Symbolic Forest

When I last wrote an article about how this blog is built, how it is turned from Markdown text into an array of thousands of static HTML pages, over eighteen months ago now, I said that “another big change to how the site is published” was coming soon. It did, indeed, come soon; I just didn’t write about it. Since summer 2024, this site has been published by an entirely new static site generator. Moreover, it’s my static site generator.

When, in 2020, I decided to switch the site from hosted Wordpress to being static, there were a few options to choose from. Jekyll is (and was) one of the leaders, but it’s written in Ruby, which would have been a whole new ecosystem for me. Eleventy seemed like a good option, and I can’t really remember why I didn’t choose it at the time. The tool I eventually went with was Wintersmith, because it seemed simple and straightforward, and a quick proof-of-concept showed that it had all the features I needed. The only red flag, though, was that it didn’t seem to have been updated very recently. Nevertheless, I thought, I could always move again later.

I reimplemented the site with Wintersmith, got everything working, and built new Wintersmith plugins to provide all the features that Wordpress had, like tagging and categories. And all was good. Except, Wintersmith still wasn’t getting updates.

Wintersmith was part of the JavaScript ecosystem, distributed via NPM. Every time I ran a build, NPM would warn me that a big stack of Wintersmith’s dependencies were outdated and had security risks. None that genuinely affected me; but still, it was more and more of a concern. I thought: well, I could patch it; but then, I saw, someone else had already submitted a patch to do just that, and the patch was sitting there in the project repository, unmerged. I had to switch.

Rather than learn a new system, though, why not take Wintersmith and fork it? It’s open-source software, after all. A fork is simply when someone takes an existing project which doesn’t quite do what they want, or which is going in a direction they don’t like; and they make it their own. Like two different branches of the evolutionary tree; things split off in different ways, and we end up with mammals and lizards and birds all happily coexisting.

So, I picked a name—Iceforge, to give it a nod to its heritage—and got started. And along the way, I changed a lot. Iceforge is a classic Ship of Theseus. Every single line of code is changed, but it will still build a basic Wintersmith site, and plugins only need slight changes to port them from Wintersmith to Iceforge.

The reason I can guarantee every single line of code in the application has changed—aside from possibly some of the blank ones—is that Wintersmith was written in CoffeeScript. You might not have heard of CoffeeScript; I had used it, in the early 2010s. It is essentially an alternative syntax for JavaScript. It’s a much terser syntax; it’s heavily whitespace-dependent, and at the time it was created it included a few features JavaScript didn’t have, like classes.

I didn’t like using CoffeeScript, although I understood it well enough to write my own Wintersmith plugins; so I immediately knew that Iceforge would use something else. The obvious choice was TypeScript: a more verbose version of JavaScript, more verbose because it includes compile-time type checking.

Naturally, I had to switch over from using CoffeeScript classes to JavaScript classes; that wasn’t an issue at all. The asynchronous coding style also, I thought, could do with an update to it. “Asynchronous coding” means that, when the application goes and asks the computer to do something that might take a while, like reading a file, it will get on with something else whilst it’s waiting until the file is ready. When I’m cooking food I’ll pop it in the oven, and then I’ll go take the rubbish out whilst it’s roasting. Asynchronous coding is just like that, but not as tasty.

Originally, Node.JS handled asynchronous coding through something called continuation-passing. It relies on the fact that functions, individual pieces of code, can be passed to other functions which can then call them. With continuation-passing style, if you want to read a file, you call a system function and give it first the filename, and then the piece of code to call when the file has been read. It worked well given the limits of JavaScript at the time, but it means that code can end up a little bit broken up and fragmentary. The code that gets run after a “slow operation” has to be separate from the code that gets run before a slow operation. Moreover, Wintersmith was largely plugin-based, and continuation-passing clutters up the plugin API. Every Wintersmith plugin has to be written in a continuation-passing style and the plugin authors have to remember to call their continuation functions even if the plugin itself isn’t calling any slow operations.

