If only

I’m a confirmed oddball. Most of my opinions are way outside the mainstream. Which can make life uncomfortable and make it hard to connect with other people. They want to pin me down but they aren’t able to.
 
So there’s always this lingering feeling that if I could just be “normal” life would be a lot easier. I’d have more in common with other people and I’d have a much smoother ride.
 
Utter nonsense of course. Firstly, what the hell is “normal”? According to who? By what definition? I’m chasing after something as slippery as an eel.
 
Secondly, who says being “normal” is any easier than being an oddball? We all have our fair share of disasters and tragedies whatever our personality. If I imagine some blissful scenario where I just sail effortlessly through life, I’m sure I would be sadly disappointed.
 
But I suppose we all imagine some ideal world where our personal failings and quirks are magically discarded and suddenly life is a bowl of cherries.
 
It ain’t going to happen.

Eccentric, moi?

When I was a boy, people were commonly seen as "eccentric" and such individuals stuck out a mile for their eccentricity - meaning their strange and unconventional conduct.

Nowadays the term has virtually lost all meaning, since eccentricity is commonplace. So many people - youngsters in particular - are now conspicuous by their strange clothes, strange behaviour, strange beliefs and strange aspirations that they just aren't remarkable any more.

It's routine for people to have elaborate tattoos, multiple piercings, flamboyant clothes and extreme political views. We think nothing of it, we see them as quite normal.

Oldies are more conventional and some will still stick out as eccentrics, like the moany old codger who hates the neighbours, and they're very noticeable oddballs. Oldies in general still go for a fairly orthodox appearance - no tattoos or piercings or tee shirts with controversial slogans.

It was unusual when I was young to see any kind of "eccentric". We might see the odd person talking to themself or cursing everyone in sight or collecting garden gnomes, but that was about it.

The only obvious eccentric I can think of in this immediate neighbourhood is the guy who walks down the street trailing a suitcase. Clearly he isn't heading for the airport because he appears with his suitcase every day. Which naturally sets us wondering what's in the suitcase. The proceeds of a bank robbery? His worldly possessions? The manuscript of a book?

Of course we can't possibly ask him, that would be most intrusive and impertinent. Maybe one day the suitcase will fall open and all will be revealed.

Go with the flow

Anxiety is seen as something very abnormal that we shouldn't be experien-cing. The assumption is that it needs to be banished or at least greatly reduced. But is that right? We live in an increasingly uncertain world in which the future is far from predictable, so isn't anxiety a rather normal reaction to what's going on around us?

There's climate breakdown, the invasion of Ukraine, the cost of living crisis and the crumbling NHS, just to pick the most obvious problems.

Yet we're told we should be free of anxiety and trundling along happily in our little domestic bubble, not paying too much attention to what's happening in the rest of the world. Just go with the flow and follow your instincts.

But if more and more people are saying they suffer from acute anxiety, doesn't that suggest that anxiety is actually a normal reaction and that calmness and serenity (or whatever is the opposite of anxiety) are not normal at all?

In which case, what needs adjusting is not our individual reactions, which are perfectly healthy, but the world around us that's causing those reactions?

I've been an anxious person for decades, and no matter what I do to lessen the anxiety, it stubbornly persists. And I think it's significant that I wasn't anxious as a child but very happy-go-lucky and carefree. It was only as I got older and learnt more about the wider world that my anxiety developed. Is that really so surprising?

Perhaps we should live with our anxiety as a healthy emotion and not bust a gut trying to get rid of it.

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Five comments failed to appear on my last blog post. Only two comments were missing on this one. Things are improving.

The old normality

Belfast is rapidly returning to a kind of normality after two years of pandemic restrictions. Very few people are still wearing masks or using hand sanitiser and few shops still have limits on customer numbers.

But it's not the new enlightened normality a lot of people were predicting, it's more the old restrictive normality that people wanted to change.

When we were all outside our houses on Thursday nights clapping for the health workers who were dealing with incredible pressures in an underfunded NHS, and we were aware of all the other frontline workers who were keeping society going - teachers, lorry drivers, supermarket staff, transport workers, postal workers, the emergency services - it looked like a big step forward.

A lot of us hoped that once the pandemic was over, those frontline workers would get the proper appreciation they deserved - big salary rises, special bonuses, better staffing levels, better working conditions. They would be seen as vital cogs in society and not invisible minions nobody cared about.

