Meanwhile, 24 hours earlier

Look, I did go out!

A picture taken in the Campanile Bathroom before I went out to Pink Punters, and Jane and I hooked up with Siobhan,, Joanna and Isobel.

You can tell this picture was taken on the night before, because I'm a lot less baggy-eyed than I was in the pictures I took last night.

Back by non-popular non-demand

My, hasn't the year flown? Tomorrow is Non Non Photography Day again!

Yep, once again, to counteract the worst excesses of the frankly evil Non Photography Day, I ask you all to spend July 17th photographing everything and anything, just like last year.

Once you've filled your flash cards with images documenting the minutiae of your day (and hopefully thoroughly pissed off a few Non Photography Day adherents with your incessant shutter-clicking) you can upload them to the resurrected Non Non Photography Day Flickr Group which has already started to buzz in anticipation. (Well, a few people have mentioned it, anyway.)

Lets make NNPD 2007 the happiest, snappiest one yet!

We Sparkled

Sparkle ... what can I say?

No really, what can I say? I've run out of new and interesting ways to do post-outing write ups without slipping into tired cliches.

I want to say "it was so nice to see x y and z again", but that would be boring. But then again, I did meet a lot of nice people, both old friends and new. And it was nice. Really nice. I'll just leave out the list of everyone, because you know who you are.

But that wasn't the important thing.

I want to write up a detailed account of the 3 days, but that would probably be boring too. So I'll summarize: I dressed up a lot. We went out a lot. Sparkle happened around us. And in many cases despite of us.

But that's not the important thing either.

I want to write gushing praise for people like Kim Nolan, and the AXM people, and the hundreds of other people who put an amazing amount of effort into making Sparkle happen.

That's important, but that's not it.

We took quite a few pictures:



But, believe it or not, that's not the most important thing.

This is the most important thing: I felt great. And, for the first time in a fair while, I felt like I looked great. Which, sometimes, is the most important thing of all.

This morning I are mainly knackered

Blergh... it might not look it on the map, but Britain is big. Traveling any distance across it is a tiring process.

The main purpose of the trip was a party at Jessica's to celebrate her quarter-century, which was great fun. Look, I dressed!



Yeah, I know it's not that good a picture, but it was the best of a bad bunch and, as Siobhan points out, I'm bound by The Law. If we don't post pictorial proof that we've dressed in public within 48 hours, according to Transvestite Law it never actually happened, and these big black flying monsters turn up to erase the event from history. True! My hands are tied.

Oh, and guess who we went to see on Sunday! Only one of the icons of the UK tranniesphere, that's who! She might seem to disappear occasionally, and she's getting a little long in the tooth, but she's still one of Lancaster's finest. I'm talking of course about, Erin. Well, we were kind of in the neighbourhood, seemed rude not to. She's looking well. Oh, and Siobhan was there too. Which was nice. :-)

Good, despite lack of dinosaurs

"Lets go to the Raptor Foundation!" Jane said. She always itching to get behind the wheel of my hot-rod Vauxhall Corsa to test her newly restored driving skills.

After being patiently convinced that not all raptors are two-legged dinosaur killing machines, I agreed.

It was a jolly good day out. I took some pictures...







There are a few more on Flickr, if you're interested.

Picnik

Picnik is a free online photo editing tool I've been playing with this morning.

It will do all the everyday photo-tinkering functions, without the need for a desktop app. If you've not got a tool for editing photos, or you're working away from your desktop, this is ideal.

Best of all, it integrates fully with Flickr. You can even use it to touch-up photos that are already in your stream on-the-fly (although it does seem to want to reduce the resolution of very large photos by a fraction).

I was quite impressed. And now no-one's got an excuse for uploading bad pics to Flickr! ;-)

Diffraction

Today I mostly went to the beach.

2 months in 10 seconds

In mid-November I stood beneath a tree on the bank of the Ouse, looked up and took a picture of it's gold-green canopy.

This week the Ouse burst burst it's banks, flooding the surrounding water meadows, and today Jane and I took a walk to see the results. Recognising the same tree, now bereft of leaves, I stood in nearly the same spot and took another picture.

