My last day of work before the New Year’s break had Munky emailing me to inform me that my birthday present had been nabbed by customs. My birthday was way back in November, and I knew he was getting me something because he’d told me it was going to be late, so you can imagine that the sense of intrigue was somewhat fierce by this point. Being told that it had failed to get through customs made this even more so.

Shortly after I got home Frood emailed me, subject line: “You can has claws!” I opened said email and found the following message and attachment.

“Didn’t get through postal customs.”

At this point I jumped to an over-excited conclusion. Because the man in the picture is wearing trousers very similar to the ones Frood had been wearing when he left for work and I’d received that mail from Munky explaining that my birthday present had been caught by customs, I figured that Munky had got these for me as a birthday present and sent them to Frood because he works in a postroom, Frood had taken delivery and this was a picture that a colleague had taken on his phone.

I was so excited. I had visions of filling a room full of cardboard boxes painted as ninjas and running around yelling “Meega nala kweesta!” and “Snickt, bub!”

I mailed Frood back immediately, peppering him with questions, no doubt sowing the seeds of confusion. His response:

“No, they are from a news story. They were seized at the international mail hub in Coventry. So you can’t actually have any claws. “

Only, in my now-disappointed excitement, I failed to see the first sentence and fired back another email suggesting that perhaps all we had to do was present ID to the post office and pay the duty charges and we could get them through. Then I grabbed the phone and called Munky.

Me: Hi!
Munky: Hey you! How are you?
Me: Never mind that. What’s this about claws?
Munky: What?
Me: The claws! The claws stuck in customs!
Munky: What?

And then the whole sorry story came out and finally, with Munky gasping for breath in hilarity at how I had been beaten very profoundly with the coincidence stick until I’d grasped the wrong end of it and clung on like a kitten with a catnip mouse, I realised that I could not, in fact, has claws. At all.

Bah.

And I still don’t know what he’s getting me for my birthday.

My first ever photocard driving licence arrived in the post today. I’m chuffed to bits. You may well wonder why. After all, I’ve had a licence since I was seventeen, which is long enough ago to have done my motorcycle training when it was just part 1 and part 2. So it’s not the thrill of finally being able to operate a piece of heavy machinery on the public highway.

No. I am excited because this is the first formal identification document I’ve ever had that has a photo of me with the black eye. This one, if you haven’t seen it before. My passport has the eye that nominally looks like an eye, which means I have to swap them out every time I go through airport security (although last time I flew to Ireland I forgot and neither Edinburgh nor Galway security seemed all that fussed).

OK, for everyone else this might not seem like a big deal, but it is for me. I don’t like the so-called “proper” eye. I’d rather not bother with it at all. Sadly I can’t get away with that because I still have to look professional for the day job and it’s a job involving lots of contact with the public.

Having said that, it’s amazing how many people just don’t notice at all.

When I was very young, my mum (whose literary taste is pretty good, even if I am biased) brought home a copy of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed. I read it and it made enough of an impression on me that years later, with everything that has happened in the intervening decades, I still remembered enough of it to have a friend of mine identify it. I tracked it down, bought a new copy, and read it again. On doing so I realised that, not only had I been exposed to a remarkable piece of speculative fiction at a very young age, I had been exposed to my very first piece of queer fiction.

If a book describing a near-immortal, double-X chromosome shapeshifter who ends up fathering children isn’t queer, I’m not entirely sure what is. But that’s an entire semantical discussion for which I have neither time nor inclination.

My own interests are absorbed in human perception, and how our prejudices and preconceptions affect how we view and interact with the world around us. I see it everywhere, from the cyclist lit up like deep sea plankton nevertheless being the victim of a SMIDSY to blatant sexism, racism and homophobia. Take away the blinkers and you start to see into the cracks. The cracks aren’t in the fabric of the world: they exist in the fabric of our cultural norms and assumptions.

Here in the west we are largely caught in a bipolar paradigm. Light and dark, good and evil, black and white, male and female. The real world doesn’t work like that. The darkest night is the one that lets us see the stars most clearly. We are trapped by this adversarial idea of the world that has absolutely no evidence to support it.

If there is no evidence to support it here, in the real world, where the chairs and the hatstands live, then there is no place for such rigid definitions in speculative fiction, where lie the sex lives of crystalline extremophiles and the wistful desires of steampunk robots.

It was for that reason that I was pleased when the Outer Alliance was formed and immediately signed up. Their mission statement reads as follows:

As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.

I don’t have a lot of work. My longed-for career as a writer is currently closer to the stage of wishful thinking than anything approaching reality. But at the bottom of this post is a rough first draft I penned in response to a prompt on a creative writing course a couple of years or so back. It’s the opening sequence of a story that would like to be much, much longer. The tutor didn’t rate it much. He thought it was a ghost story that had gone off the rails. He was very wrong, but I didn’t ever explain to him that there were no ghosts planned for this tale.

For me, the belief that there are male and female and one copulates with the other and that’s all there is to it flies in the face of everything the natural world tells us. As Mark Morford said:

Let us be perfectly clear. Not every individual animal necessarily displays homosexual traits. But in every sexually active species on the planet, at least some of them do, for all sorts of reasons, and it’s common and obvious and as normal as a warm spring rain falling on a pod of giddy bottlenose dolphins having group sex off the coast of Fiji.

Queer isn’t queer, it’s normal, and thus to fail to have it represented in speculative fiction would be not only refusing to think outside the box, it would be building a much smaller box inside the existing one, climbing inside and shutting the lid.

By the way, Outer Alliance Pride Day is, strictly speaking tomorrow, the 1st September. For various reasons I’m posting this now.

Call it thinking outside the box.

