Stripy Horses Or Plain Zebras?

Yes, I know what’s happening in the Ukraine. This is what’s stopped me from blogging. Before I get going on this subject, I want to explain why I haven’t said much about it. The truth is that my limited knowledge of the matter leads me to fear saying anything which might turn out to be ill-judged or crass. We all know it’s happening. My response to it, like many other issues, is to engage in what I hope is a helpful manner but also to recognise that there is a lot else going on in the world at all times, and there’s a rôle for escape. For what it’s worth, I’m thinking about Putin’s odd association between a country with a Jewish leader and Nazism, and the psychological influence being a long-term leader has on the person in that position. Even so, I am going to talk about zebras.

There’s a saying in medicine that if you hear the sound of hooves, you should conclude it’s horses and not zebras, which obviously makes more sense in Europe than in certain parts of Afrika. One of the shortcomings of my cognitive style is that I will tend to think of zebras more than horses and then wonder why everyone else hasn’t thought of that. In the context of medical diagnosis, this might mean I’m more likely to think someone has Lewy Body Dementia than Alzheimers or Paget’s Disease of Bone than arthritis. This is, however, self-correcting and doesn’t constitute a huge problem, because in herbalism one can address more than one possible diagnosis at once without necessarily doing harm. Also, it isn’t my job to diagnose, which is a responsibility legally enshrined in particular offices, none of which are mine. That said, I do need to have a firm grasp of disease processes to address them.

But this is not the other blog, so I’ll broaden that to something which is in fact relevant to the current Eurasian situation. If a first-language reader of a language with a Latin script such as English sees a page of Cyrillic text and is mindful of the adage that if you hear hooves, expect horses, they’re quite likely to presume that the passage is Russian rather than, say, Ossetian. However, Cyrillic has been used to write a wide variety of languages and it may not be Russian. This, of course, would arise in the case of the Ukrainian language, since a cursory glance from someone unfamiliar with the details of the differences might think the text was Russian. This is part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Ukrainian:

Всі люди народжуються вільними і рівними у своїй гідності та правах. Вони наділені розумом і совістю і повинні діяти у відношенні один до одного в дусі братерства.

And this is the same in Russian:

Все люди рождаются свободными и равными в своем достоинстве и правах. Они наделены разумом и совестью и должны поступать в отношении друг друга в духе братства.

For the record, in English this reads:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Since I’m much more familiar with Russian than Ukrainian, having abortively attempted to learn it in the late 1970s and early ’80s CE, the first text looks foreign to me, and in particular its use of the letter “i” seems very incongruous. The two languages are quite similar, and I wonder if the differences would be perceived as a little like those between Scots and English. That is, is there a tendency for Russian speakers to regard Ukrainian as merely a dialect of Russian? Historically there has been. This might sound quite abstruse in the setting of the conflict, and I’m aware too that many Russians won’t consider this war as done in their name, but it does impinge on English media in one particular aspect: the name of the capital city.

I’ve long considered the name of the capital of the Ukraine to be «Киев», but in fact that is the Russian version. The Ukrainian, and therefore correct, name of the city is «Київ», and at this point I’m also wondering about Ukrainian punctuation – do they use guillemets like Russian or something more like inverted commas? The Romanisation of the name is now “Kyiv” in English, whereas it has formerly been written “Kiev”, the Russian pronunciation. Is it important to focus on this with all the other stuff going on? Well, probably. The spelling and pronunciation of placenames in the Ukraine has remained stubbornly Russian in the international news media even though the country became independent from Russia in 1991 and the name of the capital was officially changed in 1995. This politicises the name. It once again reminds me of Scottish placenames, which in that case is further complicated by the presence of the Gàidhlig language and its nationwide promotion by the Scottish government. Speaking of which, when I laboriously ploughed through a Russian tweet yesterday (not “labourious” – there’s another one), I found myself, as I often am, reminded of Q-Celtic languages in the dual pronunciation of many of the consonants, leading me to feel very much, once again, that they could really benefit from being written in Cyrillic script. But it ain’t gonna happen is it? Another illustration of the politics of scripts.

