a youngster with a group of kids who are spread out to all corners of the world now.
    It's kinda odd to be somewhere so familiar, yet with a crowd of relative strangers. I know most of the people there but not very well as most are fairly recent arrivals and move in different circles form me. Other than the under-12s I was the only one present born into the village. Welcome to a step on the Londonshire property ladder.
    I'm going to move back home sometime in the next month or two. Live at my parents place, the house I grew up in, for the first time since my mid 20s. It makes sense on two levels, both financially and to be there for my dad, but it's not where I expected to be. People in their early 40s don't tend to live with their parents, even in these straitened times.
    There is however and advantage to it all. If there's a place I'm in tune with, it's the countryside I grew up in. I know its every nuance, its noises, smells and sights. Even in the darkest days of a damp December I am at home in a way I have never been in the city. And as that rare thing in an English village these days, an adult born into the community, I know the history of everyone and everything. If we had a pub, I'd probably have my own chair by the fire.
    I don't know what the next year will bring. Whether I'll still be working for my current employer this time next year or whether I'll be pursuing the startup idea I first developed about five years ago. Either way I need a bit of stability, and despite a bit of commuting for my current job a move back home will give me that.

Passing it on

    There is an air of desperation hereabouts as I head towards my date with an estradiol patch. I've reached my early forties, been married for nearly a decade, and yet there is no pitter-patter of tiny feet. It's not for lack of wanting, just that the time has never been right for my wife. I say this without malice, I think deep down she's never really wanted a child. There has always been some excuse or other - work, salaries, family difficulties or a small flat - and now the trans one which let's face it is the mother of all excuses. It doesn't change my attachment to her but I am consumed with sadness at the thought of growing old alone.
    I'm in the queue for fertility treatment. Storing a sperm sample in a vat of liquid nitrogen, which I should be able to do within a month or two. It's why I've gone much longer than many on my RLE and have yet to have any hormones. It's odd, having dropped my Finasteride to make sure there's no chance of any effect on my fertility I find I have rather too much of the boy back. I'd grown accustomed to having that part of my body under my own control, to feeling less aggressive somehow, and yet here it is back again. I hated being a teenager.
    But storing sperm isn't the solution. You need a partner who also wants a family. And since I'm not about to dump my wife I face an uphill struggle convincing her.
    There are alternatives of course. Anonymous donation through the NHS is out, you have to be under 40. Or there are services that bring LGBT people together for sperm donation, which is a bit more interesting. You can do it anonymously, as a 'named parent' where the kid knows who you are but you play no part in their life, or as a shared parent which is I guess a bit like an amicable divorced couple.
    Still, it's a big unknown. Are they reputable? And do I fancy entering a meat market? "Above average height transgender engineer who works in the publishing industry, likes old cars and makes cider. Warning, your child may dismantle stuff for fun". Oh yeah, that'll pull 'em in.
    And then there's the embarrassment. Doing your thing into a cup and handing it over. It's bad enough having to do the one thing that's still a bloke about you without someone else having to be in the next room.
    I used to have a colleague who managed to spawn children like I amassed Wrecks at the time. It seemed he could barely keep his trousers on and unseemly fertile women would throw themselves at him in nightclubs. I tried to settle down and get it right, and this happens.
    Life ain't fair, is it.

Well, that's it then.

     A friend or mine once said to me that you only really grow up when you lose a parent. I guess that makes me a grown-up then, because my mother died just over a week ago.
    It's interesting, seeing the social conventions of reaction to a death. My mother's passing was very peaceful,instead of succumbing to the leukaemia she caught an infection which weakened her heart. She faded away over a couple of days, ready for her end and not in pain. Her fears of lingering on or losing her mind were not realised.
    I almost feel guilty for not being consumed by grief, because that's how everyone seems to expect me to be. I'm not that way because of the manner of her passing, prepared for it and at the end of a long and happy life. I grieved while my mother was still alive, as I came to terms with news of her illness.
    So life goes on. Every now and then - as when I discovered "custard" and "crust" have the same etymology - I think of something I should tell her because it would interest her, then realise I can't. Which is sad, but not unbearably so.
    My sisters - one too similar to our mum not to chafe with her and the other coming back from a long feud - have had very different reactions from mine. Had they made their peace with her perhaps things might have been different, but as it is I think it'll be a while before they put their feelings to bed. It's my dad I'm worried about, he's of the generation that was taught to bottle everything up. Fortunately I'm the one who lives locally so I'll be spending a lot more time at home from now on. As Christmas approaches I've been making some of the seasonal goodies. I don't want my dad to be reminded of my mum through missing her mince pies.
    My mother's illness has taken up all my time since going full-time. I've not changed my name on a load of things I should have, but it hasn't really mattered. I've been fortunate in that my day-to-day existence hasn't held any transition-related problems..
    On Saturday I went to the pub with a group who knew me as the scruffy bloke for over a decade. Much rubbish was talked about motorcycles, and we encountered a genuine Rock Superstar in person - it's his local.
    The motorcyclists were as they always are. A couple of raised eyebrows from the two I hadn't been able to tell, but otherwise an unremarkable gathering. One or two locals  giving me an extra glance, but not unexpected and also not beyond the mildly curious.
    So yes, a new kind of normality for me. Getting on with it, and without my mum with whom to talk about it. Grown up.

