(no subject)

I have a wretched summer cold and my head hurts much of the time - not so much in a headache way more in a if I move the wrong way all the cottonwool will fall out and my brain will be empty instead of stuffed way. It doesn't help that my sugar is all over the place, seemingly as the result of the cold/virus/lurgy thingy - some of the highest readings I have ever had one day and the next back into my normal range.

That was what I wrote a day or two ago and actually the cottonwool has largely gone. Friday evening I met up with Cheryl and with fjm for tea and then had dinner with Polly and Lisa and that was all very pleasant. Yesterday I woke up with no voice, a state which continues - I can manage a tiny squeak. I am better in myself as the expression goes - physically tired but more mentally alert, though not enough to want to get back to writing past a cursory note here. On the other hand, my sugar is trending downwards, which is good.

Normal service, and post on pilots, in a day or two...

And still a little better

Good supper always improves the way I feel about my health and the world.

We ate grilled lamb steaks last night - charred rosemary on grill, roast potatoes and carrots, steamed cabbage finished in oil with whole cumin - which means that we will be eating veggies most of the week. It was very hot today so it became a salads day and since I was in the mood I actually went for a little bit of fancy-schmancy. Chopped mango, mint, spring onions in quinoa with a lemon and brazil oil dressing; steamed new beetroot with cress, chopped chicory and chopped almonds in a yoghurt and tarragon dressing (dried because too hot to walk to the shop); steamed beans added to a stewed tomato, onion, garlic and basil base; fresh celeriac grated into lo-fat mayo. The basil and mint were home-grown.

That was all totally yummy.

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An odd thing happened this week which is that I got an e-mail from Geoff H who was my English teacher at school when I was 17 and he was about 22 and have not heard from since. One odd aspect of this is the fact that he turns out to be doing translations from the Spanish for a publisher I read for - small world.

The odder thing is this = he read my Potter review in the TLS and suddenly guessed that I was the same person as the boy he once knew. He was able to check that guess quite quickly on the internet, of course, but it is interesting that he made that conceptual leap. Kaveney is a rareish surname, of course, but even so.

It's not the first time - my friend J. was a civil service colleague a couple of years before I transitioned, but I never mentioned gender issues to her at the time.

Presumably this means that I was always somewhat camper or more femme than I realized in my desperate attempts to pass.

This in turn probably means that the chicken/egg issue about my trans-ness and the period of intense quasi-sexual bullying I described here can be sorted out. I was bullied for being girly as well as for being a Southerner and a year or so younger than a bunch of post-pubescent youths; I am right to regard what happened as having been sort of sexual.

Odd that these days people sometimes use me as an example of a transwoman who isn't interested in being feminine, or maybe not.

The other thing this means is that my parents must have known far more than they would ever admit and been in serious denial. This in turn explains how I got away with so much in the way of lies about where I was and what I was doing when I spent weekends hanging out with trans whores in Manchester and Bradford. If I sometimes romanticise the street, it is because the street looked after me; also because the street valued who I was. At the point when I was tempted to run away from home and school and transition, it was my friend/dragmother Sylvia who told me that my life would be easier with a degree and not to be silly.

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Am I being paranoid, or just noticing bi-invisibility a bit more? Recent interviews with Debby Harry in the Guardian and Angelina Jolie in the Obs that both talk as if they were and always had been utterly utterly straight.