Well, it’s September, getting towards the end, and I had thought I’d have my book finished by this time FFS! Or at least off to the beta readers.

As if.

In July I reckoned I had about two chapters to go. I still have about two chapters to go. I do not know what the fuck is going on. Seriously where in the name of Pete did that all that time bloody well go? I have run round like a blue-arsed fly this month. I’ve done digs, we’ve been away for weekends, I’ve done events, I’ve been to the theatre, indeed I’m going to two comedy gigs this week because heaven forefend they should come along neatly spaced out. I have Lived with a capital chuffing L. But two years out from Mum’s death I have also achieved a princely zero percent of the tasks I put off while my parents were ill. OK it’s 10 years’ worth of stuff. That is a LOT but you’d have thought I’d have managed some.

Oh no, hang on.

There’s been one success.

Fuck let’s celebrate that then! Yeh! I’ve managed to get my son’s ADHD diagnosed. I had promised him that. It’s only taken me six months of on-and-off effort but I’ve finally got there. I now have to sort some time for him to see the lovely education woman who will help him with techniques to get through the school day, hopefully with slightly less regular amounts of panicked last minute shit!-I-haven’t-done-this! shennanagins than his mother. Woot.

Go me! Winning at life, clearly.

If you’re wondering why I would bother to get a diagnosis for him, it’s obvious you don’t have ADHD. Put simply, a diagnosis explains the madness, the dysfunction and why it takes 900% more capacity for him to fill in a form and deal with government bodies than the normals. And also you can get medication that helps you concentrate. I do not have a diagnosis, but having been through one with my son, let’s just say it’s pretty blindingly obvious where he got it from. I cannot stress how much self-hatred and frustration fell away just being handed an explanation for my complete inability to organise my time, life, diary etc through learning about his.

How much better it made me feel about having a fucking genius intelligence level (well OK one point off) that is of absolutely fuck all use (welcome to the world of C grades with the odd A thrown in for encouragement. No Bs you notice)! If it was that bloody marvellous for me, God knows what a relief it must have been for him, because he’s way, way brighter than I am. How awesome to officially know IT’S NOT HIM, IT’S THEM, I suspect it’s bloody wonderful. I would have killed for that at his age.

Here’s an example of what it’s like. McSon had his driving theory test the other morning. The night before he looked out his driving license, ready (he’d had a lesson that day and has to have it with him for those so it was in his school trousers). He took it upstairs to put back in his wallet along with some bits of his drum kit that he’d used at a gig this weekend. He reassembled his drums, had a quick practise and then after doing some homework and a bit of this and that he had a quick chat with me and went to bed.

This morning I went off to parents’ swim at the school leaving the McOthers to get to the test centre.

‘Do you need your license?’ asked McOther, just as they were leaving.

‘I don’t think so, but I might,’ says McSon.

He goes upstairs, goes to his wallet where it lives and where he knows he put it last night and … it’s not there. He panics, they go anyway, but without his license he’s not allowed to sit the test (even though he had to submit a chuffing picture of it to book a test anyway so it’s not like they haven’t seen it). I come back to discover McSon in the dearth of despair.

‘How could I be so dumb?’ he asks me. Not to my face, obviously, but by text message to me, in the kitchen, from his bedroom upstairs, because … teenager.

How indeed?  This is a question I felt keenly, having asked it of myself pretty much on loop growing up, and repeatedly over the years. This is why I always tell my child that charm will get you everywhere because sometimes, when you forget to do something that you should have done, and you have to throw yourself on the mercy of others involved in the task to help you to get it in the bag, they may help you. If you have treated them appropriately, they will go the extra mile and do it because they like you. So not only is being polite and respectful to people the right thing to do, but it gets you further, in the long run, than shouting and jumping up and down … unless you’re doing the shouting and jumping up and down for humorous purposes, and in a funny way.

