A day in the life...

I've been spending a fair amount of time in Grimsby just recently. It just happens to be the place where I lived for about 25 years and one of the projects our company is working on at the moment covers the whole of the North East Lincolnshire area. Anyway this particular day in March I'm over in Grimsby to see a bunch of clients so I get there nice and early.

It's 9.15 am and I have about 45 mins to kill before my first client of the day, so I decide to pop for a coffee in BHS. I decided on a black coffee and after paying I grab some sweetener and look of an appropriate place to park my arse, in a pretty empty seating area. Don't you always hate to have to choose, so I pause and survey the seating area as to find some kind of advantageous point. I settle for a seat near the window. The decor in BHS is off the pages of an Ikea catalogue and so I go for the fixed seating at the back rather than the free standing chairs which look quite frankly as comfortable as sitting on an orange box. This also gives me a panoramic view of the restaurant area, because lets face it I've got a good three quarters of an hour to kill and that can be particularly boring on your lonesome.

Also that means employing a back up plan to help pass the time which comes into force when you have no reading material with you and you don't feel brave enough to face some grannies wrath about your walkman being too fucking loud. The early part of the morning somewhere between 8.00 am and 10.00 am are hours of OAP occupation - when every OAP is out for their pension or out shopping to get the freshest meat from the butcher and the warmest bread from the baker and the newest veg from the grocer. Every second or third person you see is over 65 and in possession of either a Tartan clad personal shopping trolley, a very old looking white cloth bag, or an old brown leather trim hold all with brown patterned panels.

Anyway I digress slightly there but back to the back up plan. When you have no form of entertainment and your stuck somewhere you have two options one is to read all the menu as if it will provide you with some important information, that takes all of 5 mins if you read it slow. Your next option is to scan the room for posters or information messages. Again this has a short life span and boredom soon creeps in after you learn where the fire exit, toilets, lift, escalator, lighting and ladies lingerie and men's wear departments are.

So your back up plan has to have variety and constant change so "People Watching" is always your back up. Now as I previously mentioned the place was empty and after watching the two members of staff gossip about a fellow employee I hit the menu and poster messages. Then as luck would have it the OAP posse arrived after shopping and a herd of shopping trolleys came crashing down the counters for tea and teacakes or scones or a 6 item breakfast for £1.55. So needless to say I had something to watch, which was good as I had sunk to reading the fire exit routes on the back of the open kitchen door.

After watching generally for a while I settled on this one couple of old ladies by sheer accident. After a couple of minutes I started to ponder whether one of them was in actual fact a transvestite. This is not an unusual occurrence in Grimsby as the place has a handful that I know of. Now before we go any further I don't have anything against TVs in fact I quite admire them because I think society in general has a very hypocritical stance on the subject but I'll talk about that later. But I have to admit that I do find if funny when I see older men ie 60+ who become TVs because of their background and the macho attitude of their formative years. For those people it must be a real big deal and a major "fuck you" to their establishment because it stamps over all their generations morals and social values. If it happened in their day, it was the sort of thing that was hidden behind closed doors and never spoken about. Maybe in these more liberated times (?!) they feel able to be open up about their feelings and not have to hide them away.
Anyway after a little more deliberation I felt I was spot on with my assumption, though the guy had done a good job at the make up and didn't over do it and look like a woman dressed by a man, if you know what I mean. Men basically are crap at fashion because they base everything on sexuality. So if a man was asked to select clothes for a women and suggest the make up and hairstyle the woman would end up looking either like a hooker or like a catwalk model, with make up etc exaggerated to the extremes. It's not that either of those style may look crap but more to the point a woman probably won't wear them around the house or to go to the shops. Men are interested in what is visually appealing and think women would think the same. But I believe that women are more interested in comfort, than if they're stirring emotions within the loins of some male passer by.

So all this TV stuff made me think back to when I worked in a Vegetarian wholefood shop. As one of the regular customers I had, I nicknamed Mr Betterware because when I first started working there he used to go around doing the Betterware catalogue. Anyway he was a pretty cool chap in his late 50s early 60s and he used to pop in every week for his provisions. It wasn't until about a year later a gradual transformation started to occur. It started with boots, ladies boots, he always used to come on his bike so I didn't think anything of these brown tan shin high boots with a zip up the inside which he tucked his trousers into. I figured that he'd always worn them but had giving up using his cycle clips to hold his trousers. Then when he paid for his stuff I noticed his nails had become alot longer, but again I didn't think anyway of this as I didn't think it looked strange, it's just putting things together afterward.

