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.