English eccentricity

If there’s a standard scale for sanity, and there probably is but who wants a search history that can be used against them in court as a result of their looking up ‘am I normal?’ on Google so I’m not going to attempt to find out, then, like metric and imperial, there will be one scale for the rich and another for the rest of them…I mean us.

Let’s call the scale of sanity for the ordinary man in the street, or indeed Jasper Carrott’s nutter on the bus, the Metric scale.  A reading of zero means that you can pass for ordinary, you don’t twitch or drool and you don’t feel the need to perform a cleansing ritual after meeting a gypsy.  At the top end of the scale, 100, are people who are so insane they occupy positions of power, or kill people, or indeed both.  It’s around the 60 to 70 range that things get interesting, that’s where your, let’s face it, more amusing mental health issues are pitched, like believing what you read in the Daily Mail.  Tracking back towards zero we pass through the superstitious range, which encompasses everything from paying actual money for a palm reading ‘you are very gullible’, to wearing your lucky shirt on match day.  Oh, and by the way, one day you will realise that because you always clean and iron your lucky pulling shirt, those actions make it your lucky pulling shirt.

For the rich, the Imperial scale covers three main ranges.  Firstly, there is fucked up, which is what happens to an eighteen year old when they come into a trust fund.  They spend the fund initially on drugs and booze, and thereafter on trying to quit drugs and booze, possible solutions including therapy, The Priory, or a cult.  Secondly, there is inbred.  If you can inherit the family chin, stands to reason you can also inherit the family kinks in the cognitive reasoning, including the firm belief that it is still acceptable to use the term ‘darkie’ if you lower your voice while doing so.

Then at the top of the scale we have eccentricity.

Madness plus money equals eccentricity.  If you wanted to marry a goat you would be, depending on the community you lived in, laughed out of town or stoned to death.  Regrettably, there are also some corners of geography inhabited by people that would probably apportion some of the blame to the goat.  These are the same sort of people who, in conversations about women’s rights, make the sort of comments that give you the distinct sensation that your arse is clenching into your hat.  If you have a title, an estate and, and this is the important bit, some say over who gets to be vicar in the parish you own, the one with a charming Norman church, a rather lovely rectory and no knife crime at all, then it’s pretty likely that the bans will shortly be posted for the forthcoming nuptials of the Earl of Kinkey and Miss Willamina Goat.

Let’s be clear, being eccentric is fabulous, as long as you don’t hurt anyone in, for instance, your scientific experiments largely involving melons, you’re beloved.

Ever had a day, a whole day, when you have not got out of your pyjamas?  You have moved from bed to sofa to fridge to sofa to bed in one glorious relaxed manner, and you’re not even ill?  Fabulous, isn’t it.  Now imagine not getting out of bed for a week because you can’t be arsed.  That’s eccentric.

Working class and in Tesco in your jim jams?  Out, you fucking scum!  Titled and in Fortnum and Mason in a dressing gown?  Of course you are, you don’t need a wallet, you’ve got an account at the place.

The English tolerate eccentricity because, by and large, it’s more entertaining than harmful.  An aristocrat with a thing for trains may indulge his obsession by building his own railway, miniature or, my preference, full sized, on his estate.

Eccentricity is not madness, it is more refined.  It is the state of mind that causes one to be entertaining and harmless, and leads to one being fondly admired.

All about ocd...no, that should be OCD, get it RIGHT!

A lot of work is taking place to de-stigmatise mental illness.

This work is taking place on two fronts.

The first is to get people to recognise that mental illness is a real thing and just because the person suffering from this sort of illness doesn’t require one of those fucking mobility scooters to terrorise people with in shopping malls because their Greggs-related-condition makes walking difficult, does not mean it doesn’t exist.

The second front is to educate people about mental illness, essentially, not all people with mental illness are nutters, some are escapologists who wear straightjackets as part of their acts, but most people who suffer from mental illness genuinely need help.  Of course, there are a few people who are just fucking nutters.  Symptoms include reading the Daily Mail and being able to hold forthright views on immigration.  There is no cure.

Alistair Campbell tweets a lot about mental health.  Of course, as a megalomaniac who helped start a war he’s probably an expert and is part of a support network for people who, in another age, would have had an undersea volcano base and a taste for world domination, instead of just a Twitter account, so probably knows whereof he speaks.

There are many flavours of mental illness but by far my favourite is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.  Or should that be Obsessive, Compulsive Disorder?  Damn!  I would Google it but have had my allocated five minutes of internet time today before the Voices started.

The thing about OCD is this, it’s bollocks.

It is.

It really is.

It really, really is.

OCD is such bollocks that the cure for ODC should be a bloke who grabs the person suffering from OCD by the lapels of their no doubt meticulously ironed shirt and bellows ‘FUCKING PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER!’.  I reckon even the bastards at NICE would fund that.

Oh, and please don’t start in about the benefits of OCD.  So, you have a potential flatmate who tells you that they are so clean that they are practically OCD?  Best case scenario, they quietly run a vacuum cleaner over you while you sleep.  Worst case – they are suddenly sole tenant in a flat that is forensically clean.

