What story shall I write? The one about the shop assistant who thought me and my younger brother were twins because we had the same shoe size as kids? The one about scrumping cherries and getting chased by a farmer in a South German orchard with a boy called Johannes when I was thirteen? The one about beating up a boy in the school corridor when we were nine and I a girl? The one about playing Paulina in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, pointing and shouting at the most popular boy in my 14-year-old’s class: ‘That thou betrayest Polixenes twas nothing that did but show thee of a fool…..’? I now realise playing that role so suited the woman I would later become.

And what about the time I laughed at a boy who travelled far to visit me when he slipped in the cowshit and didn’t know how to cross our farmyard safely? Or at 12, kissing the most beautiful Nigerian eight-year-old boy while he lay sleeping, breathing in the gorgeous smell of him? So many stories of chasing boys, ganging up on boys, conker fights with boys, kissing boys, humiliating boys, but always seeking male attention; attention from the most good-looking, most popular, most sporty, most self-centred, most entitled boys. Adolescent feelings seem to stretch from about eight years old to twenty, twenty-one: always in love with some boy, some young man… Or the story of arguing with my mum when she wouldn’t allow me at 15 to go to the Isle of Wight Festival on the back of a 17-year-old lad’s motorbike? She sensed I’d have willingly given my virginity to him.

Incongruence: skip to my thirties, after a failed engagement at 20-ish to a gentle Barnardo’s Boy six years my senior, after numerous brief encounters, after nine years cohabiting with a lovely bookseller fella, I find myself in Leeds amongst radical feminists and taking up with women. I became a Political Lesbian. I still am. This is my identity. I can’t imagine ever getting together with a male again, although technically I suppose I am bisexual if I don’t regret my relationships with men. I never wanted anything different until I worked in a women’s refuge in Doncaster. From Devon, to Kent, to Sussex in childhood, then a conscious choice to go to the Poly in Wolverhampton – as different as I could get. Time typing invoices in a factory in Lille, Northern France. Thence to Essex and Paris, to lone hitchhiking, roaming around seven or eight European countries for over a year, to living above a shop in North London on the busiest road in Europe, lorries shaking the mattress, to Yorkshire and eventually Leeds where I’ve made my home for forty years within half a mile of where I first landed as a lodger on Potternewton Lane.

Leeds had so much to offer when I arrived in the 1980’s, was so radicalised by the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ experience: sex shops to disrupt, streets to reclaim, refuges to run, prostitutes to defend, rape survivors to support, striking miners’ wives to fundraise for, women-only discos to enjoy. It was such an opportunity to learn activism live, to mingle through my thirties with women I admired, looked up to; strong women who knew their minds, cared so much. And many were lesbians fighting for the rights of all women regardless. There were trips to Greenham Common - 50,000 women encircling the RAF base, camping by the perimeter fence in the snow one Christmas Eve, plus local protests at Menwith Hill and singing ‘We are women, We are strong…’ in Harrogate town centre.

And then in the late ‘80s came Clause 28 (Section 28 of the Local Authorities Act) forbidding the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality and we joined with men to campaign against it, our communities also reeling from the impact of AIDS. I’d been active in my twenties in my union and supported the women’s strike at Grunwick (1976-78), for example, but in the 1980’s my activism was confirmed. Although it manifests itself in different ways at different times depending on personal circumstance and external context, once an activist always an activist! Now, at 70, I say: go girl!