We’ve got to question 4 of the Five Questions in Series 5 that I posed at the beginning of the year. (OMG, a month of the year has gone already!)

Question 4: Give me the story of your life in six words.
How about this as a fair summary:
Working class, eccentric thinker who underachieved
I didn’t get where I am today by achieving anything other than mediocrity.
OK, yes I did well academically by most people’s standards: reasonable first degree, a masters, then a doctorate (by the skin of my teeth!). But I failed dismally as the academic I wanted to be and left after a year.
I was destined to be a top consultant technician in a large IT company, but allowed myself to drift from job to job. I realised towards the end of my career that I could have achieved much more so-called success if I had put my mind to it. But I hadn’t and I realised I really didn’t want it, although I would have liked the status, the money and the pension. And that, from the outside looks like under-achievement because the early academic promise should have taken me much further than it did.
Unfortunately this just reinforced my internal mental self-portrait as a loser, an image which seems to have been instilled in me in childhood. It became an ingrained self-fulfilling prophesy. But of course it’s bollox. Intellectually I know it is.
But changing one’s internal self-image is damn hard. I’ve managed to get a long way from being a miserable, negative, “they’re all out to get me” git of a loser, as my father was, and as I was set to become. But so far I haven’t managed to shift the internal “loser” self-portrait.
No wonder I’m depressive.
Bah! Humbug!