Diary

"Are you ready for the snow?" Facebook started asking me. Not very helpfully, I thought, given that I was going to an outdoor rehearsal of tomorrow's passion play.

I mean, I did what I could: I was wearing two layers of thermal underwear and a couple of shawls that went with my costume. Which in the end I didn't wear, because the director, being at heart a kindly soul, didn't insist we wear costume. Even though it was supposed to be a dress rehearsal.

So, wearing a slightly eccentric selection of outdoor garments,  we all set off into the great outdoors.

The play follows a well worn route round the grounds of the kirk and the manse and then round the village, with a wonderful tea break half way round. And I drank some utterly gorgeous tea, ate some jammie dodger biscuits, recommended a book called "The Master and Marguerita" to Pontius Pilate (knowing he'd enjoy it) before admiring Jesus who was looking especially fetching in his crown of thorns. As he ate a bag of crisps.

And Jesus carried his cross round Duddingston village.

There is something about being involved in the re-enactment of Christ's sufferings in the middle of people's streets and houses that makes it unbearably poignant, somehow.

And I guess it was only appropriate that it was during the crucifixion scene that it actually did start snowing.

And then I did my scene and led the way back, limping somewhat on my swollen ankles, all the way to the church hall where we all began.

The hall was beautifully heated and felt like heaven.

And the forecast is for sunshine tomorrow.

A load of packages arrived today. And with the packages, a massive amount of unnecessary packaging.

So I got it ready for recycling, and took it out to the bins, and recycling was overflowing. The bins were overflowing.

And suddenly I felt unspeakably weary. I found myself thinking of all the ways we humans are being uncontrollably self destructive.

I won't weary you with the list. Especially on my mind, I guess, were all the plastics that are poisoning our oceans, and poisoning our water supply, and so poisoning us.

I could see us so clearly being smothered by all the garbage we are producing. Not just of the physical kind, but the moral and the emotional and the intellectual and the pseudo-spiritual spewing out of our mouths and our keyboards and our screens.

And for a while I could do nothing at all.

I began to get hassled by the thought of all the things I need to be doing. The lines I need to be writing, and the lines I need to be learning.

The lines I will speak this Sunday as the Angel comforting the women at Jesus' tomb with the news of the triumph of life over death.

Of the lines I will speak the following Sunday as Queen Jesus:

"For we all have a light. Deep deep inside us. No matter how much darkness there is in the world around us, no matter how much darkness there is in our lives: the light is still there, deep deep in the heart of us.

And our job is to bring it out and let it shine".

And before I knew it I was writing again.

And my weariness had gone.

To Dundee today to visit Dundee Rep.

I love this theatre. I've seen two of my plays beautifully produced here: ANNA KARENINA and GREAT EXPECTATIONS.

Me and Susan Worsfold wanted to visit it to get the measure of the space for EVE, which I'll be performing there in May.

After Traverse 2, and then the Glasgow Citizens, it'll be the third different really space we've brought the show too.

The third I hope of many more.

I began the custom of standing on the theatre stages of the venues I was going to write for very early on -in the old Traverse, in 1985 - and it's one that means a lot to me.

It's so important to have the plan of the theatre in my imagination so that the characters live there as they come to life.

On the train up and on the train back there was everyone in my queer adaptation of TAMING OF THE SHREW that I've begun writing for the Sherman in Cardiff.

I loved having them there. Just as I love, now, sitting at my desk with Dundee Rep in my imagination.

One of the nicest things to me about performing in the Citz was when someone said to me they had the sense that i was addressing so much to them, and to them alone.

I hope I can do the same in Dundee. And I know, already, that I feel at home.

http://www.dundeerep.co.uk/event/eve-adam-double-bill-spring-18

I was introducing our film, "These Are My Hands" at the LGBT Flare ilm Festival at the BFI the other night.

I said, or I meant to say, that I originally wrote the poem to perform at a cabaret.The cabaret's theme was ageing, and I wanted to look at my body, and all the memories it contains.

For many years I hated my body because it did not correspond to a profound powerful sense I had of who I was.

And then when I began to live as a woman I started to feel comfortable in my skin for the very first time.

But lately, as I have become to age, I have found myself a little bit at a distance from it again because it causes me such physical pain.

