The Pizza Express Incident

What I am about to tell you is a tale of misery, desperation and woe that could probably rival War and Peace, or at the very least, The Hunger Games, which is one of my favourite books as of late and is very relevant here.

This happened to me many months ago now, but I remember it all too vividly.  I was with a large group of people (around 35-40) all dining at Pizza Express; so large, in fact, that they had insisted on us ordering our food in advance so that they could close up and clean the kitchen as soon as possible.  I didn’t even need to think about what I was going to order, as I always have the ‘Padana’, which is a mixture of goats cheese and red onions.  I was very excited about the food- I had not eaten since lunchtime and it had been an extremely busy day, including being on the stage with my fellow restaurant companions.

After about ten minutes of us sitting, the pizzas began to arrive.  Every time I saw a pizza I sat up in hope, but I never heard anyone say ‘Padana’, so I waited, and I waited.  Five minutes later, looking around the table I saw that I was the only one without a pizza.  I mentioned it to the waiters and they were very confused because they’d only had one Padana on their list and they had already given it away.  I was FUMING.  Someone had stolen my pizza!!!!

This is pretty much the epitome of a first world problem, but the next 30 minutes waiting for my pizza was one of the worst 30 minutes of my life.  (Because they’d switched all the ovens off it took them that amount of time to make a new pizza for me.)  People were eating happily, standing up and giving speeches and getting increasingly drunk, while I sat there, seething with rage and bitterness.  Right after my pizza finally arrived I was forced to eat it very quickly so that I could catch my train home, still mad as Hell at the person who ruined my evening; being extremely hungry is bad enough, without watching 35 other people around you stuffing their faces.  A couple of people offered me a bit of theirs until mine came, but, alas, they all contained the flesh of either mammals or birds, which I do not eat. 

Though the incident itself wasn’t especially horrifying, and would be the kind of thing I might laugh about nowadays, at the time I was going through a terribly rough patch and the one thing that might have made my miserable existence even slightly better would have been getting my pizza on time.  Just a few days later I was doing a survey online, which asked me if I felt positive about my health, my friendships, my love life, my career or my financial situation, and I broke down and cried to Giraffe when I realised that I couldn’t tick ‘yes’ in a single column.  It’s always darkest before the dawn, however, and my life completely turned around in the next month, acquiring, in this order, Foofy, new students (therefore more money), many new friends, and a job lined up for the Autumn (which I am currently on.) Although the pain gradually faded from my life, I would occasionally think of my pizza thief: “I wonder what he/she is doing now?” I would muse, grinding my teeth and staring rigidly ahead.  Often I would be doing my normal, every day activities like brushing my teeth, or performing to a large audience, and I would think of this vile human being, and get a huge bubble of rage inside me.

The story doesn’t end there, however.  A couple of months after this horrific incident, I told Foofy the story, wanting to describe the state of depression that he'd helped bring me out of, and I saw that he had a strange expression on his face.

“What?” I asked.

“You did say a ‘Padana?’”

“That’s right.”

“…Oh dear.”

I looked at Foofy in horror, remembering that he’d been at the dinner as well, but on the other side of the room.  I'd only met him once at that point and we'd never been formally introduced.

“Did you steal my pizza?” I said ominously.

“I MIGHT have done.” Foofy replied.

As it turns out, Foofy, unlike the others at the dinner, had not pre-ordered his food, and when he’d ordered his own ‘Padana’, the waiters misunderstood and thought that the one on the list was his, but going by Foofy’s history of this kind of thing happening to him, I still blame him rather than the waiters.  NAUGHTY FOOFY!!!! It was very funny to finally uncover the identity of the person who I’d been wishing death upon for the last two months as the same person that I’d been shnoogling with.

I love you, Foofy; though several oceans separate us, I would pluck out all my fingernails and toenails one by one if that would make you happy, but NEVER GET BETWEEN ME AND MY PIZZA AGAIN!!!!

I need the Toilet! (WARNING- TMI!)

