Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I have been heartened to see some ways that Britain is dealing with the heatwave:

1) Because we're signed up to get emails every week reminding us which bin(s) to put out, we got an extra Binfo email from the council telling us their bin workers are starting their shifts earlier this week so they can work in the cooler part of the day so make sure your bins are out by 6am (not an issue on our street were most people have them out before 6pm the evening before, but I am glad to know that the people who do a tough job anyway can have it as easy as possible in hot weather).

2) I might have ordered a gift that involves chocolate for someone's birthday coming up, and I got an email from the place that says "With the hot weather set to continue across the UK this week, we wanted to get in touch just in case you'd prefer to make a change to your order."

I hadn't even thought about this! (I'd already forgotten I'd done it, actually...)

The email goes on to say

If you'd like, we can help you:

• Delay your delivery until the weather cools down
• Swap your chocolates for another gift
• Keep things exactly as they are

Just let us know what you'd like to do, and we'll be happy to help.

It's just so nice and clearly communicated, I was impressed. Especially when it wasn't even expensive or anything.

It's probably not good that I'm now sad that Adrian Chiles doesn't know how much I would love to talk to him about baseball, is it.

He's *also| a fan of a low-budget team that no one wants to go see that isn't that good but weirdly kind of is sometimes!

(Being me, I had also noticed how weird it is that Brits use a lot of language from baseball without seeming to know why they say that.)

I slept like ass again, but if I'm gonna wake up at 6am it was nice to wake up to good news: the obvious bigots of Reform didn't win, and the more normie bigots of Labour didn't win either -- the Greens won!

I don't really care what this means for Labour or Keir Starmer -- it has never in my 20 years of living here made much tangible difference who the Prime Minister is -- I'm just glad to have an MP who might not be totally useless because I've had enough of that the last couple years! We've had a functionally useless MP in Gorton and Denton since Gwynne lost the Labour whip and his ministerial post but kept voting along with Labour anyway. Worst of both worlds: he couldn't really advocate for us any more but still voted like he would've before. Not that he was much use as public health minister: my hopes were high when he first got the position, especially as he was open about his Long Covid (which I think ended up being why he had to resign on health grounds), but he was a real disappointment to people I know who have ME or LC who'd also expected him to help, and he wasn't interested in advocating for clean air in public places or anything that would help with the ongoing pandemic, and my attempt to explain to him the public health implications of transphobia-as-policy (like the totally-predictable spike in teen suicides) didn't get anywhere either.

And more widely, of course, this is making some people feel more hopeful than we have in a long time. My queer and community-defense group chats were full of relief, congratulations to the volunteers we know who knocked on doors and did other thankless work for this (in the rain! even for Manchester it's been rainy lately), and a little bit of giddy meme-making.

There's all kinds of speculation now on what this means for the upcoming local elections in England (and devolved government elections in both Wales and Scotland, but they get to have nationalistic parties to vote for there too), as well as for Labour and Reform and so on.

But for now, there's a lot of hope in a lot of people who didn't have much (I caught a link to this video and watched it before I realized it's Owen Jones, heh), and that is a great gift.

Tonight's knock on the door was a Labour canvasser who asked if I was planning to vote; I said I'd just done my postal vote this afternoon, and "I'm afraid I voted Green," I tried to let him down gently.

He still tried to show me the latest "only Labour can beat Reform" chart which baffled me: from my own time canvassing I can only expect that in such circumstances they have a box to tick for "voted for someone else" and you move on! Arguing with people who've already voted is a waste of time.

I hadn't been going to get in to this but since he wasn't going away I told him that I'm a disabled immigrant and Labour are making life more difficult for all of those so I couldn't vote for them. He said "well Angeliki settled here from Europe..."

It just felt so point-missing. I don't really care about the demographics of a candidate too much. I care how they'll vote, I care about their party's policies and how they'll affect all immigrants! (Or any other group on the wrong side of this power imbalance.)

