I was at a cash point this evening and a mother and her two children came and stood behind me in the queue. They were all chatting happily about where to go for an after school snack.

Both the children looked at me with curiosity.…

I’ve been working late this evening so I’ve only just got back to the lair, and I’m feeling angry and depressed. It isn’t anything tic-related this time. It’s about a consultation meeting organised by the Council about cuts to services in the local area which I took a group of children to earlier.…

Earlier on I was working at the nature garden. My job for the afternoon was to help the children finish a den they’ve been making out of willow. Leftwing Idiot was there helping. Most of the children who play regularly at the garden are familiar with me and my Tourettes.…

There was a large group of teenage boys behind me on the bus this morning. They started laughing at me as soon as they sat down, but I could hear one voice of dissent. Instead of laughing, he was quietly reasoning with his friends, saying things like, “I don’t see what’s funny”, “Imagine if it was your mum, or sister”, “You lot are being rude”, “It could be your family.”…

My colleague told me earlier that she’d been really tired the other day and as a result she’d been saying some pretty random stuff. One of the children we work with had said she sounded like me when I do my tics.…

I was excited to welcome a big group of friends to the go-karting track where I work this morning. Many of them have Tourettes and we’d never had the chance to meet up and race each other before.

All of us – children, parents, carers, and friends – have first-hand experience of living with Tourettes.…

It’s half term, and this afternoon at work I was sitting with a group of children making clay sculptures to go in the garden. We were talking about my tics because one of the children was new and hadn’t met me before.…

This morning I was interviewed by Stephen Fry as part of a TV series he’s making, called Planet Word. He’s exploring language in all its shapes and forms. Tourettes gives me an unusual relationship with words because when I tic, I use them without any intention of communicating anything, and that’s what interested him.…

There’s a basketball court in the middle of the housing estate where my office is, and as usual when I left work tonight a group of children were playing there. As I passed them on the way to my cab, their cheerful chattering stopped and they started mimicking the noise I was making.…

At lunchtime I met up with Laura, Emma, Hannah and her nine-month-old son Luke. We went for tea and cakes at Bea’s in Bloomsbury – Emma’s Christmas gift to us. Within minutes of arriving Hannah offered her son round for ‘a squeeze’.…