John Lewis, you crack me up

    John Lewis, a well-known UK department store, sent me a marketing email yesterday.

Its title: "Discover what's hot in electricals this month".

Presumably by the smell.

One of the herd

   Phrases like "one of the herd", and words like "sheep" are often used to describe non-individualistic behaviour. My experience yesterday definitely gives the lie to the first one.
   Let me set some atmosphere. Imagine the Benny Hill theme is playing. And it's being played by a bluegrass band. Fiddles, foot tapping, that kind of thing.
   I spent yesterday afternoon chez my parents, fixing the aged Nissan belonging to my friend G. Cars ain't her thing. Because we'd spent longer then expected at the Nissan, we ended up helping my dad separate out a cow from the herd in preparation for a routine vets visit today. This meant that I, G and my dad had to walk out into a field of cows and coax one of them into a corner of the field cordoned off with electric fence wire. Easy enough, you'd think, they're just cows.
   Trouble is, these ain't ordinary cows, they're ladies. A suckler herd, these aren't flighty heifers, instead they're middle aged cows who've seen some of the world. Cows are best managed by treating them well and getting to know their individual foibles, so not only are these cows rather mature, they've also shed the herd instinct and are  individuals. Slightly bored individuals at that, and our arrival was the best thing they'd seen all day.
    If you don't know cows, let me explain something about them. A cow is a very large animal with the motive power of a small tractor and a mind of its own. If you want to get a cow to do something, you have two choices: make it trust you enough to do it or try to threaten it into doing it. The former is the right way to manage cows, the latter the wrong way because somewhere down the line will come a time when that cow just won't do what you want and you'll end up on the wrong end of several tons of angry cow. Besides, mistreating a cow is not a very nice thing to do. So these cows are very well treated. They're pretty tame because they trust us. They know my dad really well, me slightly and G not at all but because they didn't see us as a threat they let us walk right among them trailing a line of fence tape between us without worry to find the one to be separated. Then they decided they needed entertainment.
    In theory separating a cow is easy enough. Three of you walk slowly behind the cow holding the tape between you in an L shape, keeping the cow in the crook of the L and herding her towards the pen. In practice with a field of entertainment starved individuals, things start moving.
    Cows can run when they want to. They can also jump like steeplechasers, though fortunately today they didn't do that. They did decide that now was the time for a bit of non-cooperation and instead they wanted to high-tail it around for a bit. Time for the Benny Hill moment. Pretty soon we got rather tired, and as always happens not long afterwards the cows got bored and the one needing the vet almost made her way to the pen on her own. It always happens that way, but you can't just sit there and let them run around because then they'll stop and watch you, to see what the next entertainment is going to be. And that's spooky.
     I didn't bother with my workout last night. I didn't need to. I'm still aching and that was over 24 hours ago.

Flying too close to the flame

    A morning shopping. Every girl's dream, you'd think. All the shops of the High Street there before us, my wife and I with a few hours to kill in a strange city before our train home. We didn't buy anything, save for a kitchen essential from a department store, but we spent a long time in that not buying anything and we saw a lot of shops.
    I'm lucky to be able to go shopping with my wife. It's something we can do together that we both enjoy, and it gives me access to a world that would otherwise be closed to me. I play the Dutiful Husband to a T, following her through the rails, carrying her prospective purchases and holding her coat and bag while she disappears into the fitting room. If anyone has ever noticed that occasionally one of the things she buys that she doesn't try on is many sizes too large for her, then nobody's said anything.
    Yet for all that it's something I can never be part of. I'm better off than the red-faced blokes wishing the earth would swallow them up as their other half peruses the underwear, but even then I'm still an island of drab in a sea of colour. Sometimes, as yesterday, this gets to me and I come away from the experience depressed instead of on the high I should be, and yet again as yesterday my low mood gets to my wife and affects her too.
    This time it was  standing outside the fitting room that did it. A large party of women were there, I think they were shopping for outfits for a wedding, and they were all so happy. From the attractive twenty-something in the green number to the beaming short fat middle-aged lady who looked for all the world like a boldly rose-printed tea-cosy, they were there to have fun and it showed. And for the first time, while waiting for my wife to emerge having tried on the orange dress that turned out not to fit as she'd hoped, I wished I could have been anywhere else.
    Like a moth near a candle flame, I can perform several orbits of the light that fascinates me. But eventually, as yesterday, I'm going to pass too close to it and get singed. Unlike the moth though, in time I'll come back for more.

