I get around…

No news or updates this time around, but I figured it might be an idea to map out where I’ve been on my travels out and about in Scotland (specifically those bits when I leave my home town, Edinburgh).

This is just a ton of links to previous blog posts featuring places you might be interested in if you ever visit. (Or at least, the places I figured would provide a bit of variety while I was prancing about dressed up!) The links (below the map) are provided in the order they were published.

1: Happy Bunny (Dunbar)

2: The Swimsuit Edition and
The Swimsuit Edition II: Boobwatch (Belhaven beach)

3: Fife, The Universe, and Everything (Crail, St Andrews, Cellardyke lido, and Aberdour railway station)

4: Girly road trip: A Stab At St Abbs (St Abbs, Alnwick, and Scottish Border)

5: Girly road trip: By Jupiter! (Jupiter Artland)

6: Feelin’ Hot Hot Hot (Prestonpans)

7: Scotland, I Am In You (Wick, John O’Groats, Loch Fleet, Loch Ness, and Dalwhinnie Distillery)

8: Strange New Worlds (Dundee, Balmedie Beach, Daviot Stone Circle, and Tarlair lido)

9: Strange New Worlds: Get Tae F…alkirk (Falkirk Wheel, and The Kelpies)

10: Dumbarton Rocks? (Dumbarton Castle)

11: Getting Over The Ups and Downs (Pentland Hills)

12: What’s In For You At Inverewe (Corrieshalloch Gorge, Inverewe Botanical Gardens, and Loch Maree)

13: Scotland’s Tropics: Epic Pics (Glasgow, Ailsa Craig, Logan Botanical Gardens, Mull of Galloway, and Castle Kennedy)

14: Three Days Of Twist-ing (Kingussie, and Loch Morlich)

15: Girly road trip: Need For Mead (Lindisfarne Island)

16: Girly road trip: Hello Mondo Lomond Hills (Bunnet Stane, Lomond Hills)

17: Forced Feminisation Photos (Hillend Ski Centre, and North Berwick)
and Getting Old Rocks! (Yellowcraig Beach, North Berwick)

18: Girly road trip: Stirling Work (South Queensferry, and Stirling)

19: Girly road trip: Mind The Gap (Hadrian’s Wall, Sycamore Gap, and Vindolanda)

20: Girly road trip: Benmore Gardens

21: Girly road trip: Dawyck Gardens

22: One last, epic, Scottish girly day trip (Eilean Donan Castle, Glenfinnan Viaduct, and Glencoe)

I’ve also been to other places that didn’t really merit their own write-up, but you can find their photos lurking in the gallery:

a: Loch Lomond

b: Loch Chon

c: National Museum Of Flight, East Fortune

d: Newcastle Upon Tyne

Whenever I do more trips around the country, I’ll update the map… 🙂

Girly road trip: mind the Gap

I returned to Northumberland with some of my writing buddies for another girly road trip. First time out, we visited Alnwick Castle. This time, inspired by more locations in the area drawn on a teatowel (don’t ask), we visited Hadrian’s Wall. (And how often do you think about the Roman Empire?)

I’d been there before, and knew that because we were all massive nerds, Sycamore Gap was the place to go; after all, it had featured in Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves and was one of the most familiar landmarks around. It would give us a chance to walk a short stretch of the wall (but a hilly one), and dress up for daft photos. I even went to a toy shop the evening before and got a tiny, dirt-cheap bow and arrow set.

Be there or be square! Oh… it’s a square…

The weather was decent, and the site was mobbed (a local charity group for disabled kids was also doing a promotional photo shoot there), so after our picnic lunch we had to arrange the camera in a way to hide all the other activities going on behind us.

I did the silly-bugger-version of Kevin Costner, my friend Karen opted for a somewhat Tolkein-ish Friar Tuck, and my friend Sarah dressed in black and wielded a spoon to play the Sheriff of Nottingham (and even agreed to have jam from her sandwich smeared across her cheek to mimic the facial scar).

Even though none of us resembled the original cast, passers-by recognised what we were doing instantly. One of them asked if we did this a lot? “No,” said Karen, “No,” said Sarah, “All the time!” said I…

Everything I do, I do it for you shits and giggles.