On identity

    As the days get shorter and we have a sudden reminder of impending winter, it comes almost as a shock to see nearly two months have passed since I went full-time. Of course, so much has been going on I haven't had time to think.
    I think I'm not alone among transgender people at this stage of transition in experiencing a mild crisis of identity. You don't magically change on transition, you're the same person you always were. So you've had four decades of socialisation as a bloke, and that doesn't magically go away. I don't mean by this how you behave or how you look, but how your life experiences affect you. So you still feel like the person you were six months ago, and back then of course you were supposed to be very different.
    I'm sure it'll pass. Better to think about it now than like some people mask it with an obsessive pursuit of transition milestones and have it stay with you for a lifetime in a ghastly closet of assumed stealth.
    Meanwhile, inner residual bloke or not I have plenty to do. Pressing cider as usual at this time of year, a bumper crop this season. Getting on with shoemaking, casting a pair of foot moulds in plaster that seem to be taking an age for the residual moisture to come out. And things to do with my mother's illness. My annoying sisters are in the air, never conducive to low stress
     Life goes on, eh!

Very abruptly growing up

    My mother is not well. After a few weeks of feeling weak and having muscle pain she went to the doctor, only to be told that she has something serious. Terminal, in fact. They can do things to make her life a lot easier and put off the inevitable, but at some time in the next year or two it will claim her. It could be sooner rather than later, we just don't know.
    She's in our local teaching hospital for a few nights at the moment for some tests, fortunately in good spirits due to feeling better after treatment. With luck we'll bring her home this evening, at which point she'll email my sisters. The last thing she or my dad wanted this week was them descending on the house as self-appointed angels of mercy to organise things that didn't need it.
    It's important to put this into perspective. My mother is in her late 80s. At that age though you hope there could be many years to go the fact is that the probability of something serious cropping up gets higher with every year. And having seen my grandmother slip into dementia in her 90s several decades ago I'm acutely aware there are far worse ways to go. At least this way she retains her faculties and receives proper care right up to the end. It's a sad indictment of our society that the quality of your end-of-life care depends on the trigger words in your medical file.
    My dad is his usual self, not really opening up. As luck would have it I've been at home this week, I can see I must make the effort to spend more time there from now on. Maybe a few nights every week.
    It's something of an abrupt exercise in growing up.

Village poos, more than slight return

    For somewhere that is neither very hot nor very cold, we Brits don't 'arf moan about our weather. A cold snap that's pretty minor if you are Canadian, floods a Bangladeshi would consider a mild inconvenience, now a heatwave a Gulf coast Texan would consider rather cool.
    Yes, we've been baking for a week or more now in the high twenties Celcius. My parents have their portable air conditioner on in the older part of their house with its thick walls, and I spend my days in the cool of an air conditioned office. My wife is not so lucky at her work, and nights are uncomfortable and sticky. I must remember this next February when a wind comes in from the Urals via the North Sea.
    Tensions are running a little high in the village. A year ago I described the latest chapter in our poo saga - an overloaded sewage outfall and poorly maintained septic tanks up the village resulting in a raw sewage problem nobody wants to take ownership of. In that year precious little has happened, and now in the summer heat the problem is making itself rather obvious. A lot of argument later, and accord has been reached. They're all going to fit modern digesters like the rest of us in the village have before the end of summer.
    Unfortunately, a month or more has passed since that accord, and no sign of any work. The owner of the house closest to the smell is incandescent, and one of the neighbours further up the hill has declared that they're not going to do anything because everyone else has been so beastly about it. Or words to that effect. I'm unaware of any legal threats yet, but I'm sure they'll come in time.
    Meanwhile you can almost hear the rumble of approaching Environment Agency JCBs.
    The problem is, we have morphed during my lifetime from a village of simple country folk to one of Successful People who have moved out of London to the peak of their personal housing aspiration. They tend to be people who consider themselves to be rather important, typically directors of mid-sized companies for example.
    We're a settlement in which everyone considers themselves to be the Lord of the Manor, and considers everyone else to be the peasants. Sadly I am not able to bang their heads together with a handy farm implement so all I and the rest of us can do is throw up our hands in despair.
    And the sun keeps beating down.
    I wonder if there are any tomato plants growing along that ditch, they'd be well fertilised! :)

