MAKING A TIT OF MYSELF

Let me say at the outset that I have nothing against breasts. 

Apart from my own, which would have trouble filling a contact lens, let alone a bra, I happen to think they are rather beautiful. In fact, I appear to be the only woman in the world bemoaning the dropping of the swimsuit section in beauty pageants.

   

Let me also say that I have nothing against women breastfeeding in public. But is it too much to ask for a bit of discretion? I know that babies have to be fed and that the human body is the most natural thing in the world, blah blah blah; but having just endured a two and a half hour flight next to a breastfeeding woman, I’m going to risk the wrath of women everywhere. 

I’m sorry. I didn’t like it. If I’d closed my eyes and poked my tongue out a centimetre, I could easily have fooled myself into thinking I’d been incarcerated at a dairy farm.

   

The flight did not start well. I am very fussy about where I sit. Unless I am flying long haul and have my own sleeping area, I have to be at the front and in an aisle seat, quite simply because I suffer from claustrophobia. I book my seats well in advance and pay premium price to get them, so, as far as I’m concerned, I’m not committing a heinous crime by refusing to give it up. 

You want your seat? Book it. Pay for it. Just like I did. It ain’t rocket, or even Boeing, science.

   

Last year, some people were incensed when I wrote about not giving up my seat to a woman in the aisle behind who asked for mine on the grounds of “I’d like to sit with my boyfriend.” No, no and no again. And why didn’t he ask? If you can’t survive three hours without your partner, you really shouldn’t be together in the first place.

   

But back to Dairygate. 

I was in one seat. The woman appeared to want/need five, although I couldn’t quite work out why at this point. I was asked by a crew member if I’d move to row two at the other side of the plane. Not. Going. To. Happen (did I mention I also have to sit on a particular side?). Just as last year, there were dirty looks from fellow passengers – although I suspect had they been asked to move, it would have been a different story.

   

So, the milkmaid sat in the window seat with her baby and one free seat between us. The second the seatbelt sign was off, out game a gargantuan breast to which the six month old infant (at least I was polite enough to ask about the beautiful child) attached herself with the safety instinct of a passenger bracing themselves for landing on water.

   

I continued to politely engage, accompanied with lots of Oohs and Aahs about what a hungry little girl she was. “No she’s not hungry,” said Spanish mummy. “She eesss like theesss all the time; she cannot be away from me. Alwaysss she want the breast.” Oh, great. Another double brandy when you’re ready, steward!

   

Then, the unthinkable happened. From the row behind, another child appeared. She only had effing twins! It reminded me of a story I heard about Mike and Bernie Winters when they were starting out. After Mike’s routine had died on stage, out came Bernie and someone in the audience allegedly shouted: “F**k no! There are two of them.”

   

That was me.

   

Luckily, the boy was not so demanding, not least because his sister decided it was her turn once more. And so it all began again.

   

Now, like I said, it wasn’t that it offended me, but I think we should keep our bodily parts and functions discreetly hidden when in the company of others. I am deeply offended when people put their bare feet on train seats; I don’t like people wiping their noses with their hands; I’m not partial to men getting their willies out and pleasuring themselves on planes (though I have seen it happen). 

As someone who has been getting her tits out for the lads for decades (I promise you: I really have stopped now), I know that the words pot, kettle and black will spring to mind; but I still think that a 150 minute movie of a giant tit doesn’t make for great viewing. I could barely keep my ham and cheese toastie down.

   

Whether we like it or not, we live in a world in which we should be sensitive to others and be aware of cultural differences. I’m not suggesting airlines provide golf umbrellas to shield lactating breasts from passengers such as myself of a delicate disposition; but neither do I want to be sitting next to an air balloon in my face – literally.

   

I know my mother stopped breastfeeding me when I was six months (although she still proudly shows off the chair she used to do it on – less proudly when she recalls that she had me in one hand and a cigarette in the other); I know people who have breastfed their kids until they were four (they grew up to be nuts, should you be tempted); I’ve never had kids, so the best I can muster is a few guys (who were all crap at it, by the way; quite why they think the right technique is downing it like a can of Stella is beyond me, but that’s another story). But this was the first time I’ve been so . . . well, up close and personal as an adult observer.

   

I’m waiting for the screams of “most natural thing in the world”. 

So is masturbation; I still don’t want to see it at 30,000 feet. 

On the plus side, in the unikely event of the plane landing on water, I wouldn’t need to struggle with my life jacket; I’d just grab the nearest lactating tit and breathe deeply.

