An extraordinarily long chapter which has a bit about prosthetic penises in it

They came from shortlists, well designed,

To fill the House with just their kind,

The lesbians with butch, cropped hair,

The Tory ladies dressed with care,

The deeply spoken, and the squeaky,

They came from Ramsgate and Auld Reekie,

Harridans and cold, hard bores,

With steely eyes, pugnacious jaws.

Their politics were much the same

They thought alike, shared every aim,

They crowded round the centre ground

And dished out dull, bland bites of sound,

Their minds were empty, speeches hollow,

Ambition led, ideas could follow,

And yet they rarely ever did.

And they would never make a bid

In favour of less government

Because they were a regiment

Of bossy sisters who loved rules

And took the demos for dumb fools.

They spat at liberty and swore

To do away with common law,

Because they did not understand

The history of our ancient land

And thought a web of regulation

Would much enhance this once great nation.

They didn't know that less was more

And mould grows from a single spore.

After the euphoria of June 24th the cold reality set in. The mess of choosing the new leader of the Tory Party, the endless struggle by the media to understand what had hit them, followed by the patronising talking down of the result and the people who had brought it about. Virginia and the rest of the seventeen point four million were racists, apparently. Yet she knew instinctively Rochelle would have voted Brexit. The Shaz she had known in her teens, probably would not have been arsed to vote at all. Was ‘arsed’ an expression in common parlance in the eighties, in England, Virginia wondered? It certainly wasn’t one found in polite conversation, which was mostly what Virginia had been used to at that time.

Virginia still had faith in politics and democracy at this point. She barely felt any need to try anything serious of her own. When Theresa May looked likely to be chosen as the next Prime Minister Virginia’s heart sank, but she didn’t resort to witchcraft. Perhaps it seemed too likely that Theresa might retaliate in kind. And, after all she had prayed to God to send them someone suitable, and she had to trust His judgement, though it seemed as if He had played a rather mean joke in sending Theresa. Virginia contented herself with sharing bitchy articles by Gerald Warner on Disqus. Certainly, Gerald was the only person who had seen right from the start the kind of creature May was. He seemed to be almost the only one who had not been deceived into thinking she was the next Maggie and as such, the right woman for the job. Virginia believed Boris, as a Brexiteer should have had the job.

Virginia was not mad keen on Boris. She couldn’t admire a man who’d made pregnant women abort the babies he had made. But Virginia had a theory about leadership. She believed it was a biological quality, unrelated to politics at a fairly profound level. It was a quality that all our fellow apes would recognize. Various gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and monkeys would probably have elected Churchill, Maggie and Blair and they would not have needed to know anything about their ideas. And they would almost certainly elect Boris. But only silly humans would elect May, Cameron, Major, Brown, Callaghan and so on.

On the other hand Corbyn was a rogue male who had survived for years on his own in the Trotskyist wilderness. Was he a Trot? Virginia could never remember the difference between the ‘People’s Front of Judea’ and the other lot, he was an old leftie of some sort. A rogue male could easily depose a bloodied female and take over a tribe with its consent. The rogue male who has lived through the wilderness years unharmed has demonstrated his instincts for survival as well as the quality of his genetic material. The other quality that an aged Trot espousing a 19th century ideology has, counter intuitively, is conservatism. His ideas may be ‘progressive’ but they are well known, much tried, old hat sort of ‘progressive’ ideas. Take renationalising the railways, for example. The idea of a nationalised railway system brings to mind images of steam trains and the 1970’s film of The Railway Children, a time of happy, kindly, socialist station masters, like Perks and guards in smart uniforms, and women with cut glass accents as well as images of Red Robbo. English people were used to taking the rough with the smooth, they would take Red Robbo with Jenny Agutter. The desire to take them was a conservative one, not a socialist one, however much nationalisation was a socialist principle.

The only time Virginia felt really tempted to use her ancient skill was when Gove stabbed Boris in the back, politically. That day was the one on which Virginia came very close indeed to sending some evil spirit to do Gove in, literally, but invisibly, bringing an end to both his career and existence. Recollecting this was difficult for Virginia. It was another reminder that she had inherited her mother’s impulsiveness and wrong judgement alongside her ability, though she had stepped back and restrained herself, in the end.

She had liked Gove before this. His education reforms had been the subject over which Virginia had lost more ‘friends’ than any other, back in the days of Facebook rows. It felt almost personal that Gove had betrayed her over her choice for PM, when she had defended him with so much vigour and enthusiasm. God it was difficult. When they were all bastards really how could one choose which ones might not deserve to live?