I appreciate there's a lot of new volunteers on all sides in this by-election. (Seriously dude, I hope they trained you enough that you know there should be a box for you to tick that says I can be done wasting your and all your colleagues' time!) But it's hard not to feel like this is what Labour has been for all twenty of the years I lived here: focus on this exceptional individual, not the boring systemic problems that the party will always shy away from.

The funniest thing was, as I was finally getting this guy to go away, I'd spotted another guy behind him and I'd assumed he was a fellow canvasser with this guy, but as I started to close the door, he caught my attention to say "I'm from the Greens, did you want to put up a sign?" And only then I remembered that D had in fact asked for one the other day, so me and this guy and D eventually ended up out in the rain trying to find something to affix it to before ending up dragging a big tree in a big pot to the edge of the driveway for maximum visibility.

I hope that sends the Labour canvassers a message, for the couple more days until this election finally happens.

Today was a hard day, one of those where I'm just worn down I think.

Today I'd like to share this Letter From Minnesota. I keep thinking that Minneapolis, St. Paul, other Minnesotan cities have big populations of refugees, from Somalia and from the U.S.'s "secret war" in southeast Asia. Not just in living memory but people my age who arrived as children. My heart breaks that people who came to Minnesota specifically for safety and sanctuary (Renee Good among them) are now finding it so unsafe.

So. Anyway. Some good things:

1. I got a message saying my bloods are fine, which is especially exciting because this means I can finally (six months later than expected) get blood taken only every six months instead of every three months.
2. I went to the gym and actually felt the good brain chemicals from it this time. Also, an annoying charge that had been on my account for a month was just wiped out by the young person behind the counter, who didn't even give me a chance to explain why I thought it was unjust, he just sorted it right away!
3. Not only has a transphobic group been blocked from a transphobic attempt to keep trans women out of women's swimming places. More than 32,000 people said they wanted the ponds to remain trans inclusive – 86% of the respondents to the consultation on this. This followed previous votes overwhelmingly supporting trans pond users, and a petition with over 14,000 signatures asking to keep the ponds inclusive. Transphobes are disproportionately noisy and have too much access to power in the UK. But it's important to hang on to the reality which is how neutral-to-positive the majority of people are towards trans people.

I never got around to talking about the other two things that D and I saw that week, Breaking the Code or Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein.

Breaking the Code is a play that D had seen a TV movie version of (starring Derek Jacobi, that sounds amazing) of a book he's also read and considers the best biography of Alan Turing. D knows quite a lot more about Turing than I do, so I consider this high praise. My knowledge is more on the did-the-walking-tour that that guy (Ed something?) does around "Turing's Manchester," I've seen his mug chained to the radiator at Bletchley Park and for the afternoon I was there I did understand how the bombe worked but I've forgotten again now...and of course I know the tragic ending to his story that queers absorb: prosecution, chemical castration, suicide. I was really enjoying the walking tour until I remembered that bit was coming up at the end...

Anyway, I really enjoyed the play. I liked the epilogue that has been added to it, where a modern-day pupil at the school Turing went to is doing a presentation or something about him for LGBT History Month, which adds his pardon and a little more context to what's otherwise an utterly pointless loss of life. This life also happened to be really important to the second world war, but I am always mindful of how many ordinary lives were diminished in similar ways. I do think that having to be secretive about what he did during the war, even afterward, does offer a sad parallel to his isolation.

The play is set during his time in Manchester, with flashbacks to school and Bletchley and everything and I've no idea how true to life this is but in the play anyway he's wistful about his time at Bletchley, seeing it as a period of freedom, getting to be himself -- he's played with a very autistic affect and a stammer that can be severe, he could be weird and queer and chain his mug to the radiator and he could get away with whatever he wanted because his brain was so important to the war effort.

"Breaking the code" at first seemed an odd name for the play because breaking the code is exactly what -- D taught me -- Turing did not do; three Polish cryptologists did. (Turing developed optimizations to their methods, and created an electromechanical computer which allowed Enigma to be brute-forced much faster. He was a genius and deserves to be recognised as such. But he was part of a team at Bletchley who were building on Polish work, and Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski deserve recognition along with the French spy Hans-Thilo Schmidt and many others.) But of course the phrase can also of course to social codes, which included compulsory heterosexuality. When Turing reports a burglary to the police and in the process tells them he has broken the law -- "gross indecency" -- they have to act on that; he has broken a part of the legal code.

