The few most recent times I’ve spent with my niece, she’s proclaimed that I’m “SO like a BOY!’. I’ve asked her to explain and she’s said that it’s because I don’t wear dresses and skirts and don’t wear makeup and because I like gadgets. I’m 42, I don’t think I’m supposed to be playing with Barbie dolls, but I think I can see where she’s coming from.

She said it again tonight and I responded by telling her that it’s just different and the world would be a boring place if we were all the same.

The time will come when we’ll have the talk about girls liking boys, boys liking girls, and the accursed sexual deviants who need electric shock therapy to stop them liking people of the same sex. Growing up in the seventies, it was never talked about: girls liked boys, boys liked girls, and people like Larry Grayson were just made up for telly. When I was Con’s age, maybe a bit younger, I had a friend at school and we were very close. She once said to me that when we grew up we could get married. I can’t remember it freaking me out, but I can’t remember my exact response, or how I felt, if I felt anything at all. Maybe it shows that kids of that age don’t really care about anything like that until adults put their own vicious ideas into their heads. She remembers Ali though and knew that we were together, but a year or so on with me on my own, and with the influence of other children, her natural acceptance of what “just is (was)” might be tainted by what others say.

“My Auntie Tina is… a SPINSTER!”

Gawd.

Curiosity
Talking of stalking, I’ve been visiting my local pharmacy on a regular basis over the past year or so. When I haven’t been popping in to pick up my own prescriptions, I’ve been going there to pick up my mum’s heroin supplies. Each time I go, the pharmacist catches my eye and I’m left thinking, is she or isn’t she? And I’m not talking about Harmony hairspray here.

In those situations, you do things like look at her shoes: flat, but that makes sense (it always makes sense to me, whatever the situation). Is she wearing any rings? No. What about those glasses? They look a bit like mine. Dress sense? Always trousers, with a feminine top, but nothing particularly girly. Fingernails? SHORT! Makeup? Never.

Of course because she’s the resident pharmacist, her certificates are up in the place, so I know her name. But even worse/better, I noticed her behind me in her car one day – she actually drives into work on part of the route that I take, coming from the Whitefield direction. I know what car she drives, roughly what time she passes near my house, I could wait for her to pass…

STOP IT RIGHT THERE!

“We met over a box of citalopram. It was the slightest brush of her fingers against mine as she handed me my medication. Then our eyes met and it was then that we realised… we were wearing the same glasses.”

I have no idea how to strike up a conversation with people. I don’t know when I’m flirting and I certainly don’t know when people are flirting with me. There is no hope. A spinster I shall be.