We are all strange in different ways

I have just been watching a BBC Wales documentary on iPlayer. Yes, I know. I live only for pleasure. It was presented by the comedian Rhod Gilbert, whom I find intermittently amusing but who is rather more thoughtful than I had imagined. Because I saw it on iPlayer, I don't know if it was shown nationwide on the Beeb, though I hope so. Anyway, it was about shyness, from which, prima facie perversely, given that he's a stand-up comedian and performer by trade, Gilbert suffers.

It was both thoughtful and thought-provoking. I (reluctantly and histantly) hold my hand up here - I am chronically shy. Some of my friends will know that and nod accordingly. Others may be surprised (should that make me proud?). I sometimes make myself out to be a misanthrope, and there is much about humanity that I hate, from wilful ignorance and thoughtlessness to stupidity. But, if I'm honest, I don't really hate people. I'm just frightened of them.

It was interesting to hear Gilbert talk to fellow sufferers - and I will use that word, it is something to be suffered, even if it doesn't have a syndrome attached to it (though in this modish world it probably does) - and discuss the origins of their shyness. It seems that there is at least some hereditary component. Certainly, my father was a shy man. If my mother is shy, she has developed world-beating coping skills. And I say that with admiration. It may not have helped that I was essentially an only child; my half-siblings, with whom I did not live, arrived when I was into double digits, so a lot of my childhood was spent in my own company, which I rather liked. I developed an interior world, of books and toys and Lego, in which I flourished.

This is not to say that I was utterly friendless. I was never gregarious, but I had a small and valued circle of friends from an early age, some of whom, I'm pleased to say, I still see (my oldest friend, who was best man at my wedding, I have known for more than 35 years). I'm not trying to portray myself as some kind of sociopathic freak. However, it is true that I once complained of a stomach ache in order to be taken home from a friend's birthday party, and that was not the only such incident of which I can think. (That I was conveyed home in my friend's grandfather's Rolls-Royce was an added bonus, I admit.)

Nonetheless, shyness has affected my life, from when I learned to totter around until the present day. How, I hear none of you ask, does it manifest itself? I am, basically, useless with new people. I can never think of things to say, and being placed in what to most are ordinary, quotidian social situations are for me stomach-churning pits of anxious hell. What am I worried about? Looking like a fool? Well, partly. I should be used to that by this age, I know, but I fret hopelessly about having no words to conduct what is, for everyone else (or so it seems - we'll come back to this) an everyday activity. When I worked in the House of Commons, it was the practice that every year's new intake of clerks would be taken to the bar on their first day and introduced to colleagues of all grades and ages. My own first day was of course stressful, though I was so shredded by nerves that day that it was only another passing blur in a carnival of anxiety, but when I had to go in my second, third, fourth years, to meet newcomers, I was still in a state. The acid knot in the stomach, the queasiness, the urge to flight, the dreaded fear of being ridiculed or, perhaps worse, ignored - all of these were only slightly dampened down by a couple of glasses of wine.

I wanted to be welcoming, I really did. Hospitable, wise without being arrogant or overbearing, knowledgeable without being smug, and maybe I sometimes was (I got engaged to one new colleague, so it can't all have been bad, though we never completed the transaction - my fault). The funny thing is that I flatter myself that I'm a reasonably acute observer of human behaviour, and I could see everyone else doing what I wanted to do. It's just that I couldn't do it. I didn't know how. It was as if I'd missed a critical lesson at school, in which everyone had been taught what must, surely, be a fairly basic skill, but I'd been absent. David would be affably and effortlessly avuncular, while complaining that everyone was too young; Tom was peerlessly interested in people and made them feel the centre of the world; Mike was simply his gregarious and generous self. I was a tongue-tied, sweating mess, stumbling for the most basic of pleasantries. And these should have been simple social interactions: you have new starters, so you ask what they did at university, whether they'd had previous jobs, what committees they were on, how they were finding it.

It took me back to parties at university, which could be heaven or hell. If I knew people well, I would party with the best of them. Give me a corner seat and two or three chums, and I would have a whale of a time. I would talk, regale, gossip, cackle and laugh like a drain. Nothing could be better. There is a photograph, which I may try to unearth, of one of the greatest parties I remember, in one of St Andrews's greatest party flats, 7A Playfair Terrace, in which I almost look happy (I have an unfortunate resting face, which I gather women call RBF, or Resting Bitch Face). But I am in fact smiling, and I was having the time of life.