In one way, the video below took two months to make. In another way, it took about half an hour experimenting with Morph Age morphing software.

Either way, I'm kinda proud of it. :-)



You can see the original pictures here and here.

I think I need more food

Hmmm, eggs make a meal out of anything. HP sauce doesn't.

Forget Naan Bolognese. Brown Sauce á la spread, anyone?

...

I need to go shopping again, don't I? :-S

Rain

Lots of the wet stuff about today. Luckily I'm indoors with everything I need, i.e. hot soup and big mugs of coffee.

Wide versus deep

I pointed out a strange fact to Jane today: because of this site, more people know me as Becky than know me as Simon.

She agreed, but noted that although fewer people knew me as Simon, the ones that did knew me a lot better.

Which is also true.

One type of knowledge is wide but shallow, the other deep but narrow. Overall, they're probably roughly equal.

That's all there is to this post... I thought it might go somewhere but it didn't. Ho hum. :-)

Nothing camper than a Campanile

They've done it up! It's all leather sofas and twirly cane things in vases. Feels a bit weird drinking here in male mode.

How to make your own Fetish PVC Witch costume

Hello boys and girls!

With Halloween rapidly approaching, you might be stuck for costume ideas. A lot of outfits can be quite expensive, but I’ve got an idea for a great costume that you can make cheaply at home. This outfit would make an ideal present for a tranny in your family, so you might want to make sure that they leave the room before we continue.

Are they gone? Great!



Take a look at this outfit that Becky’s modelling, looks fantastic doesn’t it? You’d expect to pay at least 2 guineas for an outfit that good from a posh PVC shop in Knightsbridge. But would you believe it cost less than 20 pounds? That’s right!

First you need to make your PVC dress. For this I used a standard PVC maid’s uniform, of the kind that everyone has stashed away somewhere! If you’re not sure where there’s one in your house, just ask mummy or daddy!

One you have the PVC maid’s uniform, discard the satin pinny and badly-made lace headband, as it won’t be needed for this costume. You might want to wash off any obvious stains, although these add to the character of the final outfit!

Next, you’ll need to make the underskirt or “petticoats”. For this you will need about 4 metres of gauzy material, which you can get from that shop in town with the faded sewing patterns in the window that’s been going for donkey’s years and seems to keep afloat even though hardly anyone visits apart from little old ladies on market day who go in for bizarrely coloured wool and a natter with the strangely fey elderly gentleman who’s worked there forever.

He’ll also sell you some black ribbon, about 3 metres will do. He’ll also try to show you some pictures of him and his young gentleman friend on holiday in Tuscany, but politely decline and leave the shop swiftly.

You might want to get an assistant (sometimes called a Tranny Wallah) to help you with this part. You need to fold the material twice along it’s whole length, so that you have 4 metres of quadruple-thick gauzy material. Pin the material near the folded edge to keep it in place, and then sew along the whole length about 1 inch away from the folded edge.



Now you can feed the ribbon down along the sewn edge of the material and gather it together. The gathered edge can be adjusted so that it fits neatly around the waist, and then the ribbons tied and cut to length.

Next the hat. Like me you’re probably thinking “there’s bugger all chance of me sourcing a PVC witch’s hat”, but actually I found one in the first costume shop I walked into. Which just goes to show that children today are all going to grow up perverts.



Finally, add a pair of 5-inch heeled shoes that you just know are going to be torture after about 10 minutes, a set of cheap false nails from a joke shop, and a pair of expensive tights that cost extra because some “designer” put extra holes in them, et voila!

Witching hour

It was great fun. Expect full blog post later this week.

China Girl

I have a habit of pinning things to the notice board in my kitchen and never taking them down, so that new items get pinned to the strata of old ones.

I had a bit of a clear-out yesterday and re-disovered this little gem...

er...

Some explanation may be necessary.

I was working on multimedia learning package in the late nineties, and we were looking through a set of stock photography for pictures of rabbits. We came across this picture of a bunny lounging on a cushion in what looked liked Chinese boudoir.

