Ten Random Facts About Me

1 From the age of 5 til 15 I was legally required to attend a series of state sponsored institutions which effectively brainwashed me (although I now suspect that a lot of the programming was already in place by the time I entered them at the age of 5). In recent years I have made two attempts to de-programme myself from the effects of this period of my life but I am beginning to wonder if this is not perhaps the work of a lifetime.

2 I am supposed to be related to William Shakespeare. There is a family tree on my mother's side that shows Shakespeare's sister, Joan, married William Hart. My mother was a Hart.

3 From the age of 6 I have periodically suffered from some kind of altered state of perception, usually just before I fall asleep, in which I seem to have a sudden inspired understanding of eternity or infinity. This is always instantly and unbearably panic inducing and makes me shout for my mother or whoever is closest to me in my life. There's not actually any real hope that my mother or anyone else on the planet can make me feel better but the act of shouting is usually enough to jolt me out of the feeling. One week when I was fifteen I experienced these terrors so much and not just at night that I feared it was about to destroy my life and that I would either kill myself or have go to a lunatic asylum. In a normal waking state I can think about and conceptualise these topics without being in the least perturbed.

4 For years I found it hard to follow films and continually annoyed and baffled my friends by whispering questions like Who's he again? What are they doing? What's happening now? It was only in my late twenties when I started to seriously watch and analyse films and scripts that I felt like I was starting to get them like everyone else seemed to naturally. I'm not sure why this is. Perhaps the archetypal western narrative plot structure didn't imprint on me at the same early age as usually happens because I grew up watching relatively little tv and didn't go to the cinema until I was 15 or maybe my perception is just naturally not narrative driven.

5 When I was five years old an older girl called Alison Tailor told me I was funny and that I should be a comedian when I grew up. It was the first time I'd heard the word comedian and I wasn't sure what it meant. Years later I'm still not sure.

6 I have little interest in what the world calls politics. I subscribe to Frank Zappa's definition of it as 'the entertainment arm of Industry'. To me politics especially as it is reported in the media is at best an unconscious pantomime and at worst a deliberate confidence trick. That doesn't mean I'm not interested in the issues that politics supposedly deals with. It fact it means that I am interested in the issues that politics supposedly deals with. The way the world is run, who gets and does what are issues I find very interesting but the entertainment aspect of this, the who said and did what bit, whilst undoubtedly as entertaining as any good soap opera or tv drama, seems ultimately trivial. Perhaps politics is an example of how a result or an effect can sometimes be mistaken for a cause. Most people appear to think that governments, politicians, voters have the power to take actions that change the world. I see this as true only in the very weak sense that almost everything is both an effect and a cause of something. To me politics is an utterly unconscious and mechanical effect of the more fundamental underlying structures of psychology. Ultimately, like Gurdjieff, I guess I think that that everything happens and nobody really does anything, least of all individuals in nominated positions of large institutions. Politicians don't shape the world, the world shapes politicians. Ah... but 'WHAT is the world, O soldiers?'

7 When I am not either intentionally directing my consciousness or totally absorbed in something the default screen saver mind activity in my head is imaginary football commentary featuring myself as the main player in a Liverpool team. When I was younger it was cricket commentary with me as the opening bowler for England.

8 I shared a bed with a man for two months.

9 When I was 18 a friend and I drove 4000 miles across Europe in a 1975 Austin Allegro Estate. The exhaust pipe fell off in Milan and we deliberately replaced it with an amusingly large chimney exhaust from a lorry that had the effect of making the car look like some kind of massive French horn on wheels. We drove around the plains of northern Italy like that for a month, often dressed in black wigs. When we ran short of money in Caorle on the Adriatic coast near Venice we busked, my friend on the guitar and me dancing.

10 I once made my wife laugh so much she had an epileptic fit. We've since separated.