I aten't dead

Happy Flickr Tranny Day :-)

Thanks Gillian for suggesting it...

...and thanks for fulfilling my childhood tranny fantasy of a domineering Scottish aunty-type who coerces me into dressing. ;-)

T-zer

Blog outreach

Dan from All That Comes With It has hit upon a way to raise awareness of other blogs by allowing guest bloggers to contribute posts, and has given me the great honour of being the first person to take part.

That's one way to look at it; another way is he's worked out a way to generate free blog content and I was the first chump to fall for it. I choose to believe the former. :-)

Either way, you can see the results here. It's not saying anything I've not said before, but Dan doesn't know that, sucker!

The Nightmare Before Easter

Easter is exceptionally early this year (to see exactly how uncommonly early check out this moveable feast of Easter facts) and as if by protest the weather has decided to be exceptionally awful. I'm laying here under the duvet, blogging as hail and sleet batters the window.

I woke up screaming last night. The weird thing was, I wasn't having what I would call a nightmare. I remember dreaming that I needed to scream (for some vague dream-addled reason related to making someone think I was crazy) so I did, out loud. This woke Jane up, who understandably woke me up properly to tell me I was screaming. I couldn't get back to sleep after that. I wouldn't have minded but I didn't even get a decent nightmare out of it.

That's it, there's nothing much else to blog about at the moment. There are a few things that I'd like to blog about, but I can't until they actually happen. Something to look forward to I suppose.

Probably not as niche as you'd think

Trannieness - use it or lose it

I'm supporting Gillian's Flickr Tranny Day. Excellent idea!

Damn, I suppose that means I have to actually take part now, doesn't it?

Random thought

They have all these "plus one" channels on the telly today, why are there no minus one channels? You know, where they'd show programmes an hour before they appear on the main channel.

I only ask 'cos I've thought of an awesome money making scheme involving the racing on Channel 4. No, sorry I can't tell you the details.

Dammit...

I spent half an hour composing a blog post tonight, only to find I'd written almost exactly the same post two and a half years ago!

I wonder if anyone would have noticed. :-)

Transpocalypse 2008 - An Idea

A few people have been in contact to ask if there will be a UK Tranny Blog Meet (see Transpocolypses passim) this year, as they are supposed to be at least vaguely annual.

So...

Just blue-skying this an idea at this stage, you know, running it up the flag pole, see if anyone salutes kind of thing.

My idea is to run Transpocalypse 2008 alongside the other (slightly larger) tranny event of the year... Sparkle, up in Manchester.

There are several advantages to this, not least that a lot of trannies with blogs and websites will already be going to Sparkle. And people who weren't going to Sparkle might be persuaded if they knew there was a decent meal and a chin-wag with interesting people in it for them. And for those nervous about a first time out there'll be lots of hotels full of trannies to blend in with.

The plan would be for me to book a nice place for a meal somewhere near to the main Sparkle events (I already have a venue in mind), on the evening of Saturday the 28th of June. After the meal people people would be free to join in with the rest of the Sparkle fun, however they see fit!

So... interested? Based on feedback I'll start formalising things a bit. I've already spoken to this year's Sparkle organiser, Bella, who's keen to add it to the list of official Sparkle events.

Comments and direct emails welcome! Register an interest, and I'll keep in touch.


What is Transpocalypse?

Transpocalypse IS:

• A (roughly) annual blogmeet.


• Open to bloggers who are trannies, blog readers who are tranny and bloggers who have a tranny readership (for whatever reason!). Basically if you're reading this and you're not simultaneously oiling a machine gun, you can probably come.


• Quite hard to spell.

Transpocalypse is NOT:

• Cliquey or exclusive. It's open to trannies and non-trannies alike, you don't have to dress en-femme but you're more than welcome to. Partners and friends are also welcome.


• A huge deal. It's a meal with nice people in a nice place, with people who are cool about people dressing up in lady's clothes. Some of them so cool they even write about it.


• Named very well, in hindsight.

Communication restored

I don't usually bother with the email function in Flickr, because I'd configured it so any Flickrmail sent to me was forwarded to my home email address, and most of the time it was just notifications about strange people adding me as a contact (50% of the time they have their tackle on show... meh).

But today on a whim I clicked on the inbox in Flickr, and found three months worth of unread Flickr mail!! Stuff from friends who probably thought I was rude to ignore them. Stuff from people who I've never met but sent me really nice messages that I never replied to. And the usual page after page of add notifications from the tackle-out brigade. I didn't miss those so much, but you'd have thought I'd have noticed their absence!

If you've emailed me via flickr since around Christmas last year, and I've not replied, so very sorry!

Trouble

Part 5 of Tales of Serendipity

Ever since we'd arrived in Sri Lanka we'd felt an undercurrent of unrest and danger. One of my Dad's work colleagues had had his car shot at by a soldier, apparently when he'd driven down a road he'd been told not too. There were parts of the far north that were designated as "no go areas".

