Movements: France

 I don't like flying. It's not the flying part itself that annoys me - looking out over the clouds or the land below is amazing - but the way that airport security, services, prices and overall treatment generally leave you with a sense that you are being abused all the time. So for journeys that don't involve travelling across oceans I prefer to take the train. I am on a five week trip, part business, part social, part domestic, and I'll be taking the train much of the time. The train lets you see more and is less cramped.

I'll be seeing a lot of friends and family but my companion is Coco Peru and Little Miss Alien that I wrote about a few weeks ago. 

I set off at the end of April, piling my boy case and my girl case into a taxi to my nearest station at Sanremo, an extraordinary modern structure with platforms buried deep inside a mountain with a long tunnel with four travelators that takes you from the station entrance to the trains. 

 

They say to allow ten minutes to get to the platforms from the taxi rank outside and they're not wrong. You can run it in five if you're fit!

I can get from home in Italy to Britain by train in a day but I prefer to take it gently and so I spent my first night away in Nice. The train journey along the coast from Italy to Nice is one of the most beautiful in the world, trundling along the corniche that overlooks rocky coves and passing through attractive seaside villages like Menton and Beaulieu-sur-Mer, and even the tiny country of Monaco. 

Nice itself is famously attractive with its palms, azure bay and beautiful buildings. It's overpriced, though. But I had chosen my hotel well as it was set back from the street at the end of a leafy drive. I hadn't realised when I booked that the Hotel Oasis had once been occupied by Russian writer Anton Chekhov, for whose plays and short stories I have the great admiration, and is said to be where he wrote one of his most performed works, Three Sisters. 

Weird modern sculpture to Chekhov in the hotel garden

The morning train to Paris from Nice takes over five and a half hours so I try to get a comfortable seat by the window on the side overlooking the sea as the coast around Antibes, Cannes and Juan-les-Pins is dramatic, with pinnacles of red rock overtopping small coves and jagged headlands. 

Taking photos through the train windows is not easy, though. This is the only half decent photo I got. 

In Paris you change stations to get the Eurostar train to London from the Gare du Nord. It's a very comfortable fast service through the Channel Tunnel. I had to disappoint my newsagent who wondered if you could see fish out of the train windows. Sadly not. Maybe fish gazing could be a feature of any second tunnel?

It's always a letdown to get off the smart Eurostar and go down into the dirty, smelly London Underground. Thankfully, that journey is short. And so I arrived in London for the first part of this trip.

Sue x

Ann Drogyny: a tribute

 I'm very sad to have to write that my friend Ann Drogyny passed away last night. 

 

I am glad she is out of pain following accidents and a long illness. But I am sure she wouldn't want her friends to be mawkish and sad for too long as that would go against the whole grain of her life, her wicked sense of humour that she never lost to the last, and her love of upending expectations. The photo above of her enjoying a swim on a crowded beach in Spain sums it up. When people puzzled at this ebullient tattooed trans person from abroad splashing around with her family and asked why she holidayed en femme with her wife alongside, she'd simply reply that she liked it, her wife liked it and it didn't harm anyone. Which is kind of how any trans person wants to be.

I met Ann quite a few times in London. Here, for instance, at a bar ...

where I recall loving her beret. And here eating out with our friends ...

She just enjoyed doing things as a woman, such as visiting museums or taking her daily constitutional walk near home after retirement. This is how I remember her.

 

With her wife, she was a well-known figure on the fetish and fancy dress scene, too. For father's day, her daughter once captioned a photo of her and Ann going out somewhere in latex skirt suits, "the family that are weird together ... are weird together", a typical skit on the more homely mottoes that families are supposed to live by.

Ann centre stage at Magic Theatre at the Rivoli Ballroom

 

Ann's Flickr pages are a cornucopia of weird and wonderful outfits, modelled with typical exuberance, from floaty classics to sexy fetish.

I used to link here to Ann's blog, Androgynous Meanderings, but she stopped writing it some years ago. It's still a top example of what a TGirl living life to the full can get up to. 

Such a fun person and such a great sense of humour, from very dry and sardonic at times to quite knockabout at others. Her chosen name says it all!

I think my lovely friend Stephanie (on the right in the picture below) has today written the perfect farewell to Ann:

"You will be greatly missed, my friend. RIP you old tart."

Thanks for the good times, Ann. And for all the laughs. Will miss you greatly and am unlikely to forget you, for all the right reasons.

Sue x

So how did my slimming drive go?

 I've spent the last six months diligently losing weight because I am sick of being overweight and less healthy, and because I really want to get back into those pretty little dresses and short skirts I used to wear.

My challenging target was to lose 50 pounds between November 1st and April 30th. I wasn't able to weigh myself at the end of April because I was travelling, so my last weigh-in was the morning of 28 April when I was 71.8 kilos or 11 stone 4 pounds (i.e. 158 pounds). That's a loss of 32 pounds overall.

So I managed almost two-thirds of my target. I am very pleased with my achievement as I look and feel different and don't have all that far to go to get into my ideal weight range.

Today I tried on a couple of those little dresses I had in mind and they fit reasonably nicely. A little bit of tummy shows still, but I can wear these again now without embarrassment as the cotton material is a bit stretchy. That makes me happy. 

I'm wearing some of my smaller size black coated jeggings now and they fit me again. It's just as well because a light lunch in Chester city centre sitting near two women dressed casually but neatly with lovely makeup, jewellery and hair sent my dysphoria skyrocketing. Why couldn't I have been born a girl? Life would have made so much more sense! Anyway, we aim a least to look right so as ease these feelings.

So I think that I'll be back at my healthy weight some time this summer. Warmer weather means no stodgy winter food and lighter meals, as well as a greater desire for outdoor exercise. 

Thanks to all my readers who posted encouragement during my slimming drive. It really helped.

Itinerary

As you'll have seen, I'm back in the UK now after a pleasant journey through France by train, stopping a night in Nice. I stopped in my old town of Twickenham and I'll now be in the city of Chester for a week. Then I'll be spending a weekend with a sister in the North of England. After that I'll be spending a week in Scotland with my friend Roz and may well get some proper fem time. Later in the month I'll be visiting another sister in London and catching up with friends and, if all goes to plan, having a meal out with my trans girlfriends there, like in the old days. After that I'll be staying with a friend in Sussex for a couple of days. I'm likely to return to my main home in Italy very early in June, travelling by train, this time stopping in Paris.

Quite a complex and wide-ranging itinerary, therefore, with absolute male mode for seeing family, unfortunately, but a more natural feminine focus the rest of the time and some proper girly time with other TGirls.

I'll be posting my adventures as they happen, starting with France. I visited my deposit in London and, as well as collecting various items of clothing, I also picked up all the photos ever taken professionally of me, either by my photographer friend Stella or at the Boudoir Dressing Service in 2004-08. So I'll be able to share more of those.

Slim and hot; it's the way to be!

Sue x