Symbolic Forest

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.

It’s over eighteen months now since The Mother died, and I’ve barely even talked about it here, aside from one piece I wrote about burying her. There are a whole heap of reasons for that. For one thing, the posting rate here has slowed down to one post a month if that, due to all the various other things making demands on my time. For another, a whole heap of the experiences I had around my mother’s deah pivot on it being, when it happened, less than a year into my gender transition. As I wasn’t open about being transgender on this site until this March, I could hardly recount a lot of the things that happened, from the excited curiosity of the funeral arranger, to the cold stares some of my mother’s friends gave me as I walked into the church behind the coffin.

Some of this, though, is down to how I feel about the death. I don’t feel grief at the death of my parents. Rather, I feel anger, a low, slow-bubbling anger that they let me down in life. And that is all rolled up in my gender too, to some extent.

My parents never supported me. Financially, yes; emotionally, no. I came out to my parents as trans when I was in my early 20s, and they were universally unsupportive about it. My mother cried. Prayed. Said I should start going to church, or take up a new hobby like playing bass guitar, and that would take my mind off the idea. When I started to seek medical support, she kept telling me I didn’t have to go through with anything, at every turn.

So when I decided to stop putting my life on hold, when I decided twenty years later that yes, I needed to transition, that I would never be myself if I did not: I also decided I wasn’t going to tell her. After all, I’d already come out to her once. She didn’t deserve to put me through that a second time. I came out to everyone else; I started wearing nail polish; I changed my whole wardrobe. I did it all right in front of her, and just let her watch and work it out for herself this time.

She died about ten or eleven months into that process.

By the time she died, she knew my name, even though she always claimed she had forgotten it. She even used the right pronouns for me, some of the time. When I am still sorting out her belongings, cursing the state she let things get into, I am also always, in the background, angry that none of that happened until the last few months of her life, until she knew she was on her own apart from me. I wish I’d had the strength and the bravery to cut both of my parents out of my life, and find my own way forward. It would have been very different.

This all sounds quite bitter and nasty, but I’m posting this now because this is June, this is Pride Month, this is the month that for queer people, is supposed to be all parties and parades and excitement. I’m proud of who I am every month of the year though, which is why I’ll always still be angry at the way my parents treated me when I needed them. I wish my mother could see me now, so she could see just how much I’ve changed since she died, and see just what I missed when I was younger.

Eventually, I will write down all those stories, about the dark comedy of the Accident and Emergency ward where half the staff couldn’t get through the doors, and about lying on a bed, half asleep, listening out for the ambulance I had asked for three or four hours before. I’ll have lots of other stories to tell, too, all those fragments and pieces by which I realised I was transgender and started trying to do something about that. Those are important stories. They’re not just for June.

Keyword noise: death, The Mother, queer, trans, transgender, transition, Pride.

One stereotypical nerd gadget I’ve never seen the point of, that I always assumed was the nerd equivalent of hand-woven gold hi fi cables, was the mechanical keyboard. I assumed they were, as the phrase goes, fidget spinners for IT geeks. Something that is expensive and makes lots of fun clicky-clacky noises, but doesn’t actually change your computing experience by one tiny bit.

Well, reader, I was wrong. I admit it. Completely, absolutely, 100 per cent wrong. Switching to a mechanical keyboard has been one of the best productivity improvements I could have made to my workplace. Since I started using one, my typing has speeded up enormously. It’s definitely not just a toy. Having a decent length of travel on each key movement somehow genuinely makes it much easier and quicker for me to type; and also makes my typing a lot more confident. I’ve never learned to type properly, and I still make a lot of mistakes, but in general I’m finding my fingers skip across the keys much more freely.

This first started last summer when I was already tempted by the idea, and saw that a fairly cheap model already had been reduced quite a lot on sale. So, I bought it. And, if nothing else, it was pretty. It glowed, with rainbow light. It came with a choice of beige or purple keycaps, so being contrary I naturally changed just half of them over, trying to get a dithering kind of effect from beige on the left to purple on the right. It kind of worked. Typing, though, was excellent.