Not just for Christmas

    Christmas has passed, leaving a trail of silver paper and flatulence. This year's was a good one as it happens, lacking too many familial complications. Just my parents, and us two. No awkward phone calls from feuding siblings or aunts.
    As I mentioned, I was girl for the day again. I cooked the meal, for which my mother was very thankful.
    My mother surprised me, by offering me some of her surplus clothing. If you're reminded of the passage in Bridget Jones' Diary in which Bridget is dressed by her mother in a frightfully frumpy outfit at Christmas then think again, I'm blessed with a mother with taste. She gave me a very simple black dress from one of the lesser-known suppliers specialising in clothing for very tall women, and as you might expect it works very well on someone with my body shape.
    So all in all a success. And as always, not entirely easy to come back from. Like those Dogs Trust adverts: being transgender is for life, not just for Christmas. Annoying, innit.
    The countryside is very wet indeed, everywhere is either muddy or flooded. I squelched through some more pruning on Boxing Day, then exercised my mother's dog. As a rather diminutive mutt she's not overly keen on splashing through flooded footpaths, poor thing.
    So back to work today in a nearly deserted office. Extended coffee breaks with the couple of nearby colleagues, long lunchtime. Nice in a way, but kinda heightens the feeling of isolation being one of a few dozen in a place that normally houses hundreds of people. And over it all hanging the spectre of January's GIC visit. It's funny, there are people now recovering form GRS who entered that pathway after I did and I'm still the scruffy bloke to my peers. I'm not sorry to have spent that last few years the way I have though because I am certain that more people than would admit it move forward in haste down the path of gender medicine only to repent at leisure.
    I just wish I had a definite resolution from it all though.

Squelch

    Time to crack open a bottle of cider and curl up on the sofa watching the TV. A great heap of damp and grubby clothing is in the washing machine. Green tree moss, British mud and a hefty addition of wet dog smell, all being removed with the help of a plastic ball full of Persil.
    December in rural Britain is usually cold, in every form from bright and cold through to freezing cold, damp and depressing. This December, like the rest of 2012, had diverged from that rule book, being warm for the season and very wet indeed. My parents land is flooded, as is most of the surrounding farmland. In driving to their place I found myself having to brave the uncertain depths of more than one stretch of flooded back road in the Rollerskate, unfortunate memories being conjured of the time I misjudged a flood and nearly got the car stuck. The latest installment of my Welsh course was abandoned half way through, the heightened adrenaline rather claimed my attention.
    So I've been squelching around the orchard in Gore-Tex and wellies, pruning the apple trees. 2012 was a bad year for apples as for most trees the blossom came in a cold wet spring, but what they lost in fruit they made up in growth. I have a small forest of young branches to tame, something I have to do without encouraging yet further growth next year.
    It's fortunate the Rollerskate has a very good heater. I didn't have long enough to really dry out in front of my parents fire and the drive home ( Wyt ti'n mynd y gallu siarad Cymraeg? Ydw, dw i yn mynd y gallu siarad Cymraeg!) shifted some of the damp. I should really have packed a change of clothes, shouldn't I.
    Around us the country is entering the usual pre-Christmas frenzy. We did all our relevant shopping weeks ago and got in a couple of weeks groceries at the start of last week, so fortunately we're avoiding it. Not so far away from us is a retail outlet village, a place that draws a never-ending stream of label-afflicted idiots and makes the main roads in its vicinity impassable for two months over Christmas. Now you know why I was using flooded roads earlier.
    We're going to spend Christmas day at my parents place. No sister this year, just them and us two. As last year, I'm going to leave the scruffy bloke on one side for the duration. I have a red and black dress lined up that should be festive enough for Christmas Day without being too impractical for turkey-cooking duties.

