Invisible – The Essential Guide For Aliens Stranded On Earth

Have you ever wondered why you can’t wait to get away from the party, go home and put your feet up alone?

A highly unusual new book by Welsh/Australian author Tony Matthews delves deeply into the persona of the solitudinous introvert, recluse, and vegan and reveals the true character of those who prefer to remain steadfastly in the background, quietly observing the world generally but rarely taking part in it. Invisible is a frank and, at times, intensely funny examination of what it’s like to be a quiet introvert in a world that generally likes to party loudly and excessively.

As a boy, and right through his entire life, Tony Matthews has craved anonymity and invisibility — a state of being that is not only well beyond the laws of physics as we know them but also one largely at odds with his chosen profession of novelist and historian which often requires significant media and public exposure.

In this brightly humorous and exquisitely insightful account of his strange life, Tony Matthews takes his readers on a mystical journey through the highly unusual world of ‘Invisible Man’.

Reflecting his own young confusion, Tony questions why, as a boy, he appeared to be a round doughnut irrevocably stranded in a square biscuit-tin. His quest for understanding takes him on a roller-coaster ride until he realises finally that he is about as comfortable on Earth as a crocodile in a handbag factory.

As a young lad, Tony, or Anthony, as he was then known, spent much of his boyhood alone, wandering the chemically saturated, coal-dust-tainted hills, swamps and abandoned copper-smelters of 1950s Swansea, South Wales, hiding in old air-raid shelters or bomb ruins or the crumbling World War Two gun emplacements at the base of a rocky island lighthouse situated on a headland, musically called Mumbles, a name which, for some unfathomable reason, immediately conjures up images of Hobbits or dwarfs or possibly little Welsh goblins. All this makes Tony sound as mad as a fruit fly but in fact he was just a young, tousle-headed boy with a torch, a book, a wobbly-bladed penknife, and a slightly different mission in life.

This is a book filled with a precise and edgy observation of life on planet Earth told in a style of wry self-deprecation and vividly expressed good humour. It is also an intensely moving description of a deeply committed vegan life in which Tony describes himself as, ‘an honorary extraterrestrial with a forged hall-pass to Earth’.

The book begins with a look at a young boy’s life as seen through the somewhat distorted prism of a satirical lens. Tony introduces a tapestry of reclusive characters who either shaped or influenced his early life including several rather potty aunts — one of whom, apparently, could speak with the dead. Tony also spends periods of his summer vacations in a Stone-age cave where, crawling like a burrowing owl into a narrow tunnel, he quite remarkably discovers the fossilised remains of a million-year-old pterodactyl.

Among many other aspects of life faced by the typical introvert, Tony also introduces ‘The Zone of Absolute Terror’, otherwise known as the much-feared ZAT. This is a place that all introverts have to visit on occasion, usually when starvation eventually drives them out of hiding. Public speaking, dealing with checkout operators or answering the door to salesmen are all classed as major ZATs.

Curiously, the author demonstrates that introverted people also make great secret service agents and he tells of how he was once ridiculously headhunted by the C.I.A. The book not only discusses what it’s like to live as an introvert and recluse but the author also writes about some of the most interesting, weirdest and wackiest recluses in history. Additionally, Tony introduces the reader to one really peculiar set of experiences that has been an integral part of his life for many years — real, verifiable premonitions.

Utilising the tools of incisive humour, Tony strips away the myths and legends surrounding those who embrace a reclusive lifestyle, while at the same time exposing a dysfunctional array of wacky characters and issues.

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An Interview With The Author

I understand that you used a rather strange method to write this book. Can you tell us about that and why the book was written?

I wanted to write this book to assist with people’s understanding of why some of us are introverted, and vegan, and how we manage our lives when almost everyone else in the world seems to be partying continuously and clustering like paperclips to a magnet. The book was penned using my ‘wobbly-knobbly’ system. In other words, it was written entirely in my spare time, at night, when dressed in my pyjamas, seated on a wobbly chair with a laptop perched on my knobbly knees! By the time I’d written over a hundred thousand words, my bum was getting a bit stiff and my knees were wobbling around like Chubby Checker’s.

Introverts and recluses like you, especially if they are also vegan, are often regarded as ‘oddball’. Would you agree with that?

Introverts and especially introverted vegans are destined to be regarded by society generally as being rather odd. However, Invisible takes the ‘odd’ part of that sentence and turns it on its head to reveal aspects of animal rights and reclusiveness that delve into the deepest part of human expression and does so, I hope, with lots of fun and good humour. Invisible is a strange, quirky and satirical look into the life of a reclusive vegan writer. After reading this book, I think that most introverts will be remarking: ‘Thank goodness someone has spoken for us at last.’

Was it difficult for you, as a reclusive introvert, to tell the story about your own private life and the inherent reclusiveness and introversion that have been part of your persona since childhood?