Other parties, though, oh God. Thrust me into a room of mostly strangers with the words "small talk" circling my head like cartoon birds, and I would rather be, to use Rhod Gilbert's picturesque phrase, cutting off my genitals with a pizza wheel. I assumed - yeah, yeah, probably rightly - that most people, women especially, would find me dull, boring, a drain on their evening. I would in some part at least live up to that by becoming an incredibly awkward, twitchy bore, especially around women. So it was a vicious circle. The prophecy fulfilled by mine own self.

All of this brings me around to what most people find a contradiction. At university, especially as a postgraduate, I was an active debater. I don't pretend that I was brilliant, but I was reliable, and, all too often, if the Society needed someone to fill a chair and speak for seven minutes on a random subject, I got the call. I also spent some months presiding over debates during what I will call an interregnum and go no further than that at this point. In addition, I was a leading member of my prep school's dramatic productions. So I am, in some ways, a natural performer. If you gave me a topic, half an hour and a glass of wine, I'd happily talk to a room of 200 people.

As I say, most people find this a contradiction. You can't be shy, they say. You can speak in public (and tolerably well, if you will forgive my editorialising), you can do so at short notice and you can do so without obvious anxiety. It's true; public speaking doesn't rattle me. Apart from my first time (of how many things in life is that true!), I was never nervous when I debated, nor when I had to give talks to visitors or students when I worked in the Commons. It was just a thing I did. Mostly I enjoyed it, because I am vain and I enjoy the sound of my own voice. I also think I'm tolerably funny.

So, how does that work, you might ask? I suspect both of my parents, who had to speak publicly in their professional lives (and no doubt did it incomparably better than me), found it much more nerve-wracking. For me, it's very simple. It's about control. If I have to speak to a room of 200 people about, let's say, capital punishment, I'm in charge. I know what I'm going to say (well, more or less), and they have to listen, or cheer or boo. That I don't mind. Don't get me wrong, I've played tough crowds, proposed things people are against or opposed things they support. But I'm still at the helm.

It becomes a whole different game when 200 people become three, or two, or, God help me, one. Who knows what they'll say? It becomes a dialogue, and that's an unpredictable horror of hugely greater proportions. You'll say something; they'll respond, with something you can't possibly predict. Then you'll have to respond. That's what I hate, what I fear, what torments me.

To return to my title, we are all strange in different ways, as the BBC documentary demonstrated. As an example, Rhod Gilbert finds it nearly impossible to go into a coffee shop alone and drink a cup of whatever. I find solitary jaunts to hostelries absolute heaven, and have no problem with them. Maybe it's that faux-misanthropy. (Though, I should say, just as an observation, I find it very comforting being surrounded by people, even if I don't know them. Unless I'm feeling really miserable, I'd rather have a pint on my own in a pub than open a bottle of beer at home.) Anyway, I understand completely and exactly why he has found an outlet, perhaps even a curative, in performance. As part of the documentary, he made contact with three very shy people from various parts of Wales, and got them to perform a stand-up routine in front of a small and supportive audience. All three found it traumatic ("I've shit enough bricks backstage I could build Trump's wall") but all three thrived on the experience, and I was so pleased for them. Gilbert confessed it was cod-psychology and fretted that he was doing the wrong thing, but I think he hit the nail on the head.

So, there we are. If I ever meet you at a party and I'm dull and awkward, I'm sorry. I'm just not very good at this lark. I hope my friends will agree that if you stick at it, I get better (though very far from perfect). I really dislike the syndrome-ising of everything, and I don't think I suffer from a disorder (at least not in this regard). I'm just terribly, terribly shy.

Ghosts

I have been thinking a lot lately about absence. I have written elsewhere that I am determined not to become a professional grief merchant, and that remains my hope. So I'm not going to bang on about the loss of my father. I still rail against the cruelty of what Uncle Monty so wonderfully calls "some vulgar little tumour", which has taken my grandfather, my father, Big Pete, my lovely principessa Celia (the fairest, calmest and most level-headed clerk there ever was) and so many others. But no-one ever promised the world would be fair. No-one would sign up if they knew the full terms and conditions. We're pitched into this maelstrom and we have to make the best of it.