    As always, it's just too damn easy.

    In about three weeks I'll be off to the GIC again, to talk about The Future. I can't honestly say I'll be the scruffy bloke this time next year, but neither can I outright give up. I'm in an odd position though for someone following my path. It seems more usual for partners of transgender people to threaten to leave if they transition. My wife made the observation that as I am not happy and thus neither is she it was more likely our marriage would end eventually if I didn't.
    Nobody said it was all going to be too damn easy, did they.

Dead cow

    The title says it all really, yesterday our oldest cow died. Not a sad moment, in that she was a geriatric amongst cattle, over twenty years old which is well beyond a bovine three score years and ten. In her prime she was the matriarch of our little herd, but as she became decrepit we had moved her into our back field where she pottered around unmolested by younger animals. Yesterday morning she was on her feet in the sun, by early afternoon she had died. Probably a better end that having her hip give out and being euthanised by the vet.
    There was a time when we'd have fired up the digger and buried her, just as farmers would have done for centuries. I remember doing exactly that over twenty years ago for our first matriarch, as a spotty teenager learning to use a backhoe on the clay. However since the BSE panic in the 1990s the Government have insisted on the incineration of dead cattle that don't enter the food chain, so this morning a truck will come to take her away.
   Of course, our back field is not close to the road, so my afternoon yesterday was unexpectedly spent moving her with our ever-handy digger. Quite a task, cows weigh a hell of a lot and even though the rain has now gone away the digger still managed to get stuck more than once. Unfortunately the extra load had a habit of lifting the steering wheels off the ground, making it a difficult machine to control. So a hot afternoon with chains and a Kawasaki Mule, inching the larger vehicle through the mire in a cloud of diesel exhaust.
    A somewhat undignified final journey for the cow.
    My normal walking of my parents dog was a little later than usual yesterday. Grubby and aching from my exertions, when the dog plunged into the river I succumbed to temptation and went for a paddle, something I haven't done for about thirty years. I didn't emulate the dog in going for a swim, water up to my knees was refreshing enough.
    As I return to my week in an office I'll no doubt be asked about my weekend. I'm not sure whether a dead cow counts as Polite Conversation.
   

The village poos

    It is interesting to observe the reactions of a group of people when it becomes clear that one of their number has done something bad, but nobody knows quite who it is. My classmates back when I was twelve years old reacting to the theft of a ten pound note, or the people in my village reacting to a mystery dog chasing sheep a few years ago, nobody owns up but everybody has their own Prime Suspect.
    I remember in the class of twelve-year-olds the culprit turned out to be the last person anyone would have suspected. The "bad kid" that became Prime Suspect turned out to be blameless and the criminal was found to be the anonymous kid at the edge of the crowd, the one who never crossed anyone's radar. I learned a lot from that episode.
    The village I grew up in is a hotbed of finger-pointing at the moment. It's the periodic sewage eruption that's done it. You see we're a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, and we're not on mains sewage. So every house has its own arrangements, in some cases a septic tank, or in about half the houses a spiffy new biodigester. The latter devices are a miracle for the rural dweller, they efficiently process all waste and emit only clean water that's safe to put in a stream, while the former are stinking piles of mess at the best of times.
    So every time we get heavy rain, the septic tanks can't cope. They have difficulty draining away, and they can't handle any extra water. So raw sewage ends up going down their outfalls.
    Raw sewage sounds bad, but surprisingly it needn't necessarily be a bad thing if there's not much of it. If left, it'll rot away pretty quickly. You wouldn't want to come into contact with it, but the countryside is a pretty big place so it's likely to remain unseen. The problem in our village is that a row of houses share the same outfall pipe, so we don't just get a small outfall from one tank, we get the combined outfalls of a great row of them. So the ditch it runs into ends up a festering mass of sewage, the water overflows onto the road, and the whole place smells of sewage for a few weeks. Not very nice, is it.
    This situation has been going on for decades, on and off. Lots of recrimination and a few waved fists, but nothing done about it. The houses have morphed from farm workers dwellings into flashy homes at the top of the property ladder for the idiots who watch those awful shows on TV about moving to the country, which simply means that recrimination is more likely to entail solicitors letters.
    Unfortunately though someone has committed the cardinal sin, and complained to the council about it. A walker, faced with an overflowing ditch with raw sewage in it on a public footpath. And their target was not the culprits who made the sewage, but the unfortunate landowner across whose land the ditch runs. Not surprisingly he's hopping mad at a problem not of his making.
    The council are Bad News in this context. The Environmental Health people have powers to Fix It, and Now! which means in practice they can issue an order to the source polluters which in effect says "Get a biodigester or we'll turn up with the JCBs and send you a very large bill".
    And here's where the finger pointing starts. In a whole row of houses, everybody's blaming everyone else. There is even a faction who are blaming the landowner on whose land the outfall is ending up, as if he's the possessor of the arsehole from whence the poo came! It all seems like so much fiddling while Rome burns, as if the Environmental Health JCBs are revving just over the horizon while they blame everyone else. I am sure the legal threats will soon be flying, and I'm very glad my parents live in a different part of the village and already have a biodigester. These people think nothing of spending many thousands on a shiny new 4x4 or a keep-up-with-the-Joneses home improvement, but they won't spend similar money on something that will have a real effect on those precious house prices they care so much about. It's all about maintaining a jetset lifestyle on credit, these days.
    So there you have it, news from the countryside. If you have romantic notions of what it's like based on those stupid TV property shows, that's the reality in the 21st century. The countryside smells of poo, and always has done, except the neighbours are now likely to dish out legal threats first and think later.
    Remind me why I keep going back there? Oh yes, I'm one of very few left born into it who didn't follow the script and move out to make way for people from the cities without a clue.

