My best friend Beezie has informed me that I’m getting more and more like Edith Sitwell. Apparently it’s mainly the pointy nose, but also the odd outfits. Then my dear old Ma gently responded the other day to a passing comment in which I’d had cause to refer to myself as normal, “I don’t think anyone would call you normal, sausage,” and a beloved school friend I’ve known since I was eleven introduced me at a Christmas party as “Bev: lovely but bonkers.”

Well, it’s news to me I must say. Rather a shock actually. I thought I was a fairly straight forward type. Either I know myself not or everyone else is guilty of something of a misjudgement. I was disheartened to stumble upon Henry David Thoreau’s words: “it is as hard to see one’s self as to look backwards without turning around.” I think he may be right. But then I thought, bugger it, I don’t care. I don’t care how bonkers people might think that I am as long as I am my own bonkers.

And besides I’ve had a technological break through. I’ve downloaded the entire School of Saatchi series off the iplayer. I had been trying, unsuccessfully and possibly slightly foolishly, to locate it on You Tube, until a stranger at a party whose TV had inexplicably exploded, introduced me to the iplayer. Now I love the iplayer. You can see informative art related stuff without having to live with that monstrous jailer nagging on day and night encouraging you to stick pins in your eyes. It’s not an avalanche, it’s a torturous drip, drip, drip. A dealer in class A drugs. An insidious dominatrix. And only insidious now because we’re so used to it we can’t see it. Rather like oneself, it has become impossible to make out through its own numbing fug. By comparison he in the sky has nothing when it comes to expressing the sigh of the oppressed creature.

I suppose my venom towards it must represent some sort of a fear of anaesthetisation. It’s true. I don’t want to go to sleep. I don’t want someone else making my decisions for me. I don’t want someone else telling me what to wear, and think and do and say. I don’t want to internalise the world around me until I become nothing but a parrot, unaware that none of my thoughts are my own, and unaware that the only thing that drives me is my fear. Fear of life and fear of death. It does that to you. It sucks the love from you and replaces it with fear. I should know because I watched not one but one and a half Midsomer Murders over Christmas and let me tell you it was one and a half Midsome Murders too many. Why does everyone die at Christmas? It’s a Yuletide stitch up bigger than Santa and his fat coca cola branded knickers.

Henry David Thoreau also said, “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears.”