If I ever had a feminine side, it probably died of embarrassment the day we all wore skirts for Comic Relief. It struck me then that there is a great deal to be said for trousers. In fact, if I could, I’d wear them in the bath. Some might question the relevance or necessity of these disclaimers. But I’m afraid few subjects inspire the male of the species to such uneasy merriment – “Aye aye! Something you want to tell us?!” etc – as this. We laugh at what we do not understand, which is probably why we are always so jolly. But trans-sexualism does more than discombobulate. It challenges and disturbs. Thank heavens, then, for Jan Morris’s ‘Conundrum’, which explains, quite calmly and sensibly, what it’s all about . In this beautiful, profound memoir, she recounts her journey from male to female, from James to Jan, or, in her words, ‘if not a butterfly, at least a presentable moth’ with the exquisitely tender prose which is her hallmark. To me, she stands with Hugh Trevor-Roper as one of the finest stylists of her generation. On her new life as a woman, for instance, she says ‘It was inevitable and it was deeply satisfying, like a sentence which, defying its own subordinate clauses, reaches a classical conclusion in the end’. What I found fascinating about this book, quite apart from its aesthetic pleasures, is the fact that Morris has now seen both sides, so to speak, of the door to the girls’ cloakroom. ‘The male body’, she says, ‘may be ungenerous, even uncreative in the deepest kind, but when it is working properly it is a marvellous thing to inhabit’. I’d never really thought of it in those terms before. It certainly explains the filthy looks I get on walks as I disappear behind the nearest tree. Her newfound happiness brought with it, she learned, certain challenges. Although she continued to live quite happily with the woman she had originally married, the law of the day did not recognise such couplings, and so they had to divorce. Irreconcilable similarities, one presumes. She also discovered ‘that men prefer women to be less informed, less able, less talkative and certainly less self-centred than they are themselves’. Can this really be true? I tried asking Amy, Lucy and Faduma, but by the time I’d explained why I find the subject so interesting, and then re-phrased the question in very simple language, our lunch-break was over, and we had to go back to work.