Faithless Bodies

One of the things that really hurts about negative portrayals of trans people, particularly those that are made in the name of lowest common denominator 'humour' or just plain old mean-spiritedness, is that they're something we have to deal with on top of the problems the trans experience brings with it already. Two links I've seen recently have really brought this home to me again, in a way that moved me and made me think a lot about my relationship to my body.

The first was CN Lester's heartbreaking post about the relationship which s/he, as a trans singer, has with hir own body. As a classically trained singer, Lester finds hirself in a position where s/he feels s/he cannot take testosterone due to the effects it would have on hir vocal range. As a result, s/he finds hirself estranged from hir body, regarding it, well, as an 'it', an entity separate from hir self, an entity s/he has to work and negotiate with to achieve her ends. I've had this experience as well: the constant little ways in which my body won't do what I want it to; the moments when I think, no, that isn't me, that doesn't look like me, do I look like that? And the pain that brings.

The only way to stop that pain is to try and take measures to make your body align more with your sense of self. For example, recently, after deciding I'd finally had enough of the constant nightmare shaving was for me, I opted to start undergoing laser treatment to permanently remove my facial hair. And that has been great: I already have less of a five o'clock shadow after just one session. I would recommend it to anyone.

But when you're young, you have fewer tools available to you, and you can use less healthy methods to try and express the gender you feel. I was reminded of that by a line in another post about trans issues I read this weekend, on Questioning Transphobia:

'For example, I have seen several cis women assume that trans girls as children and teenagers interacted with images of the beauty ideal (models on magazine covers, for example) just like cis boys do, and don’t realize that this ideal really does have an impact on us and on our self-image, and that combined with body/gender dysphoria is one of the many reasons we can be suicidal. I know multiple trans women who pre-transition developed eating disorders in hopes of developing a more female appearance.'

The emphasis there is mine, and the reason is that that was my experience as a teenager. During my late teens, I became anorexic and bulimic (yes, I know you wouldn't think it to look at me now, thank you...) and that eating disorder was intimately related to my gender issues. I used to look at pictures of girls in 'lad-mags' and the third page of the Daily Star (I know, I know...) and note the way their hips jutted out at an angle...then I would feel my own hipbone, rubbing my hand on it and trying to decide if it was as visible as theirs. I used to watch Gladiators on a Saturday night and obsessively compare my weight to that of the female stars. I was overjoyed, once, to find that I weighed less than Panther and Lightning; though I never managed to get to the point where I was lighter than Jet or Nightshade. Probably just as well; getting down to their weight would've killed me.

What does all this have to do with stuff like transphobic comedians and conferences, you might ask? Well, it's simple enough: this pain is what we are already dealing with. We don't need anymore. Some of you may be aware of a meme doing the rounds on Tumblr about bullying, the essence of which is that people who get mocked for their supposed 'imperfections' are often struggling with things which their tormentors can't conceive of. As trans people we struggle with mental health issues, addictions, eating disorders, and all manner of troubles as a result of the dysphoria between the gender assigned to us by society and that which we feel ourselves to be. So having people drag up as caricatures of ourselves to get cheap laughs, or writing newspaper articles which call into question our bodily integrity - our right to bring our bodies closer to our selves - really does not help.

I want to end this post with two things. The first is Criminally Fragile, a poem I wrote last year which represented a real breakthrough for me, as the first time I'd been able to write something which worked about where my head was at during those mixed-up teenage years, and which is one of the poems I've written about of which I'm most proud; and, secondly, a song which got me through that dark period, and which I was reminded of today, reading CN Lester's link: 'Salva Mea', by Faithless.

How can I change the world, when I can't even change myself? I plan on doing both, to be honest. I do what I do in the hope that, in the future, some young trans kid like me won't have to worry about changing the world on top of everything else.

Back

It's two in the morning and I'm awake. Don't rush to comfort me. This is actually a good thing.

It's a good thing because the reason I'm awake is a burning need to write. To get something down. To express something I haven't felt in a long time. Anger. And that I feel angry is a good thing, because for far too long I've felt, if not exactly depressed, then certainly worn-out. Beaten down. Burnt out.

