That was the future, that was.

    They say today's children are digital natives. That is to say, they have never known a world without ubiquitous computing and to them operating a computer is as natural as a dial telephone or a record player was to someone born in the 1970s.

    I feel sorry for today's children. They are surrounded by so much computing power, yet they know so little about how to use it.

    I was part of the first generation of digital natives, for whom affordable home computing arrived just as we were old enough to get to grips with it. I saved my primary-school-age pennies and bought a Sinclair ZX81. Back then if you wanted to use your computer you had to learn to program it, there was very little commercial software and the machines were designed to be easily programmable. My generation learned BASIC, and if like me we were extra-geeky, machine code. I eventually learned enough about the internal circuitry of the Sinclair to understand its operation completely, the only computer I've had that I've understood to that level in a long career in technology.
    My generation's schools had rooms full of similar home computers. In an unusually far-sighted move the UK government funded the development of a school computer - the BBC Micro - and we kids lapped them up. It is fair to say that many people like me were given careers by that investment.

    By comparison, today's children learn basic Microsoft Office skills. They use computers as appliances, dumbed down in case they might inadvertently learn something from them.

    I spent a while a few weeks ago sorting out some of my old PCs. Dismantling and scrapping some broken or archaic ones, resurrecting a couple of slightly more capable ones to take a lightweight Linux platform for web browsing and other general purpose duties. These were hot gaming and software development platforms in 1998 and 2001 respectively, but now they don't really cut it in the modern PC market. By rights I should get rid of them, but when you work in tech it's always useful to have a spare PC or two around.
    It is sobering to realise though that I'll soon be able to buy a more capable PC the size of a credit card for the equivalent of $25. The Raspberry Pi is a single board computer designed to use a modern HDTV as a monitor and a commodity USB keyboard and mouse. It uses a processor similar to the one in your mobile phone and for storage it uses a memory card like the one in your digital camera. Best of all it runs a full-featured modern Linux operating system which gives it the ability to do most of what until very recently you needed a full-sized PC to achieve. As you might imagine, I'll be placing an order for one as soon as they are released.
    The aim of the Raspberry Pi is not to give geeks like me a new toy though. It is aimed at schools, and it is designed from the start to be easy to program. Its creators - among them some of the people whose imaginations were sparked by the 1980s computer boom - hope to recreate some of the interest in computing as more than a study of appliances that we had with the BBC Micro thirty years ago.
    Maybe today's kids aren't going to be so unlucky in their tech after all.

A walk in the fog

    As somehow befit the moment, today was a dim and foggy one in Southern England. Last year I spent a while sitting in silent contemplation of TDOR in the parish church I was christened in, this year I passed on that one but  took the same long walk with my mother's dog.

    Happy mutt, fog must bring out the doggy aromas or something.

    So, fog inside and out. A lot to think about. I passed the tree that was in front of me when I heard that Grace had died, its leaves a pleasant coppery colour. The fog blocks the ever-present noise from the main road a couple of miles away, so the dog and I were alone in a world of muted shades, with ghostly trees looming in the distance.
    I thought of Andrea Waddell, and then of a friend of mine who has taken up sex work - I have no idea why, her day job earns her crazy amounts of money! - and ended up as I did last year, angry with the world.

    Don't like anger. It's the testosterone wot does it. Damn stuff should be banned.

    Here's a tip, next time you're likely to be down, take a walk with a happy dog. You're never alone with a dog, and she won't judge you. Plenty to interest her in the leaf litter. I was reminded of the time she put up a muntjac deer which set off at a rate of knots, the dog following on her too-short legs and being left in the dust.
    In an odd echo of last year, I bumped into our neighbour, walking her two dogs. Old friends with my mother's mutt, three dogs ecstatically happy to see each other, tearing off down the field.
    Our neighbour is a close friend of my mother's, and my mother has taken her into confidence about my gender issues. We hadn't talked about it, but after exchanging pleasantries she complemented me on my hair. It's grown out to the point at which the same wave my mother and sister have is beginning to show.
    It was a slightly odd conversation, a scruffy bloke and a middle-aged woman talking about all this while walking through a field of next year's oilseed rape in the fog. I showed her my photo from Sparkle on my phone - not the one I put on this blog but another with my sister - and saw the usual double-take. But no negativity, as she had been to my mother she was nothing but supportive.
    I'm not sure that a similar conversation could have taken place thirty years ago. On TDOR it can be easy to forget that however slowly it is happening, we are still moving forward.