From 2015, JavaScript gained an awful lot of new features; one of them was “promises”, a new way of calling slow operations without passing continuation functions. A couple of years later, it gained the await keyword to go with them. A slow function, nowadays, can return a Promise object, and the developer can choose whether to treat that in a continuation-passing style, or to use await to pause that particular line of execution until the result from the slow operation is ready. Because, in my opinion, that produces much more readable code, I restructured all of Iceforge to use awaited Promises everywhere that the code had been using continuation-passing. When a developer is writing an Iceforge plugin, their plugin registration function has to return a Promise, but they don’t have to worry about adding a continuation boilerplate call any more.

I made various other useful changes, such as building into Iceforge’s “blog” site template a lot of the features I’d developed for this site. The Markdown parser had to be tweaked a bit, just because the API of the underlying Markdown rendering library has changed a bit. I developed a unit test suite, not something Wintersmith has ever has as far as I’m aware. The one thing I haven’t done yet is documentation. At present, all I’ve done is to add documentation to the code itself; learning how to use Iceforge is left as an exercise for the developer. At some point, when I find the time to write all that, I’ll get a documentation site online. After that there are a few other things I’d like to do, such as port over the rest of the existing Wintersmith plugins, and implement footnote support in the basic Markdown plugin. After that… Iceforge 2.x could do with a much bigger rewrite, to tidy up aspects of the API that I’ve just found a bit weird. There’s no rush, though.

If you want to use Iceforge you can install it from NPM, either as a global tool, or if you’re willing to consider your website source code to be an NPM module, locally within that module. I like the latter, because it works cleanly with CI/CD toolchains, but you could do it the other way too. This blog post isn’t meant to be Iceforge documentation, so I’ll let you play with it yourself, but feel free to try it out and give it a go. I will get the documentation site finished some day, I promise.

Keyword noise: blogging, Caitlin lectures you, coding, Coffeescript, computing, JavaScript, Iceforge, programming, static hosting, static websites, TypeScript, Wintersmith.

Occasionally, over the past few years, I’ve mentioned how I’d like a model railway, but there are just too many interesting railways to choose from. In fact, I’ve always wanted a model railway. My father also always wanted a model railway, but never quite managed to do anything about it either.

This has led me to an interesting place in life. I’ve always had many, many plans for different model railways. I’ve tried to start building them, and I’ve never got very far, but the research I’ve done has been immense. On the actual railway history side, I know my stuff. I know my Bristol & Exeter from my Bristol & Gloucester. I know my Midland from my Great Northern from my Midland & Great Northern. I know why the Great Western Railway had LNER-style signals, and I know where the LNER ran in North Wales and why. On the modelling side, I know my theory too. I know why cassettes are better than traversers, and the difference between EM and P4. I know who Edward Beal was, and how his West Midland Railway wasn’t the real one. I know John Ahern created the Madder Valley, that Barry Norman doesn’t mean the film critic, and that Cyril Freezer has had his day. I know that dyed sawdust is a thing of a past, and I’ve admired Copenhagen Fields. I know the theory. I’m just no good at putting it into practice.

Like any skill, though, this is a classic chicken and egg situation. I’m just no good at putting it into practice, because I don’t try.

The answer to that, of course, is to just pick something and start. And nowadays, model railways have come on a long way from where they were when I was a small girl. There’s so much more that is either available to buy off the shelf, or has been at some point and can be found on the second-hand market. You just have to be judicious what you choose to build. If you want to model something from after 1950 or so, it’s much easier than something before around 1925, just because the amount of diversity in the railway network dropped dramatically following the creation of British Railways and the National Coal Board.

That means that building a model of, say, the Brecon & Merthyr Railway in 1905, would be difficult for a practical beginner, even though it would be incredibly interesting and different to most of the model railways out there. A model of the Brecon & Merthyr fifty years later, though, would be relatively straightforward. A few obscure local locomotives were still around, but most were fairly common Great Western and British Railways types. All the obscure little 4-wheel coaches the line had in 1905 had been scrapped and replaced with ordinary GWR ones; all the colliery-owned coal wagons with hand-painted lettering had been replaced with plain grey British Railways 16 ton ones.

With that in mind… I’ve bought myself a treat. I’ve bought myself a regular train set with a few extra bits and pieces, so I have enough there and then to at least get something moving and give me the inspiration to build more. Let’s see where it goes from here!