It started with a little local difficulty at work. I won't go into details here - this blog has always prided itself on being as unspecific as possible about where I toil to earn my handful of scraps from the capitalist table. Confidentiality is one reason for this, but another, very important reason, is universality. I believe the problems I encounter at work - the problems most of us encounter in the warped work culture of the kyriarchy - are pretty much the same anywhere. When I blog about some aspect of work, it isn't because I want to have a dig at a particular employer: it's because I'm painfully aware that the issues I deal with at work are the same or very similar to the issues others deal with. It's an entire culture we're dealing with, a sickness that has metastasized through the entire body politic: and I need to describe the symptoms of that sickness in a way that's as depersonalised as possible. It can never be fully depersonalised, because suffering under such a sick system wounds me, as it wounds so many others, as it causes such a terrible psychic cost to our society as a whole; but adopting a 'no names, no pack drill' position allows me to sidestep the accusations of sour grapes that would doubtless be forthcoming if I were to get more specific, while at the same time allowing what I say to resonate with others. And the fact that it does resonate - that the responses I get when I write a poem like, say, Employer of the Year or Collude to Exclude, are expressions of weary familiarity rather than shocked incomprehension - rather suggests that this is a universal experience I'm writing about. Yemaya knows I wish it wasn't.

So, reader, you will understand why I don't wish to dwell on the problems at work that started off my downturn. After a certain point they became immaterial anyway. If it wasn't work it might well have been something else: certainly the kyriarchy showed no inclination to soften up during my own period of relative inactivity. Trans women were still being murdered, and misgendered in newspaper headlines. Disabled people were still subject to the vilest witch-hunt we've seen in politics in recent times. The Coalition still seemed hell-bent on turning Britain into a third-world nation to satisfy their big financial backers. All was fucked, all was fucked, and all manner of things would be fucked. But I lacked the anger to effectively deal with this. I was, as I say, burnt out. Like many of us from time to time, I felt as if I was repeating the same things over and over, banging my head against a wall and achieving nothing beyond throwing up the tiniest scattering of brick-dust and giving myself a concussion.

In that kind of headspace it can be hard to see the signs of hope. I saw the news finally start paying attention to groups like UK Uncut and The Broken of Britain; I saw Transmediawatch make progress signing media organisations up to a Memorandum of Understanding about trans representation; I watched as the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya did the impossible and stood up to their oppressive, western-backed elites. Intellectually, I could see that progress was being made; emotionally, it failed to register. I would see a story and think 'I should blog about that' or 'there might be a poem to be made about this' but beyond a sluggish recognition of that fact, I couldn't stir myself much further. Just this week, for example, I found myself moved by the plight of Rebekah Brewis, a trans woman being brutally treated by the Oregon authorities, whose case I learned about on the eve of International Women's Day, of all times, and thought that here was something I needed to speak out about, and here was a time when it mattered to say such things. But it didn't happen because, still, I lacked the fire.

To be fair, I was partly to blame for this lack. I had planned, during my week off in January, to take some time to simply relax. However, the discovery of a cheap rail ticket offer in a local paper set me off planning to do a gig in London, and then - since I had the week off - to do a bunch of other gigs elsewhere to take advantage of the situation. At a time when I should have been replenishing my strength, I pushed myself to my final reserves, desperate not to waste time, to get out there and get my message heard. And I'm glad I did, because I enjoyed those gigs and, without going to London, I'd never have encountered the brilliant work of Anna Chen, but the net result of all that gigging, all those late nights and long train rides, was that when I returned to my day job I was running on less than empty. I needed time out. I needed space to think. I needed to sleep in late and spend whole days doing nothing more strenuous than taking a shower and putting a DVD in the machine. I needed to fucking relax.

Fortunately, this past week, I've had that time. Another week off work coincided with a friend being away for a week and needing someone to look after her cats. This gave me the opportunity to take time off away from work, away from my parents and - because I couldn't travel - away from gigging. It was, in fact, a way to force myself to relax. I could go out during the day - and I have, to attend a fantastic gig by local women poets for International Women's Day, and to check out the John Martin exhibition at the Laing Art Gallery, to acquire nice things using a money-off voucher for the Body Shop and to mark what seem the first tentative stirrings of spring by buying and drinking my first bottle of Rose of the year - but I had to be in by the evening to feed the kittehs. Wild nights were out of the question.

