LIKE BREATHING OUT AND BREATHING IN [66]

UPDATE (26/10/2017): I received my Gender Recognition Certificate in the post, and the world became, for once, demonstrably better. The soundtrack to my celebration was “Land of Hope and Glory,” followed by “Look Back In Anger” by David Bowie, and the live version of his “Station to Station” title track, from the “Stage” album... and then "Sunrise" by Eric Carmen, for some reason.

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There has been a lot about transgender rights in the news recently, especially in the last week – to those in the United States, still enraged by the President planning to remove thousands of trans people from the military, your President is Donald Trump, so what did you expect?

The one group you don’t hear, apart from left-wing pressure groups, right-wing pressure groups, and media commentators, and media commentators, are ACTUAL TRANSGENDER PEOPLE. I then remembered that I see a trans woman in the mirror every day, so here I am.

[You take five pictures, and the first one was the best.]

On Sunday 23^rd July, the UK Government announced two consultations. The first, ahead of the fiftieth anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality – the age of consent wasn’t the same for everyone until January 2001 - is to ask the LGBT community’s experiences of discrimination, and on accessing and using public services. I completed this survey online - you get the feeling that these questions are being asked for the first time, especially those on discrimination.

The other survey would have been important to me, but I already decided not to wait for the answer. In the autumn, the Government will canvass opinions on whether applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate, to change your gender in law from female to male, or vice versa, should be streamlined, allowing people simply to identify how they wish, instead of needing evidence about why you needed to do it.

Many people have not waited to be asked. We already know that Germaine Greer, “Woman’s Hour” presenter Dame Jenni Murray, and the novelists Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Fay Weldon are all on record as saying that transgender women are not real women, while on Twitter, Piers Morgan has a profound dislike for the idea of people not identifying as male or female, although “third gender” or “two-spirit” people, among other names, are found in cultures for centuries.

The reason I am not waiting for the Government here is simple – I am applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate, under the existing system. There had been a bill in Parliament to change the process, but after the first reading, months of delays, and a General Election, nothing more happened.  Therefore, I am pressing on with what the existing process, which costs £140, requires me to do.

It relies heavily on evidence that you are on your final-destination path, including medical reports, passport, utility bills, official letters, and a statutory declaration I have signed in the presence of a solicitor – there may have also been something about collecting all the gold rings, jumping over a ravine, and rescuing a princess, but I haven’t seen anything more about that. A panel then decides if I should be given the certificate that has “female” written on it, but with what it has taken to get there, both in years of personal experience as well as paperwork, it may as well also say “sane.” Either way, it unequivocally leaves no room for doubt.

Even if I am choosing to do this the hard way, it doesn’t mean it will be a harder-won victory than those that may only have to fill in a simple form later. For the record, I think having a statutory declaration will weed out those who don’t realise how serious changing your gender, in the eyes of the law, really is. Only 112 people submitted applications under the existing process in the first three months of 2017, so making that process easier won’t open the floodgates for women’s toilets and changing rooms to be invaded by men, which is an understandable fear, but unlikely. The Republic of Ireland already have a simpler process, introduced in September 2015, and only 240 people have used it, out of a population of five million.

S-H-O-PP-I-N-G, WE’RE SHOPPING [65]

There are those people who may miss the personal touch of a friendly face at the end of their supermarket shopping trip, but for me, the self-service checkout is a joy. I can scan what I bought quickly, pay quickly, and get back into the open air. Granted, there are those times when an item is too light to have been weighed by the machine, the occasional instance of, “unknown item in the bagging area,” and the rare treat of having the machine being opened up because it jammed itself when trying to deliver the change from the note you entered, but other than that, it is fine.

I am not anti-social – at least, I don’t think so – but I want shopping to go by quickly, without having to enter into a conversation with store staff about what I wanted, or what they think I should do – I go in, I get what I wanted, and get out. You do not want any experience that involves your unloading your choices onto a conveyor belt, so a cashier can see the results of your decision-making skills. I also prefer have the cashier being redeployed into a better job elsewhere in the shop, instead of watching them scan a particularly tricky barcode on a bag of bananas, a frustration that did not need to happen.

Superficially, self-service checkouts look like a cost-saving measure, putting one member of staff in charge of a number of machines. However, what starts as a test, or trial, only continues because the rest of us find it too useful. Shops in the UK were generally run as a personal service to all, picking the items for their customers before charging for them, until Sainsbury’s converted their Croydon branch to a self-service supermarket model in 1950, pioneered by the US store Piggly Wiggly in 1916. From then on, you take your basket, and you take what you need from the shelves yourself. It reduced queuing, and freed up staff to help with merchandising, changing the shopping experience.