As I write, it’s still only a couple of days since the Sycamore tree that gave the gap its name was felled by a fuckwit with a chainsaw (currently thought to be a guy in his 60s who’d been evicted from a local farm; I might update this later once the truth is known).

It’s a sobering reminder that sometimes when you decide to postpone visiting a place “because it’ll always be there”, it ain’t always so. I’m just glad I got to take my friends there while it was still standing.

Left: an impressive bust. Right: If there’s chain links, I feign kinks.

Afterwards we headed to Vindolanda, a nearby museum with an outdoor cafe. We were greeted by a receptionist wearing a plethora of LGBT badges (and Tolkein stuff, and a Star Trek badge based on the newer series, not the good ones of old, but I kept my mouth shut about that). She was obviously delighted to see us (not sure how many crossdressers they get here) and I doubt we’ll ever meet a more helpful member of staff!

Infamy! Infamy! They’ve got it all in for me!

Vindolanda was a Roman border fort with a small support village attached. All that remains are the foundations and lower walls (and drains), but there’s a reconstruction of a wall and gate to allow experimental archaeologists to see how the soil and stones settle around the building works.

Quidquid latine dictum, altum videtur

Veni, vidi, induebar veste muliebri

Vindolanda’s gardens and museum make for a thoroughly pleasant summer stroll (I’ll spare you those photos; that’s not what this blog is about!). And there were enough recreated statues around and about to have fun with…

Puellae cupiunt habere deliciam

Time filled up really quickly, between the journey to the wall, the walk, the picnic, and pottering around the museum and cafe. We had enough of the day left to enjoy the outdoor exhibits before they locked the gates. We also met that helpful receptionist again, on her way out after packing things up for the day.

If I was a scared nymph of the village, how would I decorate my temple?

On the way home, along narrow country roads, I drove with the expectation that I’d encounter a load of dangerous drivers, and I wasn’t disappointed. Why do we always have to drive considerately for the benefit of the inconsiderate ones? Anyway, my passengers soon got used to me singing “wankpanzers!” to the tune of “Ghostbusters!” whenever we encountered a car built too big for the roads, or sarcastically faking orgasms at anyone overtaking dangerously. Sometimes you just gotta provide your own entertainment, ya know?

[This is my 100th blog post here!]

The figures on that fresco look thoroughly unimpressed with me…

Forced feminisation photos

I imagine there’s going to be a ton of disappointed people suckered in by the title of this entry…

“It’s a [thirst] trap!” – Put this blog entry down to sheer Force of personality…

This year I celebrate 40 years of crossdressing and HOLY FUCKNUTS WHAT THE WHAT NOW???

Well, I can certainly say it’s been 40 years since I first saw the thing that inspired me to start crossdressing: Return of the Jedi, specifically Carrie Fisher in that bikini, compelled me at the age of six to wait until my parents went to bed at night before crawling out of my own and trying to recapture that look using a rolled-up vest, a towel for a skirt, and welly boots.

Eh; it was a start…

I’m positively glowing in this makeup…

The last time I talked about this, in a bit more detail, was ten years ago here. I’ll spare you my opinions of the franchise – let’s just say I always found it a mixed bag [cough those two Ewok movies cough] and my nostalgia’s been doing more heavy lifting lately.

These days my crossdressing is fuelled by a lot more experience and a far more expansive wardrobe collection. I can do swimsuits, but bikinis elude me. And all this is still something I feel obliged to keep hidden from my parents (ho-hum).

“Shiny! Let’s be bad guys!”

I’ve done various bits of cross-dressed cosplay before – Star Trek, Wonder Woman, Tomb Raider amongst others – but hadn’t thought about Star Wars until after acquiring a pair of cheap lightsabers. And with a choice of going to the light side or the dark side, I could take two bites at this cherry.

The secret to doing this shit is pretending you know what you’re doing.

Trouble is, I’m a complete shameless tart, and Jedi tend towards modest robes. I think there was one blue-skinned background Jedi in the prequels who went around in a sports bra and leggings, but I had to find some other way to adapt the look into something a bit more my style: I bought a cheap-shit robe, cheap-shit tunic and cheap-shit shiny brown leggings online, and hoped for the best.

