Kelvedon Hatch Nuclear Bunker (part three)

Very handy to have a nuclear bunker nearby in this kind of situation.  If you could get in it - which you probably wouldn't.  And would it be any better?


After all, we can only imagine as we wander round the hospital section of Kelvedon Hatch the horror of that place should the worst have happened.  It's dark and menacing in there as it is.


The cardboard coffin on the floor is a terrifying sight - its lid open as if ready for its intended occupant.  Shivers. 


We move on to other rooms - including the Prime Minister's, which is labelled as such.  In the bed lies a dummy with a John Major mask on.  The room is sparse, but seems like quite a lot of space for one person and his family (we presume) - compared to the living conditions in the rest of the bunker.


Finally we come to the canteen - where it seems food is served to people who fancy a bite to eat after their appointment with the alternative past.  Here you pay the entrance fee - which has become an exit fee.  You just put the money in a box while people shuffle about in the kitchen with their backs to you - it's very odd.


Around the walls are little baskets and boxes filled with cold war...er... merchandise like 'Protect and Survive' leaflets, Russian army badges and postcards of the bunker itself.  There are also toy guns - when I come back with Freddie the week after my first visit I buy him one of the guns.  An act of enormous bad taste under the circumstances, given where we are.


You exit the bunker through a tunnel and are surprised to find how near the outside world actually is when you are in the canteen.  Difficult to believe you would be safe in there.  Much better down in the depths I would think.


You go back to the car feeling slightly transformed - or I did anyway.  Not quite believing what you've just seen.  I suppose it's the actual sting of history - feeling it and seeing it and walking in it as a real thing.  And not just history but an alternative history also - what might have been.


The grip of the bunker extends into our lives when we get home - we might search the internet for information about nuclear weapons, for films like 'Threads' - the utterly terrifying docu-drama about the effect of a nuclear war on Sheffield.  The whole thing is on You Tube - watch it if you are interested in this period.  Watch it and tremble.


Also on You Tube is the 1960s documentary 'The War Game' which covers the same subject matter.  It is equally frightening and grim - although strangely beautiful, I can't say why.


And there is the QED documentary 'A Guide to Armageddon' - also very interesting but with a slight distance because purely factual, not quite as scary.


All this stuff is on the internet - and lots more.  The Nuclear War never happened - but in a way it happens all the time, and continues to happen over and over again on the internet ... and in the dark corridors of Kelvedon Hatch the war is imagined time and again by people who dare to look inside.  


Fascinating it may be but thank god, thank god it's all virtual these days.

Hair removal...

Pretty much all women struggle with unwanted body hair to some extent but trans-women obviously have a big arsed problem with this.  When my body was producing tons of evil testosterone I suffered horribly from the growth of horrible, brown shitty fucking mammal hair on most of my body.  It made me so fucking angry to remove it and see the stuff almost growing back before my eyes.  You just want to scream : 


WHY IS MY BODY DOING THIS ????!!!!


Now, thanks to the wonderful androgen blocker 'Decapeptyl'  (oh sweet, sweet Decapeptyl) the hair growth has slowed down a lot and it is WONDERFUL.  
I mean it's not a miracle cure but after years of it getting worse and worse it's glorious to have it slow down like this, I can tell you.


But for all this complaining it could have been worse.


So, hair audit.


When I was a teenage boy I started to grow bumfluff on my upper lip and chin.  It didn't bother me too much at first to be honest - but then I'm not one of those 'I always knew I was a girl, even when I was a sperm' trannies.  I started shaving it off and left my cheeks because I thought it wouldn't grow if I didn't shave it.  Er... not sure about that theory.


Although actually the theory seemed to be borne out because I didn't grow any hair on my cheeks - and I honestly thought it was because I'd never shaved them.  As the years went by and my feelings about being girly grew stronger I became more and more glad of this fact - and I still am.


From puberty till I started laser / electrolysis two years ago, I never really grew hair on my cheeks.  I'd get the odd one and shave them off - which didn't in fact propagate growth.  So that meant no sideburns or anything awful like that.


My Dad took my 'inability' to grow proper facial hair to be a sign of some kind of hormone imbalance.  What with the wearing dresses and everything.  
I wonder?


Actually not - I've had tests and (before I started HRT) I was a totally normal male in every physical respect.  Yeuch.  Not any more though - yay!


So, facial hair.  It became unbearable of course and I was so glad when I started laser treatment, which at least thinned it out.  Even though I only grew it on my upper lip and chin it was pretty thick and tough in both those areas, so my electrolysis lady tells me!


So you shave every morning - like a man does.  But unlike a man (well, most men) you put your make up on afterwards.  Foundation all over that area - followed by plenty of powder.  I never used to wear lippy much because I didn't want to draw attention to that bit.


