A Grumpy Old Man’s Tale 39 Iroko, Ermine and Critters

“You’re seriously telling us that you’re doing all that learning just to cook chicken chow mien, Jeremy‽ Just get a book written in English, Lad. My missus would lend you one if you’re strapped for the cash.” Pat’s words caused gales of laughter. All knew that was not the issue, but they were up for the laugh anyway.

Hannah and Hannah – The Bigger Girls

However, as I said we got lucky, with pretty lacy trim, a lovely bow to enforce the dividing line between our conjoined state, and overall some delicious shades of coral. Not exactly pink you understand, there’re just enough shades of orange in there to make us truly distinctive and obviously of superior lineage.

“I’ll let you use the rooms upstairs rent free if you’ll hire LGBT+ folk, Mary. There are loads come in here who are highly qualified, but can’t get work despite the equal opportunity legislation. Many like you had decent paying jobs till their management discovered they were different. Make it clear you will hire anyone who can do the job. The LGBT+ are taking a chance just by breathing, for sure they’ll take a chance on a future job even if it means working for free for a while. Everyone that comes in here knows you got fired for being trans. They’ll be more than willing to help get some guaranteed discrimination free employment off the ground.” Mary who was acutely aware how it felt to be unfairly treated and how little it took to hurt someone who was already suffering decided to take Elsie’s advice, and so it started.

I think unless something happens soon to change his life significantly, something that gives him a place in life, a rôle, a purpose and some light at the end of the tunnel he’ll end up committing suicide before long. Such a mind set is dangerous in people who have kids they care about because their minds become so disturbed they often take the kids with them rather than risk them ending up in even worse circumstances. Keep that to yourself. None else who can’t reason it out for himself needs to know. His lack of self confidence and the fear he’ll lose the children is crippling him to the point of being barely able to function. Christ his whole life has been one unending pile of shite, whatever happens has got to be an improvement. A decent single bloke with no life experience worth a damn and even less self confidence who has clearly been reviled and abused all his life by women as well as men was given the custody of his sister and brother in law’s three orphaned kids because his parents are too old and his sisters already have a family and cant afford to take the kids in, and with no bloody support at all he was expected to cope playing mother and father both to the kids. He’s doing his damnedest, but what the f*** were the powers that be thinking of?”

Part One
Yet again Lindsay was dreaming. The dream was strange but as usual vivid and sharply detailed. It seemed to involve being in a bed in a small room with numerous folk dressed in blue and others in white coats looking at inexplicable things that had moving patterns on them that seemed to almost but never quite constantly repeat themselves. They also looked at objects that made strange noises at regular intervals. Lindsay was aware that there were a number of tubes and white string like things seemingly connected to the bed. However, like many of Lindsay’s dreams it was neither totally rational nor totally consistent. Lindsay’s dreams made life a living torment, for dream and reality crossed over, blended and became each other. It was impossible to determine what was a dream and what was reality. Dreaming of dreams within dreams within dreams, and dreams even deeper nested than that, dreams like images in two mirrors facing each other that reached to infinity and drew one into insanity, meant Lindsay had no idea what being awake was like, for all such experiences were probably only dreams too.

Part 2
“I want you to come home with me. I am here to arrange it all. I know about carrying the message to engage the assassin to kill Tomas, and the new dresses made by Serena your fee paid for. I know you are really a girl. I know all about your new dresses and where you keep them. I know how you get past the guards dressing as a girl, but you won’t be able to do that for much longer will you? It will not be safe for you when the guards here discover that you have been tricking them. I said I want you to come home with me, but I want you as my sister, the girl you want to be. I know you wish to be able to read and write, and I can give you that and much more too.”

Phyllis was cynical, perhaps with good reason, and considered the delegates and deliverers of the course to be a typical, left wing bunch with a disproportionate number of non whites, non binaries and generally professed anti establishment pedants, despite most being paid good, upper middle class salaries by the establishment which they were in truth pillars of. ‘Ah well,’ she’d thought, ‘It’s good to know that hypocrisy is still alive and kicking at all levels.’

I look at my skin which has lost of its elasticity of youth. I think about my long gone missing teeth and the dentures that have taken their place. My lost muscle tone and the tight buttocks that women told me were so attractive have long gone as have most of those women, for few women, never mind men, live to my age. At a hundred and five, despite my good health, and reasonable faculties, I am an old and decrepit man staring death in the face because my heart is finally giving way to time. I have at most three months left, and you can’t imagine how grateful I was to receive that information.

Many of the men I knew who have been dead many a year would have paid a long price to have had my life, yet I could only wish it on those whom I hated the most, those who had no idea that I was never truly a man, and whose idea of what constituted masculinity I found totally repugnant.

“However, back to the matter at hand. Nowadays, the matter of male and female is considered by the open minded to be a very broad multi dimensional continuum, a multi dimensional spectrum if you like, rather than two points at the opposite ends of a single dimensional line. However, the question I would love to have answered is at what point, and why, does a person of one apparent gender or perhaps that’s better expressed as one apparent identity, wherever they are on that multi dimensional spectrum, make the decision that they are in the wrong body, or indeed that they are in the right one? I’m asking what is the trigger mechanism that brings about that magical transformation? I know the matter is much more complicated than that, but you have to start somewhere. I am sure I’m not the only one who would like to know. I also suspect the matter to be deep, very, very deep.