Unwilling smallholder

    A Sunday evening after the first few days of full summer heat, I'm sitting on the sofa with a half-consumed pint of cider, enjoying the cool air. That slightly sticky hot day feeling, and the accumulated aches of a couple of days keeping the farm ticking over.
    The British countryside is about at its best in early summer. The vegetation is all brand new and there's not yet too much of it. The whole place echoes to the sound of hungry forage harvesters and their attendant trailers collecting the silage harvest, but that is as much transitory as it is part of the agricultural year.
    We were out this morning to check the cattle and to pick up a pile of fencing stakes and hurdles from  the field they have recently vacated. 'Hurdles' might bring to mind rustic woven withies, but these hurdles are large galvanised steel sectional pens, for which we needed the trailer behind our little 4-wheel-drive truck.
    It is a lot of fun, barreling down a minor road on a hot summer day in a vehicle with no weather protection beyond a roll-over bar. I have been bathing in SPF50 sun cream so my recently-lasered face escaped burning, but I was in the interesting position of having my hair blown all to hell by the wind. And filled up with blossom petals.
    It's been a weekend of machinery. The wonderfully named Billy Goat rough grass cutter, my parents' lawnmower and our little Italian cultivator with its incredibly reliable Japanese diesel engine. The latter would not have been my choice on Saturday, I had to do the job in three stages due to the heat. Still, all's now set for this year's vegetables.
    My parents are both worried that all this will get beyond them. It worries me too, that place is the only real home I've known. My wife and I have had various sometimes-unconventional abodes, but they've always been temporary. My parents place has always been a constant.
    My wife suggested to me again that I should consider transitioning, as she can see the effect of all this stress. I can see her point, but I'm still not ready to consider it. Life can be annoying sometimes.
    I dug a couple of rows of potato ridges. Those will take the earlies, one of next weekend's jobs will be to dig another two or three for the main crop. If this sounds a bit late, it's because our soil is very heavy and damp. Annoying to cultivate, but handy in a drought.
    I'm attached to this smallholding lark. I could do it, I know. But it's not for the faint-hearted, and I would be well-advised not to pursue an impossible dream.

