By big guns I don't mean muscly arms, although that can apply in the trans world. I mean big guns for driving off people who are annoying. Transphobes, for instance.
My crab companion here, Luggy the Lugbutt, is planning a pincer movement.
So all these military jokes arise from my last trip to Scotland. In 2024 Roz and I went round the Highlands, seeing many of the sites famous from the Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746), the last of Britain's many dynastic civil wars. The current German dynasty won over the previous Stuart one (so here's a big hi to King Karl III). Sometimes we planned our visits, such as our day at Culloden (1746) which has a big visitor centre and guides, and sometimes we came across sites inadvertently, such as the (rather pretty) battlefield of Glen Shiel (1719), where units of the Spanish army assisted Stuart forces. Anyway, I wrote about it here. So we thought we'd finish our history lesson with a trip to Fort George outside Inverness, which was built by the London government to control the Highlands after the rebellions.
It's magnificent, almost the last word of the star fortresses that peppered Europe in the age of cannons. You can read about it here.
Strangely, it is still an army base and there were soldiers wandering about with mugs of tea (which reassures me that NATO's northern flank is well protected!)
I'm not lost here, just posing by a signpost. Not as exciting as the one at John O'Groats the previous day, though.
Here's me looking about as military as a transgirl can.
Roz and I with some bug guns.
And Luggy the Crab aiming for Terfs.
Talking of Terf, or rather Turf, the fort has grass on the bastions, as you can see, and as it had rained it was very soft and muddy and my tapered heels sank right in. I had to clean the mud off in the ladies' toilets when we came back down.
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| Rooted to the spot! |
The view from the fort is this.
Pity it was a grey day but this is the Moray Firth. The spit of land centre right is Chanonry Point and behind it is Inverness. There is supposed to be a resident pod of dolphins here but I've never seen them. I've lived on the Mediterranean Coast for seven years now and I've never seen the dolphins here either. Are dolphins real? I'm beginning to think they're made up to attract tourists to barren waters. Hey, I can start my own conspiracy theory.
In one of the guardrooms they have a bunch of period clothes that visitors can dress up in.
I think I prefer the tricorn hat to the Victorian lady's bonnet. It gives me a piratical air!
It was a Sunday and there was bagpipe practice in the yard.
There was also a museum dedicated to Highland regiments and, above all, to medals and their winners. This is where both Roz and I felt uncomfortable. Men getting rewarded for the violent acts they do is not something we feel affinity with these days. I know that as a child I used to make military model kits whilst dressed in a skirt (hey, why not mix the boy interests with the girl ones and save time?!) And the world then was full of relatives, teachers and other men who had fought in wars (and their message was that peace must be paramount). But the pictures and texts of award-winning brutality put a dampener on our interest and we didn't stay very long in that bit.
I'll save the next and quite amusing leg of our day's sightseeing to another time as I thought it worth sticking with the fortification theme here because the following day I left Scotland and spent a day in Berwick-upon-Tweed, which is now just over the border in England, although it switched from Scotland to England many times over the centuries. It has a complete circuit of magnificent late sixteenth-century bastions that are very impressive.
I love the serpent benches all around.
Luggy found another gun to direct, this time over the River Tweed. This is a Russian cannon captured during the Crimean War (1853-56).
It's sometimes hard as a transwoman not to feel a bit under siege these days. But I think the days of dominant, aggressive men are in decline, despite the current crop of them. Frankly, the antics of the current violent, masculinising leaders is so damned childish; the last hurrah of boys who never properly grew up... And who feel so threatened by LGBTQ people, too! But as you can see, we continue to live our trans lives as nature made us to.
Next time, Roz and I spend an afternoon examining the legend of Macbeth and puzzling over the weird humour of Cawdor Castle!
Sue x
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