I'm going to start this article off with a delicious contradiction: being yourself is both the easiest and hardest thing you can do. OK, let me explain using myself as an example.

It's easy in so far as it requires very little effort. I have no sense of fashion and, generally, only wear what I feel comfortable in. This means that some clothes can last me for years, tend to be slightly faded and only get replaced when they are threadbare or have a few too many cigarette burns. And the new clothes I do buy tend to come from Matalan of Asda. Cheap, cheerful, but comfortable. A shirt is only a shirt. Why pay over the odds for something I only wear to cover my ever-expanding beer gut and hold my fags in the top pocket?

So far as personal appearance goes, as long as my hair is combed and I've had a shave, I'm happy. Do I care what other people think of how I look? Ah, no. Look, I'm overweight, rapidly approaching middle age and if my partner didn't complain of stubble rash I probably wouldn't shave every day either. I'm lazy and proud of it. I could watch TV and eat prawn cocktail crisps for Scotland.

OK, that's the pro's, what about the con's? Well, the biggest part of being yourself is forming your own opinions and sticking to them. Now, over the years, that has landed me in some pretty hot water. I tend to speak as I find, and I don't exactly have the mind of a poet laureate or the mouth of an angel.

Now please don't misunderstand, I'm not a racist, sexist, Alf Garnet or Bernard Manning type bigot. But, if I think someone is talking a load of shite, I tend to express that orally. And that can leave you with very few friends, and occasionally very few teeth and a broken nose.

It's one of the reasons I tend to avoid social events at work. I know that, once I have imbibed even a small quantity of alcohol, my tongue will most certainly explain to that waste of skin and bone who sits opposite me that he is a snivelling, arse-licking, skiving, proto-human and it amazes me that he has the ability to walk upright and string together a coherent sentence. The other reason I avoid work related social events is that I can't stand the afore mentioned penfold proto-human.

Was I one of the in-crowd at school? No. Do I wish I had been? No. I'm actually really glad I wasn't. The sacrifices I would need to have made to fit in with those wannabes would have been worse than public school buggery. The choices I made then made me

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