The rabbit seemed to have a strangely sultry expression. Someone (probably me) suggested that it looked like high-class porn for bunny fanciers. And from that this spoof magazine cover developed.

Don't look at the close up, whatever you do.

Yeah, I know, it's wrong. I'm not into rabbits. Honest. :-/

Holiday '06

That was a fun week. :-)

It started with a Very British Tranny Night down in London. I looked like this:



For about 5 minutes before we went out of the door. Then as usual it all went a bit rough round the edges. The outfit was kinda built around the gold lamé skirt, which I found a couple of weeks ago in Milton Keynes. It sang to me.

Amazingly, I sucessfully recognised and chatted with everyone I was supposed to at Trans-Mission. Including the delegates from Tokyo, Sydney, Finland and All Points Not King's Lynn.

Then a brief Thistle Full English Breakfast and a snooze and it was off to Portugal. The bit at the bottom they call the Algarve.

Which was great. I've never done a "beach" holiday before, normally I like to keep busy and go places where I can point at architecture and say "that's interesting" in a John Major accent. So it was a nice change of gear.

The Algarve during the summer season must be absolutely heaving, judging by the number of bars and restaurants there are to cater for tourists. The great thing was they were all still open despite the lack of customers, so we were spoilt for choice for places to eat and drink. At the same time the weather was still very good, so it seemed like the best of both worlds.

We spent most of the time lounging on the beach. I caught up with some essential work: reading a Pratchett Backlog and finding the entrance to World 4 on Super Mario Brothers. You know, real important stuff that tends to slip if you don't make time for it.

I also took some nice pictures, I'm not going to bore you by showing you them all.

I am going to bore you by showing you some of them.

This was the view from our apartment.



The cars really did whizz past leaving lines like that. But only after the third or fourth glass of Port.

Here's a shot taken on the beach that I'm kinda proud of.



And finally, a shop for Lady's Things.



Oh yeah, that reminds me, I've also been reading the most astonishing piece of transgendered fiction ever commited to paper. I've got no idea how or when I can blog about it though.

Or if anyone's even interested. I always get the feeling after coming back from a blog break that everyone might have wandered off to do Other Things. ;-)

Envéritély

That's what I'm talking about

It's not been processed much, basically what came out of the camera with a little contrast adjustment and cropping.

This looks like me, it's not entirely flattering, but it's how I looked last night, and I think I look great. That's a good photograph.

Thanks April. Nice to catch up to. So many old friends, blah blah blah. :-)

Last night was good fun. I might blog about it properly if I get a chance.

Look how hard my pen is

One of the countless perks of working in healthcare... free pens from drugs companies!

I've had this one for ages, shows no signs of wearing out yet.

...

... my MiniCards from Moo came today!

I couldn't resist buying a full set on top of my freebie ones, and I'm glad I did, they're awesome!

These are Simon ones... now I need to buy some for Becky. :-)

Jane

Just thought I'd blog this, cos it's a nice pic. :-)

Becky wuz here (and here... and here...)

So Flickr have properly integrated geotagging into their service, and it seems to work quite well.

I've spent a semi-constructive hour or so going through my old pics and tagging some of them with their locations. At first I just did the ones of interesting architecture and such, but then I thought: why not the ones of me too?

After all, Becky does get about a bit (quiet down at the back).



So now you can find out just exactly where pictures like the one above were taken, if you were so moved.

One thing that annoys me a little is that they've used Yahoo's mapping service, which is a poor imitation of Google Maps. Flickr freely admit it's not as detailed as it should be, and are promising to work on it, but at the moment I'm wishing Google had bought Flickr and not Yahoo!

Cardiff...

...is not nearly as interesting as you'd imagine if, for example, your entire prior knowledge of the place is based on watching Doctor Who.

There are a lot less gaseous aliens, and a lot more stag and hen parties. And the only thing vaguely resembling a planet-threatening Slitheen-designed power plant is an odd cooling tower shaped wooden chimney over the Welsh assembly. Although I assume this is mainly for funnelling hot air safely away from the politicians below.

Speaking of which, why do the Welsh have an "assembly"? What do they do there? I'm guessing visits from the nit nurse and talks by the local Chief Constable.