  

  

  

  

  

I CAN SORT THE WALL, MR PRESIDENT!

OMG! I am a political genius. Why didn’t I think of it sooner? I’m getting straight on the phone to the White House as I think I’ve found the solution to the whole wall problem. Within hours, I could bring to a halt the shutdown that is crippling America. I could be next year’s Time Magazine Person of the Year. I might get freedom of the City of Washington. I could become President Trump’s New Best Friend.

  

I think he’d like me. Not least because I predicted he would be President the second he said he was standing. I suspect he’s probably got a wicked sense of humor (hey, come on – I can be as sycophantic as the next soon-to-be-sacked official). I certainly think I have something to resolve the current crisis engulfing the country, which I think would endear me to the President greatly. And I can say it in 10 characters, thereby leaving him a whole lot of others to bang on about whatever else he chooses on Twitter (apologies; I know that’s no way to talk about my NBF).

   

Until I got my Green Card last year (legally, since you ask), I’d never thought of a career in politics, much less American politics. But now I’m gripped by the daily soap opera it appears to have become. I’m so gripped, I’m taking Russian language classes (even though I’m already fluent after a bottle of Chianti). In the category in which I was applying for the Green Card, I had to state, under the “National Interest Waiver” (i.e. not having a job), what I was going to contribute as a legal immigrant - financial, social, artistic et al – and now I have it. I’m going to contribute to the political health of this great country.

   

True, I can’t stand for President, as I wasn’t born here, but maybe I could get all that changed. You see? I am already well into this narrative. But would I want to live in Washington DC? They go to bed before 2am there! How old am I? Four? 

And what if the Oval Office is too oval for me? How oval is it? American football oval, or Kiwi fruit oval? Can you hang paintings with rectangles in an oval office? Would I have to have an oval husband? I have a bit of an OCD thing going on with shapes, so this might prove something of an issue. I think I’d prefer a rectangular office. Or a hectagon. Is that allowed under the Constitution?

   

While we’re at it, I’m not too fond of the color white, either. Would I be allowed to paint the White House blue? How is anyone even supposed to find it in an East Coast snowstorm?

  

Sometimes, I think I over-think things. 

And maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

   

So, back to the main point and my solution for solving America’s current problems. Brace yourselves.

   

Here goes.

   

Forget the wall.

   

Build a moat!

   

Yes, a moat.

   

As an island, the UK has natural borders. Yes, I know you can fly in and bypass all that stuff, but if the President banned all flights from Mexico and the only way into the US was by water, how difficult would it be for people to get here?

   

Unless they had a Moses among them, doing his parting of the Red Sea party trick, it would be pretty much foolproof. No bricks, no steel: just a whacking great river with hyped-up rates for the dinghies so that only people earning upwards of a million dollars a year can afford them.

   

I’ve looked at a map of the world. Here’s how the moat’s going to work. You start digging at the Pacific Ocean and don’t stop until you reach the Gulf of Mexico. True, it’ll be expensive, but with a few men in hard hats and a couple of shovels, I think it could easily be accomplished. And Voila! Problem solved.

   

Britain’s prowess in ancient wartimes was the protection its geographic placement as an island offered it. Quite simply, they could see the enemy coming. They’d get up in the morning and, over bacon and eggs, look out of the window and ask “Hey, what’s that whacking great lump of metal coming towards us, bobbing along?" “What, that whacking great thing that’s not going to reach us before Christmas next year?”

   

Then they had ample time to finish their breakfast (several), gather their weaponry, lie in wait, and before you could say “Hello, sailor”, everyone on said great piece of metal would be dead.

   

Water is by far the superior material for keeping the enemy at bay (in this case, literally and metaphorically) than any bricks, mortar or steel are ever going to manage, and I don’t know why anyone has not thought of it.

   

So, President Trump, I am putting myself forward as Head of Wall Planning (water division), and it’s going to work like this.

1.     Look at map. Slice land from left to right.

2.     Dig deep. Water will eventually appear.

3.     Ban all Mexicans from taking swimming lessons.

4.     Ban all flights in and out of Mexico.

5.     Tickets for boat trips to be bought in advance and only with ID (no swimmers allowed. Olympian medallists banned for life).

6.     Ban all men with the Christian name Moses from boarding said boats. Men with names Noah and Jonah subject to additional scrutiny. Look carefully into their working background regarding ark building and whale-hiding.

