TIME REGAINED

Burns Suppers.

2012-01-25T13:20:00.002Z

I live in Scotland, top of that strange shaped island in the north eastern Atlantic.

We have a National Bard, national poet, and a day to celebrate the lecherous old drunkard, that day is today.

We have a National Dish which you would have thought could have been our famous wild salmon or hill caught venison but no! It is Haggis made from all the bits nobody will buy mixed with onions, bait of spice, and oatmeal which should then be stuffed into a sheep’s stomach, we are nothing if not gourmets…

It would be a crime to eat such a delicacy alone though we did on Saturday, it is more traditional to get a roomful together and have a party of sorts. In the best gatherings the “great pudding” will be led to the table by someone in full Highland regalia playing the bagpipes, once the European Union gets word of this and measures the sound intensity of bagpipes in a domestic setting I am sure they will instigate legislation to ban it! There is a poem which is delivered to the haggis before the declaimer eviscerates it with his dirk, a dagger he keeps down his sock… People say poems in praise of lassies, I said he was a lecherous womaniser didn’t I? Traditionally a lassie gives a speech in reply before outers join in with their poems or songs. It can all be a bit much especially when they get to dancing highland reels after having drunk some of our National Drink.

Sunday we were invited out to lunch by friends who have some money so I was somewhat disappointed when an email arrived some days later to say that some contribution by Burns would be required. Darn, I really like Haggis but here was a premature Burns Supper where I had hoped for a real treat and a chance to chat with a few university professors to add to my font of useless knowledge. I googled “Burns and Haiku”, sadly he was such a traditionalist and fond of his own voice that he never used the form, all I got was a recommendation to burn my Haikus to CD! Next I Googled “Burns shortest poem”. He wrote countless hundreds but Google had no idea which was the shortest, so much for the internet!! We did eventually find a couple of epigrams which would not have us in the limelight for too long and neither were about sex or drinking.

Epigram Addressed To An Artist

Dear Sir, I'll gie ye some advice,

You'll tak it no uncivil:

You shouldna paint at angels mair ,

But try and paint the devil.

To paint an Angel's kittle wark ,

Wi' Nick , there's little danger:

You'll easy draw a lang-kent face,

But no sae weel a stranger.

Mine was to show that even though Scots were famous inovators in road building, they are still a mess!

Epigram On Rough Roads

I'm now arrived - thanks to the gods!

Thro' pathways rough and muddy,

A certain sign that makin roads

Is no this people's study:

Altho' I'm not wi' Scripture cram'd,

I'm sure the Bible says

That heedless sinners shall be damn'd,

Unless they mend their ways.

I did learn that our mild winter is due to a 25% rise in the suns UV output even though the light output change due to sunspot activity was only 1 to 2 %, this change affects the north Atlantic weather systems especially it seems and few had bothered to measure the UV changes before assuming that they were just related to the light output, Duh. Record sunspot activity has been related to our recent bad winters…

Sunspot Activity at 8,000-Year High | Space.com

That concludes today’s useless information .

After all that anticipation we did not get our Pudding but an excellent Beef Wellington. Tonight we will get a Haggis from one of the prize winning makers, you smirk!? Thankfully there will be no bagpipes or too much poetry though I think I shall take mine along to raise a smile ot two.

It has been my aim to do something to break the long gloom of winter by spending a while out in France helping with renovation projects but they have stopped for a while, last year we had a spa break when a friend celebrated her landmark birthday with a large group of friends. This year Julie is going to spend some time staying with her cousin an a big city for some culture and I am going to visit one of my online friends, a week to decide what to wear.

Jonathan Meades on France.

2012-01-18T12:35:00.000Z

Two likes in one programme , what joy...

Jonathan Meades on France.

January, staying cheery.

2012-01-17T11:48:00.000Z

January! Month of cold and colds… I feel fragile and that is the last thing I need right now. So many of our friends have reported failing health recently, some think that is what christmas cards are for!

The joy of reading books rather than computer screen has been rediscovered.

I feel a little low because I have gained a small amount of weight and lost fitness with spending the last two months dealing with toenails and the restricted walking with the raw toes. I am fine now and ready to get out, I can even get my feet comfortably into each of my two pairs of shoes, more comfortably than I have ever been able to do. My greatest hope is that the treatment to kill the nails works this time and the twisted horny nails never bother me again.

Until I abandoned shoes for sandals forty years ago it was costing a fortune in shredded socks… With the muscle changes to the feet and the improved toes It might now be easier to find shoes for those occasions when they are needed, they are well over a size down from what they were before! If only it was not frosted on the ground everywhere now I could be out rebuilding some strength and stamina. I am wanting to get out and enjoy my new life…

So many of us spend years, decades, staring into the mirror telling ourselves that change could not possibly work on the raw material we see reflected in the glass. I am still pleasantly surprised when I catch a glance of myself happily going about everyday tasks. There is a sadness associated with transition. You get to know many while they are in this transit camp and get to watch them bloom. Just as they start to become beautiful their need to be here fades and they are gone leaving the memory of yet another miracle. One journey which I have followed posted a video today. For those who think that this can’t possibly work and you will be alone forever have a watch…

Debra, Transitioning Past.

Time flies.

2012-01-11T00:11:00.001Z

The days are flying by into this New Year. Often quite a sad time as the Yule tree loses its decorations and comes down for yet another year and the house looks quite plain and empty. Fortunately the weather this year is being much much kinder to us that last and we are having some bright sunny days like today rather than the deep freeze and thick ice on the roads we have at this time last year.

This truly is the New Year for me, and probably a good moment to mark the change from the old life to the new. After a sociable Christmas and New Year when my change has been totally accepted and hardly noted any more by close friends and hardly noticed when I go out in the wide world. I think I can now claim that my social transformation can be considered complete. It is not to say that I am perfect in every respect and I’m sure many will have second thoughts and suspicions but I no longer sense any negative reaction wherever I go. This is clearly what I had hoped before just to short few years ago while staring into a mirror and seeing a quite masculine face staring back. How could it possibly be that it could be transformed into anything even remotely representing feminine? At this point you might be hoping for a few pictures of the gruesome hairy creature I once was and an up-to-date one of me looking all glamorous but I think it is best that I deny you this pleasure.

Usually at this time of year I will be feeling quite glum, short days and gloomy light make up an often depressing time but this year I feel quite cheerful. I can hardly believe 10 days have passed already. I’m so worried that the spring will be upon us before I know it that I am already scanning the seed catalogue and planning what vegetables should go into the garden in the spring. In recent previous years I have had help in the garden from a young teenage daughter of friends which this year has quickly transformed from a young innocent creature into a real teenager and for the first time in her life has gone off to do some real schooling, she says she’s doing drama but didn’t say whether she was teaching or learning! I suspect she will not be around so much this year and so have mentioned the possibility of sharing a part garden with a direct neighbour, he was somewhat disheartened when he first arrived to learn that my vegetable garden once belonged to his cottage but had been separated from it by a high wall when someone in the past gave away the cottage but decided to keep the garden not thinking that their drunken brother deserved the pleasure it would give! It gives me a lot of pleasure, though sometimes it’s more of a punishment only softened when the crops start to produce the kind of vegetables which money cannot buy.

So far I have not broken my New Year’s resolution. I’m the most sociable people who somehow finds it difficult to be a success on social media! It is an entertaining distraction, pointing the way to many interesting things and each week many hours vanish almost without you knowing. The downside is the volume of angst which pours out onto the screen, I have had a lifetime of depression and angst of my own to deal with and though I have always been happy to be supportive and pass on what little comfort I can I am enjoying my holiday away from it. Perhaps in this day and age it is not surprising that social media sites are popular with their rapid short bursts of communication, I read mutterings online that email is obsolete in the twitbook age, perhaps for those a generation younger but I can’t help longing for a few friends who like me prefer the slower electronic version of an old fashioned letter..

Ironic really somebody who has always hated writing a letter then again nobody ever figured out how to do spell check which worked with a fountain pen.

Living in and age where you can buy an avocado any week of the year I miss those things which used to mark off the year in regular seasonal ways, Easter eggs are disastrous now, the first ones were on sale mid December! I have not seen hot cross buns yet, they are late this year the first ones were on special offer on New Year’s Day last year! One thing that does remain seasonal is Seville oranges for making marmalade, the only ones where the white pith cooks away to something transparent and you can never buy shop bought marmalade which taste anything like as good as home-made. Last year’s supply was finished last week so I was pleased to receive an e-mail from one of my girlfriends saying that she had spotted the first oranges in one of the few independent vegetable shops we have now. I was just going to pop in and buy a few kilos and be on my way but found myself in a long conversation with the girl who runs the shop which opened just a year or so ago. Last year was the first year she had ever made marmalade herself and like many things there are 100 ways to do it and some tricks which can make life easier, I left her with a few ideas to try though she can’t try my favourite which is to push all the fruit for a hand turned meat mincer which grinds the Orange skins into something which can be spread evenly onto a slice of hot battered toast.

My juices are going just writing this. Guess you know what I’ll be up to tomorrow…

Resolution...

2012-01-02T19:01:00.002Z

New Year is never the best time especially in these northern latitudes with so little sun and subsequent lack of vitamin D. It is best to be aware of any lowering of mood before it overwhelms you. I am so much better about this than I was in former times.

There are so many things which need to be attended to so that when the seasons change we are ready to be free to take advantage and get out if we wish, another road trip if it can be afforded comes to mind…

Blogs were my chosen social media and continue to draw me back though many which I used to follow have now run dry… For over two years now I have been on fb and have a few there who regularly entertain me but my posts based on my dull life have not triggered much comment or sparked any regular correspondence, well those who replied most died which is not a good sign! I do know because with yet another change there impending with their timeline imposition I have read through my timeline from beginning to end. Editing is only possible post by post which is why I was still up at 4.30 this morning… In hindsight it would have been easier to go with my first thought which was to delete the account and start another, I would not be so tired now.

New Years Resolutions are made to be broken, everybody knows that, so I have made one with the express intention of eventually breaking it. Whilst sticking with it I will be able to assess just how much that which I am choosing to give up is part of my life, do I get cravings to indulge, does anyone notice I am not engaging and get in contact. Already I feel a sense of freedom and a freeing of more time to post blogs…

Bye-bye timeline, bye-bye...

Thoughts at the year's end.

2011-12-29T23:59:00.000Z

Yuletide has never been my favourite time of year as I may have mentioned…

The year flashes before your eyes as you try to write to keep distant friends and family up to date, some have had a bit of a surprise and those who should be up to speed have been hopeless at absorbing the new name! Poor postie must think there are about eight people with similar names living here.

Thank goodness for the photo files which act like a diary and supplement the hazy memory with reminders of forgotten enjoyable trips and meetings with friends. I know many disparage “the c********s letter” but it has to be better than the half hearted scribbled signature combined with blurry postmarks which have us guessing for days sometimes…

In most peoples eyes my change is a fait accompli with the only vestiges of resistance in some of those who have been closest to the old me and find it hard to overcome the imprinted automatic greetings with wrong pronouns and especially amongst my partners cousins who still flinch at a close contact. The latter becomes more pronounced with the absolute acceptance of so many, it would be impossible to fake the soft embracing hugs so many of my closer women friends share… Priceless.

For so long I have been at a happy place, completely comfortable with my strange hybrid body which seems so natural to me now. I don’t know how I would be feeling if I had lived these past years with a sack of junk bouncing between my legs and have never regretted for a moment my decision to deal with that problem early on. Before c********s when I paid my visit to the GIC in Glasgow I found myself comparing my present self with the creature who first went there just two short years ago. I remember speaking about how much some must change at one of my earliest appointments at a time when I felt that I probably would not change too much from how I had been for most of my life. How wrong I was!

Gone is my long hair! For this visit I arrived with a fringe, something which I have not had for nearly forty five years… Some of my nails were broken so gone was the colour which was so long my trade mark as the collection of forty small coloured bottles testifies to. For forty years I longed to wear earrings and necklaces but could not bring myself to do it after some nasty close encounters when a student in the seventies, now they are something which leaves me feeling a little naked if I go out without them… My old androgynous clothes now feel almost butch when I wear them for doing housework or gardening, being a child of the fifties and austerity it is hard to part with most of them until they are worn to rags, this may have to change!

Stepping out with my slowly improving wardrobe is so liberating though that feeling is fast being replace with the general feeling of a happy rightness. That rightness feeds back to the confident daily presentation which increasingly has me interacting with strangers who despite a good few clues to the contrary, like size, have us chattering away with no sense that they see anything other than another woman. I have been having both my large toenails removed over the past five weeks so have spent too long in the waiting room at the doctors surgery for the procedure or subsequent dressings. During one long delayed wait with just me and another woman a long dialogue started up, first about the usual, cold wet windy weather and delays then on to life the universe and everything… I think that was my final passing out test leaving no more doubt that the project has worked.

As we work through our transitions I think we have periods of absolute comfort as we achieve some personal goal then some anxiety as we face some change. As I said at the start of the post I have been quite comfortable with my present body and for so long thought that this would be the end of my physical change. Now that GRS is now a possibility with the funding now in place I do find myself in a strange state of low anxiety that something like age related health will trip me up with the final goal in sight. I have lost some of my recent joyfulness and find myself a little lacking in focus and lethargic. Weird, you would think it would have the opposite effect.

I thought that this would be a presentless c********s, not a bad thing, I have enough to keep me entertained. Just before c*********s there was a packet delivered by post from Virginia. Those who have been reading for a while may have come across Melissa who took ill in the early summer and soon succumbed to a melanoma on her back. The packet was from her sister Robin and contained some of Melissa’s earrings and a delicate chain bracelet as mementos of our friendship. The earrings show a more flamboyant side than we were used to from her blogs and at present are hanging amongst the decorations on out Yule tree!

2011-12-17T23:04:00.000Z

I guess with fewer posts published on the blogs which I follow there are fewer prompts to inspire a post from me…

I have been looking at some older photo files for another project and occasionally come across pictures of someone who looks vaguely familiar though any feeling that the creature was once me is getting weaker. If I had known just a few years back that I could be at the place I am now and feel so comfortable and what I guess can only be called “normal” with the body I inhabit, I would never have had a moments hesitation to move forward. Starring into the mirror, after decades avoiding them, I remember the fear that that hairy face and clumsy body would never easily exist in a more feminine form and move freely in the wide world. It is now just get up and go without a second thought, how wonderful it feels I lack the skill to adequately describe but it is beyond all my expectations.

The winter is setting in with record wild gales bringing down trees all over the place and snow closing roads even with all the extra resources put on standby after the last two winters. Naturally it is time to venture over the backbone of the country to the GIC in Glasgow. We made it this year, last we were iced in and could not move the car for a month, this year I got to sit in the waiting room and be tortured y some of the worst christmas music I have ever heard. Long way to go to just chat about how great it is all going but seemed pleased with how things had gone for me and letters have been written for the surgeon to eventually get on and do his thing. That is nearly two years since they first saw the long haired me on the feminine side of androgynous, I have moved more feminine than I ever though I would.

Board and lodging for the night was provided by a distant cousins family who provided a fine meal which marked a significant age for this body, not a date which I wished to “celebrate” much to the dismay of those who wished for a party. I must be getting old because I forgot to pack the bottle of Champagne which they gave me as a present, I blame the wine they gave us to drink including a marvelous bottle which I gave them as a present, our last good bottle! A 1928 Maury, pure heaven…

The next day we met up with another GIC visitor and then spent much of the rest of the day visiting a couple of museums and their cafes and restaurants to catch up on Louise’s news. Nobody ever gives us a second glance, just a few girls out for the day, how I wish I had found a way to escape like this earlier…

Back home to the freezing cold, road iced up for days and trying to tidy up for the expected crowd who are coming to eat on christmas day. Ten seems like enough without being hard work. Think it will have to be a rescued fake tree this year since one the height I wanted was £60 / $ 93 and the money is being spent on food. Shame, decorating a tee is really the best thing about this time of year. Presents have been banned this year and with luck for all time. In an ideal world you would love presents but nearly everyone is now agreed that spending money on things you would love to receive to give to others only to receive in return stuff you have no room for no need of or desire to own is just stupid. Reduced income sure focuses the mind.

Cards are all sent. Working through the address book was something of a shock as all the redundant names were scored through, what were once occasional entries every few pages have become large patches in most sections. Think this is telling us to enjoy what time we have and not put anything off for later. We have been getting out visiting friend whenever the weather permitted and in one day when perhaps we should have stayed home as record gales ripped up trees and caused flooding but who can turn down a lunch invite?