Rug pulled

    A couple of weeks ago my wife dropped something of a bombshell.. She said straight out, that she thought I should move forward and transition because in our current situation neither of us are very happy.

    Ouch. Unsurprisingly that pulled the rug from under my feet.

    We've been attending counseling together for the last couple of months, with Relate. It's been a little tough at times, but our counselor is very good and it has been of benefit to us. When people think of Relate, they think of marriage break-up counseling, of couples arguing hammer and tongs over who gets which end of the family dog, that kind of thing. For us that has not been the case, our counselor has remarked that to her our relationship is very strong. Instead we're using the service as an opportunity to explore our issues as a couple surrounding my gender, and it has been of great help. A little uncomfortable, that's all.

    Did I say a little uncomfortable? I should have said a lot.

    My whole approach to all this has been based around building walls. My family would never accept it (Though bizarrely at the time I was also mistakenly convinced they already knew), I'm too large, my feet are too big, I'd never pass as female, the list went on. This might be familiar to other trans people.
    Each wall I built has been slowly eroded. My family all know now, and have been surprised, but accepting. There are natal women my size and shape. Shoes are difficult in a 15 but not insurmountable. I see something of my sister in the mirror when presenting female.

    I wouldn't make a very good builder, would I.

    And now the most insurmountable wall has crumbled too. The line-in-the-sand. My wife has turned round and said that I shouldn't do this for her.
    In a way I'm glad that this has come out through and been explored in counselling rather than between us as it inevitably would have. The space provided by Relate is there for exactly this purpose, a neutral space. Face it calmly and rationally. As the saying has it, like a man. Funny, that.
    You might think I would be going forward with a song in my heart at this news. After all I have a GIC appointment in a few weeks and all I need do is turn up with a deed poll on my hand and set the ball rolling. But no. What we have is too important to jeopardise and I can not do that. Anything that happens has to be in both of our best interests, unequivocally. She might not leave me were I to transition, but what matters is not whether we stay together but whether she's happy.
    I recognise that I'm on a downward slope and it one day may go horribly wrong. I guess the events of the last week or two might have brought that into sharper focus. But I ain't done yet, and I'm not giving up. A bizarre image floats into my head at that, of Maggie delivering her "The Lady's not for turning" speech.
    So in a couple of weeks I'll wander up to town, walk across the park again and sit down in front of a psychiatrist bloke again in an office overlooking a busy London street. He'll see a scruffy bloke, not an oversized girl. Something has changed since my last GIC visit though, I now know what I want to ask for from him. I've seen counsellors locally, but never gender specialists. I will ask for whatever specialist gender counselling they can offer me.
    I'm done with trying to figure this out for myself, I need a bit of help to get to the bottom of what ails me.