First family member

    The other evening I had the Long Chat with my cousin. I came out as transgendered to the first member of my family. She's a bit older than I am and has seen quite a bit more of the world than I have, plus at just over an inch shorter than me she is the only woman I know I can just about look in the eye. We don't see each other that often but we have become friends as adults probably because we both have slightly less conventional approaches to life than most of the rest of our extended family. She's also quite close to my mother, which was one of the main reasons why I wanted to talk to her. I have no plans to talk to my mother about my gender issues unless it becomes absolutely necessary because I see no profit in upsetting her but in the unfortunate event that she were to find out I think she'll need someone to talk to. Hence I wished to recruit my cousin for that role.
     She took it quite well, considering it was probably not what she was expecting. I'd asked her if it was OK for me to share something in confidence with her and she said nothing would faze her, but I don't think this had crossed her mind. So the silence was a tiny bit more shocked than it has been with my friends I've come out to but to her credit she soon rallied and we had the by now usual conversation about what it all means. We then settled into a discussion about our family dynamics with a level of frankness I've not shared with any other family member. It was as though the level of confidence between us was such that now we could talk without the usual in-family politenesses. I think she really appreciated the chance to do this, like all families ours has its hidden tensions and I think the opportunity to finally be able to talk candidly about them was cathartic for her.
     We ended up on the phone for a lot longer than I expected, my wife looking pointedly at the clock as we were due elsewhere. Once over the shock she provided some surprising insights into the whole thing, which was both unexpected and very welcome. I will not be coming out to any other family members in a hurry but I am very glad to have done so to her. A very worthwhile conversation.

Explaining GD to a genetic girl

   Having a bit of a conversation with my friend up north I came out to a few weeks ago I came up with something I think is worth sharing. I was trying to explain to her how gender dysphoria can take over your mind at times, as someone who's bisexual she was seeing it through that lens which is to say that as an expression of sexuality being bi does not have the capacity to render your brain dysfunctional.
   This won't work for the 50% of the population who are male, but I explained it in an email thus:

The problem with GD is that it's a brain wiring thing and the part of the brain that's wired as girl complains loudly about the hormone balance it doesn't like. Gender fog. So GD becomes a bigger part of you than you might prefer. For obvious reasons this is beyond my comprehension, but does PMT - another hormone/brain kickup - take you over in the same way?

    I'm pleased to say she understood that explanation immediately, both in terms of PMT and motherhood. Useful if anyone else needs to make the same point to a sympathetic but not-quite-comprehending genetic female friend.