The other metric that D judges a biography of Alan Turing on is whether it says he invented the computer -- he didn't, or if he did it depends on what you mean by "computer" and for that matter "invent" -- and the play could probably have done better at that but it didn't feel egregiously inaccurate either. Turing does at one point say something like "we won the war because of me," but of course saying it doesn't make it so, and he says it to his "bit of rough picked up from the Oxford Road" as the police officer describes the young man, so the possibility of exaggeration to impress (or dismiss?) seems plausible.

Finally in a thing that probably only I noticed, near the end of the play when Turing has met up with an old Bletchley friend, who's now a wife and mother, and he's now infamous for his gay crime. So they have a lot to catch up on. At one point Turing is explaining about his "chemical castration," which was the option he took to avoid prison. I'd known about this, but I'd somehow never until this moment considered that what he'd been given was of course estrogen. They gave him dysphoria, I thought. What an awful thing to do to anybody. Anyway, the thing I noticed is that when Turing tells his friend in his matter-of-fact tone "I'm growing breasts!" all around the auditorium there was a chuckle from the white, older audience who like D and I were spending our Halloween at t the theater. I didn't laugh. Turing cheerfully went on to say something like "No one knows what'll happen to them when I stop getting the injections, if they'll go away or what!" Sitting there, seventy-one years later and a short walk from the stop where we'd gotten off the bus, which I just learned is where he met his "bit of rough from the Oxford Road" as the police officer in the play describes his lover, and a chest flattened with modern compression fabric, I winced. No. If only they just went away again... I was disappointed but not surprised at the room full of respectable theatergoers laughing at this. (The idea that taking estrogen would make someone less horny seemed much more amusing to me, but that's based on knowing so many trans women, and they are of course women and not men who are being punished.)

Oh wait, one other me-specific thing: in the play, Turing's mother did not accept that her son had died by suicide. It reminded me of my own mom, who was outraged when asked by police if my brother might have crashed his car intentionally. I understood that they have to ask but she was livid at the question. Maybe some mothers are just always going to be. You think you know your son so well, maybe better than anyone else, and then it turns out that no one gets to know him any more. I saw this play the day when I'd had that dream about being called my brother's brother so maybe that's why I thought of this.

Recently D sent me the link to a 2019 Dreamwidth entry of his about an outing to Anderton Boat Lift that stands out in our minds for two reasons: one is that it's the day before we ended up dating and we had no idea but the other is that he mentions that we, he and I, had been on about going to Anderton Boat Lift for ages by that point.

And the other feat of canal engineering we always talked about wanting to visit is the Falkirk Wheel.

But unlike the Anderton Boat Lift which I could rush my work day to finish a bit early and be picked up in time to get there for a late lunch, or the Barton Swing Bridge which is so close we biked to it last summer (or maybe two summers ago), Falkirk is very far away so we'd never found an excuse to be in the vicinity.

Until this Stornoway trip. D has a complicated spreadsheet with all the moving parts for such a trip and realized that if we stayed at the further of their two usual spots after the ferry back to the mainland, it would leave us with little enough driving to do on the second day that we could spend some time in Falkirk.

We saw the Kelpies first, which I'd heard about as motorway landmarks from haggis but never thought about as a destination. We had so much fun there though that we stayed past the time D had expected our visit there to last and got home at 8pm instead of 7pm. The weather was beautiful, there were good dogs everywhere, the visitor centre had a very good video explaining the history of Falkirk and was full of excellent tactile models: the kelpies made of Legos, little models of them to scale with world landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, the Sphinx, the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil...

Then it was on to the main event. First we had lunch at the kind of place where we'd have wanted to sit outside even if we weren't always doing that now anyway, we ate in the literal shadow of the wheel. I was sitting across from D who when the wheel was moving was just smiling at it in a way that reminded me of icons of saints gazing upon some heavenly scene, full of proper awe and joy. So I got to see the Falkirk Wheel and I got to see how happy it made him, and I can't decide which I enjoyed more.

