Sunday, 12th March, 2006

Taste The Difference

photo wine looby

Must just briefly explain what I was doing last night with a bottle of Chateau Pichon Baron (Pauillac) 1997.

Obviously mature from inspecting the colour. Pleasant, mature fruit on the nose. Clean. A fat texture, with still a little unresolved tannin. Firm acidity. There is some sweet, pastille like fruit. For drinking over the next couple of years. A rare performance for this vintage. Good

(http://www.thewinedoctor.com/tastingsprofile/pichonbaron.shtml)

Looby was having a birthday party, and had invited me round because, apparently, I'd "be quite a good addition to the evening"

Rather than just being a birthday party like the one I'd organise ("Hey guys! Come round! Bring wine and get pissed!"), it was a much more sophisticated affair, with nibbles, booze and a quiz.

One of the quiz rounds involved us blind-tasting two bottles of wine — one the aforementioned posh wine, and the other a "cheap" plonk (although, personally, £10 for a bottle of wine is not cheap IMHO )

Despite killing of every single tastebud I have over the years through smoking, I managed to get it right The posh one had much more of a complicated smell to it (I would say "nose" there, but I'm common as muck, and no wine-buff) and a richer flavour.

Oddly, it smelt like my gran

Anyway, a lovely evening — during which I managed to exhibit my complete lack of knowledge about Eddie Izzard.

Snow Daemon

photo

We don't get snow very often here in Lancaster — not the stuff that settles anyway. I think it's got something to do with Morecambe Bay — the strange microclimate that we have here always keeps thing too mild to have full-on settling Fun Snow™

This morning though, there was quite a blizzard going on, and by lunchtime we had a good few inches.

And (woo hoo!) it was proper snow — the stuff that you can make into snowballs, not that crappy powdery shite that is the closest the skies over Lancaster seem to be able to manage.

I figured it was the perfect opportunity to go out and take some interesting, pretty, photos, so I wrapped up, grabbed my camera, and set off up the road...

The thing is though, the sky's been overcast all day, so nothing really came back looking like the winter-wonderland type of shot that I'd imagined.

Never mind...

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me is how herd-like we all are with the weather. One day of sunshine in May and every tubby, hairy, ugly bloke in the country has his top off and is drinking Carling outdoors. Two spots of rain and we all sprout umbrellas. Half-a-snowflake, and out come all the sledges

Up at the Castle, a huge crowd of people had gathered, and were taking it in terns to propel themselves down the hill in, it seemed, whatever they had to hand. There were a few proper sledges (I think I even saw one with rails), but mostly it was chavs in orange bin-liners.

Speaking of chavs, I saw the comedic sight of a girl of about fifteen shivering her way past me dressed in, well, fuck-all really — some fake-branded sportswear and a furry hood.

"Get me home", she hissed to her little band of male droolers. "I'm fuckin' freezing".

"Shouldn't have come out in the snow wearing less than what you had on last night", is what I should have said.

...

At the bottom of the Priory graveyard, I was confronted by this...

There were quite a few of these enormous snowballs lying around. I saw one kid trying (unsuccessfully) to push a showball that was bigger than him at one point. Mostly, I thought they were pretty cool — it's just a shame they were all so filthy.

The snowman in the top picture, BTW, I thought was bloody typical of Lancaster — a town obsessed with Tolkein

...

So yeah, snow w00t!. I did feel rather sorry for some of the chavs I passed on the way home, sitting on porches rubbing their feet and hands to try and get the blood circulating again — but then, if you will go out in polyester...

I, on the other hand, had this to come home to...

*yay me*

I dunno Jo ... I would have said "chav ~ redneck/trailer-trash", but "chav != redneck/trailer-trash"

(Can I just divert for a second to mention that I'm rather flabberghasted that I didn't — until doing a major Google search — know that the mathematical symbol for "is similar to" is the tilde )

I was wondering though (and I know this kinda gets brought up all over the place, but it's ripe for discussion, I think) whether chav trannies exist.

See, part of My General Transvestite Theories™ involves a lot of peer pressure. I'm still not convinced that the actual act of wearing women's clothing has any actual basis in the psychological make-up (ha!) of us — I'm still thinking that it's a socially-inspired expression of something else within our psyche.

It's like, I suppose, the difference between the idea of becoming a transvestite, and discovering one is a transvestite.

And I'm wondering (perhaps patronisingly — and feel free to haul me over a barrel on this, I'm probably wrong) whether or not within the über-macho world of chavness, such an expression — or 'outlet', perhaps — can actually be stumbled on.