This is never my favourite time of year with the low temperatures and low light levels and endless inane christmas music, well they call it music! Roll on new year and lightening lengthening days.

Months ago facebook threatened to put your whole history out as a profile and I set off on holiday worried about what would be up when I returned. Clearly they are not as clever as they thought they were and it has taken until now to start to appear. Only a minority have voiced any disapproval of the new format. I liked being here blogging and took a long time to try that different place. Now the old concerns are flooding back, I saw it as akin to dropping into a cafe and conversing with friends, a few jokes, a few serious conversations. Now it seems all conversations are to be written on the walls for all time and everyone is supposed to be able to open my bag and browse through my diary. Perhaps it is because I am an open but fairly private person, no embarrassing pictures of me at parties to be found, I don’t even post too many things I like or much about my strange past. Does anybody out there have any thoughts on this? Are you going to just accept this new format because you want the world to know about your every move or are you going to quit in disgust or start a new empty profile and reinvite your old friends to see who still wants to know you?

Skeptical old biddy signing off...

Winter blues...

2011-11-27T23:31:00.000Z

Well that's really great, I've just remembered voice-activated typing program and turned it on for the first time since I upgraded the operating system and would you believe it the first message says this program is not fully supported! Brilliant!

You must all think I've disappeared like so many others but I've been a little distracted for the last couple of months.

We had a fabulous time in France, three weeks of glorious weather, blue skies, above-average temperatures, and the sea was better than it has been all summer so got to swim almost every day. This wasn't quite the autumn break we had been expecting but we put up with it… We did manage some culture between some good food including at trip to Montpellier, our third visit over the years and we have still done nothing more than visit the Farbre art gallery and eat lunch each time at one of the open air restaurants in the park outside!

Almost immediately there was a trip south and the chance to meet up with friends and family, that marvelous restaurant lunch meeting Lucy for the first time and a few days staying with my sister's family and a chance to meet up with Jenny again this time with Vickie.

Sophie and her cat.

We also managed to visit the renovated Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and with Julie's magic parking badge were able to park right outside in a city where it's almost impossible to park anywhere. The place is an absolute treasure chest and you could spend months doing nothing but visit this one museum.

They had a quite good copy of this Greek sculpture which we had seen in Athens 30 years ago. I guess this is what they must have thought of as an ideal male body, I shudder to think that I was once grouped in with the likes of this... NO no no!

We have been trying to distract ourselves from the possibility of winter blues with a few local cultural visits and quite a few of the public lectures at the University. It takes our mind off the cold damp foggy weather.

Only for the most adventurous

wheelchair users!

Edinburgh Chambers Street Museum.

When I'm not trying to hibernate I have been indulging in an old hobby, having large toenails removed.

The price of having large feet is that the big toe sticks out and regularly gets something drop on it, both of them are now severely distorted and grow as thick as horn, so thick in fact the doctor hurt his wrist removing the first one, they take them off like we used to take the lid off a sardine can! This one is healing up quite nicely so with luck the second one to be removed on 19th. December will feel no worse than this on Christmas day when the house is full of friends who've come to lunch. I think this will be the first christmas not wearing my one good pair of shoes, scarlet patent leather pumps. This is all good practice for whenever I get to be a real patient sometime in the future.

Our friend Louise came to visit us on Friday arriving in the most ghastly weather, dark gloomy and windy with driving rain. The reward for horrible journey was a complete change to bright and sunny with blue skies by the time she was ready to try us out for lunch at a fancy farm shop and restaurant in the country. It's getting on for two months since we last met in Perth and went shopping together. I've been living in what we bought almost constantly for the last month! Julie wore her purchases most of the time we were in France. This time we bought black pudding which we ate with sliced fried apples which Jenny gave us on our visit to Oxford.

It was lovely to meet Louise again though sad to see somebody having to suffer through the process which was my lot just 2 to 3 years ago. I now know that I could have already been through this long ago had I just stuck to the crazy system we have in the UK and which I have long disapproved of. Thankfully things are slowly improving and soon more will be allowed to start hormones before throwing themselves out into the world with no help as in the past.

My life is now settled and the once desperate need to read those exploits of others going through the same process for information and reassurance has faded away. So many of those whose blogs I did read have finished the process, had the surgery and started to get on with their lives leaving their blogs far behind. How the whole nature of how people write their blogs has changed in the short time I have been involved...

This week I had a quite a surprise whilst listening to the radio where the principal character had a name quite familiar to me, a male name once used to try and describe me. I didn't flinch, it was just another guy in a radio play, just another name, it was almost as if it had nothing to ever do with me…

Remembrance sunday 2011

2011-11-13T11:33:00.000Z

They march to gather by the memorial where last year the 90 year old gates were stolen by scrap merchants.

The war to end all wars and create a land fit for heroes...

666 miles for lunch with Lucy.

2011-10-30T00:50:00.000+01:00

The trip meter read 666 miles as we pulled into the car park, we were about two minutes earlier arriving than we had said we would be.

I have met a few fellow bloggers since I started and each one has been a joy to meet and Lucy was no exception. Somehow I had formed a mental image of Lucy from her blog and the few emails we had exchanged and here she was exactly as I had imagined her. If I had learned anything about Lucy it was that she was not afraid to enjoy a decent lunch and that is what we had met up to do. The walk from the car park to the restaurant in the Lanes of Brighton was a only a few minutes so we had the best part of three hours to sit and sip a glass of Tuscan wine and chat about life the universe and everything. It was a fun time which passed in a flash and I can hardly wait until we meet again.

Having come so far is only seemed sensible to pop into the local hospital to see if they could do anything about my small birth defect. We found the place on the outskirts of town overlooking the rolling chalk downs with the sea not far beyond. Heck, this was more like a smart holiday hotel. They seemed to think it was past it’s prime and renovation was soon to commence to bring the accommodation up to a state the state hospitals could not hope to reach.

No grubby car park with horrendous charges and the reception was exactly like a smart hotel with service to match. A little formal paperwork was soon dealt with and a short walk taken to a comfortable waiting area. Shortly the person who had dealt with the appointment details a month previously found us to ensure that everything was understood then The head nurse who supervises each patient through their whole treatment came to explain about the tour of facilities and meeting with medical staff. Everyone wanted to ensure our comfort and provide drinks while we waited. I was tempted to find a sharp instrument and test wether this was all a dream, everyone was so helpful and friendly and seemed to enjoy the work they did…

Liz, the personal assistant to Mr Thomas and clinical nurse specialist stays in touch with each patient throughout the whole process and she gave three of us her standard introduction to the process and explanation of all required by each patient and then a run through of their procedure with the aid of a cutaway model of the alien structures we were born with. After all my years of interest there were still a few interesting facts which came up that I had never come across. Two of us were all ears but one did not seem to want to know exactly what was going to need to be done, just wanted to wake up fixed! Two of us were somewhat shocked by her attitude as was Liz!…

Julie joined us for a tour round the facilities which normally you would be thrilled to get to use but they start next week to update every room and ensuite facility, those lucky enough to look out to sea will think they are on holiday!

Countless apologies were made for the lateness of the surgeon who had a 12 hour work load before seeing a small group of us. Those with slightly later appointments were former patients returning for checkups and three of us were to see about our birth defects. One of the group had failed to understand that a surgeon can’t expect to be on time and had made some arrangements for soon after the notional time given for her appointment and Liz asked two of us if we minded letting her go first, she gained no points for not giving full attention and seriousness to the matter! And looked none too happy as she left after her consultation… I got second spot having the longer drive back to my bed for the night so with a good luck message from the other girl I stepped in to meet the surgeon who could decide my fate. Julie joined me for this interesting interview. Liz, and Mr Thomas, a quiet introverted man as she had described him, worked quickly and efficiently through my notes questioning intently all the time and I added information when I felt it relavent. In no time I was ushered into an adjoining room for a close inspection of the defect. Half my clothes were soon on a chair and I was half naked on a couch, something which never bothers me, not really my body! Another few questions while the defective parts, well those which remain, were man handled and assessed. A cool conclusion was given as to the potential of the remaining material and more than confirmed my intention to opt for a cosmetic procedure.

Hands and voices are now probably being raised round the world in shock and horror at such a decision. How could you come so far and not get as much as you could? What if you find the perfect playmate in the future? How, why…?

I have my partner of half a lifetime still with me through all of this and she will not be expecting me to be playing away from home and after a lifetime of being unattractive romantically or lustily to more than a couple of people on this planet It is realistic not to raise my hopes to high that an invisible alteration is going to make me hot property and highly desirable to pounce upon. A recently opened play in London was written by a woman in her late sixties who stated that she had not been touched for over thirty years but wished to have sex with someone she could like as often as possible in the time she still had. I have vague memories from the last century of physical pleasure but know this one will not see a repeat no matter what form I take. I find joy in just being as I am now and hope for more of that when mind and matter are more congruent.

I also want to recover in a reasonably short time since I am the shopper, driver, gardener, half or the partnership and Julie is the brains and not as physically able as she once was. If she remembers she will bring me the occasional hot drink while I recover, unless she is reading a good book then...

At this point I expected a demand to loose weight especially since I have regained some of the summer losses whilst testing the current menu choices in France, I was anxious that I was not going to be really accepted by some of the French family so comfort ate for a while then acceptance grew! No demand for weight loss was made and it would have been so much easier to do if ordered upon pain of refusal to operate! So which parts need hair removal? None!

Then I heard the words “I think we could possibly do this in the first half of next year…”!

I must have had a smile on my face when I returned to the waiting room and the girl who was to follow me asked the rhetorical question about it going well and I could see that it had given her some hope too as she set off for her chance at being repaired.

Now returned home and not looking forward to the darker evenings after the clocks change tonight. Some time in the very near future Liz is going to be telling me exactly how their timetable is for me but already my mind is racing trying to get organised. I still feel like I am in a game like snakes and ladders and will suddenly be flung well back. Just my pessimistic nature based on previous life experience. I will believe it when the stitches come out…

Still feel low writing when I know this is the post Melissa was waiting for and would have enjoyed and shared my joy.

Sunday lunch.

2011-10-16T21:14:00.000+01:00

Our escape time here is drawing to a close and the weather is changing from the roasting hot to cooler low twenties during the day. I even slept under a sheet for the first time in weeks last night, sleeveless tops are not the thing for evening wear anymore.

For Sunday lunch we went to our favourite restaurant just across the garden, someone has to do independent testing to make sure the standards are a high as they have always been. Louise says that I should not be eating between meals, well I am not but some of the meals have been better than we make at home…

So here is a taste of life in this desert corner of France where Julie’s sister and French chef husband have had a restaurant since 1982. The first was in an old vine store just a hundred metres from here, very rustic and family friendly which after the first season cost nothing to advertise since so many customers returned year after year and their children grew and brought their families. Life was more relaxed then and most chose a menu selecting from the 15 foot long cold buffet table of meats fish and fresh salads where you could eat as much as you wanted! So much in the way of vegetables was not common in France. There was a large open grill which burned vine stumps though in high summer you might not be able to see your rabbit grilling because the fire would be in an old wheel barrow at least until the local blacksmith made a custom wheeled BBQ for behind the building. Here was a great family atmosphere and the were in the guides like the Michelin which had them on the map, a rare thing, as good food at moderate prices. They did a roaring trade until my sister in law started to find it too much and their children decided they did not wish to work there, knew how hard it was!

After the business was sold they decided to start a more flexible one in the garden! They had never been able to buy the old building but could build one new to their own specifications as a small Friday to Monday restaurant with a terrace and two bed and breakfast rooms and a kitchen from which they could do catering jobs too. Their daughter is now front of house and is especially interested in encouraging specialist local producers and has wines of the week which she presents with the background to their production as the clients get to taste them. It is called the green roof in french of course but as the government keeps taking away money at the wrong moments then giving it back again it has been several years now without the green living roof. Finally the components for watering and drainage have been ordered and in a break from the past It arrives after I leave! Now a girl no real help any more...

It was too hot for us to eat out on the terrace but others found it to their liking and basked in this late summer sun, we kept out of the direct sun and tucked in to a great lunch.

I found that they had pinched the magazine I had

bought to improve my French, well my food French.

Starter was so good I tucked right in without a

snap. I asked for a second to photograph but...

It was the fish soufflé, light as air.

Julie chose the confite of duck leg

Pork with palourdes for me

We shared a desert of pear cooked in wine,

really we shared it!

I was a life model today...

2011-10-14T20:24:00.000+01:00

The net croaked in and out of consciousness here this morning as I tried to finish reading then comment on Dru's blog about the absurd difficulty of attending an art class with her daughter. It made me just want to rip my clothes off and wander off into the wilds so that is practically what I did, taking me back to exactly where this blog began some years ago.

The irony struck me, as I spent an hour and a half on a long wander through the surf before going in for a swim, that I feel no anxiety or embarrassment about being on the beach with my hybrid body. As free as I felt there in the past it was always slightly tinged with embarrassment, not at being naked but as not being my true self, to all intents and purposes everyone would have seen an androgynous long haired male, rare on that beach but not unknown.

It is mid October and still warm here, upper twenties centigrade eighty fahrenheit, and there are still quite a few specimens out there on the beach to examine. As strange as we may consider ourselves we exist well within the range of human expression though perhaps those of us who are less than ideal find nakedness better than being trussed up in costumes which just emphasize our short comings and end up more comfortable on the naturist beaches! One woman my age or older strode past me with an energetic gait which could only be described as masculine whilst I "skipped" along. For many and especially single women it seems to be an infinitely safer place than the regular beaches...

The kind of school I was sent to could be a bit like a boot camp at times and there was no point being shy about your evolving body or you would soon be a target for humiliation, some things you learn quickly! I felt little ownership of the shell I inhabited much like a hermit crab, it would have to do until I grew out of it. Being naked on the beach was actually liberating by not having to wear a male beach uniform which branded you it was possible to be yourself and feel free for those brief hours...

Not to mention not having to lie about in a soggy costume!

Life modelling is hard work! All I had to do was hold a wine glass while my niece drew a design for a ceramic tile, a job you would think I was trained well for with all the wine I have drunk, but even though it was empty it weighed a ton by the time she was finished and all the muscles ached like you can't imagine. She did not need me to disrobe...

12 degrees.

2011-10-12T10:54:00.000+01:00

It is only 12 degrees centigrade today and overcast - back home.

32 degrees here and what does a cloud look like?

Need a swim and some oysters for lunch...

Itsy bitsy, teeny weeny abstract patterned borrowed bikini...

2011-10-09T09:45:00.000+01:00

We are now half way through our family visit. For a while I was cursing having brought the laptop with me taking up luggage space and weight and the not getting email updates when we arrived and net contact vanishes without notice… Things we take for granted…

Why did we pack autumn clothes? All that weight and it just hangs on a rack while I live in a borrowed bikini. It is October so leaving sun hat and swimming costumes at home seemed sensible and must have saved nearly 300 grammes! As it has turned out the temperatures have been in the high twenties centigrade and until today had forgotten what a cloud looked like.

A neighbour back home wondered what on earth we were going to do being in the middle of nowhere without a car. Hardly had a moment to do the gardening which I said I would probably do. A trip was made high into the foothills of the Pyrenees to find wine for the family restaurant, we found a Dutchman, hair filled with crushed grapes, who was just starting to pick whilst the vendage down here near sea level is finished and folk are out trying to shoot the prolific numbers if Sanglier, a wild pig which thrive n these vineyards but if they are unlucky like one was it will find itself featuring on the menu here, this week it is as a pork pie!

I had assumed that we would have missed the late summer treats like figs but a few had been saved for me, so high on the tree only I could get to them! Then we fond what must have been some of the last at one of the few remaining roadside stalls, half of the kilo bought did not make it home... Pomegranates straight out of the garden are something of a new treat and there are now some almonds, if I can avoid the bitter trees, and walnuts are about too.

Whenever we arrive my sister in law starts to get wanderlust so we relented and went with her to Cadaqués in Spain to visit the home of Salvador Dali.

