Benefit Street, Brighton.

                                                          I have just spent most of my weekend with Wildfire Women and my blood is still tingling.  For the first time I 've been in a gathering in the UK at which I didn’t feel like the World’s Greatest Imposter. Nor did that Girl in The Bubble feeling overwhelm me. (I must assure you that I really was a girl when I named this feeling). And –bonus- I got to dance. Bit of a misnomer that – I just got up and made an arse of myself as has been my lifelong wont. And for the first time in far too long I did it without feeling anyone gave a damn. And its been far too long since I’ve done that. I didn’t, at first, even get what Wildfire Women was all about; which I deftly translated into massive guilt which consumed me for the greater part of the first day. It was true that all these other women appeared to have been on the bones of their arses; or been traumatised in their past; or battled illnesses both mental and physi

A few minutes ago I did something absolutely stupendous.  I don’t expect anyone noticed.  In fact a couple may have done that shuffley thing many English women do when they start off being embarrassed and metaphorically shake themselves, remembering that it’s ok to talk about mental illness now. (Not being snide – I find it endearing). See, it’s one thing to talk about it, but it’s quite another to throw it casually into the conversational pit. Especially when that conversation is public and with people one’s never met. Oh, I’ll sit in front of an audience and tell a few hundred people about mental illness. I’ll write articles about it and get interviewed about it quite happily. Literally - because I’m always so happy to get people engaging and talking freely. Especially the one’s who’ve gone all their lives thinking they were the only ones. But socially – well it’s pretty much the kiss of death.Try sipping your glass of complimentary wine, when someone says over

I once turned down an invitation to have tea on The Britannia with the Queen and Monty and all;  in order to go on a first date excursion, picnicking up in the mountains. In to-day’s Britain this factoid would bring down one of two reactions. The first would be hearty claps on the backs and “I should think so too!”. The other is “OMG! Are you insane? What were you thinking?”. (Mind you, in my current incarnation, the average reaction would be “Havin’ a larf, are we?” At the time I was 18 and I could legally please myself! As I was only a scant few weeks out of boarding school  this freedom was heady and still rib-ticklingly and foot tinglingly novel.  I couldn’t be cajoled into compliance, nor ordered to obey.  No-one could ever expel me again. Or forbid certain ways of doing my hair! And no-one would, ever again, make me wear the same clothes, day after day after interminable day. Nor make me leave a nice warm bed at 4.30 in the morning to stand around for h