Matt Haig

Yeah, and it's brilliant.

That Zed is so strong.

Exactly.

But no, it was never official.

But I've still actually to this day on, you know, blinking social media, Instagram.

My name is Matt Zedhague.

Well, at 10, I was moved again because that was the school I wasn't thinking into.

So I had a year in a very small, idyllic little primary school with, I think, only 28 people.

It was so small I was in the football team, which, you know, I mean, they had everyone in the football team.

you know so i was there for a year and that was heavenly but then that made the sort of juxtaposition of going to big school a bit scarier and um at secondary school that's when i started to struggle socially i'd say in in a big way where i went inside myself and uh had difficulties

Internally, I just felt very different and sort of had feelings that I couldn't explain in terms of just not fitting in.

And I think, again, going back to my... Even though I wasn't adopted, I often felt like my mum never knew, you know, where she fit on, like, any sort of identity, so, like, class.

So she would often...

make herself very middle class and so you know should have your radio for and you know all the symbols of middle class as my mum would be but then we lived in a very working class area so I didn't know where I fit in because my mum was a teacher my dad was an architect but I was in this quite tough working class school so automatically there was a kind of disconnect of where I fit in

So to fit in, often I would sort of be very downwardly mobile and sort of like be the naughtiest one or gravitate to the naughtiest.

It's interesting because one of the subjects I ended up doing at university, history, I was told I was special needs by the history teacher at that time.

I was told I was special needs in history and in art, but I was never told what those needs were or what was the special.

It's a very odd way of using the term special needs, isn't it?

Well, I...

I didn't know anyone who was labelled autistic.