All this political turmoil coincided with Nick leaving to live on the continent. Virginia and Nick knew their love was strong, or weak enough to withstand the separation, and he would be coming home for the weekends once or twice a month. Virginia knew she must not become even more solitary and peculiar than she already was, there was nothing less attractive than a lonely, menopausal witch, for one thing. And for another, knowing that her skills had increased during adolescence she was expecting them to develop further over the coming years, but during the menopause they might go haywire. She had already lost her ability to fly in dreams, which was devastating as it had always seemed connected with her other ability, since that often required her soul to leave her body. She didn’t want to ‘go wrong’ or lose control, she might end up trying to bump people off left, right and centre. She needed to relax a bit.

In November there was trouble again, this time at the High Court. Virginia watched segments of the second trial online. The Judges didn’t half fancy themselves. Virginia believed in judgmentalism, because she believed that the ability to judge things correctly, or to the best of one’s ability was the pinnacle of what made human beings God’s special creatures, above the beasts. But she also believed in prejudice and trusted instinctive prejudice first. She could be persuaded by argument, but only up to a point, after which she snapped back, like an elastic band to her original prejudiced position. It was important to be like this in a democracy, because you didn’t have enough information to hand to make your choices in an entirely informed way. And if you thought you did you were kidding yourself and were likely to be exploited by ‘fact checkers’ and people who ostensibly railed against fake news, while lying by omission, like the BBC. Anyway, Virginia was divided in her mind as to whether judges were entitled to be arrogant, because of their high levels of intellect and whether they should receive the vast amounts of money they did for their work, or whether they should all be volunteers. Money had a way of clouding judgement and love of vast quantities of it always involved devilry of some sort. And arrogance that derived from thinking you ‘were worth it’ and tossing your woolly wig about was not the innocent sort of arrogance one might develop as a result of thinking you were intellectually brilliant.

The case brought by Gina Miller caused Virginia much difficulty, she so much wanted to bring about the end of that woman’s interference, but what if she had a point? Virginia did not trust May, any more than Miller did, the enemy of her enemy need not be her friend, but neither did she need to regard her with so much more antipathy. If Theresa were really the creature Gerald described, then she could not be trusted to negotiate on behalf of people like Virginia. If the approval of the agreement had to be spread between the 680 MPs at least May would not be able to hide anything really outrageous. Virginia succeeded in reigning in her murderous instinct and when, eventually, parliament passed, with a large majority, the legislation which allowed the Government to trigger Article 50, Virginia realised that Miller had done the Brexiteers a favour. Once again, she breathed a sigh of relief that she had left politics to take its course and had not intervened.

Virginia had not wanted her country to bother with the Article 50 process at all. She believed that it was only necessary to repeal the 1972 European Union Act, a unilateral act, which would not require any shenanigans, and would cease to allow European law to become statute automatically. This was the sort of straight forward, sovereign way of going on that Virginia would have admired. All this palaver with Article 50 was allowing the other side to dictate terms. The very idea of it made Virginia’s blood boil.

Virginia was aware that she was a bit mad, of course. Not least because her adult children told her so, every few days. Virginia had only known one really mad person, in childhood. And when she compared herself, she knew her own condition was mild. This woman had been a great friend of her mother’s, an artist with manic depression. Only Pat had never seemed to be depressed, only manic. And her mania was mostly glorious. The first time Virginia experienced it she was rather frightened of it. Pat had turned up at Kineburn, having hitched a lift with a poor young man, who must have been almost terrified out of his own wits. She was dressed in the garb her husband so accurately named ‘Ethnic Tat’, which added to the mad effect On arrival she had announced she was going to be their housekeeper and cook, having decided that cooking and housekeeping for her own family, in her own large, 17th century house was not quite as interesting as doing it for someone else. In truth of course she simply fancied Virginia’s father, as many women of a certain age did. Pat’s husband referred to these ‘femmes d'un certain âge’, which included his wife, as ‘The Post-Menopausal Fan Club’. Virginia had been used to their silliness in childhood and vowed that however batty she became herself, as a woman of a certain age, her battiness would not take the pathetic form of fawning over a man.