Some businesses did indeed compensate their employees generously, but most didn't and in fact if anything salaries and working conditions are now worse than they were pre-pandemic. Not only are wage levels still in many cases dismal but the rapidly rising cost of living is eating into them.

Most people are once again taking frontline workers for granted or even abusing them when they slip up. The politicians are setting the tone by refusing to reward them for their hard work and their high exposure to covid.

Health workers who always went the extra mile and did absurdly long shifts (and still do) are now taking out loans and using food banks in order to keep going.

The old normality is reasserting itself quite ruthlessly.

Back to normal

We all like to think that we never worry about being "normal", that we just do our own thing, however weird or unusual it might be. I mean, who wants to be "normal"?

Not true of course. The fact is that we're always striving to be normal, whether we're aware of it or not. We may all want to do our own thing, but we don't want to be seen as a total loony. Nor do we want to be seen as undignified, embarrassing or vulgar. In private we have a very precise image of an appropriate public persona and we stick to it meticulously.

We don't go around

Sobbing with grief and misery
Laughing hysterically
Talking to ourselves*
Wearing pyjamas, wedding dresses or pink polka-dot suits
Ranting about the state of the world
Picking our nose or farting
Pointing at fat people
Smashing car windows

Dignity is very important to us. We don't want to be viewed as a figure of fun, an emotional wreck, or someone hopelessly out-of-control. We want to appear sensible, mature, responsible - in a word, dignified. And what is being dignified but acting normally, behaving in a way that other sensible, mature individuals would expect us to?

The occasional lack of dignity in suitable circumstances is fair enough - at a funeral or a party or a divorce hearing. But we soon put a stop to it and reassert our everyday decorum. We'll happily defend the idea of eccentricity but actually most of us steer well clear of it. We may think Grayson Perry's fabulous but we're not going to greet our own neighbours dressed as a small girl with a lollipop.

We're all more normal than we like to think we are.

* The less said about that the better 

Dividing line

I guess we all try to steer a careful line between normality and eccentricity. On the one hand we don't want to be normal, which means boring, predictable, obvious, stereotyped and just like everyone else. On the other hand we don't want to come across as some raving loony so detached from social norms that everyone gives us a wide berth.

I don't think there's much danger of my being seen as normal, since so many of my views and feelings are way out of line with other people's, or at least other people's as depicted by newspaper headlines, cabbies and the old geezer in the supermarket.

There's a much bigger risk of my turning into a wild-eyed eccentric, frothing and fizzing about every controversial issue and becoming the local laughing-stock that nobody takes seriously. I sometimes have to rein myself in and refrain from the sort of off-the-wall opinion that makes people knit their brows in bewilderment and ask me if I'm feeling all right.

I often have to ask myself "What would a normal person do in this situation?" and then act accordingly. Or alternatively, if the thought of behaving like a normal person, even for a few minutes, makes me distinctly queasy, I just keep quiet and wait for everyone else to enlighten me as to what the normal response might be.

When I come across someone who is conspicuously, dramatically eccentric, flouting every known rule of normal conduct with manic glee, I shudder and hope fervently that my own behaviour is still well short of such lurid extremes.

It's hard to tell though. I'm eccentric enough already, what with being a feminist, a socialist, a vegetarian, a Royal Jubilee refusenik, an Olympics don't-care, a Dexter Dalwood fan. Would it take much more to propel me into the heady realms of nutterhood?

But it's all relative, isn't it? It doesn't take much to feel eccentric in this particular neighbourhood, packed as it is with God-fearing churchgoers and Union Jack-wavers. If I was camping out at some mud-drenched anti-capitalist rock festival near Stonehenge, I would probably feel completely at home - and sickeningly normal.

Footnote: I guess at the end of the day, whether I feel normal or eccentric is pretty academic, because the only thing that really matters is whether other people accept me or not.... 

Out on a limb

I'll let you in on a secret. Although, as you know, I'm a conspicuous oddball guaranteed to have quirky opinions on just about everything, there's a little part of me that hankers to be 100 per cent normal and conventional.

I'm quite used to being different. I've been out on a limb my entire life. I've never fitted easily into any familiar category - the tough guy or the doting father or the sex maniac or the sports fan. I have a natural tendency to veer off down a side street, leaving everyone else behind.