7.     Strictly no fishing in the moat (non-swimmers might hook themselves to a rod and goodness how many illegal immigrants that might bring in).

8.     No one knowing the words to River Deep Mountain High, Cry Me a River or, especially, Last Boat to America allowed in the moat at any time (check to see if in possession of a David Gray CD in relation to the latter – definitely a No No).

9.     No taco vendors allowed at water’s edge on Mexican side.

10.  No towels offered at water’s edge on American side.

I am America’s savior. Just floating it as a solution, Mr President.

  

GHOSTS OF CHRISTMASES PAST

Every Christmas, I miss my dad. This year, it is especially painful because last month I hit 60, which was the age he was when he died in January 1990. 

   

I had the best birthday, surrounded by family and friends, and I am so blessed in having a life rich in friendship, kindness and incredible love. In my numerous celebrations, it was as if all my Christmases had come at once, and the fun and laughter on both sides of the Atlantic (the Pacific end is yet to come) moved me to many tears - of immense joy.

   

But for me, Christmas is now always tinged with sadness, remembering the people who are no longer here to enjoy it. On Friday, my best friend from school, Shelley, would also have been celebrating her 60th birthday. I imagine what reminiscences we might have shared, as we did so often, even though time and continents separated us. She died in August 2017 and I regularly read our Facebook exchanges and the many diary entries I made throughout our school years. 

   

I had the most joyous childhood Christmases. I can still smell the Play-Doh and see the marble necklaces I made by mixing the colours from different pots together. I remember the thrill in the transfer of ink to page in my John Bull printing set; the flow of lines on Etch-a-Sketch and Spirograph; the excitement of the cage coming down and the cry of “Mouse Trap!” in the helter-skelter of red and yellow plastic that was the best board game ever.

   

I remember Dad’s socks - one each for my brother Nigel and me - and the tangerine and walnuts hidden in the toes; the saucer of milk we put out for the reindeer on Christmas Eve, when, before going to bed, we were allowed to choose just one present to open from our stash. And the dark, slow, quiet night. Oh, that awful, interminable darkness and silence of Christmas morning, when my Nigel and I would cough loudly outside our parents’ bedroom door, willing them to wake. 

   

You knew you were getting older when the presents began to change in nature - that sorry day when you started to get clothes instead of shiny plastic; the three lemon-shaped soaps that turned up every year and never got used; the wands of coloured bath oils that were always the last thing to be opened, their jewelled exterior never managing to hide the fact that the Scalextric you really wanted hadn’t materialised yet again (just me, then?).

   

Dinner was always a spectacular affair. Mum made her own pudding and cake, and apart from the year she left the tea-cloth used to wipe out the turkey actually in its belly during cooking, everything always went off without a hitch (actually, I think I recall a time when Dad, whose task it was to turn the oven on, forgot). 

   

Of course, one can never recapture the joys of a childhood Christmas, but I am lucky to have had so many of them. It’s a time of the year that inevitably changes with age; most of my friends have children and are now enjoying grand-children, thereby getting to re-experience the delight in their excited faces. With the exception of buying for my mother and her for me, there are no presents anymore, which is just as well, as I wouldn’t have any room for them. I prefer to spend money on meals and drinks and enjoying good company. 

   

A few days ago, my comments about wanting Christmas to be over attracted considerable antagonism on Facebook. It felt like Brexit Revisited - no one being allowed to voice an opinion without the risk of entering into full scale battle. 

   

I don’t enjoy Christmas anymore. It’s the busiest time of year for me with work. in 2016, I was hospitalised in December and had a 48 hour nose bleed - a burst blood vessel owing to stress. Last year, following my mother’s fall, I also went flying when running to her house. I cracked two ribs and was incapacitated the entire holiday, although provided with ample food and drink sustenance from the very generous Debbie and Theo Paphitis (I’m thinking of breaking another couple of ribs over the weekend).

   

I find Christmas songs infinitely depressing, and if Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, a razor blade and I happen to be in the same room together at any point, start ordering wreaths for my funeral. 

   

I can’t bear the loud music, balloons and drunkenness in bars; the overcrowded roads and trains; the really bad TV, because all the companies are saving up their best stuff for the New Year.

   

And don’t even get me started on New Year’s Eve, easily my most hated day of the year. 

   

I’m actually very happy to be spending a quiet time at home and ignoring it all. I don’t even have a tree. What’s the point? You only have to take it down again.

   

Now, where’s that corkscrew?

   

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.