I felt like I was typing much better than I ever had on laptop keyboards, but there was something wrong. Still, I resisted the temptation to be a keyboard nerd. An enthusiast. One keyboard would be enough for me.

The problem with the first keyboard was that it was only a 60% model. In other words, it only has about 60% of the keys of a “full” PC keyboard; just the core letters and numbers really. To get all the other functions, you need a modifier key. A lot of laptops do that to access extra functions or squeeze all of the keys into a laptop case, but this was using it for fairly basic functionality like the four cursor keys. When coding, I find myself moving around with them a lot, so having to chord to use them quickly became annoying. On top of that there were other little problems: the Bluetooth connection would sometimes glitch out, particularly if the battery was low. When the battery ran low the only warning was one of the modifier keys flashing, and then when you charged it up there was no sign of how charged it was. On the good side, its small size made it nice and portable. Overall, it was a good starter.

After a few months, I’d decided it was time to think about buying a full-size mechanical keyboard. And why not go all in and just buy a “barebones” model. A barebones keyboard is, well, not really a keyboard at all. It’s the core of a keyboard, but it doesn’t have any keys. You have to fit it out with keyswitches and keycaps for it to work. When it arrived, it was very nicely-packaged, it felt very substantial, solid and heavy, but I couldn’t actually start using it.

It’s a Keychron K10 model, and all you have to do to get it working is push switches into each of those sockets. You get to choose the brand of keyswitch you want, though, and switch manufacturers publish complex charts of the response and movement of different types of switch, describing them as “soft”, “firm”, “clicky” and so on. I just went for a fairly soft switch from a well-known brand, and set to work plugging them all in. It was quite a therapeutic job, pushing each switch home until it is firmly in place.

The harder part is choosing the keycaps: harder, because as well as how they feel, they have to look pretty too, and there are an innumerable assortment of manufacturers who will sell you pretty keys. And in the end, I just couldn’t decide, so went with a set of plain black “pudding” keycaps. “Pudding” keycaps have a solid, opaque top but translucent sides, so the backlights on each key shine nicely through. I’m not sure they are the right keycaps for me long-term, but they were a nice and cheap “first set”.

Am I going to turn into a keyboard nerd? Well, I’ve already tweaked it a wee bit. I kept hitting the “Insert” key by accident, not being used to having a key there, so I’ve already changed the switch on that specific key to be a much firmer, clickier one, so that at least when I do hit it by accident I notice I’ve done it. I’ll probably change the keycaps for something prettier at some point, something a bit more distinctive. I’m not going to go out and buy a lot more keyboards, because I already think this one is very nice to type on. It has a sensible, useful power lamp that flashes when the battery’s low, is red when it’s charging and goes green when it’s finished. But, overall: I admit I was wrong. This is much, much nicer to type on—I’m writing this post on it now—than a standard laptop keyboard is. For something I’ll use pretty much every day that I’m at home, it’s definitely worth the money.

Keyword noise: keyboards, mechanical keyboards.

Today, March 31^st, is Transgender Day of Visibility. This year, 2024, it’s fifteen years since the event first started. Event is maybe a big word. It’s a marker, a day in the calendar for trans people to stand up and be loud about who they are.

The calendar sometimes seems full of queer-related events nowadays. Aside from TDoV there’s LGBTQ History Month (February, in Britain at any rate); Pride Month (June); Transgender Day of Remembrance (November); and probably more that haven’t immediately sprung into my head. It sometimes feels like there’s so many similar events in the calendar that they are coming around every week. Nevertheless, they are still all important. Transgender Day of Visibility was started as a celebration, a reaction to the only trans-specific day in the calendar being one of sadness and hurt, a reaction to the medical establishment’s position that the ultimate goal of all trans people should be to become invisible, and a reaction to those who don’t think trans people should be included under the queer umbrella. A day for us to stand up and be proud of ourselves.

Yes, ourselves.

This blog started in its current form in August 2005, getting on for nineteen years ago. In all that time, I think, I’ve not once referenced the fact that I am trans. There’s a reason for that.