But this post wasn’t supposed to be about the Ukraine but horses, asses and zebras. Note that I put horses first in that list. Conceptually, we often have a tendency to separate marked from unmarked concepts in our language and thought, so I clearly regard horses as the unmarked concept in that list. Also, asses are apparently less exotic than zebras to me. There is some justification for that because a zebra, visually speaking, is literally marked, but there are other aspects to this. For instance, in Western Eurasia, where I live, horses are more familiar and widespread than zebras, and this is basically down to human exploitation of them. Historically, the exploitation of horses is vastly important and the domestication of the horse is a necessary pre-requisite to that. I feel unqualified to comment on the issue of veganism and horses because I’m aware of disparate views and my own encounters with them are somewhat limited, though also a lot more extensive than the average contemporary Western urbanite because I grew up in the country, used to hunt sab and have been on a lot of demos with mounted police present. It’s odd to think that up until a little over a century ago, these animals would’ve been an everyday part of life for most people in these isles regardless of where they lived.

I’m aware also that I’m thinking rather in terms of a binary opposition between zebras and horses rather than a ternary one between horses, asses and zebras. I can’t help thinking, though, that zebras and asses have a lot in common compared to zebras and horses, such as their tails and manes being more similar. I don’t have a firm impression of how large zebras are either, and I’m aware that there are three species of them and just talking about “zebras” generically is fairly vague.

But the question I’m working up to is this (actually there are two): Is a horse a plain zebra, or a zebra a stripy horse? It could equally well be, is a donkey a plain zebra or a zebra a stripy donkey? I should probably also explain why I’ve been calling them asses. The reason for this is that donkeys to me seems to refer to the domesticated species, but there are two other species of ass who are wild. I’m not being frivolous here, incidentally. My question is, are the extinct ancestors of today’s equines primitively stripy or primitively plain? Or did they have a different appearance than either of these? It seems to me that we assume in many pictures of prehistoric equines that they were primarily plain, although some have stripy portions of their coats. When we do this, are we being “horse-centric” or is it based in science? Are zebras the unusual ones? How could we find out?

The other question also sounds nonsensical but isn’t: is a zebra black with white stripes or white with black stripes? This doesn’t seem to make sense until you see one of the unusual individual zebras who are the other way round than usual, and at that point you realise that it is in fact normally a particular way round. Right now, I can’t remember which. But this is a secondary point.

Equines are members of a declining clade, that of odd-toed ungulates or perissodactyls. This order’s heyday was back in the earlier part of the Cenozoic and includes the largest land mammal ever, the Indricotherium, which shows convergent evolution with the giant sauropod dinosaurs of the Mesozoic. Nowadays there are the relatively widespread equines, the rhinos and the tapirs, and so we’re in the peculiar position of having a small order with one or two extremely populous species, namely the donkey and horse, a couple in the middle and a relatively large number of species who are largely recently extinct because of us, or severely endangered for the same reason. However bad the domestication of the horse and donkey may have been for individual members of those species, it’s turned out to be good for their survival as species.

Domestic zebras don’t happen. This is because they don’t meet six criteria making a species suitable for this, which incidentally humans may have done themselves – we may ourselves be domesticated. These criteria are that they must:

• Eat food that’s easily available where humans live.
• Reach maturity quickly.
• Don’t panic easily when startled.
• Be docile.
• Breed easily in captivity.
• Have a social hierarchy.

Zebras only conform to some of these. For instance, they do graze like horses but they’re quite aggressive. They’re unpredictable and have been known to attack humans. The same is true of horses but to a much lesser degree. This seems like a good adaptation for resisting being dominated by other species, such as ourselves, but ironically it seems to have led to them becoming much rarer than horses, or perhaps staying at a similar level of population for longer. Remarkably, one of the effects of domestication is often that the animals resulting have black and/or white patches, so the fact that zebras aren’t but are still black and white is interesting.