I was too young to understand the political situation, all I knew was that some people called the "Tamil Tigers" were fighting with the government for land and recognition. It was all happening a long way away from the city, though.

Until it suddenly seemed to get very close indeed. Evening curfews were declared by the government. Overnight, I lost the huge freedoms we'd enjoyed over the previous two years.

One day fighting broke out in the city, and the air was filled of shouting and police sirens. We watched from the balcony as columns of smoke rose all around us across the city.

Suddenly there were an enormous series of cracks and bangs, very close to the house, and we ran inside terrified. We went to sleep very scared of a city that had once seemed to friendly and welcoming.

The next day we found out the truth. Somebody had set light to a bottling plant near the house. The cracks and bangs had not been weapons fire, but burning crates of empty bottles exploding!

The riots came to be known as "Black July", one of the darkest times in the country's history. Up to 3000 Tamils were killed that day.

Sri Lanka had become to dangerous, and my Dad's contract was coming to an end. It was time to go home. The trouble is, two years was a fair proportion of my young life and Sri Lanka was home. England seemed a distant, cold and alien place.

We went back to England that summer, I cried more on the return trip than I had on arrival! Over the coming months we watched the on news as Sri Lanka sank deeper into a bitter civil war. One that it still hasn't recovered from.

But one day I'd like to go back. Just to see how much of what I remember has survived. And to relive my days of Serendipity.

The End

My Days at Eton

Hello! Back home now from a week's training at Eton. Not the college, obviously, but a software company based a stones-throw from the public school for the nation's most over-privileged. It was a bit hair-raising driving in one morning during rush-hour, when the streets were thronged with floppy-haired boys in tailcoats and white ties. A moment's distraction by the sat nav and I could have taken out an entire future Tory front bench.

I've done countless training courses over the years, and there are certain commonalities:

The trainers always have tics or regional accents that start off charming but end up being incredibly annoying after about half an hour.

The air conditioning never ever works properly. In this case it was incredibly hot up until an hour before the end of the last day, when a bright spark worked out that it needed to be switched on.

They always have complicated coffee machines that almost require a chapter in the training manual to themselves. This one involved posting a pouch in a small slot and then answering a multiple-choice electronic questionnaire before it would give you a drink of tea. Douglas Adams would have been proud.

The trainers always try to tell you complicated things just a few minutes before the end of the day, when most people's brains are usually having trouble just maintaining their body in an upright orientation. One of our trainers started off a topic one afternoon at about 4:45 with the words "Now you don't need to know this but..."

I don't know about you, but if someone tells me that I don't need to know something, I can't remember it. It's not a case of being too lazy to remember it, my brain literally switches off. I'm trying to concentrate on the words but my brain is going "but she said you don't have to remember this! I'm tired! Look, there's a plane out the window!".

Anyway, back home now. Glass of wine in hand and best wife in the world by my side. Facts learned at great expense to my employers already starting to leak away. Here's to the weekend!

Becky - The Wilderness Years

Part 4 of Tales of Serendipity

This is a bit of a supplemental chapter, please feel free to skip it if you're not interested in the very early stirrings of a young tranny abroad!

Becky, of course, didn't actually exist as a named individual before 2000, and the faint inklings of tranny-ness I was carrying around in my head certainly hadn’t got a name back when I was in Sri Lanka.

I’ve just always wanted to use “Becky - The Wilderness Years” as a blog title!

I soon realised when I started trying to write down experiences from that time (when I was between nine and eleven years old) that while I distinctly remembered having tranny thoughts before I went to Sri Lanka, and I definitely had them afterwards, it was hard to remember specific tranny-related stuff from the time I was there.

I have dredged up a couple of memories though. One of my friends was the daughter of one of the ex-pat families we tended to hang around with. One weekend we were all visiting a hotel complex up the coast, and she and I got to exploring the rooms and corridors. We were always exploring, we lived to find places that we though no-else knew existed. We seemed to spend most weekends in various hotels, and the back-corridors and service areas were our secret passages and concealed hideouts.

This day we'd "borrowed" yellow towels from a maid's trolley and were using them as props for games. As a joke this girl (dammit... I can't recall her name) wrapped one around my head so it hung down over my shoulders. A bit like long blonde hair.

She laughed and said I looked like a girl, and then found another towel and wrapped it around my waist like a skirt. We then played a game, at her suggestion, where I had to pretend I was her younger sister.

Of course, my fledgling tranny neurones were firing like crazy. Not really knowing why this seemed so exciting, just knowing it was. The girl said that I would look great in makeup, and she'd make me over the next time I visited her house.

