22nd Jan – You can thank your lucky stars that we’re not as smart as we’d like to think we are.

Have you come across one of those types who claim to be undiagnosed but on the spectrum? They are increasing in number, and they do this thing where they say, ‘every single one of us is on it somewhere, we just don’t know how to measure it yet,’ you know, so that it doesn’t sound offensive. We know who they are – the same old Boomers, now leaving their offices to colonise the creative space. Try telling them that for a proper diagnosis they’d have to spend the next six months on a psychiatric ward getting assessed by a Nurse Ratched-cum-Jimmy Savile paramedic and see how many of them are still telling you they can’t stand their peas touching their fish fingers then.

I mention this because I’ve realised something about myself lately. I am undiagnosed ADHD. It explains a lot, and I like me better with that sort of background. I’m not announcing yet lest it becomes fashionable, but let’s just say it’s working as a life solution. Either that or I’ve got 180+ IQ, and that is what explains my standoff with the rest of the human race – they are a source of aggravation with whom I’m constantly impatient, whilst they think that I’m an untethered idiot who’s always running away with the next thing before we’ve resolved the present.

The YouTube test was pretty convincing though, and I must say there may be something in this IQ idea because everyone I meet, whether or not they are successful in their various fields of endeavour, strikes me as not just slow to comprehend, but somehow obsessed with repeating ad nauseam that which they’ve finally managed to comprehend.

This notion has gained such traction with me that I am starting to think that my father may not have been that bad after all; persuading myself to look at him and his sort like exhibits in a museum from whom I have evolved. I would forgive you father for you know not what you did, were it not for the fact that you have been pretty nasty about our perceived differences.

I’ve just got off the phone to the Dog’s Bowl creative. I need to get into the swing of a regular call with him where I pitch what to other people are mad ideas; too often and it looks like I’m saying the first thing that comes into my head, too seldom and it looks like I’m not trying. A happy medium, not my strong suit, needs to be sought. To justify the call, I opened the conversation with the news about the appointment of Fips. He wasn’t very interested, but I expected that and I was pleased with my reaction to his underwhelment (oh yes, us folk on this side of the spectrum make up new words too – it’s one of our things), in that I gave him a metaphorical shrug over the phone, and expressed complete lack of interest in his lack of interest. Cool eh? Through that I worked myself into a position of hating him, and through that, I found the grounds on which to make the pitch. I’ve got an idea, I said, and I’m going to tell you now; do you want it by phone or email? And he chose phone. Good old me, I just gave it to him straight without selling it. Once I take the ADHD-buzz out of my system, I am actually really good at being a cove. Suddenly, he was the one trying to justify his role in the call.

The idea was for a TV advert for their new organic beer. I proposed getting a mid-ranking celeb with an unjustified confidence in his/her cultural status to talk earnestly about the qualities of the beer, then to throw in an errant word or two where they pronounce their Vs as Ws, as an uneducated Dickensian urchin might. The beauty of the campaign being that if you were to choose someone who’s often on the tele, that they accidentally continue to repeat the same shibboleth in their other appearances so that it might catch on as a national joke. And if you chose the right sort of conceited prick, they would try to divorce him/herself from having done it once they’d realised what they’d done, and so stir it all up all the more. I proposed someone not too thick that the original joke would not work with them – so you couldn’t have celebs who are clinically retarded like Scott Mills; or so blinded by their pursuit of fame that they were incapable of reason, like Dale Winton legacy Rylan Clark Neal: they wouldn’t get it, then would ham it up too much once they did, to ruin the whole thing.

He suggested Stacey Dooley which was on the right lines, but she’s already common and talks that way anyway. More Pritti Patel I told him; or perhaps David Davies who is sufficiently lacking self-awareness to make a potential jackpot for the idea – though I wasn’t sure how would he wash with the hipsters whose high-tide mark for current affairs only reaches as far as Blair and Tomasz Schafernacker. We discussed it for a while, by now giggling and doing impressions to each other of how we’d imagine various well-known TV people as idiots from Dickens – I particularly enjoyed his rendition of Alan Carr as Mrs Joe Gargery, until I hit upon Mariella Frostrup and Giles Coren. I pressed the point hard on the latter because he’s supposed to be a foodie, and he’s got that false confidence in his own intelligence, which we, from our pitch on the spectrum, can see has no heft.

I can just imagine him saying, ‘the new beer inwented by the geniuses at Dog’s Bowl, that’s tasty and good for your cadiowascular health. It’s conwerted me. I adwise you give it a try.’  Especially if we get the twat in a stove pipe hat to deliver it.

He’s having a think about it. He’d better be quick because now I’ve had a practice run on him, I’m going to give it to Fips, who has sent me an email this morning, and advised me to do this:

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