Tell us about a time when you felt out of place.
You get used to being the outsider if you grow up as I did. Sent to boarding school at eight, shuttled between divorced parents, “presented” to the latest girlfriend, boyfriend, step-mother or step-father, I learnt early how to become a chameleon. Dress right, say little, copy the cues, and I could usually blend in.
But that sense of not belonging has followed me into many corners of life. Sometimes it was comic, sometimes humiliating, sometimes simply awkward.
I remember a dinner party where a friend invited “William Smallwood,” someone I’d known at school. Only the wrong William Smallwood arrived — the local postman’s son, not the landowner’s heir. He sat stiffly among blue-blooded guests who stared as if he’d stumbled in from another planet. I felt for him, but I also felt out of place myself, perched among a crowd whose lives were never going to touch mine again.
At JWT, the ad agency, I once joined a graduate weekend where the room brimmed with Oxbridge confidence. Into the mix came one lone polytechnic lad, forever reminding us how unfair it was. Instead of riding the opportunity, he bristled until he left — or was quietly asked to. Watching him made me question my own belonging in that corporate world.
And then there were the times I set myself up for the fall: turning up at a heavy-metal audition with nothing more than Cat Stevens in my repertoire; claiming to know about offshore navigation because I’d once crewed for my father; pretending to play first flute in the school orchestra when I could barely finger the notes. The bravest (or most foolish) moment came when I “escaped” school one night to a local disco. Jeans, white T-shirt, the best I could muster — but one look at my haircut and face, and a young farmer’s fist reminded me I didn’t belong there either.
Out-of-placeness has a taste, a smell. A dreamlike over-exposure where the lights are too bright and the script you’ve memorised suddenly makes no sense. These days, if I sense it coming, I often slip away before it can sting too hard. Unless, that is, I have a partner in crime — someone to share the embarrassment with. That makes all the difference.
Because here’s the truth: it’s not really about belonging everywhere. It’s about having one place, or one person, where you don’t need to pretend.
Here’s a shaped, extended blog post drawing together all the threads you’ve surfaced — from the doctors to school, Oxford, family, and the spotlight. It weaves them into a single reflective narrative that could stand as a longer Jetpack piece.
Out of Place
There are times when I feel not just out of place, but like a fraud.
I notice it most in the doctor’s surgery. I’ll sit there with a hideous earache or one of those deep headaches that make my whole head feel alien, and yet the words won’t quite line up with the medical textbook. I describe the pain, the pressure, the way it blots out thought, and already I feel a fraud. As if I’m wasting their time. As if the illness isn’t real because it doesn’t come neatly labelled.
That sense of being out of place has shaped far more than my health. I loathe drinking culture, for instance, because I know my limits: if I join in, I’ll be the one who gets blind drunk. There’s no moderation switch. So I avoid those settings, but with that comes the subtle exclusion of not quite being part of the group.
At school, it was sharper. Nine years in an all-male, all-boys environment: loud, competitive, artificial. I was always the wrong age — a September baby put into the year above, forever developmentally behind, especially in sport. Except for swimming, where I excelled. In the classroom or on the playing field I was the youngest, smallest, a latecomer trying to copy the rules of the game. “Kick the Can” was one of those moments: I just scraped in, while a boy six months younger was mocked for being too small, too babyish. His rejection was a reminder that my belonging was precarious too.
Oxford was supposed to be an escape, but even there the old patterns returned. At Balliol I walked into dining halls and seminar rooms crowded with the kind of public school boys I thought I’d left behind. Their accents, their confidence, their networks — it all reminded me of what I wasn’t. I carried a horrible early sense that I’d never quite be at ease in that world, no matter how many essays I wrote or clever remarks I tried to muster.
Family, too, was divided into worlds where I never quite fitted. My father had a revolving door of girlfriends and three wives; each new one required a presentation, like being auditioned in a family play. I remember being ten, my grandmother taking me to London as a birthday treat. I hadn’t seen my father for a year, and when the taxi pulled up I thought it would be just him. Instead, there she was, the new girlfriend who soon became the second wife. We toured the Planetarium, the Natural History Museum, Hamleys. I held back tears the whole time. My grandmother’s fury at her son’s insensitivity was one of the few moments I felt someone was on my side.
And always, there was the split between my father’s world — castles, waterbeds, grand houses — and the quieter lineage I longed for. My maternal grandfather had been the son of domestic servants, left school at fourteen, fought as an officer in the First World War and worked his way up to be a regional brewery manager. A life of grit and graft. I sometimes wish I’d known his side of the family better, that their world had felt more like mine.
Yet there were moments when the out-of-place feeling evaporated. Oddly enough, they came under the spotlight. Singing live on Radio Val d’Isère in French. Acting, presenting, swimming. When I was performing, I felt most in place — as though the fraudulence flipped into confidence, the strangeness into belonging.
Out of place. Out of depth. Out of step. It has been a constant refrain in my life, whether at the doctor’s, in the pub, at school, or even at Oxford. But maybe that’s why the spotlight feels so important: because when the light hits, I finally stop pretending.
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