I've cut my hair again. Happily (and somewhat unusually) for me, I am experiencing absolutely no post-haircut regret. In fact tonight I'm loving it and am, as a result, rather smug.

I'm also thinking again about what is going on underneath all this compulsive haircutting. I seem to be trimming and pruning almost weekly, my hairdo creeping shorter and shorter, its style wavering about, curling and creeping behind my ears, seeking its shape. With each snip of my scissors, I feel like I'm desperately trying to match how I look on the outside with how I feel on the inside.

My appearance has always been massively significant in my world. I have hidden behind femininity and then I have slung it out in fury. I have utilised its powers and I have been crippled by its limitations. I have blundered around confused as to what this thing called womanhood even is. My clothes and hair have always played a vital part in that, from a childhood of boys' clothes and loathsome haircuts to long hair and a precocious, feminine sexuality at thirteen, when I was a loner indie-kid in my uniform of biker boots, black eyeliner and short skirts. By 15, I was a raver, popping pills and returning happily to baggy trainers and jeans and sexless Mambo T-shirts.

I don't think I really felt remotely female until my early twenties. I think I could pretend like I was one, and there was some sort of inkling in that direction, but on the inside, it just didn't match up. I would scour the magazines for pretty girls who felt like a different species from me.

Also, I realise I can also actually recount the entire last ten years purely in terms of what shade of colour I was obsessed with at the time. At 23, I discovered Buddhism, festivals, hippies, meditation, chakras and Reiki. I moved to Brighton where the sun always seemed to be shining and felt like I had escaped from a lifeless, colourless, dowdy, grey cell. During this period I became obsessed with turquoise, silver and baby pink. I painted my entire bedroom bright turquoise and hung glitter balls from every part of the ceiling that reflected the sunlight a thousand times over. I made a large silvery glitterball shrine devoted to Vajrasattva, the Buddha of purification. He was my discoball Buddha. I wore little baby pink jumpers and sparkly blue dresses and I painted my nails silver. Sounds foul, I know, but I still think it was kind of kookily cool. I revelled in cosmic-girly chic, young and vibrant and a world away from how I'd felt for the previous 7 years, which was old; old and grey as the fucking mountains.



Then I started to get a bit of a feeling for some inner sexual power and my real passions and desires. I got into Mary Magdalene and Rilke and Patti Smith and became obsessed with dark purple. My bedroom became a dimly lit shrine with an abundance of Evolution shop netting, Edward Munch pictures and dyed blue roses. My next room was similar, but this time with little sculpture shrines of broken glass around it, a Garcia Lorca poem handwritten around the top of its walls and a huge purple swirling vortex I'd painted on one wall, six feet high. Then I broke up with my boyfriend and painted over the whole goddamn room in coconut and duck egg blue; light, grounded and non-intense colours. I got rid of the broken glass and the Lorca poem with the painful relationship. I was done with intensity.

When I moved into my present flat, the decor and all my clothes went green, right down to my purse. I became a lady, with a wide brimmed hat and a flat full of birdcages and spotty scarves and flowery teacups. I wore polka-dot flamenco skirts and neckties and my boobs even grew, so for the first time in my life I had a cleavage to show off. I liked my new life as a lady. It was kitsch and camp and over-the-top feminine. It suited my newfound curves and womanly figure. I dressed up in frills for festivals with my friend and we sold chocolate energy balls and gave out free spankings to the highest bidder.

I have a certain fondness for retro chic. The Twenties, Thirties, Forties, Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, I love them all (though I'm still not sure about the Eighties). I find it hard being a modern girl. And at present, I am finding it hard being a girl at all. I have largely eschewed the frocks and skirts, the busty tops. My flat is still a haven for birdcages, Venetian masks and flowery teacups, but the flamenco dresses are firmly at the back of the clothes rail. I've taken to wearing more boyish clothes, comfy jeans, shirts, caps, jackets and sometimes, even ties. I feel stronger somehow in these clothes, and less in need of something, even if I'm not sure what that something is. And I have cut my hair off for the first time in my life.

