Diary

I hadn't meant to write anything last night. It was a full day. It had started early getting on the train to Glasgow to do an interview going out live on radio Scotland.

Then preparing for a lecture in Strathclyde University that evening, and supper afterwards.

It was coming up to midnight by the time I left the railway station, and I thought I had made peace with the resolution making part of my self. That super-ego of mine is a relic of the time I was so insecure in myself, so afraid of making people angry, so determined to be good.

So in the circumstances it seemed OK to miss my daily blog, just for once.

But then these sentences began to form themselves when I was in the taxi, and the only way to get rid of them was write them down. Just inside the deadline...

And now this evening I'm still thinking of everybody's reluctance to ask questions in the lecture hall. I remember when I was a student being pathologically unwilling or unable to talk in class.

My shyness was very strong. I had an instinctive impulse to stay silent, and never draw attention to myself.

And I was so struck, and dumbfounded, by being in the presence of a roomful of articulate and intelligent people who so obviously felt the same.

Then while I was cooking supper this evening I remembered those dreadful conferences I sometimes had to attend when I worked in universities.

And the unspeakably dull talks people gave in a language that was not meant to communicate, but to impress. To intimidate the audience with the speaker's use of specialised language.

And that the questions that were invariably asked afterwards were not genuine requests for information or invitations to debate. But expressions of ego and attempts to put down and humiliate.

No wonder that lecture hall was not a safe space. And how sad...