Keyword noise: railway, model trains, model railways, Brecon & Merthyr Railway.

Folklore is… something we had, right? The things people used to do, especially all those people who lived out in the country and whose lives were devoted to threshing and winnowing and all those sort of rural verbs we just don’t use in the modern world. Folklore is all that stuff, from the ancient Static Past that never changed.

This view is nonsense, nowadays, among historians and folklorists, but it used to be their genuine assumption, say a hundred years ago, and as a result I have a feeling it still lurks in the back of a lot of people’s minds as a kind of default opinion if they ever think about the topic. In reality, folklore was always fluid and adaptable; we’re just missing a lot of it, because it was only about 150 or so years ago that people started writing it down, and saying “I guess this is what the peasants have always done since Time Immemorial”. Folklore is still around us today, and it’s still changing and growing too.

The reason I’m writing this, though, is that last weekend we went out and committed an act of folklore. We—me, R, and the Two Children—went into Newport, to see the Newport Mari Lwyd.

The Mari Lwyd is Welsh, as you might guess from the name. Specifically, it’s a South Wales tradition, from the time around the New Year. The Mari itself is a horse skull on a stick, carried around by someone hiding under a white sheet, like all the best ghosts. It’s led around by a Leader, smartly dressed in a top hat. And it’s great fun. We still sometimes call it by the name The Child Who Likes Fairies used when she couldn’t pronounce Welsh very well: the Ghost Pony.

The Newport Mari Lwyd is done by the Widders Border Morris, from Chepstow. For about an hour or so, the Mari is lead around the centre of the city, with stops for morris dances. Between the stops, the Leader is the MC of proceedings, interprets for the Mari, and generally “holds her back” when she wanders into shops to terrorise people. If you don’t mind being terrorised by a very large skull on a stick, it’s great fun.

We followed all the way from start to finish: into Greggs in search of a sausage roll, into the pet shop for more food, or the slightly mouldy greengrocer, or the Arcadia coffee shop. We stopped outside a pub, with a guy stood outside it holding a toddler in his arms. The Mari bent down so the wee boy could stroke her nose like a real horse, and the boy did, looking confused and baffled but treating her entirely like he would a living horse. The followers all had their phones out recording, or their SLRs, some with selfie sticks to get their phones up above the crowd. And of course all the time we were passing people who weren’t part of it, who hadn’t come along specially, some of them jumping in fright and getting away, some of them intrigued and coming to stroke the Mari too.

This isn’t, of course, what the Mari used to do. The organisers specifically describe it as an Urban Mari Lwyd, in this form because it works well in a city centre, popping her head into all the shops along the way then finishing in the record shop in the arcade to ask the owner to play “Crazy Horses” by The Osmonds.

When the “original” Mari Lwyd tradition was recorded, the Mari would go around knocking on the doors of houses. At each there would be a battle of riddles with the person who opened the door; and when the householder lost, the Mari’s party would go inside and cause havoc: eat the food, drink the beer, grope the women, rake out the fire. And then, on to the next house. The party would often include people in blackface, and a Mr Punch. By the time it was written down, it was almost gone, and by the 1930s the tradition was effectively extinct. A few decades later it came back, as a deliberate revival, much as many “folkloric” aspects of British life were. In the early 1970s, a form of the Mari appears as an evil antagonist in Susan Cooper’s young adult fantasy novel Silver On The Tree, which I quoted here previously. Cooper’s Mari is almost untirely unlike the real one, and pops up in a part of Wales in which she wasn’t a tradition. Nowadays, many places in Wales have some sort of modern Mari Lwyd, like the Newport one. Going into private houses: out. Actually taking people’s food: out. Groping people: very definitely out. The modern Maris (Mariau?) are all suited to the modern world, frightening people only if they like it.