During the day it would get darker and darker and if I was going out after work I would secretly shave again and put more make up on.  And we're not talking about a quick once over - I mean going over and over and cutting myself and going over and over again up and down and side to side.


In case you're wondering - I do use a boy razor for this because I figure they are designed to get as close as possible - which is what I want.  But I don't use boy shaving gel (!)  because I don't want to smell like a man, obvs!


After the hair was thinned out with laser treatment I moved onto electrolysis - which is more permanent but more painful.  Actually you hear horror stories but it's not THAT bad - it gets worse as it gets up to under the nose.  The chin is just uncomfortable.  I had the hairs on my cheeks done and they haven't particularly come back.  I get little ones on my neck which I tweezer out.


I got the idea for this blog because this morning, for the second time since I've been on HRT, I put my makeup on and FORGOT to shave first!!!  I did in fact shave (I still don't feel confident enough to leave it) but for that to happen is truly remarkable.  It's the best feeling.


So, moving down (I'm going to be honest here so get ready) - my chest has thankfully never been hairy - in fact most of my hair problems are below the waist.  I pluck the hairs on my chest, which I still get.  You have to watch for them (I carry tweezers at all times!)


Worse are the hairs that grow from my nipples.  Oh yes - it's gross.  Thank Decapeptyl they have slowed down because plucking them is a painful business and the ingrown hairs cause horrible spots.


Still get them though.


My arms, thank gawd, are no hairier than any other woman's so that's a blessing.  In fact they're considerably LESS hairy than some women I see!
Armpits are shaved - no problems.  Once or twice a week.




But I get dark hairs on the outside edge of my hands - I have electric tweezers which I use on those.  It hurts.


Once we get to the waist the real problems start.


A hairy bum is not what a girl wants now is it?  Difficult to remove - you can't get the angle for waxing it yourself - it doesn't work.  Oh yes - I've tried!
I use depilatory cream on these 'sensitive' areas and it's fine - and with the testosterone reduction it has slowed down massively.  Thank God, thank GOD!


I did burn myself quite badly with the cream when I first used it on the trail of hair which insists on growing up to my navel.  Actually that area is difficult - often it comes up in little spots.  With the reduction I've started to tweezer them in the hope they won't come back.


Legs!  They were horribly, horribly, horribly hairy in a way I can't even describe.  In fact tears are pricking my eyes as I write this and remember what it was like and how fucking gruesome I felt.  My legs were covered - absolutely covered - in thick brown hair.


To make matters worse whenever I removed the hair, even a bit of it, I was plagued with terrible itching and ingrown hairs and would scratch till I bled.


In the end I could bear it no longer and started to wax my legs about once a month.  Waxing was kinder than shaving as it grows back slower and less itchily!  But still my legs above the knees were covered in huge spots for about a year - really bad ones, like a biblical plague basically.


Eventually that got a bit better and, once again, since testosterone reduction it's all slowed down.  Now I shave my legs a couple of days a week and will wax the hairs near the top again soon.   Hopefully a lot of them won't come back after the next wax.


I think I'm down to my toes.


Writing this has made me realise how far I've come - and what a journey this has been.  Even just the hair removal story has been epic.


God, I feel so much better and so very, very happy.  It makes me want to hug everyone in the world!  You don't know what it's like - unless you've been there.  Never again, never again.  Now Jaye is getting better.

Kelvedon Hatch Nuclear Bunker (part two)

...after entering through the huge doors, designed to withstand... well... a nuclear blast, we enter the bunker proper.


The is a large room where the location of blasts can be plotted on maps - along with the effects presumably.  Chillingly there are reports written on blackboards of phantom nuclear blasts which have not in fact happened - you hope.


You don't feel deep underground because the entrance tunnel is very long and slopes down very gently - in fact you are deep down under an artificial hill which has been built above the bunker, and quite a way down again after that.
There is a feeling that one would be safe down here - but also that the safety might be worse in the long run.


In small rooms films play, like the famous 'Protect and Survive' public information film, and a few families sit around uneasily watching them.  It seems appropriate entertainment for the surroundings.  We go on through many more rooms and corridors and a large central staircase which shows the full three levels of the bunker.


There is a room filled with antiquated typewriter like devices - not exactly computers and nice chunky old telephones.  The whole place is a dream for the lover of analogue technology and radio signals.  There is a small BBC radio studio, little more than a cupboard, from which hopeless survival broadcasts could have been broadcast - Margaret Thatcher appears to sit behind the desk - a mannequin wearing a spitting image type mask.  An ironic touch.