Sharpening up my act

    Never having been out in the world en femme, I've never really had to bother too much about how I look. I could certainly do a lot worse, but when I'm merely cross-dressing for my own amusement it doesn't matter much if I get something a bit wrong, or maybe do something in a less-than-expert manner. All that is set to change though. If I am to show my face as girl even in the safe space of a TG support group then my presentation needs to be as faultless as I can make it in front of my peers. I'd hate for someone to look at me and think "She didn't make much effort!".
    So to that end I've been busily sharpening up my act. First to receive attention has been my weight. I'm fortunate enough to be in pretty good nick with a very active lifestyle so I wasn't in too bad shape in January, but there's always room for improvement. Someone my size can pack away an astounding quantity of food, so I've simply cut my portion sizes down to those consumed by mere mortals. Not surprisingly this has had some effect. Down from 224 pounds to 213, that's 11 pounds since January. My BMI was in the healthy range anyway, but that's got to be good. Unfortunately though it's had the effect that some clothes, both boy and girl, no longer fit me as my waist has dropped from a size UK18 somewhere in the direction of a 16. My upper body is always going to be an 18 - it's a ribcage thing - but I didn't quite expect this much change at waist level.
    It's also now a couple of months since I stopped biting my nails with the aid of the excellent Stop-n-grow. I have never posessed a set of unbitten fingernails as an adult so now I've grown them to what is for me an unfeasably long length (but is probably not very long in the scheme of things) and shaped them carefully I'm discovering just what a pain in the arse they can be as well as a relative joy to look at compared to the gnawed stumps they used to be.
    Take mobile phones for instance. People with fingernails press the buttons with them. People without fingernails use the fleshy end of their finger. I've spent a lifetime doing the latter, so I now find I'm spearing my fingernail down the gap between the keys and failing completely to text or dial as I want to. Which is probably very amusing to watch.
    It has been worth the effort. If nothing else I've lost the perpetual annoyance of pain in one finger or another where I had bitten a little too close. But I think I'm going to have to resist the urge to grow them further just because I can, and trim them back to sensible levels. Before I catch one of them in something and hurt myself.
    Finally, I've after a bit of effort and research picked a better foundation and taken the time to get a good colour match. Not having too blue a beard I flatter myself I get a good enough concealment without resorting to trowelling it on, so the Clarins everlasting foundation range does the trick and is comfortable to wear, if a little pricey. Having put both myself and my wife in stitches looking at "chestnut", a colour I can only describe as "Game show host orange" and all the colours in between to "ivory", a Goth-like pastiness, I find that I'm a "toffee". I'd always thought of myself as a mint imperial, personally.
    As I have observed before, passing is not my strong point. Someone standing on White Horse Hill could tell I'm not a GG. But at least the above effort should mean that our observer by the White Horse might have a moment of doubt if the moon wasn't shining.

Not in my back yard?

    NIMBY. An acronym for "Not In My Back Yard", made popular in the UK in the 1980s by a government minister complaining at local opposition to infrastructure construction projects. It's used as a pejorative term for someone who vehemently opposes a project because it's being built in their locality but who would be quite happy to use the same project if it were built somewhere else.
    I met a NIMBY at the weekend. A village over from the area I grew up in, the Government want to build a new high speed rail line. One day this will carry passengers from the North and Midlands down to London at a couple of hundred miles per hour and thence connect to the European high speed network. It's an important development that will shorten journey times within the UK, make international travel a lot easier and remove the need for a lot of short-haul internal flights with their attendant pollution. Of benefit to all, you might say.
    My Sunday afternoon was spent loading my mother's dog into the car and taking a short drive to a pleasant spot at which to exercise the mutt. This happened to be the piece of countryside through which the rail line is planned to pass along the route of a former main line railway closed in the 1960s. The Great Central Railway was the last of the Victorian main lines, it never achieved its full potential because it didn't really go anywhere useful. It did however have the benefit of being built late enough in the railway age to have been designed with higher speed in mind and this has made its surviving earthworks of interest to today's planners. As it stands now it is a corridor of woodland through the countryside providing a fantastic wildlife habitat and it's been a favourite place of mine to visit for years.
    The locals are all pretty upset about the project. One I know slightly from way back was spitting feathers, to put it mildly. House prices, noise, blight, no benefit to him, Gordon Brown's final revenge on the countryside, we already have perfectly good trains, the rant went on. I nodded sympathetically and continued on my way. Since I know he's partial to the occasional skiing holiday I wondered to myself how long it would be before he boarded a high speed train to the Alps.
    The trouble is, though I can see beyond the near horizon and appreciate the wider benefit of the high speed railway I will be very sad to see the current unruly tangle of undergrowth destroyed. I'm not bothered about the railway itself, I've lived near a main line and I'm sure my NIMBY whose house is a couple of miles from it will not find it to be anywhere near as bad as he fears. I just hope once the construction is over that the wildlife can return.
    I spent a while clambouring over the brickwork of a bridge that took the railway over a small stream, my mother's dog looking extremely bored nearby. Stamped into each coping brick is the mark pictured, complete with the date of construction. Seventy years, not long for a railway to last.