So, for a week, I've been forced to chill. And, tonight, my friend came back. And, lying in bed, I found myself turning things over in my head. Thinking about things like the March for the Alternative later this month. Thinking about what I'd say at the gigs I have lined up next month, when I'll have longer sets to work with and more time to make my points. Thinking about the government, reflecting on stories my friend had told me from the union conference she'd been on, pondering cases like that of Rebekah Brewis, mentioned above, and the shameful reporting of the changes to clothing regulations for trans women that I've seen in the papers this week, and the efforts I've made, and continue to make, to shift my own gender presentation to an identity with which I feel more comfortable, and the microaggressions (and, lets be frank, risk of macro-aggressions) I have to deal with as a result.

And suddenly I didn't feel burned-out. I didn't feel beaten-down. I didn't feel tired and weak and useless. I didn't feel spent. I felt a whirl of emotions racing through my brain. I felt a desire to engage with those emotions properly again. I felt my fingers twitch to touch the keyboard. I felt my synapses trying on sentences for size. I felt - for the first time in months - angry. And anger, as John Lydon once pointed out, is an energy.

So. I am angry. I am shouty. I am ranty. And I am going to be ranting about a lot more things on here in the weeks and months to come. If you're reading this and you like that - and I'm going to assume, if you've been reading this for a while, that you do - I'd like to bid you hello again. If you're new to this blog, I'd just like to bid you hello. And if you don't like the thought of being ranted at by an angry, poor, left-of-centre trans poet? Well, you could probably stand to learn the most of anyone from this blog but, y'know, if the thought of acknowledging the opinion of someone who lacks your privilege really makes your guts churn and your eyes bleed? The back button is your friend, chum. Jog right on.

KSM Exit 75, drinking, vagrancy, and visiting That London

Still alive. Still here. Just. Mum got ill again, and family drama led to me spending a rather fraught and self-pitying night at the Angel View Inn, Gateshead (nice place, lovely staff, great food, but given the circs a place I never want to go to again), then decamping, after a long day of literally bumming around Newcastle, back to Michelle's place. I'm getting kind of sick of all this to-ing and fro-ing, though, so today I did something I've been meaning to get around to for ages: I got a form from the local Housing Office, to register my interest in moving into what we used to call a council house before corporations like Gentoo got in on the act. Soon, perhaps, you will experience me blogging from the freezing cold of my own personal Bedsit Hell. Exciting!

It's not all Morrissey-esque misery, though. After my day of experimental homelessness in the Toon, I went to the long-awaited Borders reunion drinking session at Tilly's theatre bar. A fine night in a fine venue and, after we decamped to the equally fine Bodega, a great deal of fantastic conversation was had on topics as diverse as the foibles of customers, the most disgusting things found behind bookshelves, and my role, as head of the Psychology & Social Sciences section (incorporating Erotica & Sexuality) as the Pornographer of Gateshead. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...so that was a ray of sunshine in an otherwise depressing weekend.

Another ray of sunshine is my upcoming visit to That London to do some poetry gigs, which is happening next week. I'll be reading at RAW Poetry in King's Cross on Monday the 4th; Poetry Unplugged at Covent Garden's Poetry Cafe on Tuesday the 5th; then it's up to Hebden Bridge for Write Out Loud's own 'read-around' session on Wednesday the 6th, before finishing up in Middlesbrough for the Black Light Engine Room's National Poetry Day extravaganza. It's a tornado of troubadouring which I'm privately referring to as the Cheap Date Poetry Tour, largely due to the fact that I am having to do it on as close to no budget as possible (and the fact that I will sleep with  random members of the audience in return for a drink, obviously). And after which I will probably sleep right through for the remaining three days of my officially-sanctioned week's holiday...

Hot Sex Action (there isn't any)

It snuck up on me this morning that it's over a year since my wife and I split up. It then occurred to me that it's been even longer since the last time I had sex with anyone. Which is, y'know, kind of a shame because, to be honest, I'm pretty sure that last time is going to turn out to be, well, the last time.

I know it sounds slightly mawkish to say so here (and in fact I had been toying with submitting this to Arwyn's series Naked Pictures of Faceless People over at Raising My Boychick until I thought no, sod it), but I've been feeling increasingly that I'm fundamentally not ready for a relationship with someone else that goes beyond friendship (although to be honest, when you don't conform to normal gender standards, have a bad case of social phobia and tend towards bouts of misery if not abject depression, just making friends on its own is hard enough). A serious relationship would entail entirely too much. Too much opening up, too much letting people in, too much exposing the vulnerable parts of myself to someone while giving them the kind of access that means they can really, really hurt you.