And when I say “I think there was one background character…” I know perfectly damn well what her name is, how she dies, her exotic accent (kinda French), and the game where you can play as her and cut down battle droids. I’m a massive fucking nerd, but I was trying to play it cool for a second.

I also use this pose when I’m getting tied up OH SHIT I DID NOT MEAN TO TYPE THAT

For playing a baddie, it’s much easier: black and shiny. Well, I’ve got the catsuit and boots already, but to get a bit more variety and texture I got some cheap-shit shiny lingerie to put over it. It seemed to do the business.

The bad girls in Star Wars are usually ‘Inquisitors’, with names along the lines of ‘the third/fourth/fifth sister’. I reckon I could dip into the namesake band one of my writing buddies named me after: my dark side character can be ‘the twisted sister’…

I named these ‘Woody’ and ‘Buzz’, the same names Andy’s mother in Toy Story gave her toys.

I figured it’d be good to get two contrasting locations for the two characters: Jedi are all about life, so a forest seemed the best place to illuminate. I found a quiet scrap of trees next to Edinburgh’s dry ski slope that would fit the bill.

Putting my own spin on things.

For the evil shots, I wanted some place that looked barren and rocky. There’s a spot at North Berwick where the sand and rocks look like a cheap film set from an old sci fi show, but I can assure you all that it’s a real place and it was bloody freezing too.

Lightsaber colours inspired by a flag I saw…

Playing a baddie is all about perfecting your “don’t fuck with me” look.
You can practise this when negotiating Edinburgh’s streets during the summer festivals.

Naturally there were dozens of photos taken in order to get the handful that stood out (with the help of a very patient friend who’s also an excellent photographer), not to mention all the practice shots beforehand (I did these by myself to figure out practicalities).

I’m just glad I didn’t have to Photoshop anything: the settings and the colours from the blades were all I needed.

Have to say, I’m really happy with the way they turned out!

A surprise gust of wind adds a little robe action to this pose…

Moonlight and even Jupiter (on the right) make this perhaps the most epic photo I’ve appeared in?

Strange new worlds 3: get tae f…alkirk

Usually my photoshoot trips go without a hitch and I don’t have much to say about them other than where I went and what the scenery was like. The fun ones are when things go wrong somehow, just to add a bit of adventure to the proceedings. Bonus fun comes from being dressed up in a way that can’t be ignored.

I went back to the engineering marvel that is the Falkirk Wheel and the towering sculptures of The Kelpies for some night photos – when they’re lit up, they look like something that’s landed from the planet Zog, so I figured they’d be ideal for another outing in my retro spacesuit.

It turns out they don’t really light this sucker up any more, except for very special occasions. (I’m not special enough.)

It’s been a very long time since the Falkirk Wheel opened, and the whole thing about lighting it up at night doesn’t happen much these days. We didn’t have a tripod with us, so long-exposure photos where I tried to freeze my pose weren’t an option – and using the flash is a great way to bugger up the lighting conditions. I figured if I was going to Photoshop in a space helmet, I may as well go batshit with special effects to hide the washed-out face and crisp shadows.

Yeah, maybe went a bit overboard in Photoshop here…

It took a fair bit of trial and error, and we went exploring on the other side of the upper canal (my torch lit up a fence that I was all set to climb over until I saw a gigantic NOPE of large spiders scuttling about. Instead, we went to the canal tunnel and took some shots avoiding the graffiti on the walls. Anything for a location that looked faintly science-fictiony!

Pretending to be awestruck by a fluorescent light… I should’ve put in some holograms or laser beams or something.

On the way in, the road to the car park was open and accessible. What I hadn’t foreseen was a large, long gate that was now padlocked shut, preventing anyone else from walking about after dark. It now prevented us from leaving. As Admiral Ackbar once put it, “IT’S A TRAP!”

Well… shit.

Fortunately there was a number to call the canal control room in case something had gone wrong. I figured that a transvestite in a silver space suit unable to escape the canal car park counted as something going wrong, and eventually got to speak to a harassed guy with a ton of alarms blaring in the background.

I explained I hadn’t seen the gate and didn’t know it would be locked at 8pm – could someone possibly help, maybe, if it isn’t too much trouble, sorry to interrupt your evening (etc).

