I am a short man

I am a short man. About 5 ft 4 inches in my socks.

How small is that? Bigger than Prince, about the same height as Stalin. A touch shorter than Maradona and Tom Cruise.

The specifics don’t matter. I’m short. Below the 5ft 7inch mark: that line which marks the small from the respectably middle-sized.

I was the second shortest in my year at school. Then Ian Rutter put on a growth spurt at the age of 16, leaving me shortest.

At least it cleared things up. Got it out in the open. There was no false pride in not being smallest. I was short, titchy, pintsize. Little Rich. It’s my defining feature.

I’m little and you know the score. Mouthy. Feisty. Something to prove. Trying too hard. Don’t know when to stop. You have the final word, I’ll have the final final word. It’s the way it is.

I’m competitive, fiercely competitive. I used to play football and loved nothing better than felling a six footer with a sliding challenge. Did I leave my leg in? What do you think?

Now I ride my bike, walk up hills. That’s when my body type comes into its own. Light. Low to the ground. Nimble. I walked up Ben Nevis recently and stopped to chat with a big man who was struggling up the mountain. And then I kicked on with a winning combination of masochism and sadism. Bye-ee.

I’m funny too. If you’re small you have to be. It’s part of the game. Get the joke in first. Self-deprecate, just like Louis Armstrong laughing off his blackness to please the white folks. If you are a minority, and you want to get along, you’ve got to have a joke. You’ve got to make the majority feel comfortable.

What does this make me? Do I have small man syndrome? Do I have Napoleon Complex? I say: these are the tags of mediocre men sized between 5ft 8 and 6ft 2ins. (The really tall have their own problems.) These terms are lazy pejoratives hurled at small men. I refute them absolutely.

But it’s true that small men are either figures of fun (Dudley Moore, Ronnie Corbett, Nicholas Sarkozy) or figures of hate (Ricky Ponting, Tom Cruise, Nicholas Sarkozy).

I want to explore in this blog the condition of shortness. Why do average-height people consider us so amusing / objectionable? And why do we try so hard to win their affection and gain attention?