Another Saturday sat by the keyboard paws at the ready as I type up a kind of spontaneous post on what has been a pleasant sunny afternoon here recovering from a migraine yesterday that put most things on a hold.
Mine are what you call classical with the aura and tend to last typically three days where everything is super sensitive to the slightest sound or flickering light for days after and it's not uncommon for me to have involuntary spasm down the left side of my face.
One thing I have been doing more of when I have been able to is reading stories around the staples of my boyhood as I start to reconnect more with what it was I loved about it and for me that included soccer.
Reading Dan Freedman's Jamie Johnson football centred series which also is being made into a tv series on CBBC over here is helping in recovery of what I was all about as over the years people have tried to push more toward their own ideas and that's not working cos I just loved being that boy however out of the ordinary the odd interest might of seemed at the time, it was all that I and critically my peers lived for back then.
It's that I want back.
Earlier on the week I was a bit busy tidying around the shelves my stereo lives being old-fashioned enough to have a complete set of separates rather than either an all in one system or play everything from a computer.
I needed to get to the connectors of the original compact disc player to unplug it and remove ready for a newer more expensive model as the rest of system is capable of a more higher standard of reproduction and many of recordings I have and enjoy are so well recorded would be a pity not to take advantage of all they have to offer.
Where this ties in with this is blog is because music forms a part of my age regressed schoolboy side, I carefully considered how to tackle the physical side of it to minimize the inevitable pains involved in doing it when your paws are like mine, breaking it down to chunks doing a bit at a time and I managed to get it done fairly straightforwardly. Learning to think through tasks to make things better for me has been one the things I have been learning to do over the last few years and it seems to coming together now.
When I started my formal education apart from the question of uniform which was kept purposely simple in Infants and a bit more mature in Juniors, it was usual to put us into interlocking vests and Y Fronts usually white or pale blue given our school unlike some hadn't formal underwear rules.
Thy were normally made from cotton, sometimes fully covered, other times what was called 'Stringed' literally criss-crossed except for the actual Y fronted bit and a bit of a religion given the fuss made about making sure we couldn't get cold from the slightest gap.
Later on subject to 'school rules' motifed briefs started to creep in with colourful designs and logos such as 'Concealed Weapon' came out, the latter causing much mirth amongst us although I was very much a traditionalist preferring white Y fronts.
In the era of my childhood somethings were different and one was that for ideas that are more talked about today their wasn't many words available to described them and indeed a key number of terms we use today just had no equivalents back then.
That made the process of thinking and talking about them difficult because you literally didn't have the language for it.
There always was something 'different' about me compared to most of my peers and if we were to write this in mathematical language where B would equal Boy (and Male) and G would equal Girl (and Female) I'd be B` relating to but not being identical to B.
I loved my school uniform similar to this except the shirt was grey and the sweater was red and wearing my shorts, wearing them way past junior school even into adulthood even and while I was curious about girls uniforms never really had a jealous wanting for them.
In those days there was more rigid gender roles and it was more that I wanted to do a few of the things they did as much as I loved being a boy and spending most of time with boys in boys school uniform.
When talking about this time, I feel the that while I was very much masculine and would never trade that away, I was pushing for that bit of space that allowed the full expression of that boy pushing at the edges from the norms of the era.
I was always a willing participant of boys pe and sports even though with my disabilities playing was far from easy feeling at ease with boys close up and play fighting with the best of them.
I picked myself up and got back in the game showing more 'balls' than many of my peers did loving that time as difficult as playing could be so you couldn't say I was a 'mommy's boy', quite the opposite, just a little different that's all.
In the language we use today, I was exhibiting some gender fluid traits that were tolerated more in girls than boys (plus some girls do wear shorts in school today) that were frowned upon not so much by the school but by other adults and other children who had invested a lot in their own gender roles and were not prepared to have their system interrupted by a gender-fluid biological boy at the time.
For me though I never wanted to be a girl just the kind of boy I was and still am proud of my own gender.
My name was a very popular name of its era that began with the letter C and when I was born apart from saying "Congratulations" to my Mommy, They announced I was a boy and everybody congratulated my parents on having another son and from that day that's what I was.
It means different things such as when we were at junior and infant school we form lines to enter our class after recess so I have to line up with a boy and we boys let the girls go through first.
It means we have our own games although to be honest nobody really wants to play with me and we play different school games in Games compared to girls such as soccer although I do join them for Rounders and we have different teachers for this.
Because our school is in rural district we don't have any special facilities and indeed our school is very much Victorian so the other thing is we have to change and clean ourselves in the cloakrooms.
We also have our own outdoor toilets which to be honest I don't feel comfortable in and indeed do go at different times to most of the boys.
You see this "Boy" thing is a very big thing in our world as we're expected to hang out in boy spaces and girls keep theirs to themselves.
I know how to spot straight off who I should be in the company of: They should be wearing grey shorts like I do and talk in a slightly gruff way, leading which is what boys do and at least as convention has it not in dresses or skirts.
I love being a boy.
