How's YOUR Female Geography?

When you've spent the last five years in a fog I expect suddenly bursting back into clarity again is going to be an illuminating experience in any circumstances.

To have done it in the Spring is to add all those tropes of rebirth,  and leaving the Underworld that happen to be circulating around from about March. Anyone who is not totally insensate at this time of year is genetically programmed to rise to the call of Nature triumphant.

But to do it in this lockdown has proved exciting, and thrilling, and illuminating by turns - and sometimes all at the same time so I really do, like a girl in a Romcom, gasp audibly and stop in my tracks; quite often. I have twice, unconsciously, but ever so theatrically, raised a hand to my bosom while doing so.

(Apart from the conviction that I was certifiable insane, the Fog really seemed to draw a sort of dark oily fuzz over the perceptions.
Imagine then, what it's been like to round a bend and come face-to-face with a bawdy, lusty double peony!)

So, while Boris and I have been both flitting about discovering May-flower Sleet, and the infinitesimal detail that goes into flowers no bigger than a fingernail...I've been gathering rosebuds while I may, dancing with the daffodils, and Making Great Discoveries.

All of this, you understand, on that higher plane - that ephemeral word of art and nature and poesy & whimsy.

Pretty much as far away from the world of unanchored uteri or  restless bladders as its possible for any woman on earth to be, really. Or, I tend to think, about as far away from such thoughts as every woman on earth wishes to be.

In the middle of a lockdown and all.

Now, until I was about 18 my vocabulary was considered precocious. It became in turns 'considerable', 'surprisingly [!!] competent' and 'unusual'  as I journeyed through the world of marked essays.

I find it intolerably sad that, after all that early hype, my vocabulary, for the purposes of a telephonic diagnosis, became "inadequate".

I knew that, in the middle of a global pandemic, I'd have to have a blind diagnosis reliant upon me adequately conveying, verbally, and sight unseen, an accurate account of what was most definitely not a dry cough or a temperature or a sore throat. One could, I expect, enable the video-chat option, but who the hell would seriously feel blase about sending pics of one's Twinkle Cave to one's doctor? I was reasonably articulate and expensively educated. This was not going to present a problem.

I'd requested a female doctor not from coyness, but because I realised that the best tools I had available for explication were analogy and simile - with the prerequisite that the person to whom I was analogising possessed a vagina.

"Right! I said briskly when asked for symptoms. "It's exactly like that feeling you get when you've had a heavy period and the tampon saturates and starts to slide down because it's so heavy?" The pause I made here had not been so much for acquiescence, but for breath. Until I realised no acquiescence, nor rebuttal, had been forthcoming anyway. I waited a second. Dead silence.

Oh ye gods! She wasn't a tampon user?  She had fixed ideas about tampon-users? She had led an "Out With Tampons!" rally at Uni?

Or, even worse, she didn't have periods?  It was her lifelong sorrow and her secret suffering? She felt cut off from her sisters and I had just exacerbated her feelings of isolation?

Until -  the ultimate moment of horror - the thought struck that she'd never experienced that feeling in her life and so considered I was careless about personal hygiene? And that my mother  hadn't trained me to change my feminine hygiene needs frequently? And was she wondering did she have to start doing this over the phone?

"Uh well, you see, it's that area just near the..." I was immediately stymied.

Hey, I know the words for all the usual bits - but not all the subdivisions in between. There are, in my defence,  a large number of long pipes and tubes distributed about the body. What's the convention: do they have "entrances"? or "necks" (a vision of a scrawny chicken-neck floated into consciousness and I dismissed "neck". ) Are there various quadrants perhaps? Navigational indicators such as half-way points, or "Road narrowing" signs?

And what do you call the space behind the door as you push the entrances to one of these pipes/tubes open and you have to direct traffic over to it?

Fortunately, she began to run down a checklist of symptoms at this stage to which I could happily answer Yes or No. It was when she asked me how it looked that I was once again covered in confusion.

 I mean I know what it looks like. Just to refresh my memory I'd had a bit of a rummage round with a mirror and a Bic lighter the night before.  Everything seemed to be pretty much as I remembered. All still present and correct.

 But how does it look? Er...a bit like a squashed pear? Somewhat overwhelmingly pink? A bit rough around the edges because the wax has run out and I've heard of the Death of a Thousand Cuts so am rather hesitant with the razor? Rather off-putting straight after eating a rather nice dinner?

"Did you see anything that looked a bit strange?"

To tell the truth its always looked a bit strange to me.  I mean its wonderful that the men in one's life  always seem to enjoy pottering about in one's Lady Garden; but you wouldn't want to live there yourself, would you?

However, in the end, we managed to settle on what both of us agreed was a pretty fair guess under the circumstances. So as the afflicted parts have no chance of being dragged into the light of day - or the lights of a surgery, preferably - for at least another 6 weeks I divide my time in the interim between resting and sweat-inducing frantic sets of Kegels at all other times.  Especially when walking Boris. (Which becomes the only true test that you're successfully isolating the right muscles: seeing if you can manage to walk around in public doing them without squinting your eyes, pursing up your mouth and causing small children to run screaming down the street as you walk by.)

Bloody hell, I was thinking, as I scrunched my way down London Road clutching Boris's lead for direction and Kegelling away in what I fondly believed to be a relatively grimace-free way. It's amazing how bloody unglamorous all my life's little drama's seem to be.  I couldn't succumb to anything that rendered me pale and interesting and soulful while there was still some gross reminder of one's body's essential ickyness left to experience.

Just my luck, in the middle of a lockdown, to spend every step I take outside the house wondering if the next one is going to results in various bits that should be on the inside suddenly sliding outside and landing with a splat in the middle of the gobs of spit and strings of gum on the pavement.

What could possibly be more embarrassing than shuffling about with a fixed rictus of effort etched into one's face; doing silent, lonely exercises in the scented May sunshine?

It was exactly at that moment that the extensive bridgework that anchors every one of my top teeth in place furloughed itself and simply dropped out.

 Three groups of rigidly isolated muscles went into spasm and, with a rueful grin of toothless irony, I hobbled down the road in a pastel cloud of May-blossom sleet.

Teach me to ask myself daft questions!