Alice Caldwell-Kelly

Alice is a podcaster from London, now based in Glasgow. She is a host of Trashfuture and also the 'Well There’s Your Problem’ podcast about engineering disasters with slides, and the 'Kill James Bond!' podcast about killing James Bond.

#### **Early Life and Education**

Alice was born in leafy suburban south London in 1991, the year the UK invaded Iraq for the last time ever. Her mother and father both had boring but well-paid office jobs (remember those?) but met in a (non-outlaw) motorcycle club, thus setting up a pattern for the rest of her life that they would be cooler than their child. Alice grew up in Bromley and attended the local primary school, then was unceremoniously removed from being normal and put into the selective private School Dulwich College. She was a keen fencer (sabre), and participant in both the school's Combined Cadet Force army detachment and its Amnesty International branch, a combination that caused her absolutely no ideological dissonance. Alice achieved excellent GCSEs and was generally an extremely annoying type-A personality, whose career goal was to become an Intelligence Corps officer. You would have hated her.

Thankfully, at about this time she began to feel that she was 'some kind of gay or something, I dunno.' This went down about as well as you would imagine. She also began to experience symptoms of Brain Problems Syndrome, culminating in going completely insane, self-harming a lot and dropping out of Dulwich with no A-Levels.

#### **More Education, Scotland**

Alice then tried A-Levels again at local brutalist institution Croydon College, where she started smoking Marlboro Reds, watching annoying films and wearing a long coat everywhere. You would have hated her. She dropped out of this one too. She also had a blog. It was called 'Teenage Misogyny'.

At this point her mother announced that she was moving from London back up to her native Scotland, and invited Alice to tag along, which she did. She repeated the same trick at local modernist institution Langside College, where she was vice-president of the student council and then also dropped out without any qualifications by going insane again. Langside College then collapsed, which means they're never getting their student council hoodie back from her.

About this time, Alice fell wildly in love with Christopher Caldwell, an American social worker/writer, and forced her way through the British immigration system to marry him and move him out here. They have lived together in Glasgow since.

#### **Wait, More Education?**

After three attempts, Alice deduced that further education colleges weren't going well for her, and tried a night school access course to the University of Glasgow School of Law. Bafflingly, she graduated this, and more bafflingly, was accepted into law school, just in time to start wondering about all those weird feelings she was having about 'women'. Like, 'wanting to be one'. Too scared to self-diagnose or self-medicate, she got a referral to Glasgow's Sandyford Gender Identity Clinic with a mere eighteen month waiting list. She spent those eighteen months completing a first year of law school and getting very bored of constitutional law.

Finally, she got a first appointment with a psychiatrist, who correctly identified that she was depressed and therefore refused to prescribe hormone treatment. Alice went back and forth through an additional year of appointments, most of which seemed to be about whether she was wearing a dress that day and if she cried when she jerked off, before at long last getting her grubby hands on the goods. She is still attempting to become the arbitrary level of skinny required for genital surgery.

Transition is a wild ride and as such, the Brain Problems Syndrome came back, leading Alice to repeat her first year. And again. And again. And again. In total she has spent a doctoral amount of time on the first year of a bachelor's degree, such that it has sucked all the joy out of legal study and also terrified her of ever going back to full time education.

#### **The Wilderness Years**

So what's a serial dropout, mentally unwell transsexual to do? Well, firstly, become Muslim to cope, which has at time of writing has been a successful bulwark against her killing herself. Secondly, inevitably: post. Taking the Twitter name 'Alice Avizandum' after the Scots law concept of 'taking time to think about something,' a thing she herself has never done, she logged on to The Bad Website to fill her days while Chris went to work at his real job. She got in a lot of stupid fights, ran a gimmick account ('Common Trans Girl'), and generally made an irritant of herself. One day, a writer named Hussein Kesvani slid into her DMs to ask if she would be interviewed for his book about modern British Muslims. Alice said yes, and then incidentally got asked to appear on an episode of something called 'Trashfuture'. She and Hussein never did the book interview.

#### **Professional Microphone Botherer**

People seemed to enjoy Alice's contribution, and before long she was hired by Trashfuture full-time. She has spearheaded innovative new projects, most notably 'watch YouTube videos with your friends for work,' and is a highly-motivated self-starter with a strong track record of excellence. Whenever she gets bored she asks someone she likes on Twitter to start a podcast with her, which has resulted in both 'Well There's Your Problem' and 'Kill James Bond!'. Somehow, enough people like these to actually make a living, for which she is endlessly grateful. Her current priority is to put together about £20,000 in savings for various surgical and parasurgical interventions - hairline advancement, laser vision correction, grotesquerie remediation, wart shrinkage, etc. - to successfully 'pass' as an attractive woman in order to deceive the unwary. She lives in a shitty Glasgow apartment with her husband, has a coterie of mean domme girlfriends, and collects watches and police memorabilia for some reason.