On her first mad visit Pat had cooked them a meal, a reasonable vegetable stew, as a basis, but then she had arranged a huge, uncooked Cumberland sausage in each bowl, with a pair of raw, home grown beetroot, complete with muddy roots, on each side of it. Of course, Virginia and her sisters had not understood the symbolism. But it was many years before Virginia could fancy a sausage and she was well into her forties before she began to enjoy beetroot again. After the strange meal their mother had taken Virginia and her sisters round to their half-brother’s flat, where he had taught them how to play draughts, a very suitable game for such an old house. Later on, they had been allowed to peep out of the window and watch the men in white coats take Pat away. At the time Virginia had been glad the men in white coats had taken the nasty woman away. Now she thought it dreadful that a person could lose their liberty because they had arranged a few raw sausages and unwashed beetroot straight from the garden, suggestively and frightened three little girls. When she thought of it out of the blue it made Virginia catch her breath and her throat constrict. How far away might she be herself, from being sectioned at any given time, if her mischief making got out of hand and began to bear serious fruit.

Virginia lying awake in the black velvet of the early hours, before the second sleep, one morning considered the history of misogyny. The history of locking up women who were a nuisance was a long one. Conservatives could regard it as pretty much a universal tradition and therefore one which was probably worth preserving. This was why it was important not to be a conservative in all things. The Poet and his sort had made their accusations against Alison Carter and her sort. And women who were not called witches and tried and put to death for their crimes were often called whores. Sometimes they were called both. Women who were raped and had babies outside wedlock had been shut up in loony bins and had become institutionalised well into the 20th century. Television and radio programmes had been made as late as the mid nineteen nineties in which women were interviewed who had been incarcerated after reporting rape or incest in the nineteen twenties, thirties or forties. They had been given strong medication, lobotomies, ECT which had subdued their spirits, dulled their brains and slowed their speech.

The benefit of being a conservative though, was that eventually liberal thought became so well established itself that it became conservative thought by default. The good old liberals and progressives and Christians had campaigned so long against misogyny that finding misogyny abhorrent was now accepted as traditional by conservatives. And yet state sanctioned misogyny still went on. And oddly it was the liberals and progressives who were keenest to turn a blind eye to it where it was a result of the behaviour of conservative men from other cultural and religious backgrounds against the usual working-class English women. Or even when it was against the wives, daughters and nieces of these men themselves, women were always further down the pecking order, even in protected groups. These men, whose antecedents had not lived on the island before the mid twentieth century could not, therefore, be expected to sign up to the mid to late twentieth century progressive/liberal revolution.

The disadvantage of being a liberal and progressive was that once one’s views became established and ‘old hat’ they became conservative and then had to be rejected and swept away. This had happened to the campaign against misogyny and feminism. The dyed in the wool Tories now thought equal rights for women were, on the whole, a good idea, so it was necessary for the progressives to find new ways of deriding this old-fashioned nonsense. Of course, the new way could not be an old way, at least not where it pertained to members of the majority population. So, the whole trans thing had taken a grip. Now women could not request that matters might be arranged so as to allow a level playing field, based on adjusting the level, to take into consideration basic biology, because being female was not a matter of biology. Men could have babies and menstruate, and women could have big dicks and hairy chests. And if lesbians suffered vaginismus when forced into sexual activity with one of these well-hung dames, then their cunts were cramping and contracting out of sheer, bloody minded transphobic hysteria. And if they were just worried, they might suffer such a physical reaction and were making a fuss about an imagined worst-case scenario, then that just proved the Ancient Greeks had been right, cis women sometimes did have wombs in their skulls, instead of brains. Thank God for transwomen to redress the balance. Just get over it!

Virginia turned over and tried to doze off again. Phoebe came to join her, and she stroked her long nose and kissed it gently. But once one’s mind had got hold of an interesting topic it seemed necessary to keep pondering.

Certain varieties of men, with certain religious beliefs were free to compel their wives to cover themselves up entirely, in black. They were free to regard them as less than equal before the law. They were free to forcibly marry them off, forcibly mutilate them in childhood, forcibly prevent them from undertaking paid work, free to beat (and even murder them, if they did it overseas.) Such special sorts of men, such others, such outsiders, could not be expected to live by the progressive rules the liberals had devised to keep the majority ethnicity conservatives decent, because that would be racist. And of course if they abused young, working class, white women and children and others, well such women had been used to it through all their existence, all the history of their class, is not their personal history, at the hands of their superiors, as maids as mill workers and housekeepers and as mad witches. It’s just culture innit! And anyway there are no such things as ordinary, biological women, if you don’t want to be abused, identify as a man, or a ‘Powerful Woman’.

