TRANS-TALL AND STANDING PROUD

So, a Dutch “positivity trainer” has filed a lawsuit to have his age officially lowered by 20 years. He’s currently 69, so I’m baffled why he wouldn’t want it lowered by 40 years, as men of 49 are, by today’s standards, really past it. And try being a woman of 60, as I now am; we are now considered past it barely after reaching puberty.

Emile Ratelband has compared the change to those wishing to identify as transgender. Talk about hijacking an already overcrowded bus.

Do you remember Nkechi Amare Diallo, who wished to identify as black? She’d changed her name from Rachel Dolezal – which she had already changed from her birth name, Rachel Moore. 

Comparing her experience to that of trans-gender Caitlyn Jenner, Nkechi declared herself “trans-black”. And subsequently appeared everywhere on our TV screens, parading her trans-blackness with a perm that looked as if it has eaten Michael Jackson’s bouffant for breakfast, lunch and dinner - the kind of hair crying out not for a stylist but a topiarist (she was charged with committing welfare fraud earlier this year, by the way).

But listen up: a curly perm doth not an African American make, any more than changing a piece of paper to knock years off your age won’t disguise the fact that your body isn’t keeping up with your brain.

However, I must now confess that these inspirational stories have had a profound effect on me and are forcing me to come clean about my own situation; I am just hoping that I will be met with the same understanding. Despite my diminutive appearance and the fact that I am biologically just five feet, I have decided I wish to identify as trans-tall.

   

All of you who called me Bridget the Midget when the song hit the charts when I was in school can laugh the other side of your faces now. The others, who addressed me as Titch (after the so-called comedy act, Titch and Quackers) can get lost, too. I am a very tall person who is short only in public perception, and Nkechi and Emile have finally given me the courage to come out regarding my true identity.

   

My life as a Lilliputian will henceforth no longer be known as Jaci and the Beanstalk; instead, I am registering a name far more suited to my trans-tall state: Longfellow Giraffe Brobdingnag.

   

I am not short, nor have I ever been. I have a T-shirt saying that I am a tall elf, but even that I find offensive. Why do people assume that the body into which you have been born is the one in which you live in your head? Just as NAD subjected her hair to electric shock therapy to suit the soul with which she most identified, so I am having leg extensions to comply with the being I know myself to really be. 

   

Unfortunately, it involves having my legs broken in three places and having a set of circus stilts implanted from my ankles to my thighs, but this is who I am, right? You see? I am already adopting the lingo of my new tall persona.

   

Being trans-tall comes with so many advantages. I can shout “Oi! I was next!” while standing at a bar, without the person behind me being served first and spilling a pint of Stella over my head. I can jump queues by saying “I’m on the list”. I can put luggage into the overhead rack on a plane without having to stand on the seat and look helplessly to a man to give me assistance. I can reach every magazine on the top shelf. 

None of this would be possible if I had been content to languish in the body that has been imposed upon me since birth.

   

I confess to having had a great deal of therapy before coming to terms with my trans-tall self. People always assumed that I was just a raucous Welsh dwarf who laughed too loudly and partied too much. Now, they will know the truth: I was a giant trapped in a small woman’s body, and there was just too much of me trying to contain itself in the tiny frame for which I was never meant.

   

Like NAD and her blackness and Emile and his age reduction, I will continue to identify as whatever I wish: namely, tall. While NAD eventually admitted to having being born to white parents but identifying as black, I confess that I was born to short parents. Dad was five feet six, Mum four feet nine and a half; yet I still identify as tall.

   

As one of NAD’s supporters said: she has chosen to self define and what’s wrong with that? Emile, too, is self-defining in a bid to combat age prejudice. I get it! Why let biology get in the way of a good delusion.

   

Yes, I have chosen to self-define, too.

   

I am trans-tall.

   

Live with it. 

   

Step on me at your peril.

   

MORE REFLECTIONS ON MY 60TH

The countdown to my seventh decade began last Tuesday, when my dear friends Loraine and Kerrianne took me for drinks and dinner in Bath. 

I have a checkered history with the city, having lived there first for 11 years and another year when I rented a house there in 2017. It’s close to my mother in Bristol, and I have some close friends there, among whom I now count Loraine and Kerrianne, who are two of the most kind-spirited, generous, big-hearted and thoroughly wonderful people I have ever met. Loraine (who is an MBE) used to be the city’s mayor; how I wish we had managed to touch base back then when the only social life I knew was the local pub quiz (and I’m still arguing over who invented the rhyming couplet).

   

Next stop was Cardiff and my dear friends Liz and Ronw, who treated me to a stupendous night of tapas and wine at Curado Bar. I regard their entire family as my own; their four girls are beautiful, clever and extraordinary young women. Our greatest adventure was when we accidentally became embroiled with the Mafia in Spain, when we innocently thought these sweet guys genuinely wanted to set up a TV station. In all fairness, it was already in existence; we just didn’t know, as we went in day after day, pitching programmes (leaving Liz and Ronw’s poor children parked in McDonald’s), that it was a front for money laundering. There is still an international warrant out for the arrest of the ringleaders.

   

On Thursday, my friends Janie and Mike took me lunch in Café Citta, a family-run restaurant that is never less than a joy, and the same is true of my friends. They were nearby neighbours, who, during my 10 years living in Llandaff until 2016, pretty much ran my life when I was away from home. Always entertaining company and very funny, they are breathtakingly kind and supportive.