She chose a hotel near the shore in what was a quiet street when we arrived and even when we got back after a late evening meal, only then did bars and nightclubs open for Saturday night! Thankfully I had two ipods with me, you can never be too sure!, and at three I woke to such a noise I just drowned it out with some of my own! Spain has much more sheltered coastline than here in France and the multitude of small coves offer calm waters and easy access for Julie who is always a bit unsteady getting in and out. There were many such coves within the town foreshore itself. Warm evenings sitting at a beach front cafe with a drink and a selection of tapas while watching the sun set over the sea is hard to beat! On the way home we even found a near perfect beach if the shade of a tamarisk tree and a close by restaurant for a paella is what you are after…

Over a week of daily sea bathing is not what I imagined from this trip but this should soon come to an end as cooler weather moves down from the north. Cooler will mean more easily getting on with small jobs about the place without getting exhausted! I have found a stash of old paint tins and have given up asking what I can paint, they have been very happy so far…

Looks like a chance for a little culture and a market day in Céret, the town where today’s snap on my picture blog, “voyageoftheeye” was taken last year.

When I left here in the early summer I was quite unhappy about how some of those close to me here seemed to feel, the jury is still out on that but though not perfect things do seem to have moved on as the reality sinks in. Some close family and friends do seem to find it hard to reprogram a lifetime of calling your name even if the evidence of their eyes is so absolute! Introductions as X who used to be Y is hard to stop too! Another week to work on that!

Darn.

2011-09-27T17:04:00.000+01:00

Just heading off for a family visit. I have been joking for weeks that the miserable excuse for a sumer will turn warm and sunny the moment I leave like it did in the spring and lo and behold that is exactly what is about to happen...

Net contact can be a bit ropey where we are heading so don't expect a lot of comments or posts.

In the past I would pack in a few minutes, my disguise was almost constantly the same fine trousers and tee shirt or pullover top, only the colours changed so it was simply a case of grabbing some which happened to be clean and be off.

Now there are just so many choices!! And a baggage allowance that is less than I could carry!! Thank goodness I have so little money for clothes or I could find it too difficult to choose and have to stay home...

Melissa Alison Price.

2011-09-23T23:12:00.000+01:00

Just the other day a 0.87€ stamp fluttered out of my handbag where it had been since I had purchased it along with its siblings in April while in France. That is £1 or $1.5 and they had been acquired to send post cards to one special friend who had retired early to the Piedmont in Virginia. The stamp had hardly hit the ground when I opened an email from a long lost net friend who had decided to seek me out and pass on the bad news that she had been searching for our mutual friend only to discover that she had departed this life a month before, just one month short of what would have been her 63 birthday. I had not long ago posted an old fashioned letter to her country hideaway knowing that post was being redirected. It had been written with dread and clearly said that I fully expected that it would be her sister who would be reading this years birthday greetings.

I asked for some sign of Melissa’s fate to be able to pass a message on to the endless posters of messages of concern.

My € stamps had been to send postcards of the European journey, she said that few items of real post fell into her mailbox and this was our little game on these trips. Being away from the net much of the time away it was a chance net hookup in the middle of nowhere about a month into the trip when I sent a message one evening asking if she was OK, her net activity had been a little different from what we normally expected when I had been reading online, her comments kept us going after all. A message came back immediately and we did an online chat which she had said she would never do preferring our exchange of long emails. Out came the saga of going to one of her regular family Monday meals forty miles from her sanctuary and ending up in hospital! The saga sounded horrendous and lacking in any real longterm hope of returning to her old life.

For such a private person to have to suffer the hell of her treatments and the well meaning ministrations of her 90 year old mother while trapped with little stimulation and no outlet for the personality we all knew and loved whilst in a high rise apartment in the stifling summer heat must have been a sad way to end her time here. Her mother after all had always refused to accept the Melissa we knew...

I was shell shocked, we were like online sisters and there was nothing I could say or do to help. The final card from the French part of the trip could now never be sent, what could I write?

Those last four months must have felt like an eternity and the replies to my attempts to keep her amused became rarer and shorter as she spent more time under morphine and she kept falling asleep at the keyboard. Somehow even in the darkest moments she managed to slip in one of her trademark quips to show that her spirit was not yet broken but the suffering could not be hidden.

She only made one brief return visit to her sanctuary in the woods and I am sure she knew she would never be able to manage the effort required to live there ever again or ever again be able to live out her life as our Melissa.

I have lost many of my closest family and friends but the tears shed over this new loss exceed all those previous tears combined. My twin soul is no longer suffering the slings and arrows of this cruel world and that is my only comfort.

Melissa Alison Price. 21 September 1948 - 20 August 2011.

Blue sky day.

2011-09-16T23:42:00.000+01:00

Perhaps it is just me but the net life which gave me such support and information is no longer the joyful thing it once was. Perhaps it is because my progress has been relativly slow through the transition process allowing so many to race on ahead and vanish. I don't think I shall go like that, better to stay and show that life does go on.

This strange summer has definitely passed, the geese are honking overhead and the browning leaves are already blowing about in the tail end of a hurricane. No matter which way the wind blows most of the leave in the street end up in front of our house…

After a season trying to finish some needed hard landscaping to aid access round the garden trying ti find enough dry days to manage it bit by bit I am left with just a short section of driveway to finish before I give up for this year. The wind and rain do occasionally give way to a warmish sunny day with endless blue skies and the last week or so has been taken up with being sociable and the sunny days occurred just when needed. A picnic on the beach then a day in the highlands with two other couples and yesterday a beautiful crisp clear day in a perfectly preserved riverside village with our friend Louise. Some of the village has been preserved by the National Trust and in the excellent introductory video it was pointed out that what is now so peaceful and picturesque was once a hive of dirty smoky industry much like the Grangemouth oil refinery far across the Firth of Forth. Quite the steepest garden I have ever visited and with a southern aspect gave us a comfortable place to bake in the sunshine before adding to the honesty box for fresh garden produce. If Julie had actually picked up the tomatoes which she had waxed lyrical about and for which I paid generously I would be a lot happier! I suspect we shall be having a lot of pumpkin soup next week!

Julie & Louise

True to form today is cold wet and windy. I am interested to see how my cheery mood stands up to the impending winter and long days of gloom. I hope that this will be the first winter without a real dip, my old depression seems like a distant dream.

We shall be making a short road trip later in the autumn to visit some family and friends and to attend a first consultation at the hospital where Scottish gender patients generally get their treatment. The process still feels less than certain with the added complications of age and health, I doubt that I shall really be convinced that it will work until I see the stitches being pulled out. Don’t hold breath, this is still some way off in the future and no doubt some interesting hair removal to be done before that...

Near naked woman running round the garden!

2011-09-05T00:58:00.000+01:00

Red Polo Through window.

Quite a while since the last post, grinding on through this autumnal weather which passes for summer this year and slows so much down.

It has not been boring, far from it. Numerous memorable things have happened, many I have probably forgotten already but others are harder to forget. So was the most memorable glancing out of the upstairs window to find my recently retired neighbour chasing her happy yappy dog around the garden while she herself was only wearing a pair of floral knickers, or could it have been finally giving in and letting a man get on top and finding it difficult to relinquish control, or could it be finding ourselves low on ready cash having found a second hand low mileage car for sale after we had decided not to bother trying to buy a new one when our savings plummeted in value almost overnight, or was it something completely different?

The neighbour has lived there for about twenty years and for some of those years we had not seen her once, now we see so much of her! She must be mad! I love letting the sun occasionally warm my whole body but not once this year, she is going to catch a chill like that!

This is the sad end to an era of colour. The colour red. In the past thirty years getting a car has usually just been deciding between wee polo or golf, depending on various circumstances it has ranged from extremely frugal to tyre squealingly quick. The one constant has been the choice of colour, the brightest lipstick red available and by some miracle it was always there on the colour chart. We had finally decided we needed more room to carry age related aids and something higher off the ground to help with access. Friends had a Citroen which has been a great success carrying huge quantities of stuff for an enormous distance and is still going well so we set off to find what the current model was like with the knowledge that we had the foresight to put away money starting thirty years ago just to be able to buy ourselves something like this just when we would need it most.

We had a test drive and it was comfortable and takes what we need to carry with ease so we sat down to see how we could get one, it would have to be ordered and take six to eight weeks…

So would we like one?

Yes a red one.

That will be £440 extra!!

What! So what is the standard choice?

White.

White and what else?

Just white!!

We have never seen a white one.

Nobody seems to want white!! Perhaps we could be flexible on the cost of colour since you seem so upset!!!

So how much for reversing sensors as shown on page “X” of the brochure?

To get that you have to have automatic folding mirrors and cruise control all in a package.

So how much would that be?

No idea!!

What?

They have not told us yet and will not be available until the end of the year at the earliest!!

So how about the opening window in the tailgate, that would be handy for through ventilation when out picnicking and for loading the boot to capacity without stuff falling out?

That is reasonable and available now.

Great, so it is not part of some insane package?

No, you just get blackened windows, two on each side and the rear so that you look like some mafia hit squad and can’t see out well!!

How much does one of these cost?

A small fortune and we will not offer you much for that cute red Polo with low mileage either.

At this point Julie is bored and exasperated and just wants it to be over and says just order it, I say it will take most of the savings and I want to see the money in our hands before we say yes, remember three years ago when we tried to look for a new car, the economy collapsed while we were away on holiday and the savings were no longer enough. That will not happen twice says Julie!!!...

Obviously that was a few weeks ago so imagine my surprise having already given up on the idea of changing to find that we had agreed to buy a cheaper secondhand low mileage similar Peugeot. People will leap out and try and stop us for a lift since so many are now used as taxis round here. Obviously we could not choose the colour but it is not white or grey or black or silver which make the roads so dull these days, it is a sort of dark blue and has few creature comforts. We get it in 12 hours time. No more cute cars, no more red…

I met this guy a few weeks ago and he seemed nice and quite keen and interested and looked fit. Then sadly he did not answer my calls, two messages is my limit, I am not going to go begging! Then all of a sudden he appears on the doorstep and makes a date! Then he fails to turn up of course but soon calls again to make another, men!! I have just never done this kind of thing before and do find it hard, near impossible actually, to submit to control, especially to a guy. Finding him on top and not knowing what he wanted to do next had me nearly a nervous wreck, if he tells me what he is up to and lets me help a bit I am ok but letting him just do what he wants was just not on. He admitted that he nearly did not come that day but in the end was back in the afternoon for more and was soon back on top again! I could hardly believe it. That leak had been worrying me for months.

Only forty years since I first saw a doctor about not being the boy everyone thought I should be I have a first consultation appointment, confirmation letter in the post. Shame we did not know that we would buy a newer car since we had booked a couple of cheap flights to get a couple of weeks late summer sun in France. We could have driven there again and passed by the hospital where the appointment is on the way back five hundred miles south of here. The appointment is just days after we return, probably fly right over it!

A Peugeot built like a tank.

A good news day?

2011-08-23T01:35:00.000+01:00

Post garden project blues started to wander through my brain! Life is so calm and peaceful but the flurry of others ops happening recently had started to highlight how many had sailed past me during my time here on the net and somehow I was failing to ever finish this body project by running out of time and age related health making it impossible to continue.

Just as I am contemplating renaming my blog along the lines of “Cinderella needs size eleven glass slippers” a call to the GIC to make my six monthly appointment, see how interested in me they are!?, It was mentioned that the mistakes in applications for funding had been solved and go ahead given! How that will translate into action I have no idea. I know that the lists from Scotland are oversubscribed and places few at the best of times but the possibility that next year may be my year had an instant effect on my mood and interest in life! I have been trying to slowly loose some weight and maintain some degree of fitness to be ready for this mythical hospital date but now that it seems like it might actually happen everything changes. I have to loose more weight and keep a closer check on blood pressure, fitness may help here. House projects have become more urgent to progress before I get laid up for recovery. Garden has to be ahead of schedule rather than how it has always been, way behind! I had better have everything dug and prepared before the winter this time, you can see I am already wanting action by the spring! No dreaming of holiday trips for next year until some kind of timetable is mentioned…

My next scheduled visit is in December on my birthday which I am no longer marking in any other way. I will have to try and get some earlier clarification of the position and routine from here on in. Perhaps I have raised my hopes a little too high and soon but for the moment my mood has peaked and I shall use it to get as much done before the winter sets in.

Even before this happy news I have shocked myself by how much I am getting through even with the loss of “T” power, just by being positive and alive. I am trying not to think about how much better this place would have been if I had been in this kind of mood for the last thirty years since we moved in together.

Better late than never I guess...

Cinderella's worn out gardening shoes.

Summer almost over before it begins!

2011-08-20T01:18:00.000+01:00

Rustic handrail

carved from tree branch.

20 th. of August already! The summer has been a washout, wetter than almost any ever and cold growing weather with many vegetables not developing anything like their normal size or vigor. The broad beans (fava) have given up their last good picking and the french beans have not yet given a single bean pod! Black berries or brambles as the call then round here are now hanging like bunches of grapes so we were happy to have a guest here tonight to help eat some.

A week ago I was working all hours I could to catch up the time lost through rain to get the garden presentable for a party organised ten weeks before when we returned from our holiday trip to find everyone bronzed from the hot dry weather they had while we were away! After two wet summers I thought this was going to be reasonably dry, how could we have three wet in a row! Easily as it turned out!

By Saturday night at midnight when I finally finished I could hardly bend to undo my boot laces but the garden had places to take all the guests plus space in the greenhouse and house if all turns out wet. The first two guests arrived dead on time and for once I was almost dressed! Within seconds the sound of raindrops hitting the greenhouse roof was heard and all the outside chairs got wet! Thankfully it was a rare day of sunshine and they quickly got dried off before the next brief shower, I joked to those sitting that they would not get wet if they remained seated and though meant as a joke most did so I joined them as the last brief shower passed over and then the party went with a swing. A crate full of pink Cava helped as did a table full of food. Judging by the volume of noise caused by the conversation everyone had a great time. Being a hostess does not let you stop to join in many for long but once everyone else had served themselves I filled a plate and joined a group where a professor of ancient French declared that he knew little about british accents but loads about French the proceeded to differentiate british accents with interactive examples from all present and exquisitely subtle demonstrations of the regional differences. How much does he know about French if this counts as nothing!? My accent as I knew is dull and uninteresting mainly because I pronounce most words in a correct standard English in my overeducated under qualified way!! He said it better than this but I forget how…

After the rush of the previous week I took some time for myself, even read a whole book in a couple of days rather than the month it has been taking recently and after thirty years finally discovered that it is possible to lay out in the warmth of the greenhouse and doze away. Seriously have to reconsider the growing of plants in there if the growing beds can so easily be made into sofas with the hoarded cushions found in the attic.

Friday became a day of pleasure. First we met up with Louise from Edinburgh to visit a five-hundred year old royal hunting Palace in Falkland in Fife. For three months in the winter not a single ray of direct sunlight reaches this town at the foot of the Lomond hills but during our visit it was bathed in sun. Over five hours wandering about and stopping for coffee and for a light lunch all passed so quickly, real time still beats net chat. A diversion on the way home took us to friends / distant relations who live in a divided country mansion of some considerable age Their time there had been spent filling up the vaulted storage spaces on the ground floor with all sorts of junk, normally this would not be a problem but builder arrive in a few days to renovate this part of the house to make it habitable again so people have been invited to take whatever they want in return for a donation to a charity. The invite had come with an apology since they know we already have too much of our own junk! We really just wanted chat and home made cake…

The day was rounded off with dinner at home with an old friend who we don’t see so often now that he is married to a vegetarian and has a busy home life but with wife and child away in the heat of Paris he was able to entertain us before catching a train to meet them for the second half of the holiday in London. We were soon back as if it were those carefree days in the 80’s and 90s again and he , and we, got to enjoy a juicy steak and ripe blue cheese which is forbidden in his home!

Now conscious that time to fix and repair various parts of the house exterior are running out for this year so have to get back into action. It all helps to take my mind off the thoughts of being a kind of cinderella amongst those I know online. A sudden flood of folk going through operations in these past few months leaves me sometimes feeling like the ugly puppy who never gets chosen from the pound. Many I knew when I first arrived have long vanished back into the world and now many who came after are speeding past to their futures. I have few things to complain about in my new life but it is now hard to get the enthusiasm to follow new blogs like I did the old.

I guess we go through all this much like a class and I have had to repeat a few years! So many of us don’t even get this far so I have no real reason for regret or self pity but it does sneak up on you when you least expect it...

Half a lifetime on...

2011-08-13T01:15:00.000+01:00

I am somewhat amazed.

Half a lifetime ago we signed up to be a couple, Julie did the proposing, and did mention a tax advantage which the government quickly closed, but here we are still together.

