I Might Or Might Not

Last night I was Struck by a Thought in the middle of the night, and for once instead of telling myself I’d remember it (I never do) I picked up my pad and by the light of the moon bouncing off the frost, I wrote it down.  In fact I wrote down two ideas – rarely do Ideas strike singly – and they were these:

It may/It might

Dress penis

Not only that, I was astoundingly able to make sense of them over my morning tea.  They both pertain to the novel, and the first is a dialogue that goes like this:

Leuka:  I may go to the party

Leon:  You mean, you might go to the party.

Leuka:  So – what you’re saying is, might is right?

The second refers to a time long, long ago when I was wearing an ankle-length dress outside on a hot day.  To avoid tripping over it, I had gathered it up in one hand, and as I was walking along I couldn’t help noticing that people were smirking and giggling.  I eventually twigged that the cloth I held in my hand resembled a pendulant* penis.  I guess you could say in a way that I was cross-dressing…

Which brings me to last night’s TV (last night on iplayer, not last night in the real world) and a programme called ‘The Boy in the Dress.’  This was an excellent and light-hearted drama about a cross-dressing boy featuring Tim McInnerny as a martinet of a headmaster and Jennifer Saunders as a French teacher with a terrible accent.  This was followed by ‘Still Open All Hours’ which is shaping up to be a terrific sequel to the Ronnie Barker sitcom featuring some of the original characters and some new ones and brilliantly written as ever by Roy Clarke.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04wtdl8/still-open-all-hours-series-1-episode-1

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04w7pgj/the-boy-in-the-dress

Kirk out

*Is ‘pendulant’ even a word?  Spellchecker doesn’t like it – but that spellchecker’s a curmudgeon.  He doesn’t even like the word spellchecker unless it’s hyphenated.

 

 

 

Becoming Amanda

I have decided that it’s time for me to write about the stuff that Mark is going through, and more specifically, my response to it.  People have been very supportive: they regularly come up and say, ‘I bet no-one’s asked you how you’re feeling, have they?’ and I’m tempted to say, ‘in fact, everyone comes up and says I bet no-one’s asked you how you’re feeling, have they? – but I don’t, I just smile and thank them.  My stock response to this question is ‘how long have you got?’  I find it very hard to formulate a response, but I shall try.

Basically, I don’t really get it.  I have never really understood gender dysphoria and I don’t now.  Cross-dressing is one thing, but what Mark is doing goes far beyond that.  I’ve never had a problem with cross-dressing – I quite understand a man wanting to dress in more colourful or interesting clothes than those which are culturally available: Grayson Perry, Eddie Izzard etc – no problem.  But this is something else – and yet it’s not the whole hog.  I was quite clear that Mark could not change sex and still be married to me, but that was never going to happen.  He doesn’t believe you CAN change gender in fact.  He’s written a whole blog post about that:

http://homeedandherbs.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/a-clarification.html

OK, fine.  But what he’s done is to ask everyone to call him Amanda (close friends and family excepted and you can be sure there’s no way I’m calling him that), going as far as to change his name by deed-poll; and he continues to cultivate a feminine appearance (shaving body hair, painting nails etc) and take hormones.  So I don’t see how this fits together.  How can you be a man and yet not a man?

On the plus side, he is a lot happier.  So that’s good.  He’s also (and I’ve been complaining about this for years) a lot tidier, cleaner and more hygienic.  To be honest, without that change we could not have moved here without a hell of a lot more hassle as he would have resisted all attempts to make him throw stuff out.  But as it is he’s got rid of a lot of books and magazines which languished unread for years.  So that made me happy.

Also – and this is very interesting – he gets a lot LESS hassle from people in the street.  This is not just because we’re living in a much nicer area as it started when we were still in the West End.  The fact is, he used to get stares and cat-calls – and that has more or less stopped.

Weird.

I’m guessing that’s down to him being a lot more confident, which he is.  Stuff that I used to have to do because he would get in a mental tizz about it, he now does.  So that is a great relief.  Mind you, on the negative side, we got talking to a bloke in our local last night who totally came on to Mark and seemed to be interested in a threesome.  So that was creepy…

Kirk out

 

Do Not Adjust Your Poet

That title, I have to say, has nothing whatever to do with today’s post: it just came to me in the middle of the night and I thought it would make a good title for a poetry collection.  Not, probably, the one I am assembling at the moment for a competition:

http://www.cinnamonpress.com/competitions/

nor the one I am re-doing as a pamphlet which already has a title (The Ballad of the Bowstring Bridge) – but possibly a slightly whimsical or political collection.

Hm.

A propos of that, I had a rather nasty comment on this blog yesterday.  Mostly commentators are polite, witty, respectful and interesting; but I do occasionally get the odd abusive comment.  These will not be published – and I will usually suggest to the commentator that if they would like to make their point again without being rude or insulting, I will be happy to publish it.

But! onwards and upwards… for Tuesdays are concerned with prose, and I have begun a non-fiction work which is a memoir of forgetting.  (LOL).  If this sounds a bit paradoxical, it illustrates the paradox of my life for the last five years since hitting (or being hit by) menopause.  I have forgotten everything: streets, routes, maps; people, people’s names, people’s children’s names; what I did yesterday, what everyone else did yesterday, what Katy did; what I watched last night, last week, last month – in short, my whole life is a continual forgetting.

I am interrupted by Mark asking if I can read Urdu.

‘Not in the slightest,’ I tell him.  Then I think for a moment.  ‘But I do know that the little dots are vowels,’ I say triumphantly.

‘No, they aren’t,’ he retorts.

See?  I don’t even know what I know.

Aaaand back to the post… so, it’s quite helpful to me to be writing this memoir and if, when it’s done, I can publish it, it will hopefully be useful to others.

One thing I do remember from yesterday is that at Philosophy we talked about Descartes (or ‘Day-cart’ as everyone seems to call him.)  My knowledge of Descartes was previously confined to one phrase – albeit in three different languages:

Cogito ergo sum

Je pense donc je suis

which of course in English means ‘I think therefore I am’.

Everyone knows that phrase.  But what I didn’t know was everything else he thought about consciousness – and now I can’t tell you what that was without referring to my notes.  Nope, I’ve looked and it’s too complicated to put on here.

Whilst we’re on the theme of prose, though, I was interested to hear that the winner this year of the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction was a biography of an Italian Fascist written in an experimental style.  The SJ prize is not known for being avant-garde, so I think the likelihood is that the experimental style is highly successful, so I’d be interested to read it.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/04/biography-fascist-samuel-johnson-prize

Must go now as I’m trying to listen to Grayson Perry and that is not conducive to blog-posting.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/reith

Kirk out