We finished eating just in time for D and I to take the next tour, where you get in a boat, go up to the aqueduct and along the canal a little while you listen to a local do their spiel (ours was called Gary! and he complimented my #TeamGary t-shirt which I happened to be wearing that day).

Sadly V wasn't feeling up to it: this was Day 9 of traveling and being so much busier than usual was already catching up with them. But they made the right decision; they know so much about narrowboats and canals anyway and the tour was very audio-based and they'd have struggled to get much out of it. They had a nice time in the sunshine watching ducks and moorhens and more good dogs, and buying the cutest fridge magnet in the gift shop, a little abstract model of the wheel that you can spin like a fidget toy, which is delightful.

For a few years now I've been desperate to show him the Aerial Lift Bridge in Duluth, and this has only deepened my desire to make this happen. It doesn't seem overly likely any time soon, but then the Falkirk Wheel has only existed for 23 years and we must have spent at least half of that talking about wanting to go see it, so I'm okay to wait a while.

Sadly V wasn't well enough to go out with us today, but D and I went to see the Calanais standing stones and the broch Dùn Carloway.

Things so old, no one knows why they're like they were. Why use so much timber in a place with so few trees? Why build it so high?

The broch is 2000 years old and the stones were put there 5000 years ago, longer ago than the time since. And no one knows quite why. These things that will seem precious and exotic to the people on the big cruise ships that dock at Stornoway are so ordinary to the locals that V told me about a house they nearly bought when they lived on the island that had some standing stones on the property so one of the things to be aware of is that people might inadvertently wander through your yard.

Once when my parents were visiting, my mom gushed on the train back from Chester (I think, unless it was York) how neat it is that Ing-ga-land has all this hiss-tree until she said something like "We don't have anything like this at home" and I couldn't help but say something about how that was because of the genocide and colonialization. She changed the subject then.

I had to learn about things like Cahokia all by myself, we didn't get that in school!

"There's a wee step here," D told me as we made our way out of the cemetery where we'd gone looking for the pyramid monument that he'd been alerted to on Pokémon Go.

He's often warning me of little things, potential hazards, like this as we're walking around so that wasn't remarkable at all.

What I remarked upon was the language. "Do we all get to say 'wee' now that we're in Scotland?" I asked. "I noticed V saying it earlier but didn't know if it applied to us too."

D had a ready answer. "Yes." It sounded very authoritative!

Stirling has been great. The trip here took an hour and a half longer than it should've thanks to spending that time at a standstill on the M6, thirteen miles back from something that'd happened near Tebay. So by the time we got here, checked in, and found some food, it was 8:30 and I was thinning about going to bed soon when D asked if I wanted to join him for a walk. We could walk down to the lively studenty area or uphill to the "Old Town," with things like the castle, a bunch of statues of old dudes with extravagantly Scottish names, and other touristy landmarks that were all closed and in the dark. But I've still enjoyed it a lot, I was introduced to the concept of a paneer burrito which I'm sad I can't have again in a hurry, and we did find a pub (a hotel bar actually) near the castle -- so close to it that it's called The Portcullis, because it was in the castle's portcullis.

And now I can use Scottish words for things, apparently! So that's nice.

According to this, and a new book I maybe have to read now, a gay pioneer in the UK was blind.

In 1960, seven years before the law in the UK changed to permit sex between men, he had written to the national press declaring himself to be gay. Roger believed that the only way to change public opinion about homosexuals was for them to take control of the gay rights movement – and this required them to unashamedly identify themselves on the national stage. But nobody else had been willing to do it.

It's because of his blindness that this person had to come in to his life: an Oxford student, also gay, who could be trusted to read his papers and write and generally be a kind of personal assistant.

To gay when it was illegal, and then to be blind, required a lot of access intimacy when everything was still on paper.

The article ends:

In the years since, it has often led me to wonder how many other quiet revolutionaries live among us, ready to share their stories, if only we knock on their doors.

So many. I'm sure of it.