Sentient dogs and juvie seagull pleasures.
These stones in this spot and this moment’s float alone on in and out wash.
Practice for when we’re grown and time to dive for more than just the fought over trailing bladderwrack and plastic that could be crustacean shell bonus on the day.
JJ, 50, Brighton
TOMBOY – By Jacqui Soo, 53 and a proud Scouser.
“You’ll never make a lady out of that one” uttered my paternal grandmother to my Mother when I was aged about 3.
How right she was. I am the only girl with four brothers. Second born and teacher to the younger three lads (and subsequently, most of their mates). It was I – not the eldest – who took them for their first pint, to the match for the first time and educated them on how to treat a girl when taking her on a date. And it was me, not the boys, who was the best footballer, so said my Dad.
I was his chippy’s mate and hod carrier and I loved mixing cement with my Dad. The viscosity was mesmerising. So much better than making batter for Yorkshire puddings. “Please Mum, don’t make me make the gravy” I pleaded on a Sunday. It is a sacrilege to make lumpy gravy and I couldn’t quite understand the alchemy involved in producing a smooth gravy from meat drippings and Burdall’s gravy salt.
They are all jealous of my footballer’s legs with chunky calves and thick, muscular thighs. But that wasn’t an accident either. From the Summer I left junior school in 1973, I started work on a milk round. 7 days a week for thirty bob. Carrying a full crate of milk from the 14th floor of a tower block down to each level gave me forearms like hams. Then there was the swimming and the hockey, netball, rounders and athletics. I was the typical all rounder. I insisted on wearing shorts. No skirts even on the sports field. My Mum even wrote me a note to excuse me from wearing a skirt to school. I hated them with a vengeance.
My Mum refused to buy me monkey boots as an 11 year old so with my wages from the milk, I bought my own. Maroon with yellow stitching. I loved them. A forerunner to my love affair with DM’s. I kept the receipt from my first pair of branded jeans. Wranglers costing £6.99 from All Mankind when I was 13. Then came the denim jacket. All that was missing from my life was a motorbike. I’m saving that for my mid-life crisis!
I love being a tomboy. It liberated me. I didn’t care if people thought I was a lad. I never wanted to be one though, I liked being a girl.
But then I grew my hair. It was after a kd lang concert where every dyke had the same haircut! This was before the variety of styles a la Beckham. So now, it’s down to my waist. I love it. It’s wild and wavy and full of all of the colours of my varied ancestry. I am a Mermaid.
I shocked my Mum in 2005 when out shopping with her. I bought a pink dress. A tomboy dress though. “I have great legs Mum and this will show them off.” Short sleeves to display my firm biceps and forearms and short enough to see the thunder thighs. Full length zipper to reveal a lovely cleavage (good bras are essential). And, to compliment the look, steel toe capped DM boots.
Butch Barbie was born.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here's an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,300 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 55 trips to carry that many people.
FEBULOUS 2014
Musing my Memories {a slice of herstory}
Carpentry, karate and motorbikes
Discos, bars and clubs
Squats and co-ops
Lesbos, Greenham and Womansland
Marches, demos and protests
Celebrations and condemnations
Pride, lots of it
Girlfriends, lovers and friends
Making culture, art and love…
Bronwen, 59, USA
Matters of Love and Death
You know you’ve reached middle age
when you just don’t come like you did in your twenties.
Younger friends bustle through their thirty something’s with kids and houses and friendships, solid with time and sharing, or so I dream for them.
I’m racing ahead uphill empty handed,
No treasures or ties to carry proudly along
Careful cache in the dresser drawers and jeans pocket of my world.
Books of poetry sometimes call – you can’t read your own – timeless teller of your story – but I hear it well enough from the page.
If you had a daughter would it be me?
Wizened word-smith, speaking wisdom from the tree stumps of your water retentive thighs.
My body like a bomb damaged building
water main pulsing gently into disfigured ground,
Back stairway to basements no longer passable,
no chance to leap the broken step,
too far-gone, a route I’ll never scramble down again.
I’m in the old girls club at last, fitting in, knowing the language, something that means something to say, my own fractured concrete that was and counts for something.
The route romantic pathways traversed, you can’t get through, it would take a bulldozer to move the fallen tree and no point anyway, nothing down there to see, no need for that old line, a new bypass carved up the edges.
Freezing to death in the snow, lie still long enough not to know you can’t move that leg any more.
Sometimes I do that in bed in the morning, 2 or 3 seconds of no sensation but warmth, before consciousness wades in.
3.4.10
Janet Jones, 49, Brighton
It was hard enough getting them to understand, hard enough to explain the situation, without other people muddying the waters, casting aspersions. That, however, was the unfortunate state of affairs she always found herself in. She didn’t ever get the chance to start from scratch. There was always some other influence. Just once, she screamed at the wall in her head, just once I want to be able to have a blank canvas.
It wasn’t that they were ganging up on her, far from it. She was offered support and counsel continuously. It was just that the support and counsel either came from an uninformed corner, or it was tainted by ignorance. Mostly, though, they meant well.
Unfortunately, once in a while, the intention was more than naïve ignorance, or blind stupidity. Once in a while, there was malice in the words and sentiment. That was when it hurt the most. That could, and often did cause her to want to shut the world out, curl into a ball under the duvet and cry for days. Far too often, she had wished she had a button to end it all. Just push the button and it would all go away. But that wouldn’t do. That couldn’t happen. That was weakness, selfish, cowardly. No. She must front it.
Kelly Tonks, 40 , Folkestone
Dori Kirchmair, 52, Nottingham
I had always wanted to have a baby. To be a mother, right from when I was a young girl myself.
The years went by. Then I met my partner. My future wife.
She had never considered being a mother herself.
But I had.
Always had done.
So, I started to think, if that’s what I wanted.
I needed to go after it. So that’s what I did.
I got creative and wrote, ’20 ways I could have a baby.’
Some of those ideas were pretty obscure. But, one
of them was just the ticket.
Everything seemed to fall into place.
But what if. What if.
But nothing.
I knew with every fibre of my being that it would work.
And it did. First time.
Boom! 9 months later – Our Beautiful Amazing baby girl was born.
Amanda Thomas, 43, Whitstable, Kent
I follow the path
and pause to smell the lilacs,
recalling childhood.
But next day they have vanished:
two men are wielding chainsaws.
Andrew Derbyshire, 66, Southend-on-Sea
FebulousFebruary 2026: The Old Photograph 
Written
on February 25, 2014