No I… I have never felt, though I said I’m self-conscious about the way I look, I have never, since I’ve come here, ever felt that anyones looked at me and said, Hey, you know, that guy, hes just a little bit too ugly for the post no, no not at all.

But has it affected your confidence?

Oh it affects my confidence in sort of funny areas but
It what kind of ways does it affect your confidence? Because obviously your career
Yeah, no, I… if any, in a way… hmm I think it’s probably contributed to me being more outgoing in some ways because I had to be.

So would you say there have been some positive aspects?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah definitely, and much more than some of my friends, or some of my, some of the kids I knew growing up who also had a cleft palate. I was lucky that way.

OK so you knew other people with clefts?

Yeah, yeah.

Do you know how well they’ve fared?

I have no idea. I would imagine some of them are in prison.

Right OK hmm.

…Two of them were the big boys’ in various schools I was in.

Oh right.

Yeah just mean, mean… and, who knows, they may be judges and lawyers now. But, you know, that was a long time ago so… but how much of this I can place down to overcompensating, or compensating for having a cleft, and how much is a result of having fairly outgoing and loving parents, I don’t know. But I was certainly aware, I’ve always been very aware that I’ve had iteah.

Would it be fair to say it’s helped shape your character?

Oh yeah, it would be ludicrous to say anything else, yeah.

I guess 13 onwards, I think really, you know, a bit of teasing about the way you look… from… other, you know, from other kids. I remember not being able to play rugby because, just through kind of… it was considered to be risky, risk of injury I guess. So that kind of… it was quite a sporty school, so I guess that kind of instance, sort of difference but I took up other stuff instead. But yeah mainly, mainly it was just kind of… you know, teasing and sort of… snide comments, I guess. But actually there was always a level of bullying which I think actually quite a lot of which wasn’t related to having a cleft; a lot of it was just… it happened to everyone as well.

OK yeah.

So I guess one has, you know, one has to pick apart the stuff that was cleft related and the stuff that was just teenage boys being nasty to each other [laughs].

Yeah so it’s difficult to sometimes separate it?

I reckon there was probably of the latter than the former actually.

OK hmm.

I think the kind of cleft, as I say, might occasionally have been a catalyst, might have set you apart. But I kind of quite liked being slightly different, I think: didn’t mind it, didn’t mind it so much.

You didn’t mind doing the different activities, did you say?

No I didn’t mind just being a bit, you know, just being a bit different.

You didn’t mind being different in yourself?

Yeah it just suited my personality probably, so it wasn’t a big deal for me.

So would you say it helped shape your identity a little bit?

Kind of hard to know….Yes, I mean yes, I mean all… in the sense that all… all experiences shape your identity, whatever, whatever they are, I think unavoidably, yes.

I guess kind of the way I looked perhaps… came back to consideration every so often, I guess. And I, perhaps in my late 20s, I’m just trying to think, yeah very late 20s thought about having the bone, the jaw… alignment, or possibly just having the nose moved without the jaw alignment. And I went to see a consultant at that point who… I had a where they put sort of dye down the back of your throat and look at your speech, your soft palate and how that works during speech.

Oh yeah I’ve heard of that yeah, yeah.

I know theres a scientific name for it, which I can’t remember something-oscopy, nasoscopy, something-oscopy. Anyway they the guy I saw, who was very good, kind of felt that it wasn’t totally cut and dried whether moving the jaw would affect my speech. I felt that actually speech perhaps trumped looks [laughs]… or, you know, in terms of priorities.

OK yeah.

He also felt that without realigning the jaw and just trying to do my nose, that it was a bit like sort of… painting over a badly repaired wall, [laughs] if that’s the right metaphor i.e. he felt that to move the nose and do that work properly you needed the foundation of moving the jaw. So following through the logic of that, it was something which I kind of felt it was all or nothing, and I decided again… what I’d decided ten years earlier, which was to leave it and haven’t really thought about going back to do anything since, and probably won’t I imagine now, now I’m 38. I don’t strongly feel the need to go through tons of surgery right now.

That I didn’t have any associated problems. So, you know, I guess mine has been a fairly straightforward case. But it’s just like with anything that makes you look different, I think you just have to get on and do what you want to do. You can’t let what other people think or, you know, how other people treat you hold you back. And that’s not to say that theres been times people have made comment about me, I would say, you know, it’s more likely they’d comment about how… the fact that I’m very small or, you know, what a small person. You know, I’ve had some very cruel comments made to me regarding my size, but you can… you hear it and, yeah, sometimes it does hurt, and I’m sure it’s the same with people that have a cleft lip and palate, that perhaps are more visible than mine, but you can’t let it be the reason that you don’t do something.

So it’s not a defining feature?

No it absolutely isn’t. And I think the way things are now with surgery getting even better, I mean as a teenager I met a plastic surgeon and they discussed what else they could do for me.

OK hmm.

And my decision was very practical: I said that I’d had enough surgeries in my life and I didn’t want anymore, that I could breathe well, I could eat well, I could speak well, and that really visibly on the face of it most people didn’t really notice that there was anything else different about me, and I chose not to pursue any more surgeries.

How old were you at that point?

I think I was in my early teens. I think I was maybe 12, 13, 14, that sort of age group, perhaps when it mattered most to me how I looked. But I wasn’t prepared with the pay-off, you know, I’d had, as I mentioned, other surgeries, and some of them were quite enormous and had been not so great, and I just thought, No I’m not prepared to go this way And, yeah, when I became older, like when I was at university, there were times I thought, Maybe I should have opted to have my nose changed you know, and it was probably a notion maybe in a moment when maybe socially I didn’t feel as confident as I had at other times. But… it passed and I certainly never felt that… the need for… you know, my fear of surgery and my unwillingness to undertake the surgery far outweighed my need or, or willingness to change my face, you know. As I say, it might depend on how different you feel you look.