How things have changed. I know you are supposed to invite a huge number of people you have never met and probably will never meet again and spend a fortune which you really need to start your new life together on entertaining these people and showing your friends that you can spend far more than they did.

We did not do that. It was not as small and quiet as we planned, in the end the party doubled in size to four since we took our own witnesses. A fabulous meal in a Michelin starred restaurant run by a famous TV chef at the time was followed by a few snaps in the back garden next to the compost heap using a self timer and colour film, the first and one of the very few rolls which ever went through that camera. Then an amorous afternoon before the evening when a large crowd of friends, who thought the were coming to a birthday party, arrived. It was about half way through the evening, just before the fizzy wine ran out , that my new mother in law proposed a toast to a new happy couple… Much stunned silence as the penny took a while to drop…

No more fancy restaurants, no more fancy wine just something half price from the supermarket and amorous has not happened since last century but we are still together and seem to be happier than for many years now that I am less gloomy and brooding.

We are still trying to have a party, advertised as a garden party this time. It was still a building site this morning since this wettest summer, what summer, has set the work back weeks from expected completion when the invites went out two months ago.

A friend has sent sunshine from Ecuador, I hope it arrives in time...

Site of photographs so long ago,

Julie contemplated garden party two months hence...

Small world...

2011-08-11T02:03:00.000+01:00

At an exhibition of some of my work just over two years ago I was approached by a guy who really liked the work and wanted to meet the person who had done it. The subjects wandered off in all directions as we chatted for nearly an hour. He was soon to set off for a year learning to build traditional wooden boats in New England so we were not going to be meeting up again any time soon. I gathered that this time away was a finding himself time after a turmoil in his life and a marriage break up, we shared a taste in melancholic music! It transpired that he played and recorded his own music and before leaving the country posted me a copy of a CD.

A few days ago while tapping keys on the Mac, up came his music so I did what you do these days and searched for him and quickly found a myspace blog, not somewhere I have been before. The Maine trip was a success and he spent a lot of time there with a new girlfriend then spent a year on the opposite coast with another girl, some lucky guy. Then there was a small snippet about some documentary about changing F2M…

I had not a clue! Here was a really nice guy with sweet but masculine voice, not surprised girls like him. I sent a message and he remembered our conversation and had through the grapevine already had someone mention that I had changed, he was not at all surprised…

He is back visiting for a month or so and has suggested we meet up again, there may even be a concert before his return to the US, I am looking forward too hearing of his adventures in boatbuilding.

He had wondered what I had been doing in the way of work since we met saying that the change had been an inspiration to write music for him. I had just started a new blog under a new name with a lot less words than I write here, if you want something cheery to start the day then follow me and get a new photograph every day. The first was made not far from where the conversation I have written about took place and was made just last week when out with a couple of old friends for the day. In future they could be anything from anywhere and any period over nearly forty years especially when I get a scanner!

Voyageoftheeye

The “summer” continues cold and wet with brief cool dry days occurring at random, today was continuous rain as will tomorrow be along with a severe weather warning. The neighbour foolishly drove the ten miles to a small town to shop and had never driven in such horrible conditions and often could hardly see the road for the rain and gloom at midday. I fear it will either rain until Sunday so that the garden is a mess then brighten for a planned party we are unprepared for or I shall organise the house to squeeze people in and neglect the garden work completely which should guarantee perfect weather but nowhere to go! I could work in the rain and hope for good weather because the house is not organised for a large party. Thank goodness for those two glasses of wine tonight, I don’t seem to be worried...

Room with a view.

2011-07-29T05:42:00.000+01:00

I used to photograph things, now I just seem to photograph the view from my bedroom!

These are the views from yesterday morning and just a few minutes ago.

Just working in the garden.

2011-07-25T00:31:00.000+01:00

In the past my donor body was subjected to a roller coaster ride of manic activity and deep lows of despondency. I quite liked the manic phases and could sometimes get a lot done in a short time before the lows returned.

Life is now quite flat but flat at a good level. If I want to do something I have to push myself and it has taken a while to get used to this. I have been pushing myself on the garden projects for weeks now with only a few breaks and with the evenings being the best time for much work especially the cement work I have been taking care of the long summer light we get in Scotland, today finished at 10.30 pm yet again.

The usual trusty concrete mixer decided to just stop and was out of action for about a week until my net searches found some helpful guy who phoned to help diagnose the fault treating me in a kindly way as the obviously less smart than a man way guys have when they have to deal with a woman. I mark this up as a success as was his diagnosis and the instructions on how to strip down the machine to be ready for the new part were perfect. Having it grind away on a Sunday seemed less than neighbourly so I have spent the day removing a largish spreading tree without crushing the plants growing within four metres. With pains taking care all the small side branches were removed then I borrowed a chainsaw to cut through the thick spreading branches to near the point of breaking then eased them down pulling on ropes onto the one nearby path. Julie looks on in wonder not able to understand how I can do this when friends pay out a fortune and have devastated gardens to contend with afterwards!

Two of the largest twisted boughs I had long ago stated would make perfect rustic handrails for the front steps up to the house. It was assumed that I was just dreaming out loud so Julie got a surprise to find me stripping bark off one limb which I had lashed into place to try out my idea. A magical sculpture and handrail in one! It will take a fair bit of work to bring it to perfection, the other one looks as promising for the other side. Feeling slightly smug.

The vegetable garden has been neglected much of the time since we returned from out trip, the garden help goes in with her mum who is starting to enjoy growing things, shame that they will not touch any weeds which are not close to what they want to eat! Thankfully I was not able to persuade them of the joys of artichokes so we got the whole crop, this was the last picking.

So life goes on but with a little added back ache. Thankfully my new bumps have not shrunk with the new weight losses...

Un-ladylike work.

2011-07-11T00:56:00.000+01:00

Scottish summer!

After two poor wet summers I thought the chances of a dry one would be reasonable. Last year the garden table never even came out of storage for the summer but it has this year. Yesterday we were out drinking coffee after our breakfast thinking that it was almost hot enough to bring out the summer hats we bought in Germany just before the cold and rain started. We were talking about the plans I had for the garden work after I had oiled the table top. The moment the last drop of oil went on it started to rain hard from a near black sky!

Much of the time I have been working on the driveway until it goes dark just after ten then sleep like the dead! I must be burning a few extra calories and have lost nearly seven pounds since we came back from our trip. I am doing a lot of unlady like labouring and have unearthed the concrete mixer from it’s seven year coma, I don’t remember the bags of sand being this heavy though they do seem to get lighter as the weeks go by. The driveway is worse than I thought with some of the hardcore hanging over voids which have been washed away. It was perhaps a mistake to put the car away in the garage while I set to work with the collected sand and cement and piles of reclaimed gravel, shame that I ran out of material before enough was repaired to be able to escape again! A friendly neighbour was in his rags and had just finished emptying his trailer as I arrived seeking help last Sunday. We made a trip to the DIY depot and loaded up on more sand and cement then I helped him fix up a pergola in his garden in payment as a nice break from the graft in my own. I still dream of one day sitting long summer days, warm in the shade reading or listening to the radio. A girl can dream!

Today was hopeless with overnight rain then just as it became dry enough the sky went black again. Just to be infuriating it stayed mostly dry but threatening enough to not want to start anything useful! Then there would be short bursts of rain to call an end to all hope. If the toilet flush mechanism had not broken to take my mind off things it would have been frustrating. Modern plastic fittings are rubbish, this unit is only six years old and works much worse than the cistern downstairs which is 117 years old!

That is quite new from the 1896 modernisation! The roof is 170 years old and even though I paid out good money about fifteen years ago to have the slates stripped off and the roof re-felted and slated a monsoon rain found it’s way into the bedroom mid week at six am when the wrong kind of drip drip woke me as the drops fell just inches from my hifi. A MAN came to assess the situation in the afternoon and agreed with my diagnosis and we will just have to find the money for a repair to a stupidly designed valley. I asked if my emergency repair using some left over kitchen vinyl and lead pipe (never throw anything away!) was any good, he muttered something about it being better than he could have come up with!

We have a garden party organised for the middle of August, am I anxious yet? No, but if there is not more dry weather soon I might be…

I went to look at the fruit bushes, time for some black currants, none left, the birds have nearly cleared all this years black and red currants and the gooseberries too. This is the first time they have not left more than we need. Next year the fruit cage will be re-netted and they will have to go and torment someone else. I don’t begrudge them a good feed but being that greedy is just not on.

No pictures, just too busy and or tired to take any...

This tansition has been a nightmare.

2011-06-27T18:56:00.000+01:00

Rainy day, dream away, let the sun take a holiday…

Story of this summer! Muscles ache from breaking up concrete driveway, I know, not really girls work but…

With darkness at noon and heavy rain I thought I would just play on the net for a while, I rarely seem to use it for anything other than following trans issues.

For a while now I have been in transition and to be honest it has been ghastly! My life for decades was near perfect then suddenly life became a nightmare with everyone asking me when I was going to transition, did I not think it was time, I would be more popular if I transitioned they said! I didn’t see the point myself, why go through a painful and expensive process just to find that everything you knew and took for granted was gone and useless and you have to find out by yourself how to function in this new world. Well I finally succumbed to pressure and threw myself into the change! Lo and behold it is a nightmare, I am near broke and I am not popular, in fact the phone never rings any more. The transition to digital photography has done nothing but kill the joy I found in exploring the world with film and lens.

In my previous life I found joy in composing elements of the world into neat squares and rectangles one hundred percent accurately delineated by the camera’s viewfinder. The kind of image you wanted to record could be decided by the choice of film, monochrome or colour, high or low sensitivity, grainy or smooth image saturated or soft colours etc. No matter how old the camera you could use the most up to date film technology. The cameras, like musical instruments were designed for instinctive finger tip control of focus, aperture and shutter speed and had zero start up time, no batteries and no annoying motors buzzing to tell everyone that you are thinking of making an exposure!

To get the equivalent result to what I had on film costs the price of a new car and depreciates even faster while becoming obsolete before you have earned enough to cover it’s cost! Last year I threw a digital camera in the bin, £200 / $300 and after a couple of years this holiday snapshot camera became so flakey it was useless. In years gone by it would have become a faithful friend and would be retired to a shelf to remind me of the joy we had had together but why would I want to be reminded of the frustrations? It got replaced by one which I had not even bothered to ever handle but ordered over the net as a reduced price old model. It works after a fashion except if you go outside when the screen is useless, then again my eyes are starting to fail for near subjects so my arms are hardly long enough to see the screen crisply so I never know what it has focused on, I have become an impressionist photographer composing a blurry fuzz where once I would be obsessed by precise positioning… I won’t even start to mention lenses and their quality!

This rainy day led me to investigate the one camera which seemed to have been made to attract a purchaser such as me. I was told that it was not cheap but I am know as someone who will sacrifice a lot to get one thing of quality and treasure it. As I have said not something the disposable digital market has provided so far!

It was Fuji camera which I looked up and the manufacturers must have been proud of their new product, they even made a very decent website to showcase it, now be honest, how often do you ever find ANY website which can be called half decent, a tragic waste of the net!

This machine has controls where they should be, the designers did not really “know” where to put them! But they found out! The thing is lovingly manufactured from durable materials in a precise way with attention to how the controls feel. It has a classic non threatening look, quite the opposite from the large heavy expensive black lump of plasticy DSLR which I bought for doing work if ever asked! It has a fixed lens designed with the largish sensor to provide a beautiful image quality especially in the way it deals with out of focus elements. If you ever read of someone drooling over the beautiful “bokeh” a lens draws you know you have found someone who knows and loves lenses! The camera even has what most cameras do not have any more, the one thing I miss, the thing which shows you what you are going to record from the point where you see it, not at arms length bur precisely HERE!

While I am broke with not enough income to feed a cat there is still an account with money for photography, it keeps getting depleted by household expenses so if I don’t use it for something like a camera purchase soon there will not be enough for a camera purchase, even Julie agreed. In fact she would like me to find something like this which would reignite my passion for making images…

I have the money ready to leap out of my account, new pin number and everything. So why have I not jumped in the car and driven the 25 miles to the nearest dealer?

The idiots in their infinite wisdom decided that the viewfinder would be alright if it only showed 90% of what the lens would record! A Rolls Royce camera with a Trabant viewfinder worse than my first toy plastic camera as a child!

Last week at a dinner party there were three of us in unison who spoke of our frustration with how modern cameras work, there must be millions of us out here who want a proper camera instead of these plastic gameboy toys!

Congratulations Fuji, 100% screw up!

Anniversary blog.

2011-06-20T02:37:00.000+01:00

It does get better, I can vouch for that.

This is something of a milestone as the 200th. Posting, not something I ever envisioned typing all that time ago when I started out on my first curious investigations on the web.

It is now just over four years since we got connected at home, I was resistant for many years saying that my partner had no need since there was free fast connection for her at work and I had no need. In fact I had a strong need but was wary of taking steps not knowing where they might lead, knowing that I was probably going to find myself on a slippery slope with little chance of stopping!

My initial investigations were occasional and coldly scientific! I guess I wanted to find the perfect treatise on transsexualism online which I had failed to ever find on a bookshelf and of course the web does not work like that! Snippets of information were gathered but it was a long time before I came across anything like a personal blog. I put this down to the fact that I was an old untrained person wandering about in the dark! Once I started to find some interesting people and stories I felt bad about being an anonymous reader, a voyeur! In two weeks time it will be three years since I got a web identity and started making comments, initially on Live Journal where after a few months I finally got up the courage to start writing my own blog.

It was not long before I discovered that Blogger was hosting more of the sites which interested me so I opened a mirror blog here only to discover that there was twenty times more commenting activity here!

Initially it was an investigation into my buried memories trying to reconstruct where I had come from, so many memories had been lost for decades. Eventually it became what it is now, the every day musings of an aging transitioner hoping that it might help those others out there who like me spent years or even decades imagining that there was no hope and their chance had passed them by.

It is also a year on from my finally going round friends and family to tell them exactly what was going on in our lives and wait for the sky to fall around our ears and watch the dust clouds rise as friends rushed away. What an idiot I was to doubt such friends and it must make a dull blog to continue to read of the almost total acceptance and support. Not everyone has rushed to accept and a sad and significant couple have been somewhat hurtful with their deliberate use of the wrong pronouns, which when used in new company whilst you are present wearing a skirt and nobody has had an issue with it up until that point, is a hard thing to forgive.

This weekend away illustrates how far I have come in one short year. We met several people who we have known well for several decades who had no idea who I was, one was an artist renowned for her observational skill who had been on a national committee when I was vice president and several of our meetings had taken place in her home, she swore she had never met me in her life!

Looking back on photographs from a year ago when I was quite pleased with how my appearance had become I can see the great changes in body shape as the muscles changed into buttocks and breasts and my face softened and filled out. Three months have passed since my last visit to Alison to electrify my few remaining stubborn hairs on top lip, chin and lower neck but so few all urgency has gone especially when she declared that I now had fewer than most of her natal female clients who came for various other treatments!

My dreams have never been interesting, mainly illogical and frustrating without being populated by anyone recognisable even myself who is a blank cypher usually in dreams. All that changed a few weeks ago when I realised that there was a curvy woman in the dream and it was me! It was still a dull dream but…

Life is finally fine, I can say that I am usually happy for the first time in my life. We get on with our lives and I am accepted and never give it a moments thought, I just am me. Life has not suddenly become exciting but all everyday life is so much more comfortable when you can finally be yourself.

UK health service is painfully slow especially in Scotland where there is no surgical provision at all, that’s right, no surgical provision at all! We have to accept a painfully small quota of little more than a handful of places in the south of England which last year were over subscribed so some of this year’s places were taken by those left waiting from last year! It can only get worse with financial cutbacks so I expect a long wait and hope I am still fit and well enough to take advantage if my turn ever comes around. My one consolation is that I had the orchidectomy so there is not much rubbish in my pants these days and I do not have to suffer any side effects from long term anti androgens. Tough on those who do.

May '09

May'10

June'11

That concludes my anniversary state of the life address.

Garden of life.

2011-06-13T11:21:00.000+01:00

Well, who would have thought? Life just goes on.

I guess this is what we long and hope for, years, decades of wondering if it could possibly work. The face caught in a mirror tells you “don’t be crazy” as the results of a life on testosterone have ravaged your once soft features and time is thinning hair and receding the hairline. Your life is a mess with a constant swirl of thoughts of “what if I had done this” or “what extra circle of hell would I be in if I follow my heart”, “what would I look like and will it be good enough to manage to live a new life” and the list goes on. Why can’t the world see your problem and why can’t you just get the help which you so obviously need!?

