Not getting it

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Norah quoted that at me – after she’d read what I wrote about the Jeremy Kyle Show. I told you she was educated. Apparently it is from an essay by a bloke by the name of John Donne.

Anyway, I thought it sounded good: really profound. So I asked her to write it down for me.
‘I don’t know what it’s got to do with Jeremy Kyle, though.’ I said.

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ she said.

She didn’t realise it, but in that once sentence she had encapsulated my real problem: ‘not getting it’.

I may have written some of this before, but for as long as I can remember I have always felt a bit of an outsider; an observer – looking in on life but never really being part of it.

And a lot of that is to do with this fear of somehow failing to grasp what everybody else seems to know instinctively: of simply not getting it. And with it comes the feeling that people are ‘making allowances’ for me, tolerating my lack of the most basic of social skills.

No, not a lack of social skills – I think I have plenty of those – more like it’s a kind of ‘emotional illiteracy’ – yes, that more aptly describes it: emotional illiteracy.

I have usually put it down to being an only child. But I think it is more than that. I think I may have been over protected. But more, even than that: we were a family that ‘kept ourselves to ourselves’; we were a cut above the rest of the people in our road, in our village. We weren’t really, but I was always encouraged to believe it to be so.

I’ll say one thing for those people who go on the Jeremy Kyle Show: at least they’re ‘up front’ about their stuff. It’s all in the open.


No member of our family would have gone on the Jeremy Kyle show – even if it had existed then. We did not believe in washing out dirty linen in public – we didn’t even wash it in private. So it never got washed. And I’ve ended up with it.


I sometimes wonder if the ‘bad’ examples are not really the ‘good’ examples – if only we realised.


Amy Winehouse, Pete Doherty, Britney Spears, Gazza, Alex Higgins, the late George Best, Janice Joplin, Keith Moon, Freddie Mercury – all these people with a huge talent “wasted lives”? NO, THEY ARE NOT.

These people have really got the handle on things. They refuse to “play the game”. Life is absurd anyway. Grab it by the scruff of the neck, and shake it, like a terrier. A young woman, dying of cancer, who had packed more in her short life than most of us will in twice her lifetime said of life “Gulp – don’t sip”.

And these folk on the Jeremy Kyle show, whilst maybe lacking the talent of the above mentioned, are “gulpers” and not “sippers”.


Anyway, I have been out for a pint of beer and something to eat – and feel the better for it. So who cares if the rain is bouncing off the asphalt on this July evening – and, who knows, some day I might just ‘get it’.