I chose the word "absence" deliberately, because I suppose the more obvious choice would have been "loss". But I think there's a distinction. Loss is awful. Dreadful, appalling, heart-wrenchingly awful. It passes. There is probably some modish new theory on the different stages of grief - it's the sort of thing that clever people can make vast sums of money out of. (For purists, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross said there were five stages of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.) Myself, I like Tom Lehrer's description of a philosopher as someone who makes money from giving advice to people who are happier than they are. Absence is permanent. That's what gives it its crushing weight.

Another parenthesis, if I may (will he ever start, let alone stop? I hear you cry). In a debate about the power, for good or otherwise, of religion, Christopher Hitchens, whom I revere, even if I thought he was right only 50 per cent of the time, made a throwaway remark that the Catholic Church's association with fascism before the Second World War was a stain from which it had not recovered, and - here's the rub - "and never will". Now, I don't know if he's right about that. As a proto-atheist, I'm not sure I care, though as an historian I should. But those three words, in that delicious English accent, have come to haunt me. "And. Never. Will." I don't know if Hitch meant much by them, or if they were just a niggling coda to annoy his opponents. Either is possible of him, which is what made him so great and so infuriating a polemicist.

Now, though, I feel their power almost crushingly. They inform almost everything I do. When I think - as I know my siblings do in this time of still-raw loss of our father - that I must say this or that, or, to be more accurate, text this or that to the old man, it's not just that I can't. I hear Hitch. Those terrible words. And. Never. Will. So, to return to my theme, loss passes. Absence, by its very nature, never can. And. Never. Will. I feel sad currently, that my dad is not around. In time, I hope, I will feel less sad. But the essential truth will remain, until my dying breath (whether it be soon or distant), that he is not there. Absent. Gone. Gone forever.

I said I wasn't going to become a grief merchant, so let me talk about something else, albeit connected. In the Times magazine this past weekend, William Leith, whom I like (and wondered, erroneously, if he was the son of Prue), wrote an excellent article about attending a support group, for want of a better phrase, for people who had recently left relationships. (It was interesting, to me at least, that he was the only man in a group of about a dozen. But I draw no conclusions.) It was led - because she may as well have a plug to the handful of people who will read this - by a woman called Sara Davison, who sounds formidable.

I am, as those who know me will attest, after they have stopped laughing so hard the Kenco comes down their noses, no lothario. So my charge sheet is not a lengthy document. I have loved maybe half a dozen women, not all of whom have returned the favour. I am also - and this is not an advertisement - currently single. That handful of relationships is a mixed bag in terms of termination, but I give away few secrets when I say I have not generally been the protagonist.

What I can say, with my hand on my blackened, shrivelled heart, is that I have loved each of them honestly and wholly. Nor has there been much of the overlap which seems to suit so many of my more skilful friends. Good luck to you - I couldn't keep up.

Anyway, this is dangerously close to another digression. I was talking about William Leith (with whom I have never been in love). In his Times article, he mentions that one of the exercises he was asked to perform as part of that recovery, if one can call it that, was to write down the characteristics of his ideal partner. His response broke my heart. "I wrote down the characteristics of my ideal partner. It is a description of my ex."

Here, I hope, is where I come back to absence. I know exactly what I would write in the same situation, and I know exactly whom it would describe. Friends probably know too. But where there was once presence, now there is only absence. And, to subvert Hitch, always will be.

How does the human heart - or whatever organ you want to consider as the seat of love, attachment, fondness, affection, caritas - deal with this? I suppose it runs the spectrum. We are tougher than we think. We have to be. Life is more lemons than lemonade, as anyone who, like I have, has reached middle age, must know. We are torn between two extremes. Well, I say "we". Of course, I mean "I". Don't we all? On the one hand, we venerate and visit and revisit the rushing joy of youth and early love. If you put me back in a rehearsal room at the age of 15 with ***** playing the piano, I could be there in a second. (I am not musical at all. I just gawped.) The blood would rush in my ears, my knees would go weak. Equally, stick me in a dingy piano bar with ***** and my great friend Tom battering away at the ivories, and I would be in very heaven. But it's not going to happen. And. Never. Will.

I think - and this is the end-of-He-Man lesson moment - we cope in two distinct ways. We cherish these memories, and revisit them, perhaps in our dreams, perhaps in our reveries, perhaps in conversation. But we also harden ourselves. There is, I think, an emotional, a mental equivalent of scar tissue which covers the heart (insert own organ of choice). Because how could we survive otherwise? Life is not a dress rehearsal. The young heart beats so violently that it could not survive the inevitable disappointments without some kind of defence mechanism. Otherwise the old oaks of England would be festooned with hanging bodies.

