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It was a huge culture shock moving from Sussex to Cambridgeshire and we both hated the place. The lack of trees, hills and seashore didn’t help, but the thing we found hardest was the lack of large towns. It seemed that you had to travel miles to get to anywhere worthwhile. In Eastbourne, we had Brighton (pop 300,000) just twenty miles away, but twenty miles from Ely just took us to Cambridge, a city no larger than Eastbourne. To get anywhere approaching the size of Brighton meant going all the way to Peterborough. We still miss the shopping and countryside that the south coast offers and I guess we will as long as we live here. In 1998 we moved out of Ely to the nearby village of Little Downham and discovered that village life was far better than life in the mini-city of Ely. But other things were happening in our lives. I had left Chivers and started a software company with an ex-colleague and I’d also trained as a clinical psychotherapist and hypnotherapist. The software business was never a great success and when my business partner left the firm (and his wife of 25 years!) I found it impossible to continue. I had been doing quite a lot of counselling work with people who had gender identity problems like myself, and it was at one such session that I realised the truth of my own condition. A client asked me ‘What is it for you? Is it the clothes?’ ‘No,’ I said ‘It’s just right, it’s natural, it’s how it should be.’ In that one moment I realised that the psychiatrists who I saw when I was 27 had got it wrong. I was not a transvestite ... I was transsexual! The trouble was that I was now 51 and had been married for 21 years. How could I tell my wife Linda? The following day I plucked up the courage to say what I knew had to be said ... and the bottom dropped out of our world.