I protested like crazy and said I'd never do that because I was a boy (why? WHY do trannies always act so defensively?) and she never went through with the "threat".

Even when I made pointed reminders on each of my visits to her house. "Huh... you'd better not try to put that makeup on ME!!"

Yeah, I know, such a fool.

The other thing I recall was an occasion when my parents had gone out for the evening and we were again being baby-sat by Sheila, who (as always) was pretty much letting us get away with murder.

I'd been thinking about some of the cool summer dresses and makeup and stuff that my mum had, but there was never a time when I was alone in the house to, er, investigate.

I couldn’t stand it any more, so I decided to co-opt my brother into things.

"I say! Here's a wizard wheeze!" I said to him (or words to that effect). "Why don't we go into Mum and Dad's bedroom and try on clothes and stuff."

My 7-year-old brother, completely oblivious to my ulterior motives but always looking for inventive new ways to be naughty, was all for it. So (once again advising Sheila that this was to be kept strictly secret) we ventured into our parent’s bedroom.

There followed and evening of my brother and I prancing about in flouncy dresses and inexpertly applied lipstick. I’d made a little more effort than my brother, naturally, but not so much that it didn’t look like carefree messing about.

We cleared up afterwards. No-one would ever know we'd been. I even didn't argue about tidying up my brother's share of the mess, which was highly unusual.

Mum still, inexplicably, found out. We were both given a stern telling off. My brother was apologetic, I was mortified.

No prizes for guessing who the snitch was. Stitched up by Sheila, again!

The funny thing is, decades later when I came out as a tranny to my mum, I mentioned that dressing-up session. Because I was convinced she might have guessed from that occasion (and other indiscretions) that I was interested in girl's clothes.

Amazingly, she could hardly recall it happening, despite her anger at the time being seared in my memory. Just goes to show, I think, that trannies tend to place more emphasis in our minds on things that we feel "out" us, when the other people involved barely register them.

Final part: Trouble

Adventures Abroad

Part 3 of Tales of Serendipity

Some of my favourite stories of Sri Lanka are actually re-tellings of my Dad's adventures. Like the time he got drunk with the entire Blue Peter Summer Expedition team in a bar in the middle of nowhere. Or the time when, at another bar, he got chatting with a man who had an important job...

"In my village I own the only elephant," he said. "We keep it in the temple."

My dad nodded sagely. "Because it's a sacred animal?"

"No, because it's the only building big enough."

Obvious, really, when you think about it.

I did have my own adventures too, of course. One of the best things about being abroad as a child was that I got to experience all the fun stuff without the all the worries and petty concerns that my parents must have faced daily.

Our first house in Colombo was large and airy, with whitewashed walls, a roof terrace and a large walled garden. While it was a nice house, the area of the city it was in wasn't quite so pleasant. A large open drain ran alongside the street outside, and although our parents sheltered me and my brother from a lot of it, I get the distinct impression that it wasn't a particularly safe area of town. One event I did get to hear about involved a hawker who arrived at the door selling malaria vaccinations. My Mum turned him away. She later found out that this was a well known-scam. The vaccine didn't work and he'd probably only have had one syringe, which he would use for the whole street.

My Mum wasn't left on her own to deal with all this kind of stuff, though. The company had arranged for two locals to work for us: Sheila, who acted as a sort of au pair, and Mohan, who fulfilled any handyman duties required while my Dad was away with work.

Mohan wasn't to stay with us long, he left under a bit of a cloud after some indiscretion that I wasn't given the details of. Sheila, however, stayed with us for all the time we were out there, and became almost a member of the family.

After a couple of months it must have become obvious that the area we were living in wasn't ideal, and we moved to another house in a different suburb of the city. This area seemed a lot more gentrified and safer. The house was adjacent to a police station (which pretty much guaranteed low crime) and near to the city's planetarium and main television station.

The house itself was a young kid's dream. It's wide waxed floors were ideal for racing toy cars, building elaborate Lego models, and for generally ruining socks by sliding about on. It was full of interesting nooks and crannies for me and my brother to play in, and we soon started to treat the entire place like a giant climbing frame. I worked out that if I climbed out of the bathroom window I could shimmy along a ledge and, via a series of ledges and footholds, climb up up onto the roof.

One day, while Mum was away shopping, I decided to share my mountaineering prowess with my brother. Knowing that we'd get in trouble if found out, Sheila was given strict instructions not to tell Mum what we were up to. For some reason we'd got it in to our heads that Sheila was on "our side" against our parents.

A few days later Mum sat us down and told us that the policemen at the station across the road had spotted us climbing about on the roof, and told her to make us stop. We were terrified at the thought of the police getting involved, and never climbed up onto the roof again.

Of course, several years later I found out it was Sheila that had told Mum, out of sensible concern for our wellbeing. She'd made sure Mum used the police story, because although she was terrified at the thought of us falling, she was also afraid we'd stop being friends with her!