One problem with working out whether they were primitively striped or not is that fossil horses are of course just bones and teeth on the whole. I’m not aware of either frozen or tar pit equines, although they may exist, so the problem is they tend to be fossilised in such a way as not to preserve skin or hair. There’s another issue too. It may not be a question of stripes versus plain so much as the distribution of the stripes or the presence of other patterns. There are melanistic zebra foals with white spots on a black background, as it were. It seems there could be several ways of working out what happened when.

Zebras are stripy for a reason and the question arises of what selective factors might have led to this. Perhaps surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to be connected to protection from large predators. They can be smelt by lions and other carnivores from further off than the stripes would make a noticeable difference to their appearance. It’s thought that the real reason is to confuse biting insects, which is also the cause of their tail anatomy, which acts as a fly swatter. Asses have the same kind of tails. Therefore, is it possible that the stripiness or otherwise of an equine could be related to their tail anatomy? Not entirely, since asses are not striped, but horses are the ones with divergent tails and zebras and asses both have the original in that respect. However, these are only two of a dozen and a half theories about this.

Just to answer the question of whether zebras are black with white stripes or the other way round, zebra skin is black and it’s an adaptation for some of their coat to appear white, so they are black with white stripes rather than the other way round. This becomes evident when you see a zebra who is striped as a “negative” of the common type, because they actually look like white animals with black stripes. There are also three living species of zebras with slightly different skin patterns: Grévy’s, Mountain and the Plains Zebra. They’re in a subgenus referred to as Hippotigris, and there are two others, the asses in the unsurprisingly named Asinus – these have three living species, two of whom are Eurasian and one Afrikan. Finally, there’s the horse itself, presumably in a subgenus called Equus, and although there are two subspecies of these, namely the tarpan and Przewalski’s horse, the latter has a different number of chromosomes, so I don’t understand why it’s considered the same species. European horses, now extinct, were also a separate species, and some of these were piebald, as can be seen in cave paintings. Przewalski’s horse and the ancestors of modern domesticated horses diverged during the last Ice Age, roughly in Crô-Magnon times. It may be that the tarpan and Przewalski’s horse are the same species and horses a separate one.

There used to be a fourth subgenus: Amerihippus. Unsurprisingly, these are American, and in fact horses originally evolved in North America although they died out before Columbus. Once again, the presence of horses and their possible domestication in America might have made a huge difference to the course of history, but of course nobody knows if their temperament was more like zebras or horses and asses, and of course whether they were striped, plain or something else. There are Pre-Columbian native figurines of horses. It used to be thought that American horses were wiped out during the last Ice Age, but in fact they seem to have survived it. Genetic studies have shown that there were horses unrelated to those introduced by Spanish settlers in North America, and only two years after Cortez arrived, there were people on horseback in the Carolinas, even though meticulous paperwork recorded that none of the horses brought by the Conquistadores had escaped or been otherwise lost. There is a political element in the idea that American horses died out in the Ice Age, because it makes it seem that anything worthwhile was introduced by the Europeans. However, this does still raise the question of why horses seem to be so much more important in Eurasian cultures than Native American, and also makes me wonder if their ancestors had always been in America. Native American dog breeds are remarkable in that although they are still of the same appearance and behaviour as the breeds present before the Europeans, they are actually now entirely descended from Old World dogs. How this happened is a mystery. Native American horses today can have curly or very long manes compared to Old World horses. They are also sometimes piebald. More remarkably, some of them have slightly stripy legs! This, I think, is a clue.

The other hypotheses regarding zebra stripes include the idea that they create cooling convection currents by forming alternating hot and cold strips of air, that they help zebras recognise each other and that they’re warning colouration for what are apparently quite aggressive animals. If these situations apply to North America at the time the ancestors of today’s Afrikan zebras left, it’s feasible that they were already striped.

