I've occasionally described my experience of life as like seeing everything through the wrong end of a telescope. For some reason, things that ought to have affected me just didn't, and conversely I couldn't see any way of influencing what went on way over there in the little dot of light at the far end of the telescope.

As a child, I quickly discovered that my peers consequently found me offensive and ridiculous. I worked around this by climbing trees and living in a pretty solitary fantasy world.

As an adult, I discovered alcohol and - BOOM! - the telescope collapsed and suddenly other people were right there around me, for the most part perfectly comprehensible, and indeed I became rather fond of some of them.

Sitting in the pub after work, with my ever-present pile of magazines and books, I read about this hot new thing called "High-Fuctioning Autism" (later "Asperger's Syndrome", then demoted to merely a position on the "Autism Spectrum"), and also much about the supposed introvert/extrovert dichotomy.

Whenever I suggested to somebody that I might be a bit introverted or "Asperger's", this suggestion was met with incredulity: "What? You?!"

I'm a better human being when I'm drinking a lot. Not, I must stress, when I'm drunk. Rather when whatever my brain does to keep me distant from everything around me has been disabled by regular doses of alcohol. I understand what people feel. Occasionally I even know what to say to them. I can be relatively sober and be overwhelmed by Platonic love. It's extraordinary and wonderful.

By my mid-twenties I moderated my alcohol intake. It now waxes and wanes, but to be honest, I wish I could do without self-medication altogether. I look in the mirror and see somebody simultaneously much younger and much older than I am. Brings to mind William S. Burroughs' phrase "borrowed flesh". I wish that there was some way that I could be close to people that doesn't involve blasting my brain with a toxic chemical.

I don't have many heroes. At last count it was two, maybe three. (You only acquire heroes when you're young, and some of them quickly lose their lustre.)

One of them just said this:

Ever since my teenage years, I felt as if there were a filmy curtain separating me from other people my age. I understood the words of their conversations, but I could not grasp why they said what they did. Much later I realized that I didn't understand the subtle cues that other people were responding to.

Richard Matthew Stallman changed my life. Previously I understood all paid work as transactional. You do something you find distasteful, but you're compensated for it. The idea of pursuing a trade ethically, with dignity and self-respect, was astonishing.

I can't imagine what it's like to be born looking at life down the wrong end of the telescope, and not to have alcohol to fix it. RMS doesn't drink. I am not ashamed to admit that collapsing the telescope by sheer intellectual effort is beyond me.

That doesn't excuse several instances of inconsiderate behaviour, but I'm standing in a very shaky glass house, so I'm not going to throw any stones. Motes and beams and all that.