The Mighty Quinn

Bonkers, barmy, barking, bananas. In a world that seems to have gone mad, I hope we can still preserve some of our vocabulary for my favourite brand of madness – benign eccentricity.

My Great Auntie Nin was an absolute legend. Completely barmy, completely harmless. She had things we didn’t have at home. With generous widow’s pensions from two husbands, she was ahead of the curve in household appliances. She had a giant TV at a time when my brothers and I were still tuning in to the Home Service on the crackly radio. She spent a lot of her time asleep in front of it. She’d doze off in a documentary and wake up in a murder mystery convinced that Alan Whicker was the perpetrator.

We had no fridge or freezer at home. Nin had a mahoosive Kelvinator refrigerator where we could make our own ice lollies. As a dedicated follower of royal fashion, she had a snappy Pembroke corgi called Marcus, whose company I enjoyed on long beach walks.

Material goods aside, we enjoyed Nin’s company because she was just so funny. Malapropisms and spoonerisms dropped from her mouth with no embarrassment whatsoever. Out of earshot, we used to parody the Dylan-penned Manfred Mann hit The Mighty Quinn.

“Come all without, come all within

You’ve not seen nothing like our Auntie Nin”

Find the right words

Eventually the time came for Nin to hand over her crown as the barmy one in the family and the role naturally fell to me, uncontested. With pride, I’ve inherited her benign eccentricity. I think that’s the nearest I get to a pigeonhole (Don’t Fence Me In, April 2021).

Other benign eccentrics include the people who don red frocks as Kate Bush and join others worldwide one day a year to set a record for the Most Wuthering Heights (Bonkers! August 2023). These folk epitomise the kind of benign eccentricity I love. They do something harmless that makes them happy, makes other people happy, and keeps them out of the doctor’s surgery.

With so many new labels for our mental health, the problems come when people use the same words to describe the actions of completely different people. I don’t identify at all with The Bossy Orange Guy in the Red Tie yet we both may be considered mad.  Which is why I would like to reserve some of the milder vocabulary for those of us in the B-class: benignly bonkers, barmy, barking, and bananas. Is that too much to ask?

Eccentricity vs insanity

Eleven years ago, with extraordinary prescience (Obama was still in the White House!) Michael Schreiner, a Seattle-based therapist, described the line between eccentricity and insanity as ‘razor thin’. He blogged:

“Those who have become insane are no longer able to see the world in any objective sense; they project their subjective fantasy world onto the objective world and can’t differentiate between the two. Their inner world is their outer world.

Eccentrics, on the other hand, retain a degree of objectivity. They know what ‘normal’ is and that, for better or worse, they are deviating from it. But this deviation is the external manifestation of their internal self-actualization, the [my bold] decision to be themselves instead of trying to fit in and be just like everybody else.

You could say that where eccentricity is ultimately expansive, insanity always inhibits. Where eccentricity lets people be more in the world as themselves, insanity forces people to be less in the world as shadows of themselves.”

Play> The Mighty Quinn > Manfred Mann

Feel free to sing along, and even insert the name of your own eccentric relative. Please listen to the words, for they are timely. Quinn the Eskimo was a bit unconventional, but people eagerly awaited his arrival to lift them out of the everyday and experience joy and peace. I hope that moment is soon.