Sometimes I really resent the fact that I have a bladder- don’t get me wrong; I’m very grateful that I have one as opposed to having some kind of awful condition, but I wish humans had been invented not to have to wee at all.  Many day to day activities are completely governed by the fact that I have to be near a toilet.  If I am going on a trip, I can only have either orange juice OR hot chocolate for breakfast, which, as you can imagine, is pretty much as serious a problem as is possible to have.  There are even some drinks, like tea, that seem to go literally straight through me.  The other problem I have is that I can go from not needing the toilet at all to OHMYGODI’MGOINGTOWEEMYSELF in the space of just a few minutes.  On tour, we have very long trips in our van, and I have taken to going to the toilet every time we stop, whether I need it or not.

This has worked for the most part, but the other day I had an almost-disaster.  Coming up to a town in Italy, I knew that I needed the toilet, but we could actually see the town, so I knew it wouldn’t be long.  Besides, we were stuck in traffic, so even if I'd said I couldn’t have gone anyway.  Because there was nothing to be done about it, I didn’t mention my desperation until it was too late.  Thankfully this story does not end in me weeing myself in a van, but the fact that I didn't mention my complaint for a long time reminded me distinctly of this incident when I was very small:

I went through a period of being car sick when I was young where even the mere prospect of a long journey or simply smelling the inside of the car would put me on the edge of vomiting.  I seem to remember that both my sister and I would complain of feeling 'car sick' before we'd even left the house.  Anyway, moving back to a different kind of bodily fluid, I was desperate for the toilet, and the traffic was moving about a metre a minute, if that.  45 minutes later, we had only just arrived into the town and I was the most desperate I have ever been.

It’s funny, needing to go to the toilet- it’s painful, absolutely, but it's worse than mere pain as it consumes your entire body and mind and sends you utterly potty.  (If you’ll pardon the pun!) I was told by my van-mate later that he was really worried about me because I looked to be in severe distress- whether he was sympathetic about my pain or merely worried that I'd soak all his worldly possessions in urine is neither here nor there, but I don’t remember much from the agonising 20 minutes that we spent driving through the town at 5mph dodging various people on bicycles and pedestrians that obviously were not used to cars being on these roads.  I recall that I tried to comfort myself with some Leonard Cohen, but his soothing, husky tones only made things worse.  After a while, I realised that if I didn’t do something in 20 seconds, I was going to wet myself. 

I asked for the van to be stopped, whereupon I said- “don’t worry, I’ll find the hotel!” Not even knowing what it was called.  Thankfully, somebody reminded me to take my phone with me.  Staggering deliriously into an ITALIAN restaurant in ITALY, I ran, wide-eyed, up to the first waiter I saw, and almost yelled:

He said he didn’t, but I asked: “Kanne ich seine toiletten habe bitte?” Which I think means “Can I please have your toilet?” But thankfully he understood me and I ran for the door.  My wee lasted for over a minute.

Coming out of the restaurant, I was faced with the glorious sights and sounds of Italy, and thought to myself- “life feels GOOD right now.” Like I was on some kind of drug (they should market a drug that always makes you feel like you’ve just done a wee- I think it’d be a top seller!) I happily noticed that the van had only moved 8 metres in the time that I was in the restaurant.  I got back into the van, realised what a fool I had made of myself and remained almost silent for the rest of the journey.  The smile didn’t go off my face for hours, however.  

On Tour

Now that I am devoted to travelling around Europe for the next 7 months, these seem to be the main recurring motifs in the symphony of my life:

1.   Never knowing where my toothpaste is

EVERY SINGLE TIME I get to a new hotel, which is almost every night, all I want to do is brush my teeth and go to bed, but my toothpaste is always ALWAYS at the very bottom of my bag.  Because of this I have to unpack and repack my entire suitcase every time I want to brush my teeth.  While I’m brushing my teeth, all I am thinking about is how I simply MUST put my toothpaste somewhere accessible this time, but every time thus far I have forgotten my own advice when the time comes to actually put my toothpaste away, and it goes back to the bottom again.  (It is worth noting that a similar thing happens with my pyjama bottoms as well.)  Yesterday I thought I had been clever by putting my toothpaste and toothbrush in my handbag instead of my suitcase, but, of course, by the evening I’d forgotten all about this and emptied out my suitcase to look for it before I remembered where it was.  You win again, past me.