Another parenthesis: I don't know if this is true of women. I am a man and understand - if only a little - other men. Women may be entirely different. I would be stretching it to say I am a feminist, but I am all for equality, so, in a way, I hope women are the same (though it's a terrible burden to lay on them). But I really cannot say with any authority, despite having been married once and engaged twice.

Absence. I knew I had a point. It is a hard station. Worse, it is permanent. But it is part of the human condition. Perhaps I should go to Sara Davison's classes.

Family values

Those who know me will be aware that children are not my favourite thing. However, I am not an inflexible man - ho ho ho, I hear you cry - and on Friday the opportunity came up to infest myself on my my dear, dear friend Mike Hennessy and his family for the evening in Reading. I have not been feeling particularly 'up' recently and the prospect of a night in the warm embrace of family seemed just the tonic.

I first met Mike when I joined the House of Commons in 2005. How to describe him? Not an easy task. He is, first and foremost, a Catholic, father of eight home-schooled children, and a man who makes JP2 look like John Calvin. Not for him the liberal orthodoxies of Vatican II. His views on the current pontiff are, to put it mildly, trenchant. To say all of that, however, is somehow misleading. If Holy Mother Church is Mike's great guiding principle, his great love (apart from Kathryn, to whom we shall return) is The Good Life. He is a wine expert of considerable renown, who has forgotten more than I have ever known about the grape, and who accuses me (perhaps rightly) of having a terrible palate, but, like me, he can also appreciate the value - in every sense - of a bottle of Malbec from Lidl. We both know how to cut our cloth.

Mike and I hit it off immediately. It is difficult to say why. I am agnostic (at best), childless and, when we first got to know each other well, at that stage going through a divorce. I suppose I am a student of the Catholic Church, and I enjoy military history, a subject dear to his heart (ask him, or don't, about Indo-China). I know why I liked him: apart from enjoying a few glasses, his was and is a brain which fizzes and whirrs. He is a devotee of Belloc and Chesterton, of David Jones and Jutland, of Rabelais and Aquinas. Lift the lid, and you will find something interesting happening. He even knows some salty stories about Eric Gill.

Anyway, we have been friends these past dozen years and can always fall into idle conversation about this and that (or that and this). I don't remember when I was first invited to Casa Hennessy in Reading, but it's a while ago. I was rather daunted. As I say, I don't much like children, and I knew that Mike had (at that point) seven (Gabriel has now been added to the flock). I'm not very good with younglings, and I also knew that Mike's were home-schooled, and I wondered if they'd be asocial freaks who had "spectrum" stamped on their foreheads.

As it happens, I needn't have worried about a thing. They were - and remain - the nicest and most balanced bunch of kids I've ever encountered. The older ones were polite, courteous and respectful; the younger ones were a bit daft and playful but so obviously kindly that I was taken aback. I didn't feel awkward, nor did they regard me strangely (as well they might). Stepping into their home was like dipping your toe into a bath at just the right temperature.

Mrs Hennessy. Kathryn is a fiercely bright woman who (I think I'm right in saying) read Russian at Oxford - she and Mike met at Oriel. She has shouldered the burden of the home-schooling, and the children are a tribute to both her and Mike. I discovered early on that she is from Hartlepool - I was born in Stockton, so not so far away - and I also found she had a love (not shared by Mike) for Prefab Sprout. So what's not to like? Seeing her again on Friday was a pleasure and a joy, as I hadn't seen her for, embarrassingly, probably a couple of years.

Friday night in the Hennessy household is pizza night. Many pizzas are required for parents plus eight children and hangers-on, and finding an appropriate film is not easy. Mike had bought One of our Dinosaurs is Missing from Amazon and we giggled our way through absurdity and comedy racism. (Peter Ustinov seems particularly fond of yellow-face impersonations: see Charlie Chan. Ah-so.)

There was plenty of wine, and after the film, as various children were dispatched to bed, we chatted and generally put the world to rights. Something which becomes easier with the latening of the hour.

What's my point here? I suppose it's this. Prima facie, I don't like children. But presented with such a lovely family, especially as I was feeling so low, it was a tonic of an evening. The warmth of human comfort is sometimes important.