How to be incredibly popular, like me

Sociably anti-social or anti-socially sociable?

I used to copy Joe Dunmore. I don’t know how he put up with me for so long. I’d have been totally freaked out if the roles were reversed.

I used to copy the tutors at Art College. I thought I had a licence to critique other people’s work, so I’d go round the class as the tutor did.

How to turn an entire year against you.

I copied the comedians at the production company. That didn’t go down well either.

I can judge an atmosphere in a room but I can’t pick up on social mores. The rules, in other words.

I was overfamiliar at the first stonemasonry workshop I worked at. Not very wise. There was a Lord of The Flies-style pecking order there so people hated me.

They were wankers anyway.

What is going on?

I don’t have Borderline Personality Disorder.

Do I have Autism and/or ADHD? This would seem the most probable.

I’ve masked and copied for years, stared out of the window or even watched the laundry churn around in the washing machine when I was little for tens of minutes at a time. 

I wanted to be liked so I copied other kids, always chasing the most popular kids, hanging by their coat tails.

I always maintained when I was being assembled they took my frontal lobe out of a skip. It's gone from bad to worse with FTD.

I could never revise. I would dust my bedroom meticulously with a 1/2” wide flat paintbrush instead.

Boring lesson? Most of them are. Why pay attention when you can look out of the window and watch Ernie the caretaker hypnotically going up and down mowing the grass?

In my twenties I'd flip from being scared of my own shadow to periods of intense confidence, so pleased in my own skin I’d be frequently approached by women in pubs and clubs.

It wasn’t an act - I really did feel that confident. Borderline arrogance.

And then it left. 

Thankfully for the best part these days, I am confident, or rather, adequate, in my own skin. I am me. It’s taken so long to get to know me, to even like me.

Those first few (four!) decades were more difficult than I’d have liked. And no person or mechanism to label and treat those symptoms, unlike today.

But I think it’s flipped over - harsh lessons learned stay for your entire life. If you wrap someone in cotton wool they never really learn and may expect the world to bend over backwards to accommodate them.

We do the young no favours by doing this. You still have to go out there, try, fail, get up and get on with it and learn in the process.

No one else is going to do it for you.

The 80s

Yuppies, vulgarity, venality, shoulder pads, shaggy perms with highlights, spoilers on Ford Escorts, greed is god, white stilettos, aerobics, ankle warmers, headbands, bubblegum pop, mullets, flicks, drum machines, Reagan, Thatcher, trickle-down, ra-ra skirts, deely-boppers, smiley faces, Tennants Extra, Marlboro cigarettes, pop videos, acid house, Falklands War, Miners’ Strike, Arthur Scargill, Neil Kinnock, Noel Edmunds, ITV, Blind Date, Duran Duran, Essex, Spandau Ballet, gold lamé, Wham, Goth, trendy, rasta, mod, casual, new romantic, punk, met’ler, psychobilly, hippy, skin, raver, Testarossa, Sierra, A-Team, Transformers, He-Man, Dynasty, Dallas, Care Bears, Kylie and Jason, Neighbours, Eastenders, Joan Collins, Roland Rat, I’m all right Jack.

You think this is cool????

Yuck.

Thank god the 90s came immediately afterwards to take the taste away.

Winchester

I visited my old friend Rupert, his refrigerator-sized son (my godson), Sophie and daughter.

On Tuesday Rupert and I left Sophie and the kids (who don't like old stuff) and went to Winchester. I’d last been there 6 or 7 years ago on a weekend with J. 

It’s quintessentially English in a Country Life or This England way. You’d bring North American friends here, Bath and The Cotswolds.

Ancient, civilised, tranquil, refined, orderly, quaint, pleasant. So much architectural history everywhere.

We had lunch in a lovely old pub called the Wykeham Arms. Great pint of Dark Star Hop Head (3.4%) - perfectly kept beer. 

Then the Cathedral itself. Wonderful hotch-potch of architecture. Thankfully the diocese had run out of money transforming the Romanesque into early English, so it just stops half way through. So much wonderful work there - frescos and polychomatic stone all over the place. Great to see the puritans didn't get to everything.

Lierne vaulting - NOT fan vaulting!

Romanesque period: built 1079 - 1150s. 

These are only 16" high. Amazing.

Wonky Winchester - it sank at one end.

The RoodScreen - keep you lot out!

Gurt nave.

18th century marble statuary

Gurt wall painting.

Saxon?

This is an effigy of God - seriously. There are about 4 in the UK

Romanesque, innit?

Lovely door - great colour combi 

Pisspoor repair.

Gurt flying buttresses.

The Culture of Work

Why aren’t these people dead yet?

Having lots of video playback in my head- situations I regret. One period that always plays back like a nightmare, is the first job I got in London when I returned in 1998, 27 years ago. 

Until I got FTD I’d barely thought about it. But in recent years it’s been gnawing away at me like some disease. This particular period of my life is primarily what causes me to randomly shout out expletives. 

I’d decided to check out what the world was like outside masonry so I quit my job and moved up to London, living on the floor of my mate's living room for a couple of weeks until I got sorted out.

