Colourful and often amusing characters that influenced and were in turn influenced by the haemophilic author are revealed in this book exposing a life as other lives but with the addition of the challenge of chronic illness. History, both family and that more general, completes the autobiographical trilogy the previous two books What Are Yer? Bleeder! and The Rest of Me Bleeding Life began. If you're looking to read of sober normality among family, friends and the other haemophiliacs mentioned you will be disappointed as most mentioned here were real people at the same time wonderful and often deviant.

Colourful and often amusing characters that influenced and were in turn influenced by the haemophilic author are revealed in this book exposing a life as other lives but with the addition of the challenge of chronic illness. History, both family and that more general, completes the autobiographical trilogy the previous two books "What Are Yer? Bleeder!" and "The Rest of Me Bleeding Life" began. If you're looking to read of sober normality among family, friends and the other haemophiliacs mentioned you will be disappointed as most mentioned here were real people at the same time wonderful and often deviant.

You know you wouldn't do that, Derek Haughton hopes he might not! In this follow up to What Are Yer? Bleeder! the struggle to maintain selfhood against convention and imposed morality continues. Disaffected, disgusted and delinquent after a young life of hospitals, special education, 'bleeding' and self questioning the haemophilic author does his best to live up to his own hard won maxim: Forget should and shouldn't. Do what you can.

Born a haemophiliac in 1944, not long before the end of WW11 when treatment of the condition was primitive if not altogether absent, a boy had to learn his limitations and when to push through the boundaries utilising a mix of cunning, observational skills, obscenity and charm to frustrate the efforts of the adult world to contain him. Having heard at too young an age a prediction that he would not survive to see his fourteenth birthday, anger simmered below the surface to break free in awe of no-one, puzzled by many and sent away to Corley Open Air School for the first five years of his education, then persecuted in an orthopaedic children's hospital he learned to mistrust authority in general, and developed a defiant attitude, determined to prove everyone wrong in every way. Even those he loved were viewed with suspicion and every word they uttered tested, accepted or rejected as he found necessary. Three years of the home tuition he loved followed the open air school; then special school tested his endurance and improved his patience but taught him little else.