It’s said that the reason for the long manes and hairy tails of horses is connected to the North American climate. If this is so, it would be expected that their ancestors wouldn’t have had these before it became quite so harsh. It seems that the cold of the Ice Ages led to horses evolving these features, and in fact Przewalski’s horses have spikier manes than the more familiar horses, although their tails are still similar. As mentioned previously, the Palæarctic and Nearctic zoögeographical realms are sometimes united into a single Holarctic realm, consisting of North America and Eurasia, and the mammalian and other fauna of this vast region, comprising fifteen percent of the planet’s land surface excluding Antarctica, is shared between the two continents, such as wolves, bears, formerly woolly mammoths, beavers and so forth. However, of course there are differences – coyotes spring to mind very close to being wolves but not quite – and the question arises of whether the North American horses are the same species as Eurasian horses. I presume that if they couldn’t breed true, this would’ve been noticed by now, so the alternatives seem to be that native North American horses are either hybrids with Eurasian horses with some North American horse DNA, just as some Homo sapiens have Denisovan and/or Neanderthal DNA, or that the horses in question have always been two subspecies. The former possibility is particularly interesting because of the presence of faintly striped legs among them. If this is from a separate species of native North American horse hybridised with Eurasian horses, maybe that species was more obviously striped.

I’ve largely ignored asses in all this, which is probably a mistake. I do have the impression, and it’s just a hunch, that asses and zebras are closer to each other than zebras and horses. One reason I think this is that there are native Afrikan asses but no native Afrikan horses. Zebras are smaller than horses at around a dozen hands and weigh from 250 to 450 kilos. Adult plains zebras can be as little as ten hands and Afrikan wild asses actually slightly larger. It’s easy to get hypnotised by the apparently central, “standard” equines we’re familiar with in Europe and ignore a possible alternate route of zebra ancestry.

So, to conclude, this is what I think, and this isn’t based on genetics. It’s scientifically established that equines are essentially American animals. Incidentally, there also used to be native South American horses which I’ve ignored for the purposes of this post. The original members of Equus had coats of various colours and patterns, including piebald, black and different shades of brown. Some of these had faint stripes, and these traits were widely distributed through the first species of the genus, Equus simplicidens, also known as the American zebra and found in Idaho, Texas and presumably other places. They’re supposed to have looked like this (the one on the left):

I don’t know what the reasoning behind the idea that the American zebra was striped is. I do know that the apparently most basal population of humans, the San, has considerable genetic variation in skin tone so my conclusion is that the American zebra was probably quite variable but had a brown and fawn striped variety. I also wonder if the South American horses were a lot more like zebras due to living in similar climates to today’s Afrika south of the Sahara.

My ADHD

I’m not keen on the idea that a person has internal conditions which are problematic. I prefer the social model of disability, which is that society disables people. For example, most people in the West eat dairy, and lactose intolerance is therefore seen as a disorder, but it wouldn’t exist if there were no sources of lactose in the diet. Also, there’s a strong tendency for disabilities and disorders to become part of one’s identity, and this is not helpful. That said, I have two official disorders which could be shoehorned into a psychiatric diagnosis should one choose to do so. One of them is very obviously gender incongruence, which was diagnosed sometime early last decade by the NHS. But I also have another diagnosis which is much older, from about 1975 if I recall correctly, and that’s what’s now known as ADHD but back then was called “hyperactivity”. Because I was understood to be a boy back then, I got this diagnosis much more easily than I would’ve done otherwise, and I think my ADHD shows itself very clearly in this blog. I haven’t been very closely focussed on it much of the time, and of course that may be part of it.

There’s probably no doubt that I’m neurodiverse and I would frankly be astonished if I couldn’t be diagnosed easily as depressive, but I don’t think there’s any good reason to pursue such a diagnosis as it wouldn’t be useful and I don’t consider my depressiveness to be essentially problematic. There’s a whole plethora of other things going on, some more nebulous than others, including probable dyspraxia, possible Geschwind Syndrome and a weirdly split form of what might be thought of as Asperger’s, which again suffers from being underdiagnosed in women and also as manifesting differently in us. The ASD aspect of my personality is, however, odd, and not officially diagnosed, because in some ways I’m a classic aspie but in others I’m almost the opposite. The way I think of myself is as in a wastebasket diagnosis which may or may not exist, but which I would call “neurodiversity not otherwise specified”. I do not consider myself in any way disabled and I place any problems I might encounter outside myself. This is partly because epistemologically I am more externalist than most people: concepts are not mental but objective entities which exist independently of being conceived of, in spite of the etymological link between those two words.