During a lot of this year, I felt like I just wanted to look and feel boyish. I felt constrained by my hips and my curves as much as I felt constrained by my still insistently alive desire for affirmation from men. I wanted to be free from all of it, perhaps a skinny, boob-less boy-girl. Perhaps I wanted to be free from gender altogether, from sexuality, so I didn't have to work out what it all meant and why it was felt complex. On the one hand I began to renew my interest in gender politics and on the other, I was falling for poetic images in Christianity and saints such as St Francis of Assisi.

Although to some people it may seem like a deep contradiction, to me it feels like maybe it was no coincidence that, as I started going to local Queer events where cross-dressing, sexual ambiguity and androgyny are the norm, I also began going to church and following the trail of saints such as St Clare, who defied religious convention by sneaking out of church down a secret passageway to join St Francis and others in a new, radical way of life, as she experienced a holy conversion. In the dark of that night they helped her cut off all her beautiful hair.

There are now days when I wake up and I want to look feminine and definably a woman. It feels good. So when I stood in front of my bathroom mirror tonight inspecting my new self-administered haircut, I suddenly realised why I liked it so much. There was, at last, the start of a synthesis. It was that same synthesis I've been seeking inside myself these last months.

It is a synthesis of different sides of myself, where one does not have to reject the other for its own survival. Where I can feel masculine and feminine, boy and girl, woman and man and all the shades in between; where those words mean everything and mean nothing at the same time. Where my desire is my own, and not something reflected back to me through the half-light of another's desire for me. Where my sexuality is not what my identity hinges on, and men (and women) do not hold the keys to my self-worth. Where I am hard and soft, potent and yielding, receptive and active. It's a place of the hunter and the hunted, the chaser and the chased (chaste), the doer and the doing, the done; the giver, the taker and the giving itself.

When I strip back the layers of conditioning, take off the years of habitual behaviour, the naked sight underneath is a disconcerting one.

The lady and her polka-dot skirts have left the building. There's a strange boy in her place, with very feminine charms and a gentle touch. She is soft as ever, but with a wilful eye. She is the figure in a photo, me at ten years old, pale blue jumper, jeans and Clarks brown shoes.

Last year my mother suffered a massive stroke that left her brain-damaged and unable to speak, eat or move. The strange thing is that I now find that I have almost the same haircut as when I was ten; just as my mother weaves her slow and painful way out of this world. I cut my first fringe earlier this year as she lay looking the other way, out of the window, in a half-trance. Her words, spoken to me regularly from the age of thirteen, have lain dormant in my mind until tonight, yet they were words that always kept me away from the scissors ...Don't ever cut your hair, never cut a fringe, always keep your hair long; such beautiful hair...

Whatever it is I've lost in that beautiful hair as I chop and I snip, is worth it for what I gain, simply from its absence. It's been a lifetime of seeking myself, losing myself, creating identities and shedding skins. The clock ticks, the sea of life surges on, personality unravels to reveal itself in more brilliant colours than ever. The final bed is made; the sheet turned over. The mirror reflects the light shining on it. A bird takes its final breath. I am alone. The bathroom is empty except for one reflection; a face looking back at me. It is nothing I have ever seen before.

Barbarism Begins At Hove

The Smiths have influenced me more than possibly any other band I've listened to in my life, and Morrissey has been a muse of mine since before I was even in my teens. I never got to see them live, which is a significant regret, considering the force and elegance of Morrissey's performances and the almost maniacal fervour of their audiences.

There's a violence, a bravery about Morrissey, and something so primal, so achingly tender in his writhing and his crooning; something so perverse and contradictory in his gyrating nakedness and his saintly detactment. Everything laid bare, yet totally ambiguous. All this raw, sweating, complex humanity, this bizarre sexuality; it's like watching some kind of brutal boxing match, or an ancient pagan rite. Morrissey would detest this analogy, but to me he's a bit like a Spanish torreador, whipping the bull and the crowd into a frenzy before the blades go in. Numerous people have said The Smiths were miserable, wet and poncey; but they never realised they'd missed the point entirely.

It's very hard to describe Friday night for me without putting it in context. When I was eleven, although pretty grown up for my age, I was only just starting to discover music. I wore frilly white blouses and navy-grey kilts, an outfit I had swapped to from the battered jeans and geeky blue jumper I'd lived in up to that age - the age when I decided, enough was enough, I now wanted to look like a girl, be a girl, instead of being the odd, boyish thing I'd felt like up until then. I was tired of not feeling like I fitted into one gender or the other. So I grew my hair, became pretty, longing to be normal.