A ‘Powerful Woman’ was an MP, particularly a childless one or a butch lesbian, she was a woman of colour who married a very rich man, or a Democratic President, she was a film star or celebrity who screwed her way to the best roles, a woman who had smashed through the glass ceiling after compulsory requirements had been put in place to ensure a level playing field and equal opportunities, but who liked to pretend she hadn’t got where she was today by anything other than her own merit. ‘Powerful Women’ had never given a flying fuck about ordinary women, the wife of the Poet had not cared for the threat of hanging that had hung over the women in valley, after the Poet made his accusations, as the freezing fog had used to hang in winter, for weeks on end. There had not been a real sisterhood in the days of the weird sisters, any more than there was one now, between Amal Clooney, Mrs May and the thousands of girls who’d been raped in Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, Manchester, Sheffield, Oxford, Hull, Derby and so on.

All the lefty liberal crap was argued for with reason and philosophy of a sort. The extreme conclusions which the liberal, progressive left drew were conclusions they reached after lengthy debate.

As Burke’s ideas about prejudice had to be brushed aside, because Burke‘s ideas became conservative ideas over time, then prejudice had to be regarded as absolutely abhorrent. No matter that it was natural for certain prejudices to exist, the prejudice of a mother in favour of her own baby and vice versa, for example, prejudice was wrong in itself, so it must be stamped out.

The Soviets had tried this stamping out of basic prejudice on mothers and babies, getting women into the workplace, field or factory while the babies were left in nurseries to be looked after by other women. The non-Communist west had taken up this idea, too. Because prejudice bad. Why should society be organised in favour of literally ‘know nothing’ babies? And economic growth good. Everyone must be a worker.

So men and women were no different, except women couldn’t be bin men or work in road gangs, tarmacking the motorways and flinging bollards onto lorries in the face of oncoming traffic travelling at speeds of fifty miles an hour. Because such things were beneath a woman’s dignity.

But if women and men were literally the same then why keep up the pretence that they were different? A woman who thought she was a man and a man who thought he was a woman, on the one hand was expressing a truth because men and women were no different according to the central tenet of feminist, liberal philosophy. On the other hand they were contradicting the truth of no difference by declaring the difference to be so profound that the physical reality of being a man, that is having a thick waist, facial hair narrow hips, a deep voice, no breasts must be brought about, through hormones and surgery (apparently a passable prick could be crafted from a bit of bicep and bingo wing.) And the physical realities of being female in males, could be brought about similarly.

Virginia paused in her philosophical rant to compare the desire to construct a prosthetic penis, with the desire to construct a prosthetic eyeball, in the mind of the creator. A prosthetic private part was the opposite to a prosthetic window to the soul, however much it might be said a man thought with his prick, and that perhaps his soul resided there. Virginia could not imagine a woman suddenly thinking about sex every verse end however many hormones she swallowed, sex was not really complicated enough to take up a woman’s thoughts, unless one went in for role play and even then a woman would have to devise a very thorough character for herself, with a significant history in order for it to provide satisfactory food for sustained thought. In fact, the only time women did not think was during sexual intercourse. It was a holiday from wittering to oneself. Suddenly starting up an internal dialogue was fatal. Shut the fuck up.

A surgeon who wished to satisfy a trans man’s needs to seem like a biological man firstly had to believe that physical appearance could and should be made to match the way a person wished to be understood. Virginia did not agree with this point of view. And surely the prosthetic penis would be almost as useless as the prosthetic eye in terms of sexual function, that wasn’t quite what she meant, don’t start imagining a prosthetic eyeball put to any other use, it would be unhygienic. Virginia wasn’t sure about the prosthetic penis on the urinary tract front, presumably the real thing was made to connect to some central, artificial tube that was lined with some impermeable membrane so urine could not infect the real flesh of the prosthesis. She would have to read it up. Only reading up about such things seemed voyeuristic. It was a pity that in adulthood there was no equivalent of the Jane type girl, who would take one look at you and divine that there were still certain matters to do with other people’s sex lives you didn’t quite get. Of course, there was the internet, but that involved making permanent keystrokes, which could be used in evidence against you, if you didn’t know what you were about. And trying to find out what a prosthetic willy was for was terribly childish and would be like looking for rude passages in novels and when you found them still not really understanding them. That was one of the great mysteries of the world: understanding things in words was not understanding them yet putting things into words was the only way we had of explaining them. Virginia would never understand the need for a biological female to have a prosthetic penis, however much she read up on the subject. Was the prosthetic penis provided so a trans man looked like a cis man in his pants or at the urinal, or was it to be used like the real thing? Dildos had existed since the upper Palaeolithic period, apparently, which seemed appropriate, called ‘bâton de commandment’. If Virginia ever decided to become a trans man, that is what she would call her prosthesis. The first dildos were made of stone, tar, wood, bone, ivory, limestone and teeth. Perhaps the maker of the 17th century bone eyeball had also crafted dildos. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a penis, as they say in the prosthetics trade. Anyway, both the modern plastic surgeon and the 17th century eyeball maker were interested in what it was to seem perfectly human to other humans, in the physical sense, and seeming was of course part of being perfectly human, even if not a major part.

