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Chapter 3|Jude
| Back to Chapter 2 | Back to the beginning There is a bus stop a short way down the hill from the bookshop, and Jude joins the gaggle of passengers in the so-called shelter. (When it rains here, it usually rains sideways, and the shelter was clearly designed by someone who was only familiar… Read more
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Chapter 2|Kate
| Not read Chapter 1 yet? The beginning is a very good place to start. Kate is a single mum, though she’s not too keen on having that pointed out by others. She’s certainly done the whole parenting thing all by herself, but the label ‘single parent’ has a stigma attached. If this is the… Read more
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Chapter 1|Freyja
It’s eight o’ clock on Thursday morning – a cold, nondescript November sort of morning – and Freyja drags herself out of bed. The alarm clock first broke her slumber half an hour earlier, but Freyja has little enthusiasm for the day ahead. She would much rather slip back under the covers and back into… Read more
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Scottish Green Party reaffirms trans positivity
I’ve been a member of the Scottish Green Party since early 2014; for various reasons I hadn’t felt it important enough to nail my political colours to the mast before then. One thing I love about the party is its commitment to fairness, equality and inclusivity. As a trans woman, I was so pleased to… Read more
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Emergency post: extended GRA consultation deadline
This weekend the Scottish Green Party holds its annual autumn conference, and I was looking forward to going along as a (mostly inactive) member to participate in its democratic decision-making process. But, for me, that has been overshadowed by the UK’s consultation on reform to the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA), the deadline for which… Read more
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Unpost four: another hour
I’m giving myself a little less than an hour to write this off-the-cuff meandering piece of irrelevance. Why I should subject you to this is anybody’s guess, but I reckon a gap-filler like this might be better than nothing for someone. If you’re only here for my proper blog posts, that’s fine. Ignore this and… Read more
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I would go out tonight …
… but I haven’t got a stitch to wear! So croons Morrissey in The Smiths’ song ‘This charming man’, released in 1984. It was in that year, my first year at university, that I was introduced to The Smiths, and for some reason theirs were the first songs I’d really paid attention to for their lyrics.… Read more
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Chinks of darkness: a visual postscript
In my previous post, I described how my mood had sometimes felt almost totally dark, but with occasional chinks of light breaking through, while at other times it had seemed almost relatively ‘normal’, except that there were chinks of darkness bursting up from somewhere. This is what depression looks like at times, when I’m in… Read more