This page has been waiting for eight years.

It was eight years ago that Tamsin showed me a newspaper cutting saying that adults could have ADHD too.

Eight years since I drove up to Liverpool to the ADHD Foundation and took the test. They told me that not only did I have this peculiar mental kink that affects 5% of the world’s population, but that I was in the 1% of the most severe cases.

The story is told in my book Faster, Louder, Riskier, Sexier: Learning to Love ADHD. It took me seven years before I was comfortable about publishing it.

All that time, I was too ashamed to admit to a “mental condition”. I thought there was something rather pathetic about people who wore it on their sleeve (I never did have much time for Prince Harry).

So, what changed?

I began to see it from the outside.

After the trouble off the Grand Banks, I sent the Aries self-steering gear to Holland for repair. DHL told me that since it was going to be returned to me, there would be no Stupid Brexit customs duty to pay.

But the Dutch insisted that it should be a “Temporal Import” – and sent it back … to the Isle of Man, where it started from.

But I wasn’t on the Isle of Man anymore. I was in Crosshaven, in Ireland, and I’m afraid I became rather overwrought. I told David, the DHL LiveChat operator to “Go stick your head in a bucket of hyena offal”. He cut me off.

I was about to unload in the same vein all over Angela in the Isle of Man office, when I saw myself from the outside, saw how unreasonable I was being. I took a deep breath and instead told her: “I’m sorry. I owe you an apology. I have a mental condition which causes me to behave inappropriately sometimes. Can we start again…”

I don’t know where that came from. Maybe because she was being so patient, and I was being so rude…

But suddenly, I felt an enormous sense of release – and it feels good to add this page; to “come out”, as it were.

But I would still far rather not have it at all.

I could take medication, but if you have read the Good Health page, you will understand that I don’t take pharmaceutical products of any kind – not even an aspirin.

And yet, now I discover there is a natural supplement which is said to help.

I’ll let you know how I get on. In the meantime, I’ve added it as an update on the Good Health page – look for “July 2025”.

 

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