2.   Stealing stuff

I’d never considered the little toiletries and knick knacks that you get in hotel rooms to be useful before, but at the moment I’m stealing everything I can get my hands on…pens, paper, plastic cups, teabags, sugar sachets, shampoos, body lotions, and soaps.  This may seem crazy but it all adds up; I’ve not had to buy a single bottle of shampoo since the beginning of August.  I’ve also got into the habit of putting breakfast food into my bag to eat later; sometimes I merely slip a banana in while nobody’s looking (that’s what she said) and other times I brazenly butter bread and construct magnificent sandwiches right under the noses of the people running the hotel.  I’m such a rebel!

3.   My food bag

I need to have somewhere to put all the food I have stolen, and in this case it is a medium-sized cloth bag that Foofy bought for me in Munich.  Despite being washed several times, the inside of this bag tends to resemble some kind of biological disaster; you never know what you might find when you delve into it; will it be a piece of stale bread? Some sweaty 3-day-old cheese? Or perhaps even a rotten peach?  At the moment I have 3 bars of ‘Ritter Sport’ Chocolate which each have one square missing because I couldn’t decide which one to open first.  Other people would have been crippled by indecision but I simply opened all three at once.  Also taking up a large amount of space in my food bag is a huge packet of Leberkuchen, or, soft ginger biscuits, which doesn’t seem to be decreasing in volume despite me eating several of the biscuits a day.

4.   Endless BREAD

Because I cannot exactly put soup or porridge into my ever increasingly disgusting food bag, I am forced to take bread-related items and graze on them slowly throughout the day.  Even things like yoghurts are out of the question as they might burst, ruining everything in my bag.  Some theatres very nicely put on food for us when we arrive, but, again, it’s always ALWAYS sandwiches.  I’m certainly not complaining about this because they are under no obligation to provide us any food at all, but due to my utter stubbornness surrounding how I spend my money, I cannot possibly go out and buy different food if there is free food available.  Rather than buy something delicious for a few Euros, I despairingly struggle my way through my third sandwich of the day, only marginally happy that I’ve managed to save some money.

5.   Laundry

Although I did visit a laundrette once (while we were in Denmark), at the moment doing my laundry usually consists of washing each item of clothing separately in my sink with a stolen bar of soap, or, if I’m feeling luxurious, some hair conditioner as well.  I am both lucky and unlucky to have a bright pink costume; It looks wonderful, but anything it is washed with will inevitably turn pink.  My clothes then need to be hung out to dry for a number of hours to ensure that they are wearable the next day, and one time I grossly failed at this, meaning that I had to wear a wet costume in one of the performances.  Thankfully the wetness didn’t show, but it felt very strange indeed. 

6.   Mess

I am not the tidiest person in the world but I have significantly improved recently as I’ve grown up and have had my own space to make nice.  In tour we don’t have a space to make our own, so this doesn’t happen.  I also used to be incredibly considerate when it came to hotel rooms, making sure that I cleaned up after myself meticulously so as to not make any extra work for the hotel staff.  However, after a month of travelling my laziness has slowly increased, and I have taken to leaving a trail of pure destruction in my wake: within one minute of entering a hotel room every surface will be covered with screwed up receipts, bread and croissant crumbs and dirty underwear, which I will attempt to tidy up later by randomly stuffing in my suitcase next to all my clean clothes.  I need to develop some kind of a system.

This was my current hotel room on arrival:

And this is it LITERALLY three minutes later, including the apple core which I still haven't moved from my bed:

7.   Bruises

Although I have an (albeit, limited) knowledge of how to fall safely, yet dramatically on stage without hurting myself, the little injuries can build up.  Every day (sometimes twice a day) the same part of my thigh suddenly and sharply comes into contact with a corner of a heavy solid metal structure.  Although each incident in itself is not enough to cause a bruise, the repetitiveness of it has led to a large cluster of bruises on my right inner thigh.  Very appealing! I’ve also hit my head a number of times, but it’s all part of the fun.  There’s something strangely satisfying about going back to my hotel room and showing Foofy all the new 'owies' I have received that day over Skype.