It's ironic that the prospect of opening up in this area should be so frightening, because I'm only beginning to get used to how liberating it is in my writing. As I've written recently, it's only at the last couple of gigs I've done that I've started to do some of the poems I've written, but always feared to read. And I've found that to be an incredibly powerful experience: it makes me feel more honest as a writer and, strangely, more connected with my audience - probably because they get to see the real me, rather than the front I put on for so many years. It feels good to tell the truth in public.

But as liberating as that can be, I worry that opening up in private will be too much of a high-stakes gamble. On the page, on a stage, there are rules and limitations. If it's just you and someone else, alone...No. Too much risk. And too many practicalities to be negotiated. It sometimes seems to me that explaining to someone what I want out of a sexual relationship would simply take too much bloody time to explain. Heck, some days (this is one of them: can you tell?) I'm not even sure I can explain it to myself. Factor in a similar amount of time coming to understand what a partner wants, where their lines of desire intersect with mine, and what things to keep off-limits...who needs all that meshugah?

And so you get used to it: the terror of potentially romantic interaction; the pain of seeing people that you think you'd be so right with when you know that in all probability you're wrong, and that's a mistake you can't afford; the fact that you will spend your life watching other people enjoy a happiness you'll never feel again. You get used to it, and you hope that one day you can even make your peace with it, and you work as hard as you damn well can on making sure you never let the experience turn you into some horrible, shrivelled up old puritan arsehole who hates the thought of anybody having fun.

Oh, I don't know. In the grand scheme of things 'not being able to have the sex' doesn't really figure in the top 100 in a world where you can have your house blasted to shit by people who will then give you a pamphlet about Jebus; and it isn't as if there aren't many, many pleasures in life besides the old thirty seconds of squelching noises (I'm listening to one of the most orgasmic non-sex-related things I've ever experienced, John Adams' 'A Short Ride in a Fast Machine' even as I'm typing this). Besides, given the way my life keeps twisting itself into odd new shapes at the moment, for all we know next week will find me desperately trying to type out a blog entry using only my big toe, while being thrown brutally around some kind of sex-dungeon by a posse of Amazon Love Titans. Hope, as they say, springs eternal; though on the other hand, hope can be crueller than resignation. And , on that vaguely Soviet note, goodnight for now. My next blog entry will be more of the usual ranting, I'm sure. I just felt a need to get this off my chest. You can make up your own joke about me doing that in the absence of someone wanting to get on it.

'What goes up must come down, all that swims can also drown...'

And so to the Trent House, Newcastle, for my second appearance at Jibba Jabba, that bar's new spoken word night. Jibba Jabba is shaping up to be a good venue, attracting a decent crowd and striking a nice balance between newcomers and regular performers. I'm not sure which of those categories I fall into at the moment: I wasn't sure if  I was going to perform last night - having planned to go just to discuss dropping some books off for a charity regular JJ attendee Amina Marix Evans works with - but planned a set anyway just in case.

In the event this turned out to be a good strategy as I wound up performing third in the set. I like performing fairly early (for one thing it gives you the chance to relax with a couple of post-performance beverages instead of spending the whole night sober, jittery, and waiting to go on) but I worry about going on first - I'm not the most cheerful of poets, and I worry that sending me on to plough through my tragic tales of gender-incongruity might kill off the room. Equally, the last spot is tough, because you need to provide the exclamation mark to the evening. Inadvertently I wound up doing just that last week at Cellar Door in Durham, and, given that I was in a rage after the cisfail that had been waved in our faces earlier in the evening, it was a weird kind of ending. So it was nice to nestle comfortably in among everyone else's performances, where I could do my thing without too much worry.

I was still kind of worried though. Not only was I doing 'Criminally Fragile' for the second time ever, I also decided to challenge myself by reading 'NSFW' a sort of sister poem to Fragile which is about...well, it's about sex, and desire, and particularly the experience of having desires that are kind of kinky. I figure if I'm going to start performing stuff about my gender identity more openly, I may as well come out and admit to being a bit of a pervy little bitch as well.

Or at least that's what I told myself. I was still bricking it when I got up. Why not junk the planned set? Just do some funny, silly stuff, set people at their ease, don't take risks. On the other hand I'd pretty much outed myself, gig-wise, a week ago, so...

