PREFACE
My father was a psychopath. It seems a bit odd saying that now, looking back. But he was. No question. He was charming, fearless, ruthless (but never violent). And he had about as much going on in the conscience department as a Jeffrey Dahmer freezer. He didn’t kill anyone. But he certainly made a few killings.
It’s a good thing genes aren’t everything, right?
My father also had an uncanny knack for getting exactly what he wanted, often with just a casual throwaway line or a single telling gesture. People used to say that he looked like the scheming Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses—which he did—not just acted like him, which he also did (he, too, was a market trader).
The BBC sitcom could have been a Dutton family video.
I once remember helping Dad sell a load of datebooks at Petticoat Lane Market, in London’s East End. I was ten at the time, and it was a school day. The datebooks in question were a collector’s item. They only had eleven months.
“You can’t sell these,” I protested. “There’s no January!”
“I know,” he said. “That’s why I forgot your birthday.”
“Unique opportunity to get your hands on an eleven-month diary, folks … sign up for a special two-for-one offer and get an extra month thrown in next year for free …”
We unloaded the whole damn lot.
I’ve always maintained that Dad was in possession of pretty much the ideal personality for modern living. I never once saw him panic. Never once saw him lose his cool. Never once saw him get hot under the collar about anything. And believe me, there were plenty of times when he might have.
“They say that humans developed fear as a survival mechanism to protect against predators,” he once told me. “But you don’t see too many saber-toothed tigers prowling round Elephant and Castle, now do you, boy?”
He was right. I certainly hadn’t seen any. There were a few snakes, maybe. But everyone knew who they were.
For a long time, growing up, I used to think of Dad’s bon mot as just another of his market-stall one-liners—here today, gone tomorrow. A bit like a lot of the crap he used to sell, funnily enough. But now, years later, I realize that there was actually a deep biological truth to what the crafty old guy was saying. In fact, he anticipated the position taken by modern evolutionary psychologists with uncanny, sublime precision. We humans, it appears, did indeed develop our fear response as a survival mechanism to protect against predators. Monkeys with lesions of the amygdala, for instance—the brain’s emotional sorting office—do very stupid things, like trying to pick up cobras.
But millions of years on, in a world where wild animals aren’t lurking around every street corner, this fear system can be oversensitive—like a nervous driver with a foot hovering constantly over the brake pedal—reacting to dangers that don’t actually exist and pushing us into making illogical, irrational decisions.