“Aye, I can send a manny tae let ye oot, but we’re huvin’ a wee spot ae bother,” said the guy at the other end, “Can ye gie us half an hour?”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Aye, right enough.”

This is my excited face when I stare at a locked gate for thirty minutes.

The thing about cross-dressing in public is that you have to make yourself immune to feelings of embarrassment. A canal engineer in a high-vis jacket taking time out from his siren-filled office emergency to free the numpties who didn’t drive off when they were supposed to would make most people feel foolish.

Not me.

Not at all.

This is one of two horse-head sculptures that tower over the nearby motorway. It always looks this epic, from any angle.

Consequently we got to the Kelpies car park with not much more than half an hour left until it shut too. There was another car park but I didn’t fancy the long walk; so we had to do a rapid run around the sculptures taking photos, and I had to make quick decisions about what angles might work, and the kind of shots I was after. (Sometimes I can plan it out in advance, sometimes I have to adapt.)

Kelpie statue or borg architecture?

Things were made a lot easier by the epic lighting and the slow phasing of the lights through the spectrum. The only downside was the couple of dozen people still wandering about.

The whole deal about ignoring what other people think of you comes in quite handy when they’re all wrapped up in their warm winter coats and boots, and I’m prancing around in lycra and go-go boots. Maybe they feared my beauty; maybe I scared them off; or maybe they just wanted to get back to their cars and leave before the gate was shut and locked. Who knows?

Epic lighting all caught in camera…

So it was a slightly more eventful evening than I’d planned, but I got the shots I wanted. I just needed to find a spot with some epic lighting and an interesting background and strike a pose for a bit.

Any fool could do that. Surprisingly few fools do!

Strange new worlds 2: morning star

First thing in the morning is a great time for photography for all sorts of reasons. For one thing, there’s the ‘golden hour’ after sunrise when the light is just perfect. For another, there are fewer people around to stare at you prancing about in a silver catsuit.

I’ve written previously about cosplaying as a retro astronaut, and there are a whole bunch of places where I could – with minimal photoshopping – make places in Scotland look like they were on another planet. I’m pretty sure the people who witnessed me wondered what planet I was on, too…

Sometimes the weird shit requires quite a tightly-focused angle. I ventured to Edinburgh’s Sheraton Hotel early on a Saturday morning to twitch my bumcheeks at guests having breakfast, posing beside artistic stone spheres and a hemisphere covered in shiny tiles. (These had seen better days; the trick was to find an angle where the gaps wouldn’t be seen, and to hide the abandoned fencing where posters had been hung to advertise shows during the recently-completed summer Festivals.)

The location in the city centre meant parking the car where I probably shouldn’t (just as well the traffic was light at sunrise on a Saturday morning!) And being in the city centre, it meant pulling on my go-go boots whilst weekend workers ambled past on their way to their workplaces. You can see why I don’t do this sort of thing at rush hour…

Another thing I sometimes have to pay attention to is the tide. (I’ve done this for various swimsuit shoots at Dunbar, for a Baywatch-themed shoot, and at a ruined lido in Fife.) If there’s one thing this has taught me – balancing tides with weather conditions – it’s patience and making the most of whatever you’re presented with.

For the spacey shots, the causeway to Cramond Island in the Firth of Forth resembled – to my feverish, teenage-geek-brain – the ruins of a long lost civilisation. (In reality, anti-submarine defences from the last century.) On this morning, there were a few more people walking about but the tide had only just receded far enough to make the causeway passable, so I had it to myself.

Some mornings you just have to take a chance. When it’s misty or foggy, you might get ‘moody’ or ‘atmospheric’ shots. And by happy chance you might get some epic, backlit clouds. At Arthur’s Seat (also in Edinburgh’s city centre), I got a few mountainous-looking photos in fog lit by the dawn sun. There was one old guy out walking his dog who asked if I was taking these photos for a Festival Fringe show.

I lied and said yes. (I’ve used this lie before.)

Sometimes, if it’s harmless and lets you get on with your day, it’s best to let people believe what they want to believe.

Of course, I’ve done a bunch of night-time photoshoots too (but that’s something for a whole ‘nother blog!)…

This is actually right outside a hotel’s breakfast room…

Pew! Pew!

Minimal photoshopping required…

Some days you get lucky with the view…

A water treatment plant. The smile is forced.