I couldn’t make a sentence, I couldn’t even say what I meant to say. It has been observed that I can be somewhat reticent when I don’t have a keyboard in front of me or a couple of glasses of wine inside me.

Gert suggests that

perhaps too many people are taught to bottle up their emotion, that is un-genteel to express anything other than a measured equilibrium.

Obviously some people are born reserved and others have it thrust upon them. But it’s not about gentility; my mum’s family are fairly posh, and my dad’s family are not, but it’s certainly dad’s lot that brought out the undemonstrative in us. Frankly, mum overdoes the whole hugging thing, and has a horrible way with direct questions about one’s inmost feelings. People use the phrase dark horse to describe me, and I’m happy with that.

Dad showed me a reference once, that his boss had written about him. The only reservation the boss had was dad’s apparent absence in meetings, because he rarely spoke in front of a group; I’m not that bad, you know – I’m pretty vocal in meetings. Mind you, dad must have been younger then than I am now. What is this damned conspiracy to make me feel old at the moment?

It can’t be inarticulacy. In one of those moments when I know I really should say something because I’ve been quiet too long and I’ll be making other people feel uncomfortable, I start to obsess about it: say something. say what? I dunno, comment on the weather. I’ve already mentioned the weather Well, has it changed at all since you mentioned it? I can’t keep banging on about the weather, they’ll think I’m boring. They already do; you haven’t said anything for ten minutes. Shuddup, it’s a companionable silence.

How come my inner monologue is so very verbose?

This sociophobia of mine, I reckon it stems from the day I started secondary school, and committed instant social suicide by asking the question, Who is Simon le Bon?

Of course, the fact that I was one of only two people in the class who didn’t own skin-tight jeans didn’t help much; in fact, on mufty day, when we were allowed to pay a small fee and not wear our bottle-green uniform, I managed to turn up in a pink skirt and white blouse that would have gone down perfectly well at primary school a few months earlier. Well nobody told me that everything was different here.

When I realised the mistake with the jeans, obviously I went to my parents, who are the people you can rely on in a pre-teen crisis, aren’t they? And mum told me that she wasn’t going to buy me a new pair of jeans when the ones that I had were in good condition and still fitted me. She attempted to make up for her harshness at Christmas by making sure that Father Christmas brought me a pair of burgundy legwarmers. I found that if you folded the jeans round your legs, and pulled the legwarmers right up, it only looked a little bit like they were flares being worn under legwarmers. This trick worked with my raspberry-coloured cord dungarees, as well. At least, I think I got away with it.

It never really worked, though. You can’t go back from a Simon Le Bon faux-pas. Anyway, I’d worn a really pretty gypsy-style dress to the school Christmas party [I hear you crying would she NEVER learn?] I liked the dress, but you know, a howling crowd of eleven and twelve year olds can’t be wrong. They also owned make-up that hadn’t been given to them by their grannies during a spring-clean.

Shortly after this, I decided I didn’t like trendy clothes anyway. I also didn’t like trendy popstars, and I didn’t really care who they were. This is a mechanism for coping with cognitive dissonance, which I can strongly recommend.