Wandering round underground rooms and tunnels is rather exciting in itself, but the thought of being stranded down here, waiting and breathing and fearing whatever you might find when you lift the lid and emerge into the new age - it's atmospheric in the extreme.


One large room has governmental department signs around the walls - as if the civil service departments had been reduced to a desk and some folders - which under the circumstances would be pretty much the case...  Dummies wearing radiation suits and tattered clothes - bland faced, waxen victims - stand around among the mild accessories of government and the strip lights shed a yellow, flickery light on the scene.  


We proceed toward the hospital area and the cardboard coffins...

Kelvedon Hatch Nuclear Bunker (part one)

(note - this is what you sound like once you've let JG Ballard into your head)


This unassuming house-like building located rather incongruously in the middle of a wood is the entrance to Kelvedon Hatch Nuclear Bunker near Brentwood, Essex.


Presumably it was made to look like a house to deter people looking for shelter - although I find its failure in this respect just the first of many fascinations about this place.  It looks municipal somehow.  It represents the banal officiousness of death.


I visited the bunker a few years ago - twice in the same week because I was so spellbound.  It really is an almost mythical place - somehow magical and dark and appalling and wonderful.


Like a lot of children in the 80s I was terrified of nuclear war above all things when I was growing up.  Over the years this fear has mutated into a perverse fascination - almost an intense, trembly love of anything even related to nuclear destruction.  I am slightly horrified by this tendency within myself and yet I embrace it because we are all alchemists of fear - we all turn it into gold within ourselves.  


I suppose we enjoy the pumping of adrenalin and the endorphine rush - pretty much absent in a largely safe world.  And also there IS something beautiful about the majestic destruction wrought by a nuclear bomb - the graceful hand sweeping across the surface of the Earth and ripping everything away, leaving nothing but clean, cauterised rubble.


I also grimly enjoy the campaigns, the public information, the 'Protect and Survive' leaflets and films.  I don't know what it is - maybe it's just everything about it scares me rigid and that fear is one of the most exciting things I know.  It's somewhere I go in myself to feel truly alive.  Just sometimes.


So, with that background you will probably see why I was so intoxicated by Kelvedon Hatch - a rare example of a nuclear bunker which is open to the public.


When I say the word 'bunker' it probably sounds like rather a small affair - oh no.  The 'bunker' is huge - I suppose it's like the office of a government department transplanted underground.  Upon entering you find no one there to take your entrance fee, which you are probably holding in your sweaty little hand.  In fact you just pick up an audio guide handset and make your way down some steps.  It's disconcerting from the very start.


You walk down a very long tunnel.  This would protect the people inside from the blast, as well as being easy to defend - a chilling fact which can't help occurring to you as you walk down it.  On the wall is an illustration of how the bunker would act as a Faraday cage and protect the inhabitants from the electro magnetic pulse caused by cloudburst nuclear weapons.  On the other side are temporary bunk beds.  The whole place smells like taupe musty office folders.


At the end of the tunnel is a radio communication room, filled with pleasingly chunky analogue equipment.  Then you walk through the enormous blast doors into the bunker proper...

Freddie's Hoo Newspaper

I am really proud that Freddie sat and wrote this earlier this evening.  He worked hard on it so I thought I'd post it here.  I just helped with some of the spelling but the words are his.  I think some of his sentences are really beautiful and honest - especially the last one : 



Hoo news Paper

Hoo is my home with 7356 people Including me. Our School has 160 pupils. But I get treated horribly at the park because my dads a girl. Anyway lets get back to Hoo.

Hoo is a good place for children in the history of Hoo but we had bad times like getting bullied. Hoo is the most healthy village in England because the crops grow every year.

The roads are too busy because Hoo is quite busy.
We have a shop called McCoys what makes the best fish in Hoo. Hoo is my habitat.

Hoo is like a sun to me but it is filled up with knowledge and wisdom.

                    

Email to the Head of my local school...

Hi

My name is Mrs Jaye Butler-Moore, I came into the school in person today to make a complaint about the behaviour of students wearing your school uniform this morning -  I was told to put the complaint in writing by email for your attention.

Basically, I am suffering an increased amount of abuse from teenagers and children in this village because I am transgender.  So, I live as a female and am undergoing treatment with hormones etc - I am currently under the care of Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic.

There is nothing new about the abuse - I have been in touch with the police about it before and they've been very helpful, but the frequency and aggression of these attacks is increasing.  It was especially alarming to me this morning that children wearing your school uniform were brazenly shouting abuse at me - it just seems that they think this behaviour is acceptable and carries no consequence.

I am sorry to subject you to this but I will give you examples of what is shouted at me, so you can understand the severity of the incidents : 

Fuck off tranny   (that was shouted at me this morning)

Tranny

Tranny Boy

Queer

Fucking Queer

You're fucking disgusting

You're a fucking joke

Transvestite

Wanker

Transvestite cunt

It really is appalling - especially when you consider that these things are often shouted at me when I'm with my nine year old son.

