Note to self ...

... don't do interviews in London and Edinburgh back to back, it's insane and you just end up very tired and running on adrenaline! I have certainly covered some miles over the past few days and I'm looking forward to having maybe a day or so to relax!

Things have been kind of manic since the weekend in actual fact and I have crammed so much into this time that I really do need to catch my breath!

I guess the mania started on Friday when I spent about 5hrs chatting online to someone I'd met briefly at Manchester Pride. I asked her to come along to a birthday party I was going to in Manchester but since she lives in York it makes the logistics a little complicated and costly particularly coming so soon after Pride weekend - in fact I was considering not going for the same reasons. Anyway, we got on so well and had so much in common that it got to the point where 'no' was not an acceptable response, she HAD to come along.

So she did. And we did get on really well and just, as we both agreed, 'clicked'.

It's early days so I'm not going to go into vast amounts of detail about her and our relationship, I personally think intimate information is best kept private and not something I ever want to publish to the world at large (I've put more details on FaceBook for friends but even there a line must be drawn). I think some the recent experiences might be worth discussion though.

For example we walked into Manchester city centre to see a film (a suitably sedentary activity with which to sober up) and we were walking along holding hands. Strangely this didn't seem in any way odd or 'wrong' too me and I was really rather too hung-over and tried to notice peoples reactions. It did occur to me that it might generate some stares though. In Vancouver I saw many gay men and women holding hands and being affectionate in public but it's not something I've seen alot in the UK, even for straight couples I think there is a distinctly more reserved attitude than in other parts of the world.

One of the things that I did struggle with in my head was how I would feel when dating someone female. I've always said that I am now technically a lesbian, I don't have any attraction to men at all. But the problem is how I would feel about my gender and sexuality when all my previous memories would put me in a very 'male' role in a relationship with someone female. This doesn't seem to be what I feel now, if anything I feel more feminine, not less, and definitely see this as what it is, a lesbian relationship.

So my tour of the UK also included a trip from Edinburgh to York to see the new woman in my life for one brief evening before she had to go to work and I had to return home to sort out the piles of washing and mess in the flat that accumulated due to all the rushing around! The train journey from York back to Preston was quite long but very beautiful. The slightly less beautiful picture to the left is me looking tired and the one below was of one of the many pretty train stations on the way back.