All that internal angst ended some while ago when I finally decided to step out into the world. It comes as a big shock to find all that free time inside your head! With so long a time since you did anything other than obsess about your absurd position in society you are not going to be trained to be able to quickly fill this time, what on earth to do with it all? I have not yet found out, I guess much of what I do would be called daydreaming, like sitting on a wide endless beach enjoying the open vastness of it all after the noisy prison cell of former times.

I am happy to fill my time with the everyday things of life and if you live in an old house like this one there are plenty of everyday things!

Since we returned from our road trip the garden has taken up most of my time, not least because I am trying to finish constructing a ramped walkway round to the large greenhouse where we can sit when conditions are too poor to sit outside. This is Scotland on the same latitude as Moscow after all! This is a larger project than expected and now has devastated this whole section of garden but will eventually give us somewhere sheltered from the evening onshore cool breeze whilst catching the late afternoon sun when it shines.

I started this project last year and no sooner had I exposed the earth beneath the old stepping stone pathway than it started to rain and the ground remained wet for most of the “summer”! Our return from the trip saw scorching temperatures for a few days and I wondered how I was going to be able to work in that heat. Last year on one hot day I was briefly tempted to slip off my tee shirt to help get on but was struck by a strange mixture of emotions! Here I was, someone who regularly in the past gardened merrily in the nude found myself very uncomfortable with the idea of digging away topless at a time when you would have still taken a look and described me as mostly topless!

Not really an option this year as the top bumps are developing nicely and a number of over mature trees have been removed which used to give me the total privacy I craved. The new me is happy for the garden to have been opened up slightly even though a number of houses can now over look various parts though none can see me slaving away on the new project.

After two days of heat we have gone back to Spring like temperatures with occasional showers but conditions have allowed me to progress the excavations which have been like an archeological dig finding remnants of brick and concrete structures and wrought iron pipes buried when the house was “modernised” in 1896! One thing I do wish is that the old me had not been so wound up on all those thoughts of misery and self destruction with little thought of more than a few months into the future, that old me had far more muscle and in a manic phase could have used that testosterone fueled muscle to do this kind of job so much more easily!

Once the hole is dug out I shall be able to start putting in a rubble foundation from all the rubbish in corners of the garden and from breaking up the frost ruined driveway. Did I mention rebuilding the driveway!?

So now you know why I have not been posting much since we returned, finish at 10pm with the long light we get at this latitude and sleep like the dead.

It is drying up after the overnight showers so have to get on...

A not so grand day out in Glasgow.

2011-06-01T01:18:00.000+01:00

A day trip to Glasgow, regular readers will know that this means a trip to the Sandyford gender clinic. Just less than a year and a half ago I made my first visit and they confirmed that I was not crazy. Today I think that they confirmed my suspicions that the system we are held to is!

Happy with how I am in my new life and they did not even want any blood, in fact took a note to pass the testing on to my GP service just along the road from where we live and told me not to come back for another visit for about six months, just before the winter sets in should do nicely.

Do I have any questions? Well yes, where is the letter about funding? In the UK we have a national health service and don’t be fooled by the national bit, the system is broken into countless fragments each fiercely hanging on to it’s set own of rules. I can get to the major teaching hospital for this region without driving past more than about a hundred houses but they should not have applied to that area for funding but to one where we never go and facilities are so far away we would never get a visitor if admitted to hospital there!

If this regional health board agrees to funding!?! IF! Then I move one place forward on the board game to a waiting square. How long to wait you ask, long enough for your clothes to go out of and back into fashion!

Six slots are allocated to Scottish patients each year and more than that were on the list last year so some took up the first slots from this year. It seems that English patients get treated differently and there is more flexibility in how surgeons time is purchased. It is actually cheaper to purchase the private slots than the regular ones they already pay for but our health boards will not pay up!!

Pay up and go private like the rest of us I hear you all chant in unison. I am sure there is an element of driving us in that direction involved in their thinking even though high taxes have already paid for our health care, it is only free at the point of care! They told me that the whole system is under review since they have noticed that it just does not work! A glass half empty exists for this situation and I am sure it costs a lot to treat the depression the situation puts people in but that is alright apparently, it comes out of another budget which is fully funded!

The irony is that if I had been sent to them directly when I first saw my GP in 2007 I could have been through this whole process and be writing about the post op joy of living but you may grow old and grey and never see that post.

I was told forty years ago that I would never get help in this lifetime and I am starting to believe that ghastly doctor was right.

Age, health problems and home situation may well make sure I never finish this process if the delay is too long. So if you take anything away from this post it would be don’t delay getting into whatever system you have to work through and don’t leave it till you are old and grey!

Darn chilly in the garden so here are some random thoughts.

2011-05-29T10:42:00.004+01:00

Photos not long sucked into the mac so you will have to wait a while to see what we have been up to on our trip, have patience...

This is all back to front! We went on an early spring road trip to let Julie enjoy the cooler weather, her range before getting weary is greater in the cooler seasons. We hit an immediate heatwave in the south of England then once near the Mediterranean while it was briefly cooler than expected and while the rest of France dried to a crisp it soon warmed more than she had hoped for. Arriving home we find April and May have reversed this year and storms have ravaged the country, friends who were opening their garden for the “Gardens open” charity events for the last time, since age creeps on, were in the news instead with trees blown down! It looks sunny out there but the winds are blowing a cold chill round the garden, not my idea of fun.

I have always just worn any old rags discarded by others for garden work, my clothes were too delicate! Now I find myself grumbling that my wife's castoffs are not really feminine enough, no wonder she could not really see me as “not a guy” even wearing her own clothes!

The new life just fits so well I hardly think of it now until something brings me up short like my odd time in France or the occasional person who wants to talk about it, most seem to just accept. My sister had saved up a years worth of questions despite our long phone conversations. It seems I parried questions about my strange lifestyle and presentation, clothes , painted nails, long hair, hair removal and clothes etc with such casual and simple explanations that neither sister really suspected anything about my true nature. Once I finally found someone to live with they stopped questioning all together, probably with a sigh of relief. As we worked through her question you could see her reflecting on these past misinterpretations and the life I went through. Sad that we can miss a whole lifetime of living honestly with those family so close to us .

One of our stopovers was with a couple whose wife is a family doctor in a general practice where she had come across several patients like me but only in fairly recent times and she does not have too many years to retirement. Most had their lives quickly transformed once they asked for help but I was a little taken aback when she said that one patient in the practice had fully transitioned to female but after several years came back for help reversing the process. I have become so accustomed to the stories of lives saved by transition to hear of one who could get it so wrong "and" be somewhere in the health system as a psychiatrist now was disturbing. I know just how fundamental my identity is to my being. This is not like fancying a sports car and regretting the decision because it does not fit your lifestyle!

If I had been able to test drive the life I have now no matter how briefly, all those decades ago when I first discovered that in some places there really was help, I would have done everything possible to gain this life then.

Wisdom and regret of old age!

Followers

2011-05-28T16:26:00.000+01:00

Is it just me or has everyone lost their followers on their blog?

It has been a couple of days now!

Home.

2011-05-26T13:32:00.000+01:00

Home at last. I would have stayed on the road until the money was all gone, I had got to that point but Julie had reached the opposite conclusion and wanted home and NOW. This missed a few hoped for days with friends in the south of England but…

So much to do to get back into home life and the post trip dip to get over too.

Seven weeks away is quite a while and catching up on blogs has had it’s usual quota of misery while more than half of my blog list has now ground to a halt with blogs stopped, gone private with no way in or dormant for months. This corner of the net has not been the happy friendly place it used to be for a while now but it is feeling distinctly lonely here now!

I am still here and normal service resumes shortly.

A long rambling post after being away from net connections for what seems an age.

2011-05-20T00:19:00.000+01:00

Something like normal service has been resumed. The sadness of he past few weeks is not forgotten but we are now too busy with being on the road to often think about it.

We left after lunch on Tuesday, lunch was in a smart restaurant, research for the family business! It only took three hours so we were on the road by four pm! Farewells were done as if nothing was amiss, probably for them nothing is.

By early evening we were settled into a chambre d'hôte in an old farmhouse deep in the country on a farm growing asparagus and serving their own kiwi fruit juice at breakfast.

In the morning we set off to a small town to collect a package of bed sheets ordered too late to arrive with us in the south but promised to be at a shoe repair shop in a supermarket complex in the middle of nowhere. I had nothing to do with these arrangements but had noted where to find the place the previous evening. The building seemed to be being totally rebuilt whilst business continued as normal, our shoe repair, key cutter parcel holder etc etc guy was one of the first of the new small enterprises to start in the new complex. He saw us standing at his counter while he chatted to someone a short distance away and came over to serve us beaming a smile and asking in that charming french way, good morning, how can I help you ladies? As I said normal service has resumed.

A picnic lunch acquired, we set off to explore the Ardeche gorge, think very small grand canyon. The road wandered over the countryside in the shape of a piece of dropped cooked spaghetti. Marvelous views along the way and not enough traffic to hinder much or block parking at the laybys to hang over the edge. By he time we had exited the gorge and joined the road along the Rhone we had traveled a fair way south, switching on the satnav it said you have 500 Km to go north and it will take you most of the day to get there!

It was not far wrong but we reached our next stop in Alsace just before eight o be greeted by a cat horse and goose at the front door of a wooden gabled house at the end of the village.

******************

That was an eternity ago now. We have stayed two nights in Alsace spending one day in the Shlumpf museum in Mulhouse which has a marvelous collection of the earliest attempts at building a motor car then gets obsessed with nearly a hundred Bugattis including two of the Royals which have to be seen to be believed. A fascinating day.

From there we quickly passed into Germany with it’s free motorway system but a better equivalent to hell than such a place on a Friday is hard to imagine so we got off quickly and headed into the Black Forrest where we could smell the cut timber in the air and hear the birds sing. Our lazy route soon meant that we had to do the last part of the route on a second parallel motorway at Friday rush which is practically stationary! Better than a mix of trucks in one lane and black overpowered 150 mile per hour screamers we had earlier. Clearly these drivers have noting to do with paying the driving costs and I would advise investment in brake replacement parts as a good bet. Castration of male drivers as a requirement to receiving a driving licence would be an excellent idea for the overall safety of the general population!

Eventually we were with Lucy in Wurtzburg in her apartment on the edge of town with views into the street in several directions and a small roof terrace to catch the afternoon sun. Actually there was too much sun for the time of year and the air conditioning in the car had given up! It was quite hot and there was little air movement so deep into the continent, thankfully the apartment was still remaining cool.

A lazy river trip reached by tram took us down river to the bishops summer palace gardens and the next day we explored the quiet Sunday town roads by car and had asparagus for lunch in the shady part of the town center where a children’s festival was in full fling. Germans take asparagus very seriously when in season!

On Monday we departed taking care to avoid all major roads and had a delightful drive through a clipped and tidy rural landscape to the west, not a ruin ripe for restoration in sight. A red squirrel is watching me type from about ten feet away while I type this in the garden of Heinka & Woolfgang who have been determined to lavish us with hospitality from the moment we arrived. The hell of the autobahn has been replaced with a warm glow of charm but I feel a chill having looked at the map of where we are headed with almost no space between the roads!

Naturally they have no wifi and much time was wasted trying to purchase a ferry ticket with the usual impossibility of confirming the cards were not being used for fraud, we phoned before we left telling them exactly which countries we were visiting and when! In German and on a PC it was close to a nightmare the when it was done I found they had a cable which fitted the Mac! Mixed feelings as after a while away from the net both joy and sorrow always seem to be waiting there.

Country food and a world champion cake shop distracted us from the usual round of museums and galleries. One day trip was made to Heidleberg with it’s romantically ruined castle hanging over the city fortunately with a funicular to drag us up there along with hoards of river cruise passengers who whizzed through but missed so much, especially the gardens which had been built but not fully laid out to the elaborate plans when the French arrived in the 1600’s and set off the powder store! After centuries of new additions the Germans lost heart, abandoned the site to a romantic ruin and decided to build elsewhere.

*******************

No net at next stop! Blogger down for last evening and morning before departure so no blog update possible.

********************

No Rhine-maidens seen on our gentle drive along the river from Bingen past Koblenz. The river, blocked just a short while ago due to a sunken barge lost in the raging floods is now working at very low water levels but still huge barges pass in both directions every few minutes with tour ships and cruises dodging between. Steep terraces of vines cling to the sunny hillsidesand ancient castlesperch on the high cliffs each side of the gorge. After a roadside lunch we bought a kilo of fresh asparagus and set the satnav to get us to our next temporary home. When we saw that we were an estimated hour from our destination we called ahead, no sooner were we off the phone than the first Friday holdup occurred! Two hours later we arrived though Julia could not recognise the house even though she had visited there soon after Gabriella had first moved in in the 90’s. Our definition of “too much stuff” has changed! Our task of rationalisation now seems like a small task compared to poor G who has even more things to places to put things than we do plus she has three parrots, two cats and a dog! The parrots have decided not to show off their repertoire and remain speechless.

The nearby city of Essen had been European city of culture last year which coincided with the rebuilding of the local art gallery so that had to be one of the things to do. A huge crisp modern gallery made us glad that Julia now had a set of wheels to save energy though once in a gallery with we hope the requisite reduction she leaps to her feet and we can’t keep up and took turns to take advantage of the wheels ourselves. I have always thought that every gallery visitor should be supplied with an electric wheelchair and I am now convinced! What joy to be able so sit in comfort and study a work closely. Too closely often for the legion of attendants as we regularly triggered the silent alarms!

****************

The continent is now far behind us, we passed through the well ordered Netherlands with it’s tall elegant girls and the highest concentration of bicycle users I have ever seen though very few of them could ever be called cyclists! I thought I knew much of what there was to know about bicycle design but the vast interpretations on the theme by the Dutch had my head spinning. A few hours wandering the streets and canal sides of Delft had us feeling we could come back to this country even though all signs appeared to be sets of scrabble letters and I was more lost than in Germany and for a few minutes truly lost when searching for where we had parked the car, thank goodness it was one of the few red cars in the country!

After a poor fish meal near the shore we took the overnight ferry to the south of England, briefly visited my youngest sister to abandon our luggage the surprised one of Julie’s oldest friends who had not been seen for forty years and we had been warned would make an excuse if we gave her warning! She admitted that our warning had been right but was glad we had just turned up. A few hours catching up were followed by a magical mystery tour of Cambridge as she as a pedestrian and bus user tried t direct us to all the places she wanted to go.

Now with yet another set of old friends chatting till midnight when they gave me the web code, one of our few sets of friends who are not ludites!

Feel this has rambled on but … Normal service can’t be far off now.

Perhaps the end of an era.

2011-05-02T22:08:00.000+01:00

Strange day in paradise. Sorry no pictures.

With the weather so changeable trips to the beach have been few and short, Julie no longer enjoys the beach being unsteady on her feet and for many years has hated the struggle to get out of the sea if there is any kind of wave action. Today there was wave action! The day was sunny and warm with a light wind, hardly enough to excite the meeting of the Mondial de Vent just round the headland, an event in some world series of windsurfing and such like. Blocked that village for over a week. I wandered off by myself for a stroll along my favourite beach with perhaps a short dip in the water. What I encountered was waves breaking a hundred yards offshore a couple of metres high, I come from a mixed up units age! Not since the evening when I nearly drowned had I seen waves like these! Shoulder high waves crashed, just 20 feet away from where I stood, into a hollow and the wash was surging high onto the beach.

I wonder how many in the western world get more than a few steps away from their civilised comforts, sensual pleasures in a darkened room. To be a mile from your car and clothes, just a light rub of suncream your only link with modern life, wind and surf up to the neck invigorating the skin at one with the wild elements more than makes up for the sensations I do not seem made to enjoy. Sadly our time here is drawing to an end, not quite as pleasant weather as we might have hoped for and not as many trips out as we could have done in the past.

It takes a long time for me to get my ears accustomed to the French sounds and start to understand what is really going on. What this has done is confirm my suspicions that this is the one place where I am least accepted. Not by visitors but by some family! Not anti what is happening to me, not wishing that we were not here but constantly miss gendering and in French it is quite blatant. I had been asked not to be too pushy with my brother in law and he sees no difference in his mind and happily uses masculine terms in public which cut to the quick. My heart is heavy, not a term really understood till now and my desire to return to this place, which for many years I have thought of as a second home, has diminished. They have had longer to get used to the new me than anyone and I have failed miserably to win them round. There are moments when you can see that they know that they should try but then when they are not concentrating it all breaks down…

***********************************************************

At that point I had run out of energy and so had the laptop battery and all shut down and went black, at bit since my mood has been in the days since I wrote that.

