Marked for life

It seems to be conventional wisdom among therapists that your experience of childhood will have enduring repercussions throughout your adult life. The way you were brought up leaves its mark in many ways.

But not everyone agrees that childhood is that significant in your character development. Some would say that's just an excuse for poor adult behaviour, and that it's entirely up to you what you make of your adulthood.

I strongly believe that your adult behaviour is greatly influenced by your childhood experience, and that it's very hard to throw off that experience. The attitudes and assumptions you're exposed to as a child become deeply embedded and can affect your whole personality.

It seems obvious to me that my woefully inadequate childhood led directly to me being a rather clueless adult. My parents and my boarding school between them left me with poor social skills, low self-confidence, repressed emotions and dismal self-awareness. I've spent my life trying to overcome those failings, but with limited success.

The sceptics would tell me my childhood is past history and has no influence whatever on my adult life. Instead of harping on about my childhood, I should just forget about it, focus on the present and grab life's opportunities.

Well, I have indeed grabbed life's opportunities, but I'm still conscious that other people are often better-performing adults than myself, quite confident about all sorts of things that still make me nervous and hesitant.

Or so it seems. It may be that their apparent confidence and social poise is only skin-deep, and underneath they're equally nervous. They're just good at hiding their trepidation. Or hiding their blunders.

In the final analysis, I've made the most of my life and had lots of fun on the way. That's good enough for me.

University of life

How true that formal education only goes so far and most of our education is from the university of life. Anyone who imagines they will leave school fully equipped for adulthood will be rapidly disabused.

When I look back at my schooldays, it's laughable how many essential adult skills they never taught me and how naive and ignorant I was until I enlarged my education by other means.

I may have absorbed plenty of French, Latin, Mathematics and Chemistry, but my awareness of anything other than academic was abysmal.

One glaring omission was any knowledge of women. I went to two single-sex schools and saw little of the other sex before I started work. It took me a while to adjust to these strange beings with their very different view of life.

I never learnt any practical skills apart from woodwork (Why woodwork? You may well ask). I'm still an ignorant bungler when it comes to cookery, clothing repairs and alterations, painting, electrics, plumbing, or car mechanics. I wasn't taught anything about money matters like banking, mortgages, insurance, wills or tax returns. All those things I had to find out for myself over the years.

And what of all those social skills I only picked up after leaving school - dating, sexual relationships, holding down a job, dealing with difficult people, being true to myself, being discreet, and how to behave at things like leaving dos, marriages, births and funerals. About the only social skills I acquired at school were dodging bullies and routinely exposing my naked body.

Probably the most useful skill the university of life has taught me is critical thinking. When I was young I was remarkably gullible and would happily soak up other people's ideas. Gradually I learnt to look at those ideas more carefully and see if they actually made sense or not. An awful lot of them didn't.

A skill that's been much more useful than chemistry.

Absent friends

A lot of women complain they can't find a suitable man - either they're stuck with a useless dickhead or they know a really bright, considerate guy who's giving them the brush-off.

Luckily I've fared pretty well with sexual relationships, but I have a similar problem when it comes to making friends - they're either liabilities or non-starters.

I really envy those people who have a wide circle of friends to give them support and encouragement at times of personal crisis or triumph. Right from my childhood I've never stumbled on the simple knack of forming deep and lasting friendships that go beyond the initial chatty bonhomie and light-hearted banter. There's a connective threshold I've never managed to cross.

I've tried often enough. Plenty of people have struck me as potential friends, people whose company would be rewarding and inspiring, but if we got together at all, too often it would be for weeks or months at best. Then inevitably something would go adrift, our meetings would lose their impetus and we would gradually lose touch.

On the few occasions when a friendship has lasted longer, the seeming friend's chronic unreliability, neediness or plain craziness has finally turned it sour.

I feel embarrassed and bemused that I lack this simple universal skill so routine to everyone else. It's discomforting when other people announce casually that they're "going out with friends" or they've "got a friend in a million", and I'm unable to reciprocate with my own happy tales of friendship. I always suspect they're secretly pitying me for my backward personality.

But no matter how much I watch other people effortlessly chattering to their friends, trying to work out how it's done, I'm left as baffled as ever by their social dexterity - like someone who's tone-deaf trying to understand music.

There it is, though, and I've learnt to be philosophical about my blind spot and to appreciate those gifts I do have. There are far worse traits than a failure to connect.

And at least I have one solid, enduring relationship that transcends friendship and gives so much extra meaning and significance to every aspect of my life. Jenny and I clicked instantly and we never looked back. A wee miracle.