Until the wind changes.

Once again my life is turning over. I'm not the person I was even a year ago, though I suppose that's true for everyone. For me, it's especially so. One year ago, for starters, I was still pretending half to myself and certainly to the world that I was straight. It's taken me most the year to be able to say that I'm not to the great wide internet. Still not comfortable with it, really, but I guess nobody ever is. I'm sticking with the 'bi' label for the time being but we'll see how that goes.

One year ago I had never really fallen in love - loved people, certainly, but not fallen heart and soul.

One year ago I was jumping about from pillar to post, blown about by winds not of my own devising. This year, I might not like the place I am very much at the moment and I might not be very confident about how the places I am going will turn out, but I am here of my own volition. I am living somewhere I chose. I am choosing to leave my job and look for something else. I am choosing to take a great big break before I start in the Civil Service sometime next year. And I feel that I have achieved something this year in actually getting that damned job.

I'm done with Cambridge for the moment. My last night here will be the 31st of October, though I will feel like I've gone by then because I intend to stay with people that day having moved out of Argyle Street the day before. I might come back sometime - it's a fantastic city and the people are wonderful. I love some things about living here. But I need a break from it. I need to be away from the pressure cooker of excellence that is both stimulating and exhausting. I need to break from the people and the situations. I need to be somewhere bigger, where there are different people and different things to do. I will miss it hugely, especially when I'm trying to build a new life somewhere else and definitely when I'm back in St Albans or Cornwall trying to find something to do until somewhere between April and October when my life will be purposeful again.

I have become something, this year. More myself, less hidden. I have acknowledged parts of me and stopped apologising for them. Not in any way all of them. Self-confidence for me seems likely to be always a bit difficult and actually I wouldn't have it any other way. I don't want to be so confident in myself that I stop questioning ways I behave and think with regard to the world and my place in it. It is part of that recognition of who I am that I want to get a tattoo. I have never wanted that kind of permanent change to my actual body before - I've even talked about it on here. But this is sort of different. It's an affirmation - a revelation, not a concealment, as I seem to have envisioned it in the past. I am going to do that, I think, if Traci will come with me and it doesn't prove too scary to walk through the door.

Odd that I hate the New Year posts in January that I feel compelled into. This moment, the end of the summer and the descent back to the winter feels like the natural moment of change. Things are in flux - the year is turning, I can feel the summer heat fading and the autumn earlier nights are here and coming in fast. I guess it's always been the moment of change - it's September on Tuesday, and a new school year starts. I always enjoyed the first day back at school.


I sang at a wedding today, feeling shattered by a very difficult week indeed. It was pretty hard going, actually. Odd that it was 'One More Step Along The World I Go' (very slow and not very good tune recording here, though I'm pretty certain that practically EVERYONE sang that at school and still knows it by heart) that I found the hardest to get through. I needed to do something. I bought a bag, which I do kind of need because my beloved blue handbag is getting pretty tatty, but it didn't fill the hole. I needed to make a statement to myself. Do something slightly crazy to stave off doing something truly crazy. So here's the haircut. What do you think? The woman who cut it looked horror struck when I first said 'same length all over, a couple of inches long'. She said it wouldn't look very feminine, and suggested a bob instead. I wasn't wedded to my idea, really, I just didn't know how to picture a bob. It was never boy hair I was after, just something that will look neater and more like I take care of it than my usual bird's nest, and would be the change I need in my life.

This still doesn't feel like my head. She showed me the back of it and it looks like someone else. I've NEVER had my hair this short. The closest it got was chin-length when I was 12 and I didn't like it then. This, I'm quite pleased with. It won't look like this after I've slept on it and brushed it and washed it, but I think the shape will be ok. My curls are a quite enthusiastic when I give them a chance. We'll see. It's definitely not what I had before. Comments appreciated...

Also, it turns out that it's bloody hard to take photos of yourself in the mirror.


I've been calling it grown up hair to myself. I haven't got the little girl long hair I've had for years, that I always wanted when I was tiny and never could grow. That part of my life is over. Here is something different. I am something different.

Final acceptance.

Actually, this guy is nothing to do with anything I want to talk about. AND I think it's probably a girl, not even a guy. She's turned up three or four times in the evenings about 10ish. I wonder if her owner goes to sleep or kicks her out or something. We nearly always leave our back doors open, and she just pootles in and makes herself at home. She's pretty keen on the fridge. She thinks it's great. I offered her a bit of sardine from out of said machine though, and she turned up her nose at it. Ah well. I think she's lonely. She mostly just sits and purrs at us. She is without a doubt the single biggest cat I've ever met. She's a bit fat, but she's BIG too - her paws are bigger than an inch across. Hefty. I like having a cat around. In theory, we aren't allowed pets inside, (the rats are technically 'outside' - this was the agreement with the landlord), but since our house is being repossessed at the moment and the landlord seems to have gone totally AWOL I've given up even thinking about it. But my new friend, nice though she is, wasn't the point.

I want to get my hair cut. Properly short. Every time I say that to people around me, they say, 'So...you like girls now and need to have the hair to match?' Which kind of annoys me. Partly because it's true, and I hate to be so predictable. It's not that I want to conform with any stereotypes - exactly the opposite, out of pure contrariness*.

I have been progressively getting my hair cut shorter for the last couple of years in any case, but it hasn't been exactly drastic. I'm annoyed with how tatty it looks when it's long. This picture by the the inimitable Mr Allsop is in many ways a really lovely picture. But my hair's a STATE.

It's quite thin, though the curls means it doesn't necessarily look it. Partly it's that I just don't get it cut often enough and rats' tails is what happens to my hair if I don't get it cut enough. It breaks easily. It's shorter than that now, but it's still that wispy no matter what I do.

My thought is that cutting it short will help it seem less thin and pathetic. The curl means it shouldn't go flat and JUST ick. And if it does, I learnt about mousse. I might not be very girly, but I did figure that one about.

It is about coming out, somewhere along the line. Something about being different and making a statement. Same as the vague but fairly insistent desire for a tattoo, I think. 'I have decided this, now let me show that it means something'. An acceptance. I'm WAY too shy for the tattoo. I'll look at pictures of them and think about it, but the actual walking into a shop and saying 'draw this on my skin' is too much involvement from someone else. Getting my hair cut is pretty ordinary, though. I'd shave my head, except I'd get more questions.

I think I want something like the same length all over, about 2-3 inches, to give it space to curl. I don't know. I might just go for more short and quite layered. Don't know. It'll probably wait for a while until I actually leave Baker Richards (at the end of October...crazy...).

...thoughts on the hair style, anyone?

*True story: I vividly remember being in year 2 (I called it J3 back then, and I was 6 going on 7, for any foreigners) at school and being asked to make something that measured wind direction. I can't even remember now what everyone else made - something with paddles, I'm pretty sure - but I very deliberately didn't go with what was the only really sensible idea given the materials we had because I wanted to be 'different', and failed the test totally. I remember reading the comments my teacher was writing down over her shoulder. Being Contrary Is Not Always The Answer. It's amazing how often I've failed to take note of this since then.