But when I wrote my poem I wanted to look at it with compassion. And that's where the poem came from.

A friend who is a film-maker, Evi Tsilagaridou, happened to watch the performance, and she decided it would make a short film.

So we began by recording the soundtrack, and that was the basis of the film.

She wanted to film me naked and I agreed because it fitted the subject matter of the poem. But also because it seems to me important that non-standard bodies get to be celebrated and to be seen.

Queer bodies, especially. My body is part male and part female; my body is ageing, overweight, and covered in scars.

In the poem i say these are like scars from the wounds I have suffered in life's battle. Which means they should be celebrated.

And although bodies like mine are often hidden away because they are thought to be shameful, and I, for sure, have suffered profoundly from bodily shame, it seems to me that a non-standard body like mine is a source of pride.

And it is an act of defiance to show it to an oppressive world.

And so I dedicate it to every one who has a non-standard body in the hope that it will help all of us recover from our shame.

And that means I dedicate it to all of us....

All I have to report today is happiness.

And I was just about not to do it, because I feel very tired and a bit pissed and I had this feeling it doesn't matter.

But it absolutely does.

I woke up with the feeling it was going to be like my birthday all over again, and it was.

I've loved:

Being with my daughters. Being with my son-in-laws. Being with my grandson. Being with my granddaughter. And laughing a lot.

It's true my grand daughter didn't laugh much. Or rather not at all. But she is only three weeks old and she does do the most heart-stoppingly beautiful smile.

And then there was work. I gave my daughters my new radio plays to read, and the younger has given them the thumbs up.

And Jesus Queen of Heaven was a big success last night and is sold out again tonight.

And "These Are My Hands" the short film I wrote and perform in, had its premiere in the British Film Institute on London's South Bank in its Flare LGBTI film festival.

And I don't know how it went. But I'm proud of it anyway, and I'll see it tomorrow.

And thank you, universe. Thank you again and again....

It's such a funny feeling being up here in the Black Isle knowing that at 1230 am our time she'll be taking the stage of the Teatro Solis with my "Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven".

I wish I could see her to see how her performance has moved on since I last saw her in October.

She was marvellous then, and I know she's been working on it most days ever since.

Thinking of her, I so want to be there. And then I also want to be in Curitiba in Brazil on Easter Sunday to see Renata Carvalho perform in the Anglican Cathedral there.

And that makes me feel a bit guilty because I know I should also start getting ready to relearn my words to perform her in Dumfries the week after.

One reason I wanted to keep control of this show and keep it alive was because I knew people would keep wanting to see it. And I simply can't bear the way Scottish Theatre commissions and stages work and then mostly just chucks it away straight afterwards.

It's such a waste.

But I really never thought this would happen.

I mean look at her. That Queen Jesus. She's a busy multilingual lady....

68 is not supposed to be a big birthday. But somehow it feels like one.

I tell myself "I'm 68" and it feels old in a way 67 never did.

Not in a bad way, necessarily. I don't like not being able to walk any distance or finding myself feeling unable to get out of chairs sometimes. But the rest of it I enjoy.

I love having grandchildren. There used to be such a compulsion in my life. A compulsion to get on, to succeed that's somehow gone.

One of the compulsions I'm in the process of losing is the need to explain or justify myself.

So in a minute I'll stop.

But I do want to say thank you for all the lovely messages and birthday wishes.

And say how much I'm looking forward to the year that is to come...

"That's a smoker's cough you got" the man said to me. I was sitting on a bench outside the waiting room of Inverness Bus Station, and he was squatting quite close to me smoking a cigarrette.

And I said, "Why should I have a smoker's cough when I don't smoke?" and he said "You just do".

And I might have added "Maybe it's because you're sitting so close to me smoking" but he said it for me: "Probably because I'm sitting smoking so close to you".

Then he said "Transgender?" which was a kind of impertinent question but I'm never going to deny it. And soon after it was "Have you had the operation?" which was even worse and I told him in a friendly kind of way it was none of his business and he said he understood and then we exchanged names.

I told him my name was Jo and he told me his name was Tiny wand it wasn't a joke. And he showed me an official letter to Mr Tiny So and So and he stood up to show me how tall he was.

"Six foot seven" he said "And it's no joke".

And he said he was going to London and he knew a transwoman and she was a good person.