So the first time I saw Morrissey on Top Of The Pops, I was repulsed, as he flailed around the stage with flowers in his back pocket, a pale cardigan and bare chest. It took another year before any kind of interest in what Morrissey had to offer my psyche manifested. And it was purely, it seemed, by chance. Bigmouth Strikes Again had just come out as a single, and I hated it, hated The Smiths and all they stood for. Then, one evening, in my bedroom, I could hear my sister had the radio on; it was the John Peel Show. Then I suddenly heard these lines floating across from her room to mine: " I dreamt about you last night/ And I fell out of bed twice./ You can pin and mount me/ Like a butterfly"

I strained to hear the rest of that song, and was instantly converted. From that point on, I was obsessed. I bought all their LP back catalogue, got a load of Oscar Wilde out of the library and developed a rather frightening obsession with the Moors Murders. I gave up eating meat. This meant flushing the chicken off my Sunday dinner down the loo when my mum wasn't looking, or feeding it to the dog, or even throwing it out of my bedroom window onto the flowerbed below, as my Mum refused to let me become vegetarian.

When The Queen Is Dead came out that year, I played it to death and memorized every line, every word. Moving into my thirteenth year, I became fully immersed in teenage gloom. I dropped out in school, lost all my friends, became the class 'weirdo' (writing "Free Myra Hindley" on your Rough Book isn't the kind of thing to endear you to your classmates). I watched Andy Warhol films late into the night, took my first trip to Whalley range in Manchester, and got stoned on my sister's boyfriend's homegrown cannabis. I read more poetry that year than I probably have done in my whole life since. I wrote songs and poems. Lots of them. I drew. I played along to 'Well I Wonder' on my guitar. I discovered Buddhism. I self-harmed. I became intrigued by The Occult and Aleister Crowley. I tried desperately to Astral Project. Just all your regular teenage things.

I don't hold Morrissey or The Smiths responsible for this remarkable shift in my psychology. Or for the intense depression I kept falling into. Or for my plummeting exam results at school. In fact, looking back, it seems that, along with the books I read and the films I watched; my late night thinking sessions, Morrissey's voice coming out from my stereo was one of the things that actually got me through at least those two years of painful teenagedom without seriously fucking myself up.

I wonder how many other people who have a love for The Smiths have a similar kind of teenage tale to tell? The Smiths have always taken flack from the more superficial critics; it has been said that they promoted self-obsession, pretension and introspection. But The Smiths were never a refuge for the weak and navel-gazing. They showed strength and dignity. Yes, they attracted the shy, the geeky, the ones confused about their gender or sexuality. The clever ones who saw too much. But more than anything, they just stood up for what was human.

Morrissey was like the tall boy with the big feet who stood between you and the class bully, the one who wanted to smash your face in because he thought you were a wimpy weirdo just because you couldn't play football or you never got off with anyone at the school disco. The Smiths were for those who were sick and tired of hearing corporate shite on Radio 1, who didn't want anymore shoulder pads and perms, who needed a light to shine out in those dark, dour days of Thatcher's Britain.

November Spawned A Mozzer, was an entire evening dedicated to Morrissey and The Smiths, a night where die-hard fans could indulge their somewhat strange devotion to him and his music. This night was strictly for fans only. The ceiling was laced with Morrissey bunting, the walls covered in images of his naked torso; a TV played interviews with him, and a massive screen above the dance floor showed him in concert. Gladioli were handed out. There was even a 'best Quiff' Competition, with a John Betjamen book as prize.

To outsiders, it would have simply looked like madness. But far from being some kind of embarrassingly cringey tribute night, it was very touching. Almost everyone sang along, whether unabashed with their friends on the dance floor, or quietly to themselves, pints in hands, or in some corner. These people, undoubtedly having spent night after night in solitary communion with this music, were suddenly together. There aren't many opportunities in life to sing along with a crowd of people, the words "I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does .."

