Confession

There's a smashing eminently readable blogger in North Wales called John Gray and on television there's a comedian called Alan Carr. Both deserve the approbation contained in the label "The Chatty Man". Recently John was accused of being rather "feminine" in his "Going Gently" blog which attracts a lot of female followers from around the world. In his defence, he referred to some of his male followers - including yours truly whom he described as being "blokey". I took that as a compliment. However, the truth will out and I have a confession to make... I'm actually a transvestite.

Take last Saturday. We returned from Hull City's nil-nil draw with Queens Park Rangers and I felt like going out to celebrate.

After showering, shaving my legs and plucking my eyebrows, I delved into my "alternative" wardrobe. Where had Shirley hidden my sheer twelve denier silk tights that I bought in Hong Kong? And yes there was my brand new Aidan Mattox "cold shoulder" dress in bottle green sequins. It was the very first time I'd be wearing it down at the pub.

Carefully, I donned my "Always" Raquel Welch ash blonde wig, pinning it back invisibly. I applied "Polytex" concealer liberally, eye shadow sheen and bronze red lipstick. Looking in the mirror, I thought - "What a doll!" My efforts and investment had all been worthwhile. Finally my patent leather Jimmy Choo stilettos and a couple of ripe grapefruit down my top and I was ready for some fun.

At the pub and as usual, no one recognised me as Yorkshire Pudding. It was all "Ooo! Angela you do look nice!" and "Haven't seen you in a long while Angela!" etc.. Standing at the bar waiting for my fifth pint of bitter, Leeds Mick squeezed my right buttock and called me "darling" so I whacked him as hard as I could with my Coccinelle designer handbag. "Jesus! What the bloody hell did you do that for?" he complained after staggering back on his heels and collapsing to the floor in a heap. I stood above him with one heel on his chest and whispered malevolently, "Just because!" Other regulars guffawed with delight.

Standing in the men's urinal, I relieved myself rather awkwardly before adjusting my latest pair of grapefruit in the cracked mirror. A tattooed biker whose lavatory visit co-incided with mine looked visibly shocked. I wandered back into the lounge bar where I overheard a couple of feline women referring to me as "blokey". The bitches!

It's not easy being a transvestite. You have to remember to keep your legs together when sitting down and all manner of smelly men will try to hit on you only to be terribly disappointed by a well-aimed knee. Debenhams department stores are also not keen on transvestites using the ladies' changing rooms.

So that's it. The truth is out there now but hey this is 2011 isn't it? We're allowed to be who we want to be. Just don't tell my imam. He'd never let me in the mosque again if he knew.

Endless

View of The Humber from Paull

On Friday, I had to bobby on over to Hull's Royal Thai Consulate in order to acquire my work visa for Thailand. Afterwards, I thoroughly intended to drive along the north bank of the Humber estuary in order to visit Spurn Point where I planned to take a few photographs for the Geograph project. I had not ventured there since I was eighteen.

However, in Ottringham, I saw a signpost for "Sunk Island". It is a name I had often noticed on maps of East Yorkshire but I had never before been there. The Humber estuary is a wide and changeable meeting point for sea tides and huge volumes of river water. Peppered with mud flats, deep water channels, spits and marshes, it gives and it takes away. The map is never fixed. Here land and water seem to merge under endless skies.

In the middle ages, a great big sandbar lay off the coast south of Patrington. High tides covered it but gradually as the deposition of alluvial material increased, it emerged from the river and with drainage techniques borrowed from the Dutch, it became a vast 8000 acre estate of rich farmland. This is now Sunk Island.

How different is this landscape from the rugged Yorkshire Dales or the rolling chalk wolds that embrace East Yorkshire from Flamborough to High Hunsley. Sunk Island is as flat as a pancake. As the song goes, on a clear day you can see for ever and ever more. Farmsteads surrounded by hardy copses occur intermittently linked by single track lanes and in the centre of the "island" is the old school and the old church to which schoolchildren and parishioners must have trudged for miles.

I could see Grimsby over on the far south bank and the funnels of an ocean going vessel gliding by above the line of the island's Georgian embankment. A cold wind eddied about me straight off the North Sea. Perhaps there was a pattern of hedgerows there once - to impede the wind but now the vista is open with green winter sowings heralding the coming of springtime. It was a most strange and atmospheric landscape.