Before I get mugged by a dozen Welsh readers I'd better counter that with some England-bashing. Erm, the English are all rubbish at making cheese on toast. There, that should do it.

I'm not too sure about Cardiff, I went on a whim for no other reason that it was nearby and somewhere I'd never been before.

It seems like a place in transition. There are some admirable attempts to graft a modern city onto it's old industrial bones, with varying levels of success. The waterfront, for example, is aching to be a South Bank, but currently feels more like a Southend. Trendy wine bars seem to be fighting a battle with chip shops and vendors of tatt.

Maybe I'll go back in a few years time and see who won.

Over and out

Thanks to Jane wangling us some tickets, I spent the afternoon at an RAF families day.

Families days are basically the forces' way to show what all our taxes are being spent on. I'm exceptionally pleased to see mine have been spent on bouncy castles and beer tents. :-)

It was a jolly nice way to spend the last day of the heatwave (it officially ends tomorrow folks, and I don't need an illegal Met Office feed to tell me that).

One of the best bits was a display by the Red Arrows. I love the Red Arrows, they demonstrate what the British forces do best: incredibly precise manouvres very close together whilst clad in bright red camouflage. If we could get the red arrows to wear furry black busbies we would.

Mosaic

I just thought I'd share this with you. It's a mosaic portrait Jim Bumgardner created of little old me, using photomosaic software he wrote himself.

You have to zoom in to see the full effect; the picture is made up of thousands of individual photographs of flowers. I think it's fantastic!

Jim is a bit of a Flickr star, he designed Colrpickr, a brilliant tool that finds pictures on Flickr based on colour. He also co-wrote the book Flickr Hacks, among many other projects. I feel quite honoured to be the subject of one of his works!

The Basil that Lived

I have a love-hate relationship with fresh basil. You know, the kind that comes in it's own little plant pot. I see it on the shelf in Tescos and think "mmmm, basil, great for pizzas and pasta and stuff."

So I buy it, take it home, snip a few bits off for my tea, and watch it die.

I am the Dr. Harold Shipman of herb care.

Except this one. I was going away for a long weekend, so as an experiment I stuck the pot in half a sinkful of water, thinking it would probably drown.

But it thrived. So I keep it constantly in a big bowl of water and it loves it. It's even survived several prunings for various pasta dishes.

You're probably saying "yeah Becky, that's how you keep basil, everyone knows that."

Actually you're probably saying "Worst. Blog. Post. Ever."

Hell, I needed something to replace that last blog entry. :-)

Colour Illusion

I saw a link to and intriguing optical illusion on Siobhan's blog, and decided to try to reproduce the affect myself.

Hover your mouse over the image and stare at the black dot in the middle, move your mouse away without moving your eyes. The black and white picture will appear in colour, until you move your eyes.



Clever huh? I could explain how it works, but that would be rather boring. What was slightly annoying was, after I'd worked out how to do it all by myself, I then found the tutorial. :-)

Also Jessica tells me she's trying to do an automated version that works with pictures from Flickr, so watch out for that!

Becky's Web...

...a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist!

(Well, doesn't exist for the purposes of this blog, anyway.)

Engerland

A pub off Russell Square, a pint of lager, and football on the telly. What could be more English?

Oh, perhaps the weather could be more English, it's bleedin' scorching out here!

This is the road to Hull

Well, we're actually in a village near Beverley, having eschewed the delights of Hull. The Humber Bridge made the trip a lot shorter (or less wet, depending how you look at it).

Gotta go... Dr. Who just starting and Maureen Lipman's a baddie! :-O

Snake

Slight change of pace.

Jane and I went for a walk around King's Lynn's docks today, and I took some pictures that I'm particularly pleased with.

The X stands for Mission

Jane and I went to Trans-Mission last night, which was nice. The great thing about TX is I can almost guarantee bumping into at least a couple of good friends. Last night was no exception. Connie and partner Tracy, Clarissa, and Joanna were all there, to name but a few! It was nice to catch up properly, particularly with Connie and Tracy, who I've not really had a chance to have a proper chinwag with before... babes, I'm sorry we dragged you both to the diner afterwards when it turned out you weren't hungry! But you were great company. :-)

Vicky and Jasmine put on a top night, as per usual and to be expected when TX is getting near it's 50th outing. They had a few problems with the new owners of the venue not providing enough bar staff, but those kinds of things are pretty much beyond control, and I know that after Jasmine has had some choice words with the manager they'll be up to scratch next month!