Tomorrow we leave here and head north towards friends in Germany. Normally I would be a touch tearful and sad leaving this place and friends behind. I shall be sad and tearful tomorrow too but this time because I now know that I do not know when I shall be able to return if ever. They have been very generous towards us and in many ways as friendly as can be but the truth is that I have failed to be really accepted for who I am now by the two people who most need to be onside here. All their friends and new people we meet have had no trouble or even question my past then the spell is broken by yet another stupid offhand remark. I have been down for a couple of weeks now and have done very little because of it surfing the emotions on the edge of tears.

Julie now knows that I cannot return without positive proof that they have come round, I cannot return after another year and allow myself to be outed like this all the time. I have no idea where I shall have evolved to in a years time but I fear they will be in exactly the same place.

A few hours on the road and I am sure the sick tearfulness will abate and I may even be able to start enjoying the trip again. This part is all down to Julie’s planning, mine was to get us here!

I doubt that I shall get much sympathy, this is after all the only setback I have really had to face but it feels as bad as a bereavement.

New sex club just down the road.

2011-04-29T10:45:00.000+01:00

I was chatting online last night and my chatee suggested that I should visit a local sex club. Somehow I mentioned that such a place had opened a couple of miles away in an old police station and that it could somehow kick off a post, she suggested that I should sample their services first to add authenticity to the post, how we laughed, you had to be there, no not the club!

Funny thing sex. There are two dogs in this house driven demented by it, the boy dog thinks of almost nothing else, wants to suck and lick my toes as foreplay to trying to rape my leg! Saying no has driven him wild, now his old mother, about 90 in human years is giving off the chemical signals and you would think he had found and consumed a whole stash of interesting drugs! Given half a chance, when the moment is right he will arrive like an exocet missile for their incestuous coupling in as public a place as they can find.

Several recent blogs have mentioned the desperate interest in the contents of our underwear especially as a means of classifying us in their minds, always it is the sex in transsexual that seems to get them. Often there is no sex in transsexual! As curious as people seem to be 60 to 70% post GRS patients have reported not using the new equipment and those who want to often report difficulty finding any partner to play with.

Strange how the rest of the population is not really willing to define themselves publicly with the exact contents of their underwear and just exactly what they do or would want to do with it. I am sure they woulds make the lives of most transsexuals seem very dull. For those who are not so shy there is the new club and clearly some do want the public to know what they have and how they want to use it

On this planet of six billion plus we are far from alone in our difficulty to easily find a compatible partner with all the handicaps of societies constantly changing rules through time and space battling with the random brainwashing by family and friends. Sometimes it is a wonder that there are any happy relationships out there as we play these games of sexual poker never fully able to declare our true hands.

Today they say the world is tuned in to watch the post coital matching of a couple of British twenty somethings, perhaps it will be a better match than the one the bridegroom’s mother made when entitled to wear white and did not fully understand what she was signing on for. Why so much fuss when divorce has become so normal it is almost expected and should be incorporated into the ceremony, “Will thou take Will until lawyers do you part?”

I am happily married, not something my younger self could ever have imagined I could have written. By three I knew life had all gone wrong, the world did not see me in the role I knew should be mine and my role models were the happy same sex female couples which I encountered. By the time biology lessons had confirmed my fears and it was also confirmed that male / female couples were the only acceptable ones I really had given up on being part of this world and settled down to a solitary life. I had not even bothered to analyze my personal feelings and drives, experience had already told me that both sexes rejected my company and even if I could find a lesbian, why on earth would she choose me over the real deal!? Surely I told myself I was at he end of a very long line of millions probably so why even join the queue?

It is only recently that I have realised that I fit a definition of asexual. Not being too bothered or interested I had never really enquired! I had a drive all be it one which could hardly be measured by even the most sensitive instruments on the planet but it was actually there, well sometimes. I assumed asexual meant absolute zero activity but seems not. Even those in the category will engage with those they form bonds with, they don’t have to want the sex but we all perhaps want closeness and to make a partner happy. Not having any need for a male climax, preferred not to have the smelly sticky stuff everywhere to be honest, I could do the tantric thing and keep it available for a partner's pleasure indefinitely, until demanded to stop providing orgasms! Interestingly this service is not popular and the very small number who have tried it soon got bored. I loved being part of someone else’s desires, it was the trigger to what pleasure I derived along with the female body to play with. I am delving far back into the last century to remember these things!

I now love the utter calm of zero sex drive aided by the lack of testosterone and the HRT which you might have thought would increase it. Sex in films elicits no response beyond the analysis of the woman’s curves and wondering what on earth such a woman could possibly see in the horrible male she has been told to like! Finding a sex club in the vicinity merely caused a curious chain of thoughts on the strangeness of human sexuality and what would drive a couple to emulate the dogs on heat to publicly copulate with strangers of unknown cleanliness. No doubt this gives away my desire for adoration, serial monogamy and horror of disease. Link this with the fact that my drive has never really given me the urge to cross a room in search of sex let alone drive miles and pay entrance fees suggests that I shall not be spending tonight researching the facilities down the road.

I have sometimes felt like someone who has no sense of taste bewildered by those who spend their lives seeking out fabulous foods when you only need the right mix of protein, carbohydrate, fats, vitamins and a few trace elements to survive. I wonder what it must be like to be driven by desires and utterly open to experiencing being taken into the world of someone else’s lustful urges but it is not to be…

Good luck to those who do get their dreams fulfilled.

Lazy Easter...

2011-04-24T13:30:00.001+01:00

The plan to laze in this little paradise soaking a few rays of sunshine as the bones warm through this Easter has slightly backfired. Instead of this magic corner of France being driest and warmest it has for the first time ever all reversed. The meteo channel which I watch for the fashion parade of the women presenters and sometimes miss the weather, warned of this for days so I worked on a few barrow loads of wood for the woodpile. Not a pristine pile of logs like the picture of Anna’s store a few days ago, the wood here is grubbed up vine stumps since folk here are changing from the old individual low vine bushes to taller wire trained vines which can be harvested with a super expensive machine, pickers are becoming a rare sight in the vineyards now. I wish they had pruned the stumps before creating a huge piled tangle across the road from the house but at least I thought the snipped up remnants of the last year would make good kindling. I survived admonishment for cutting up a woven basket weave chair to make a container for the bits, my sister inlaw loves watching things fall to bits in the garden! All tucked away well under cover from any possible rain ready to keep us cosy and even cook over I thought. The massed percussion which woke me was driving rain which soaked everything!

Often we live quietly over here while the restaurant works away, we don’t mind eating scraps sent over like the dogs do, like the foie gras yesterday lunch. Today was going to be quiet so we made up numbers for them and tried a new dish of egg and asparagus which was out of this world, someone has to test these things! We nearly got out of the restaurant before being invited to sit and chat to Eve and David who have just bought an abandoned wine store just a hundred metres away. They had come down a couple of years ago to the wedding of their friend who lives in the castle at the top of the village and fell in love with the area. She was tall and dressed in a fatigue green parachutist jump suit and looked so chic even though she had just taken a break from cleaning out junk abandoned half a century ago. Once we had helped them with their bottle of wine we went to survey the project, hope they have pots of money!

There are a few holes starting to show in the roof which is probably why the owners decided to eventually sell, despite the horrendous downpour we have just had the floor was bone dry and the copper sulphate stored in hessian sacks showed no sign of ever seeing damp. She should have no trouble keeping her architect in order since David her partner (legal civil partnership!) is an architect in Paris while she is a sculptor. Ancient front door is in need of a rebuild at the bottom so she took me to show me one which had been repaired with great sympathy nearby, I said that it was a shame that the guy who had done that one was not coming to visit until next week since the rain had defined exactly where the limit of the problem was, she knows we are on the same wavelength, could be a friendship here! After we had explored the dark cavernous space and were about to leave the repair guy arrived! He knew that the rain would have defined the limit to the problem so drove out of his way with car full of family to check out the job, clearly some worthy folk still.

Now we find that Lisa (who would have thought there could be so many?) and friends of her’s we visited are up from Barcelona to eat or local oysters and are booked for tonight and it is our job to amuse them and it means we get a chance to taste the goat dish they have on the go.

This is not us eating Sophie’s garden clearing goats as promised, The two virgin girl goats turned out to be a pregnant hussy and a castrated boy. The two baby goats turned out to be ultra cute but untamable menaces eating everyone else’s gardens so have been given away while the originals instead of being in the freezer have become registered pets! They are now to fussy about what they eat to be able to clear Sophie’s garden which is what she got them for in the first place!

Well that went really well, especially the brochette of interesting internal bits of goatette. Our visitors had eaten three dozen oysters each the previous day down at the lagoon, I think I had just short of a dozen last week, clearly not the appetite which I once had and certainly could not keep up with their drinking. They should get on with the high speed link to Barcelona then we could visit them more easily. Last time we went directly to a party from our airport arrival and even though we were far from central the car parking cost us more than the accommodation for four of us.

Through the colds and subsequent hacking cough phase we have taken up residence at opposite ends of this large bed / sitting room which Yanna built with en-suite bathroom for her mother who used to alternate between us every three months. Julie has lived in great luxury at the bedroom end while I have camped out in a single bed living like a refugee at the far end. Last night we were reunited and together slept like puppies till lunchtime! So much for Easter! They do not seem to bribe children with chocolate eggs here but they do ring the church bells for a special service just across the road, we both remember hearing the bells, making comments about them but immediately being soothed back into a coma. For someone who these days sleeps so little I find it strange just how much of the time here has been slept away.

The word for dust in French takes up half a line

this is a nest for dust!

Much of the rest of the time has been spent repairing things and gardening with an occasional trip out. My packed clothing was mostly for a good 4 to 5 degrees warmer so I have not been my glamorous self and after a week I found all our collection of clothes which we leave here, for me tatty working clothes which has reinforced something of a “not much change really” attitude slipping in. Yanna has grumbled that with less muscle strength I am not quite as useful as before, him and he still slips into conversations occasionally though more to a slight annoyance than outrage now. Rushing to the shop just before closing time dressed in rags was bound to bring out an incorrect response but they are so rare these days I wondered who they were talking to! Duh!

A grand day out.

2011-04-19T23:58:00.001+01:00

The family do some outside catering along with other restaurant and B & B business. Our niece was going to a tourism conference in on of the nearby towns so persuaded them that she should do the lunch! After a lazy morning on our part four of us loaded the buffet into the back of the Kangoo and hit the motorway directly to the venue site for midday in Narbonne. Once delivered we were free to play and drove just a short distance to my new favourite large shop. Captain Picard has brought together large quantities of fresh produce from all over the galaxy to Grand Frais, no wonder people are flocking into the area!

Picnic items added to what we found round the house and we were back on the toll road towards Carcasonne, a perfectly preserved mediaeval walled town before taking to the country roads towards Limoux where the “champagne method” of making sparkling wine was first discovered. It used to be one of our favourites but after hearing of some of the vile characters involved in the trade may never drink any again. Out of town we drove into the hills which just a handful of years ago was unspoilt but clearly the local planning department are corrupt and odd buildings have sprung up is stupid places everywhere leaving only the last mile of car width road unspoilt. At the end was a potter we knew, Anna Scott, with whom we had planned our picnic lunch.

We had everything but wine, then again last time we visited we found her in the vineyards supervising her pickers, little did we know that she had grubbed up all her vines because of the nasty corrupt cheating Limoux producers who used to take her grapes. Added to which the local mayor had ensured that she was the last to be connected to the mains water when the natural sources dried up. Paradise is full of serpents!

Anna is even older than us with a very colourful life behind her able to drop a few names into the conversation impressive to our generation. Now short on ready cash and never really been interested in it she perhaps wishes that the Picasso drawing had not spent it’s life in the full sun in the kitchen, the paper now browned and the colours faded. Everything in this tummble down old farm house was full of interest including all the ceramics she had made based on her study of ancient coins from the archeological digs. The house stands on a stone age site and has Roman wheel ruts worn into the stone running along the rear wall.

Naturally I quickly took a few photos.

2011-04-17T21:18:00.000+01:00

If you were hoping for a load of pictures of the trip from Atlantic to Mediterranean showing the snow capped Pyrenees along the way, tough! After an evening watching the sunset from the restaurant while eating a fish dinner in restaurant hanging over the beach I started to feel a cold setting in at breakfast the next morning. First stop was the pharmacy to hold back the symptoms and that seemed to be working fine as we explored the Biarritz coastline so popular in the more elegant decades of the early 20th. century and still popular with surfers. Heading inland on country roads we aimed for somewhere we found by accident nearly thirty years before, it is said to be one of the prettiest villages in France and the Hotel was a beeswaxed time-capsule of old France. What we found was “cleaned up” village wanting to welcome tourists but now without character and as dead as a graveyard with about a dozen carloads of tourists from all over Europe wondering what to do next! Just before arriving we visited the most beautiful church a few miles away built with stones from a sacked Roman town. It has become a Unicef world heritage site which means that halfwits have been allowed to drape cables all over the interior to power unnecessary lighting which makes it impossible to see let alone enjoy the building, as for the junk piled into the corners of the building, crass information panels spoiling the views and as for the tacky cheap grey gravel treatment for pathways round the building…

The fairly new and quiet motorway lay a few miles north so we hit it and cruised three hours east where I could die in peace! Now four days later Julie has decided to try the very same cold for herself despite all attempts to stay apart and avoid warm skin contact! She regrets trying it and is spending Sunday evening in a miserable heap in front of a blazing fire.

Sunset with Spain across the bay

Biarritz

Dying in the garden, not glamorous!

Town postie, Port la Nouvelle

Photography with several bags of

market vegetables is nigh on impossible.

Delicate French pruning.

A flower for Jenny

requested a surprise desert

A glass of Maury with our olives

Coffee in the sunshine

On the road, savings vanishing fast.

2011-04-12T18:29:00.000+01:00

On the road with only occasional net contact, no Black i, Berry phone or such like to play with. Met with Lisa and Jenny just outside Oxford at my sisters home. Took ferry to visit Guggenheim gallery in Bilbao and am now on border looking out onto the Pyrenees with Atlantic beach half a mile away. Never been to this corner of France so will look about before heading east to the Mediterranean border in a few days time. Don't expect to hear much from me for the next month! They say a snap is worth a thousand words, perhaps a few less for some of these!

Jenny's home made cider

Poor Rob was outnumbered six to one.

bit fuzzy since three bottles had evaporated.

Near Jenny's house!

Had to compare local cider, Jenny won.

Local building style, Oxfordshire

!!!

Sunday pub lunch

End of boat trip, Bilbao.

Tagged prisoner in the cafe.

Hall full of steel, photos forbidden

R & R from the Trans battlefield

2011-04-02T22:21:00.000+01:00

There are Trans wars raging throughout the net if you surf about but all that will do is raise your blood pressure. Better wander amongst those blogs with a little T running through them but otherwise full of snippets of real life. I used to write about my search for past lost or hidden memories seeking out my early roots. Some things bring back memories more than others, scent and taste can evoke decades past in a moment and reading one of my favourite blogs, dru-withoutamap but with a glass., one of the few really pleasant recollections of childhood came back to me. My comment says it, the taste of "apple juice " brings back memories of being left on summer evenings in the gardens of country pubs, Think Inspector Morse for detective fans, and the occasional treat of an "apple drink" instead of our usual orange squash. No doubt illegal but my grandfather started on cider when he was two years old! These days I prefer French farm ciders, are the one's made from pears still ciders? After reading Dru's post I needed a treat after a hard day in the garden and was lucky enough to find the last bottle purchased with the last €s from the sale of pictures from last year's exhibition in France while on the way to the ferry in Le Havre.

This is supposed to be me being happy having drunk half the bottle with my stir fry.

Gardening has been done with a chain saw but no matter how much I remove it still seems overgrown. One benefit has been an improved atmosphere in the car which had a three metre juniper chopped up and left in it for three days before I could be bothered to go to the recycling centre, a million times stronger than those dangly air fresheners from the petrol station, nice.

