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.