Kierkegaard's Lunch

Readying myself for what feels like a forced emigration, I am putting together the soundtrack of a whole life spent living in England... I am a trans woman who has lived in the UK almost her whole life. Now I am leaving the country, forced out by the deepening political, legal and cultural hate. It's a bitter moment. I am trying to come to terms with having to do this by, amongst other things, charting my 64 years of life in England in 64 songs that I have loved and which have formed the soundtrack of my life in a country that has made clear it doesn't want me anymore. You can read more about the background to this project here:  https://kierkegaardslunch.blogspot.com/2026/08/mourning-england-in-song-part-1.html ******* Street Life - Roxy Music (from Stranded) I was just eleven when this epic came out, and I remember discovering it a year or two later - likely when Roxy's next album, Country Life appeared (containing the absolute belter of a track,  All I Want Is You),  a...

Readying myself for what feels like a forced emigration, I am putting together the soundtrack of a whole life spent living in England... As I make preparations to leave the UK, I'm getting hit by what I can only describe as a grief. Apart from 3 years spent in Asia as a young child, as my father was sent abroad, England has been my home for all of my 64 years. I never imagined in my darkest of thoughts that there would ever come a time when I felt excluded and pushed out of my own country - driven out by an unrelenting and bitter campaign to remove from me the basic rights on which I thought I could absolutely rely. Because I am a trans woman and because the UK has now become the pariah of Western nations - on a national basis going further even than Trump's America in its rush to delegitimise our right to be known and treated as women - I feel that I have no choice but to go.  I cannot live in a country where I am told I cannot urinate in a women's toilet anymore (after al...

Shorn of the decency to which it was generally held by an EU that was created in part to act as a counter weight to individual nations' predilection for hating and even killing its minorities, the UK now sits in European rankings just slightly above Russia and Georgia with respect to its treatment of trans people in law. An international LGBT+ organisation recently remarked that Gender Recognition no longer functionally exists here. Even that bastion of human rights, Belarus, scores higher. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. An Amnesty International analysis of just four influential British newspapers across 2020-2025  (The Times/Sunday Times, Telegraph/Sunday Telegraph, Guardian and The Sun) discovered that they had published almost 17,000 articles about trans people in that period - the equivalent of nine a day. Across that entire avalanche of hate trans people were mentioned by name (as opposed to characterised as a faceless, inhuman group) just 24 times. 16 of these mentions...

Nesrine Malik in The Guardian today is right [ The Democrats are in deep trouble in the US – and Labour is on the way to joining them] Starmer is the UK's Biden; a brief reactive intermission in the grotesque far right takeover of society. His fate is sealed because he believes in nothing and has left the stage completely open for those who do believe in things - like nationalism, prejudice, hate and xenophobia. The day after Starmer won the election, he addressed the nation from Downing Street. He said the following words: “ From now on, you have a government unburdened by doctrine, guided only by a determination to serve your interests. ” Though it got little attention, as a trans woman trying to survive in a country that was already hurtling towards bigotry and discrimination at a speed no-one could have predicted a few years before, I found it a deeply chilling remark. I wrote on this blog about it at the time. It was said by him, I imagine, because he judged the country to b...

Back at the beginning of February this year I wrote on this blog that I could foresee Keir Starmer throwing the British trans community under the oncoming bus that was Donald Trump and his deranged transphobic obsessions. I speculated that in the coming months, Trump would prove incredibly difficult to deal with and that Starmer - understanding just how appallingly weak the United Kingdom is now (entirely reliant on the US for its nuclear deterrent, with an armed forces that have dwindled to shockingly small proportions and now cut off from the trading power of the EU that might have some sway with the authoritarian American President) would be forced into a dual strategy of supplication, flattery and concession to keep him onside. I predicted a scenario of Trump being invited for a State visit to the UK, with Starmer keen to offer something to keep the President sweet and to demonstrate his commitment to some of the ghastly culture war punishments that Trump enjoys inflicting on his...