Sunk Island Images:-

Ambam

You must have seen this news story. Ambam, the thirty four stone lowland gorilla at Port Lympne Wildlife Park in Kent, England has astounded observers by getting up on his hind legs occasionally and walking like a man. It is believed that he is simply mimicking his human captors or perhaps he finds his increased height useful for observing the impending arrival of food. Well if Ambam can do this, I am going to start harrumphing down the street on all fours!

Crazies

When I was in Santiago, Chile, I had a couple of days to pass before my flight out to Easter Island. Just round the corner from my cheap hotel - near to the busy Alameda that runs through the heart of the city - I found a bar. On the first evening, I sat inside it and watched a local football match on television.

On the second evening, before it got dark, I was sitting at a pavement table, reading a book with a litre bottle of "Escudo" beer for company. I looked across the Alameda to see a group of men dodging the traffic on their way across. Usually pedestrians used underpasses to avoid the hazards of the thunderous daytime traffic.

The gang of thirty-something men requisitioned a table adjacent to mine and it wasn't long before communication happened between us. They were astonished that I had come from England and delighted that I was on my way to Rapa Nui which holds a special place in the affections of many Chileans. Their English was more than imperfect but of course brilliant in comparison with my Spanish.

I noticed they were all a little unkempt as if their clothes hadn't seen washing machines in weeks and a vague odour of the stale unwashed hung about them. They looked as if they had been out in the open air too long and if entered in a personal grooming competition their scores would have been even lower than mine.

Beer flowed and night came. Communication became less fluent. They all seemed intelligent - but apparently none of them had jobs as far as I could make out. They didn't want to talk about such things. They wanted to drink beer, sing songs and talk about England, Rapa Nui, Maggie Thatcher, General Pinochet, the Colo Colo football team and the American CIA. I noticed that other, more respectable looking men in the bar were cold-shouldering the gang and even though I was becoming inebriated I felt increasingly uncomfortable with them. It crossed my mind that I could be ripe for mugging so at an opportune moment, I said my goodbyes and hurried back to the Hotel Ecuador.

They reminded me of other thirty-something Chileans I had met in a park the day before. Eyes slightly bloodshot, hair and clothes slightly dishevelled, giving out poems on little sheets of coloured paper and then begging for some financial support to help them through college. Who or what they really were I shall probably never know and the same with those crazies in the bar.

Will

He was twenty minutes late. When I greeted him at the door there was no apology. I sort of had to wring it out of him. We had postponed our evening meal deliberately. His half-hearted apology was accompanied by a suggestion that we wouldn't have had time for dinner anyway. I insisted that we would have had our meal if we had known he was going to be so late. Not the most auspicious of first meetings I have to admit.

Who was he? A legal geezer. Not a lawyer but a representative of a company that specialises in writing wills and managing the estates of the dead. Although a modern man with a fancy computerised pen that sent our documentation back to head office in the blink of an eye, there was something very Dickensian about him. Meticulous and neat, he had clearly been immersed in legalistic language for many years. He spoke as if from a manual and seemed irritated by what to him must have seemed like dumb questions from lesser mortals. He probably deserved a good slapping with a wet kipper.

It was a day that once I thought would never come. The day I made my first will and testament. Mr Con D. Ecension filleted our "estate", putting numbers in boxes and then adding them up. If you die. If Shirley dies first. If the children pre-decease you. Inheritance tax. Property. Investment. Bank. Funerals. Horrible words all colliding together. But you've got to be sensible. This is something that grown up people do. They make wills and somehow life is no longer all about living, it's about dying too. No wonder I had put it off for so long.

Mr Ecension left just before nine after buttoning up his gaberdine raincoat and ensuring that everything was in order in his leather briefcase. At the door I shook his hand - like you do - and wondered if he would refer back to his late arrival - but of course he didn't.

As soon as he had left, I got back to the kitchen to finish off the spaghetti, having earlier made the bolognaise sauce and as I stirred I thought of the solicitor, Mr Kenge, in "Bleak House":-

He appeared to enjoy beyond everything the sound of his own voice. I couldn’t wonder at that, for it was mellow and full and gave great importance to every word he uttered. He listened to himself with obvious satisfaction...

