I hope that nobody thinks I’m being racially prejudiced when I say that, much though I am fascinated by her, I do not find the Anglo-American academic Mikita Brottman physically attractive. It is her mind that has raised my longstanding interest, nothing more.

Honest.

This is because, for me, Ms B is like a mirror that reverses not left and right, but male and female.

Obviously, we’re different in a lot of ways: I don’t smoke and I don’t have any tattoos, for example.

But there are big similarities too.

We were born in the same year (1956) and we were both keyly core contributors to seminal early issues of the transgressive journal Headpress Journal.

And we have various other things in common, like our mutually shared passion for corpse’n’cannibal cinema, our Glaswegian accents and (at different times) our season tickets for Hull Kingston Rovers.

So it is that, looking at Ms B, I have the uncanny experience of seeing myself as I might have been, had I been born female.

But it’s not just uncanny.

It’s horrifying at times too.

Okay, I’m comfortable with the idea that, born female, I would have been less intelligent and more conformist. So I don’t mind that Ms B is a Guardianista. Not particularly. I can face the fact that I would quite likely have been one of them too, as a female.

But there are worse things than being a Guardianista, believe it or not.

Ms B has a PhD in EngLit.

A PhD!

In EngLit.

It’s not at all easy for me to face the fact that I might have had one too, as a female. It really isn’t. But how can I deny it? I might have. That despicable, deplorable, thoroughly disreputable subject might have attracted me. In fact, it would probably have attracted me.

<retch>

But it gets worse still.

Ms B is a psychoanalyst.

A psychoanalyst.

Ach du lieber Gott!

See what I mean by “horrifying”?

I mean, even if I’d been born female I wouldn’t have sunk to such depths, would I? Would I? No, I have to face facts: I might. But I don’t think so. I have a feeling that there’s more to Brotty’s interest in Freud than her gender statusicity and her key commitment to core componency of the counter-cultural community.

But I’d better say no more. Verb sap.