good roads

Following on from a comment by Anji, I dug out this excerpt from Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, about being on the right road. Because it's the sort of thing that is cheerful making.

The dawn was contagious, spreading rapidly about the heavens. Birds were stirring and the great kingly trees were being pleasingly interfered with by the first breezes. My heart was happy and full of zest for high adventure. As I walked down the road I was pleased enough with everything.

The road was narrow, white, old, hard and scarred with shadow. It ran away westwards in the mist of the early morning, running cunningly through the little hills and going to some trouble to visit tiny tOwns which were not, strictly speaking, on its way. It was possibly one of the oldest roads in the world. I found it hard to think of a time when there was no road there because the trees and the tall hills and the fine views of bogland had been arranged by wise hands for the pleasing picture they made when looked at from the road. Without a road to have them looked at from they would have a somewhat aimless if not a futile aspect.

De Selby has some interesting things to say on the subject of roads.Roads he regards as the most ancient of human monuments, surpassing by many tens of centuries the oldest thing of stone that man has reared to mark his passing. The tread of time, he says, levelling all else, has beaten only to a more enduring hardness the pathways that have been made throughout the world. He mentions in passing a trick the Celts had in ancient times - that of 'throwing a calculation' upon a road. In those days wise men could tell to a nicety the dimension of a host which had passed by in the night by looking at their tracks with a certain eye and judging them by their perfection and imperfection, the way each footfall was interfered with by each that came after. In this way they could tell the number of men who had passed, whether they were with horse or heavy with shields and iron weapons, and how many chariots; thus they could say the number of men who should be sent after them to kill them. Elsewhere de Selby makes the point that a good road will have character and a certain air of destiny, an indefinable intimation that it is going somewhere, be it east or west, and not coming back from there. If you go with such a road, he thinks, it will give you pleasant travelling, fine sights at every corner and a gentle ease of peregrination that will persuade you that you are walking forever on falling ground. But if you go east on a road that is on its way west, you will marvel at the unfailing bleakness of every prospect and the great number of sore-footed inclines that confront you to make you tired. If a friendly road should lead you into a complicated city with nets of crooked streets and five hundred other roads leaving it for unknown destinations, your own road will always be discernible for its own self and will lead you safely out of the tangled town.

space cadet

There I go again, clocking up more motorway miles. Totting up the distance I've driven in the Traveller since I got it, I find that it's roughly the equivalent of going to Proxima Centauri, which is not too bad going, even if Proxima Centauri is about as near to the Earth as it's possible for a star to be. Unless it's the sun, of course.

There are other similarities to interstellar travelling, as well. Like that funny business with relativity, where when you come back from space you find that you've only aged a little bit but everyone else has got much older, or is now long dead. What with the needle on the Trav's Smiths speedometer rarely venturing above the 60 mark, I observe a similar effect when I get back from a trip to the Midlands, except that I've got older too.

What got me thinking about space travel was the stuff I was eating while driving on Friday night. I got some pasties before we set off, from Joe the Baker on the Gloucester Road. They were very nice, and sort of qualified as astronaut food in that they came in a sealed container, even if it was made of pastry. Of course, you can't suck up the contents through a straw, but hey. If I were an astronaut I think I'd like to have a stock of cornish pasties on board, for those moments when you're being attacked by the Mekon and you fancy a bit of comfort food..

Much more astronauty, I can't help feeling, and what got me thinking about this stuff, was the packets of crisps I bought at Hopwood Park service station. They were doing a special deal, two packets for a pound, and there were some interesting flavour options. (I like to push the culinary boat out now and then - I once bought a Full English Breakfast pizza at Tesco's. It had bangers on it, and bacon and egg, and beans, and it was just about as delicious as you can imagine.) So I had a packet of Fish and Chip flavoured crisps, and a packet of Cajun Squirrel flavour.

The fish and chip flavoured ones reminded me of Great Yarmouth, when I found myself there one rainy Easter. I was wandering around the industrial zone, past the abandoned Birds Eye factory, looking for the Nelson Monument. The tide was out, and there was that rich, fetid smell of damp and decay in the air. I wondered if the person who had mixed the artificial flavourings had ever been to Great Yarmouth when the tide was out. Whatever, it was inspired.

The cajun squirrel tasted like nothing I have ever tasted before. So it probably tasted like cajun squirrel. Not jambalay, crawfish pie or fillet gumbo. Cajun squirrel.



I did feel a bit ill by the end of it. But no-one ever said the life of an astronaut was all plain sailing.

face to face

Here's J's birthday party. Two of her daughters were there through the magic of Skype. So they had to supply their own slices of cake, as they're down in the far South West.

When I first had a place of my own (room in shared flat in Portsmouth, £7 a week) there was no phone in the house; there were phone boxes a few hundred yards in either direction, though. And hardly any of my friends had phones, so when I went off to sea I wrote letters and so did they. Once, the Christmas post missed me in Den Helder and chased me around the North Sea for a while, finally catching up with me in Aberdeen in April.

I'm slowly getting up to speed with social networking sites. I've recently reconnected with a bunch of chaps I worked with on Karen Bravo, a seismic survey ship, when I first ran away to sea. It's nice catching up with them again, and a feeling akin to re-entering the crew mess after being on leave for a few weeks; a casual but friendly greeting and an exchange of jokey pleasantries. But in this case the gap has been over twenty five years.

of course there were only black and white photographs in those days

There's a reunion being planned in the spring, so...