From then, the more the customer can be persuaded to do themselves, the more that shopping has changed. Argos, started in 1972 as an online store without the website, have stores that are mainly storage space, where customers give staff the catalogue numbers for the items they want. Argos were primed and ready for the growth of “click and collect” shopping online, because they could now get their customers to make their usual transactions with them at home, a system that other shops have had to introduce, or build warehouses that are able to handle home delivery – Argos, on the other hand, have vans waiting out the back of their larger stores, sending out stock the same way they went in.

Will this mean the end of the shop as we know it? Will we only shop online after a certain point? There once was a time when people had to queue at their bank, within its opening hours, to take cash out of their current accounts. Now, you use an ATM to take out your cash, and make deposits in some cases – ATM makers like NCR and Wincor Nixdorf also produce self-serve checkout machines –while the majority of banking is done online or over the phone. I last walked into the local branch of my bank two years ago, and I’m not sure it will be there for the next time.

GET YOURSELF AN EGG AND BEAT IT [64]

Idle questions are those you should watch out for the most, because you can never be sure you will find the answer you need to put your mind at ease.

We all know people count calories for health and diet reasons, but I wanted to know when that practice began – why I wanted to know was beside the point. I knew the idea of calories is based in the 19^thcentury, but the counting of them appeared to be a more recent phenomenon, my thinking most likely guided by the increasing number of diet plans available in the last forty to fifty years.

In the United States, their Food and Drug Administration started mandating nutritional information on packaging in 1973 to include calories which, along with figures on recommended daily intake, developed into the standard white “Nutrition Facts” label found everywhere. The reason for this was simple – consumers wanted to know what made up their food.

In the UK, however, things were less clear for me to find, unless I wish to spend the rest of my life straining to understand the numerous clauses, sub-clauses and definitions of terms that make up UK laws and regulations. What I did find was that, until fairly recently, the focus on UK food packaging was on telling the consumer what was in the product, rather than applying specific numbers to it.

In 1946, descriptions of ingredients had to confirm common names of foods, listed in descending order of weight. Therefore, describing a Mars bar as “milk chocolate with soft nougat and caramel centre” could be all the nutritional information that was required, but brand names and trademarks didn’t have to say anything other than their own name on their packaging until 1980 – we all know what it is, but what’s in it? More controls on descriptions, and the claims that could be made, came in from 1970, and were refined in 1980, 1984, and 1994, but a full table of calories and nutritional information were only mandated from 1996.

So, the shift in the information people wanted for food appeared in the 1970s, with calories becoming part of the decision making. This correlates with the growth in instant and microwave meals, and in processed foods and ingredients like high fructose corn syrup, first identified in 1965, which is metabolised more quickly by the body than the cane sugar it often replaces.

However, using calories in nutrition and food science is what started the practice altogether, following the results of more than five hundred experiments, begun in 1896, by the American physicist Wilbur Olin Atwater, who used a bomb calorimeter to burn foodstuffs, and measure the heat generated by it. Atwater’s results popularised the use of “food calories” as a measurement in nutrition, and confirmed that different types of foods created different amounts of energy – from there, fat and alcohol were determined to have about nine calories per gram, versus about four for protein and carbohydrates, making future calorie counts a simple case of calculation, instead of setting things on fire.

It is Atwater that concluded that Americans ate too much fat and sweets, and moved around too little, advocating a bean-and protein-based diet instead. However, because Atwater discovered that the body metabolised alcohol in the same way it did carbohydrates, and reported the conclusions, it gave drinks companies something good to use in their advertising, not an ideal situation for someone who was also involved in the anti-alcohol temperance movement.

TWIDDLY-DIDDLY-DEE, TWIDDLY-DIDDLY-DEE [63]

“The trouble with Twitter, the instantness of it - too many twits might make a twat," said David Cameron, a year before becoming Prime Minister, while being interviewed by Christian O’Connell on Absolute Radio – he has since tweeted over 2,500 times.

Five months earlier, on 3^rd February 2009, Twitter entered the consciousness of most British people when Stephen Fry posted a message from a building at the end of London’s Oxford Street: “Ok. This is now mad. I am stuck in a lift on the 26^th floor of Centre Point. Hell’s teeth. We could be here for hours. Arse, poo and widdle.” Fry has since quit and rejoined Twitter a few times, including on one occasion, again in 2009, when he said there was “too much aggression and unkindness around.”

In 2017, Twitter is known as the social media website where there is not enough space to express yourself. Facebook has built its reputation as the greater data aggregator, providing acres of space through its main site, then Messenger, Instagram and so on, to give two billion people all the space they need to display their lives, make connections with others, and pour their souls straight into Facebook’s servers.