And anyway, chavettes' clothes are awful — why anyone would want to wear them is beyond me

Transvestism ~ Tourette's

tranny rant

Oh boy.

Right, see, I've had a small theory for a while. I'd like, if I may, to apologise in advance for my complete lack of understanding about what Tourette's Syndrome actually is. In fact, I probably don't actually mean Tourette's, I probably mean Coprolalia...

Coprolalia (pronounced cop-row-lahl-ya) is involuntary swearing or the utterance of obscene words or socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks

See what I mean? This is like when people use 'Schizophrenia' to mean "split personality"...

Anyway, sorry.

The thing is though, that I've come to the conclusion that these two things have a lot in common. Both involve expressions of self in terms of 'socially unacceptable' behaviour.

OK — why do I wear dresses?

That's easy — dresses are what women wear, and me, being a crossdresser, wears what women wear. So ergo I wear dresses.

But who says that's what women wear? Probably the same people that say that I can't stand on a street corner shouting "cunt" at the top of my voice.

(ie. Society)

What I'm getting at here, is that both of these things involve — at some level — the greater society that we live in deciding what we can or can't, should or shouldn't, do. Both of them, in some way, involve doing things that are totally defined in opposition to a man-made construct of what is "normal".

I'm confused sometimes, when other trannies say things like "I like wearing women's clothes — they make me feel comfortable" — because for a lot of the time, they seem to dwell far too much on the actual objectivity of the clothes. The silk, the tafetta, the satin — rather than the symbolic gender attributes that clothes contain.

What if it was the other way around? Would we still get off on wearing silky panties? Or would we be strutting around in tuxes?

...

My point (if I have a point. Do I ever have a point?) I guess, is that I sometimes wonder whether or not a lot of the gumpf I see other transvestites writing about has ever, actually, been thought about. All the "I do A because of B" bollocks that flaunts its way around the net and in print seems, to me, to have very little basis in reality.

It's all homes-spun philosophy, masquerading as "insight".

I wonder, sometimes, just how much of what it is that we do has anything to do with "gender". Because for a lot of us, I suspect, it's just about doing something that's wrong.

Aye, maybe, but 'chav' has complicated and disputed origins to be honest. Some sources say it's a Romany word, others say it's a derivative of "Chatham", and some even suggest it comes from an abbreviation of "Cheltenham Average" (she says, quoting Wikipedia verbatim)

What's interesting about the word, perhaps, is how it's become pervasive throughout the UK — despite regional variations.

In Belfast, for example, they're not "chavs", they're "spides". And I'm led to believe that for a long time in Lancaster, they were known as "scratters".

People take offence too easily these days, I reckon. It's Political Correctness gone mad, I tell ye.

I don't think it's sheer bloody mindedness to challenge society's benchmarks.

No, I agree. I'm not saying that's the motive — just the outcome.

I'm confusing myself here, so you'll have to bear with me...

I'm saying that the supposed 'link' between the clothes themselves, and a want to express something that we don't understand, are completely seperate. I'm saying that anyone who says "I like wearing silky things" (for example) is demonstrating a fetish, rather than some kind of gender dysphoria.

...

Actually, I don't really know what I'm saying — apart from "I think a lot of the debate within the Transvestite Community is a pile of shit"

who is more qualified to give "insight" than the ones who do it?

Honestly Kath? I think, maybe not us — not the ones who do it at all. Because we're pumped full of subjectivism, and can't see the wood for the trees, usually.

We have too much of a vested interest in ourselves to actually be able to comment on why we do what we do, and what happens when we do.

"wtf am I doing"?

Precisely — but I'd argue that's got very little to do with clothes, and very little to do with 'gender'.

It's a thing that we have, that makes us want to do other things. It's something core within ourselves, that we end up expressing with a pair of nylons and a rah-rah skirt.

I've been trying to work out, for a long time, what that thing actually is — and part of me doesn't want to find out. Because the moment I find out what it is, is the moment it becomes boring.

the donning of female apparel being the ultimate expression of admiration?

Honestly Katya? Nope.

In the main, the 'expression of feminity' that a lot of us portray, ends up being some kind of patriarchal 'ideal' of what we — as men — want women to be.

You're going to have to excuse me here, because (a) it's morning for you, and (b) it's late-night-drunkedness for me, but in some ways I think it has a lot to do with K's survey that she published a few days back — that notion that we are 'what men think women should be like'.

I don't think that's "adoration" at all — I think that's oppresion...

...I am so going to bed