Wow, what a remarkably utilitarian blog entry this is! I suppose I should go the whole hog and mention that the resurfacing works on the M11 made for a very slow journey back, and that it rained heavily, and we didn't get back till 5...

but that would be boring, so I'll end with the only decent pic I have of me from last night.

Windmills

Saw this on the way to Jane's and couldn't help but stop and take a few pics.

What the test was

So yeah, so now my blog is serving pages in ASP format. For those unfamiliar with ASP: it's like PHP but better. If you don't know what PHP is, imagine a duck wearing a beanie. It's nothing like that.

ASP is better than PHP for two reasons.

1) It costs money. ASP is expensive. PHP is free. Expensive things are better. Stands to reason.

2) I can write for ASP and I don't know PHP. Things that I know how to do are better. Stands to reason.

Still confused?

Okay, basically ASP will let me do funkier, more dynamic, stuff with my blog. I've already been tinkering with adding dynamic backlinks, a-la this entry. Now if another blog links to me, a short summary of their blog entry appears at the bottom of my blog entry, together with a link to their blog. Clever huh?

I've got to work on the styling a bit, but in principal it works and I'm happy with it.

And for all of the people for whom that went entirely over their heads, here's a picture of me looking pretty:



Yay me! :-)

Top 20 favorites of 2005

I heard about this via the Flickr Blog. Basically you make a set of the top 20 of your most favorited pictures from 2005, make a mosaic out of them and them add them to this group.

The easiest way to make a mosaic is to use fd's nifty Flickr Toys.

It's a nice way to look back over 2005, starting with a trip to Liverpool, then Barcelona, that outfit of Jessica's, Halloween, Christmas, and New Years.

2006 and all that

Well, here we are. Another year, eh?

2005 ended as 2004 did: at a party at Sophie's house. The theme was 80s. Well, more correctly my theme was 80s because I seemed to be the only one who'd taken the stuff about a themed party to heart (either that or I'd missed a couple of memos). I think that I looked so heartbroken when I was told that most people wouldn't be bothering with the theme that Sophie and Charlotte dressed up 80s-stylie in sympathy. Jane was up for it all along, of course, and regressed to her 80s goth persona.



The reason I was upset was that I'd actually gone to the effort of creating my t-shirt from scratch...



An item that will shortly be available on Ebay. :-)

It wasn't, I must admit, the best night out of the year from my point of view. It was mine and Jane's third night out in a row (each one of which had involved a lot of driving) and it had all caught up with us somewhat. Still, it was great to see everyone again, and bring the year to a close in exactly the same place it had started for me.

Which made it easier to spot what had changed over the year. For the better, which is the main thing.

... and enjoy 2006!

Boxing Day

Got a bit warmer once we got in amongst the trees though! :)

Boxing Day

The day after Christmas is called Boxing Day in the UK and some other Commonwealth Countries, and is a national holiday.

It's tradionally spent either:
a) shopping in the sales
b) going for long walks in the vain belief that this will cancel out the huge amounts of food you ate the day before.

Jane and I opted for the latter, and went for a bracing walk on Holkham beach, on the North Norfolk coast. With a strong north-easterly and nothing between us and Norway it was exceptionally bracing!

Booze

There are times when the slow shutter speed on my mobile really annoys me. But it's accurately captured the blur of frenzied bottle-removing that occured a few seconds after my boss dropped this crate of wine on my desk.

Park and Pride

"It is spacious, well-lit and adorned with beautiful red brickwork, complemented by slinky silver vertical aluminium fins that create a rippling wave effect."

London may have The Gherkin, Cardiff may have it's Stadium, and Edinburgh it's Parliament, but now King's Lynn has it's own modern architectural claim to fame.

For now we are officially home to Britain's Best Car Park.

