Poet

It is over and I am back on the taxi rank.

These pages will no longer have the gleam of academia shining out of them, at least not for another few weeks.

It is nice to be home but I do miss my brilliantly clever fellow students, and had to smother a heartfelt sigh when the first of tonight’s idiots said Wot You Reading I Read A Book Once.

I do not believe that a single one of my customers would be able to distinguish a villanelle from a haiku, for goodness’ sake, maybe we should put Jacob Rees-Mogg in charge of Education.

We had a person call in to read poetry to us this week. We got chatting and she talked to me about villanelles, so obviously had to try and sound intellectual. You have all experienced my own poetic efforts, and so you will have a good idea how convincing I might have been. I was even less convincing than usual, because she told me halfway through the conversation that she wished to be called Zee, not She, which completely confused me. I explained that I had never met anybody who was called Zee before, except the taxi driver on the rank at home whose name is Zee. He does not like to be called Zee instead of He, but because it is his name, and would, I think, be astonished and horrified if anybody suggested it.

He is Hungarian, and does not have much truck with novelty. I rather like him, he is a very good taxi driver.

Of course I was instantly curious about all of the background to this. I had already noticed that she was an unusual type of lady, because despite being a lady in every other respect, she had a ginger moustache and beard.

We were all politely trying very hard not to notice this, or think it was at all interesting, but of course we all did.

She explained with what I am not sure was exact accuracy, that we have always had third sexes all the way through history, and it is only during very recent times that we have divided the sexes into male and female. I was not entirely convinced about this. I thought that some of our earlier monarchs had decreed some fairly unpleasant consequences for people who expressed anything other than absolute boy/girl certainty, but she was quite certain and obviously I was too polite to argue.

In any case, I was in no position to argue, because this is a subject on which I can safely say I have done no research whatsoever, and I was completely beside myself trying not to pester her with a thousand questions. I think I need more information before I could consider myself to be in possession of an Informed Opinion. It is not at all possible to hold one of these until one has considered all viewpoints, so I was not going to waste this opportunity to get a new viewpoint for my collection, such chances rarely come my way in Windermere. They might not be unusual in London but I had never met a lady with a real beard before, and I had to try very hard not to behave like a six-year-old visitor to PT Barnum’s tent, which would have been colossally rude.

I wonder how it has come about that it is not polite to look really hard and with a great deal of interest at new things.

I do not understand the current fashionable musings about whether it is possible to be a boy or a girl just by feeling like one, because I think that if you are a girl you do not have the first idea about how you would feel if you were a boy. You might be fairly fed up with being yourself, I get like that sometimes, but it is perfectly possible to become a different sort of person without actually cutting any bits off. That is the point of New Year’s Resolutions. Telling everybody you are now something else seems to me to be asking them to do the changing for you. It means that they have got to remember to do things differently instead of you having the bother of remembering it yourself.

I was also dying to find out how she knew that she wanted to grow a beard. Disappointingly, she was not terrifically forthcoming. She smiled enigmatically, and said that it was important to express oneself. Obviously I agreed with this, since I am also quite keen on expressing myself, albeit not in quite the same way. After that I listened with the greatest of interest to her poetry.  I am sorry to say that this was a bit disappointing, mostly because she had a very soft voice, and I couldn’t hear huge chunks of it, and she seemed to be the sort of person who would be offended if you asked her to speak up a bit.

She also started some of her poems with something that she called a Transphobia Trigger Warning, which puzzled me a bit. I can’t imagine that anybody would ever be triggered into transphobia by a poem, unless it said something like Everybody who is not transgender smells of poo, which as far as I could hear, none of them did.

There was an awful lot of being cross with people who did not accept her, probably about six of her poems were about this difficulty, and I must confess that I did not really understand that either, because I do not think I know how I might go about making somebody feel accepted. When you say you want somebody to accept you, what exactly should they do? I am more than happy to do accepting things if I know what they are, but she wasn’t very specific about that. I would have liked to ask her afterwards, but she was talking to other people and it would have been rude to interrupt.

Despite all of this I came home feeling as though I had acquired a small Insight into current affairs. I did not like to ask Are you a Trans person like they talk about in the Daily Telegraph? but I think probably she was, and now I know all sorts of things about Trans people that I did not know before.

I do not know nearly as much as I would like to know.

I do wish it was not considered impolite to ask.