Julie has been busy writing various articles and today was the launch in the local museum of a small book about local worthies and she was asked to give a short talk about her chapter since the launch was being held next to the painting of George Paterson which she was responsible for buying for the museum shortly before her retirement. They got her to reduce the size of her contribution but she got some revenge by talking to a captivated audience for about half an hour, she would be there still if there had not been two others waiting to give their contribution. I bought a laptop because writing a book about the sitter was going to be one of the projects to fill in her retirement. She hates laptops, even the baby mac! Aside from that there is just no time available to do research when being retired fills every moment with countless other random fun things.

Having dropped Julie at the door of the museum I went in search of somewhere to park the car which did not cost a fortune, motorists are driven away from the centre of the city and forced to negotiate an obstacle course of building sites and roadworks but it gave me a chance to do one of my favourite pastimes, translating signs. Why are so few done well, look good and tell you something useful and unambiguous. todays sign shows you that spring has sprung but I like that it seems to say that you can't park in the short term parking. Who cares, I found free parking less than a hundred yards away. look at that! Born into an Imperial measuring system and still only half transitioned into Metric!

Will I ever be trusted with diamond earrings?

2011-03-28T00:02:00.000+01:00

Clocks have sprung forward, well some have them have! I have only briefly owned a watch which I used as a stopwatch for timing paid parking but after a couple of years it vanished towards the end of the last century. Clocks now seem to be everywhere and there are some unchanged since the last change and one in the phone is still on European summertime! You can see I hardly ever use my mobile except for emergencies or to get my friends mother to open the door if I visit and she does not hear the door bell. For someone like me who is not a natural morning person, extra light in the evenings is a real bonus.

At last a little warmth in the air and a chance to get some gardening done. The weedy strength weed killer could be sold as plant food! Nobody would notice the difference! About ⅔ of the early vegetable seeds and potatoes are in and my garden helper is going to get some later things going in pots while we are away. Julie prefers to travel in the cooler months so missing the spring display is the price we are paying. It has been warm enough to sit out for our coffee, once even too hot after ten minutes since we are not yet used to it. I tried the same when visiting friends only to end up sitting on the ground as the over wintered chair gave way shredding my gardening pants exposing milky white thighs and black knickers! Got a good laugh out of it which my old self might not have done. They were my favourite hand me downs from Julie and had forgiving waist band, rags now.

I used to photograph artworks but nearly everyone now has a go at it themselves. It is my own fault, I used to explain how to go about it while I was working since all my clients were friends, soon became friends if we had not been before. A rare call to spend a day in a painters studio, 12 hour day leaving us both exhausted, clearly not as young as we used to be. The hundred mile round trip through the spring countryside was a bonus as was her eclectic musical tastes which parallel my own so we covered Santana to Simone and Gregorian to Glass, a few tracks seem to have got stuck in my laptop!

The ten year census forms arrived and had to be filled in today. I have always felt bad about these since I felt like a non person. The questions have been set by idiots many completely useless like the number of rooms without any idea of the size! Open plan living has become more popular reducing the numbers! We filled it in as best we could being a same sex marriage due to political stupidity in legislation and I claimed 2 hours per week work which is about right for the last two years! Nearly every question had an answer somewhere between the available boxes. Interestingly they say nobody reads individual forms yet the prosecute those who don’t fill them in properly, that does not compute!

Look forward to see if there has been an increase in the Jedi Knight following this time, it was a very popular religion choice last time.

Lunch was spent comparing losses of friends and listing those now on the way out! Friday we said goodbye to our most colourful friend and Julie gave one of the addresses at the memorial service.

I got her to rewrite it after the first read through, very dry and solemn compared to her usual style. Jokes were inserted at my request and we had the place laughing out loud. If Henny had been organising it herself she would have had a gospel choir singing for us and no doubt got them to do it for free! I gave my ticket to the civic reception to a friend then picked them up later to go to the house to drop her ashes under a tree in the garden decorated by a small proportion of her hat collection, I am sure she would have approved of the belly dancing at the party afterwards by another of her close friends.

To mark the event I wore my favourite dangly earrings with gardening implement charms. One of the could even be down that hole with her right now. Clearly it is going to be a long time before I am trusted with diamond earrings.

Ladies who lunch...

2011-03-20T01:41:00.000Z

Humans are strange creatures, our lives can turn just on the meeting by one special person at the right time, or not! For no logical reason we can deny ourselves is simply attainable pleasure which others would take for granted daily that which we could deny ourselves stubbornly for our whole lives. Today I finally attained something only briefly tasted many decades ago, only humans could be this stupid!

I was in my early teens and new that a local girl could easily give me the pleasure which I so longed for, I knew she had granted several others already. We didn’t know each other too well and she will slightly haughty so it took some courage and a little time before I found the way to ask her and was more than a little surprised when she said yes. To say that I was more than a little disappointed when she called a halt after only a minute or so is an understatement, perhaps she saw the pleasure I was having. I knew it was going to be good but had no idea it would be that good! We parted and I don’t think we ever spoke again. For some reason I never met anybody who could quite facilitate the same experience and though I briefly tried to go out of my way to seek it I soon gave up and assumed I would never have a chance to prove that those initial feelings were as good as I remember. That is until today.

In this modern world you can meet people online and chat away and get to know each other more easily than a random face-to-face encounter in real life. Sometimes this virtual foreplay can lead to actual 4D encounters in real life and today I had one. Being older and more sophisticated we set up a date and met up and had a marvelous lunch in a highly recommended Thai restaurant. Being perverse we both chose something Japanese! Exquisite Bento boxes pleasing both the eye and the taste buds then the indulgence of a little desert. At this point we left to head to my place for coffee after a quick walk through the old town town.

This is all dull everyday stuff, people do it all day everyday but to us it was special.

Muscles and coordination are not quite the same as they were in my youth that the physical joy when it came I don’t have words to describe. How could I have denied myself this pleasure for my whole life? Thank you Louise.

It may be an antique of a bike and like me, past it’s prime, but it rides like that short ride I remembered from all those years ago, what joy and joy to come with my wonderful present. Once again thanks Louise.

Pancakes are not just for Tuesdays!

2011-03-11T23:13:00.001Z

Pancakes should not just be a once a year treat for Shrove Tuesday.

When I first came to Scotland I was disappointed to discover that they thought the pancake was about 2 ½ inches diameter and rose to about a quarter of an inch in thickness during cooking. Quite acceptable, but to me not as much of a treat as the thin pan sized pancakes which I used to make with my mother when I was a child.

Basic proportions, makes enough for about three people as desert, pictures are double quantities and we started with savoury fillings then sweet.

Four ounces plain flour sifted

Two eggs

One fluid ounce of light cooking oil plus milk to make Half a pint

Pinch of salt if you want

Originally the recipe was half a pint of full fat milk but over the years I have come to prefer the cooking oil and skimmed milk mix.

Sift the flour into a mixing bowl and add the two eggs and a very small splash of liquid mix then whisk until smooth.

Continue adding liquid whilst whisking until you have a creamy even liquid batter mix.

Some people say to let it stand for a while before using, it will slowly become slightly more elastic in the finished pancake especially if you have saved some of the mix in the fridge overnight. If you’re in a hurry don’t worry you can use this mix straightaway.

Do you really need a well seasoned frying pan to make consistent pancakes. If you’re really keen you will keep one especially for this job, if you’re a little bit crazy like me you will keep two high up out of anybody else’s reach!

Heat the pan, the trick is to find the correct heat for your pan, it is something of a medium heat and once you have it set and remembered for the next time you will be able to make pancakes all night without ever touching the control again.

Some people use butter in a pan, I prefer a light cooking oil. Add a few drops to the pan and once heated wipe around with a small wad of kitchen paper, I’d wipe around the pan with this before each pancake.

Finding just the right amount of batter for each pancake takes a little trial and error, if you can find a small ladle which is just the right size you will never have to think again. You want just enough batter in pan to be able to cover the bottom with a rotary tilting action. Slightly loosen the edges of the pancake with a spatula or blunt rounded kitchen knife, let it cook until it stops steaming then if necessary fully loosen and turn it over.

Now you have encountered your first major decision, are you going to be a pancake tosser or flipper, the more flamboyant will probably choose tossing whilst the more demure like myself will be happy to flip it with a spatula. Even if I wished to toss my pancakes my pans are cast-iron and my muscles have wasted away!

You can do serve them straight to the table, I find I can cook them about as fast as a table full of dinner guests can consume them, alternatively you can pile them up in a warm oven with sheets of waxed or silicon paper between.

Now all you have to do is decide what to top them with.

The classic Lemon juice with a sprinkle of sugar or maple syrup is always popular. One of our favourites is thick Greek yoghurt with fish eggs though we have been unable to find them in the shops this year. This week we had them with a prawn cocktail mix and another batch with mushrooms in a white sauce with a dash of the soy. Only your imagination will limit the possibilities.

If a small kid could make these, anybody can. Enjoy.

Spring and winter at the same time

2011-03-11T00:33:00.001Z

This is usually out in December

In the end we only ran a hotel service for five days before our absent-minded professor got himself organised with accommodation closer to the University where he will be working for the next two months. They say fish and guests go off after three days with Richard this is not quite true, He is a font of interesting information and once he had overcome the jetlag and was excellent at washing dishes. It gave us an excuse to invite people around to eat and my readers know how infrequently we do that! If only he would learn to put down the toilet seat and lid!

Just tidying up the garden to get it into the state where it is safe to leave when we go away for Easter has been exhausting. If ever there was anything called male privilege it has to be strength and muscle tone! I love the slimmed down arms and hands but the strength is just not there for cutting through branches and raking and digging. All my carefully nurtured nails have snapped off one by one and a soft skin scratched and full of splinters from the blackberry vines. We have been lucky with a mild dry spell of weather and feel that I am on track to get some things sown and planted in the next few weeks, choosing what to grow that can be ignored while we are away is a bit of a challenge so we may end up with a lot of beans and potatoes this year. Tomorrow the weather forecast is suggested we may get another fall of snow, not at all surprised since they have been snow and hail showers on and off all this week. My chainsaw friend has been away in London all week to oversee an exhibition of his work from the last 40 years so I have been unable to get rid of all the accumulated wood and clearly now it would be best to take out a few more trees before too much more growth starts up.

Several people have referred to annual fat day instead of pancake Tuesday though who needs to wait for this annual event to make a few pancakes? At first I thought Richard was going to leave on Tuesday morning and I made pancakes on the Monday but that didn't stop me making an even bigger batch when he was still here on the Tuesday! Guests are often surprised at how quickly they arrive at the table once I start cooking but I do keep two cast iron pans just for making pancakes. I think I'll do a separate post on how to make a pancake, I might even put some tags on the post to see if I can draw in some extra readers just for the hell of it.

We were in a hurry to get out the other day and at the last moment I realised I had forgotten to put in some earrings and without thinking picked them up and slipped them on the holes, it is not long ago that I swore it was an impossible job without the aid of a magnifying mirror and a good light. All these little things add together to complete the picture of my new life. Nobody can say that it's perfect and for many of you saw it would-be surprised by how dull it appears but for me it is beyond anything I could have imagined just a couple of years ago.

Those few years ago there were times when I wondered how sensible it was to go through all this turmoil for the few years which I have left. There were days great sadness this week when I heard that Gracie Hunter had suddenly died. She was a little bit older than me and enjoying every moment of her new life and had just moved into her new seaside apartment on the south coast. Keep up much of their energy into helping and supporting others and I like many had an open standing invitation should I be passing away and had expected to sometime this year. She will be greatly missed by many. She was lucky to be staying and having fun with her friend Taz when her quick end came all of which I am sure sure would be most grateful. Sympathy for poor Taz.

Roadside crocus Edinburgh

Busy, busy, busy.

2011-03-06T01:08:00.000Z

Gallery Glasgow

It is some time since my last post and the world seems to be intent on falling into chaos. Our quiet life plods on.

The season is turning towards spring again with longer light and green shoots appearing causing the annual panic to tidy up last year's growth before all becomes chaos. Time to do some serious weeding, so serious I had to borrow a chainsaw! This speeds up gardening more than tenfold and if I hadn't completely blunted the chain I'm sure little of the garden would survive. Last year I noted the start to rot in the base of a large tree but could not bear to cut it down until the birds had the chance to eat all the berries then we had a period of such intense rain I could not get cut it down and had to hand back the chainsaw which had a brand-new chain, I was out of luck this time since my friend has just spent two weeks devastating his own garden? Luckily I have been forgiven for wearing out the machine since I used the wheelbarrow to transport a huge pile of wood to his store. The days of being able to wield such a machine about effortlessly are long gone and I have slept well for two nights now from sheer exhaustion. People often talk of male privilege and I have always denied having any since I never lived any kind of male life but perhaps I should count the musculature created by testosterone as the one male privilege I did enjoy without realising it.

After numerous cancellations because of winter snow and unavailability of the doctors at the gender clinic we finally made the trip west. Better organised this time we stayed over for the night with family taking our very last decent bottle of wine as a token offering, 1928 bottle of Maury, it is supermarket wine for us from now on sadly.

The clinic just seems to want to keep an eye on you once you're on their books. At this stage there is little they can do but check your blood to see that there are no adverse reactions to the HRT and in that respect all is fine. As for any timetable towards GRS they are completely hopeless and as in the dark as we are! Strange games are being played between the funding bodies and the three surgeons who do this work. Perhaps I should repeat that to show that I haven't made a mistake, three surgeons for a population of 60 million! They call it the "national" health service but there is no national about it, countless regions have been created and each one makes up its own rules at random about what it will and will not do. They make it sound like a game and call it "the postcode lottery"and few win.

I listened intently to be exasperated story given to me by the doctor. The closest surgeon is 350 miles south and they have never used him but tend to use somebody 500 miles south who has quite a lot of surgical slots available. Our health service buys up some of the slots at a high price and the remainder are available for private patients at a lower price. The number of available slots for Scotland has been reduced and the health service refuses to buy any more of the available places. Last year very few were able to go from Scotland and four patients had to be held back to be added to this year's quota. You don't have to be a genius to see that this is all getting out of control…

Well that was over a week ago and life has been busy and those frustrations have melted into the past, what will be will be. Gardening is taking up a lot of my time and my new delicate skin and nails are taking a toll. They have taken a little time off to visit the noise of the city and packed in a little culture and smart cafe life followed by a meal in an Italian restaurant with a glamorous friend. In the galleries and kept meeting people we knew who had never heard the news, as ever nobody even blinked!

National Galleries Edinburgh

Edinburgh Castle

We stayed overnight in somebody’s flat, even remembered to bring the keys this time! Before collecting a friend from the airport we were able to visit an exhibition of the work of August Sander and his portrait of the German people mainly before the Second World War, it was far too honest to be popular with Hitler and his books were destroyed.

What started as collecting a friend from the airport has once again turned into a hotel situation! Having a house guest is fun for a while especially if it is an absent-minded professor who keeps us entertained but we are hoping he is able to find a replacement for his failed accommodation arrangements.

One a.m. Early to bed for me, Sunday lunch party to organise when I get up…

First green shoots and unexpected news

2011-02-17T00:02:00.000Z

There is very little letup in the rain. We’ve tried to not let it keep us in all the time, we have made several trips out to visit friends taking great care with so much standing water in the fields and the roads. Every puddle is now a potential crash site as evidenced by the many signs going up to denote a recent police presence and road cones warning of some of the worst holes in the road. This year it is going to be impossible to drive around without being constantly held up with temporary traffic lights whilst they do a very bad temporary patch. Nobody seems to have realised the scale of this disaster!

Julie recently opened a Facebook account after a friend from the past sent her a request, this has led to several other contacts with old acquaintances. One has moved into a city 60 miles north of here for a year’s contract work so we agreed to meet up in the art gallery. Because it was so disgustingly wet the three of us were able to waste most of the day wandering about discussing the works on show and being us naturally how we would have displayed them! With a decent cafe and loads of seats around the building we had a great time catching up on so much, sometimes we were all together and usually one of us was chatting to Ronnie and we got on as though she had never been away. We caught the cafe for a last cup of coffee shortly before it was to close and only then did she tell me that there was an Apple store in town just a short walk away so I escaped briefly to go and buy some software. Like many Scottish towns they do do flat very well and I learned that going downhill in slip on pumps can be hard on the toes, never had this trouble in sandals. I managed back just as they were thrown out at closing time. Because we had eaten so well at lunchtime they expected evening meal together was rejected and we decided to find a way out of town while there was still some light while Ronnie decided to torture herself with four hours of Nixon in China. We might have been tempted to join her but you need to prepare for something like that like an athlete preparing for a competition!

