A Little HSP Story.

Now that I’ve explained all about HSP in one easy lesson, I can tell a little story. (Actually, I might have told it before, but some of the people who read this blog weren’t even born then, and the rest didn’t know I was HSP – and neither did I, come to think of it.)

Back in the mid-nineties, after Mrs Thatcher’s policies had killed my photographic business, I had a lengthy period of unemployment. One day, the Gestapo at the Department of Employment, part of whose job it was to punish the unemployed for creating the unemployment statistics (nothing changes much, does it?) sent me on a course in a town about twenty five miles away to learn about computers.

I had no money so I had no car, and the bus service was hopeless, so every morning I had to push myself through the same unpleasant routine. I would get up at 6.30 into an unheated bedroom – because I didn’t have the money to afford heating – and walk the two miles to the railway station. It was still dark because the course lasted from the end of November to the end of February, and it was always either very cold or very wet and windy.

That wasn’t the really bad bit. The really bad bit was what I had to put up with for the rest of the day. The course was held in a portakabin erected inside an old industrial shed. It had no pictures, no greenery, and no windows in the plain magnolia walls. The air was stale because it was the same air being constantly recycled, so if one person had a cold, most of the rest of us caught it as well. Row upon row of old Amstrad computers sat blankly under row upon row of dull fluorescent lighting. The atmosphere in the place was one of sheer despondency, and when somebody complained, one of the ‘supervisors’ (there were no teachers – they gave us an error-strewn book and told us to get on with it) replied ‘If you think it’s bad coming here for thirteen weeks, mate, you should try working in the f****** place!’

It wasn’t a pleasant experience.

Now, had the Gestapo at the D of E recognised that I was HSP and made due allowance, they wouldn’t have sent me there, would they? I could have stayed at home and played with my train set instead. And then I would have spent three months of my life being a bit less bloody miserable.