[Smalltalk] I'm exceptionally bad at smalltalk, and also don't respond well to it. I'm not one of these people who generally can talk to, say, a hairdresser, probably because I feel like I have no common reference points. That said, where I fall down is not being very good at the verbal parrying that establishes what the common reference points are. This is made worse by being a hopeless bloke, having no interested in cars, football and, to a certain extent, tits. So even the usual gambits just fail on me miserably. This probably marks me out as being 'boring', and would probably be confirmed if my interlocutors were to discover those subjects I do have an opinion about. New people can be problematic, too. I don't know if flerdle or penelope remember what I was like when I turned up at my first pilg...

[Aspergers] I have a friend who is like this, and his mum suggested he might have Aspergers. However a friendly medic who had met him immediately said "No, he's not got Aspergers"... I think there is a fashion to give everything a fancy label nowadays, and like Projoy, believe this is not a good thing. I would have thought it were obvious that different people approach things differently, and there's degrees of conformance to the "standard" way of doing things (known popularly as "normality").

In fact, drawing these two stands together, I find most "normal" people rather dull. Is this just me being an arrogant arse-wit?

[Aside] Am currently "working" at home, and the phone rang whilst composing the above. The caller hung up immediately. I hate that - why can't they just admit to having dialled a wrong number? I don't think it was a potential burglar...

[rab] I think you reminded me of me :-)

... and I was overcompensating out of sheer terror :-)

[flerdle] I didn't mean to scare you! Luckily I think the beer and Tim-Tams sorted everything out.

[rab] My last posting was just to explain why (perhaps??) I seemed rather boisterous at times, (I wasn't saying that you were or weren't) which is another way of "coping", but not my usual one, I think because of the complete novelty of it all, especially the Tim-Tams. And I was stone cold sober, so that wasn't any excuse either. You certainly didn't scare me, and am looking forward to hopefully visiting again next summer.

Which, in a way, brings us back to collecting junk: I have a small amount of "stuff", but mostly I have books (I've been very restrained, honest!!). I used to have a tendency to collect empty or hardly-used notebooks (mmmm stationery), but recently disposed of almost all of them. A lot of things will be farmed out to friends/relatives, and some stored, but I'm quite looking forward to starting again in January with little more than a suitcaseful. Should be interesting.

Wow, what a stream of revelations we have here. Bob is right to say that OCD is something quite different from "obsessiveness", and I get very angry when people talk about being "a bit obsessive-compulsive" and so on, when Goddammit! They haven't the faintest idea what it means. Sometimes I wish I could just turn my whole brain off and put it away in storage for a long, long, time. Someone asked earlier if OCD is related to autistic disorders, and there is evidence that it is. There is a greater overlap of occurrences of OCD and Asperger's than you would statistically expect, and indeed I have had my own brain photographed, rather excitingly, in an experiment to test this. Asperger's is the syndrome suffered by the narrator in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and one of the reasons I was so moved by that book was that, God help me, I identified with practically every aspect of him, except for being unable to read expressions, which is a defining characteristic of Aspergers. Many of the things that character does, such as counting, refusing to touch certain things, etc. are traits associated with OCD. Personally I think OCD, autism, and Asperger's are all somehow related, but people like me are very much on the "high-functioning" end of that spectrum, which means we can pass ourselves off as normal human beings. Well, most of the time.
By the way, it's true that some of these disorders are "over-diagnosed", but they are "under-diagnosed" as well. One in twenty adults in the UK has ADD, but the vast majority are never diagnosed.