All the while it must also be argued that a person who considered themselves to be a woman or a man, without any desire to take on the physical characteristics of a man or a woman, must be allowed, not only to declare themselves to be whatever it was they had decided upon, but that everyone else must go along with that decision and address them and respond to them accordingly and with a straight face, because this decision was not a symptom of mental illness and one must be good mannered in one’s personal interactions. This was reasonable, because the idea of how we wish to be regarded must belong to us and not to the rest of society and not the state. It was the opposite of the new position with regard to verbal communication, which no longer belonged to the communicator, but to the receiver of the communication to interpret as they chose, however wildly. The receiver of visual information communicated by the physical attributes of another’s body must not be so impertinent as to draw any conclusions from that physical, biological information, they must wait for the person to inform them of how they wished to be understood, how they wished to seem even if they did not seem as they wished to the person required to do the seeming.

So how were the progressives going to square these various circles? And how would the arguments shake down between Conservatives and the left? Conservatives were no longer conservatives. Small c conservatives would simply keep their thoughts to themselves and muddle along as well as they could, trying to abide by the hundreds of new rules the progressive children dreamed up every day (all the while pretending there were no rules and rules were all essentially bad.). It seemed that Conservatives were in favour of biological and physical representations of the human form. The Government thought it was a marvellous idea for anyone who wished, even very small children, to start taking steps towards altering their physical appearance in order to make it resemble the physical appearance of the sex they wished to be. In other words, wishing to seem to be the opposite sex was not going to be enough in the eyes of the Tories, you had to go at least part of the hog. So now, in order to achieve the great goal of ever increasing economic growth a woman could give birth, put her baby into a nursery, go back to full time work and when that anxious, institutionalised baby got to four or five it could decide it wanted to be a member of the opposite sex. When it got to about ten years old it could take hormones to prevent its balls dropping, its voice breaking or its periods starting. And a little while later it could then start the surgical journey that would lead to its physical appearance matching more closely, though never entirely, the way it wished to seem. Everyone would be happy; everyone could tell at a glance which pronoun to use. A whole new market would be opened up for plastic surgery and hormones and the previously small market aimed at transvestites which produced and sold dresses for women of six foot and over and size thirteen stilettos, or suits for men of five foot with thirty six inch hips would increase exponentially.

The progressives however thought this was a cop out. Of-course anyone who wanted the surgery should be allowed it, free on the NHS, no questions asked, as much or as little as they liked. But they had also decided that those who wished to seem to be members of the opposite sex without making any attempt at appearances must be allowed to declare themselves to be that thing they wished to seem.

On the whole Virginia preferred this argument, theoretically. It was more rational within the limitations of reason itself and within the boundaries of its own context. If men and women were the same, except with regards to dustbins and tarmac, then it made sense to say a man who was pretending to be a woman or vice versa must be regarded as whatever they declared since it was to all intents and purposes, according to the new logic of sameness and equality, an immaterial declaration, yet one which, for some crazy reason, was important to the person themselves. Since Virginia was a conservative she did not think the state had the right to require anyone to jump through a surgical hoop in order to prove a philosophical preference, especially when the state itself had pronounced that preference or difference to be non-existent, in order to pursue goals of economic growth, unheard of in the days when women were mothers who stayed at home for the purposes of child rearing.

Also if people could just pretend to be what they liked then there would be no reason for children who might have grown out of their ‘gender dysphoria’ to undergo irreversible treatment.

The argument against this ‘self-identification’ was made in terms of the need for female only spaces. These arguments were true: rapists, misogynists and paedophiles could, under the new rules, enter women’s changing rooms at the baths, or in clothes stores. They could enter women’s shelters or hostels or hospital wards, they could demand smear tests and to be imprisoned in women’s prisons. This was not acceptable to conservative thinkers. So, a Great British compromise must be reached. A person must be allowed to identify as whatever they wished, as long as that identification did not have any negative or harmful effect on any other person. That was the basis of Liberty itself, the kind of Liberty that became conservatism over time, not the new, progressive, dictatorial sort.