His wife had met her off the internet and had gone off with her. "Twenty five years of marriage gone", he said, "But I don't mind".

And now he was going down to London to work as a scaffolder. He'd got his certificates and everything. But he'd no work lined up and nowhere to stay either.

He was going down on the overnight bus. He'd got a good sleeping bag and he'd got fifteen quid and it was going to be allright. He wasn't worried.

And I thought of the money hanging round my neck and the loving family I was going to see.

And then I saw my bus appear on its stand and I said I know he hadn't asked me but here was twenty quid and good luck.

And he looked so bleak as I waved to him as the bus drew away.

And I think of him tonight, on the overnight bus down in England somewhere and all that awaits him when he gets off at six tomorrow morning.

Bless you, Tiny. I hope it works out....

The song I'm learning, "I wonder (Departure)" is about a young woman from a small conventional town who has the chance the chance to leave the safety of her upbringing and its predictable expectations, and go and take the opportunity to live her dream.

She's afraid. She doesn't know what to do.

But by the end of the song she has found her courage and goes to pursue her dream.

One of the things I love about the song is that it's apparently very simple but describes a very complicated moment. And it's very specific, but at the same time allows the listener or singer to apply the story to herself.

So I could take it, for instance, to be about the moment when I could finally live as a woman but hesitated, frightened, tempted back to my old much safer life as a man.

The woman of the song finds herself drawn back to the idea of getting married, settling down and having children... and singing it reminds me of the time when I was young and such a conventional life actually seemed impossible t me.

And yet how I could have gone into academia, for instance, and yet destroyed the possibility by walking away from my PhD for seven years. Feeling that the conventional path was abosolutely not for me.

It was something to do with wanting to live as a woman, and the feeling I had that that was something sick and horrible; and the feeling I had that I was a writer and that that had to take priority.

And yet somehow it's all been given back to me. I did get married, I did have children, and my family are such a source of joy. And I did become a university professor. And I did become a writer.

And now I live as a woman...

And I'm not at all sure I'd have become aware of that in as clear a way without the experience of trying the sing the song.

Life is miraculous. And so is music...

I'm learning to sing an ABBA song. I know this isn't much in the grand scheme of things, but it means a lot to me.

Partly because my singing voice was silenced for so many years. I was firmly told I couldn't sing and my shame and shyness seemed to confirm this.

And so every time I sing it feels wonderful to know that isn't true.

The song is called "I wonder (Departure) and it was released in 1977. At that time I desperately wanted to be those young women. The fact I couldn't be them hurt me so profoundly.

The fact I wanted to be them anyway left me feeling humiliated and ashamed. I could tell no-one.

I was raining to be a nurse in those days and deeply unhappy. Soon afterwards, I left my nurse training.

In that time of my lifeI had failed to finish my PhD, failed to train to be a nurse, and failed to become a writer.

I was 27 years old. I had no idea what would become of me. All I had was the strong sense that somehow if I finished my thesis it would help me become a writer.

That was all I could do, and and so I did it, though it didn't make any sense to me.

Of course in those days I had no sense I would ever actually sing any of their songs.

And so to come to their music and sing it feels so unbelievably miraculous. Especially after everything I have achieved, as a man and as a woman. As a grandfather and a grandmother....

I feel the deepest, profoundest sense of gratitude.

This comes from a play I wrote in 1994. One called "Dreaming".

I wrote it for the Edinburgh Puppet Workshop, who are now called "Vision Mechanics"

They were lovely to work for, and I was so proud of the play. But this was before anyone had really considered writing ofr young people as a serious thing to do. We were way ahead of our time, did terrible business, and I almost bankrupted the company.

I am so glad I didn't. They are still producing beautiful work. You can find out about it here
http://visionmechanics.org/

The phrase "Remember kindness" came into my head yesterday in this blog, and I'm I've looked up its source.

I was writing in an oddly prophetic way about a process that we are now living through.

And must unite to resist....

I'm thinking about the 312 Conservative MPs who voted to take free school meals from one million poor school children.

And did so knowing that malnutrition among school children is a growing and intolerable problem.

We know this used to be a terrible scourge in Britain. Hungry malnourished children. Presenting with rickets and other utterly preventable diseases.