Meanwhile, Twitter may let you add a picture or a video, but the site’s origin as a way of sending SMS-like messages to small groups, and co-founder Jack Dorsey’s definition of the word “twitter” as “a short burst of inconsequential information,” show that public perception, and use, of the site has outstripped the site’s intentions. The ability to broadcast your thoughts is too compulsive for some, and the free, easy cyberspace setting makes real-life consequences feel, well, inconsequential.

How do I fit in to all this? I mainly use Twitter, and Facebook – I really cannot be bothered with any of the other sites right now – to signal I have written something new, or to highlight something interesting. However, I have felt the need to repudiate things a few people have said, once I realised I had the same means they did. I have only done this with the tweets of three people, but they are people that give the impression they could not be bothered by anything anyone said.

The people are Donald Trump, with his self-styled “modern-day presidential” attitude on social media that would get any other person fired from their job, requiring both defense and explanation  from White House Staff; Piers Morgan, a former newspaper editor who writes a column for the Daily Mail Online when not pontificating and raising his voice at people on breakfast television; and Katie  Hopkins, a contestant  on the reality TV show “The Apprentice,”  noted for her hardline views there, which has also been turned into a career as a hardline newspaper columnist, insisting it is the Left that made her, like a Frankenstein’s monster. These are all very forthright people, where I wouldn’t want to agree with them, even if I did, because of the way they force their opinion on people.

The responses I have made on Twitter have been when I could see someone was only talking from their own point of view. Humour had to be central – I am not trying to incite conflict of any sort – and if I made a point at the same time, that is fine. I like that one person described my tweets as “sassy,” because, at last, I now have proof. Basically, all you need to do is remember that, just because someone feels they can say what they like, they will become answerable in one way or another, as Katie Hopkins would know, having lost a court case over libelling the cook and blogger Jack Monroe – just because it is social media doesn’t mean it doesn’t count.

I’m not yet saying we should “drain the swamp” of annoying people from Twitter, but they shouldn’t have to be completely comfortable in saying whatever they like – there have to be consequences. We should have a backup plan - we could all migrate back to MySpace instead. No, I didn’t know it was still going either.

DON’T GO NEAR THE WATER [62]

Last year, I did some research for an idea that never materialised. I had it in mind that a product test of bottled water would be quite funny, but the reason I thought that was why, ultimately, it was not worth doing. Recently, this came up in a conversation, and I was told that I should do it, because it was a funny idea… I’m still not totally sure.

My research involved buying up various brands of bottled water over a couple of weeks: these names included Evian, Volvic, Buxton, Tesco Ashbeck Water, Tesco Perthshire Water, Highland Spring, Acqua Panna, Glaceau SmartWater, Fiji Artesian Water, Voss Water from Norway. I also made sure to try our tap water at home, and the Brita-filtered tap water from the break room at work. I restricted my purview to still water, finding sparkling water to be as hard to drink as tonic water, and envisaged creating tables and charts that led to the single, inevitable conclusion:

IT ALL TASTES THE SAME!!! There is only so much water you can take before you realise it is all just water. For there to be any more to it means it is no longer water. Water, water everywhere, and it costs so bloody much. Give me a Victorian-style drinking fountain any day, then a bottle to fill up.

I kind of expected to find I had wasted my money but, apart from a slight difference in the taste of the tap water, coming from the large chalk deposits where I live, having only one available answer to your experiment leaves you unable to form a decent joke. Therefore, chastened, I abandoned the idea, and wrote about typewriters instead.

However, the abundance of bottled waters from which I could choose is, to me, a bit perverse. It was the British that started to bottle water in the 17^th century, transporting the perceived health benefits of the Malvern springs across the country. Taking a “water cure” was popular in Victorian times, evoking Roman spas like those at Bath, where its sulphurous hot spring, more to bathe in than drink, was touted as a way of restoring your “vital fire” as much as curing “the Scratch.”

Even then, if water is water, why do we go so far for it? Why was I able to walk for fifteen minutes from home to a shop that sells artesian water from Fiji, which is nearly ten thousand miles away? Why does the supermarket Tesco have an English brand of water (Ashbeck) and a Scottish brand (Perthshire)? Why does paying the extra for a glass bottle, over a PET plastic bottle, make water taste nicer? Why have I been buying Evian for the sole reason that I think the bottle looks nicer, rather than what is in the bottle? Why will there only ever be questions, when I know it is just water?

That said, good drinking water can be hard to find, but bottles of it are always found where it is already plentiful.