So men who were pretending to be women, or self-declaring, as that pretence must henceforth be known (so as to avoid hurt feelings) could not be imprisoned in women’s prisons, could not enter women’s changing facilities or other ‘women only’ facilities or demand smear tests and so on. The reason for enforcing these rules would not be old fashioned, conservative nonsense about protecting women. It would not be because there was any difference between men and women - it would be because some women were convinced that there was a difference between them and men. And if the people who wished to seem to be members of the opposite sex must be acknowledged to be members of that sex, then it must, by dint of the same logic, be acknowledged that that sex existed at least in some people’s minds and that those who wished to appear members of it, because they were ‘born into it’, must be allowed to pretend they did not wish to be harmed as a result of the inferior physical strength with which that imagined characteristic somehow truly endowed them.

By means of this complex philosophy, one could also provide the age old excuse for allowing misogyny to continue within Islam. All one needed to do was to insert a couple of extra steps in the justification chain. Certain protected religions/cultures did not believe that there was such a thing as the secular state. In fact Christianity was the only religion which encompassed the idea of the Seculum, Christianity had invented it, in fact. In England, Henry the eighth at the insistence or on the advice of Cromwell had taken this idea one logical step further. (Even back in those days progressive men, who wished to sweep the old order away, justified the longings of their dicks with philosophical and theological discussions.) In order to establish the Church of England, so that Henry could ignore the Pope and marry Anne Boleyn, he had pointed out that Christ had come as subject. The state could do what it liked and in Henry’s day the Monarch was the state, to a large extent. Anyway, the result was that although the Church of England was the established church it was not the state exactly, even though the Queen was its head. There were things which were secular which the state might involve itself with and things which belonged to other, non-established religions, which the state might choose to keep its nose out of, since freedom of religious thought of subjects was also a long established principle within the nation state.

But as Christianity was the only religion that acknowledged a separation between the secular and the religious life, then it was not possible, while acknowledging the religious freedom of non-Christian subjects, to impose ideas the state had about how people should go on, if such ideas were in direct contradiction of a religious law. ( At least where airy fairy things like gender identity might be concerned, they could interfere in order to inculcate correct thinking on such things as the joys of sodomy, because telling small children about the joys of sodomy was one of the founding principles of progressivism and was the highest ranking of all the top trumps.) So the excuse could be made that if it was against Islamic law to pretend to be a person of the opposite sex, because that would give women an excuse to let their hair loose, show their faces or legs, undertake paid work, marry whomsoever they pleased and so on, then Muslims must be free to prevent their own kind from identifying as members of the opposite sex. Since it was part of their religion to believe that women were inferior, they must be allowed to carry on in that belief and treat their women accordingly. Similarly, any transgender Muslim man must be ostracised or worse, for wishing to pretend to be a member of the inferior sex and thereby degrading himself and his family. Though not amongst the wider, secular or Christian population.

So to recap: a man could identify as a woman or vice versa, there were no such things as men or ordinary biological women. Because some men might only be claiming to be women so that they could do women harm, even though there were no such things as ordinary biological women, these men who said they were ordinary women (thereby acknowledging that women existed, at least as states of mind) should be prevented by law from entering ordinary women’s safe spaces, because although being female was only a state of mind, it was a state of mind which came with a whole load of physically inferior characteristics. People who thought of themselves as ordinary women being generally smaller and weaker than people who considered themselves to be men, which made them vulnerable. The state had a duty to protect the vulnerable. The state however, could not protect the vulnerable who were governed by a set of religious laws which took precedent in their lives over secular ones, because religion trumped the state, where that religion was not Christianity, firstly by not acknowledging the concept of the secular at all and secondly by being the religion of a minority which itself required it to have special status and protection, since minorities were vulnerable. Therefore Muslims could go on regarding women as inferior before the law and acting according to ancient misogynistic principles, if they damn well liked, and this dispensation applied not only to the way they treated the ‘so called women’ who followed Sharia law, but to the way it treated non-Muslim ‘so called women’ whom they wished to use as whores, because if these women chose to believe there was such a thing as woman, well they had better understand all the territory and baggage that went with that, including misogyny, violence, and being treated as a whore.

What, Virginia? Did I hear you suggest Christ’s second great commandment, to love our neighbours as ourselves, was a simpler approach? How dare you, you ignorant Christian bigot! Did the enlightenment pass you by? We come to our conclusions and design our laws based on reason. There is no other God and his spirit is rationality, his son is The Logical Conclusion and he commands not that we love our neighbours as ourselves, but that we merely tolerate them as an intellectual exercise.