Doubt

    Earlier today I read a piece form Sophie Jean entitled "When I First Knew", in which she describes coming to terms with her gender issues from a young age. It set me thinking, not about coming to terms with yourself but about coming to terms with that realisation afterwards. In simple terms, occasional doubt. "Can this really be true, might I just be an especially deluded transvestite after all?".
    I'm sure I'm not alone in this, that having reached the point of bringing all my gender problems together in my mind relatively late in life I've occasionally had moments over the last year or so when I still can't quite believe it. After all, so the line of thought goes, "I'm the same as I was before I figured it out, why haven't I er... changed somehow?" Well, the simple answer to that is this: Hell yes I've changed, it has to be something pretty damn fundamental to turn off two decades of clinical depression like a damn light switch!
    But it touches on something a bit more basic to do with gender identity. Just as you don't magically change from boy to girl between your ears by swapping your trousers for a skirt, you don't magically get a girl brain just because you figure out you should have one, it has to be there first to be discovered. And I'm pretty damn certain you don't spend your childhood delving through the girly side of the dressing-up box or spend a lifetime in which your gender-identifialble dreams are female without having something of a girl brain installed. So why on earth should I expect anything to have changed!
    Maybe it's not so much doubt at my conclusion but doubt at my cognitive ability, "If you're supposed to be so damn clever why on earth did it take you so damn long to figure out the bleedin' obvious!". It's easy, I'll just blame it on my male side. Isn't that what women do? :)

A cook writes

    I have a bloke mate who isn't very good in the kitchen. He tries, but there's no passion. Mostly he ends up pulling stuff out of the freezer, mixing something from a jar or packet, or sometimes even picking something up from a takeaway. Like me he grew up in the 1970s UK but unlike me his mother has a very traditional approach to food. Where his mother called in her family to sit down and tuck in to traditional English fare of boiled vegetables and overcooked meat, mine as a disciple of Elizabeth David whose elder sisters were born in the Colonies would involve us all in the elaborate production of curries, risotto or regional Italian pasta sauces. This was heavy stuff in 1970s rural Britain where the most exotic food item most people had ever seen was a prawn cocktail.
    I am heavily indebted to my mother for this. She gave me and my sisters equally a lifelong serious interest in food and its production which growing up as we did amongst farms and market gardens we were able to indulge from an early age. It's nothing to do with some corny stereotype prompted by my gender issues that I do nearly all of the cooking at home, my wife's a damn fine cook but it doesn't matter to her to the extent that if I'm prepared to prepare our food she's quite happy to let me get on with it. Which works very well for us.
    I only wish I could persuade her to join me in liking some of the less healthy and more stodgy desserts.

Friday afternoon blues

    As an exercise in keeping ones brain active enough not to fall asleep either before the end of the working day or while driving through the Friday rush hour, writing a random blog post about nothing much at all doesn't really cut it. But the filter machine downstairs has been turned off for the weekend so there's no coffee left, the office is hot enough to cook pizza from the built-up white heat of technology and opening the window only brings the buzzing sound of an elusive two-stroke motor. So there's not much else I can do right now.
     Just what are they doing that requires a small two-stroke on a wet Friday anyway? No need for leaf blowing, it's March. Similarly they won't be grass cutting yet. Sounds far too constant for a chainsaw. Generator? Surely not one of those nasty little Chinese portable jobs with the chocolate bearings and the pre-glazed bore!
    My weekend will be spent variously spaced out on Zopiclone, racking last year's cider and fettling various rusty bits of farm machinery. Wet and rusty bits of farm machinery, that is. The BBC tells me we're due some light rain which is to say anything from a soft spring shower to a miserable drizzle. We Brits have many different words for our precipitation. Still, with luck I'll taste a little of last autumn's golden halo in the rough proto-cider I draw off the lees. If you're not a cider-phile then I can only describe the flavour I'm looking for as intensely pippy, as in apple pips.
    Whatever your weekend brings you, I hope you sleep well.