Tootsie.

1. Somebody else is doing Tootsies (toes), so it falls to me (mapping tangents) to explore the 1982 Dustin Hoffman film, in which Michael Dorset, an out-of-work actor goes to extreme lengths (!) to land a job (Michael Dorsey Becomes Dorothy Michaels WITH HILARIOUS CONSEQUENCES).

2. So far as we know there this has nothing to do with Tootsie Toys or the Ford Sunliner, or any of that. No... nothing. But it has everything to do with the body, and the world of appearances, fronts, facades. I think about my face and I think about making it up. Transvestism appeals. I think about the transparency of the gesture: to be seen not being but trying to be something (no, some-one) you are not, and then (perhaps for moments), becoming her. Circa 2006, trying on my girlfriend's favourite outfits (I mean my favourites, not hers: the white skirt she bought for a wedding, a little flimsy top, a silk scarf). It didn't last (but not, I think, because of this brief but enjoyable flirt with transvestism).

3. Standing before the mirror I looked good (even if I say so myself), chest swelling, hips widening, some other things shrinking and folding around, one of my ribs going spare.

4. The theme song? "It Might Be You".

5. In a documentary 'Why Men Wear Frocks', the Artist Grayson Perry examined transvestism and masculinity, and claimed that the majority of M-to-F Trannies are straight (who knew?), and that Transvestites are in it for the finery, something about presentation, something about display. There was a quote I remember from a Victorian diary, somebody who had tried it and liked it saying that he would like to meet others like him, who he gorgeously described as "tight-lacers", a term for which I am full of affection.

6. Either generally or specifically (I no longer know from where, or as whom, I am speaking) - there is at certain times a desire to become the other. I imagine the girlhood, piqued with the wistfulness of my own, untranslateable boyhood. I never became you - perhaps that wasn't what I was driving at. You were off somewhere in the distance and you are still further now. Tonight I am in your city, and someone else lights the lamps that you see by, down the same streets I was lost in once, before I lastly called 'time'.

7. Becoming myself again, straightening out, I wonder, if I have already met the next woman I will sleep with, imagining features I might come to love, the curve of her neck, the hinge of her thigh, and I stop myself, stare out the window at the traffic, think of something else for 1,2,3,4... And again I return to her (the future), think about the improbability of wit, charm, I mean slickness (these things are always achieved by other means), and I begin to enjoy the following line, from the film:

"You know, I could lay a big line on you and we could do a lot of role playing, but the simple truth is, is that I find you very interesting and I'd really like to make love to you".

It should never be that simple. You ought to have to play the game.