   

And so to Saturday: my party at the Dean Street branch of Soho House, where I had booked an upstairs room that was a perfect mix of drawing room and bar. I had the lights dimmed (but not too dark); Fifties and Sixties music playing (but not too loud); and wine flowing . . . and flowing. I decided to forego food, as I reckoned adults know how to eat and would be more grateful for free wine rather than one glass and two canapés of something they’d be looking for a bin to spit them into.

   

Though I say it myself, it was an incredible party. I have never felt so loved, and I have never felt so loving. The age range was astonishing: from 18 to 80, and it was an eclectic mix. I didn’t want to have a “works” do, and having people there who have been in my life for so long – my first university friend, Helen, from 40 years ago, for example – gave a cohesion to the evening that made me feel cocooned in a bubble of gratitude and humility. 

For all the hardships along the way – and none of us is immune – I felt truly blessed to have come to a point, after six decades, surrounded by the people I saw before me: family, friends, work colleagues past and present, my dentist and hairdresser (yes, really!).

   

When I made my speech (has to be done), I felt overwhelmed by life – so much so, that I didn’t even recognise one of my oldest friends, Tina (twice!), who I saw just three weeks ago. I greeted one couple at the door like long lost relatives, only to suddenly clock their confusion when they realised they were at the wrong party.

   

Everyone genuinely had a great time, and I was particularly touched by the young people in their early twenties, who said it was the best party they had ever been to. I wish my mum, who has been incapacitated following an accident a year ago, could have been there; also, my dad, who died not long after my 30^th. But my brother Nigel and his wife Kim were there and it was wonderful to spend time with them – something we rarely get to do, given the distance between us. It’s something I vow to change in the future.

   

Inevitably, it’s been a week of reflection – on family, friends, the past, the future – and, as I’m now in the three day countdown to the day itself (November 5^th), I’ve been thinking about how I marked each decade. 

Ten: a bit sad because, being born on November 5th, I didn't really understand why I was being given explosives rather than toys as presents. 

Twenty: no idea. I was so miserable and depressed I didn’t think I’d see another year, let alone 10.

Thirty: Chalk and Cheese restaurant, run by my friends Liz and Ray, in Chalk Farm. I made everyone play “The Shoe Game”, which nobody understands even to this day. I remember throwing a shoe at one of my friends who was chatting up my sort-of boyfriend though. 

Forty: Soho House in Greek Street. I have always said it was the happiest day of my life, which, until then, it was. 

Fifty: a dinner in a London restaurant, a party in Cardiff, and also one in Paris, where the last guest, unconscious on the stairs, was carried out by les pompiers, yelling at me in French that this wasn’t their job.

   

Sixty (almost): Soho House, 76 Dean Street – the happiest day of my life. Love and thanks to everyone who was there and made it so.

   

So now I find myself in New York, where my cousin Debbie (daughter of my father’s favourite brother Ray, neither sadly no longer with us), is flying in with her friends on Monday; also, my friends Mary and Liam (Thursday) and Howard (Friday). I’ve planned a dinner, a boat trip and, on 10^th, a celebration at Mr Biggs which, as anyone who reads my posts knows, is my second home in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen.

   

I have no idea what the next phase of my life holds; for better or worse, none of us do. But while we have love and breath, life’s atrocities can never defeat us. 

That’s not something I always say, but heck: it’s my party and I’ll smile if I want to.

   

See yer all in 10 years.

  

  

REFLECTIONS ON THE LAST WEEK OF MY FIFTIES

Mozart’s Requiem and the Adagio of the clarinet concerto

The majesty of Klimt’s dancers and the delicacy of his field of poppies

Toulouse-Lautrec’s dancers, now in the partying shadows of Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, for fear of daylight tainting their delicate ribbons

The genius of Rilke and the comfort he gives on every page of Letters to a Young Poet

Brahms’s violin concerto

The sculptures of Isaac Cordal in urban environments, speaking to the destruction of the world

The sonnets of Shakespeare

John Keats’s uplifting, heartrending letters to Fanny Brawne

The amphitheatre of Rome

The Eiffel Tower

Huddling over a hot mulled wine at the foot of the Champs- Élysées Paris Christmas market

Eurostar, effortlessly making it through 17 miles under water, linking England to Paris

The smell of the Nutella crêpe stall as you emerge from Paris’s St Germain des Prés Metro into the chill of Boulevard St Germain

Dusk falling on the mountains of southern Spain on the road from Marbella airport to the coast

Seeing a real Picasso for the first time, breath shooting of your chest with the punch of something “other” – and you really don’t know what

Rodin’s The Kiss in Paris’s Musée Rodin, the figures emerging from their marble, as if for the first time, out of duty for every tourist, then sinking back into rest, sure of their eternal togetherness

Oysters and champagne at Bofinger at the Bastille on a Sunday morning after a stroll through Paris’s 4th Arrondissement

Sailing around the Mediterranean, salt, wine and laughter editing the shoreline out of sight

Lighting a candle on the Island of the Dead in Venice, even though you don’t believe, but want to pay tribute to the children’s section of these souls forever young

Sharing a bottle of Greek brandy with a stranger in Crete, high on a visit to this country’s exquisite islands

The French Impressionists

Warsaw’s silent celebratory streets after Solidarnosc in 1983

Beethoven’s Fifth

Mahler’s Fifth

Mahler’s First, Second, Third, Fourth . . .

Mahler

Mahler’s gravestone in the Grinzing Cemetery in Vienna – ‘He who seeks me, knows who I was. The others do not have to know.’

I know who I am and am so proud to have seen, heard, witnessed and know about all of these things. I am a proud European who, every day of my life, celebrates everything to which Europe has exposed and given me, and I will defend it to my dying breath.