Or; Why Anyone Saying That Needs To ask themselves why they’re in total denial<\/h5>\n

I didn’t smile much when I was a kid. It wasn’t some Dickensian horror-story about being made to be a pick-pocket or having to go round on a milk-float or frost on the windows inside in the winter. I only went round on a milk-float on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings, because that was my Saturday job.<\/p>\n

OK, my Milk Clothes stank of sour milk and couldn’t be used for anything else. Jeans on their literal last legs. A white sweatshirt I’d properly grown out of. A horrible blue nylon coat with weird gold fasteners on the front that now, would pass as a diamond-quilted hipster jacket, but not in Trowbridge back then it didn’t. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t awful. The deal, not the coat. The coat was.<\/p>\n

We had Radio One on all the time and back then, that was something worth listening to. We also had the Christmas Eve we started way before dawn so we saw the sun rise through the steely high-pressure-over-Sweden blue winter sky, fuelled by home-made mince pies and whisky left out for us in the porch of council houses, next to the empties. I was fourteen or fifteen. It didn’t kill me. I wasn’t driving the milk-float.<\/p>\n

For Proust it was little biscuits that reminded him the past was a different country. Not just one where they do things differently, but one where you can only get a visitor visa that goes out of date too soon. For me, bottles chinking together makes me wait to hear the clack of the solenoids, the deep rising tone of the electric motor winding up and then the sound of the float coasting to a halt again. A pipe tapped out on the door of the float.<\/p>\n

Frost on the inside of the windows wasn’t special in those days. Pretty much everyone I knew knew all about that, rich and not very rich at all alike. A friend whose house was so big that the first time I saw it I mistook it for a hotel and asked directions to her house there had her own apartment on the top floor of what looked like half of Yorkshire. Her father refused to install heating up there on the basis that heated bedrooms were “bourgeois.”<\/p>\n

On the top floor, anyway. They weren’t bourgeois on his own floor. The other floors were fine.\u00a0 So was the \u00a323,000 he spent on his Purdeys, back when that would buy you a flat in a nice part of Bath.<\/p>\n

But little kids generally don’t need to be told to smile most days. I’m not a parent, but I think I can say that pretty safely. If they do there’s something wrong.<\/p>\n

Because there was never anything acknowledged to be something wrong, and there is only a finite amount of internet so some other time for that, I didn’t work out there was something wrong. Instead I behaved like a dissociated, self-regarding arse for quite a long time. Sometimes I still do. These days I realise there’s a pretty big difference between self-regard and self-awareness. Usually.<\/p>\n

The trouble is – and this is the bit that trips everyone up, including, if not especially, people trying to help – is that when you’re not thinking straight you don’t know you’re not thinking straight. Especially in a culture that doesn’t discuss it, criticises it or tells you to just buck-up and stop being so self-pitying.<\/p>\n