It beat out strong competition from Liverpool and Edinburgh to take the coveted number one spot in a poll of the UK's best parking locations. The judge, who is an expert in these matters having written two books on roundabouts, said: "When I saw the St James multi-storey car park in King's Lynn it was love at first sight."

I've made a pilgrimage to the new building myself a couple of weeks ago and I must admit it does have a spacious feel. You don't have to take any bumper-scraping sharp corners to navigate it, perhaps because the architects knew that most Norfolk cars are used to long straight country roads and not this new fangled "steering".

So I urge you, visit King's Lynn in 2006! You'll not find an amazing night-life, our culinary, shopping and cultural highlights are nothing to write home about, but at least you'll have somewhere nice to park.


Before it was famous. The car park being built, way back in May.

Transpocalypse in pictures

Train

I took this picture at the station platform just after waving goodbye to Jane. It's a long-ish exposure of a digital train information board.

Is it me, or does it look like a digital rendition of an old fashioned steam train? At full speed with a plume of 1's streaming out of it's stack.

It's probably just me!

It looks better in the large version, I think.

Heeeeeeeeeeere's Johnny!!! ... Edgar Hoover

John Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, probably wasn't a cross-dresser as rumours have suggested, but I've never let the truth get in the way of a good excuse for dressing up! So when I needed a costume for this weekend's fancy dress Halloween party (the theme being "Dead Famous") there was something about bringing old J. Edgar back from the dead that appealed!

And who's to say that if Zombie Hoover dug his way to the surface he wouldn't be dressed in a suit, tie, silk slip and fishnet stockings?



If that's whetted your appetite for back-from-the-dead fun, then check out this horrible lot...



In case you're thinking "hang on, a fancy dress party frequented by at least 5 trannies, and I'm not seeing too many ridiculously girly outfits. What gives Becky?"

Well, on the one hand I didn't want to be too obvious and just tranny-up as per usual, and on the other hand I still wanted to do something a bit tranny. In fact nearly all of the trannies there failed to girly-up!

Luckily Sophie was there to totally redress the balance!



You can check out the rest of my pics from the weekend here.

Not run of the mill

Warning, this posting contains scenes of extreme Englishness from the outset.

This autumn has turned out to be remarkably pleasant, with several warm and sunny weekends even into late October. Today we decided to make the most of yet another sunny day and headed out to a nearby water mill in Houghton, Cambridgeshire.



It's a beautiful place and I got some quite nice pics. Here's one of a rather time-worn fire escape...



And a close up of a adolescent cygnet who allowed me to get quite close before he went off in a strop (typical teenager).



Despite it being nearly November, there's still colour to be seen in nature...



After some mild exertion, a trip to a local pub for refeshment...



And just when you think things just can't possibly get more quintessentially English, you see a damp dog that's had a nice swim and is now a bit bored waiting while it's wellies-and-wax-jacketed owner tucks into a pub lunch.



Perfect! If you can take any more, I've posted some more pictures here. I'm off to heartily sing Jerusalem to myself in the bath.

All together now... AND DID THOSE FEEEEEEET...

Bex n' Jane

She's great in front of the camera too. :)

Think Pink

Jane and I went to Angelic at the Pink Punters on Saturday night. It was nice to get out and about again, for the first time in what seems like ages!

I think I was the pinkest punter there. ;-)

I think someone mentioned the other day that I'd not taken any pics of me with my new camera yet. Consider that remedied, thank to a potential future David Bailey of the tranny world, Jane! She even remembers to get the feet in!

It's my blog...

...and if I want to post superfluous pictures of me I will!

I could say that I had to do it to test my Flickr blogging interface but that would be a lie. :-D

The big picture

One of the reasons I started re-formatting my blog layout was I wanted more room in the middle column for decent-sized photos.

Like this one, from a set I recently uploaded. I was going through my cyber-shoebox of old photos and found some really great ones that I'd not yet put on Flickr. Hell, I'm paying for Pro, might as well use it! :-)

Flickr's default size is 500 wide, which necessitated re-sizing the whole blog up to 1024 wide. Which might piss off the 3% of my readers who use 800x600 screens. But I always hated those guys anyway. They smell.

