The other day I mentioned the tic-like labels Leftwing Idiot made when he was a child. The sentences he created were a surreal mix of ideas, just like many of my tics. He really enjoys the strangeness of tics, and these labels show his love of unusual language goes back a long way.

When we were chatting earlier he described how he finds repetition funny as well. This too stretches back into his childhood. He recalled how he used to say the same phrases over and over again, much to the irritation of his dad. Two that he could remember were:

“Thank you very much Hilda” and “You could not move for wildebeest.”

He couldn’t remember where the first one came from but thought the second was from a TV advert. He did it, he said, because he found hearing the same thing over and over again hilarious. In fact Leftwing Idiot was the first person to recognise the creativity of my tics and it’s probably his longstanding fascination with repetition and mixed up language that explains why he saw their potential in the first place.