8.   Music

Although I have a Kindle and a computer at my disposal, I find that my primary form of entertainment on long van journeys is listening to music on my iPhone.  Yesterday we had an 8-hour-long journey and I thought I’d listen to every Leonard Cohen song I had in my collection. (But in fact 8 hours wasn’t enough to get through them all!)  I was giddy and delirious from flu and at one point I could have sworn that I’d been listening to ‘Waiting for a Miracle’ for about 20 minutes, and I realised that, despite putting the songs on shuffle, it had played my three different versions of this song one after the other.  Apart from Leonard Cohen I have very little choice; I have the complete works of The Divine Comedy, The Beach Boys and Gilbert and Sullivan, as well as other bits and pieces.  The most shocking moment for me on this journey so far was when I was relaxing to Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ and feeling very artistic, when, very suddenly, ‘Here’s a case unprecedented’ from the Gondoliers screeched through my headphones and made me almost cry out in fear.  I love Gilbert and Sullivan but I HATE that song.  I could go into more detail as to why that is but I trust that only a tiny handful of people would be interested.   

9.   Losing all sense of time and place

This is the first time in my life that I’ve repeatedly woken up not only having no idea what bed I’m in, but also what country I am in.  One time we were on the border between Germany and the Netherlands and I didn’t want to ask which one we were in because we’d already been told and I'd forgotten.  I have also entirely lost the concept of days of the week and have given up trying to refer to the past or the future in conversation.  I feel like I don’t really have a solid location in space and time at the moment and that my situation could more accurately be described as in constant physical and temporal flux.  Before I look at my phone for the date and time, rather than being aware that we will be at some kind of time and I just don’t know what it is, I am positive that time has just stopped existing until I look to see what it is.  What is time, anyway? That’s another story. 

A Blind Date

I have been on very few dates in my life, and have not been on any blind dates at all.  I couldn't imagine anything more nerve-racking than walking into a restaurant and looking awkwardly around for someone who will be just as nervous as you are and will probably raise their hand and give a wave and a nod and then you walk over and make desperate attempts to be interesting for 3 hours.    

One day I will blog about tales from my romantic life, but those are all other stories.  This is the story for this evening, however, and I am pleased to say that it is in no way related to real life.

Dreams

I’ve always found imagination and dreaming far less confusing than reality; even in the flu-induced dream I had last night where I was living in a giant sachet of Nutella, which was a particularly upsetting dream as there was no Nutella left in the sachet.  While other people are slaves to their subconscious in their sleep and are completely free to act in whatever way they wish in real life, I find real life stifling, confusing, and sometimes downright upsetting, but my dreams, I find incredibly easy to control.

This all started when I was very little and was traumatised by watching the film Watership Down; the horrors of which I have already described in a previous post.  As a result of this trauma I would only sleep for an hour every night; the time between 6 and 7 where my parents would let me sleep in their bed with them.  My dreams became a horrifying mish-mash of thoughts, fears, and frankly quite psychotic images and sounds; probably a result of my mind trying to give me 8 hours-worth of sleep in just one hour.  Here is one featuring the weird skeleton with octopus arms:

And here’s another where a duck exploded:

Despite the passing of almost 2 decades, I remember these nightmares as if I’d just woken up screaming from one of them.  However, if you have enough nightmares, you really begin to notice when you are having one:

After a while I became fascinated by lucid dreaming.  There was a particularly interesting one when I was about 8 where I kept waking up, realising I was dreaming and waking up, then realising I was STILL dreaming, and waking up again, etc.  I began to really take notice of waking life, occasionally saying to myself- “I’m NOT dreaming.  This is REAL.” And before long, this comes up in your dreams as well.  It’s all about confidence; I know now that if I ever have to ask myself the question “Am I dreaming?” Then the answer is most definitely “Yes.”

One of these days, of course, I will jump off a cliff or strip naked in the street because I have the mistaken impression that I’m in a dream, but, fortunately, that day has not arrived yet.  I tend to use my lucid dreams to do constructive things, like practicing speeches, flying, practicing ice skating moves, or simply create a landscape and having fun in it.  Real life can be okay sometimes I guess, but there’s nothing like sitting, alone in a dreamt landscape, painting ones desires onto an imaginary canvas and watching it come alive in front of you; everything you create is yours to command, and everything you command shows you something you didn’t know; unlocking the secrets of your subconscious and revealing what is troubling you and what is really important.  It’s a bit like ‘The Sims,’ but with better graphics.