We live in one of the wealthiest societies in the world and I thought such things were gone for ever.

I'm thinking of the prison warders in a California jail who strapped a man to a chair for 46 hours. Every so often they came in to move his arms and legs, as regulations demanded. He was not allowed to go to the toilet and so peed and shat himself in the chair. When the smell became unbearable they moved him to another cell.. They left him on the bare floor with only a blanket. He covers himself with a blanket. He appears to suffer from tremors. He stands up briefly, then collapses. He stops breathing.

Paramedics enter to try to revive him, while a couple of sheriff's deputies idly watch. Laughing and chatting.

His name was Andrew Holland. He had been in jail since 2015. He was known to suffer from schizophrenia.

We know that in the 18th century mentally ill people were neglected and tortured and that their sufferings were thought of as entertainment. I thought such mistreatment had gone for ever.

Forgive me for distressing you if you have read this far.

It seems to me sometimes that our societies are in a state of regression. That we are returning to the brutalities of an earlier age.

We need to know this. We need to be aware. We need to resist.

I am not condemning the perpetrators of these crimes. What these events have in common is a lack of empathy. These criminals have no empathy for others and in the end they have no empathy for themselves. So it is no use condemning them because they already condemn themselves.

And, a little to my surprise, their actions do not leave me feeling angry and helpless. Life is too short for me to spend overmuch time on that. I have to focus on what I can do. However small it seems.

"Remember kindness" I wrote in a play once. I forget which one. I know that everything in the world connects. I know that our actions have consequences that we cannot know.

So I will try to show empathy and compassion in my work and in my living. I will fail. I will try to forgive myself and then I will go back to trying.

And perhaps something will come of this. I don't know. I cannot make any claims. But I think it will lead to something. Whether it does or not, there is really nothing else to do.

I feel bleary eyed tonight.

I've just finished printing out these five short plays. I finished the last of them this evening, just five minutes before a dear friend came to tea.

And next week I will hand them in.

I'm not quite ready to celebrate: I haven't read them yet.

They're a serial, each of them 15 minutes long. I'm proud because I've written in that form before.

Proud because they're the first new plays I've written for a while; and by the end of last year I was too ill to write anything.

I wrote three of them this week. Parts three and four I'd finished by Wednesday. Part five I got stuck on.

I was so distressed by events in the world yesterday that I found it so hard to focus on anything. And I'd made a mistake somewhere.

It's a brutal process, this: make a mistake, take a wrong turning, the words won't come and you're liable to feel stuck forever.

I had a singing lesson yesterday at 4.30 and suddenly half way through a song I understood where I'd go wrong.

And by the time I'd arrived at the Filmhouse to see "A Fantastic Woman" I knew exactly what I had to do. I had to print everything out, go back to the very beginning, and rewrite everything. That way I'd know what had to be in Part Five.

So I turned on the computer this morning before I'd even had my cup of tea to get the printing started.

Part Five was still open. And the minute I saw the first speech I knew it had to go. And that somehow freed everything else and I started writing and never got out of my pyjamas till after two.

And there was just one long speech to do. And I did it late in the afternoon.

In the middle of it all there's been one of those Facebook debates going on, inspired by my blog post of I don't know what day any more about whether the Russians did or did not try to kill those two individuals in Salisbury and what it all means...

And this all frightens me. And yet I kept writing. I cooked a lovely meal for my friend. And I feel that's important somehow. That even in perhaps the smallest of ways it's an act of resistance that matters: not to be carried away by fear or by rage but to do what we can to be creative and hospitable and kind.

Yesterday I posted that I needed to take a break from writing this daily blog.

It's not been much of a break. But it's taught me something.

It's simply that today I feel I must write this. I don't know if it does any good. I have to write it anyway.

I knew this the minute I heard on this morning's news that the government are using the attempted murder of Sergei and Julia Skripal as a pretext to expand the chemical warfare facility on Porton Down.

A new "chemical weapons defence centre". God knows what evil is concealed by that euphemism.

I know perfectly well that Putin and his government are perfectly capable of mounting a chemical attack on these two individuals. But I know, too, that we also live under an evil regime.

There is something profoundly suspicious about the official narrative that is being told us.

It saddens me to see the SNP being so eager to side with Trump and the Conservatives in supporting it.