Mystery Mosaic

This took a lot more work that you might think! :-)

Maids

Ooh, while I was fishing that bib picture off that camera I discovered that I had taken a few pictures at Reparty after all!

Enjoy!

Manchester Pride

I promised to blog a bit about Manc Pride, so here goes.

Manchester Pride was very very busy.

The end.

Okay... a little more. We set off for Manchester on Saturday Lunchtime. We queued through the roadworks on the M6. We queued in the traffic jam snaking it's way through the city centre. We queued to turn our tickets into wrist-bands to get into the cordoned-off areas of pride. We queued to get down a heaving Canal Street. We queued to buy drinks. We wandered around and saw some of the sights until we got bored and headed back to the hotel to relax before heading out again for the evening.

The evening was like the day, but with more queuing.

It was too busy. It was about 45 minutes before I managed to get a drink, in the upstairs bar of AXN, which for some reason seemed to have decided it was going to be a quiet night and only put on 2 bar staff. Everywhere else was the same. All the outdoor entertainment stopped at 11pm, which caused the bars to fill up with even more people looking for entertainment.

Eventually we found sanctuary on the boat-bar outside Eden, and the evening started to look up. After a few drinks and a relaxing time there we elected to head back to the hotel bar, where drinks weren't cheap but were rapidly forthcoming. It was Summer's first night out en-femme, and her first experience of the GLBT community, which was a bit of a shame, as it left her and her wife with the impression that "gay nightlife = queuing". But they say they had fun!

We headed back into the gay pride area on Sunday and had a much nicer time. Well, apart from the moment Jess and I suddenly shot 200 foot into the air suspended only by two thin bits of elastic...

At Jessica's

I'm still "on the road" as it were, staying at Jessica's apartment tonight after a two-day stint at Manchester Pride. It was a fun weekend, with a few negatives but mainly positives, I'll post a full report when I get back home. Also expect full details of "My Quest for the Perfect White Eyeshadow", "Summer's First Night Out", and "Me and Jessica Get Fired From a Catapult".

To answer the question from a couple of days ago about my definition "minor" shopping spree. Let me put it this way...

A second tornado hit Birmingham on Friday. Damage was extensive but localised to TK Maxx¹, Claire's Accessories², and the M.A.C. counter in Harvey Nicks³.

If you'd like to contribute to the Becky's Cashflow Emergency Relief Fund, please click on an advert on this page!

¹"£10 for a top? You can't afford not to buy 4!"
²"Ooooh... shiny things!!" Transvestite demonstrates the equivalent in taste and buying power of a whole classroom of 10 year old girls.
³"Ah, yes it it a little expensive Sir, perhaps Sir would like details of our indentured servitude plan?"

At the picnic

This little girl found a patch of mud at the festival and sat down to play with her pig.

Virtual Barcelona

I'm loving Google Earth. I was playing with it today and noticed that they'd added a high-detail map of Barcelona. In fact, it was good enough for me to virtually walk up to the fort on top of Montjuic and take this screenshot of the port below:



Compare it to this real photograph I took earlier this year:



The shapes are flattened, but it's obviously the same place. Incredible!

Xtreme Transvestism

Trust Siobhan! When Joanna set up the Extreme Crossdressing group on Flickr, it must have set the wheels turning in her mind.

I wondered why she was taking a wedding dress to the wilds of Scotland!

Bravo hon! You knocked it out of the park!:)

I dare say she'll write up the full story on her blog before long.

Fairy

Jessica did a bit of photoshop work on her own picture. Love it!

Pining for Ireland

I'm on a bit of a flickr kick at the moment and decided to upload a few of my older pics to the site.

I've just been going though some I took during a holiday to southern Ireland and it's made me really want to go back soon!

Look into my eyes...

For some reason I really love my expression in this picture. It's kind of confident yet enigmatic, with a "knowing smile".

Cottingley

...geddit?

Trannies

There are a lot more new pics on my Flickr Photostream.

Sophie, Jessica and Me

Jessica was trying out a fantastic outfit she's planning to wear for Manchester Pride.

