Now I'm not anonymous...

Looking back over my diaries is sometimes embarrassing, sometimes hilarious (often unintentionally so). After a page or two I'm right back there – living in London, keeping up a double life, with all the effort that entails...

Which is just too difficult to do long-term. I suppose I always thought that the part of my life I wrote about would fade away, that I could stick it in a box and move on. Totally separate it from the ‘real me’.

What it took me years to realise is that while I've changed a lot since writing these diaries – my life has moved on so much, in part thanks to the things that happened then – Belle will always be a part of me. She doesn't belong in a little box, but as a fully acknowledged side of a real person. The non-Belle part of my life isn't the only ‘real’ bit, it’s ALL real.

Belle and the person who wrote her had been apart too long. I had to bring them back together.

So a perfect storm of feelings and circumstances drew me out of hiding. And do you know what? It feels so much better on this side. Not to have to tell lies, hide things from the people I care about. To be able to defend what my experience of sex work is like to all the sceptics and doubters.

Anonymity had a purpose then – it will always have a reason to exist, for writers whose work is too damaging or too controversial to put their names on. But for me, it became important to acknowledge that aspect of my life and my personality to the world at large.

I am a woman. I lived in London. I was a call girl.

The people, the places, the actions and feelings are as true now as they were then, and I stand behind every word with pride. Thank you for reading and following my adventures.

Love, Belle

Wore a Victoria Beckham dress for the first time yesterday - the Derizet in black - and good lord, is that thing figure magic. Not sure if it's worth the pricetag, but if anyone has a spare grand around and happens to be feeling generous... a pair of red Louboutins wouldn't go amiss either...

Being something of a master in the art of compartmentalisation, and not a little prickly, most people seem to think me untouchable, a bit cold (or for those who don't hate me, 'reserved'). One tough nut. Certainly not the type to wear my heart on my sleeve.

But it is as much a cliche as it is the truth that appearances are deceiving. The person you think of as shy will actually talk your ear off, given half a chance. The most flowery, romantic love letters were written by absolute bastards. And under the shell of a cooly unemotional ex-prostitute beats the heart of someone who was only waiting for the right conditions in which love could blossom.

I'm not talking about passion. I am, indeed, passionate about T, hugely so. But if the last years have taught me nothing else it's that passion is usual, common even. It can be had by the hour if you're so inclined. You can fall for someone in an instant, for an instant. What this is, is something else.

So much has changed since last summer that I can hardly imagine, much less express, all of it. But I'll try. For the first time in years, I feel safe. No longer do I look in the mirror and see someone who puts up with emotional abuse because no one else would have me. I see someone who is free to choose to love and be loved, or be alone, whatever she likes.

I wake up in the morning next to someone who feels like... like nothing else. The road hasn't been easy, we've both had cold feet at different times, we've both questioned this. We both keep choosing each other.

I'm going to defer to a customary coyness in matters of emotion and say T hasn't changed my life, but rather, the way I think about my life. Since knowing him I have seen how to help myself be a better person - he showed me where the tools are - now that's worth a thousand times more than a rescue fantasy.

It may be my birthday this week, but my love, you're the one with the gift. Thank you.

It's a little bit sad - no, scratch that, it's sad on the level of old ladies buying half a cooked chicken breast in Marks's on Christmas Day, sad like a scoop with raspberry syrup AND a Flake AND hundreds and thousands that just slid out of the cone onto the floor, top-drawer, top-shelf, top-notch, sad - to admit that I get a kick out of the index of the Guide to Men (pity the preview doesn't include the flow chart! Ah well). But I do.

If nothing else, at least I am pretty good at amusing myself.

For some reason instead of doing the things I should do - finish the introduction for a new book, promote the current one, write the one after that, pack for our upcoming move, actually put in any time whatsoever to my 'real' job - I have instead been exercising my rage gland over a recent blog post elsewhere.

Let me splain: a friend on Facebook posted a link to it, approvingly. Now, when I say 'friend', I don't mean that in any real-world way but merely as shorthand for 'someone I was vaguely allied with at school by dint of both being nerdy, gangly girls on the fringes of social acceptability, who have not been in contact until the miracle of social programming forced most people our age to renew bonds that in generations past would have been acknowledged as 'someone I knew once' rather than actual, full-fledged friend,' but anyway. We're friends, sort of.

The thing about this friend is that she followed the course so often ploughed by girls of our background, proclivities and age: a Women's Studies degree at a respectable-enough university followed by appropriately counter-cultural employment interspersed with periods of living off her moneyed parents. She has ironic items of clothing and names her cats after dead politicians. She not only listened to Nirvana the first time around, but thought they were overhyped poseurs then, too. In other words, she's a hipster. To say my life spun out in an entirely different direction is understating the fact slightly.