So I went on to tell him about his rellies, about his grandfather who managed to arrive at the port to go to France, twice, before he hit the age of 30, with a passport that had expired. A man who was universally loved, whose ability to forget stuff was legendary, as a teacher at his school. Indeed, when Dad was head of the common room he had to organise the dinner, there was some doubt which night it was on, Friday 12th December, or Saturday 13th December. Dad soon cleared that up by sending a memo round to confirm the day. Trouble was it said,

‘I gather there is some confusion as to the date of the Commonroom Dinner. It will be on Friday 13th December this year.’

Then there was his great uncle, who managed, with some friends, to organise a trip to drive a jeep to Afghanistan one summer holidays while he was at university, to deliver a letter from the mayor of Brighton to the mayor of Kabhul … except after the ornate letter-handing-over ceremony in Brighton between him and his friends and the mayor, which was conducted in front of the press, they left the letter on the mayor’s desk, realised too late to go back and get it and had to have it sent on to Tehran or somewhere so he and his friends could pick it up along the way. I told him about his Uncle, who left his hired wedding suit on the train on the way down to the venue and then had to get the lovely people at British Rail to take it off the train at Pulborough and hare over there in a borrowed car to pick it up.

Clinging on by a thread, this is how we live, my son and I. Welcome to our world.

I told him about the time I booked tickets to take him to a comedy show about ADHD … and then forgot to go. I confessed how one term, I started my essays at uni a ruthlessley efficient 3 weeks out from the end of term, wondering why it was so easy to borrow all the books I required from the reference library, only to discover I’d got the date wrong and term ended in four days. I explained how I arrived at the start of the next term a week late because … numbers … and I’d got the date wrong and nobody batted an eyelid.

I told him how I managed to fly home from Norway a day early by mistake. Yes, even when the plane came down in Bergen for half an hour while they tried to work out what the fuck was going on, I still didn’t compute that the date on my ticket was wrong (coz … numbers). On the up side, neither did they, so that was lucky. I told him the story of how I went to France on an organised tour for six weeks, managed to miss the hovercraft and spent the first week trying to catch them up. Also had a lovely night in the waiting room at Gare D’Orley during that one (I’ve done that twice now; one star on trip advisor, NOT recommended). I should probably tell him about the time I called Dirk Bogarde by mistake or the time I answered the phone and said, ‘Fuck off Giles! That’s a crap Welsh accent!’ to someone who, I fear, may have been the leader of the opposition at the time.

And so on …

On the upside, ADHD does train certain useful things into a person. For example, I remember as a kid that something usually went wrong on our family holidays. I suspect this was more about the kinds of holidays my family booked than my father’s legendary forgetful nature, although I’m sure his vagueness helped, examples incoming…

There was the time we turned up in Crete for my second ever holiday abroad. There was no water so we had to spend the first two nights in the hotel owner’s flat. I remember wondering what the fuck we were doing there, but then I had a swim in the sea and suddenly everything was alright.

I remember another Greek holiday the following year when we had to spend the first week in a hotel up the road which wasn’t finished because they’d double booked our room by mistake. We got our revenge, my brother broke the bathroom mirror trying to swat a fruit fly with the flat end of a full bog roll. Or the next holiday on Lesbos, there was the fiesta we hired that we had to bump start every day until the embarrassed car hire man gave us his own ride, an elderly peugot 504 with a bench front seat and  gearshift on the steering column that only Dad could manage to work.

Then there was the time when the French fishermen were blockading the ports so we sped along the cost, reaching each port as it was closed, until finally we managed to overtake the fishing boats leaving from Calais to block Dunkirk and get away from there. We arrived at 3 am and had to sleep in the car on the port because Mum and Dad had run out of money and had spent their last 10 francs on the petrol we’d used to get there … at one of the last garages that still had some and was open.

The company honoured our Dieppe – Newhaven ticket at Dunkirk and we got the last berth on the 6 am ferry, just in time for me to do the whole sorry thing backwards two days later for a school trip. We were supposed to be going Portsmouth StMalo for that one but had to go from Dover to Calais, which opened briefly, and then get a train to Paris, that was the first night in the waiting room at Gare D’Orley by the way. In those days, you had to buy currency in advance, or use traveller’s cheques. The only reason Mum and Dad had that 10 francs  left was becase it was my pocket money for the 2 week school trip. Nobody panicked and after a few years I grew to like the chaos. Looking back on it, it was kind of fun.