Nobody said modern life had to be straightforward. One has to have the most amazingly complex intellect to be a left wing progressive.

Virginia’s mother and Pat had been totally telepathic. It was odd that Virginia’s mother had absolutely no control over Pat She knew when she would ring up, even in the middle of the night and she knew when she was about to turn up out of the blue in a manic state. It was as if Pat were a migraine, Virginia thought. One simply knew when she was ‘developing’ and by the time one knew it, there was nothing to be done to stop it.

Other episodes of Pat’s madness which Virginia knew about could still make Virginia laugh out loud and were merely normal human fantasies carried to extremes. Virginia’s favourite was the time Pat, so sick of turning up at the photo processing shop and finding her snaps were not ready, despite having paid extra for the ‘Next Day’ service, went back with an air pistol and threatened to shoot the staff, if they didn’t hand the photos over. Another time she had become so sick of her prissy, Yuppie neighbours who lived in the other half of her old house, that one morning in mid-summer she had risen early, put up three trestle tables outside their part of the property and piled them high with all the nasty old, plastic tat she had hoarded over the last thirty years or so and erected a large sign that she had painted: Car Boot Sale.

Virginia knew she was not in Pat’s league. She also knew her political instincts were usually quite good. She knew when her political thinking was in line with other people’s, however different the rest of her thinking was, particularly with regard to kangaroos. And knowing she was mad helped her not to be quite as mad as she could be. But she could not desist from reading the news all day, every day. She no longer bothered with Radio 4 and she didn’t miss it. She just flipped between different online editions of the conservative press and started to feel irritable when there was no new news. Or when the new news was tame. The desire for extreme events as justification for drawing extreme conclusions bubbled under the surface. It was only because Virginia knew the state was always expecting people like Virginia to take to the streets with their pitchforks that she managed to temper the comments she made. She had a horror of satisfying anyone else’s stereotype, though she knew that she did. She read the comment pieces in the Telegraph and devoured every article in the Spectator. She began watching political videos on YouTube, where previously she had only sought out music. All day she bickered and got cross. She lived for up-votes on her comments and felt despair when none were forthcoming. It was getting almost as bad as the Facebook days.

Virginia had always been peculiar. She knew she was different when she was a child and the dreams had started when she’d got dust and sawdust and bits of wood on her clothes from playing in her brother’s workshop and had begun to experience these episodes which were extracts from the long gone lives of others. The other children at school knew she was a witch, of course. It never occurred to them to pretend otherwise. Treating Virginia as something other than a witch would have been, to her straightforward, honest, broad Yorkshire classmates, like pretending a dog was a chicken, it simply couldn’t be done. They didn’t bully her over it, they suspected she had ways of getting back at them that they might find unpleasant. They just accepted it and kept her at a safe distance.

Virginia had had one friend at school, one with whom she was still in touch. She had been one of several daughters of a tenant farmer who worked a terribly desolate, bleak and windswept bit of moor, a mile or two above Kineburn. This girl had explained the facts of life to Virginia, in clear terms and also provided her with a basic vocabulary of swear words and slang words pertaining to the sexual act, for which Virginia had been grateful. She had also, on one bitterly cold, raw afternoon in early March, shown Virginia the container from the Elsan lavatory, which was waiting to be emptied. Virginia was not quite sure, with hindsight why this event had been so momentous, but it had been. Somehow acquainting yourself with the vast size of the stool of a human adult was like acquainting yourself with the infinity of the universe. It was much more profound than discovering the facts of life.

Virginia had also always been obsessive, too. There was the naming of things that started when she was six or seven. Not just the knots in the floorboards, but the knots in the ceiling, which were the undersides of the floorboards of the room above. Virginia and her sisters shared a large jar of marbles and these were all given girls’ names and Virginia had to remember these correctly. Her teenage obsessions were more predictable, mostly being concerned with clothes, collecting vintage items in vast quantities. She had known that vintage fabric contained the same particles of souls and extracts of past lives that antique furniture did, for at least as long. She and her sisters each had a rag rug beside their beds to keep the chill from their feet when they got up and dressed after their morning tea. They had a habit of ‘looking for sparkly bits’, which involved pulling out the lurex, Crimplene, rectangular scraps hidden among the more mundane pieces which made up the overall pattern of the rug. The rugs were woven by Mrs Carter who lived down the valley, so of course Virginia had not been sure, at first, whether their particular properties were connected to the family skill, or whether all scraps of fabric could transport one in the same way, if one had the particular skill oneself. The scraps in Mrs Carter’s rag rugs mostly just took one back to boring days of thirty years ago, at the Cattle Auction in the nearby market town, and tea and toasted teacakes in the cafe by the side of the river, after the auction had ended. Once one of the sparkly bits had taken Virginia to a dance in town, where the young, but unmistakable Jimmy Saville was canoodling with a girl barely out of puberty. Another time when Virginia was much too young to know what it was she looked upon, she had found a couple having it off in the sheep pens, at the cattle mart, and woken up as she instinctively fled the scene.

