The following probably won't mean anything to you unless you grew up in Britain at a certain point in space and time. I don't expect or even want everyone to get it. Well, I'm sitting here smoking a pipe ( think Basil Rathbone or Georges Simenon, not a crack pipe), drinking Martini and thinking it's amazing what a photo can inspire. It was a photo of some drag acts, something that I'm guessing is not socially acceptable to say nowadays but that is what drag acts used to call themselves and what I would have said yonks ago but never mind. Anyway, the bit I am getting at is that at some point in my childhood I wanted to be a boy. I could see that the deal they had, boys that is, was much better than what was on offer to me. They also got to wear cooler clothes in my opinion. The warning signs were already there when an old lady, a match for the actress Margaret Rutherford, came up to me when I was about three pushing a toy pram through a street in London and wondered if she could say hello to my dolly. She got quite the surprise when she peeped inside and was met with a pram full of mud. Packed down with a few worms trying to free themselves from my barbarous act. Much later I would insist on wearing boy's tassle loafers and a stripey t-shirt, jeans and so on and a barnet on a par with Dennis the Menace from the Beano. In those days my parents just ignored my pretending to be male and just let me get on with it. My father would most likely have wished I would put a sock in it but he never let on. During this time I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up and I had a notion that I wanted to be a whirling Dervish, a member of a Sufi fraternity and would spend hours practising this in the front room of suburbia with the aim of abandonment from the restrictions of English society whilst trying to mimic the planets in the solar system orbiting the sun. I would collapse in a heap on the floor and feel quite elated and slightly nauseated but this was 1970s Britain, a pretty boring place where you made your own fun. Once I had come back down to planet earth I entertained the idea of becoming some kind of music hall artiste. There were various spells, including wanting to be Larry Grayson, a camp stand up act. In the front room, post whirl, I would jump up, put one hand on my hip and talk about my friends Slack Alice and Everard to my parents and bemused relatives. I overheard my mother talking with her friend Brigid saying, 'she wants to be Max Wall', and me being annoyed as it was his act of Professor Wallofski that was my aim, not the man himself. Billy Dainty was another ambition as was that bloke who could disappear into his coat while walking around a stage. I went through a moment where I thought I might be able to make a living from being that geezer who hit his head with a tin tray while singing 'Mule Train'. Danny La Rue was another......girl dressing up as a boy dressed as a girl ... then it was Emma Peel, and/or John Stead. I guess that would sum it up. Decisions decisions. ...I guess most of us are just a work in progress. 

You probably wonder where on earth I live when I describe some of the goings on here. Let's just say if you read Luces de Bohemia by Valle Inclan you might get a better picture. Never a dull moment round here despite the never ending restrictions and curfews. Without going into too much detail I have already had a difference of opinion with a police officer today who did that thing of trying to get me on board with his ridiculous comparisons of situations, gaslighting I think they call it. Trying to make out that we are all guilty at times of misdemeanours. I reminded him that right now I wasn't the mastermind of what was going on in our normally pleasant community and that I was in fact the injured party. I decided to continue the conversation using the aviation alphabet and he crumbled. Two can play at that game. I'm finding this skill or art of getting the other guy to have it my way is getting better as I get older and have nothing to lose.

Britain and Israel seem to be doing really well with their vaccine programmes. Yet what is it with some British people (journalists?) in the UK who have an incessant need to be in competition with everyone else? It's not normal this neediness to show or to prove to who ever can be bothered to listen, that it is all world beating or is the best in the world. It just comes across as needy and insecure.

I haven't been on here much lately. I have been too busy exercising my right to shut the f#ck up unlike you know who. At last I no longer have to listen to the volatile, crazed, you've been tangoed, incurably stupid, infantile, clockwork orange, unavoidable, fatuous, difficult to like gobshite anymore. What a feckin' relief.

Not that I plan on going anywhere at the moment but I am one of those people that has always been scared of death, or dying. Not that it will be the end, on the contrary, it might be the start of something new and what if I am not ready for it or don't understand it, that kind of nonsense, not to mention it would be easier to just not exist and then not have to be constantly anxious about all of this bullshit. On the other hand, if reincarnation exists, I've decided to come back and be an entomologist or park ranger. You know, focus on something other than myself for a change. 

We all get targeted by weird adverts online and ask ourselves ''why would I be interested in a Greek fisherman's hat being modelled by a woman in a gas mask and some pearls round her neck?'' The latest is something called Goodgame Big Farm. It's accompanied by the imperative to ''enjoy the country life and enjoy some chill time for yourself'' and a moving image of a bloke carrying a pitchfork with a stride that suggests he is about to storm Capitol Hill, which is, I guess, just another harbinger of our times. 

There is a minister who lied, allegedly, about the EU's "refusal" to consider travel proposals for British artists and musicians. Wait for it, his name is Lord True, AKA Baron True. Of course it is! Keep on trucking....

Mr van de Ven can't enter any establishment to get bread, lottery tickets and so on without coming out and finding me chatting to a homeless, abandoned or neglected person. ''How much money have you given them now?'' he will ask. Sometimes I give them a euro or two, or three or ten. It depends. Nobody seems to carry money anymore so I fill my coat pockets with shrapnel just in case I bump into someone who looks like they could at least do with a cup of coffee. I tell them to go to the refuge where they can sleep for the night but they often put their hands together as if to pray and tell me they absolutely do not want to go there. I don't just chat with homeless people, I chat with everyone. Well, within reason. It's a great challenge if you are shy but curious. I regret not talking to a lot of people because there was no time to stop. When I did stop I found out that Tomas was in the POUM, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, active in the Civil War and claimed to have shot nuns and priests. That Antonio spoke fluent English because he once had a job on an oil rig. And this evening with my limited French I found out the French guy with the German Shepherds who addresses me as ''Mister'', reckons his dogs are working for Interpol.