Being a skull on a stick, the Mari comes across as a very gothic, a very pagan figure. That’s probably not really true originally either. The name Mari might very well come from the Virgin Mary, although there’s an alternative explanation that, being a horse, it’s just from the English word “mare”. As a tradition, like other British hobby horse traditions, it probably doesn’t date back any earlier than the 16^th century. It’s become a very Welsh icon—there was a large Welsh flag being carried by someone at the Newport one this year—but very similar traditions are found in other parts of Britain too with different variations. In Derbyshire they used a ram’s skull instead of a horse, which is why Derby County football club still has a ram as its symbol. That, though…in folklore, that’s kind of irrelevant. Mari Lwyd might have been different in the past, but the Mari Lwyds happening now, like the one we took part in, are very real and just as genuine. They’re still folklore, but folklore being endlessly created and recreated, today and in the future. Some day, in years to come, a folklorist will write down that the song “Crazy Horses” is deeply associated with “the Newport Mari tradition”, as an ancient survival; until someone else points out the song was only released in 1972, in summer, so really shouldn’t be associated with a seasonal winter tradition.

In a sense, all this is unimportant. We were carrying out a Welsh pagan tradition, because we made it one. And moreover, as I said near the start, it’s great fun for the participants. Even if the Mari never did get her Greggs sausage roll.

Keyword noise: Wales, Cymru, Newport, Casnewydd, Mari Lwyd, folklore, tradition.

Welcome, 2026!

I opened up the blog to post that, and suddenly realised that, well, it’s nearly a year since the last blog post. Every few weeks I’ve opened up an editor, and pondered writing something from the to-do list, but something else has always come up. And so, the archives menu has no entries between January 2025 and January 2026.

That’s partly, to be honest, because 2025 was such a big year for me. It had its ups and it had its downs, but more than anything, it was busy. I felt I was constantly on the road. Days when I was in Leeds for a work meeting in the morning, but had to leave mid-afternoon for a medical appointment multiple hours away. I barely spent a single weekend in my own house.

It was all for good reasons though. It wasn’t just work or medical things. There were trips to museums; trips to pick lavendar; trips to meet internet friends; trips to visit my partner’s family; trips to ride behind steam trains; trips to go swimming in the sea. The main problem, in fact, was knowing how to fit in everything we wanted to do.

I said “partner” there, didn’t I. I haven’t really mentioned relationships on this blog for a few years, I don’t think. At the start of last year, though, I’d just met someone new, someone who went from “internet friend” to “lover” to “life partner” within the space of a year. In the middle of the year she moved house, and by the end of the year we were getting joint Christmas cards from her family. We spend most of our (non-work) time together, largely playing board games.

I’ve been introducing R to trains and my favourite board games; she’s been introducing me to her hobbies and her favourite board games, and I wish I could put into words more about just how amazing she is. The future is bright; but even busier than before.

Still, I do want to try to post more often on this site again, in between going to work, sorting out the rest of all my inherited junk, holding board game nights with our friends, and everything else that goes along with both having a partner, and having kids with an ex. There is, after all, a long long list of things I’ve been planning to write, some of them lurking on the list for years. There are going to be lots of new ideas too, I’m sure. I can’t promise it will work, I can’t promise I’ll keep writing, but I do want to keep trying to write.

So, this is the new year. Hello 2026. And to the blog: welcome back!

Keyword noise: blogging, board games, romance.

A few months ago, I wrote about my first exploration into the world of mechanical keyboards, and said, at the time, “am I going to turn into a keyboard nerd?” At that point, I’d found that mechanical keyboards can be extremely practical, that I found them much, much easier to type on than a cheap stock keyboard; but I was very wary of how keyboard nerdery can turn into something expensive and all-consuming. Frankly, I already have too many expensive and all-consuming hobbies. So. Did I succumb?

Well… sort of. It hasn’t become all-consuming, at least not yet. This, though, is how my desk looks now. Yes, that is another keyboard.

This is a slightly fake photo, I have to admit, because I’d never use both at once. The bottom one in the photo is the Keychron K10 chassis I wrote about previously, but with a prettier set of keycaps. The black pudding keycaps I bought were fine as a first set, but they weren’t really pretty. Moreover, the switches I’d fitted don’t really let enough light through for the translucent part of the pudding to work as expected. The shine-through colours were quite dim, only really visible in a darkened room. Because of this, the keycaps have been replaced by something prettier, a purple gradient set with blank tops.

