Part One: The Boy at the Window
If you’ve ever wondered how an eccentric is assembled, you’ve come to the right place.
I’m not sure there is an instruction manual, but I can at least show you the early warning signs. Looking back over nearly eighty years, I can see them scattered throughout my childhood like breadcrumbs.
At the time, they looked perfectly ordinary to me.
Everyone else seemed far less convinced.
People often ask me what it’s like to be an eccentric. That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer because, from the inside, it simply feels like being yourself. It’s only when you notice other people looking at you in a slightly puzzled way that you begin to suspect you may be travelling a different road.
I think the first time I became aware of those puzzled looks was when I was about ten years old.
I was perfectly happy spending time on my own. I could stare at the smallest things and discover something fascinating within them, and I never felt the need to hurry. I was always asking myself, “What if…?”
A window pane could become an imaginary canvas. There were endless pictures hidden behind the glass if I took the time to look for them. I would breathe gently onto the pane, softening the outside world for a moment, and then press a finger lightly into the mist. A line here. A curve there. Suddenly something mysterious would appear.
The picture never remained the same.
Perhaps that was the magic of it.
As the condensation slowly disappeared, so did the image, leaving me waiting for the next one to arrive.
What I was actually experiencing wasn’t daydreaming in the way most people imagine it.
It was the manifestation of ideas.
My mind wandered into places that had no obvious destination, yet it almost always returned carrying something new. Looking back, I think of it as travelling without moving. Mind travel, perhaps.
The beauty of a misted window was that nothing had to be permanent. There was no sketchbook to fill, no painting to finish and no expectation that anyone else would understand what I was seeing. An idea would appear, live for a few moments and then quietly disappear as the glass cleared itself, making room for the next one.
School was rather less understanding.
The teachers didn’t say very much to me, and I asked very little of them. I simply wanted to get this education business over and done with. I spent a great deal of time looking out of the classroom window, for which I was caned on more than one occasion.
To the teacher, I was distracted.
To me, I was elsewhere.
The curious thing is that nobody ever asked where.
Art lessons were different. They offered a rare kind of freedom. At last there was a place where looking differently wasn’t something to be punished. It was something to be encouraged.
Looking back after all these years, I sometimes wonder how many artists, inventors, musicians and writers were sitting quietly by classroom windows, not refusing to pay attention, but paying attention to something no one else could yet see.
Perhaps that was one of my earliest warning signs.
Not that I would become an eccentric.
Simply that I was beginning to discover there is more than one way to look at the world.