Meantime, as my Facebook friends list increases, I have started seeing postings on those friends' pages from people in my family whom I no longer have any contact with. In the welsh chapel sense, that is. (Old welsh joke; every village has to have two chapels; the one you go to, and the one you don't go to). So they and I comment without acknowledging each other. Funny business. I guess that in netiquette, blanking people is as unremarkable as the Big Casual.

lost in the kitchen

Piles of washing up
Overdue library books
This bloody milk's off

out at sea

Stormy old weather. I sat in the Downs cafe watching redwings pretending they didn't mind the hail that was hammering down and carpeting the grass around them.

I'm working through a bout of self-loathing. I handled the photo shop business badly, and should have just walked away. There are more important things in life to worry about. I can't trust my judgement as to whether the assistant was being snarky or just responding subconsciously; what my friend Suzanne describes as 'information'. The information in question being the way that I am perceived.

Walk on. Learn.

My New Year's reso (I don't do reso's, of course, but this year I am....) is to work assiduously on my voice until I am finally happy with it. Which means no longer being afraid to speak in case it 'outs' me, and not being 'sirred' on the phone.

Meantime, our Home Counties correspondent and mystery shopper (Hi, J!) tells me that Waterstones in Newbury have moved their copy of Becoming Drusilla back from Biography (whither she had relocated it) to the LGBT section. It is now sitting on a shelf next to an anthology of "BDSM Military Fantasies"...

Hmmm. Now wash your hands...

I was talking about Saturday night's storm with Geraldine. She recalled a Ted Hughes poem, which captures the feeling perfectly:

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet...

funny

Saturday was a day of dramatic weather; we headed north under an apocalyptic sky, which cleared to cloudless by Gloucester. And shortly after I got home in the evening, a storm hit Bristol and the house shook in the wind. I had to lash down the skylight to stop it blowing away.






Anyway... having dropped K off, I came down through Wales and took a walk around Newport with my camera. It is a very camera friendly place.














And I met my old friend Mark who runs a book stall in the market, and caught up with the news. And then bumped into a protest over the Israeli action in Gaza. It was good to see something happening in Newput more animated than booze and fags and junk food




...walking back to the car, which I'd parked in a bit of wasteland near the river, I was accosted by a bloke with a razored head. He bounded across the road to me, with one of those smiles that aren't really a smile, and said, "It's funny, isn't it?"

I looked blankly.

"It is funny though. You're always taking pictures of these arabs. What about the white people? The homeless white people who've been here all the time?"

This was some time after I'd left the demo. He had no reason to suppose that I had been taking photos of the demo, other than figuring that I looked the sort... must be doing something right then.

I gave him a smile-that-wasn't-a-smile and said nothing. And walked on.

male, female, e-mail

I was picking up some camera stuff from a local shop the other day and after I'd paid the assistant called me 'sir', twice. A small act of disrespect, I guess, but I didn't respond. These days my guard is down because I don't want to be constantly on the lookout for this sort of thing, because that's no way to live.

(At one time, I was constantly at the receiving end of nasty stuff, and it took a while to get over it; on the platform at Cardiff station a couple of years ago, a nice old lady stopped and said how much she liked my hat. I thanked her. She looked again;

"Are you a woman?" she asked

"Yes", I said; "Are you?"

She looked hurt. "Well, it's a nice hat, anyway", she said and walked on, and I wished the ground would swallow me up)

Still, the shop incident bugged me, and I figured if it bugged me then I should do something about it. So I sent an e-mail to the manager.

Dear......

I am a photographer and illustrator. So I buy things from camera shops sometimes. I am also a transsexual woman. This is not usually a fact that I broadcast, because it is not usually necessary. I get on with life, and life usually gets on with me these days. It wasn’t always that way; in the past, I’ve had some fairly serious grief from people, and dealt with it.

Nowadays I am more relaxed, and am not constantly on the lookout for insults. So when they happen, as every now and then they do, they take me by surprise.

On Wednesday afternoon I came into your shop and bought £40 worth of things for my D70. A fairly normal transaction, but when it was completed the assistant addressed me as ‘sir’, twice.

As you no doubt realise, good practice in retail is to address customers in a manner appropriate to the gender they present as. Gender neutral language is always a simple option too. Calling me ‘sir’ is a sure fire way of guaranteeing that I shall take my custom elsewhere.

I wish I had confronted the assistant directly, but, as I say, I was rather taken aback. So now I write to you instead.

Yours sincerely,

Ms Dru Marland

...and he replied:

Dear Drusilla,

I have spoken to the member of staff who served you on this day, and he has assured me that at no time does he recall referring to you as 'sir'. He has always been a polite and cordial member of staff, and I have no reason to doubt his integrity on this matter. I apologise wholeheartedly for any misunderstanding that has arisen, and I hope you can accept that there has been no malice of forethought. ... I sincerely hope you continue to shop here as I assure you that we always try to treat our customers with the utmost politeness and respect.

Hmm. Well, I guess the lesson learned is to respond immediately when this stuff happens. Or not let it bother me, of course.