This evening Leftwing Idiot was asking me if I knew someone called Nick who might or might not have been a friend of a friend. When he failed to remember Nick’s last name with any certainty, Tourettes stepped in and sang one possible but unlikely alternative:

“Casablanca Sheep Dog Fairytale.”…

Despite the stillness of the snow outside, this morning didn’t get off to a calm start at all. I annoyed Leftwing Idiot by bombarding him with questions as soon as he’d woken up and walked into the living room. Because I knew I’d irritated him I got upset and my tics overreacted.…

My least biscuity day in over a year is drawing to a close. After being a very regular part of my life for almost eighteen months my ‘biscuit’ tic suddenly seems to have stopped.

But I’ve had false alarms before about the end of the ‘biscuit’ era so it may still make a come-back.…

I went swimming with Claire and Poppy this evening at the local hydrotherapy pool as I do most weeks. During our swim, and somewhat predictably, I had a ticcing fit. But despite the fit I felt incredibly peaceful, floating on my back in the warm water and staring up at the bright moon through the glass ceiling.…

When I lost my wooden model meerkat a couple of years ago I was sad, but it was probably a good thing as I’d started using it as a weapon to poke myself in the head with.

Last night another of my collection of wooden animals became a weapon.…

Last summer my tics suddenly took against Leftwing Idiot’s geranium for no apparent reason.

This season they have a different target and my night time routine goes something like this:

Brush my teeth, take my melatonin, get into bed, start verbally abusing the lamp-post:

“Lamp-post, stop glowing ostentatiously.”…

This morning while Fran was helping me get ready for work I started ticcing about the skills my support workers have to have. It began to sound like a very unusual job description.

My support worker needs to:

“Run around the room with sheep.”…

When I phoned the bank earlier I explained to the person who answered that I had Tourettes and she said: “That’s OK I don’t mind, don’t worry about it.”

Although she meant this to sound positive, whenever anyone says something like that it gives me a jolt.…

Living with Poppy has brought a lot of sparkle into my life, mainly because she’s so lovely but also because of her huge collections of sequins. Poppy’s a costume designer and a big sequin lover. This has inevitably meant that the castle is constantly covered with a thin layer of sparkly plastic disks.…

Yesterday evening I had an unusual conversation with Karl James. In 2001, Karl started the Dialogue Project and since then he’s had lots of interesting conversations with a wide variety of people on all sorts of subjects.

Talking to Karl was very different from the other interviews I’ve done recently because we had time to talk, and listen, to each other.…