Reader, I read the kinky sex poem. I did the set exactly as planned. And I wasn't shunned or stoned or anathemised by papal decree. In fact, the poems seemed to go over quite well. It still took a while to decompress after coming off-stage (those post-gig drinks came in very handy) and making it back from the gig through the stag-and-hen apocalypse that is Newcastle on a Saturday night was the usual exercise in pure fucking terror, but overall it turned out to be a good night. Particularly because - once I was over my nerves - there were fine sets from Jake Campbell, Jeff Potts, Radikal Queen and many other excellent local poets to enjoy, plus excellent material from co-hosts Karl Thompson and especially Jenni Pascoe, who actually performed and compered in spite of having a bad attack of labyrinthitis.

So Jibba Jabba is shaping up to be a rather excellent night, even when I'm not airing my dirty lingerie in public. Do get along to the next event if you can. As to moi, it's looking like the next time I'm going to be getting my words out will be at the next of Steve Urwin's poetry slams at the Lamplight Arts Centre in Stanley, which won't be until the 21st of September. So in the meantime, fans of the pissed-off ranting which results from the usual blend of boredom and sheer teeth-grinding frustration with the kyriarchy which powers this  blog will, doubtless, have much to look forward to. As to what I have to look forward to...well, I'm wondering about that more and more. But that's another entry, for another day.

Bodies of Trust

I've been ill for the past two weeks, which is why my blogging has been minimal. The illness I've been dealing with was an infection. To be more specific, it was a gigantic boil on that area of my body which, in 'street' lingo is called 'the taint.' Said boil swelled up until it became painful for me to do, well, anything, really: I was given antibiotics and told to go away, then, when those antibiotics ran out, I was given more of the same, told the thing looked ready to burst but not yet ready to be surgically excised, and told to give it three days and, if the thing hadn't burst, to go to A&E and demand an excision.

It finally burst on Wednesday evening. And it was foul. Blood and pus and internal gunk completely destroyed my pants. It's been leaking out, at a steadily-slowing rate, since that night, though I've been minimising the effect on my underwear by inserting wadded-up kitchen roll between the draining infection and the cloth, and I've been taking extremely frequent showers to keep the area as clean as I can.

None of this is the worst of it, though. The worst bit was having to phone work and ring in sick. Because as soon as I had to do that - even though there was no way I was going to be able to get to work, even though the gunk was still staining my pants as I picked up the phone - I was a schoolkid again, telling the teacher I didn't feel too good and would like to be sent home, and afraid that I might be told not to be stupid and to go back to my seat. So there was this fear of being told I wasn't ill; but there was also this fear that if someone said I wasn't ill enough to stay off then maybe I wasn't, really. Despite all the evidence of my senses, the guilt over asking for time off because my body had failed and the fear that maybe I wasn't qualified to interpret those signals of failure had my stomach doing somersaults. They scarcely calmed down even after my team leader had told me that yes, they'd seen how much pain I was in on Wednesday, they understood, it was fine etc. Where does all this guilt and fear come from?

Well, to put it pretty bluntly - it's the kyriarchy, stupid. Or to be more specific, it goes back to an experience I'm sure most of us had as kids, which functions to keep us scared of and alienated from our bodies. Here's (one of) my version(s) of the experience, you probably have your own.

I'm at school, in a maths lesson. My stomach is feeling bad and I feel dizzy. I make my way, tentatively, to the front of the class and explain this to the teacher. 'Nonsense,' she barks, 'you're not ill at all. Sit down and get back to work.'

I'm sure that's happened to you countless times at school. It happened to me too. And sometimes, sure, I was trying it on. But there were a lot of occassions when I did feel ill, genuinely, but was told by an authority figure that I didn't. What effect does that have, cumulatively, over time? And what does this have to do with the kyriarchy?

Well, one of the ways the kyriarchy controls people is by estranging us from our bodies. If you want an example, consider how you probably felt reading the start of this blog. You probably felt a little disgusted, a little embarassed, and had a strong sense that these are not the kind of things we should be talking about. But why? Illness is a natural part of bodily experience, even illnesses which occur in 'personal' areas.  I'm not saying it's A-OK to have a giant pulsating pustule on your perineum (clearly it isn't, which is why I went to the doctor as soon as I found it, and why you should do the same should it happen to you), I'm just saying it falls within the normal gamut of human bodily experience.

