I'll be straight with you, I watch the trashiest TV. Anything to do with car chases, deformities and velour-clad women trying to work out just who their baby daddy is - pretty much the spam of the entertainment world. So, I was having a flick through the other night, hoping for a bit of World's Toughest Prisons, or maybe Sharks Do The Scariest Things, when a BBC3 programme called Freak Like Me caught my eye. A few minutes in, I was hooked. It's all about people's weird, yet strangely endearing, little habits they have that come so naturally to them but seem completely unnatural to the outside world. There was a guy obsessed with eating out of bins. A women who only ate stale food. A student who collected dead bees. At first, I watched along with that morbid fascination you get when you're exposed to a situation you have no personal experience with. I thought to myself "I don't have any habits like this". A few days later, though, I realised that isn't strictly true. I have quite a few weird little rituals actually. It's just that they've become so engraved in my life that I don't even notice I'm doing them, don't even regard them as quirks. For example, I always, always have the volume of my TV on an even number. Don't ask me why, it's just something I've always done. Always stack my biscuits in 4's when I'm having them with a cuppa. No idea what I think is going to happen if 5th biscuit comes along and rocks the boat. Talking to my sister about it, she has her own little collection of habits that, at first, she didn't even regard as unusual because she was so used to them. I think it's exactly that little web of unique quirks, traits and rituals that make humans so interesting. We shouldn't be shy about them, we should be embracing them. We should be getting our freak on. The only thing we should be embarrassed about is the terrible pun I just made. Sorry, don't hate me.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00w59n8/Freak_Like_Me_Episode_5/