And

"I do not know my paternoster perfectly as the priest sings it.

But I know the rhymes of Robin Hood and Randolph, earl of Chester".

- William Langland (1377)

...And of course Nottingham has been long-associated with Robin Hood and his band of merry men who lived, according to legend, deep in the greenwood that covered most of lowland England in the middle ages. Close to the ancient Castle Rock, there now stands a bronze statue of the famous "outlaw":-

Teasing out the truth about Robin Hood from all the tales and films would be a challenging task for any scholar. Was he a force for good or was he simply a thief? Nobody can even say for sure when he lived. There's a possible range of two hundred years from 1150 to 1350. His origins are also very uncertain and even the authenticity of his grave in the grounds of Kirklees Abbey is disputed.

Nottinghamshire claimed him but some evidence suggests his stomping ground encompassed South Yorkshire and North Derbyshire. Sometimes known as Robin of Loxley, it is perhaps significant that on the northwestern fringes of Sheffield there is a river valley through which the River Loxley runs, passing by what was once the rural hamlet of Loxley. In nearby Hathersage, the churchyard boasts the grave of Robin Hood's lieutenant, Little John.

In ancient English mythology, there are many references to a benevolent life-giving spirit known as The Green Man. He also lived deep in the shadows of the greenwood and was a reference point for our pre-Christian ancestors. The Green Man ensured the cycling of seasons and the blessings of fertility. And of course, Robin Hood was also a "green man". Perhaps stories evolved about him in the middle ages, merely to provide a more current embodiment of that older god-like spirit from the forest.

One of the Green Man carvings in Beverley Minster, East Yorkshire

Nottingham

Statue of the great Brian Clough, King St, Nottingham

I don't know much about Nottingham. Until yesterday, I had only been there twice. Back in the early seventies I went to Nottingham University for an interview. I had been thinking of pursuing a degree in Philosophy but the more I looked into the subject, the more I realised it wasn't really about wisdom or meanings of life but had much more to do with academic language and clever games you can play with words. This wasn't for me. The next time I went was in the mid-eighties to see my beloved Hull City beat Notts County at their historical Meadow Lane ground.

Nottingham isn't very far from Sheffield - thirty six miles straight down the M1 but whereas we are very much in the land of "Up North", Nottingham is most definitely in "The Midlands". Though Sheffield has a population in excess of half a million, the city of Nottingham is home to only 300,000. However, Greater Nottingham, embracing satellite towns like Long Eaton and West Bridgford has an estimated population of 700,000 and so the central business/shopping area feels bigger somehow.

I decided to take an off-peak train - my return ticket only cost me £11.50. It was pleasant sitting there with my beaker of coffee, watching frosty fields flash by. On the broken wall of an abandoned industrial unit, somebody had painted "Shirley"in letters two feet high. It flashed by and then we were in Alfreton.

The main purpose of my Nottingham visit was to see our son Ian in the Victoria Shopping Centre. He has been working there for a few weeks now, managing a newly-opened men's clothing store which is an offshoot of the independent retail business he worked at in Sheffield for the past six years. He seems very positive and bubbly about the new venture even though it's taking him away from his home city. He's even looking for accommodation there now. Shirley's none too happy about that.

As well as the shop visit, I did something I have often thought of - I went to have my lunch in what is reputedly the oldest inn in England. It is called "Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem" - perhaps in reference to The Crusades - and it nestles beneath Nottingham Castle, snug against the Castle Rock. In fact some of the rear rooms are like caves for they eat into the sandstone cliff behind the pub. A pub has stood on the present site since at least 1190AD. Are you noting that in The New World?

I ordered ham and eggs with chips and peas and with my pint of "Ye Olde Trip" ale, I found a small table in the labyrinth of quaint little rooms. It was only when I sat down and took out my newspaper that I realised the other occupants of the room were all women. There were four pairs and two of them clearly had their arms round each other. They were not mother and daughter either. I became aware that the other three couples were also not mothers and daughters but special friends. I had stepped into a lesbian lair! Ah well it takes all sorts and it was kind of comforting to reflect that they wouldn't be mentally undressing me and viewing me as a primitive sex object - the feelings I customarily experience in rooms filled with women!

The old Market Square, Nottingham