I’m not just trans, I am a detransitioner. In 2005, I had just detransitioned. I went into deep, deep denial, about who I was and who I am. So, here, it was never mentioned.

I started to transition again in 2021. One of the first things one of my close friends said was: “Welcome back!” It touched me more than you can imagine. I scanned all of the content on this blog for anything that gendered me, and scrupulously removed them all. I wasn’t ready to talk about it here until now.

Transitioning, like coming out, isn’t a single event. It’s a lifelong process. But an important part of my second transition, coming out to my work colleagues, coincidentally happened two years ago today. Not specifially because it was TDoV, just because we happened to have the quarterly all-staff meeting that day and HR thought it would be a good idea to make it as face-to-face an event as possible. I didn’t mind. I had to do it three times, with separate groups of people. Each time I told them the basic facts, and each time everyone around me was as caring and supportive as possible. In general, that has absolutely been the case. The first time I came out, over twenty years ago, I did lose friends. Not most, but some. This time, everyone in my life who matters to me has been completely and unequivocally supportive of me.

There’s never a right day to come out. Just like being gay, though; if you’re trans, you’re still trans whether or not you come out. Detransitioners are still, ultimately, trans, even though they are used as a political football by the queerphobic—one reason I always kept very quiet about being a detransitioner. I was born trans, I always will be trans, and I always would have been even if I had never transitioned.

As I do transition, too, I’m becoming less visible. I look like any other middle-aged mum now. It’s not immediately obvious that I’m transgender, not at all. That’s one reason, I think, why days like TDoV are still important. Even though I do enjoy looking like any other middle aged mum, I enjoy no longer having to fight for my gender to be perceived, I will still always be trans. Like many middle aged women, I rely on HRT now. Even people who know I am trans forget that I am; a colleague recently was slightly surprised to discover that I have changed my first name. Before too long, people will only know if they go back and read things like this, or if I stand up on days like today and say so. It matters, though. In some ways, I want to be visible.

There’s a museum I’ve taken The Children to a few times, that often has the same person either behind the counter or working as a custodian in one of the rooms. They have long hair, and a beard. They appear to be male. But…every time they see me, even though they are a stranger, their face breaks out into a broad, broad smile as if they are incredibly happy to see me existing in the world as a visibly trans woman. I’ve seen that look a few times, on the faces of strangers in the street, on the faces of teenagers, even on the faces of work colleagues. They’re probably also trans people, trans people who for now are still in the closet, who haven’t been able to transition yet. Maybe they never will. But in moments like that, I know it’s good to be visible, it’s good to be able to show people that this is possible. At least one friend has told me that my transition inspired them to come out too. I hope I can keep doing that—I hope I can keep inspiring people and showing them that is possible to be out in the world as your true self. I hope all of them, everyone who sees me and feels that urge inside, is able to find themselves eventually.

Keyword noise: queer, trans, transgender, transition.

Regular readers might remember that two or three years back, I visited the Buck Beck Beach Bench, a strange and delightful bench built up from driftwood on one of the remoter stretches of Cleethorpes Beach. I haven’t been back very much since that visit, what for one reason and another, but I did keep following the Bench and its creators on social media. Because of that, I knew that twice since, it had been completely destroyed by storms; and then, rebuilt. After all, the Bench first started as a ramshackle, makeshift affair for dog-walkers to sit on whilst they waited for the tide to turn, and it was created by slow, organic growth rather than some grand plan. When it is destroyed, it comes back, recreated with the same impulse to create something, build something, and create a record that people stood in a particular spot and stared out at the ever-changing ocean.

The bench is smaller now, much smaller than it was before, small enough that it can almost be captured in a single photo. The bench-builders still aim for everything the bench is made from to be safely degradable, something that will rot away harmlessly when it is washed away, as it inevitably will be.

The new bench has moved a little from its previous spot which can still be identified from fragments of the previous bench lying about and projecting from the sand. It is on higher ground, now, higher above the waves. This does give it a more commanding view, but I doubt it will last as long as its previous incarnations. This is because it stands on top of a dune, close to its edge, and before very long that edge will have eroded away. It will erode quickly, both from the action of the sea at the spring tide and the footsteps of people climbing up and down from the shore to the bench and back to the shore again. I only give it a few months, before it is undermined and topples down into the water.