I don’t get nightmares anymore, but I still dream things that disturb me.  Even though I control my dreams, the ‘me’ of my dreams is very unlike the ‘me’ in real life.  I am spontaneous; vivacious, confident, and arrogant to the point of rudeness. (Whereas in real life I’m just a delight!)  My dream minions, who I suppose are just different versions of myself, are very unlike people in real life, who won’t stop in the street, push me up against a wall and kiss me ferociously, or cheer heartily when I walk into a room.  I guess that I worry that the dream 'me' is actually the real me, and she can be quite a biatch!

My chocolate mousse I make in my dreams, unlike the one I make in real life, is to DIE for, (though I must admit I still haven’t got the texture QUITE right…) and on my dream ice rink I can do a triple axel without even thinking about it.  I do a fair amount of flying, too.  It’s a bit like moving through water but without any water.

The thing is, though, it’s not real, and I know it’s not real even when I’m living it.  I can never get truly involved in the fantasy because I’m fully aware that it’s all the product of a deranged imagination.  I feel isolated by this world; I don’t get other peoples’ jokes, and they don’t get mine;

Things in this world can be messy and dirty, things can be too expensive, and I would have to travel 1000 miles in a plane to see Foofy.  The chances of being absolutely happy in a world where things like unkindness and avocados exist are fairly slim, but ultimately I’d rather struggle through this world than live a pain-free life in my dreams any day.  If only I’d spent all that time that I spent perfecting my dreams on actually figuring out how best to live my life in the real world, I might have been a much happier person today.  I used to blame the world for isolating me, but really it’s my fault for isolating myself and living in a little dream bubble.  Now that I’ve been travelling to new places and having great experiences with new people, I’ve been lucid dreaming less and less.  This is a bit disconcerting, but probably a good sign that I’m beginning to become a real human person.  Or duck, that is.

The Pen Saga

The other day I bought some stuff in a shop in a Danish town called Odense, and I chose a particular checkout because there was only one person in the queue.  Unbeknownst to me, I would spend a total of eight minutes waiting for the shop assistant to find out the price of a plate for the person in front of me, so, in hindsight, my choice was a bad one.  I didn’t really mind though because the shop assistant’s name was ‘Xander Storm’ and this pleased me.

This incident reminded me of something that happened to me when I was a wee girl of 17, and was in Edinburgh for the very first time trying to buy a pen.  I don’t know about anyone else, but my overall relationship with writing materials has not been a good one.  In the 26 years I have been on this earth, I must have spent over £50 on pencils, but I have never yet managed to finish one, i.e. sharpen it down until nothing is left.  I’ve never even been close; I just lose them instead.  Similarly, I have owned what has seemed like thousands of pens, but very few of these have run out; they either dry out or I lose them, meaning I somehow manage to buy about 30 pens a year.  So anyway, here I was again, trying to buy a pen.

I had my eye on one of those pens that we used to use in school; the outer casing was red and it said ‘berol handwriter’ on it, but the pen itself was black.  I took it to the counter to pay, and that is when the trouble began.

First of all, when I took the pen to the cashier, she looked like she’d never seen a pen before in her life.  She looked at me, looked at the pen and frowned, and looked at me again.

“Where did you get this from?” She asked.

“It was in a pot over there.” I said, pointing to a clear plastic pot on a shelf full of pens, clearly labelled with ‘£1.29.’

“Right.” She frowned again and tried to scan it, but there was no barcode.

There was a 20 second pause before anything else happened.

“I think it’s £1.29…I think…” I said doubtfully, even though I knew for certain it was £1.29.  Back then I was terribly timid a lot of the time and had trouble asserting myself.

“Let me just have a look.” The lady walked out from behind the desk and went over to the clear plastic container of pens.

“£1.29.” She said.

“£1.29.” I added, for no reason at all.  The lady completely ignored me and shouted for another assistant.

“Susan?” I don’t actually remember her name- I just made it up.  Susan walked slowly over, and when she saw the pen, she froze mid-walk.

“What’s that?” She said, apparently not knowing what a pen was either.  You would think that I was trying to buy a Yeti or something.