Above is the new keyboard, a Royal Kludge 65% model in a pink and white colourway, with slightly less key travel. The reason they don’t normally come out together is: this is my new “travel keyboard”, small enough to fit into my work backpack alongside my laptop. It’s wired only, so I bought a matching pink cable to go with. It’s not too loud for office use, but it’s definitely eye-catching; so far I’ve hardly had a single office trip without at least one person asking me where I got it.

“Now hang on there cutie,” I can hear you saying, “didn’t you already talk about a smaller keyboard in your last keyboard post?” Well yes, I did. But as I said at the time, that keyboard is a 60% model. This one is a 65%, and that extra five percent makes all the difference. It means this one has dedicated cursor keys, rather than have the cursor functions doubled-up. In other words, I can code without chording. It makes my life much easier. Moreover, this one is lighter and less bulky in the backpack, due to the lower travel, and is slightly quieter and less annoying to colleagues. It’s also deliberately intended to go with a new-to-me laptop I’ve been playing with, a small pink model that used to belong to The Child Who Likes Fairies, which I’ve wiped and put Gentoo Linux on, so that I can use it as a small, lightweight laptop to use if I’m ever going to be forced to use a small, lightweight laptop for any period of time—in bed recuperating from anything medical, for example. I wasn’t completely sure how well Bluetooth would be likely to work with Linux on a random laptop, which is the main reason I plumped for a wired-only model.

Are there going to be more keyboard developments. Well… maybe. The blank top keycaps on the Keychron do have shine-through legends on the key fronts, which are a bit ineffective in the same way as the pudding keycaps were. The “clicky” switch I still have on the Insert key is a transparent-body switch, by pure chance—I found it in a friend’s spares box—and I can see what a big difference that makes to the shinethrough effect. Because of that, a set of transparent-body red switches and a keyboard rebuild might be on the horizon at some point; there’s no rush, though. Aside from that, though, I do have enough keyboards now, including keeping that first one as a spare. If I find myself tempted to buy more, I really should just sit on my hands.

Keyword noise: keyboards, mechnical keyboards.

For once, I have managed to continue on with the ongoing craft projects without starting any new ones for, ooh, must be nearly a couple of months now. Most of the crafting time has been devoted to the cross-stitch project I mentioned back in July. Despite a break for my holiday—because it’s too large to go in the luggage—I’ve got on quite a way with it. Here’s the progress to date.

It’s quite hard to take a decent photograph of, because that black background greatly confuses any camera which attempts any degree of automation. Maybe I should try telling them to use Night Mode.

Keyword noise: crafting, sewing, cross-stitch, current projects.

Recently I added Aria Salvatrice to the list of links over in the menu, because I’m always looking to find new interesting regular reads, especially ones that use old-fashioned blogging. In this case, I found myself reading one of its posts which I absolutely found myself nodding along to. It was: Video Tutorials Considered Harmful, about how videos are a much worse venue for learning a technical topic than written documentation.

In general, I agree wholeheartedly with this, with an exception that I’ll come to below. Aria gets to what I think is the nub of the problem: that for some people, with some forms of neurodiversity, it’s really, really hard to focus on the video enough to take it in properly and digest it, and far too easy to get distracted. Your mind just wanders off, in a way that doesn’t happen—or at least not as much—if you’re reading a written text. All of a sudden, you realise that your head has been completely elsewhere for the last five minutes, and you have no idea what you’re watching any more.

What I find strange about this in the tech world, though, is that neurodiversity is hardly rare among software developers and similar professions. This is definitely something that has come up with my current colleagues more than once: the fact that a good proportion of us have this same problem: if we start watching an explanatory video, our minds wander off. All of a sudden, we’ve missed a huge chunk of everything and have no idea where we are. If this is so common among tech practitioners, why are these types of video common in the tech world?

The Plain People of the Internet: But don’t you yourself there have your own YouTube channel?

Yes, I do, but I don’t use it to try to teach you things. Not technical things, at any rate. They are turned into text and posted here, or wherever is most relevant. I don’t create videos of myself lecturing to camera.

