Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

That I was fucked up as a child and then as a youth, I cannot deny. That my fucked-up-edness sprang from a sense of betrayal, desertion or withheld love I will not allow.

I praise God for my criminal tendencies, my homosexuality, my jewishness and the loathing of the bourgeois, the conventional and the respectable that these seem to have inculcated in me. I could so easily, given the smallest twist to the least gene on the outermost strand of my string of DNA, have turned into one of those awful McWhirterish ticks, one of those asocial right-wing libertarian freaks who think their ability to find anagrams and solve Rubik’s cubes is a serious index of mental value.

the eugenic snobbery of those who believe that the ability to see the word ‘carthorse’ scrambled in the word ‘orchestra’ or to name every American state in alphabetical order raises them above the level of the average twitcher, trainspotter or Gyles Brandreth style word-game funster.

my story, such as it is, is as much one of good fortune as of anything else. But it is my story and worth no more and no less than yours or anyone else’s.

Failing to imagine what it is like to be someone else. Pissing my life away. Dishonesty with self and others. Neglecting to pick up the phone or write letters. Not connecting made or processed objects with their provenance. Judging without facts. Using influence over others for my own ends. Causing pain.

Sometimes I wonder what is the point of all my dissembling and simulation if so many friends, acquaintances, enemies (if I have any) and perfect strangers are able to see through my every motive, thought and feeling. Then I wonder what is the point of all my frankness, sharing of experience and emotional candour if people continue to misinterpret me to such an extent that they believe me balanced, sorted, rationally in charge, master of my fate and captain of my soul.

Such then was the spin of my madness. I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.

that strange mixture of the Bloomsbury and the pre-Raphaelite which characterises a certain kind of girl with artistic temperament and nowhere to put it.