“I didn’t know we sold these.” The first cashier said.  “Do you know how to put them through?”

“I don’t know.” Susan shrugged.  “How much are they?”

“£1.29.” She replied.

“£1.29.” I echoed, again, for no reason at all other than to have some kind of input in the conversation.

Susan and the first lady were utterly mystified, and both looked at the pen as if it was about to explode taking the whole universe with it. Susan went to the phone; she picked up the receiver, dialled a number and waited a few moments. 

“Gary?” She said.  I don’t remember his name either; it’s all LIES.  “Gary, could you come down here please?”

30 seconds passed.

“I’m sorry about this.” Said Susan.  I smiled.  One minute passed, and Gary arrived.  He was wearing a shirt and a tie, so I took him to be the manager of this shop. 

“What’s the problem?” He asked the two girls.  They explained about the pen not being on their system, and, despite my nervous bleats of:

“It’s £1.29” and “I could just get another pen…” He insisted on finding a way for me to buy that one.  After about a minute and a half of him typing away on the computer keyboard and discussing with the girls what he could see on the monitor, and fruitlessly trying to put other black berol handwriter pens through the till, he shrugged, and looked as baffled as they were.  The expressions of sheer worry and confusion on their faces would have been very funny, had I not been so eager to turn back time and choose a different pen.

He then told me to wait, and picked up the phone again.  I don’t remember exactly what he said on the phone, but I quickly ascertained that he was on the phone to head office, as he was describing what the pen looked like, then he said:

“Okay, I’ll hold.” And after a couple of minutes where we could all hear music coming from the phone, he was engaged in another conversation which lasted several minutes, and I realised that he was on the phone to the company that made the pens.

In the end, it had taken three people 15 minutes to work out how to sell me this pen, which they, strangely, offered me for just 89 pence, and not the £1.29 that was advertised.  It was the most baffling thing to ever happen to me in a shop; I still to this day don’t understand why they couldn’t have just taken my money and worked it out later.  Perhaps they needed a barcode to open the till.  In any case, I found it more amusing than annoying because it was quite refreshing in a way to be given such excellent customer service!

Later that day I went to the site of the battle of Bannockburn where I bought a better pen, which I used for the next two years, forgetting about the first one.  After two years I lost it and I was so upset about it that I went back to Bannockburn specifically to buy another one.  However, any time spent learning about the misfortunes and weaknesses of King Edward II is certainly not wasted, but that’s another story.

Sometimes I truly believe the fable in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that all pens secretly long to return to their home planet and will escape Earth by any means possible.  Perhaps this container of pens simply showed up one day in the shop hoping to somehow get noticed and shot into space one by one, and that was the reason why no one in the shop seemed to understand their existence.  I have no idea where the pen is now, but I'm hoping that it's somewhere like this:

I'm not agreeing with you, I've just got Tourette's

The worst thing about having Tourette’s Syndrome is not the fact that I have to nod my head, clear my throat, sniff, shrug my shoulders and go ‘hmm’ every 8 seconds, but the fact that everyone thinks they’re an expert on it.  There are two general reactions that I get to telling people I suffer from Tourette’s:

People think that Tourette’s is a ‘swearing disease.’ instead of taking one minute to investigate on Wikipedia what it actually is they brazenly choose to believe that I am making it up for some bizarre reason.  I don’t know what their thought process is here- perhaps they think that I'm inventing a disease to make myself appear more interesting, or that I somehow enjoy the attention of having people glare at me when I’m sitting next to them on a train.  (It’s the WORST on trains!) I used to tell people about it all the time when I was younger because I wanted to make excuses for my strange behaviour, but due to these reactions I am reluctant to tell people about it now.  It has only struck me recently just how often it comes up in conversation, and how it’s usually referred to in jest. 

Now you may have guessed from reading my blog that I have a sense of humour, thus:

And I am all for laughing at hilarious diseases; I mean, a disease that makes you do weird things for no reason has comic value and I shouldn’t be too sensitive about it, and I’m not, as a matter of fact.  Diseases like AIDS and cancer aren’t particularly funny because they affect the lives of millions and millions of people and, even if one has never known anyone that has had a horrible, life-threatening, disease like that, we have some understanding about how us or a loved one having the disease could make us feel.  The effects of cancer, for example, are so vivid and real in everyday life that there is literally nothing funny about them at all.