But none of this so far has been particularly personal, so I shall now remedy that and talk about my so-called “hyperactivity”. My experience of my first primary school was that it was under-stimulating. Nothing on the overt curriculum was new to me, and I used to hope for a while that teachers would introduce something I didn’t already know about, but it never happened. I found this very disappointing, and came to regard school as a distraction from serious academic study. This was okay because I could still pursue my own hobbies in my own time and got fairly far with those. It’s notable that when we later came to ensure that our children were aware that school attendance was optional and they opted not to go, that the other families with whom we participated in education had a strong tendency to perceive school as involving overachievement rather than underachievement, whereas my initial expectation of our children was that they ought to be able to knock off a few IGCSEs by the time they were seven or so. However, I don’t believe in hothousing and that didn’t happen. Bearing in mind the significance of all this for a child at primary school, I would say that a hyperactive child is frequently bored and that almost any child, but not me, needs physical activity to stop them moving around at other times in a way the staff deem problematic. I also think that, like many other pathologised neural differences, hyperactive people are likely to have filled some kind of social niche which is currently not recognised in most post-industrial societies, or for that matter industrial ones, and no, I don’t know what that is. I’ve also deliberately used the inaccurate term “hyperactive” here because one of the D’s in ADD and ADHD stands for disorder and I don’t consider myself disordered in that respect. However, of course not all people who can be fitted into this diagnosis are hyperactive and I definitely wasn’t.

After my diagnosis, I was on medication for two years. I don’t know what it was except that I’m aware that it was neither Ritalin or anything like it. It was a sedative. After a year or so, I began to feel uneasy and tended to get depersonalised a lot, so it was discontinued. It’s been said that sedatives are the opposite of what someone with ADD needs to conform because it sedates the faculty which would dampen down their activity, help them to extend their attention span and the like, and to that end I sometimes wonder if the fact that I find lavender oil stimulating – actually it makes me irritable – and rosemary sedating is linked to this effect. Likewise, and this is of course just anecdotal but also phenomenological, the colour red is a low-energy, downer of a colour to me and blue is high-energy and cheerful, and I strongly suspect this has something to do with this aspect of my neurodiversity.

One of the projections made at the time of my diagnosis and afterward was that food additives worsened the condition. I find this idea rather akin to that other idea, that vaccines cause autism. It isn’t that it’s right or wrong so much as that it frames ADD as problematic and therefore having an aetiology like a disorder. Having said that, my experience as a clinician strongly suggests that the likes of coal tar dyes and in particular aspartame are quite harmful, and the liver failure our son experienced is attributed by the orthodox medical profession to the formation of immune system complexes between self antigens and erythromycin, which is similar to a food dye, hence the word “‘ερυθρος”, meaning “red”, in its name. There’s a very strong tendency for suspicion of aspartame in particular to be stigmatised, but the people who do that cannot have had my experience of many patients whose lifestyles and diets appeared to be flawless apart from the presence of aspartame in their food whose health problems disappeared once they eliminated it and did absolutely nothing else.

From a Marxist perspective, the presence of colours and preservatives in food and beverages is substantially about the alienation of use and exchange value. Under capitalism, a commodity has two different values. One is its actual value, so for example an apple is nutritious and enjoyable. It also has exchange value, and this often requires it to have, for example, a longer shelf life (preservatives) or appeal more to the senses (food dyes). These often reduce the use value of the commodity and this is a major reason why capitalism is irrational and needs to be superceded. In the case of food, it may become less nutritious due to the presence of additives and the fact that it can be stored for longer. Therefore, whether or not the likes of azo or coal tar dyes are relevant to ADD, they shouldn’t exist. There are plenty of directly biochemical alternatives such as anthocyanins, chlorophyll and carotenoids. Note that I’m not making a distinction between the natural and unnatural here as I consider that dichotomy spurious.

