Betrayal

I have a confession to make; I'm so ashamed. Last night I went to see Eddie Izzard in Manchester and I dressed as a man. There, I've said it. How disgraceful!

Fact is, my male side is too well know in Manchester to risk outing myself. A decision that was justified when I pulled into the car park and got a discount because the attendant recognised that I was a regular. The fact that the camera men were zooming in on the audience at the MEN Arena and putting the results up on the big screens was another reason for being glad that I hadn't dragged-up. If I was going to, then I would have had to do it with style - these shoes are just begging for their first outing. I didn't want to dress up and then dress down, if you see what I mean? There should be trannies at Eddie Izzard gigs, and they should be out and proud.

Sorry.

As for Eddie, what can I say? He was hilarious, as always, but the atmosphere in the vast (cold) space of the arena was a long way away from a comedy club, so there wasn't much going on between him and the audience. He could have been in any large venue in any large city. And I did miss quite a few punchlines because the acoustics were awful - too much echo. Still he doesn't do much that relies on punchlines, so it didn't really spoil things.

Action Transvestite

So here I am at the end of my first sortie, trying to get my ruddy kite back on the deck and hoping that the Jerry who pranged smudger really had bought it when the skipper pancaked into the drink and took out his bolt cutters, and the blighter hasn't been sitting on my jolly old tail since Hamburg...

Apologies for the technical fault, standard Polari will be resumed as soon as possible

In the photo, the one with painted toenails is on the left.

Should that be port?


Still, there wasn't too much of a crosswind

Outskirts

Well I took Penny out for a little trip this week! There's a turn up. I haven't done any transvestiting for ages.

I went down to Outskirts in Birmingham on Monday. I've been to enough TG groups to know that Outskirts is unique. Larna, Sally and everyone manage the difficult skill of herding trannies and have kept a twice monthly meeting of disparate trans-people going for years.

I started going there when I lived in London and discovered that some of my online friends went, and that people did actually do the 100+ mile drive up there from London. I met some very wise and friendly people, and I used to love dropping in on a drag-act then driving back in the middle of the night so that I could sit at my desk on a Tuesday morning and think "I bet I had more fun than you lot last night" to the rest of the office. But since I moved back 'up-North', Brum and back in one night has just not been possible. So when I made the decision to start up my public transvestiting, I realised that I'd have to spend the night and take a day off work, which is what I did. The drive down was uneventful but marred by me missing the holder for my nagging machine (GPS). As darkness fell I realised that if I pointed the bottom towards the front of the car, it would reflect off the windscreen, and I'd invented the head-up-display for cars. The only small problem being that the image was reversed - no big deal when you are taking a turn off the motorway, but try mirroring everything in your head in the middle of a city. Oh, and there was the only big problem, the fact that the damned thing kept sliding around whenever I turned a corner.

Anyway, I managed to find my hotel, checked-in, slapped-up and put on a nice frock and went off looking for the Equator bar in the gay village. I missed it the first time, but finally found it. I had a lovely chat with everyone altogether a wonderful evening. Larna told me about the Shout festival and her plans for a Trans contribution to the visual arts section, next year. I got to bed at about one in the morning, set my alarm for eight and woke at my usual 5:45 ... and of course I couldn't get back to sleep.

I had decided to hit the shops on the Tuesday, but they don't open until 10, so I had breakfast in Starbucks and watched the world go by. I had a look around, but my loathing of retail therapy stopped me buying anything. I've just got a complete mental block when it comes to buying clothes, I can't picture myself in anything I'm looking at, and it all seems to be designed for size 8 teenagers anyway. So I consoled myself with a trip to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery - altogether more enjoyable. Even though it was teeming with school trips, and kids of all ages, I didn't get noticed.

On the way home, inspired by Julia's post, I stopped off at my old home town, had a walk around and came out, as a transvestite, to my Mum. Well, I bought some flowers and tidied up her grave. It didn't feel that odd, wandering around places that I new from my childhood. I left when I was 18, and though I went back to visit family, the fact that it has changed so much made it feel like any other place. What's that sentence by L. P. Hartley "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there". Well I guess that makes us all foreigners. Particularly those of us who spent their childhood trying not to want to dress in the clothes of the opposite gender, but now think it's a jolly good idea.

Airborne

I've no idea why, but I was always mad about aircraft. It might be because, when I was growing up in the '60s they seemed to be the bleeding edge of technology (I was a child of the space race and if I couldn't be an astronaut...).

I hung around with plane spotters, went on school trips to Heathrow to watch the planes. I even got a short-wave radio for Christmas in the early '70s just to listen to aircrew talking to air traffic control on the approach to Ringway - in 1973, the start of the oil crisis, all three (yes three!) TV channels stopped broadcasting at 10pm, for the good of the economy, so I also spent a lot of time listening to Radio Luxembourg.