How stupid to have Valentine’s Day on Monday when all the best restaurants are closed. Instead we chose to go out to a fish restaurant by the sea on a Tuesday when the fresh fish had been landed. Even on Valentine’s Day we usually find another couple to go out with to be the one table being noisily happy while everyone else stares silently into their partner’s eyes. This time there were five of us, including a professor of mediaeval French who is great fun. After the meal we and stopped off at their house for more chatting coffee. I who know little about computers gained great kudos by teaching this professor who works with his computer all the time to do so many things which completely puzzled him! The other member of the launch party was one of Julie’s cousins and she came home with us and stayed the night. In effect lunch took all day. Julie wondered what on earth she would do with her time when she retired…

Some sort of miracle has occurred for each of our sisters, they both have sons in their mid-20s who have never settled down and had nothing but temporary short-term jobs. One has been in Mexico taking diving courses and has finally acquired a teaching qualification! He can now earn a living doing something he enjoys and I doubt we’ll see much more of him in the next few years. Even more amazing the one who in his early teenage years appeared to be a clone of me has decided to take on a hairdressing apprenticeship and this really enjoying it! Only a year ago he wanted to join the navy and do something physical! He assures me he has none of my problems! I only hope that is true.

First signs of spring are showing now only about halfway through cleaning up the dead vegetation which has fallen under the weight of the snow, get caught by this every year. It is my own fault, one of the pleasures of winter is seeing the bare bones of the previous years growth catching winter sun.

Good things have been happening.

2011-02-11T00:20:00.000Z

Two evenings of sunsets

You probably all think I have fallen into one of the large potholes created by our two-month glacial period. Living in the freeze thaw zone like we do is hellishly destructive and we now have a crumbling infrastructure which is going to make driving pure misery in the summer as they go round badly patching the countless thousands of dangerous holes. You take your life in your own hands when driving now, you dare not glance at the countryside too often for fear of crashing into the hole found every hundred yards or so. When it is wet it is even scarier since you have no idea where a hole might be.

I have decided to blame my time away on all the online chats I have been having during the last couple of weeks. Like buses, you can wait for months and none turn up, then all of a sudden… Interesting being popular for a change.

Just when you think you have reached the height of your acceptance moments occur which show you that it is even better than you thought. A friend invited a whole crowd of people from different parts of her life to help celebrate a significant birthday. More than 40 of us turned up at an old smart hotel on the southern edge of the Highlands for two night weekend. This was a Christmas present to each other otherwise we would not have been able to afford it. I made a note on the first evening but in our corner Rapunzel tower room there was no sign of a wifi signal so …

Turret room

Here we are at the “Overlook” hotel deep in the highlands and expect to hear the sound of a tricycle ridden along the corridor any moment now. Our room is high up in a conical roof atop a corner tower. The last eight hours vanished in a whirl of conversation drinks and excellent food. Our pal Elspeth certainly created an interesting birthday party experience bringing together many of her circles of friends from far and wide, very far and wide!

Many utilised aeroplanes from places like German and Finland while we only needed to make a fairly short drive. Well we would have done if I had not dropped my snapshot camera on a lawn about a week ago and needed to head off in the opposite direction for half an hour first. The route was fairly obvious but we decided to see what the satnav would come up with. A Magical mystery tour ensued highlighting in dropping down into a deep twisting Glen Farg with the trees covered in a frosted icing, the rocky outcrops were icicle covered and hundreds of the trees had been snapped clean off by the recent heavy snows and chain saw crews were out in force clearing the roads and ensuring no more fell endangering traffic.

Despite a night sleeping out exposed on a lawn where it somehow managed to fall out of my shoulder bag the little silver Lumix burst into life at my first command, I had become resigned to it’s demise but it is tougher than it looks and has been used for a few record shots of those gathered.

late view from the room

I was hardly going to buy a swim costume for one dip in the pool and the spa treatment costs were way out of my league so we sipped wine, chatted and ate our way through the first day while getting in a Whisky distillery at Glen Turret and a drive west past Loch Earn on the second day before returning to continue the previous day’s activities. We were a noisy crowd! Never heard such a boisterous rendition of that birthday song.

old folks having fun

Apart from the early time a bit scruffy after I had parked the car and towered over some short porter in the lift I have never felt so much like I was totally accepted. To get the look though I spent an age resewing the dropped bottom of my slinky velvet pants, only noticed as they were last going into the luggage!

Frosted casks at Glen Turret Distillery

Few enough from our networld appear at our front door but Louise has appeared twice in the last two weeks and charmed us immediately and shamed us with her style. How this could have been the first social visits Louise had ever made I do not know, check out her story. Julie told her she was far more glamorous than me and that was on the visit before she went for a makeup tutorial though I was the one who got called “darling” by the electricity meter guy!

Know how you all hate long posts so save some catchup for later.

Ice grip loosening.

2011-01-30T16:02:00.000Z

The remains of the North Fife ice sheet and the terminal moraine deposits. There are still glacial remains on the north shore but they have now shrunk to car height!

Normal service shall be resumed shortly.

A joyous post delayed or lost.

2011-01-27T02:47:00.002Z

This past week for me has been quite joyful and how to express that joy has been occupying my mind for several days. Unfortunately I just can't get up the enthusiasm to be joyful when every time I log on to the net our corner of it shows so many signs of infighting.

I feel quite lucky that when I first started to explore the net our corner of it was bursting with information and slowly I encountered blog after blog written by others trying to share their stories and experiences to help those who followed.

As a group I fear we are doomed to perpetual alienation from society. A room full of cats have more chance of getting organised than we do. Forces which I cannot understand appear to be at work to keep us perpetually divided into discrete categories! We're almost forming an apartheid movement where a group of post-op transsexuals have taken the position looking down upon those who do not match their criteria. In present-day society any of us who come out publicly in any way are the merest tip of an iceberg, how many countless thousands still live in fear because of being unable to be accepted openly by society whether they be someone who wishes to express themselves by dressing in clothing normally considered to be that preserve contrary to that normally worn by those born in with their particular body type through to those who have known from an early age that nature has pulled a dirty trick on them, giving them an inappropriate body and role for their mindset.

I consider myself one of the latter but it has never stopped me supporting those who have different concerns from my own. The general public have little interest in distinguishing between all our little cliques and to them they are all just grouped together under the T umbrella. Little do they know from our perspective it is broken and full of holes and offers little protection for any of us.

I have lived what is considered three generations now and have seen precious little improvement in our public image, how the medical profession treat us all how we are accepted into society unless we become invisible because they are lucky enough to get treatment sufficient for us to seamlessly meld into a preferred gender. It is hard to believe that it is nearly 60 years and since Christine Jorgensen was front-page news throughout the entire United States and many places beyond.

It is my fervent hope that all this backstabbing and infighting dies away soon and does not drive away too many fellow sufferers coming here in search of hope like I did only to find further disappointment and disillusionment.

Holiday period over, normality resumes.

2011-01-12T14:32:00.000Z

The holiday season is over and a few pounds have been gained due to the extra temptations on offer. I should know by now and never to buy cheese at this time of year because so much just appears when friends visit. It is hard to resist buying stilton cheese around Christmas when both the offers and the ripeness are at their best. At least that portion which hasn't settled around my waist already made my last batch of soup, celery and onion, truly wonderful.

Santa seems to have forgotten us or perhaps like the Post Office, cards and presents have disappeared into limbo. I've just received a birthday card which I know was posted on 11th. December should I just keep it as an early card this year? This year we gave each other gas for the central heating as Christmas presents and we have to admit there have been the best present ever! That in combination with the new windows we have been cosy than ever and when the gas bill arrived yesterday we were well into credit instead of miles behind which we normally would be at this time of year. Caroline enjoyed Christmas much more than ever before, acceptance has been total by all our friends and my changes hardly ever mentioned these days, have become a non-issue!

There are still meter high mounds of ice randomly scattered around the roads about here from the first snowfalls a month and a half ago. The occasional thaws and rain showers are both freezing on the ground overnight and when like last night terrors of scattering of fresh snow the next day is truly treacherous. Motorists have overcome there fear and are now driving you crazy speeds with not thought about how they might stop or change direction in a hurry. Walking the streets feels decidedly dangerous when yet another idiot screams past over revving the engine, wheels spinning on the slush and ice. When will it ever end?

We have avoided most of this by not going far to visit friends or entertaining at home. The Scots have always been very sociable at New Year and for a week or so into the year. For us it has been aided by acquiring half of a deer which had been shot in the cull of the large numbers now found on local farms. Not only was it very reasonable price it has been incredibly tasty, the last casserole was quite the best one we have ever cooked! Finally everyone is settling back into their regular routines and nobody has dropped in for the last two days. Now everybody can start to feel SAD since it will be a while before many of them get a glimmer of sunshine on their skin. Interestingly since losing my testosterone I have been much more cheerful at this time of year long may it continue.

There are certain things which just happen at the same time every year like the first sign of daffodils or leaves falling in the autumn, for me without thinking I start reading books about travel, longing to break free of the winter and head off somewhere on the road. At the moment I'm reading of the cycle ride taken up the west coast of Scotland and it has spurred me on to book a ferry crossing to the continent to give me something concrete to dream up plans for in the early summer. Julie is at her best when the temperatures are not too high so hopefully this will be a good time for to enjoy the trip. The plan is to try and join together as many friends with a free bed as possible now that cash is not so easy to obtain and prices seem to be shooting up, if petrol was still priced per gallon there would probably be riots in the street!

Life here on the net seems a little calmer in the T universe as the squabbling has calmed down over Christmas you doubt it will resume soon. I have deleted and resubmitted profile pictures countless times that it is a complete mystery as to what image will appear if I wish to follow a blog or make a comment clearly I have been cursed in some way and have to carry the blue Square with a question mark to warn people of the curse! I took a long time to be persuaded to join in on Facebook and had finally come to terms with it as a chatty form of blog lite, not at all impressed with the belligerent imposition of their new page layout. Clearly they know what is best for us and we have to put up with it, so many people have spoken of their dissatisfaction, so many have posted that they wish they had never tried the new profile and didn't realise there was no back button! No doubt soon this will be old news then everyone will just accepted their fate, I hate it as much as I think I will perhaps you'll have to put up with more posting here.

A glance at the new calendar shows numerous events looming in the real world, some in not so easy places to reach if this crazy winter weather continues. Time to make sure my few items of decent clothing are in a decent state of cleanliness and ready to go.

upside down in cloud: getting heard

2011-01-03T21:56:00.000Z

Scotland hardly even bothered with christmas when I first moved here 40 years ago but saved all it's energies for New Year.

Strangers arriving with a "first foot" present were usually welcomed into people's homes and offered a dram of whisky, they usually arrived with a bottle anyway to ensure that they would be welcome.

Times change and we whizz about in our cars rather than walk the streets where everyone was friendly, homes are full of more stuff which we guard against strangers, the parties are fewer. Even ten years ago it was more lively, Jill was a teacher from Australia on an exchange with a cousin so she was invited to our new Year's party on her first day here, I set off walking her home at 2 am. but surprised her by saying that I would introduce her to someone interesting on the way home and joined an international party at the new house which was still going strong when we left several hours later. The hostess was in her eighties though she still thought she should be in her twenties!

We must be getting older (not as strong as our "old" friend), since we now have a large lunch party on new year's day though this year the numbers self reduced through various family disruptions and those falling foul of the winter flu . Eventually it ended up as just over optimum!

People have been dropping in or vice versa ever since, many are not looking forward to the return to work in the next few days.

Sales prices have just had an extra 2 1/2% added over night, that was a year's inflation target, going to be interesting to see how this works out. Luckily we have more stuff than we need so no rush to buy anything and my shape and size is in a state of flux so no hurry to buy much in the way of clothes just yet.

The nasty so called comedy couple who like to denigrate us as well as other disadvantaged groups have been given airtime by the Belligerent Broadcasting Company and dark forces have been at work again to eliminate any protests. See what happened to Dru's blog.

upside down in cloud: getting heard

From ice flows on the river to dull drab and damp

2010-12-31T02:02:00.000Z

All round this has been a strange Christmas. Finally after five weeks of snow and ice has really started to disappear and we can finally get about fairly easily again. In the weeks leading up to Christmas it looked like all the best laid plans would come to nothing. Our Christmas invite for this year involved people arriving from deep within the Highlands where they were icicles longer than 3 feet hanging off their roof, someone’s mother trapped up an inaccessible road covered in ice, the hostess and her daughter somewhere in Germany where for the first time in living memory transport was being disrupted by the snow and us constantly digging out our driveway to get up to the road only to wake the next morning and find it just as bad as before. I have had lots of exercise recently! It has ruined my nails!

This is an austerity Christmas, we could have just put up a fake tree which I saved from the dump a few years ago but this year I decided to dig up the tree from the front garden which has been growing for about 10 years and for the last four or five has had permanent mirror balls hanging from its branches. I’m not a great fan of Christmas decorating the tree has always been an interesting focus for the time of year and feels quite pagan which is more where my sympathies lie. A couple of weeks ago there was a two day mild period when the snow finally left its branches and I was straight out to dig up the tree. It was a lot tougher than I had anticipated with the ground being so hard and thick roots heading off in every direction, branches being low to the ground didn’t help and I wanted to look of a natural tree rather fun the stereotypical symmetrical Christmas tree. I certainly got that and at just under 8 feet tall is quite impressive.

I used to like to collect glass ornaments to supplement the ancient decorations from various childhoods which fill the decorating box but this year the only addition is a cute blue plastic dolls shoe which I found in a buried sandpit from Julie’s childhood over half a century ago. It is the sky blue Cinderella number three for any collectors out there. Decoration of the tree took 2 ½ CDs though most of the work got done during Marianne Faithfull’s broken English! Something a little punkish certainly speeded me up.

Everyone managed to the Christmas dinner which was mainly a reunion of friends whom managed to get out to France for the opening of my exhibition in May. As agreed token presents were exchanged, there must be something in the air that caused us all to go out and buy fine porcelain mugs of varying designs, each saying something about the person who bought the mug and what they thought of the taste of the person they were buying for. An interesting game! I also handed out certificates each offering a souvenir picture of their choice from those which remain from the French exhibition, that way as they have to visit me again fairly soon!

At home we gave each other a supply of gas for the heating which has been running fairly hard for the last five weeks. I did get a real present, not really a Christmas present that a birthday present which took over two weeks in the post and only arrived on Christmas Eve. From a very understanding sister I received a small Chanel bag containing a bottle of nail colour, a little bit more adult than my normal choice this time “509 Paradoxal”. I thought I had seen my last bottle of Chanel, quite my favourite was a superfine ground pigments. Shame that the snow clearance has take it’s toll on the nails which had been cosseted for this round of socialising.

Normally we would walk around the town to distribute cards to friends and days would vanish with impromptu bottles of wine and meals but this year few ventured forth on the ice and those who posted all their cards found that they took two weeks or more to travel a couple of streets away! Two arrived today, one posted on the 11 th. The other yesterday and further away. Now that the snow has cleared from the roads except where it is piled in hills of ice there has been a sudden rush of dinner invites. The one where one of the other guests was a bishop stands out, nice guy and happy to laugh. At one point I complained about some of the kindergarden versions of the bible in use now instead of the ancient poetic versions from the past then stood back to watch. I don’t care about the bible just the language! The Queen had been on about the 400 year old King James version which they seemed to like but tended to use some other intelligent translation of greater scholarship… By then I was deep into hair and shoes with the hostess…

Our turn to stage the new year’s day lunch party so had better get up and go shopping, well in a few hours time this morning.

I am trying to think if I did anything interesting this year for a round up post, shall sleep on it.

May this New Year bring my readers all they wish for.

Christmas to Christmas.

2010-12-25T01:33:00.000Z

Christmas to Christmas from C Russelle on Vimeo.

This is not for everyone. It takes an age, 13.5 minutes of your life and you get to choose your own musical accompaniment since I don't wish to upset anybody by advertising their music here. I would recommend an evening raga for suitable mood and length. I used to be a serious photographer but I can only see a blurry screen on the digital most of the time but have learned to relax and wave it about with fingers crossed.

Until quite recently I would dodge any camera even in the distance but it was pointed out to me recently that I now smile and encourage its examining eye. The ravages of time and testosterone have ensured that I am no beauty but I can live with what I have.