Grey day in Blighty

    The 11th of November. Armistice day. A typical November day here in southern England, subdued lighting and heavy grey skies. Very fitting.
    Though I have one discreetly in the back window of my car I wore no poppy and I missed the minute's silence, mainly because I was picking quinces and I didn't have any means to keep track of time. As it happens I was thinking about a couple of people I knew who were war veterans, both WW2. I was fortunate enough to be in the last generation whose teachers had fought in the war. If you want a very realistic take on it all, get it from someone who spent the war in the nose of a Lancaster bomber, or on a Royal Navy corvette escorting Arctic convoys.
    The war - sorry, I should have said the War - is a national obsession here in the UK. My wife once remarked to her mother that British telly was all about the war and I hotly defended it, only to find Dad's Army and no less than three war documentaries on the evening we returned home.
    It was our Finest Hour y'see, Mr. Churchill told us so. He had one hell of a job of rousing morale to do back in 1940, but over the decades since his speech was delivered the war has been woven into our national mythology to the extent that it has become in a way synonymous with our national identity as a defining moment of Britishness rather than the global catastrophe it should be remembered as.
    So back to today. If you don't observe Rememberance, you are not remembering the War, and thus you are somehow not British. Or so the logic goes. We've seen it reach an extreme in recent years with the near-fetishisation of the act of rememberance in Wootton Basset, in which the ceremonial seems to eclipse the unjustness of the death of the individual. And you get the bizarre race among politicians and celebrities sometime around the end of October, to be the First On Telly Wearing A Poppy. Coquelicots nouveaux, like the race to be the first with the new season's Beaujolais.
    In the past week we've had a fuss over the national footy team's right to wear poppies when playing Jerry the Germans, yesterday there was a fuss over a Muslim group who planned to burn some poppies, and today saw the arrest of a group of far-right-wing English Defence League supporters hoping for a bust-up with some lefty campaigners near the Cenotaph. As if the Prime Minister didn't have better things to do as Europe goes down the pan, or as if the Met wouldn't rather be policing a load of ex-servicemen and women.
    You'll notice at the start of this piece I referred to today as Armistice Day rather than Rememberance Day. Armistice, the day that war ended. Because I'd rather celebrate the peace and pause for a moment to remember the men and women whose sacrifice gave us it than use the day as an opportunity to wrap myself in the flag.

It's as easy as a walk in the park, right?

    November in the UK is a time in which you have to take your chances. If you get a sunny day, use it, it might be January before you see another!
    Today my wife and I went on a favourite walk of ours, through the river meadows and up onto the Downs near Milton, Oxfordshire. I know the British climate has a reputation for being damp, but rainfall has been rather low this year so the going was surprisingly not muddy and in bright sunlight it made for a very pleasant day.
    Now you might ask why a favourite walk of ours passes near to the omnipresent bulk of Didcot Power Station and crosses the A34, a motorway in all but name. And you'd be right to ask, after all it's one of the more unprepossessing places in that part of the world. But hidden to a motorist's casual eye is a network of  river meadows that have never seen cultivation, fertiliser or weedkiller, separated by clear chalk-fed streams and lush beds of watercress. In short, an oasis of wildlife in a sterile arable plain, albeit to the thunderous aural accompaniment of the trucks heading down to Southampton.
    Sadly we were a bit late to take advantage of the blackberries or wild plums, the birds have had them all. So we did what 21st century foraging humans are supposed to do, we went to a very handy McDonalds by the A34.
    It's almost an H.M. Bateman cartoon, isn't it. I can see it now, "The Man Who Admitted To Liking McDonald's In Polite Company", in which a bunch of 1930s-attired people spill their Fair Trade coffees in horror at such a transgression. And it's true, I've bought my share of Fair Trade coffees over the years, shopped local and eaten organic. But then I married someone from Over There, for whom the chain represents not a faceless corporation but childhood parties and so I too was sucked into the Web of Hamburger Shame. With extra special sauce, oh yeah, that special sauce!
    You know you've hit rock bottom when you're poking discarded cardboard coffee cups with your foot to see whether the collect-six-get-a-free-coffee sticker has been removed. Only managed one today, from four cups. And a grazed hand, snapping off a dead stick to poke at cups in the leaves. Well, it provides a little bit of entertainment during the boring tarmac bit of the walk I guess.
    Our walk took us by the road up the hill towards the Downs, by which there was plenty of discarded fast-food debris. For that I don't blame the restaurant, they have gone out of their way to provide litter bins with their logo on them some distance away from their site, instead I'm unimpressed with people who can't be bothered to stuff the debris back in the paper bag it came in, screw it up and bin it later. Still, I guess I've had more than one free coffee out of them over the years, so I'm hardly one to complain. Maybe I should go litter-picking in penance.
    From the top of the Berkshire Downs you can see at least four counties on a good day. Our route didn't quite take us to the top, so make that two for us. The whole of the Vale of the White Horse spread out in front of us, quite a view. And in early November, one alight with autumn foliage, very pretty.
    As you might imagine, we didn't walk in silence. We have plenty to talk about, as do most couples. And as you also might imagine, our conversation strayed onto matters of gender. It does have that annoying habit of popping up. My wife said something that gave me pause for thought, she said I should work towards transitioning. Bit of a showstopper moment, that. Her reasoning is that I'm not the happiest of people at the moment and thus neither is she, so there is little point in maintaining a situation in which we aren't happy. And she has a point, however as always I am not sure all that would be entailed in my transitioning would be good for her. If that were our route then I would want to embark upon it only once all that underlies it had been thoroughly explored with our various counselors, as I've gone into here ad infinitum in the past she is too important to me to do something that might hurt her.
    So we arrived back to the Turbocharged Rollerskate, safely where we'd left it on a village side road, me with quite a lot to think about. It is encouraging that my wife is prepared to think in that direction because I think we're both aware that this is a downward slope. But while you might expect me to be celebrating such a revelation I'm doing the opposite, hanging back from the brink. Some clue as to why should be found in my description of a happy day walking with my wife.

