This November, vote for the tics you love and win a prize …

I wrote recently about two interesting conversations I’d had about my vocal tics. The first was about their dreamlike quality and the second about the process by which they come into existence.

They take any words I’ve ever known, throw them together and come up with crazy new ideas. Some are shocking, many are surreal, most are funny, and all are a complete surprise to everyone, including me.

My personal favourites include:

“Press the space bear.”
“Tell the clouds to put some knickers on.”
“Disco penguins dancing in your dreams.”

Since 2010 I’ve been cataloguing these complex vocal tics here. I do this so they can be enjoyed by everyone and used as springboards for creativity.

There are now an incredible 6,001 to choose from!

You can browse them randomly, search by categories such as ‘Dinosaurs’ or ‘Royalty’, or by any key word you like (warning – ‘Biscuit’ throws up 256 results).

In our shop we’ve got some great items already, and all the money we make from sales helps us put on creative events for children and young people with Tourettes. But we want to do more, so we’re going to create some new tic-inspired products and we’d like you to help choose the best tics to use on these.

So how can you get involved? Go to the tics page, have a browse, and when you see something you like click the vote icon (thumbs up) next to the tic. You need to be registered as a member of the site to vote, but signing up is simple and you can do it here. We’ll be giving a prize to the person who votes the most during the next month.

Anyone can take part, but for children and young people make sure that the Safe Mode is on if you don’t want them to see any rude tics.

Finally, if you’ve got ideas for anything you’d like to see in the shop, please get in touch. It’s really exciting to be thinking about making new products, but if we’re going to do it well we need lots of help.

Huge thanks and happy voting!