One practically all-pervading experience I had during secondary school might be called “the paradox of effort”. My school had a monthly effort report system where if you were deemed as trying harder than average you got a plus, if you were working about average in their judgement you got a zero and if they considered you were slacking you got a minus. To me this felt like a pit of despair, but apart from that the months when things came easy were when I got good reports and I got poor ones when I felt I was striving. A further problem, connected to dyspraxia I think, was that I got a minus in metalwork the first month, and getting a bad initial report was unknown. It was also true that metalwork seemed too stereotypically masculine to me and I didn’t like it for that reason. That gave me a reputation as lazy. I share this paradoxical experience, though, in case anyone else has had a similar experience. I don’t know if I’m lazy or not. I think I am to some extent but some of that view is internalised from this rather formative period in my life.

It’s a platitude, but it’s probably worth saying that in a way having internet access is a bit like an alcoholic having a kitchen tap which dispenses alcohol, if you want to pathologise ADHD. This form of distraction is so much more common nowadays than it used to be, and I think it’s led to a further shortening of my attention span. You can see some of this in the way this blog so often tends to flit around and ramble off-topic, although that’s probably partly down to my compulsion to write. I also tend to write things down quickly for fear of forgetting them.

ADHD also has comorbidities, one of which is schizophrenia. Others are generalised anxiety disorder, depression, intermittent explosive disorder, dyslexia, dyscalculia, insomnia, restless legs, substance abuse, phobias, psychopathy and oppositional defiant disorder. Looking at that list, I can see some of them as resulting from difficulty in fitting in, making progress or otherwise being successful. Of them as applied to myself, I have not one jot of dyslexia or dyscalculia but used to suffer from insomnia very badly. Although I’m not myself psychopathic (and yes, I do know that’s a deprecated term), my father is and the genetic element that exists in personality disorders has presumably led to me having a disordered personality but the specifics of antisocial personality disorder don’t apply to me at all. My father also has intermittent explosive disorder. I do have restless legs, but I’m practically teetotal and a non-smoker, and I now have two cups of coffee a day and went without for five years once. That, actually, may be a form of self-medication because those five years seemed to involve endless withdrawal which I hoped for a long time would come to an end but just didn’t, and I ultimately decided that even if caffeine did shorten my life it wasn’t worth not being on it, so I just went back to it.

Getting back to gender and neurodiversity, probably the worst gender dysphoria of all I feel by far is in the possibility that I may be on the autistic spectrum. If I think about it too much I would probably feel like ending my life, not because autism is a problem – it absolutely isn’t – but because of Simon Baron-Cohen’s “extreme male brain” theory. This particular line of thought doesn’t really belong here though. The same does not apply to ADHD in my mind. I’ve never perceived ADHD, considered as internal, as having anything to do with gender. However, it’s also true that it’s underdiagnosed in women and presents differently, just as being on the autistic spectrum tends to. ADHD is just as common in women as men, and consequently tends to be misdiagnosed due to the erroneous and probably structurally sexist attitude that it’s less common in girls than boys. Regarding schooling, girls are more likely to do more homework and ask their parents for help to compensate than boys are. In my case all this is complicated by having been misgendered in my childhood. Teachers are less likely to notice girls who are either inattentive or hyperactive (two different ways in which ADHD presents itself in children) than they are boys, and since I was perceived as a boy, it’s likely that this would’ve been picked up more in me. In fact it wasn’t, due to the fact that there were forty-six pupils in my primary school class, and my mother noticed something instead. This also means that women are more likely to proceed through their lives without being able to identify this feature and the disabling influence society may have on “people like them”, and it’s therefore likely to be more of a revelation to them when they realise it applies to them. This doesn’t apply to me because I’ve known about it since I was a child although I don’t often think about it nowadays. It might, though, also help if the stage at which one is diagnosed is at a point in one’s life where one has a certain degree of productive self-reflection. Whether this applied to me as an eight year old, I don’t know. I should probably say here, because it doesn’t fit in anywhere else, that it can be expensive being ADHD because I can never find anything and am very messy (although I also believe that society has got it wrong in where they position optimum tidiness, but that’s another story).

