Panic in my Breastie

The good news is, we got the house. So we're gearing up this weekend to move in. This will be the first time I've moved house since, well, ever.

As a child you're always more of a move-ee than a mover. We upped sticks a few times while my Dad was working abroad, but as far as me and my brother were concerned it just meant a small amount of disruption and a short but brutal campaign for the best bedroom.

Later on when I was in student accommodation or living with my parents, I was content with keeping all my worldly possessions in a few carboard boxes and suitcases (albeit incredibly well locked suitcases that contained stuff I really didn't want people knowing about).

But nothing has really counted as the full emotional and logistical nightmare that is Moving House, until now.

At one point our stuff was spread over four locations: my house, jane's old flat, our storage lock-up and my Grandad's spare room. With Jane's place cleared out and let, we've managed to squeeze that down to three locations. But now we've got to get the stuff from all of the above and move it all to the new place. Fun!

I must admit I'm starting to panic a bit, there's just so much to do. And before we even get started with the packing and moving, I've got to fly down to Cambridgeshire tonight, where Jane and I are attending a Burns Night dinner.

So, on the verge of being (volutarily!) cast out of my own wee-bit housie, and with thoughts of plans for the future, and I give you one of my favorite poems by Scotland's 250-year-old bard (translation for people not of the Scottish Persuasion below).


To a Mouse

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi murdering pattle

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union
An' justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion
An' fellow mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may theive;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't.

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's a strewin!
An naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's win's ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' wearing winter coming fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till Crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro! thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves and stibble,
Has cost the monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turned out, for a' thy throuble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld.

But mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice and men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!
The present only touches thee:
But och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!


My translation for a modern day reader:

Oi! Little mouse! Calm down my son, you'll have a heart attack!
Don't run off, I promise won't hit you with a big stick,
Er... or anything else. Forget I even brought up the big stick.

I'm sorry that we just knackered your house,
I take equal responsibility as a member of the human race,
And I hope that you'll accept my apology as a fellow mammal.

Yeah, so, you've done a bit of grain-stealing in your time,
Whose going to miss a bit of grain anyway?
It's a victimless crime. These farmers have all got insurance.

And look at your house all broken! In the middle of winter!
And nothing to make a new house with! In December!
Not to labour the point but.. cold winds and everything!

So here's you thinking that a deserted EU-subsidised field,
Is an ideal spot for a house, until the farmer ploughed through your front door.
I mean literally ploughed. With an actual plough. Bastard.

Okay, so your house was made out of bits of straw and some leaves,
Not the soundest of building materials, as any little pig will tell you.
But still, it's a bit of a bugger. You should sue.

But Mousey, you're not the only one for whom things go wrong,
The best laid schemes of mice and men, as they say, often gang agley.
I think "gang" means "go" and "agley" means "tits up".

Still you're better off than me! You're a live-for-the-moment batchelor mouse,
Without a care in the world! Whereas I have a mortgage to think about,
And although I can't see into the future, I'm pretty sure it's going to be crap.


I'm no expert on 18th-century Scottish dialects, but I think I got the gist. ;-)

*but he's a fool.

Movement

A surprisingly productive weekend, Jane and I had a trawl around the estate agents in town looking for places to rent. We discovered two things. Firstly, that the rental specialists in estate agents don't work weekends. Possibly due to the lean times, most of the offices were manned by a skeleton staff.

Secondly, the massive new paper mill that's being built out of town has been snapping up rental properties for their employees, which might mean it's pretty easy to get my place rented out.


Sunset by the paper mill by SaltGeorge

The construction of the mill has been quite an impressive sight by the Great Ouse over the last few months, especially when it was just a bare skeleton surrounded by a dozen huge cranes. Now it's being enclosed in walls, it's turning into another nondescript grey box, which is a kind of a shame. Although I suppose that you can't really hope for exciting architecture in the paper manufacture and storage industry.

One of the agents we spoke to had a new property on their list. A 3-bedroom place with huge rooms, that has only just been renovated with double glazing and other mod cons. Jane and I took a look around the same day and we both think it's ideal.

So my job first thing tomorrow is to call up the agent and, hopefully, snap it up.

After a long time sitting on a house that wasn't selling, things are finally moving. It's a good feeling.

Since when does TV know words like "propensity"?

I reserve my right to get annoyed about trivial things

Look, I'm tired, so before it gets too big, if you could just all go over to this group on Facebook and explain to them all that likening "self-described trannies" to skanks isn't going to bring about a revolution in Transsexual rights, and is just going to piss off a bunch of people who while they don't post "ass bearing" photos of themselves on the internet still count themselves as "a tranny", because they've taken ownership of a word rather than pidgeonholing it as "something worse than a transsexual".

Yes words are important, but if you don't want to be called a tranny then don't call me, by inference, a skank. Nuff said.

If I Were a Girl...

It's odd, isn't it, how there seems to be an inherent lack of symmetry when transgressing the gender divide. This is summed up most often by the common tranny complaint "no-one bats an eyelid when a woman wears a man's shirt", but it runs more deeply than that.

Hold on to your hats, I'm going to venture into the realms of popular culture and reference a song in the current Hit Parade. Beyoncé Knowles (no relation apparently to antiquarian Eric Knowles) has a song in the charts at the moment entitled "If I Were a Boy". In it she hypothesizes how her life would be different if she were of the opposite sex, but still apparently maintaining the best qualities of "girlishness".

An a-list female pop icon like Beyoncé can sing a song like that without anyone questioning her femininity, but imagine an equivalent male pop star singing about what he thought it would be like if he were a girl.

It just wouldn't happen. For starters, no red-blooded pop crooner or rapper would touch a song like that, it would just seem "wrong". Also, Beyoncé's song is riddled with cliched generalisations of male traits, which it would be hard to reverse without sounding sexist and demeaning to women.

I'm not sure where I was going with this, other than to say that whenever I hear a tranny say "when I do [this] it's no different from when a woman does [that]" I often think no, actually, there is a difference. You can feel the difference. After all, girls aren't just the mirror image of boys, so why should male-to-female behavior be seen simply as a mirror of female-to-male?

Don't call me a landlady

Woo, my last post generated a lot of comments. Thanks, I read and appreciated every one of them. It seems to have struck a chord with a lot of people, and it was interesting the way that everyone generally empathised, but you each put your own spin on it.

It's great that people are still "getting something" from my occasional outpourings, and it's given new impetous to keep going with this blog, even if the posts become widely spaced and the dressing up even rarer!

Next week I become something I'd never considered being... a landlord. Jane and I have found a tenant for her old place, and they move in next week. This has meant some rather frantic work to get it from a sellable state to a rentable state, giving everything a lick of paint and generally fixing the things that we were happy to put up with but a tenant might take issue with. Like the hellgate in the downstairs lavvy and the lack of gravity in the spare bedroom. You know, little niggles.

So the plan is, money from renting Jane's + money from renting mine = enough money to rent a place big enough for me, Jane, Junior and assorted parephenalia. So as well as a landlord, I'll also be a tenant for the first time. I'm slightly upset that Junior is going to come into the world in a house that's not our own... but I remind myself that I spent my very early years in mobile homes while my Dad helped build the M4, and part of Jane's childhood was in a council house, and it never did us any harm!