Why we should encourage children to be more 'weird'

It’s the sort of thing that breaks your heart as a parent.

My son had been told by one of his friends that he was “weird”. Moreover, this “friend” didn’t want to talk to him because it “might be catching”.

It is certainly true that he has a number of quirks and tics, that we and some of his teachers believe may be the result of a mild form of autism, what is sometimes referred to as Asperger’s Syndrome.

This does make him stand out from his peers as “different”, which can make life difficult given the desire of children to fit in and the cruelty some of them can display towards those that don’t.

But what I told him, when I heard of what had happened, was that he shouldn't feel upset or insulted by being called “weird’ or “strange” or “different” or any of the other synonyms you might find for them in the average thesaurus. Far from it. He should take it as a badge of honour and be proud of it.

So should anyone else who feels a frisson of recognition when a certain Doors song is played. That’s “People Are Strange”, by the way. Echo & The Bunnymen did a good cover.

I have a T-shirt that I picked up at a London comic convention bearing the legend “Normal People Scare Me”. It’s actually from the TV show American Horror Story. But I bought it because it expressed what to me is a truth. Normal people do scare me. In fact, they frighten the crap out of me.

Normal people wear suits, and feel comfortable in them. They play golf, have aspidistras in the window, like to drive nice cars, enjoy gardening and listen to Phil Collins or Celine Dion (look at the sales figures if you think I’m stereotyping).

They vote for Theresa May, and Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump, and seem unperturbed when those people lie or do horrible things like designing policies that result in their own citizens getting deported (in May’s case with her hostile environment for immigrants while at the Home Office).

They buy the Daily Mail and nod their head at what it says. They’re often quietly racist, but express outrage should anyone call them on it because “some of my best friends are black”.

Bankers who nearly cratered the economy are normal people. So are the bureaucrats and officials and bosses who make everyday life more difficult than it ought to be. So are the people who missell financial products. So are the politicians who start wars and whip up resentment against minority groups to obscure their own failings. So are the people in the Norfolk market towns where I spent the early part of my career, who turn their centres into war zones on a Friday night.

Sometimes normal people are more than just scary. Think about how often it is that the oddball is portrayed in fiction as the serial killer, or the person responsible for other horrible crimes. Yet what’s striking in real life is how normal many of them seem to be from the outside. How often do you hear the refrain: “I can’t believe he’d do something like that – he was such a nice man!”

I’m reminded of what the writer Hannah Arendt wrote of Adolf Eichmann, the SS official who was the architect of the final solution, in her 1963 book Eichman in Jerusalam.

What struck her was how “terribly and terrifyingly normal” he was.

I feel comfortable in the company of people who are different because they’re not either scarily normal, or terribly and terrifyingly so. They’re peaceable. They’re fun. Most of all, they’re accepting.

Ageing rockers, geeks, freaks, punks, people who dress up in wildly colourful costumes at comic conventions; they aren’t the sort of people who will try and make fun of me when I’m staggering on crutches or sitting in a wheelchair in their midst. That’s something I’ve learned to value.

My son might have his quirks, but despite enjoying blasting aliens to pixellated smithereens, he doesn’t possess a scintilla of aggression. He couldn’t conceive of raising a hand in anger. The concept of racism puzzles him in that he can’t understand why someone would dislike someone else purely because of the colour of their skin. The same is true of ableism. He’s happy to cheer UK sports teams, but he has no truck with the ugly nationalism that stalks Britain.

If all this makes him weird, then I hope to hell that it is catching. We could all do with a bit more of that sort of weird. The world would be a better, and much nicer, place if it was normal.