Acclaimed comedian and writer Tommy Tiernan offers his unique perspective on the world at large in his column by ‘The Badger’.

I was drinking porter, bottled porter, none of that draught nonsense which is nothing more than good liquid poured into a large vessel and then fissured out through a small pipe (there’s another word for that I know), anyway I digress . . . I was drinking porter on the banks of the River Corrib with a couple of transgender Ban Garda friends of mine.

We had gone to an all male boarding school together in the psychiatric badlands of East Galway, even back then they were easy on the eye and I says to Evelyn, (used to be Maurice).

The name I says, how did you settle on the name?

She says Your one that does the weather.

On the RTE? says I.

That’s right she says, ateing an apple, I always liked her. Authoritative and responsible with a hint of mischief in her eye.

Good choice says I, good choice. And I suppose you felt the same way? I said to her pal Cusack. Cusack nodded. Evelyn and Cusack, a fine pair.

Well anyway it got me thinking that if I was to cross the gender line to the other side what name would I choose. I surveyed the inside of me mind looking for clues, sounding out various options, nothing was working.

Do you need a name? I says.

It helps. With the reinvention. Evelyn told me.

But is it not, says I, more of a revelation, more of an uncovering than a reinvention. Are you not showing the world that underneath your manhood is your womanhood and that’s who you really were all along?

I got a thundering elbow to the side of the head and thereafter a puck in the solar plexus. Evelyn.

Less o’ that, she says referring to the head and more o’ that she says referring to the gut.

Don’t get intellectual on it she says, it’s a feeling, an instinct.

Points taken. Anyway there we were, my transgender pals and I swilling drink, watching the river flow and the young bucks bucking. Swans about their business, salmon pulsing up the stream toward fish-eyed men in waders and diesel engines chugging cross the bridge.

If I was to be a woman, I said, I think I’d call meself Betheuselah.

And who would that be? says Evelyn.

Betheuselah never existed, I explained. She sounds like she may have, but it’s a madey-up name. She is something entirely new and if I was to cross the gender divide, I would not be content with a mere external change, I’d want me innards worked on too.

Go on, says Evelyn.

A womb, (a womb of one’s own) I’d like a womb.

For what purpose?

To grow things, I says.

Like what?

Asparagus, I says. You see, the growing of another person inside of yourself would seem to me to be the riskiest of affairs. I mean you wouldn’t know who you’d end up with. People are mischievous and even though you’d be related to them, they’d still have their own agenda. Far better to grow something good for you.

If everyone had a womb in which they could grow their favourite vegetable and perhaps even subsequent wombs attached to their bodies via external umbilical cords, dragging after them or hoisted on top of their heads in the fashion of noble African village women.

Without warning, Cusack expelled a fine draught of intestinal gas and Evelyn called her a legend. It brought us all back to our senses but not for long.

I was off again. I mean I suppose by extension you could suggest that connected as we are to where we are, the ties that bind not seen by the eye, that the world is our womb and that we are attached to it by an umbilical cord of needs (we wouldn’t last long in space, Sandra Bullock in her knickers) and tis not for nothing that we have the phrase Mother Earth.

Self-satisfied for a moment with this particular train of thought, I let the words hang like smoke rings in front of us, dissolving into the ether.

Have you no jokes? Evelyn asked.

That’s all I’m good for. Jokes. They use me for light relief before they go catching criminals for cash.

Did you hear about the fella who went in to get his own death mask while he was still alive? He was getting a head of himself.

They didn’t like that one.

What would you call someone who can speak with the dead and lives quite contentedly in the realms between both worlds? A happy medium.

C’mon we’ll go, says Cusack.

One more says I, one more. The colours that we see in the world have more to do with the type of eye we have rather than what’s actually out there in front of us. You may look at the same flower as a dog but because we have different types of eyes, we see different coloured flowers. When me and you look at a flower we see different things because I’m colour blind and you are not. Colour exists in you and not in the flower. The world may in fact be entirely colourless and we only think it is because of the nature of our eye’s. Colour, I said, clearing me throat for this one, is a pigment of our imagination.

We’re done here, says Evelyn.

Good luck girls.

Good luck the Badger, they replied.