I haven’t really mentioned the criteria for diagnosis yet because this is more about my personal experience. It’s also the case that what I can attribute clearly to ADHD in my life and experience may be obfuscated by other stuff going on in my head such as the weird split aspie/”Williamsoid” state of my emotional life and empathy. As I said, it’s neurodiversity not otherwise specified which includes ADHD-like features which are striking enough to be noticed and fit into that diagnosis rather than just simple ADHD. Then again, textbook cases of most conditions are more an exception than a rule and the real mystery is how any condition at all resembles that of other people, so maybe I’m not unusual in that respect. But for the sake of completeness, this is ADHD according to the medics:

ADHD has two main aspects, and “sufferers” tend to fall into one or the other (who’s inflicting the suffering though?): inattention and hyperactivity along with impulsivity. To be diagnosed, one must have at least six of the following signs as a child, or five as an adolescent (because it’s said to “improve” with age): forgetfulness, distractability, losing important items for daily activity (in my case this tended to be my glasses or PE kit), trouble organising things, often failing to pay attention to school work (I once answered the question “which is the biggest whale?” with “the blue whale is the blue whale” and said that Elizabeth of England wasn’t a very good “king” (although I tend to mix gendered nouns and pronouns up anyway, so this may not be a sign)), difficulty in maintaining attention on tasks (not a problem so much as a child as it is now), failure to finish tasks (this drives Sarada round the bend actually because this extends as far as not finishing jars of peanut butter and the like). But in my defence, at no time during my childhood did I ever mislay my mobile phone!

On the impulsiveness/hyperactivity side, which influenced me less but was there to some extent, again there need to be at least six as a child or five as an adolescent: acting as if driven by a motor (this happens when I’m tired but not otherwise – I’m pretty torpid a lot of the time to be honest), excessive talking (definitely, and more so as a child – I used to be separated from the class for talking too much), answering before a question is completed (yes – sounds useful for ‘University Challenge’), trouble with turn taking (no), unable to participate in leisure activities quietly (not quite, more unable to be inactive but fine with being quiet), fidgeting (yes – apparently I have a genetic propensity to move around a lot when I sleep as well), runs about or climbs a lot (no, although I did walk a lot – I don’t think this is significant), tends to interrupt a lot (no, but this is also part of a typically masculine use of language so it probably bears closer examination). As an aside, it’s notable that although these are supposed to be present in different settings, such as at home as well as school, a lot of these seem to be very firmly to do with how a child behaves in a traditional school setting, which although it strikes me as potentially irrelevant and more a problem with schooling than anything else, does at least mean that problems encountered as an ADHD adult might be detected early because of the kind of educational system this society has been saddled with. There are several criteria outside the specific signs. The child must have exhibited these before the age of twelve, they must be explained better by this diagnosis rather than another (this is boilerplate – it’s in practically every set of criteria for psychiatric conditions), they must, as I’ve said, be present in more than one setting (this takes some of the issue of schooling being a dysfunctional environment out of the picture), and the symptoms must interfere with school, work or social function.

As I’ve already said, there are two poles here and a grey area in the middle, between hyperactivity/impulsivity on the one side and inattentiveness on the other, and I’m more inattentive than impulsive. I could probably do with being more impulsive in fact.

As an adult, the NHS observes that it can be difficult to maintain friendships or romantic relationships, lead to poor driving (I’m actually the opposite although I have never had enough money to take a driving test) and one tends to underachieve at paid work or in education (which explains never having had a driving test!). I have in fact underachieved at education, partly because I spread myself too thinly, which is indeed to do with ADHD, and partly just anyway, although it may not be obvious because I have postgraduate qualifications. This is, however, also substantially due to internalised transphobia and toxic masculinity on the part of others at my university department in my case.

That, then, is a rough sketch of my take on my ADHD, and I hope it helps. In keeping with the poor planning involved, this post will now end rather abruptly.