Likewise, I’ve noticed my son is very calm and able to think laterally in a crisis, even when he’s panicking inside. As a kid, when there was trouble in the park or he and his friends saw someone being beaten up, it he who quietly called the police or shephered everyone to the nearest parent’s house, and safety. It’s always he who steps in and mediates between angry friends, often successfully. I’m incredibly proud of him for this.

Blowing my own trumpet here but I defy many people to be as calm as I am in a crisis. This, my friends, is because, if you have ADHD, your whole fucking life is a crisis because things drop off the mental grid and do not reappear until you are about to be supposed to be fucking doing them. If your entire existence is spent dropping what you are meant to be doing and sorting out shit that you’ve forgotten to do you soon become very adapatble.

Most of the time, you can learn make it work. Sometimes,  yes, you have to apologise and confess that you’ve fucked up. It’s not great. I mean, lurching from one organisational crisis to the next is pretty exhausting but never let it be said that it’s dull. Oh no, people like us, we live an exciting life. And of course, you soon  learn that fucking up and having to admit it isn’t so humiliating, because you are way, waaaay more used to it than other people, which means you have no pride and learn to give absolutely no fucks and just do the few things you are capable of organising without waiting for permission. That’s a win.

Frankly, if you have ADHD and you give any fucks about anything (other than not hurting others or being a cockwomble) your personality and general mode of existence means you will die of shame. The fucks are bludgeoned out of you early on in life because it’s the only way to survive. OK so weeing in your pants in the tack room after a riding lesson because you are too embarrassed to ask to use the loo also helps in that respect. Not my finest hour that one but definitely cured me of my fear of asking the dumb question and speaking up because even though nobody said a thing, they must have known and no way was I ever going through the embarrassment of that ever, EVER again.

Woah! LONG tangent there. But now you understand ADHD a little more perhaps? Although that last bit was probably autism. Anyway… onwards.

There’s another thing! Oh yes! And I’ve managed to sort it so that Mc(no longer)Mini is insured to drive a car to practice on outside his lessons … trouble is … it’s this car.

Obvs in real life it has a numberplate rather than teeth.

Yeh, I know. But the main car is an automatic SUV and the tic-tac with a boot we bought as a run-around, (a fiat 500 Abarth) is considered a hot hatch, so insuring McSon, McOther was given a guide quote of  £900 to insure a learner driver on it for 6 months while they investigated whether they could even do it … and when they had researched it further, they came back and said they couldn’t actually insure him. So instead of the 1.4 Fiat 500 Abarth, he’s going to be doing his driving practise on the 1.6 Lotus Elise with the close ratio gearbox … because it’s only going to cost £150 to put him on there as a learner driver for a year. Because it’s not a hot-hatch.

What the fucking fuck, Insurance Land?

Seriously, you couldn’t make this shit up. So there we are. It now has L plates on it. He’s doing commendably well so far and more to the point, driving extremely sensibly. Much more sensibly than I do. So there’s that.

Last but not least, I am doing an event this weekend that ever is. Indeed as this goes out, today and tomorrow. If anyone is at Norcon, I am opposite the signing tables. Do feel free to come and say hello. I will be dressed as The Pan of Hamgee, as usual, in a cloak and hat. I have no new books to sell. I’ve written about 400,000 words since the last one, they’re just not on any one project unfortunately. I am just hanging in there for the year when I get all of this shit I’m working on actually finished at the same time. There’s something to be said for jumping from project to project every time you get stuck but it’s not exactly a short cut to a steady and predictable rate of production. Never mind. At some point there will be 12 books, probably coming out within weeks of one another.

Anyway, if you’d like to, do come along and say hi to me at Norcon, because all the other authors will be selling books hand over fist while I will be sitting there making people laugh and conspicuously not selling any books to them before they go on and buy a book from each of the authors next to me. Because this is how I roll. But I have fun so I’m OK with that.