I think of the words of my INES DE CASTRO:

"They'll lie to you.
They'll tell you that they have to kill.
That they cannot avoid committing crimes.
Don't believe them. Don't believe them for a moment.
Remember there's another way..."

Today is the 73rd day of the year.

Or so my diary tells me. On Jan 1st I made a resolution to write a daily blog to try to strengthen my writing muscles; and as far as I recall, I have kept it.

Which means this is my 73rd blog entry this year. I have also written four short radio plays and will hopefully finish the fifth very soon. Which means I have succeeded, I think, in my objective.

And i have re-discovered the joy of writing. Which is wonderful.

The rules I made myself were never to take more than twenty minutes, never to write more than one draft, never to bother how many people read this or don't, and always take pleasure in its writing.

Today I had to take time off working on my current play to write this; and I realise it has begun to feel like a chore.

Time to stop, I think. At least for a day or so. I hope this exercise has given you who read it pleasure; as it has given pleasure to me.

The last film I chose for the Filmhouse 'House Guests' programme was Bergman's PERSONA which I first saw in 1971 and which has fascinated me ever since.

I wanted to find out more to understand it better, and so bought the script.

This isn't the shooting script, but a step towards it, and it differs from the film in many important respects.

But the speech i was mainly looking for remains the more or less the same.

It's the Doctor of the psychiatric ward where Elisabet Vogler is a patient following her breakdown.

The Doctor says:

"...the abyss between what you are for others and what you are for yourself. The feeling of dizziness and the continual burning need to be unmasked. At last to be seen through, reduced, perhaps extinguished. Every tone of voice a lie, an act of treason. Every gesture false. Every smile a grimace..."

I never applied these words to myself at the time, but they absolutely rang true to the person I then was.

I knew I was not the young man I pretended to be.

I concealed the fact that I wanted to live as a woman; and I concealed the fact I wanted to live as an artist.

Both these profound and powerful desires filled me with fear and with shame.

I could not resist them; I considered myself an abject failure.

And yet both have come true. And both have saved my life.

And I suddenly find myself remembering something in the Gospels:

"The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone".

And I am amazed at the journey that has taken place in my life.

A journey which perhaps began with my passionate identification with the two women in this film...

When I got off the train from being with my grand daughter, this was waiting for mw at home.

It's not a book. It's a cake. Someone from the publisher's publicity department thought it would be a good idea to send one to all the authors whose essays are published in the anthology.

Someone's put a lot of work into it, I imagine, and i couldn't deal with it somehow.

The contrast between it and the loving messy world I had just left behind, and the contrast between it and the somewhat fraught creative messy world I now inhabit as I try to get a play finished in time for its deadline...

It's all a bit too much for me.

And I don't understand what it's for. All that time and skill and money...

I must stop worrying about it. That's obvious.

And tomorrow when a dear friend comes round, we'll just eat it.

I've been trying very hard not to be rude about Creative Scotland. Knowing that good, intelligent and caring people work for the organisation and that they have an impossible task to perform.

But the other night I heard that the Scottish Youth Theatre is closing because Creative Scotland cut their grant, and it was as if all the frustration accumulated over thirty years of working in the professional theatre, and dealing with over thirty years of Creative Scotland and Scottish Arts Council decisions, and trying to keep on creating in spite of them... as if over thirty years worth of frustration burst their banks and I found myself angrily tweeting and facebooking away with everyone else.

The worst frustrations invariably occurred when I was on the Board of companies who had to make applications for funding. We would toil and agonise over these wretched funding applications and then almost invariably not get the money, and eventually I learnt to somehow calm myself with the thought that the main purpose of the organisation was not to promote or encourage artistic production but simply to ensure its own survival.

And with that their decisions, which had previously seemed absurd, now began to make a little more sense.

But this year's decisions about theatre companies make no sense at all. They certainly didn't help themselves this week by subsequently putting out a pained statement expressing their disappointment at the (utterly predictable) decision by the Scottish Youth Theatre as if it had nothing to do with their actions.

This was so inept and so contemptible I found myself shouting at the computer screen.

Once I'd calmed down a bit, I understood that in a way I don't object to them cutting their funding to the SYT. In essence, it's their job to take these decisions difficult as they often are.