I made large numbers of Airfix models, I joined the aero-modeling club at school and made spectacularly un-airworthy balsa planes. I knew everything there was to know about the history of powered flight. The only problem was that there wasn't the slightest chance I'd ever get off the ground. It was the days before holidays in Spain or Greece. Neither I nor any of my plane spotter mates had ever flown. The only people who got a pilots licence did it through the RAF - private aircraft were confined to the spectacularly wealthy. I even spent a few weeks in the Air Cadets on the unfounded hope of a flight of some sort, but the need to cut my hair and the vanishingly slim chance of getting airborne brought that brief episode to an end.

I finally got to fly, on holiday, in the 1990s. In the early years of this decade I spent a few months commuting to Edinburgh in a little 30 seater. I usually fly six or seven times a year and I absolutely love it. I love everything to do with it. I even love looking up the accident reports on the types of planes I'm going to fly in (keep your seat belt buckled at all times - the main cause of injury amongst aircrew is unexpected turbulence). Things have changed. The world of privilege, narrow horizons and lack of opportunity that persisted through the dreary '70s and '80s has gone and I've been lucky enough to keep ahead of things.

Then, after our little balloon ride in Africa, it occurred to me that right now, what with 'times wing-ed chariot' and all that there isn't a reason why shouldn't learn to fly.

So today I booked my first flying lesson...

Now I'm sure I saw a rebuilt Spitfire for sale recently.

Summer

Well a month on and I'm still trying to sort out my holiday photos. It doesn't help that I'm taking even more, and my pile of to-do stuff is getting bigger.

We've had a full house this summer, visits from relatives and children. The last time I en-frocked was at PP with Linzi, Lucinda and Suzie, back in July. Strange how I can go for ages without being bothered by the effort of dragging-up, but as soon as I don't have the opportunity, I'm desperate to slap on the er... slap. Oh well, things should quieten down as the summer fades away, and I might get a chance to swan around a bit more.

Still, all this social activity has given me three cracking ideas to get rich; the portable naughty step (We've had my two year old nephew visiting), the bunk hammock (not sure where that came from) and a Wii game linking the dance mat to a safari drive - don't ask.

The photo is of Liverpool cathedral tower (Anglican) btw.

Africa

People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them. This is what people have come to expect. It's not viewed as a serious continent. It's a place of strange, bizarre and illogical things, where people don't do what common sense demands.

Chinua Achebe



We get home and as soon as I've spent a few days sorting out the nine hundred and fifty photos we took, I get a summer cold. Not Swine 'Flu, which would have at least given me a few days off work in which to be miserable. No this was just uncomfortable enough to make life really horrible, but not bad enough to force me to stay at home and avoid the pile of stuff that accumulated in my absence. So apologies for my lax attention to correspondence. I've been alternating between work and bed for the last week.

So, impressions then:

Well the poverty was pretty much what I expected, but I was surprised to see soooo many people. People working the land, people walking everywhere, people just hanging out. Everywhere.

Mud huts. I had expected shacks and shanties, but yer-actual traditional mud-huts close in to the cities. Built by squatters who farmed every inch of spare land. The rains hadn't been good enough in the spring, and these people had planted maize and were watching it dry up. The harvest is at Christmas and a lot of the maize won't make it. Because of the drought, the schools are staying open over the holidays (winter, south of the Equator) to feed their pupils.

The Glory Bar and Restaurant. The Genesis Hotel. Starline Butchery and Hotel. The Zero Zero Bar

Malarone

The scarcity of buildings with more than one floor.

Mobile phones everywhere - even in the most remote villages. And coverage! I don't know how they charge the phones with no electricity.

A sign on a wall "Caring men Plan Their Families"

A banner for an agricultural show saying that it is "enhancing agri-business with appropriate technologies" - bullshit buzzwords out in the sticks

Talking to a waiter in the back-of-beyond who knew all about the credit crunch because his brother works in America. Watching people everywhere collecting water from streams and rivers in plastic containers. Feeling very over privileged and insulated from reality.

Lots of police check points.

Terrible roads. Up at six everyday to either drive to another game reserve or to go looking for animals.

Seeing huge herds of animals up close. Seeing huge herds of animals from a balloon.

Realising that exotic animals aren't exotic when they are in their natural environment and all around you.

Strange stars and constellations. The moon setting at 90 degrees to the horizon.

And most of all, doing all that with nice people and a fantastic guide/drive who just assumed we wanted to know everything about everything, which we did!

Catalogue

I went to Africa and I saw lions

I went to Africa and I saw lions and leopards

I went to Africa and I saw lions and leopards and cheetahs

I went to Africa...

This is going to take all day so I'll cut to the end

I went to Africa and I saw
Lions
Leopards
Cheetahs
Elephants
White Rhino
A Black Rhino
Giraffe - Rothschild and Reticulated
Zebra - Common and Grevy's
Hippos
Hyenas
Jackals
Baboons and Vervet monkeys
Water Buffalo
Warthogs
A Forest Hog
Mongooses (mongeese??) - Dwarf, Banded and White Tailed
Every type of antelope and gazelle you can imagine
1.6 million Wildebeest
Vultures, Eagles, Storks, Herons, Pelicans, Toucans and lots of other birds

... and an extremely beautiful continent.