I was about twelve when I first saw the film Alien (I obviously shouldn’t have been watching it all, but I managed to see it in secret at a friends house) In fact parts of it I saw only from behind my fingers and I found the scene in which an Alien hugs the face of its victim particularly scary.…

On the way home in the cab this evening I told Leftwing Idiot I’d like my next pig to be fluorescent yellow. I hadn’t had a ‘ticcing fit’ all day and I was hoping it would be a Piggy Day. This is how fit-free days have become celebrated thanks to the tradition of me being given a rubber pig dog-toy for each clear day.…

I often say that Tourettes is the most frequently misunderstood condition on the planet. Tonight I’m going to throw down a challenge and suggest it’s also the strangest condition there is. Here’s why…

At the weekend Poppy and I went to an exhibition at Somerset House.…

My bed was cold when I got into it last night so I pulled my duvet tightly round me and settled down to go to sleep. I hadn’t closed my blind but I didn’t want to leave my slowly-warming bed to close it, so I lay and looked out at the very familiar scene.…

I had a ‘ticcing fit’ in the toilet at work yesterday. I was able to pull the emergency cord and my support worker, Will, came to help me. It wasn’t safe for us to try and leave the room so, for much of the twenty-minute fit, I lay on the floor with Will carefully protecting my head.…

When Will and I were going through a park on our way to lunch a couple of days ago, my tics noticed a leaf falling from a tree and called out “Pull the cord, leaf!” It fluttered to the ground but I continued to shout instructions into the treetops:

“Stay on the trees, leaves.”…

Leftwing Idiot and I were having dinner together last night when I suddenly said:

“Salman Rushdie had AIDS.”

Leftwing Idiot did a double take and then with a quizzical look asked ‘Was that a tic?’ Surprised he’d had to ask, I said ‘Yes, of course’.…

For several months now I’ve been ticcing a song accusing various friends of having inappropriate sexual relations with furniture and animals.

To start with the song focussed solely on Zoë and was sung loosely to the tune of My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean:

“Zoë had sex with a table,
Zoë had sex with a bin.…

Autumn’s arrived and so has the time for the next Tourettes-inspired horoscope. This month it’s all about Libra – happy birthday, Libras!

I was curious about how this video would turn out because during the filming I got massively overexcited about the word ‘Libra’.…

In addition to repeatedly sticking my finger up at Will’s left knee the other day, my tics came up with a brand new way to swear.

Let me introduce you to the ‘Swear layer.’

All of a sudden I stuck my middle fingers up, one on top of the other, and with a voice only rivalled by He-Man himself, shouted “By the power of swear layer!”…