Now as for the blog entry itself, the one this friend linked to, I should emphasise that I don't disagree with its main points as such. On the one hand it makes some baldly ridiculous claims - the idea that before going on a date, you need to spread a man's contact details all over your flat and have a girlfriend ring up the next day to check you aren't maimed or dead being one such conceit...sorry hon, but only hookers do that. Get over yourself. But it makes some good points too (guys, don't be creepy when approaching women you don't already know) and is even slightly funny.

But I was put off straightaway by this sentence, addressed to men:

Is preventing violent assault or murder part of your daily routine, rather than merely something you do when you venture into war zones?

If you're reading my blog, then you know I'm a long time, dyed-in-the-wool A-number-1 Fan Of Men. If anything, being a sex worker made me more sympathetic, instead of less so, to their struggles and their lives. And as a result it amazes me just how casually, and how widespread, the assumption is that men have things easy.

Go on, open a Sunday supplement today. How many pages in before you encounter some polly filler by a female columnist implying men in general (or her man in particular) doesn't pull his weight at home, while she majestically juggles family, work, and the burden of having a vagina which has the audacity to bleed once a month? How many pages before you encounter some self-flagellating male columnist admitting to same?

Let me state for the record that if being a man was easy, hookers wouldn't exist. Fact.

Come now - being a woman does have its special challenges, and these can be frustrating, time-consuming, impenetrable to outsiders and even in some cases actively dangerous. But so does being a man. It's called the human condition, innit.

Have you seen The Wrestler? Have you seen Hurt Locker? Those were two examples, in the last year alone, of me thinking damn... I am so glad I wasn't born a man.

Bottom line, it takes a particular kind of self-consciously middle-class gynecentric view of the world to imagine that the only physical danger men face is in a war zone. As someone who has lived in more than a few dodgy neighbourhoods - because sponging off my parents was categorically Not An Option - and been privy to the secrets and fears of my male friends, I do not think they have it easier than we of the XX-type. Different, yes. Easy, no.

There are elements of male life that, as a woman, I am exempt from. For the most part this is reciprocal: in most situations they will never have a fear of rape. But I almost never enter a room worried about who is sizing me up for fisticuffs. When my ex, the Boy, was attacked and sent to hospital with multiple skull fractures by six strangers who jumped out of a car onto him and his brother... I was not thinking, 'well, at least he had it so much easier because he was male!' The last time T came back from Brum with a bloodied lip and a torn shirt, it occurred to me yet again that there are plenty of situations that read as 'Danger!' to men in which I would get a free pass. Because I'm a girl.

And let us not forget that the sort of men who exercise violent dominance over women do not only do that to women.

But then, it must be beastly difficult to see that from the point of view of a B.A. in Women's Studies surfing broadband in your parents' spare room. Very difficult indeed.

Once upon a (very long) time ago, after being a student and before moving to London, I had a year of working several jobs at the same time. They were, in case you wondered, at an art gallery, a bookshop, a map/travel store, and an internship for the professional employment I later returned to. I put two thirds of my earnings into savings... savings that didn't last half as long as I needed them to, or thought they would, and were long gone by the time I moved to London.

It was a busy time of my life. So busy, in fact, there were days I literally had to choose between having time enough to eat and getting enough sleep. I lost weight to the point at which my father, all ten stone of him, was concerned for my health. And once out the other side I promised - no, I swore - I would never do that again.

Which is not, incidentally, the reason I became a call girl a couple of years later - though certainly it was an experience informing that decision.

While I've had sporadic periods of intense work since, nothing has ever come close to the soul-destroyingness (is that a word? at the time, I was too tired to care) of that lifestyle. Doing work that you know isn't up to your potential or your employer's standard, simply because it must be done. Waking hours before having to be anywhere to complete tasks left unfinished the night before. Goodness knows how A2, who was dating me at the time, put up with it. Oh, that's right... he didn't. No matter. Water under the bridge.

And I've been ever so glad not to go back there. Until now, when T is more-or-less living a similar situation, and therefore so am I, by proxy.

Only this time, the major decision is not about food vs. sleep - T is far more sensible than me and ensures he gets plenty of each. No, the conflict seems to be whether we as a couple will have time for sex or time for conversation, as there isn't time for both.

Anyone with solutions on a postcard - or better yet a tweet - would be most welcome.

It is nothing short of strange to come home from a work trip and find a copy of my newest book next to the bed, but then, the publisher did post a few and T does like a read before lights-out.

'Usual disclaimer applies,' I reminded him. 'If you read somehting and agree with it, then yes, it was definitely about you. If you read somehting and disagree, then of course it was a composite and not based on you at all.'

Maybe I should be a little more self-editing now, though...