What Goes Down Must Come Up

There are only a few things about myself of which I can be truly certain: the first is that I am not in any way one of those people my first ever therapist referred to as a “level earther” – someone who lives their lives on a more or less even keel, with few ups and downs, even in the face of life’s vicissitudes. With me around, it’s likely to be a roller coaster of a ride, scaling dizzying heights and plunging to great depths with face-wrinkling corkscrew turns, unexpected stops, drops and loop-the-loops aplenty. The second is that you can rest assured that regardless of how much I get thrown around – no matter for how hard or for how long – I will cling on and for just about as long as it takes and probably cackle with laughter the whole way through.

It’s just always been like that with me. In a 20 minute dash from the womb to the world (evidently I was in no mood for hanging around waiting patiently to face the world that awaited), I shot down that channel inside the frenetic and intense rollercoaster that was my Mother so fast I almost plunged head first into the toilet bowl at home. Whether fleeing from the craziness of captivity inside her womb at the earliest opportunity or impatiently rushing out to take on a world that had a hell of a show ready for me – I arrived red faced and screaming, if the family myths are to be believed, surrounded I imagine by faces crumpled with worry and doubt as, now knowing I was Simon and not Kate, in their view my fate was sealed; I had a rare and lethal immune disease that was already killing my brother Andrew, still only 18 months old and which would almost certainly mean that I also would stand little chance of surviving into adolescence. It was gonna be a wild old ride ….

And the rest as they say, is history…

And I’m still here. Enjoy!