When they played "I Know It's Over", I remembered what that song meant to me when I was 13. I'm not 13 anymore, but standing there, it reminded me how I'm not an altogether different creature from the one I was back then. And I'm glad for that.

tuesday

These days are dark days, or perhaps light days with the curtains half-open, semi-shut. These days I am leaping from a tower into blackness, or I am rolled up in bed, clutching sheets and blankets.

I'm not sure where I begin or where this story is going, my life's ebbing away and only just beginning. I'm on the right road, but quite lost. I have achieved, and the future spreads out in front of me like an empty plain. I fear I'm a failure.

These words bluster what I want to say. Focusless at the moment and yet driven, I'm almost crazily heading towards some destination. I want to pack up my flat, get the hell out of here. I want to go mad at some festival. I want to walk a dog in the moonlight, by the River Adur. In short, I'm confused.

I get these spells from time to time, in fact, they can stretch on for months. The only real remedy perhaps is to get out of the flat, go walking, do something, anything, to stop the ceaseless mind-chatter, the compulsions, the laziness, the swirling head that takes over.

I feel like I have been dropped from a great height and have landed, splat, on a vacated hillside. All is possibility, and therefore, all is frightening. Too much possibility scares me, but stasis and stagnant boggy fields, empty of flowers, scare me more. I'm running scared, scared of my life, of what I might become if I put my mind to it, of what I might fail to become, if I don't.

I'm reading a book on Harry Crosby, who founded the Black Sun Press and who was found shot dead with his lover in a hotel room in New York in 1929. When they found his body, he wore a black flower in his lapel and his toenails were painted bright red.

I am very afraid of a character like Harry Crosby, and of course, fascinated. I find it hard to conceive of a life without drama and gunshots, excess and vision. But in truth, either my skin and my bones are thinning or I am simply becoming more aware of how sensitive I am to life's madnesses. I can't abide betrayal anymore, I can't abide mind-expanding drugs, or even hangovers, I can't do illicit sex, or even perversion and it feels as though I am turning into a moralist, a radical feminist and an evangelist. Am I simply too long lived to not see through all this junk, or am I getting frailer? Who knows, but though I feel stronger in ways I never thought I was, I also feel more delicate than ever, a china cup who wants warm liquid inside her, without the cracks, without being dropped to the floor. I want no more smashing.

Oh, this is a strange post. There is so much to tell about the facts and figures of my life, but for some reason, here, I want to keep it secret. Change is afoot, but in which direction, God only knows.

Dog Fever

So now that my quest for finding out exactly what the breed of the dog of my dreams is has come to an end, and I now know that the dog I'm after is in fact known as a Bearded Collie, my dog obsession has reached fever pitch, resulting last night in partial insanity.

I want a Bearded Collie so bad. Now I know it, even the name is unbearably endearing. This is no transient longing. I have been ruminating over it for the last eighteen months, fantasising and wrangling with my conscience as I have known I could neither a) afford it, nor b) justify housing any dog of reasonable size in my little flat.

The man I talked to outside the cafe yesterday, who was accompanying the said dog of my dreams, told me that they are apparently the most intelligent of dogs, but also need the most extraordinary amounts of walking; miles and miles as a puppy, slightly less as an adult.

Does this mean now that I have to move to the country to fulfill my dream, or at the very least install a small treadmill in my flat? I want to get a rescue dog really, and if by luck he happened to be a Bearded Collie too, in order then for us both to live happily side by side he would have to be either very old, thus not in need of so much walking, or blind. Thus he wouldn't see how inadequate his home was, or perhaps with only two legs or something, you know, the front two working, the back of him mounted on wheels, then I could just roll him along the seafront and he'd be happy as larry.

I'll stop there, I think.

What am I to do? I know if I even venture to Shoreham Dogs' Home to take a peek at the dogs there, I will return home with at least one of them in my arms.

Another alternative is to fall in love with another breed, a breed of tiny, tired dogs, who are puffed out after five minutes of walking and fit in my handbag. I'm not sure if that breed actually exists, nor if I'd like them. They sound quite weird.

The third option, the sensible, bigger person-ed, less egomaniacal, over-the-top romanticised option is to take a dog which most needs a home and is neither tiny nor huge, not a puppy but not at death's door and who has all his own legs, and leave the rest up to the universe.

Nope. I want a Bearded Collie.