Annus horibilis

    It is now twenty years since the Queen had the year she famously described as an annus horibilis. Through the year the marriages of her children broke up, and a fire destroyed a substantial portion of Windsor Castle.
    I have her words in mind at the moment, for this year seems to be shaping up as one I'd rather forget. The girl's getting no less noisy, my wife's not finding things easy at all, and to cap it all my dad's not at all well.
    There are positive things to focus on, after all I'm in secure employment that I'm really enthused about. That really means something after a career as a dotcom survivor and in an era of economic turmoil. But wellbeing depends on personal as well as economic security, and I feel as though mine's taking a knock.
    I think I may have a lot on my hands over the next few weeks. Not least taking on the temporary running of a herd of cattle. Minor publishing industry cog becomes unwilling farmer. Sadly the current generation of cows don't know me very well, the sods will no doubt play up. I'll have to bribe them with extra hay.
    So if my muse stays absent for a while and I haven't got much to say, it'll be because I have a lot going on.

DD

    No, it ain't the result of some new magic bustline treatment. Dysfunction & Depression, the happy couple.

    Have you ever seen a magician spinning plates? Loads of them to tend to, eventually plates start falling? That's me at the moment. Can't really elaborate on everything here, but I have much preying on me. Family, responsibilities, my wife's career choices, random worries, and my ongoing GIC counseling which I sometimes feel is doing a fine job of pulling the rug from under my feet.
    All this, and the muse has departed me. Several things I wanted to write about have delivered a paragraph or two and petered out. Perhaps that's as well, they'd probably have come across as rather sour. I'm not at my best, writing while depressed.
    So if I seem a little quiet, either here or elsewhere, that's why. These things are usually temporary, but they're very annoying while they last.

Fashionable diagnosis

    You can pick your friends, so the saying goes, but not your family.

    I have two elder sisters. Both have at times been wonderful, but at other times can be extremely pig-headed, opinionated, and annoying as hell. The eldest I've been out to for ages, in fact I went shopping with her in Manchester when I met her at Sparkle last year. My other sister has been estranged for a decade, it's a long story but some very welcome family reconciliation is under way.
    Elder sis decided now was the time to tell middle sis about me. I asked her not to because I wanted to pick my time to tell all. In practice that was going to be in the summer sometime, middle sis's youngsters are coming to stay with our parents for a while. My protestations were not accepted, and despite my getting rather annoyed and suggesting that our relationship would be inevitably compromised by such a going against my wishes, she insisted she was going to do it anyway when she visited middle sis at Easter.
    So I did the only thing I could, I asked my mother to tell middle sis on my terms, as she has an open communication channel and I don't. My mother wrote a very well-crafted email, and off it went.
    Earlier today my mother read middle sis's reply to me. Better than expected, she came across as understanding rather than hostile. A paragraph about how surprising it was because I was such a boy when I was younger. I guess the idea of my trying to conform to expectations hadn't occurred to her, 'cos I sure as hell didn't really want to be a boy at the time.
    As expected though, something upsetting. Middle sis is something of a Daily Mail reader. Really, at one time she even had it delivered. So the line in which she questioned the diagnosis was not entirely unexpected. But I found the wording she used to be slightly upsetting, questioning whether a second opinion had been sought for such a "fashionable diagnosis".
    Sigh. I am not blaming my sister for this, I'm sure she'll take on board my explanation of the reality. That a GD diagnosis is not easy to get, you have to convince not one but three psychiatrists, one locally and two at the GIC, and the diagnosis process happens over at least a year for NHS patients. And that far from being fashionable, it's one of the most deeply unfashionable branches of NHS medicine. She's not stupid, even though at times I have despaired at her actions.
    What I find upsetting is that a lifetime of veering to the right of the political spectrum and consuming the media from that quadrant has conditioned her to believe that when her brother comes to her with a medical condition that is life-changing in every way possible, she should question whether it is the fad of a bunch of fashionable trendy quacks.
     Her politics are not the issue though. Both dangerous idiots and good people come equally from left, right, and centre of the political spectrum. Believing what she reads in the papers isn't really her fault and isn't the issue either. I guess my annoyance as always comes down to the awful quality of the information presented through those channels. If you want a small example of how the drip,drip,drip of transphobic stories in the media affect real trans people, here's mine.
    It could have been a lot worse. I can work with that, explain it to her a bit better. If she'd gone off the deep end things would have been a lot messier and my mother would have been rather upset, as it is there's hope. My relations with elder sis have grown decidedly frostier, but it looks as though this might have broken some ice with middle sis, which can only be a good thing.
    There's something. A lot of coming out stories end with an ostracism, it might just work out that I get a reconciliation from this one. Which I'd say could be a result, wouldn't you?