Weight - 82kg, alcohol units - 5, cigarettes - 0 (don't smoke, reminding self of fact as get cravings when watching movie with cool actor smoking), calories - how the heck do you count those things anyway?

As many of you can guess, am currently reading Bridget Jones' Diary. Yes, me. A boy... reading a "girl's book". I've done it before, you know. I've read at least 2 or 3 Jane Austen novels, Little Women, several of the Anne of Green Gables books and even, one time, I read a book by Catherine Cookson! (I didn't like it particularly, but that's not the point) It's time for me to jump on my gender bender train once more and say, "Big bloody deal!"

Jane Austen may have written from and about a woman's perspective in Georgian and Early Victorian England, something of which I know nothing, but she did it extremely well and she did it with a dry wit that the likes of Clive Cussler or Tom Clancy (or other MANLY authors) wouldn't know if a fighter jet dropped it on their residence while they barbequed freshly hunted deer on a Sunday afternoon. As for Louisa May Alcott's classic... oh come on! Who wouldn't cry as they read that? Beth was always my favourite character.

But from the age of about 8 or 9, I could identify with Anne Shirley far more readily than any other character I'd read in just about any book. She was like a female version of me, if I were a red-headed orphan from Nova Scotia... anyway... she loved Tennyson above all poets (as any true poetry fan should), had a romantic sensibility that it has NEVER been fashionable to write in a male character and like me, got into more trouble than you thought possible for one person. I too, had a string of friends as a child that I wanted to be "kindred spirits" "bosom friends" but, like Diana, they never quite got it.

I have a friend who's getting married in 2 weeks time. She told me last night, albeit somewhat facetiously, that she wanted to have a little girl, so that she could bring her up to be a free-thinking tomboy. Cut her hair short, dress her in pants and get her nose pierced instead of her ears. She could buy her her first pair of Doc Martin's. It is statements like this that make her one of my dearest friends.

I'm not saying there is no gender division at all, of course there are boundaries to how far we can treat boys and girls the same. But I never read Anne of Green Gables and said "I think I'll wear a dress to school today" or "I want to give birth". Not that it should matter if I did wear a dress to school, my point is I didn't get that thought from reading a "girls book". Much as paranoid father's might like to think otherwise, boys are quite capable of distinguishing between what a character wears and who a character is. We can read a book, learn what women are about without wanting to be one, take on board a character's point of view without taking on board their genitalia.

Rant Ends.

Josh! xoxo