Just a quick plea to those who know me; if you’re going to burst upon me with a revelation, make it a juicy one, please – preferably sex-related. No gender reveals, no late-onset allergies – and please, most of all, no adult ADHD diagnoses.
Before you start up berating me as lacking in ‘compassion’ and ‘empathy’ (the twin calling cards of contemporary sad-sacks and milk-sops) let me say that I do believe that both allergies and ADHD exist – for a very small minority of unfortunate people. (I’m writing this in bold as I’ve noted from past experience that when people are keen to get their knickers in a twist, they often suffer a simultaneous temporary loss of reading abilities.) But do I believe that most of the people who claim to have them really do have them? Not in a million years.
You’ve heard of luxury beliefs – meet luxury maladies
Remember when no one had ever heard of aloe vera – and then you couldn’t get away from it? One minute everyone thought that ADHD was either a furniture warehouse or an obscure sub-genre of house music – and the next minute one in 20 adults (including Sue Perkins, Heston Blumenthal and Ant McPartlin) in the UK alone has it, according to the ADHD Foundation who have seen a 400 per cent increase in the number of adults contacting them to arrange an assessment since 2020.
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