Also, every teenager and child in this village seems to know what car I drive so the abuse doesn't even stop when I am driving around - the comments are shouted at my car.

I really hope you can take some action on this.  It's always difficult to pinpoint which child said what - when you face them none of them will admit it.  These things are invariably shouted to my back.

I just want them to realise how upsetting and frightening this is - and that it's a crime.

I am involved in Hoo schools as a parent governor at the Primary School, and I am an ex-student of your school myself - so I would be prepared to come in and talk to the students about what being transgender is or to work with you on some kind of training for them on this subject.  I am sure they are entirely ignorant about this issue and the seriousness of what they are doing.

As it is I am getting scared to walk out my front door - but I refuse to give in to this. 

I am sure you will be horrified to hear about this and will take some kind of action.

Thank you so much for your time,

Jaye Butler-Moore

Ivan Denisovich ...

Just finished this book what is about a man who is in like a prison thing in Russia and that.


In fact this book, based on Solzhenitsyn's own experience I believe, is about a man who is a political prisoner in one of Stalin's labour camps in the 1950s.  It's a brief and easy to read book which comes with some kudos and is quite good to leave on your desk at work because reading Solzhenitsyn makes you sound instantly intellectual.


It does what it says on the tin and describes one day in Ivan Denisovich Shukov's boring, cold, terrible life as he works his way through his ten year stretch.


His crime?   He was caught by the Nazis and escaped - therefore he was obviously a spy.  That'll be ten years for you, Ivan.  It's grotesquely unfair but he's become so institutionalised that he barely even complains anymore.  As is usual for people in these situations, he simply survives as best he can.


But that's not to do him down.  He is a remarkable character, an almost messianic everyman rather in the mould of Leopold Bloom.  The kind of character writers put before us as an example of the hugeness of human, the importance of each individual person.  There is a universe in every one.  The sort of character, in short, who emerges after a war.


It's hard to describe boredom without being boring and occasionally the novel lags very slightly - but as usual with these things the overall effect is worth the effort.  And it is a pretty slim volume, as I said.  By the time you get to the end you might just have tears in your eyes as Shukov looks back over his good day.


That's the hook you see, a day we would consider nightmarish is actually pretty good for him because he gets an extra bowl of watery soup and smuggles a hacksaw blade into camp.  The flickers of hope in his barren world will illuminate yours.


There is a kind of transcendence to him - he requires nothing more than enough to eat, a little warmth, not to suffer too harshly at the hands of the sadistic, cruel, petty regime under which he lives. 


And that's what raises this above a standard, entirely justified, novel of protest.  It's not about how bad things are - it's about how people can exist with hope in even the worst, most hopeless situations.


A beautiful, clear, precise, huge little book.

My Mum's dinners...

Obviously I grew up eating my mum's dinners.  Pictured is a plate of stew - which looks more appetising than my mum's but which does at least have that brownness about it which marks out the old fashioned type of cooking.  Wartime cooking I calls it.


I still have dinner at my mum's a few times a week and I do like the family atmosphere and I suppose I kind of like the food in a love / hate way.  I never quite understand why, and indeed how, she manages to produce carbon copies of exactly the same set of dinners every time.  There are about five dinners which she does again and again - always the same.


Everything has to have thick gravy with it.  She makes the gravy with water from the vegetables rather than in any way utilising the meat juices, so we end up with a kind of featureless goo.


You also have to have every kind of vegetable know to humanity - but all cooked till they are mushy so they basically end up tasting the same.  My mum deeply resents having to use her teeth in any way.  If the green beans are about right (al dente) she invariably grumbles that they're too hard.


No Mum!  That's how they should be!


One of the vegetables featured is cabbage which of course reduces to baby food consistency if you do any more than show it some hot water.  My mum calls cabbage 'greeeen' for some reason.  With that many 'e's.


Then there is bacon and onion pudding.  It's hard to describe really - kind of a lump of stodge with, well, bacon and onions in it.  Actually at the time of eating it's kind of nice in an odd way - but then afterwards you can taste it for about three weeks.


Meat pie is another perennial.  Mince.  In a pie.  That's basically it - a thin piece of meat pie.  'Meat' isn't a specific enough description for me of something I'm going to eat.  It's like 'meat' and chips isn't it?   hmmm


Anyway, let's not forget the most important ingredient in my mum's dinners - and one we all appreciate.  


Love.


Ahhhhhhh - blessington bless blessy bless.


As a postscript may I add that her lasagne is strangely awesome and the best I've ever had.