That brings me onto another aspect of this, though: the difference between good and bad videos, and how bad videos make things ten times worse. Now, I haven’t posted anything on YouTube for quite a long time, but that’s largely because of the effort involved in making a video that I think is good enough to put out there. In short: I edit. I don’t just live-record a video of me doing something, chat as I go along and upload it; instead I edit. I cut it down, I write a narration, I record and edit that and stitch the whole thing together so that a project that took me several days in real life becomes a ten-minute video. In the sort of tech videos I’m talking about, this often doesn’t happen. Aria writes about this in its original post:

[M]ost video is entirely improvised, and almost never cut to remove wasted time. People’s thoughts meander. Their explanations take five sentences to convey what a single one could have said with more clarity. They wait on software to load, and make you wait along. They perform a repetitive task six times, and make you watch it six times, they perform a repetitive task six times, and make you watch it six times, they perform a repetitive task six times, and make you watch it six times […] And while it is easy to skip repetitive text, it is difficult to know where to skip ahead in a video.

Because, actually editing that down, writing a script, making it concise and informative is itself a skill, a hard one to learn. It’s difficult work. Much easier to just video a stream-of-consciousness ramble and push the whole thing up to the Internet unedited. And that’s why people do it: it’s similarly easier than writing good documentation. Knowing how to explain something you know well, to someone who knows little about it, is also a surprisingly difficult skill that a lot of people don’t even realise they don’t have.

This doesn’t necessarily apply with videos demonstrating physical things that are much harder to describe than to show, by they way. Crafting tutorials, for example, such as How To Crochet A Magic Ring. Even in that case, though, the good ones are carefully edited, brief, clear and concise.

In short, what I’m saying is that video has taken over (to some extent) from written documentation because if you’re willing to accept low quality, it’s much easier to produce, even if the results are worthless. It’s inevitably lower-quality, though, because of all the flaws in the format mentioned in Aria’s piece, such as lack of searchability. It’s accidentally low quality because if the creators put the effort in to make it good, it would take as much or more effort than writing good textual documentation takes. Those flaws can be fixed by putting the effort in and learning to skills to make a good video; but the inherent flaws of the format can’t be changed. Better all round to produce written documentation from the start.

Keyword noise: documentation, video, learning, coding, software, software development.

Very eagle-eyed regular readers might have noticed that a few days ago I added a new category to the list of post categories over in the menus. It’s quite a rare event, to be honest: most of the categories have been there for many years, and new additions really don’t happen very often. Before this week, the last one I think was Being Crafty, which arrived several months ago.

The new category is This Is Not A Memoir, and in a sense that title could apply to every single thing I post here. The real point of the new category, is for posts describing my experiences of being me: a queer, transgender woman living in Britain. But it’s not a memoir. It’s not a coherent story with a beginning, a middle, and I definitely hope not an end for a very long time. It’s for, rather, moments in my life, moments of joy and sadness, moments coloured by my own life experience.

For a long time, “memoir” has been the default form in which British trans women express themselves. It all probably started with Jan Morris, who wrote and published Conundrum in the mid-1970s shortly after having her GRS operation in North Africa. Since then there have been so many other “trans memoirs” that it is almost required for any writers who want to discuss trans rights, trans issues: you have to start by talking about your own experience, almost to prove your right to talk about the topic.* This mode was specifically called out by Shon Faye in her book The Transgender Issue: An Argument For Justice, which I suggest you go and read if you want to find out more about the treatment of trans people in general in this country.

This is not my mode either. This is a blog, after all, and I am not going to embark on any sort of book-length project in its pages.** For many years, I didn’t even mention that I was trans in any of my posts. My experiences as a trans person, though, were deeply but silently embedded in it, right back to one of the very first posts, about the court ruling Goodwin vs the UK, 22 years ago, which—although we didn’t realise it at the time—set up the entire legal framework for trans lives in Europe today. Put simply, the basic principle of the Goodwin ruling is that when trans people transition, they must be able to entirely expunge their former name from the record. It’s why my university was willing to send me a new degree certificate with the right name on, why there is a special secret process for DBS-checking a trans person, and partly why trans people have their NHS number changed on transition—something not even many people who work in the NHS are aware of.

