bitter

I laugh at my own
joke — I’m a professional
schizophrenic — he
baulks sharply — victim of his
own squeamishness, or kindness

Titus Alexander wrote a book in the nineties called Unravelling Global Apartheid, which I browsed curiously one day without really comprehending. A couple of years later, I heard about some sessions called ‘Seeds for Change‘ which were being run at Union Chapel in Islington in the run up to the Millennium celebrations. They were weekly discussion groups, run by Titus Alexander, and I attended quite a few of them. At that time, I was four years into my relatively new life as a ‘mental patient’ and still getting used to it. I was also unemployed, with little prospect of paid work in the future (as it seemed at the time). The exchange with Titus recorded above has stayed with me ever since. He was really quite upset and set about proving to me earnestly that I was not a professional schizophrenic. Last night I dreamed of an informal community of sophisticated university intellectuals from Germany or Scandinavia, among whom I felt neither quite at home nor entirely excluded. It set me thinking about the whole matter of whether I am overeducated, or just self-educated, or what? I never fit in quite anywhere, and wear my intellect with a curious mixture of fierce pride and furtive shame which seems to bear almost no relation at all to the world of academia where intellect is celebrated professionally. Titus is quite a maverick in his own way too. So that’s perhaps why we had that moment.