THE NEARNESS OF STRANGERS

I met him/her on the stairs. It wasn’t the first time. We often passed one another, usually while I was on my way down, heading to work with my bike slung over my shoulder wishing for the umpteenth time that I’d managed to find a place that had an elevator.

I’d never worked out whether the person who lived in the flat opposite me was a male or a female. There was an utterly androgynous quality about… well. What pronoun do I use? “It” is too impersonal. I wouldn’t want it used of myself, after all. He or she was about my height, which says nothing. The brown hair was shoulder length, which again is no clue; and the clothes were never quite right. No matter what they were they always looked like their wearer was cross-dressing. I had seen her (or him) wearing everything from silk dresses to a suit and tie and nothing seemed to fit.

On this occasion I waited on the third floor landing while he — he was dressed, very overtly, as a male, so for now it will do — came up the narrow flight below, the bike digging in to the muscle of my shoulder. I was determined to ask. How long had we been neighbours, after all? I should at least find out which was preferred. At first I was impatient because my grip on the bike was slipping and I was running late — again, which would put me in the doghouse — but then I saw there was something desperately sad about him. Usually he just seemed tired. I had naturally assumed that whatever job provided rent money for my mysterious floor-mate was night shift. Maybe that was why I had never done anything more than offer a brief hello in passing. We existed in different halves of the day and our starts and ends were jammed up against one another the wrong way round. Whenever our paths crossed I was always in a rush and he was exhausted.

“Are you okay?” I just blurted it out when he reached the top of the stairs. The question burst from somewhere at the back of my chest and left me feeling a little stupid. I didn’t know this person: this person didn’t know me. Why would anyone share details of their personal life with a stranger? I mean, in all the times I had said hello there had been nothing more than a slight nod in return.

My neighbour stopped, right on the top step, one hand resting on the rail of the balustrade. It was a very elegant hand. My mother would have described it as “artistic”. I could imagine that hand shivering exquisite music from a violin. A totally unexpected chill crept over me as my gaze drifted upwards over the slightly crumpled, stained silk shirt to the eyes.

Dear gods the eyes. I no longer felt the twinge of the bike’s weight on my shoulder, or the growing panic of being late again. I looked into those soft, grey eyes and was lost: trapped, like the wedding guest.

“It is terribly kind of you to ask.”

The eyes held me. In those eyes I could see that the answer was no. No, he was not okay, and would never be okay again. Something terrible had happened, something so dreadful that it could not be voiced out loud. Yet at the same time it had been something that always might happen, and now that it had it was almost a relief.

“Can I…” I wondered why I was whispering. “Can I get you anything?” It seemed a really stupid thing to say even as I said it. There was just this… this need to do something. To help.

His face registered a fleeting expression of uncertain recognition that turned briefly ponderous before vanishing to polite neutrality.

“Thank you, but no. You should be on your way.”

The eyes glanced down at the floor, briefly and deliberately. For a second I felt dizzy. My neighbour stepped past, surrendering the stairs. I was halfway down to the next landing before I was aware I was moving.

When I looked back he — or she — was already on the next flight. All I could see was a pair of elegant boots with cuban heels climbing slowly and oh so wearily onto the fourth floor.

It has come to my attention that one of the secret endings (that roll after the credits) indicates that Deadpool’s fate might not have been quite so final.

If anyone gets to see that one, please let me know. I’m going to cling to the idea that Weapon XI wasn’t really Wade. It was a different actor, after all.

I liked the suggestion that one of the endings should have been Deadpool leaning in close to camera and telling the audience “Time to go home now.” That would have been awesome, and made up for the disappointment of his depiction in the rest of the film.

Got back from my lunchtime run today, pulled off my socks and discovered my right foot was covered in blood inside my sock.

Arse.

Apparently I missed a bit when trimming my nails and there was a little pointy edge that dug into the next toe along and put a big hole in it. Thankfully something of a similar, but lesser nature happened a couple of weeks ago, so I was aware that the pinpoint pain in my toe when running meant it was happening again and the sight of blood didn’t fill me with panic and horror. Not that the sight of blood usually does. Not when it’s mine, anyway.

There was an article in Runner’s World last year, I think, about how to trim your toenails. At the time I thought it verging on the side of obsessive-compulsive. Not any more. Wish I hadn’t thrown that issue in the recycling.

In other news, I’m racing at Cuper in the East Fife Triathlon on Sunday, and I’ve entered Bishopriggs (closed road circuit, woohoo!) and Peebles. I’ve heard so much about how good the Borders series is from other ladies when hanging out by the pool waiting for our heat to start in other races that I thought I’d try one. Maybe I’ll be sufficiently in shape to do Selkirk next year.

In other other news, I was watching the new series about Wonky Willie’s chocolate last night, and they did a sports test to see how cacao worked as an energy drink. Reduces perceived effort and promotes fat burning rather than carb. Wow. I’m sold, and I don’t normally like chocolate. The stuff that’s sold in the UK as chocolate is too sweet, and dark chocolate has too much tannin taste in it.

Although, having said that, I just bought a small bar of his 70% Peruvian, which I was convinced would be too bitter for me, and it’s really rather scrummy.

After years, and years, and years of insisting that out there somewhere is a film set in WWI where they build tractors into aeroplanes, Munky has found it.

Dude. Srsly. There were mines in the air and zeppelins and dirigibles and FLYING FREAKIN TRACTORS.

Watch and learn.

The name of this 1980s piece of hokum? Sky Bandits. I got the year right and everything. The only reason I couldn’t find it on IMDB is the description of it bears no resemblance to the plot that I remember at all. And there is no mention of the word tractor in the keywords. FAIL.