Tourette’s, on the other hand, must seem completely inaccessible to the general public; they can empathise with losing one’s hair or having a tumour removed because that is something that could potentially happen to them.  What people don’t seem to empathise with is things they don’t understand, and when people don’t understand things, the easiest thing to do is to laugh at them.  I’m not trying to be all high and mighty here as I’m completely guilty of this too, and, seeing as it must be very difficult for a person to understand what it is to have no control over one’s movements or vocalisations, it’s not surprising people make jokes about it.  By the same token, I have no idea what it would be like to have my testicles kicked, and so laughing at it is very easy.  And Tourette’s, let’s face it, is a hilarious disease when not properly understood.  I laughed myself silly at a book called ‘Pets with Tourette’s’ which involves an adorable rabbit yelling out ‘Tossbag!’ It’s not the general public’s fault that they’ve been given a false impression of what the disease is, so I bear nobody any ill will for making Tourette’s jokes.  80% of the time, I find them just as funny, and I don’t mind at all when people laugh at my tics. The other 20% of the time I give an inward sigh and wish that the disease that I happen to suffer with wasn’t one that also happened to be hilarious. 

Just in case people don’t know what Tourette’s is, it’s not actually a disease in itself, but just a way of categorising tic disorders.  Many people have tics, but, to have Tourette’s Syndrome, you must have had at least one vocal tic and at least one physical tic (at the same time) for over a year.  Mine have been going on for 17.  (The disease where people swear uncontrollably is actually called ‘Coprolalia’, and can be had completely independently of Tourette’s.  In fact, only 1 in 10 Tourette’s sufferers have Coprolalia, but the media don’t want anyone to know about this for some reason; maybe because people simply twitching and making random sounds isn’t quite as funny as if they were yelling 'CUNT!' at the top of their voice.)

Let me show you what having Touette’s is like.  Imagine there is a tiny cloud in your brain; I don’t know why it’s a cloud but it is:

Now this cloud, for no reason whatever, will slowly begin to grow and grow over 10 seconds.  It’s not painful, and it’s not like an itch.  I would liken it to feeling like the snowstorm that you used to get on old TVs being inside your brain.  It’s fuzzy; it’s grey, it’s sticky, and it’s really, really annoying.  You can choose to keep it there and get increasingly more frustrated, but after about 8 seconds it gets so unbearable that you need to shake it away; then you get about one second of wonderful relief, before the cloud begins to build again.  The cloud can be in the head, or it can be in a limb, or it may be in the nose or throat, meaning that you have to make a noise to get rid of it.  Sometimes I’m in a situation where performing these tics is not an option, meaning that I have to sit still and bear it; the effort of repressing them is so great that it means you cannot concentrate on anything else.  So, contrary to popular opinion, Tourette’s tics are not strictly involuntary (like a sneeze, or snatching your hand away from something hot), as you can control them to an extent.  It’s just really, REALLY hard.

I often wonder what my life would have been like without Tourette’s; on the one hand, I find myself fanaticising about how WONDERFUL it would be not have to do tics every few seconds.  To actually possess control over every inch of my body would be utterly amazing; THINK WHAT I COULD DO!!!! As is often said, freedom is wasted on the free; everyone out there who doesn’t have Tourette’s has an incredible gift in that they are free not to sniff and twitch their heads and can just sit and watch something for more than 3 minutes without feeling like they want to scream.  On the other hand, there are far worse problems in the world, and, in a way, I am incredibly lucky.  Having this disease completely shaped my personality into what it is today; I was forced to be weird and eccentric because it allows me to get away with odd things; often people don’t even notice I have tics until I tell them because I compensate for them in all sorts of inventive ways:

It also made me into the actress that I am; on stage, you see, my tics just vanish completely.  I mean, the character doesn’t have Tourette’s, does she? It’s ironic that I am only truly free to be myself when I am pretending to be someone else!  The energy stored up from tics that I have not performed is then used to raise the stakes for my character and make her as present on stage as possible.  In this way, my disease is a gift.  Hooray for me!!!! J