Hater, or simply alienated?

    It's a hoary old trope I've seen in a thousand ranty online arguments. Usually just before someone mentions the Nazis and invokes Godwin's Law, someone says something like "If you substituted 'Jew' or 'Black person' for (insert trigger word here) and said that, you'd be locked up!".
    At that point I think the argument is lost from all sides and everybody would be better off putting the keyboard down and backing away. Sadly it doesn't seem to work that way.
    It is however all too easy to become wrapped up in the perceived truths of one's own bubble and forget that without thought being given to how they are presented they might appear alienating and offensive to outsiders. Alienated and offended people do the strangest things.
    To that end if I say something I try to imagine how it might play when read in the soft glow of someone else's computer monitor. Someone, that is, who knows nothing about me beyond what the medium in which they encounter me. They don't know I'm either a harmless but scruffy bloke or an amiable but improbable girl, they only have what I've said to go on. Sometimes I'll get it right, occasionally I won't and I'll be called out on it. Being called out is part of life, engage with civility, after all the caller-out often has a point.
    It's interesting though to think about it, those of us in smaller bubbles are quick to label those in larger ones as haters when in fact they may simply be normal people who have been alienated or offended by something we've said or done. Hell, they might even be won over if engaged with rather than met with a counter-display.
    I have to admit to falling into this trap myself at times. Maybe you have too. I'm pretty sure I've also at times been someone alienated and thus labeled a hater, simply because of who I am.
    It's something to think about, engagement rather than anger. If I try it I wonder how long I can keep it up.

...I've said too much.

    So you're in a conversation with a natal female friend, and she mentions something in passing that relates to fashion, or clothing. You know, girl stuff. And you forget for a moment that to her you're just another scruffy bloke, and venture an opinion that owes something to experience rather than to guesswork.
    Or as happened to me this lunchtime, you're sitting in the main public thoroughfare at work with your colleagues, and a colleague who has made a spectacular sartorial faux pas walks by out of earshot, and without thinking you say "Oh dear, wrong skirt!". You've said too much.
    It's funny, because most of my female colleagues know all about me. My male colleagues though don't, and must be in danger of having me pegged as something of a meterosexual by now. Scruffy, into cars and bikes, married to a gorgeous wife, yet long haired and notices women by their clothing rather than their other attributes.
    I have to watch that people watching thing, it'll be my undoing. Mind you, it's not as if that matters, in my industry nobody will care too much. I do have to consider how far I want it to go though.
    I don't care, I'd happily be girl all the time by now, but I have to think of my wife. To her it matters, she's been great all along but I could so easily puncture her buffer zone.
    Today being Halloween, I'm sure some of my American friends will have taken the opportunity to unleash their female alter egos on the world. We don't do that, so no funny costumes today in the office. But something struck me about it earlier that made me laugh. If we did the Halloween thing here, I wouldn't be taking part, it's too close to home. Silly, ain't it.