And if they'd decided the Company weren't fulfilling their remit, then they had every right to cut their funding.

What i cannot stand is their refusal to explain their decisions.

They never have and they never do.

What this decision has done is spark a debate about about how a youth theatre can best operate, and that at least has to be a good thing. Provided people listen.

But in the meantime, as for Creative Scotland, I cannot bring myself to be remotely nice about them.

I don't even want their money...

I first read The Tibetan Book of the Dead many years ago, when I was still a hippie.

The book was popular in the late sixties and early seventies because Timothy Leary edited it as a guide for people going through an LSD trip.

I think I read it in both versions, and it eventually found its way into my work in my TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.

It's designed to be read over someone who's recently died by the friends and teachers of the deceased.

The soul of the dead person is believed to be still present in the room and so able to listen and benefit from its teachings.

(And i remember me and my daughter both had the same feeling in the room with my late mother-in-law's body soon after her death)

The first part of the book is a guide to the dead person, both as they are dying and immediately after their death, a guide to help them understand what is happening to them, not be too frightened and dismayed by it, and come safely through it.

The next section is designed to help them avoid a rebirth; but if they fail this test they will be visited by compelling images of the living having intercourse.

They need to take care; not get sucked in; recognise the signs of a loving family and favourable birth, and choose it.

Looking at the happiness and contentment of my beautiful and deeply loved grand daughter this morning, it seemed very clear she had heard this advice in one of her innumerable lives and taken it to heart.

She has chosen troubled and difficult times; but she has also chosen a loving beautiful family to take care of her through them...

It’s a strange thing, naming a baby.

It’s not as if you really choose.

More as if the baby tells you.

That’s how it was with Bump. She was born a week early by C section and I had a sense it would take about a week for her name to appear.

“Evie” arrived the other day. Not Eve. Evie. And there was a name missing, somehow.

“Caitlin” appeared at three in the morning the day before yesterday. And then we all spent twenty four hours testing it out before we knew for sure this morning.

And that’s exactly who she is.

My five day old grand daughter opened her eyes today and looked at the world.

It seemed to be a place of wonder that she explored unafraid.

And on this sunny spring morning she briefly transformed my view of the world.

Until I became fixated on a nes story I read yesterday that opioid overdoses have increased by a third across all age groups and all areas of the United States. Which means that over just 14 months 30% more people found living so unbearably painful they poisoned themselves trying to dull the pain of it.

Why do we lose our blissful beginnings...

Don’t think about the news, dad, says my daughter wisely, having guessed the direction of my thinking. Not when so much beauty has come into our lives...

But what has gone wrong? And how can we put it right?

Liverpool are playing Porto in the Champions League tonight.

This is not the kind of sentence I often write.

I only know this and am watching this because my son-in-law follows Liverpool.

When I was forced to live as a boy I was also forced to play football and would spend my time on the field feeling cold and miserable and trying to keep as big a distance between me and the ball as I possibly could.

I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from this experience and tonight so far hasn’t really helped.

The players seem to be knocking the ball back and forth to each other in a remarkably nonchalant kind of way and even the half time commentators have given up trying to enthuse us.

Perhaps the second half will be better they half-heartedly say.

Well. Perhaps. But This doesn’t help me understand the hold football has on so many people’s imaginations...

I remember times when my partner was slowly dying of the brain tumour that was killing her that it seemed to me in some ways her suffering was as bad and perhaps even worse than any torture the human mind could devise.

It was a kind of crucifixion it seemed to me and that's why when I wrote my "Gospel According to Jesus Queen of Heaven" I wrote

"And we will all hang on our cross..."

Because it seemed to me that the experience of Jesus dying on the cross is maybe a metaphor for what we all must go through as we are forced to let go of our life here on earth.

Today I was lucky enough to hold my new grandchild in my arms. I found myself thanking this exquisite creature, just a few days old, for consenting to come into our lives.

And that made me understand something else in that play: that maybe the birth of Jesus really is a metaphor for the birth of all of us.

But of course we don't need any of that to celebrate and feel joy at the entrance of this beauteous being into the world...

I never really understood the Easter story. It never made sense to me that God should send his only son down to earth to be tortured to death in order to save us from our sins.

I still can't make any sense of that.