As well as swimming virtually every day, I was an avid cyclist. Damon, John and I used to cycle all over the city. One day we decided to set out on an expedition to the brand new parliament building, part of the new administrative capital that was being built outside Colombo. It was quite a trek, through mainly undeveloped countryside, and it took the best part of the morning to get there.

The parliament building itself had been built in the centre of an lake, which was currenly in the middle of nowhere as the rest of the new capital was yet to be built. It was aparently deserted, but there were scary-looking guards all around it, so we sat at the entrance and ate our sandwiches.

One of the sandwich wrappers got caught by the wind and sailed off towards the parliament building. Using the tactic that we'd worked out previously (basically that young boys in a foreign land can get away with anything if their hair is blonde-ish and they look innocent enough) we strolled up to one of the guards and asked permission to get our sandwich bag back.

Which is how I got to have a sneaky look around the Sri Lankan parliament building.

On the way back we stopped in a grubby looking cafe by the side of the road, hoping to buy something to drink. It was deserted apart from the owner who served us warm Cokes, and an elderly Sri Lankan who sat beaming at us as we drank. The sight of three white kids out biking on their own miles from anywhere must have seemed quite strange to him.

As we got up to leave he stood up and, voice cracking with pride, sung us the entire British national anthem. I'm not sure why, perhaps he wanted to show us how much he admired the old colonial power, perhaps it was the only English he knew. Whatever, it was oddly humbling, and one of the strangest things I ever experienced as a boy.

Next: Becky, The Wilderness Years

Subsistence existence

All this week I'm on a IT-type course in Eton, Berkshire, which necessitated finding a hotel to stay at for the duration. Jane's employers have a special department for this process. You ring them up and say "I want a room in X for Y days" and (after asking you to talk in real numbers and not use poncey variables) they go away and find a room for you, using their considerable centralised buying power and freeing you to get on with the work you're actually being paid to do.

My employers, whilst of similar size to Jane's, aren't quite so enlightened. If you're away from home for work you have to find your own accommodation, and if you want reimbursement you have to find it for less than the amount stated in the national "Subsistence Policy" document.

At the time of writing this amount was £55, and it has been since around the time decimal coinage was brought in.

You'd struggle to find a hotel for £55 a night anywhere these days, especially in this neck of the woods. But I still had to waste a morning looking for hotels that didn't exist, until being allowed to get special clearance to book a place that, while still the cheapest in the area, was still £20 more than the limit.

And it doesn't have a car park, the nearest one being an NCP which charges another £15 pounds a night, bringing the grand total up to a slightly more expensive £90 a night. All of which I'm allowed to claim back.

Of course, if the subsistence was about £90 in the first place I would have probably been able to find a place with a car park included, and not wasted a salaried morning looking for it. Ho hum.

Still, I might have missed the chance to stay in the wonderful Travelodge Windsor Central, in all it's spartan MDF and plain white walled glory.



If you're a British taxpayer, you'll be pleased to know that your taxes aren't being wasted on giving public sector employees like me frivolities such as paintings to look at when they're billeted away from home!

Train to Spain

A while ago I made a startling discovery: I can catch a train from my home in King's Lynn all the way to Barcelona with only two changes. To put that in perspective, that's the same number of changes Jane had to endure when heading back to her old home town, which is less than 50 miles away!

Here's how the KL to Barcelona trip works:

• Catch a First Capital Connect train from King's Lynn to King's Cross.


• Wander the few hundred yards from King's Cross to St. Pancras International.


• Catch the Eurostar to Paris, using the two return tickets you got by sending off a mere £50 worth of Tesco vouchers.


• Wander casually from Gare Du Nord to Paris Austerlitz. (Or take a little time to see the sights and try the food.)


• Catch the Trenhotel "Joan Miro" from Paris to Barcelona. Be greeted at the train door by your sleeping car attendant, who leads you to your "Gran Classe" 2-berth room with shower. Enjoy a four-course meal in the dining car. Sleep (if you can) while the train ploughs on through southern France. Eat breakfast watching the Catalan countryside roll by. Arrive at 8 AM in the centre of Barcelona, raring to go, and with no baggage claim or airport taxi rank to negotiate.

Sounds kinda nice, eh?

And the great thing is, we're doing it! The Tesco vouchers were burning a hole in my pocket, and two hundred pounds worth of Eurostar ticket for fifty pounds worth of voucher is a great deal.

The Trenhotel, whilst a little pricier than an Easyjet flight, looked so exciting and romantic and fun. I've never slept on a train before. I'm hoping there's a murder that it turns out was carried out by everyone on the train. Or there's an eccentric elderly English lady who disappears in the night and was actually a spy.

But whatever happens you know I'm gonna blog about it. :-)