OM

    In amateur radio parlance, an 'old-timer' is someone who's been involved in the hobby for a quarter century. Back when I still had a current licence, the old-timers were the WW2 generation, they'd sit on 80 metres and talk about their allotments or the war. They were, to my young eyes, impossibly old.
    So it is with some distress that I note my near quarter century since passing my licence examination.
    Better an OM if not a YL than an SK I guess.

    QSB? K

Privileged

    It was encouraging the other day to read something from a natal female feminist outraged that her feminist group was debating whether to allow trans people to attend. Lots of talk about male privilege it seems, usual thinly disguised man-hater stuff. The group had settled on inaction, they'd cross that bridge when a trans woman came along. Presumably meaning at that point they'd decide to boot out a trans woman.  One wonders what they think a trans person looks like, and whether they understand that they could have trans women among them without their realising it. They Walk Among Us y'know!
    This touches on a difference I've observed between male culture and female culture. Women's groups are often exclusive, groups patronised by men aren't. Feminists and other womens groups exclude men without question, in four decades as a bloke I've never seen the reverse outside dinosaurs such as men-only golf clubs that I have nothing to do with anyway. In the real world the only bloke-only space I've patronised has been the men's loo. Even QwesT FtM, a support group for trans men and a very sound organisation, have FtM-only meetings. I've *never* encountered an MtF support space that has MtF-only events and would not be extremely pleased to see any FtMs who might attend so I was rather shocked to see that. Then again if exclusivity is a female thing perhaps we could learn from them...
    (Edit) Nutty radical feminists are all too ready to bang on about male privilege. My wicked sense of humour finds it funny that they do so in the same breath as voicing the self-evident right-on opinion that nobody should be targeted for abuse over anything they are born with and can't help. It is interesting though to think what it means from a detached on-the-fence insider's perspective. I can only see it from my own position after all.
    As someone who's spent decades as a scruffy bloke, I have had male privilege in bucket loads. It's true, especially as a large scruffy bloke I can swagger if I choose to. The world is my oyster. But do the man-haters honestly believe that people like me don't understand that? And that someone able to reap the apparent benefits of all that might willingly give it up? Does that not make them stop and think for a minute?
    Of course not. At the root of the man-haters hate is envy, for something they could never have.

    Shame, I'd give 'em the whole bloody lot if I could. It really ain't all it's cracked up to be.

Perspective

    I spent Saturday morning diving through some bins in one of my town's less salubrious suburbs. Yeah, I sure know how to have a good time. Not my usual weekend entertainment as I'm certain you'll understand, I was retrieving some property belonging to a friend.
    R is a friend of mine. Not trans or anything, just someone I know through having been a friend-of-a-friend. She's a couple of years older than me, and she has battled mental illness on and off for most of her life. In the last few weeks she's had a particularly hard time due to an anniversary of a family death, so she missed some of her medication and found herself tipped over the edge. She somehow came to the conclusion that having anything old or green in her flat would cause her to be sectioned (detained in a mental hospital) so she proceded to throw out anything that might possibly fit those descriptions.
     Personal documents, clothes, heirlooms, valuables, the lot.
    She's safe now, with other friends who are getting her back on the road. But a group of us knew that she'd chucked out half her life and would be heartbroken at the losses when she returned to her senses, so our mission was to rescue her property.
    Fortunately she'd been methodical in her turn-out, so things were neatly packaged and bagged. My small hatchback with its rear seats down was filled to bursting-point though, and we had something of a headache sorting it all out and storing it.
    It is worth learning the lesson of perspective at moments like this. It would be easy to sink into the mire, but an annoying dose of GD is not as bad as some of the things people can suffer from. Important not to forget that.