This is an extract from A Grumpy Old Man’s Tale Ch. 36 Changes Ancient and Modern that is not yet ready for posting, but I considered it to be capable of standing alone as a solo tale perhaps of interest to those who have no interest in the GOM tales.

Writing convincing sex scene is bloody difficult as Morgan Philips pointed out. It’s difficult for talented, careful writers and pointless for the illiterate to even attempt. What’s your view, Elsie?”

Andrew’s clothes had just about reached the end of their useful existence when he found the four boxes of clothes in front of the bins. The holes in his shoes had been letting water in for some time, his jeans had more holes than material and his shirt was ripped to shreds as a result of a fight over some thrown out food he’d been eating. He’s lost the fight, the food and more significantly a lot of warmth due to his damaged clothing. The boxes of clothing contained items from a charity shop that hadn’t sold. After three months anything still on the racks was dumped to make way for newer stock. After ratching through the boxes all the way to the bottom, twice, he realised they only contained women’s and girls’ clothes. The solitary pair of foot ware in the largest box was a pink pair of girl’s trainers, [sneakers] but they fit him and were watertight. There were no jeans nor trousers of any description in the boxes.

Life had made the young Andrew cynical, and he suspected if they had their hands on him Social Services would naturally return him to his mother simply because it was the most obvious f*** up they could make.

The deaths were probably evenly split between starvation and human created toxicity. Much of the later had been created centuries ago, and now the ‘safe’ containers of yore were finally breaking down, the killers of life were emerging as leachates to begin their deadly task.

Just an amusing conceit

“We went in, and answered all the usual questions Covid folk always asked concerning recent health. I noticed a sign on the door that said, ‘These doors are alarmed!’ I couldn’t help myself when I said to the bloke who was going to stab us. ‘Those doors are lucky. They aren’t going to be violated with anti-Covid vaccine. Me, I’m not just alarmed; I’m bloody terrified.’ Another jobsworth with either no sense of humour or no brains or possibly neither.

It seems strange, even if it’s true, that the ends of our adult lives shall precede their beginnings.

The tragedy of it was it didn’t matter what Nixxi wanted to be, for she already was a girl and she had been since just after conception.

Denis asked, “You any idea how lucky you are to have that girl, Pete? That older brother of yours must have been a complete f******g idiot abusing her to the point where living on the streets in Manchester was a better option than living with him. No bloke worthy of being called a man would do that to any kid never mind one of his own, no matter were they trans, nor anything else.”

All the locals and the regular Saturday evening drinkers knew Harriet’s story and she was a popular and well loved young woman. There were nods and sounds of agreement all around the room, before Alf summed it all up by saying, “She’s a sweetie, and my missus says she’ll be a brilliant mum the way she handles kids. Any news on the adoption front yet, Pete?”

Zizzie had been born in a body that indicated being a himm. Her medical advisors were of the opinion that as she went through fecundity, a second stage puberty that all the Kemainne folk experienced at about sixteen years of age, her body and face would become those of a femm. Zizzie was of the opinion they were just telling her what they thought she wished to hear and they didn’t really know what would happen.

“I remember Mummy finding me and giving me water to drink when even my muscles were silently screaming from thirst. As I desperately and gratefully gulped the water she asked, ‘What’s your name, Sweetie?’

‘I’m Billie,’ I replied when she took the canteen from me telling me I needed to drink just little sips, but to drink them often till I wasn’t thirsty any more. ‘I’m three and a half and I’m a girl. My birthday is the first of Christmas.’

“ ‘I see,’ she replied. I didn’t know what she meant when she said, ‘You come home with me, and I’ll make sure that you have everything you need, Billie.’ ”

Kelvin O’Reilly was a self made multi billionaire though virtually none were aware of his wealth for he didn’t have an opulent lifestyle, drove a thirty-five year old diesel Mercedes 300 because he liked it and was a self professed family man. Ruth was Kelvin’s sixth foster child and he was trying to adopt her.

Be careful, for life is much cheaper here than where you live, and I will kill you if you abuse me. Lest you think that is an idle threat remember that a life sentence in a women’s prison in the UK would be infinitely better than the life I currently live as a so called free woman here.

“Oh dear! Where to begin, Child. The problem is most of us are woefully ignorant concerning the world of humans and little better concerning the world of Færie. In order to answer your questions concerning your ancestress the Queen I shall have to tell you much to correct your ignorance. So you shall have to be patient, Granddaughter.

I mind playing with my gran’s sewing pins. She was a seamstress and used expensive, thin, steel pins, not the cheaper more common, thicker, iron ones that were used by virtually all women in those days. I’d been playing with them with a magnet and some had become magnetised. She’d complained to my dad, ‘I don’t know what that bairn of yours has put on them, but I’ve even scrubbed them with Ajax powder and still they stick together.’

I’m a ninety-five year old man and my dream since early childhood had always been to be a teenage girl whom a kind, young man fell in love with. He wouldn’t have necessarily been handsome, wealthy or clever, just kind and someone who cared about me. My favourite song has for a long time been ‘Words Don’t Come Easy to Me’ by F. R. David, for it resonates with my soul in ways I have never understood.