The thing is, from an early age we're conditioned not to regard our bodies as normal or, rather, we aren't allowed the authority to define what is normal for our bodies. Right around the time I was learning that my maths teacher knew better than me what my state of health was, I was also going through puberty, and growing hairs on parts of my body which had previously been hairless. And I hated it. So I tried to fight back, at first by trying to cut the hairs back with scissors and, years later - when I looked old enough to smoke - burning the hairs away with a cigarette lighter. It never occurred to me that I could just get rid of the hair by, y'know, shaving - because shaving your body hair wasn't a man thing. Women shaved their legs, men didn't. Male bodies were hairy, womens' bodies were smooth. I surrendered my bodily autonomy to the gender police, and resigned myself to years of looking like George 'The Animal' Steele's gay cousin.

Of course around about the same time a lot of girls at school were facing up to exactly the opposite problem: the constant pressure to keep every inch of their bodies hair-free, and to stay thin, and to be desirable objects to the boys around them. All of us were learning that we didn't actually have any authority over our own bodies, that our experience of those bodies would be dictated by other people: teachers, fashion experts, diet gurus, athletes, magazine editors, TV stars and, perhaps most horribly of all, our own peers. When you feel like that, you can go a little crazy. I know I did. I developed anorexia in my late teens, and spent years struggling to develop a normal relationship with food. I can't help but wonder how many other people I was at school with went through similar issues. I knew a lot of people who were self-mutilating, in  one way or another. I can't speak for all those people, but I can speak for myself when I say that a lot of my problems stemmed from a feeling that the body I had, in some way, did not measure up to a thousand impossible standards.

The last paragraph of any piece like this is supposed to be the inspiring bit. This is supposed to be the bit about how I finally wrestled my bodily autonomy away from every other fucker who tried to limit it and became comfortable in my own skin. But, as my nervousness over speaking to my boss on the phone indicates, I'm not there yet. I'm getting there, though.

These days, I'm not anorexic. I'm also not as fat as I used to be either. I'm still quite fat, it's true; but I work out and I'm steadily getting fitter. I've lost a lot of weight in the course of the last year not through crash dieting, but by simply relating more normally to food, and to alcohol for that matter. I don't drink as much as I used to. And I don't think it's a coincidence that this new healthier lifestyle coincided with me deciding to finally do something about my body hair. Nowadays, I shave (and occassionally use creams) to get rid of the mat of black fur on my arms, chest and legs, and I feel better for it. I have accepted that I like to do a lot of other non-boy things with my appearance: I wear make-up (well, nail polish mainly, and occassionally mascara), I use feminine body language, I accessorise somewhat more freely than the average XY-person my age. I've accepted that while I don't necessarily want to have an actually female body, I like to be as femme as I can get away with, and I'm okay with that.

And yet...every single day, I still come up against the idea that I shouldn't do this. That I don't have a right to decide what to do with my body. I worry that people will think I look stupid, that people might be offended, that people might laugh. I worry that people will think that because I'm such a girl,  I automatically don't deserve to be taken seriously, that the vast reserves of knowledge and education I've accumulated will be rendered null-and-void because I choose to wear pink, flower-pattern arm-warmers rather than a tweed jacket. I worry that people will think that, just because I'm frivolous, they don't have to take me seriously. 

I worry. And then I do it anyway. Because I know that, even if I can't yet shut up the maths teacher in my head, every time I allow myself to deal with my body on my terms, her voice gets quieter and quieter and quieter...

And maybe one day, I won't hear that voice at all.

I don't wanna holiday in the sun

I've began thinking about something I haven't done in quite a while, and that's taking a holiday. Going off somewhere for a couple of days to...well, I dunno really. Check things out. Soak up a different atmosphere. Be somewhere else. For a long time I've held off on this idea on the grounds that, wherever I go, I'll still be me. I'll still be alone and I'll still be a miserable git. But, there again, it occurs to me that there might at least be some sense of variety in being a miserable git in, say, Edinburgh or Manchester, rather than Newcastle. If nothing else I'll get the chance to feel lonely in different cafes and pubs.