But when it does, it will be rebuilt. And I’ll go down there again, take photos of what its latest regeneration looks like, at once the same but entirely, completely different. And then I will turn, homeward and landward, picking my path carefully back through the marsh.

Keyword noise: Cleethorpes, beach, coast, river, estuary, Humber, Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, shore, shoreline, folk art, bench, Buck Beck Beach Bench.

They say you can never go back again. Never cross the same river twice. The past is a foreign country, as the famous quotation goes. Sometimes, it can’t be avoided. Sometimes, though, it can be worth doing just for yourself.

When I was small, our summer holidays followed the same pattern, from when I was three through to when I was about 14 or 15 or so—I can’t rememeber the exact year it stopped. We would go camping for a fortnight, either two weeks in Sussex, two weeks in Kent, or more often than not, one week in each. The amount of equipment and comfort changed over the years, from smaller tents to larger tents, trailer tents through to caravans, but the destinations were always the same, the same two campsites in the same two parts of England. Wherever else we went, every holiday would include at least one day trip to Hastings, the south eastern seaside town that feels almost like a genteel resort, a noisy arcades town and a West Country fishing village all rolled into a single ball and mixed together. Here’s a photo I took when I was eleven, of the cliffs in Hastings Country Park, looking towards Fairlight Glen.

And then, in my mid teens, we stopped going. We had a couple more family holidays, where I asked for Gwynedd to replace Sussex, but I never again went back to Hastings.

Until last week.

I took The Children away for a summer holiday; and where better to go than a classic seaside town that has a beach that’s great for paddling, arcades, a miniature railway you can ride on, castles, caves, cliffs, the lot. OK, you can’t really build sandcastles, but building sandcastles is something The Children really enjoy in theory far more than in practice, and at least the sea never disappears to the horizon, the beach being steep enough to let it merely retreat a respectful few yards from the prom and the arcades. And: they loved it. I took them around all the same places I’d been taken when I was a kid myself: the miniature railway, the crazy golf, the cliff railway, the castle, and they loved absolutely all of it. We barely even left town for the week. The Child Who Loves Animals would have had us go to the aquarium every day if he’d had his way. I just enjoyed the chance to walk around and practice a bit with my new camera.

The town? As a child your priorities are naturally a bit different to those of a middle-aged adult; but, even I could see that it has changed in the past thirty years. It has improved, a lot. So many places to eat out in the evening! So much craft beer everywhere. So many Pride flags flying, even from the flagpole in the castle. But it was still recognisably the same place, the same old shape, new flesh on old bones. The 1930s railway station might have been demolished and replaced, but the walk from it down to the beach was still unchanged. The art deco promenade by the pier has artwork now, but still the same concrete lines. The miniature railway might have nicer trains, but they still go between the same two spots, past a boating lake now cleared of boats and pedalos, but to a crazy golf course that still has its windmill and watermill obstacles and where hitting the bell at the end still scores you a free round. It’s hard to say, but I’m fairly sure the fish and chips is better.

The main thing that’s changed, though? Probably me. And it made me quite emotional. The last time I went there, I had a fairly good idea of the sort of person I wanted to be as an adult. Going back, walking down the promenade, I almost drew tears as I thought about just how much of my envisaged self, the me I imagined back in my early teens, is present in the woman I am today. Even if it does mean that I have to walk along the shingle in heels now.

Because the East Hill Lift was closed for major track repairs, we didn’t go up to the Country Park so I could replicate the picture at the top of this piece. Here, though, is a view of the town from the West Hill, the castle site, still the same odd little mixture of holidaymaking and industry that it was when I was a preschooler.

Oh, I said we barely did leave the town, but we did go for a couple of days out, to Battle and to Hythe. Here’s a couple of photos of Hythe railway station, one I took age 9 (I think) and one from last week, just to show you that in some ways I haven’t changed that much at all.

Keyword noise: holidays, Sussex, Hastings, St Leonards, The Children, Bottle Alley, railway, miniature railway, Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway.