I'd lived in Wells for 2 1/2 years and was bored out of my head as all my friends had left and I was in a dead-end job as I saw it, earning £200 net a week in a stonemasonry workshop. 

Nothing to do, and no one to do it with.

I'd really lost my confidence and at the time didn't realise that I was in the middle of a long depression.

I’d also just moved into a bedsit in Crouch End and was having a less than satisfactory social life. I thought I’d reconnect with my old London friends as it had only been 2 1/2 years since I’d lived there, but people had moved on to South London and in their social lives and I found myself rather isolated.

I got a job in a TV production company. I was quite excited as it was a company whose programmes I liked. So I got the job, met all the stars, and thinking I was in with them was pretty overfamiliar. 

One thing you don't do in these companies is get too pally with the 'talent.'

As a runner or dogsbody, it's your job to do everyone's bidding, essentially as a slave. People in the media industry proclaim their status by being as rude as possible to the runner, as you can't answer back and I was even earning less in London than I was as a mason in Somerset.

In retrospect I think this all points to a failure in my social behaviour which was always present - not knowing how to behave in certain situations - when to shut my gob and when to toe the line. 

As I've said before, I think my frontal lobe was pulled out of a skip when I was being assembled.

I made a few mistakes as a runner, said some inappropriate things to management and 'talent' and overall did myself no favours.

I had some bad luck too to be fair.

The flip side was the ugliness of the media industry - a public school bullying culture, where I was insulted to my face and spoken to as an idiot, which of course I'm not, even though maybe my behaviour had let me down at times.

It all started at the top with the CEO who was quite the tyrant. He didn't like me from the get-go. 

He was a classic public school bully.

And it makes sense, as the British public schools used the fagging system, whereby younger pupils went through a rights-of-passage as servants to the older boys and were often subject to beatings and bullying. 

These are largely schools which produced the kind of psychopaths who would have been sent out to brutalise the various peoples of the British Empire. With the Empire gone, where else would they go but The City and Television?

It got so that my mental health went from general lowness to rock-bottom. After a month or 2 I had to take deep breaths before going into the office building: I just couldn't do anything right for them. 

The abuse was relentless, and all the while I blamed myself for not coming up to par.

One evening I had a minor breakdown, and everyone was just either ignoring or laughing at me.

One person I did get on with there I confided in. She was a development manager and said she really didn't understand what had happened and that they'd got me completely wrong. She gave me a list of 12 people to contact in the industry and to mention her name. 

Within 2 weeks I had left for another much better job thanks to her kindness. 

Apparently they missed me when I'd gone.

Fuck 'em.

I still beat myself up about how pathetic I was in not standing up for myself and letting people treat me like shit. This is what happened and I've never told anyone any of this. I hope by writing it down this somehow acts as a catharsis and is the start of the end of these horrible memories that keep haunting me.

Because as you can tell I still feel ashamed.

I guess I just didn't have the backbone during that particular period. Especially when your opinion of your self has flat-lined.

Years later and everything seems to point to me having ADHD and some other neuro-divergent behaviours. 

Would they behave like that in this day and age? 

Probably. The media industry outside the corporations is largely unregulated.

Self-Employment

Since getting my diagnosis I now stand up for myself more than ever. Most people back down when you do that.

I guess I feel 'what have I got to lose?'

(I know - but this is relatively new to me... )

It took me until 36 to realise that I couldn't work for other people. 

I would be lost in a vortex where my life depended on trying to please.

I wouldn't stand up for myself either.

I lived, ate and breathed work. I could rarely get away from it. It pervaded my dreams and any waking thoughts, catching me unawares. And these were trivial low-paid jobs too.

In the case of some employers, I ended up exploding at them like a super-volcano of pent-up fury.

Other times if a few of us were unhappy about something I would be the one speaking up in a meeting, and turn to my brothers for support who would all be staring at their shoes.

Oh. it's like that is it?

Thanks. I know who you are.

Being self-employed was initially terrifying, but it was worth it. It means you can listen to your Spidey-Sense and not take on certain jobs. Also, you can call out a bad idea and it doesn't matter so much about the ego being bruised as they're not your boss.

You can tell a contractor to fuck off - or tell a client you're not interested in a job because they're a nutter.

I had a good guy working with me for a lot of the time. In the end he was doing about 75% of the work as my brain just couldn't get in gear.

There are more people who should be self-employed. I know who they are, even if they don't.

I miss my friend Mat

I used to enjoy my chats where Mat would rationalise the world, break down the chaos and let me see clearly what was going on. 

He'd do it really quickly too, which was great as we could have more time for drinking and laughter.

How many people do you have who you can really talk to, completely unhindered, uncensored? 3? 4?

People like Mat leave a big void. It's only when I look to the phone to reach out to a friend that I become all too conscious of that loss.

I think of Suzy, rolling up her sleeves and getting on with a director-level job, running the house, walking the dogs and taking the girls to all their sports meetings and social appointments!

And the girls getting on with their lives. 

How bloody senseless his death is. 

That's real loss, that's devastation. Much worse than dementia.