Feeling Cute

Becky with Disco Ball

I went to Sophie's at the weekend, and had plenty of time to faff about with a camera before a barbeque on the Saturday evening. Here are some of my fave pics.

Riding the rides at Pride

Joanna's set up a Flickr group for pictures of "exteme crossdressing". That's not cross-dressing in an extreme fashion, but being cross-dressed in an extreme location.

I thought it was a fun idea so I just uploaded this pic to help kick it off.

That was taken at last year's Manchester Pride, which was a great day out. Plans are afoot to go back this year too!

Sophie Get Your Gun

Sophie went to a fancy dress party last weekend as a "saloon girl". I think this picture is what Eddie Izzard was thinking of when he called himself an "Action Transvestite"!

My face - a critique

I went out last night as Becky, on my own to the Loft nightclub in Norwich. Before I left I took a few pics of myself, including this one with makeup but sans wig.

I always enjoy putting on makeup, not only because it's what helps create the illusion of "Becky", but also the very process of "doing my face" can give me a frisson of that elusive feeling of femininity that trannies seek.

I also own loads of cosmetics. I like buying it, I like the smells and the colours. The exotic names and over-blown descriptions. I like shopping for makeup in the same way other girls might love shopping for shoes.

Except that, it's not a girl thing really, it's very much a boy thing. I collect makeup. I horde cosmetics paraphernalia. The two-stage mascaras and the automatic tweezers and the make-up mirrors with built-in lights. Although they're all ostensibly feminine items, it's a still very masculine trait. No different from my dad's shed-full of tools and gadgets for DIY and gardening. Some may never get used, but they're all the best you can buy. My dad has a Swiss Army knife which is as wide as it is long, with every tool you could possibly imagine. There's some tools on that knife he's never going to use. There's some nail varnishes in my case I'm never going to open.

I used to only experiment with makeup when I at home and there wasn't an urgent need to get ready, but now I'm confident enough to play around a bit even if I need to be out the door in two hours. I normally do give myself a full two hours to go from boy to girl. I could probably do it in half an hour, if pressed, but as I said earlier the act of getting ready is part of the evening for me. "Becky" time starts the moment the tweezer plucks an eyebrow hair.

Also, that time in front of the mirror is when I'm looking the best I'll look all evening. The foundation is free from a sheen of sweat, and my look is neither hidden by dim club lighting or washed out by harsh flash photography. The high-point of many an evening is when I put on the wig, take a critical look at myself in the mirror and realise... I look gooood!

Sometimes everything falls into place, the eyeliner goes on straight and my hand doesn't involuntary spasm the moment I hold a mascara brush to my eye. Other times, for no reason I've been able to figure, it just feels wrong no matter what I do. I sit in front of the mirror at the end of it all and see a man wearing makeup and a wig.

Trannies are their own worst critics. This is partly, I think, due to the fact is we've seen the man behind the makeup every day of our lives in the mirror. We know every inch of his face. Whereas a stranger might see a girl's face that looks a bit masculine, we see a man we know very well, who just happens wearing makeup.

Last night was between the two. I thought I looked pretty good, but there were several things I didn't like. Some are unavoidable without cosmetic surgery, others to do with my less-than-perfect skills with makeup. In Flickr I've annotated a load of notes to the full-sized version of the picture above, to try and give you some idea of the thoughts that went through my head as I stared vainly into my Revlon makeup mirror last night.

The Girls Out in Barcelona

And one more tranny pic before I go to bed. This was taken when we finally all got dressed-up at the same time and headed to Club Metro for the second time. Shannon will hate me for posting this one with her completely failing to strike a pose, but as she looks fantastic in nearly every other picture I've taken, and this was one of the few pics from that night where I looked good, I'm posting it anyway!

Toy Armies

One of my favorite pictures of the whole holiday, for some reason. We were in this little shop that sold ceramics, and these little tiny figurines representing different professions. All laid out like army regiments on parade.

Sagrada Familia Door

Detail from the huge doors on one side for the Sagrada Familia. It's covered with words of faith, some highlighted in gold. And look... tucked away on one side...