But I'm never entirely comfortable with my maverick mind, partly because I come from an extremely conservative family where unorthodox opinions were always regarded with suspicion and bemusement. I still sometimes wonder if my opinions are genuinely held or whether I assume them just to be the fly in the ointment or the devil's advocate.

So there are times when I think life would be a lot smoother, and my relationships with other people a lot easier, if I were as normal as fish and chips and as easy to understand as Mr Average. Or even Ms Average.

I wouldn't have to exhaust myself trying to explain why I'm a vegetarian or a socialist or a Buddhist or why I'm masculinity-phobic. I could happily trot out my mainstream, run-of-the-mill opinions and people's eyes would light up with eager recognition.

Of course I know it's not as simple as that. I know that in reality there's no such thing as Mr Average or a "normal" opinion and that other people can feel out on a limb as often as I do, even if they seem utterly conventional. But it doesn't stop me, in moments of desperation, trying on the clothes of Mr Regular Guy. And thinking they might even fit.
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Eeek! Jenny is still stuck at York trying to get back to Belfast, grounded for a fourth day by the volcanic ash from Iceland. Her trip to Barcelona has been cancelled. The ferries are now booked solid. How will she get home? Watch for the next gripping instalment....

Gayness corrected

It seems that the number of therapists offering to "cure" homosexuals and turn them into decent, upstanding heterosexuals is increasing.

So gay man Patrick Strudwick discovered when he investigated some of these therapists and found they even had their own professional associations dedicated to sexual "conversion".

Many of the therapists, not surprisingly, are religious believers and hold that converting gays is a kind of spiritual cleansing and rejection of sin.

One therapist claims that a third of gays treated are completely changed while another third change significantly, but he doesn't produce any recognised research to back this up.

It's been the consensus for many years that homosexuality is a deep-rooted preference that can't be "cured", unless the person was really straight all along. But religious zealots can't accept this.

One therapist told Patrick that a part of him had not developed properly, had "stayed stuck". It was a bit like being retarded, she said. He had turned to homosexuality because he had been "wounded" by inadequate parenting, and had become "confused" about his sexuality.

It's difficult to imagine any intelligent person being taken in by this vacuous mumbo-jumbo. All it's likely to do is undermine their self-confidence.

But if you're gay and not entirely secure about your preference, and maybe having to deal with anti-gay abuse and attacks, then you might succumb to the siren voices of these charlatans and their miracle cure - you too can be a normal heterosexual after all!

Why don't these fanatics just stick to prayer and proselytising instead of trying to meddle with people's minds?
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Today (Saturday February 6) is the United Nations International Day Against Female Genital Mutilation. Some 90,000 women in the UK have either been subjected to it or are likely to be. Not one person has ever been prosecuted for what is a designated criminal offence. Two organisations, Forward and Plan, are campaigning to wipe out the practice.

Arm alarm

People's irrational prejudices never cease to astonish me. There have been demands for a TV presenter to be taken off screen because her incomplete arm "might scare the children".

Twenty nine year old Cerrie Burnell was born missing the lower section of her right arm. It's not a big problem for her but it clearly is for some viewers who complain that their children are "asking difficult questions" and "might have sleep problems".

Some of the comments received on the BBC's website were so venomous they had to be removed. What on earth stirs such extreme reactions to something so harmless?

Yes, it might upset children who haven't seen such a thing before, but many aspects of everyday life can be alarming on first acquaintance. Coming to terms with these things is rather more mature than trying to hide them and pretend they don't exist.

If the critics don't think Cerrie should be showing herself to respectable society unless she looks "normal", what do they want her to do instead? Shut herself away somewhere where nobody can see her, keeping herself to herself and not embarrassing those with delicate sensibilities?

Their attitude seems to be that only those with a complete, fully functioning body are socially acceptable and anyone "incomplete" should hang their head in shame and crawl away into a corner.

Well, if anyone should hang their head in shame it's those who can't see someone like Cerrie as a human being rather than something freakish and monstrous.

I'm glad to see that thousands of people have come to her defence and said they see no problem with her TV appearances. Several charities have also supported her and regretted that people's attitudes are still so narrow-minded.

Tell you what, Cerrie. You just go, girl, and ignore the pea-brains.