I’ve already mentioned that, when I sat down to write about the death of The Mother in the same way I covered the death of my father, I simply couldn’t write about it in the same way without explaining first that I am trans. I transitioned “properly and for keeps” in between the two, and so many aspects of the experience were tied up with being a trans person that I felt I needed to “come out” to you all first. And that—inevitably, I suppose—has unlocked the floodgates, has left me comfortable writing about other aspects of being trans, other aspects of my transition, things about my life that I’d like to tell you, and things that I’d like to set down in my own canonical form before the memory fades any further. It will be helpful to you, possibly, if they are all filed in one place, even if that place itself is a haphazard mishmash in a random order

Hopefully, this is a useful explanation, not that I really needed to give you one. I’ve been thinking more about navigation, too, because the navigation of the site is tied very much to the blogging styles of twenty years ago, with every post being categorised, every post having keyword tags. I’m working through a few ideas for helping readers follow threads, follow individual projects, without needing to manually insert links between them. I’m not sure where that idea is going to go. This new category, though, is a start.

* I’m not going to name the well-known trans journalist who has been known to give her partners a signed copy of her own memoir as a present.

** Until I do get around to writing Caitlin Teaches You How To Code

Keyword noise: blogging, trans, transgender.

This year, I’ve tried to hold myself to posting at least one post per month on this site. I’ve mostly, but not quite, managed it. Nevertheless, there have still been so few that at present, with ten posts on the home page, if you scroll down to the bottom you’ve gone back almost a year. The bottom post on the home page right now is this one from last August, about my summer holiday to Hastings.

Exactly a year later, the week before the August bank holiday weekend, I’ve just been to Hastings again.

The Children are quite fond of repetition. It’s a form of comfort, I suppose. Their first choice for a summer holiday this year was: can we go back to the same place again please? I can understand it: as I said before, I went to Hastings on holiday myself pretty much every year between the ages of 3 and 13. But also: it’s a nice-sized place. It’s a small town, but it’s still got plenty of things to do, it’s got things they can enjoy doing over and over again, and it’s within reach of cities like Brighton or London if you do want a day out somewhere bigger. This year, we had a day out to Brighton, we had a day out to Pevensey Castle, but aside from that we just hung out in the town, going in the sea or poking in all the little shops. I was quite pleased I managed, once we’d arrived, to have a no-driving-at-all holiday.

Naturally, as we were staying within walking distance of the seafront, as soon as we had unloaded the car we wandered down and discovered it was the Bottle Alley Art Market. The Child Who Likes Animals was able to buy his first pieces of original art, an exciting moment, at least for his mums. It set the seal, though, on the idea that this was a good place to come because it is “our sort of place”, the sort of town where you do just come across random art but that is also welcoming and friendly to all visitors, not “artistic” in a snobbish or exclusive way.

I’m still getting used to using my “new” camera, that I’ve had for over a year now: because of that, my holiday photos are all a bit patchy. It doesn’t have a viewfinder, just a rear panel; so taking photos in bright daylight, it can be very hard to be confident I am actually framing my shot properly, never mind getting the exposure or the focus right. It does, however, slip nicely into my big handbag, so I’m wary of buying a larger model. The main thing may well just be practising more. In the meantime, some of the photos, at least, have come out tolerably well enough to post online.

The children are quite fond of repetition, so we may well end up going back to Hastings again next year. They were both frightened and intrigued, though, by one aspect of family history I revealed to them. After touring the exhibition about Sussex and Kent smugglers in Hastings’ caves, high in the cliffs above the beach, they were somewhat scared to hear that their own Georgian ancestors were wreckers and smugglers—not from Sussex, but from Cornwall. I can see us having to go to Cornwall for a holiday now, just so they can see where their distant relatives came from.

Keyword noise: holidays, Sussex, Hastings, St Leonards, Brighton, The Children, railway, miniature railway, Bottle Alley, Volks Electric Railway.