But something happened today when I was rehearsing the Passion Play. This is an outdoor event that's happening in Duddingston Village, on Edinburgh's outskirts, on Easter Sunday.

It's a beautiful thing. It uses a mix of community and professional actors to tell the story of Jesus's trial and death and resurrection in and around the village and its kirk.

We were rehearsing in the church hall. The bad weather meant there weren't many of us, and Charles Nowolskielski, the author and director, seemed to be taking an awful of the parts because the people simply weren't there.

I play the Angel at the Tomb - the Angel who comforts the weeping women and tells them Jesus is no longer there, and that he has risen from the dead.

Which meant that for most of the rehearsal I had nothing much to do. I drank the tea and ate the lovely sponge cake the church volunteers provided for us, and idly watched the rehearsal.

And all of a sudden I found myself caught up in it all. It's a beautiful script that tells the story not just what happened, but of the human beings caught up in the drama. The High Priest doing his best to defend his religion, the governor forced to take a decision he detests, the wife of the soldier who gave Jesus the cloak and the crown of thorns, the soldiers whose job it is to bang in the nails. The thief's young brother who comes to stay beside him as he dies and give him what comfort he can. The Daughters of Jerusalem who come every day to the place of torment to ease the sufferers through their agony.

It's all written with immense compassion and it's maybe that which brought those tears to my eyes.

Or maybe there is something going on in these ancient and profound story, some profound truth maybe that I will never understand.

And perhaps don't need to...

For many years I was tormented by te feeling of not belonging anywhere. When i was with men, I didn't feel i was one of them, and when I was with women, however much I wanted to,  I didn't feel I was one of them either.

It was as if I wasn't properly human, somehow.

I hate the expression "non-binary" but I know it accurately describes me and so I suppose in a society that still basically insists there are only two genders I still don't really belong anywhere.

But at the same time I know that living as a woman really suits me, even if it doesn't altogether describe me and that it's because I live as a woman that I now feel so comfortable in my own skin.

And I guess that's an extra reason for being happy I have a piece published in this anthology that came out on March 1st.

It's nice to be thought of as a "Remarkable Woman" and remarkable and miraculous, somehow, that after all that's happened, and all that could have happened, I'm still here to give life lessons to anyone at all.

But here I am. And for me, anyway, that's a cause for celebration....

I stayed in all day while the wind kept howling and snow flurries blew past my window and I guess maybe the city came fitfully back to life again, but I never saw it.

I was busy chronicling a death for the radio, and attending to the process of the coming of new life.

The new life has been happening up north, and there were phone calls and text messages and whatsapps and lately a whole series of beautiful images that for now must stay private, but what has been striking me about the coming of life and the coming of death is much they are strangely alike.

Remembering the incredible intensity of those first steps towards death all those years ago, and living through the intensity of the steps towards new life, I'm struck by how they both push us past the boundaries of the people we think we are.

How they both end in release. How they both provoke tears.

Walking through the deserted streets this afternoon, people ghostly in the driving snow, no buses and very few cars. It felt as if the city had come to a stop.

A pause maybe that was time to think.

Some people have been angry with the council for the city coming to a halt in the face of weather than in other parts of the world would be incorporated into the daily routine.

But then our enforced immobility is one of the consequences of our reluctance to think of ourselves in a collective way.

We are still too much in thrall to Mrs. Thatcher's saying that "there is not such thing as society".

We prioritize individual enrichment over public good.

And so there were people last night who ended up having to spend the night stuck in their cars on the Edinburgh by-pass.

All of which rather perfectly illustrates the inadequacy of individualism in the face of the changes we are living through.

We are afraid of these changes, afraid of the future that demands them. So there is always a temptation to retreat behind the Brexiteers' futile walls.

The wise woman who taught me to interpret dreams used to say that if we dreamt of travelling in a car we were dreaming in the individual sphere; whereas if we dreamt of being in a bus... The word 'bus', she reminded us, came from the Latin word "omnibus" which means all or everyone. So dreams involving bus travel were happening in the collective.

There's a video going round just now of a car skidding out of control and coming to a halt right in the path of an advancing bus. Disaster looks unavoidable; but at the last moment the bus does an incredibly skilful manoevre and avoids the car with inches to spare.

I wonder if the car was driven by a man.

Because, as it turns out, the bus was driven by a woman.