The only really dreadful thing that Virginia had experienced as a result of her collecting vintage clothes was related to a pair of 1950s evening gloves. She had acquired these at the ‘Save The Children’ charity shop in another, more up market town. This shop had a lot of little drawers at the back, and with permission from one of the fierce old women who were the guardians of all the town’s charity shops, one was allowed to rummage through them, they were full of gloves and lace hankies and buttons. Virginia had been pretending she was a Goth when she bought the gloves. They were very long, black satin, coming well over the elbows and would, she had thought at the time, be cool to wear at ‘Libra’s, the sleazy, mouldy, punky nightclub next to the theatre, which Virginia was in the habit of frequenting at that time. In the evening she had put the gloves away on one of the shelves of her wardrobe. That night she was more frightened by what she witnessed in her transportation into the past, than she had been on any other occasion. The gloves had belonged to a woman with postnatal psychopathy who had murdered her baby. Virginia stood, with Freddy at her side, his hackles raised, watching as the mad bitch performed the hideous act, powerless to intervene. When the child, it must have been about 6 weeks old, was dead and limp in its mother’s arms Virginia saw the woman lift aside a piece of the skirting board and push the tiny corpse into the space between where two struts came down to the floorboards and below where the laths for the plaster began. On coming round from that episode, Virginia found she had soiled herself, so scared had she been. After a 3 am bath she burnt the gloves in the Rayburn, which still had a few embers in from the night before, though her mother was in the habit of lighting it afresh each day.

Later on it was Art Deco pottery, which became Virginia’s obsession. It was fashionable, more generally at the time and so sought after and expensive. Virginia could not afford to break it as an experiment, to see where it took her soul at night. Whole, it certainly did not seem to give up any of its secrets. She suspected that, as even the costliest pieces of Bizarre Ware had once been available at Woolworths, they would mostly lead to dull snapshots of dull suburbia.

Then there’d been collecting LPs and listening to music. She almost wore her records of David Oistrakh and Jascha Heifetz out. Plants had taken over once she had a garden of her own. Every day was spent pouring over the fat, yellow ‘Plant Finder’ in search of the rare and unusual. Nick, who was working all the hours God sent during the week, was dispatched on long journeys to the other end of the country at the weekends, in order to collect things Virginia had ordered, since they could not be got more locally. When the children were old enough Virginia’s obsession became teaching the children at home and she found she wanted to know all the thinking on education, the libertarian approach versus the formal, and her children became her guinea pigs. Then there was all the local history and the history of her own house into which to delve. There was a painting phase, when Virginia took up portraiture, believing she must have inherited something from her father, not just her mother’s strangeness. She took up writing poetry too, almost always in form. Then there was the constant searching for interesting historic property, Virginia spent hours indulging this hobby, scrolling and clicking, sometimes viewing in the real world. Virginia had even had a longstanding obsession with neuroscience, reading all the popular works on the subject she could get her hands on, in the hope it would give her some insight into her inherited oddness. The antique collecting had been a constant throughout her adult life, but as antiques became cheaper the compulsion to buy became more desperate and the house more and more cluttered. And politics too kept her shouting at Radio 4, until she took up Facebook.

Quite early on Virginia had realised that the obsessions kept the other oddness at bay. She could avoid entering the lives of other people at night, in childhood, if she had tired her mind out naming all the hundreds of marbles in the girls’ school correctly, or if she’d walked around the house accurately identifying the knots by their names. Virginia had sometimes wondered if she were on the autistic spectrum, she didn’t wish to consult anyone about it, but she thought on the whole that her need to pretend almost all inanimate things were people with specific characteristics, suggested she was rather on the opposite, extreme female end of things. Marbles would have bored her to death, had they not been bitchy schoolgirls in particular colours of clothes. Yet still, the naming of them was ritualistic, warding off the dangers that sometimes lurked in sleep.

The interest in politics was not of this mind-numbing kind though, and did not have the same effect. Rather the opposite.