At this time of the year, when spring is firmly established, the day has been warm and lots of insects have been buzzing around the garden—as dusk falls, just before nine o’clock, there is still life in the garden.

If I’m still at my desk, working away on some crafting or one of my side projects, and the curtains are pulled back, then I start to see a flutter out of the corner of my eye. This is the time the bats come out.

When I mention the garden bats to some people, they’ll say “you’re so lucky! I’ve never seen a bat.” I think, though, it depends if you know what you’re looking for. They’re quick, faster than birds. They dart to and fro, changing direction apparently at random. It’s dusk, though, and unless you spot the outline of their wings you might mistake one for a small bird heading off to their roost. I’ve been stood outside a friend’s house and seen bats flying around us. I recall, years ago now, going on a camping holiday in Cornwall with H; walking back to the campsite after a lovely dinner in the nearest village, up a steep ancient lane lined with tall hedges, and with bats flying around above us constantly the whole way. I’m not sure that anything quite beats, though, the idea that bats are fluttering around my garden every spring and summer night. As the moon rises—as it is now, waxing and almost full—I stand at the window, and watch their silhouettes flicker.

I should be proud, really, that they choose my garden because my garden has enough insects for them to feast on. There must be three or four regular visitors at the moment: if you watch them, if you are quick, you can see more than one in your line of sight at the same time, or one disappear off to the left just as another swoops in from the right.

A few years ago I went on a bat walk with my friend W, for his birthday; the tour guide gave us all “bat detectors”, pitch-shifters that lowered ultrasound to audible frequencies. If you twisted the knob up and down the dial, you’d occasionally hear snatches of bat, a bit like trying to tune a shortwave radio to a Dutch or German station. Each species of bat has a slightly different voice, so if you leave the dial in one position you might miss something; equally, turning the dial makes you wonder if you’re going to be on the wrong frequency at the wrong time. For all the noises we heard, we didn’t really see very many bats. Here, though, I see them nearly every fine night. No need to listen for them when I can watch each wheel and turn. At this time of night, at this time of year, you’ll find me at the window, watching the bats.

Keyword noise: bats.

The crafting project I mentioned in my last post is finished! Well, aside from blocking it and framing it, that is.

Me being me though, I couldn’t resist immediately starting two more. And then, of course, there’s the videos still to produce. I will get to the end of the list, eventually. In the meantime, here’s some photos of a few of the things in progress.

At some point, I promise, all of these projects will be complete and will have videos to go with them! Better make a start…

Keyword noise: crafting, cross-stitch, sewing, trams, Lego.

It’s been all quiet on here for the past month, and all quiet on the YouTube front too. I do have a couple of projects waiting to be turned into YouTube videos, you see, but that means putting all the video footage together, assembling it, writing the voiceover, recording the voiceover and then cutting the whole thing so that the one fits the other. It’s a surprising amount of work if you do it like that, and I’m not sure my degree of anal perfectionism will allow me to do it any other way. Those videos will make it to an Internet near you, but not until some time in the middle of March at the earliest.

What have I been doing, then aside from that? Sorting out The Late Mother’s paperwork for one thing, naturally. But also, picking up another craft project that arrived for my birthday. I do have a massive cross-stitch project that I bought myself a while ago waiting to get started on, but this was a little tiny small one. A palate-cleanser, I thought it could be, before I start on the next big thing.

It doesn’t take long, with a small project, before you start to see recognisable progress. A cross-stitch kit too, because it contains floss that’s been pre-cut into small, manageable lengths, is always very more-ish. Using a whole length only takes maybe twenty or thirty minutes, so at a weekend or in an evening, it’s always very tempting to just do another.

If it keeps catching your eye, then within a couple of weeks, you have all the cross-stitching itself finished.

There’s still all the backstitch to do, to give it all some outline. This particular kit has three different shades of backstitch to put in, and I’m not convinced how well some of the very pale backstitching will show up against a background that is, frankly, mostly in shades of medium-grey. Watch this space and we’ll find out.

Keyword noise: crafting, sewing, cross-stitch, trams.