Over-medicated, angry, intolerant, awful hostess, bitch, vulnerable kitten? All of them?

Or all four? For three weeks I had a friend and her three chihuahuas staying. It made me realise I am not a nice person. This wasn't easy, on me, or on her. I'm still trying to work it out.

Hello from the hot summer of ‘25

Occasionally I lead writing retreats. It’s not an expertise but when I do have a go I throw myself into it and go “balls deep” as the bros like to describe it. Not literally, of course. I don’t, thank the Lord Jesus and my two XX chromosomes, have a pair of revolting (but evolutionarily necessary) testicles to stick in the faces of six intelligent women in a French chateau working on their memoir projects. And if I did, my name would be Greg Wallace and not Kate Spicer.

I could illustrate this with a picture of Gregg Wallace, but I prefer to show my beautiful little podenca Leica

This Substack is not about Gregg. He serves as an introduction to this thought whirl about 1/ my belief that good manners can be a great way not to piss other people off, 2/ the inconvenient truth about neurodiversity and 3/ the gross cognitive dissonance involved who I am and who I think I am.

I am not that interested in Gregg nor the BBC’s two decades of blindness to complaints about his groping, inappropriate joking, and uninvited unleashings of his penis in a sock. If the BBC could ignore a lifetime of paedo, necrophiliac, televisual torture device, Jimmy Savile, then of course Gregg and Huw et al could slip through the net.

Gregg never touched me wrong, nor groped me or showed me his penis uninvited...

CONGRATULATIONS GREGG YOU SILLY WILLY you’ve been sacked