Where to go, though? This is the question. It's probably best not to go somewhere I've been with my ex-wife recently: that leaves out London and York, say...and especially Paris, where we spent a truly wonderful holiday. Ditto Liverpool, though our visit there - a one-night stay for a gig I did at the City Library - can't really be called a holiday. All the places we went to for NASUWT conferences: Brighton, Birmingham and Bournemouth, are out too.

Trying to think of other places to go makes me realise that, of the many places in Britain I have been to without Michelle, many of them I haven't been to in years. Manchester I haven't been to since 2000. Edinburgh I haven't been to since 2003. Leeds I visited once, for a gig, in 2004, but haven't since. That's six years at the least - those places have probably changed immeasurably in that time. Is Affleck's Palace still there? Does Edinburgh still only have four fucking taxi ranks in the entire city? Does Leeds, while pleasant enough by day, still transform into a city-sized recreation of Newcastle's infamous Bigg Market come the night-time? Who knows?

And this is leaving out everywhere in Britain I haven't been. I've never been to Cornwall - though that's probably too far away for a weekend. I haven't been to Carlisle either, though. I haven friends who go to the Lakes on a regular basis, but I myself haven't been there since 1994, for Coleridge's sake. Speaking of literary locations, I haven't even been to Hull. Surely I should go there at least once, to see if it really is that bad?

Maybe big cities aren't the way to go. The way the holiday situation is set-up in my current workplace, all the summer weeks have been booked by the people with kids, to coincide with the school holidays. So I'm going to have to just skoosh off somewhere for a weekend. And, on weekends, most UK cities tend to be filled with heid-the-balls looking for a fuck or a fight, and I have no intention of providing them with either. Maybe I should go somewhere rural. Stay in a B&B (assuming, pace Chris Grayling, that one will have me) in some quiet little village, potter about, visit an old church and the local second-hand bookshop, watch the ducks on the pond...then go completely bugfuck around about four on the Saturday afternoon and slaughter the entire population. No, rural life is not entirely suited to me either. I need a lot of stimulation.

Added to all this is my hatred of the pointless, the random, the unscheduled. If I'm going to go somewhere, I like to be doing something, even if it's just visiting a friend. I like a trip to have a sense of mission, a purpose. This is why I like travelling to gigs so much: you get to go somewhere and do something, then you can knock off and relax. But going somewhere to relax seems kind of odd.

Relax I must though, I think. It's been a hard time lately, what with the demise of the bookshop, a month of unemployment (which, even for someone as well-supported as I, is not the cushy number Ian Duncan Smug seems to think it is), followed by settling into a new job and then being blindsided by the news of Michelle's breast cancer...It would be nice to come into work on Friday with a backpack of travelling gear, clock off at five, take a train somewhere, stow my goods in a hotel, then be somewhere different for Saturday, and have a late return home on sunday evening. Get away from it all, or at least as much as I can, for two nights at least.

But still I find myself thinking...where?

Life During Wartime

I'm posting this from the house of my wife, Michelle. I'm staying here at the moment for complicated reasons involving family. Put very simply, my mother, who suffers from a chronic skin condition, and an iatrogenic stomach condition which occurred as a result of a very misguided attempt on the part of one medic to fix said skin condition, had a severe attack of pain on Thursday night, and had to be taken to hospital. My father reacted in the usual way he does to things like this, by being a dick and trying to find some way to blame me for the situation. This is the kind of shit he's pulled since I was a kid. As a 32-year-old human being, I can't be arsed putting up with it, so I packed a couple of bags, headed over to Michelle's and have stayed here since.

Of course, Michelle and I are in the process of getting divorced, so I'm sleeping on the couch, when I sleep at all, which is not enough: I spent all of Thursday night awake and am still groggy from the sleep deprivation. It looks as if, as things stand, many plans are up in the air, but I want to stick to as much as I can: I still have the BPS forms to get filled in, and my writing I can get on with anywhere: I took my laptop with me, though haven't set it up on the broadband here yet, but I have it available to write on, and my poems all filed therein. In an odd way, that's a comfort.

I want to get on with writing. I want to get my BPS membership sorted out, and start moving towards doing something worthwhile in psychology. And I want to sort out getting a place of my own somehow, something I should have done back when, but things kept getting in the way. At this point I'm even considering a council place, something I previously wouldn't have done, but my priorities have changed. I want independence.

Most of all, though, I want my mum to get better.