Talking of Chocolate Factories...

It's always hard to know whether a post fails to get views because of its intrinsic dullness or because of some algorithmic glitch. I recently wrote what I thought a nice little snarky Medium piece satirising the widely debunked yet somehow still widely cited ROGD theory that being trans is caused by "social contagion", and it's sunk without trace - perhaps because of the word "bollocks" in the title? Anyway, here it is, if you'd like to see it. (The signal-boosting power of Dreamwidth/Livejournal is awesome indeed!)

In other news, Hiroko's mission to See All the Things before she returns to Japan next month took us back to the M5 yesterday. Last week it was Devon and Agatha Christie; this time we travelled north to Birmingham, and more specifically Bournville, where we took a tour of the chocolate factory, now transformed to Cadbury World. It was an interesting experience: part theme park (albeit muted and punctuated with quizzes about cacao and the chocolate making process), part factory tour (there were plenty of people in hairnets demonstrating things), part historical exhibition (in which a hologrammatic conquistador, and then an equally insubstantial Mr Cadbury, took us through the history of chocolate and of the firm itself). Inevitably, we were also photographed surfing on a chocolate bar. A large shop with chocolate at melt-down prices, where I bought a bar of Dairy Milk larger than my keyboard for a fiver, rounded off the day. Overall verdict: weird but good, and at least nobody got juiced.