I JUST WANT TO SEE HIS FACE [61]

The following is a journey of pareidolia – just knowing there is a word for when you perceive familiar patterns in something where there is none speaks a lot for how the mind both wonders, and wanders.

Well-known examples of pareidolia include seeing the outline of Great Britain in clouds, and imagining you can hear satanic messages in songs when they are played backwards, but the kind most often perceived are when the brain’s cognitive processes go looking for faces in electrical appliances, buildings, food, craters on the Moon, and so on, although the face of Jesus is more likely to appear in food. Hermann Rorschach’s inkblot tests, created in 1921, deliberately direct this instinct by testing reactions to ten inkblot images, chosen from a large number that were all created accidentally.

Of course, there are other ways the human mind can be directed, and that is by deliberately putting faces onto products. There is no reason that Tesla need a radiator grille on the front of their cars, unless they want them not to have a mouth. Meanwhile, the sportier you want your car to be, the more likely the headlight eyes will look meaner, with the bug-eyed Austin-Healey Sprite being a major exception.

Meanwhile, what if you are given the job of deciding the colours of a new vacuum cleaner, and find the top half of it looks like a bowler hat? It did not take long for the graphic designer in question, Michael Walsh, to decide that the nozzle looked like a nose, adding eyes and a mouth to create the “Henry” hoover. Chris Duncan’s Somerset-based company, Numatic International, had established itself in the market for industrial cleaners, but the pareidolia inherent in Duncan’s design for a home cleaner created a product that advertises itself, especially when owners start playing with them on YouTube.

This is where my experience comes in. We had a Henry hoover at home, until my parents decided upon an upright cleaner instead, but it is still the best cleaner we have. My route to work passes a specialist vacuum cleaner shop, the front window full of Numatic’s range staring out at you, from the various Henrys to Hetty, George, James and Charles, names apparently inspired by the Royal Family, and capable of various wet and dry-cleaning combinations.

But Numatic are still makers of industrial cleaners, and looking at their website made me feel a little uneasy. The “Homecare” have the faces, but then the commercial “Cleancare” range starts removing these features – the “Henry” name becomes “Numatic,” then the face disappears on bigger cleaners… but the black top-hat top half is still there, and the nose nozzle remains.

Nearly forty years of popular culture mean we expect to see the face on a Numatic cleaner, and not to see one where you expect one to be is a little unsettling. Still, if you do need one of their industrial cleaners, you could ask them to draw a face on it at the factory before they box it up.

ARE YOU OK, ARE YOU OK, ARE YOU OK ANNIE? [60]

When I gave myself the OK to write about the word “OK,” I wasn’t OK that some may not be OK with that. Sure, it would be OK to read, but instead of thinking “that was OK,” they may think it was OK instead. Then I thought, OK, if it turns out OK, that’s OK with me, OK?

Well, that is a lot of “OK,” but it reflects the list of possible origins for this word. Most often an abbreviation for fanciful misspellings of “all correct,” an apparent fad in the United States of the 19^th century, though “oll korrect,” or even “oll wright,” is a bit of a stretch, but “Old Kinderhook,” the nickname for President Martin Van Buuren, at least sounds plausible. The alternative spelling “okay” was itself another way of spelling “okeh,” the Choctaw Indian word for “it is so” – several West African languages have something similar. There are various explanations of how “OK” can be abbreviations of German, French, Dutch, Greek and Gaelic (“och aye”) words, among so many others – Puerto Rican rum can be “au quai,” for export from the docks, or an order could be from high command, or “Ober Kommando.”

I got the impression that, no matter how the prevalence of “OK” can be explained away, the fact that the “O” and the “K” are clear, unmistakeable sounds, and every language has both, the only issue is how you write it down: I always use capitals, but “O.K.,” “Ok,” “ok,” and “okay” are all perfectly fine in English, because there has never been a consensus. Meanwhile, the Finnish word “ookoo” is what the letters “O” and “K” sound like by themselves in Finnish, but it is pronounced “OK,” as in the English “OK” - the same goes for the Afrikaans “oukei,” the Maltese “oukej,” and “okey” and “okej” in most of Europe, when they are not writing “OK” themselves.

However, you can blame NASA for giving things the “A-OK.”

Is it OK that we have a word that can be used so easily? “OK” can be used without commitment, when you don’t want to say that something is good or bad. Likewise, you may want to say “OK” to confirm you have understood an order, a decision or a piece of information, but you may only want to give the impression that you have. “OK” can be used to create a distance between what you intend to mean, and what you want someone else to hear. Just like you may want to say “OK,” in a foreign country, you will get further if you have more words at your disposal.

Restricting your language? I’m not OK with that, but if you don’t lose what you want to say, that’s fine, OK?