Since the Great Pandemic, our lives have changed so much. Being forced to leave the office, we realised that to a great extent we didn’t need to be in offices. Our jobs didn’t even need to be near home, at all, except when we still needed to visit the office for meetings or when we had something to say face-to-face. That’s why I found myself, at 5am on a very dark morning after lockdown had ended, getting in the car to drive from Lincolnshire down to The South. A straightforward four-hour journey, at the most. Within five minutes of setting off, though, it had started to snow. Gently at first, but getting thicker. Within ten minutes, I reached a hill where the car’s wheels just spun to a halt on the fresh, wet snow beneath them. I paused, let my heart stop racing, and gently tried to turn the car round. This office trip had to be made. It was the last day in March, but the date was purely coincidence.

This is not a memoir, at least, not a coherent one. It is a series of little vignettes, memories, a palimpsest of moments which have made me the woman I am today. This is not even the most significant one. It is something, though, that is officially supposed to be considered significant.

Being transgender is not, itself, a medical issue. It’s just who you are, something you have to live with, like poor eyesight. Getting things to help you live with it, though, can be a medical issue. If you have poor eyesight, you can change your lifestyle by changing all your books to large print and increasing the font size on your devices; or you can turn to more medical solutions, have the defects in your eyes objectively measured, get yourself glasses or surgery. If you’re trans, nobody can stop you changing your wardrobe or changing your name, but you need to turn to medicine to start making significant changes to your body to mould it into the right sort of shape. In some countries, a friendly GP will prescribe you hormones as long as they are sure you understand the consequences. In the UK, you can only get a hormone prescription after you’ve had a psychological diagnosis of “gender incongruence”, and in order to get that diagnosis, you have to go through various stages, all of them essentially compulsory. It used to be called the “Real Life Test”, the idea being you have to demonstrate, conclusively, that you are trans in order for doctors to help you, because they have no better diagnostic tool available.

One of the key steps, in all this, is making sure that all the people around you know who you really are. That includes coming out and being your true self in the workplace. Understandably, for many people, that’s one of the most stressful parts. After all, you don’t necessarily get on well with the place where you work, and you often can’t exactly control who you work with.

So, to fit in with the plan, to step along the programme, this is what I had to do.

What I am about to say is not true in detail, only in the broad general sense, but coming out becomes easier the more you do it. The first time feels like it is impossible. The more people you tell, each time becomes slightly easier. Even so, it was still difficult, by the time I reached the point of telling work, to ping the head of HR and tell her I needed a chat. It was a fairly small organisation, everyone knew each other, but nevertheless. The important thing, I knew beforehand, was the phrasing. No “I think I am…”, no “I would like”. No. I used firm, bold, positive statements. “I am transgender. I am transitioning. I’d like us to agree on how we tell the rest of the business this. What do you suggest?”

And, as I had expected, she was entirely lovely about it.

We agreed our plan of action. We would tell my manager. He would tell the rest of senior management. As for the rest…at our quarterly all-hands face-to-face meeting, I would tell people in person. So that’s why I had to make it to the office that day, despite the unexpected snow. I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t even look like I was going back. The announcement had to be made.

By this time all my old masculine clothes were already out of the wardrobe, and androgyny was in. I’d been painting my nails for a few months. I wondered how obvious it was; I wondered how many of them might have guessed. Probably none. As it happened, just one person had, or said they had, because they’d spotted my nail polish. They hadn’t spotted all the other hints I’d slowly dropped.

In the end, it was all something of an anticlimax, and everyone else was also absolutely lovely—which is entirely as it should be. We had various meetings set up, with various groups of people, all set up for the purpose of being able to say “oh yes, there’s something else [deadname] wanted to tell you.” Most people were barely bothered, aside from a few kind women who made a point of immediately striking up conversation with me about femme things, doing their best to make me feel included. And from then—that was that. Within a few days, my deadname had ben wiped from the systems.

Why am I writing this? In part, because it seemed like such a big step beforehand, and seems like such a tiny thing in hindsight. In part, also, because the rest of the world seems to place such a large emphasis on it being a major step in your transition journey. For me, though, it seems awfully irrelevant in hindsight. An event that was more important to everyone around me than to me myself. There are many more stages in my transition that mattered much, much more. Maybe that’s why I’m starting with this. Starting with the unimportant first.

Keyword noise: trans, transgender, transition, work.