This continued for about 3 months and I guess he'd been still in the closet (so to speak) at this point until one day I was stocking some shelves at the end of the shop.
I noticed a woman enter the shop and my co-worker Val was at the till so I left her to it and continued with my job in hand. When I'd finished the lady was still chatting at the counter and I came up to the counter to pick up my ordering book. "Hello Rick" this deep voice boomed at me and I looked, and then looked again it was Mr Betterware and he was fully decked out in a black long curly haired wig, a floral frock and brown tights, low heel court shoes and matching handbag.
I replied "Oh Hi, how are you ?" tact being one of my virtues. His make up was all over the place and the voice was a dead give away. So Mr Betterware's image was transformed and after a couple of months he had perfected the art of his make up and decidedly toned it down, he walked amazingly well on high heels considering firstly he was a man and secondly he wasn't getting any younger. He came into the shop each week and never mention it to me but would talk to me about the weather and something to do with the food he was buying. Then he would go and have a chat to Val about the latest knickers, bras and frocks that he'd purchased from the local charity shops. Val found it a bit difficult to deal with to start but I understood him I knew what it was like to walk down the street and get a mouthful of abuse and threats of violence from people.

To have mothers yank their kids out of the way like you were carrying the Plague or something for no other reason than prejudice and/or fear of having spikey hair or wearing bondage strides or just generally not fitting in with societies accepted "norms".

In fact in a strange way I was quite proud of him though he never talked about it, I guess he probably got a lot of stick and his reason wasn't sexual or anything to do with feeling like he should have been born a woman or anything. His reason was a sad one and in some ways a comforting one. About 6 months before he started to wear women's clothes, he had lost his wife who he loved deeply. After she'd died I don't think he ever really got over it and he was always talking about her and how he missed her. I guess that this was of his way of dealing with her death and his own grief by getting as close to her as he possibly could. I suppose he never threw any of her clothes out so he had a starting point, maybe he'd wear her dressing gown or nightgown for comfort at night and gradually started to wear more and more around the house. Until one day he braved the big bad whole outside. Some people need drugs, some counselling to deal with grief maybe Mr Betterware found Transvestism.

Now going back to society's view on this, your average Joe in the street tends to have a real problem with TVs and I guess that it is not the TV but more a lack of tolerance and understanding of another person's way of life. This kind of attitude runs rife through our society and to be honest through the 'scene' too. Whatever the 'ism' people do struggle or just aren't prepared to deal with things that in their eyes are not the accepted 'norm'.
This can be anything from the colour of someone's skin to the their sexuality and from their gender to their belief in specific politics. Basically people view the world through their own jaded and prejudiced glasses, this view is a comparison between their own lifestyle and the lifestyle of others. Instead of accepting people for what and who they are, these people are uncomfortable with things that are outside of their own remit.

Therefore they slag it off or abuse it or even try to destroy it. It's almost as if that other person's lifestyle is a direct threat on their own and in fact on the whole fabric of society as seen through their eyes. This is a real problem and a recurring problem at that because we're not talking about re-education but about changing the way people think and the way in which they perceive life.
That's a real tough nut to crack and while most people have enough problems opening their eyes to things happening not 300 yards away from them, how do we get them to take a new global attitude.
The whole area of acceptance is based around labels that a person imposes on them self and the things that influence that person like friends, family, TV, etc that serve to reinforce negative labels and acceptance of those labels.

Furthermore that person will only accept things he or she feels comfortable with and so anything that falls outside of that arena is not acceptable. This form of acceptance means that for someone to change their view they have to firstly break the labels they impose on themselves. Then step outside of their safety net and confront and accept something new that they either don't understand or hate because that's what they've been brought up to believe. Then they have to risk losing the acceptance from within their peer groups and this is why we still see all these 'isms'. It's a hard thing to do but many of us can step outside our inbred and influenced lifestyles to accept new ideas and new people to certain degrees.

But this is what we have to change and not on a larger scale that someone is sexist or racist or homophobic or simply can't deal with the way someone dresses. Or even on a small scale that someone won't accept different forms of music or new people within a scene or new bands/zines/labels. It's about removing labels and breaking inbred and moulded influences that many just don't want to do out of fear of losing the acceptance of their friends and family or because they may be seen as uncool within their social circles.

OK, I think I've made my point and rambled alot in the process. Basically just think in future before you slate someone for something as stupid as they like a certain type of music. Also you have to challenge a person's inbred values rather than simply call them sexist or racist or homophobic the majority of the time most people simply can't give a valid argument for their hatred and that is the point that needs to be made. Well that's all for now...