In my five minutes of Googling, I learned that OCD is all about control and ritual.  Apparently, people who suffer from OCD do things (rituals) to prevent terrible things from happening.

So here’s my question…why is it only preventative?  Why not positive?  Why doesn’t a ritual result in a lottery win?

And here’s the litmus test.  OK.  You have mild OCD.  So does your pilot.  Before boarding a flight, one of you doesn’t do your ritual.  Does the ‘plane crash?

NO!  Of course it fucking doesn’t!  A 747 is not going to be kept aloft because you sang ‘fly me to the moon’ under your breath whilst checking your baggage.

Obviously, we need to take mental health seriously.  Even OCD.  And I do.  Hence…the app!

Because ODC is fucking ridiculous.  Rituals which are, essentially, a profoundly exaggerated sense of self importance, are (serious face) tragic when they affect and afflict the lives of others but are (more serious face) bloody debilitating on a day-to-day basis.

So here’s my idea for an app.

OCD swap.

(Ooh, genius idea, we could get it fronted by Noel, the last 70’s DJ standing!)

OCD sufferers swap rituals with each other.  So, have to say ‘monkey’ 500 times whilst spinning counter clockwise otherwise that reactor you’re responsible for will go tits up…but it’s your daughter’s wedding and you don’t have the fucking time?  No problem, GingerMum1974 has to have her first sip of tea of the day from a mug with the handle turned left.

OCD swap puts NukeDad and GingerMum in touch with one another, he does her ritual, presses ‘done’, she does his, presses ‘done’ and they are both good to go for the day.

And the best bit…neither actually does the other’s ritual!

Why?  Because people with OCD know it’s fucking mental.  But can’t stop it.  But are buggered if they will let it blight other’s lives.

Oh, and checking Facebook every 30 minutes doesn’t make you OCD.  It makes you needy.

Very superstitious

10 October was world mental health day.  The statistic being bandied about is that one in ten people suffer from some form of mental health problem.  More likely the truth is that one in ten people suffer from a mental health problem that has been categorised and so can be diagnosed, the rest of humanity simply has aspects of their personality that they either manage to keep carefully concealed or which have not yet been nailed down in a medical text book.

There was, a few months ago, a discussion about mental health in parliament where a number of MP’s bravely spoke up about suffering from, for example, depression or obsessive compulsive disorder, although I noticed that none of them thought it was necessary to describe themselves as suffering from rampant meglomania.

Raising awareness of mental illness is part of the issue, removing the stigma is another which is why I thought that my idea for OCD Top Trumps was a great one until I was informed by the makers of Top Trumps that this was not only in very poor taste, but also that without a movie franchise to tie the product into, sales were likely to be poor.  I went on to argue that perhaps the solution was to tie the mental health edition into the ‘Top Gear’ brand in some way, as the continuing buoyant sales of Jeremy Clarkson’s paperbacks must surely be the result of a compulsion on the part of the shopper that defies reason.  I have yet to hear back.

While there is certainly work to be done in identifying and combating mental health problems, it’s interesting that the same is not done to try and deal with superstition.  This is possibly because superstition has a much, much better PR and marketing department and even though a fist full of anti-depressants may look colourful, they are unlikely to taste as good as the chocolate available in quantity at the end of the month.

31 October is that celebration of superstition, Halloween, and as well as the only thing more fun than chocolate, which is themed chocolate, appearing next to the advent calendars in the seasonal aisle, pumpkins have started popping up at the grocers.

Was there ever a vegetable as sinister as the pumpkin?  This is, of course, because of the connotations the vegetable has with Halloween.  Prior to the fashion of carving the pumpkin, the only time the British public had to deal with a terrifying orange face was when (insert name of television personality with fake tan addiction here) appeared on our screens.  There is something genuinely unsettling about a vegetable that is grinning at you in a knowing way and that has extended to pumpkins being rather unsettling when they are in their as yet uncarved state, it’s like they are hiding something.  Scary.

Of course the British took to the pumpkin head.  The British love superstition, we love superstition so much that we even call pubs ‘The Green Man’ - and naming a pub is more important than choosing the right name for your first born, because while little Clit can always use his middle name when he grows up, nobody is ever going to drink in the ‘White Van and Wanker’.  Superstition connects us with our heritage, that’s why people have a horse shoe above their door and shove cats up ladders or something.

And possibly why so many versions of the Green Man are available in plaque form as decorations for the outside of the home.  And hats off to the manufacturer, they have not compromised in the slightest - the look they have gone for is a pagan woodland spirit, and not even the sort who would safely lead a lost traveller back to the path, but rather one who would take you by the hand and lead you to the dark heart of the forest.  Because if you think a gurning vegetable is frightening, that’s as nothing compared to a bloke with leaves growing out of his ears.

We’ll never get rid of superstition, even if we wanted to the pumpkin growers and confection manufacturers would conspire to keep it going.  Or am I being paranoid?