When I was a kid, about as tall as a gopher in a golf-hole, I’d regularly hide in a cupboard under the stairs and pretend that I was the sole survivor left on Earth after a zombie apocalypse. I couldn’t help it. I just liked to be alone. I was drawn to seclusion like a mouse is drawn to cheese-sticks. It’s always been a part of who I am. I wanted to write about that in a frank and honest way but also humorously because I knew that there were loads of introverts and recluses out there who still feel that they are a bit strange because they are so different. Not only did I want to use my words to try to broaden our understanding of what it’s like to live as an introvert in a world that likes to ‘party’ excessively, but I also wanted to let all the introverts know that there is absolutely nothing wrong with wearing odd socks all your life or madly running to the left while everyone else is running to the right. It’s okay to be different. I was a little apprehensive about writing of my private life but realised that if I wanted to ‘connect’ with people on my own level I’d have to expose my inner self to the world.

Your book deals with some heavy subjects — veganism, animal rights, ethics, climate change, introversion and seclusion, but you treat them all lightly. Was that a structural and deliberate literary approach?

Actually, I didn’t have any kind of ‘structure’ in mind when I began the book. I should add that the book had its genesis while I was seated in a shopping mall trying to remain camouflaged against a backdrop of potted plants. I saw a few peculiar things that day, especially at the butcher’s counter, and being a lifelong student of human nature, I jotted them down on a few scraps of paper.

A few days later I opened my laptop and, using these notes as a base, had soon written almost half a chapter, and as the scenes I’d witnessed had been funny, it naturally followed that the chapter would also be humorous. I found that I was able to use satirical humour to lighten the mood when presenting some fairly serious stuff, and thought that would be far more effective than trying to get my message and story across in a more sombre and fact-filled way. I believe that if you can make people smile or laugh, you’ve also made a friend, and I like to think of all my readers as friends.

Can you give us an example of one of your more unusual experiences as a reclusive writer?

Well, there are loads in the book, of course, but perhaps one of the more unusual, although this is not in the book, was the time I was asked to become a spy for the African National Congress in South Africa during the Apartheid years. I was in Cape Town at the time and they wanted someone like me who could infiltrate a government department and quietly and unobtrusively blend into the background. I was very much against Apartheid, which is why they asked me in the first place, but I’d also recently spent a brief time working in conjunction with the South African police. During that time I’d had a really profound firsthand experience on how the police dealt with activists and dissenters and therefore I wasn’t too keen on being banged up in some Robben Island prison cell like Nelson Mandela hanging upside-down by my unmentionables.

As a child you’d spend some of your summer holidays living in a cave in the wilds which, tens of thousands of years ago, had been the home of Neolithic people. Why did you do that?

It was a special place for me. I’d discovered the fossil of a pterodactyl there. I’d had to crawl through a narrow tunnel to find it and the whole experience had been completely mind-boggling because I was fairly sure that I was the first person to see that pterodactyl since Raquel Welch had been there one million years B.C. — dressed in her iconic doe-skin bikini, of course. It was pretty irresistible — the pterodactyl I mean, not Rachel’s bikini, although I have to admit that was really interesting too!

Did people think that you were a little strange or in any way different when you were a child?

Probably, although I can’t say for sure because I didn’t have a lot to do with people generally. If I wasn’t hiding in an old disused cinema with the ghosts of Errol Flynn or Fatty Arbuckle, I’d be roaming alone at an old lighthouse on a rocky outcrop and hoping that the tide wouldn’t come in too quickly, leaving me stranded. There would have been nothing worse than being perched like a puffin on a rock-ledge all night, especially in winter, because it would have been colder than a brass toilet in the Kremlin.

You’ve been vegan for more than forty-two years, do you miss eating meat and what makes you take on that kind of commitment?

Firstly, I never actually liked eating meat. I put my very first gravy dinner on my head when I was still in a baby-chair and that’s what made my hair impossibly curly — at least that’s what my Mum said. Secondly, ethical veganism isn’t a commitment, it’s a natural way of ‘being’ for anyone who understands even the most basic elements of ethics. I was once rather patronisingly told that I’d grow out of being a vegan, but that statement was made by a bling-wearing chap at a TV station where I worked who had once told me rather smugly that he’d taken an I.Q. test and the results had come back negative.

I understand that as a teen you were a Beatles look-alike?

Well, I was a young teenager and it was 1963. Every boy in the U.K. was attempting to emulate John, Paul, George and … well not so much Ringo. It was a complete disaster, of course. Everyone kept tripping over my grotesquely long winkle-pickers and sadly not a single girl had, even for a moment, contemplated throwing her knickers at me, so I hung up my Beatles suit, kicked off the pickers, and went to hide in a cave which was reputed to be haunted by the ghosts of dead miners.

In your book you present the theory that being alone, spending a lot of your time in deep thought, might be responsible for some of the startlingly accurate predictions you’ve made in the past. How does that work?

Actually some of the predictions I’ve made have completely astonished me when they came true. I question all this in the book, of course, and believe that it may be associated with my being alone a lot of the time, deep in thought. Quite recently I had a sudden and powerful flash of the face of Anna Karen, the actor who played ‘Olive’ in the TV series On the Buses. I hadn’t thought about her or the programme for decades but the vision was so strong it stopped me in my tracks. She died that night and we read about it in the news the following day. I also dreamed of the death of John F. Kennedy’s son and his wife in a flying accident about a week or so before it happened. I’ve had loads of predictions like that, and no, I can’t give you the winning lottery ticket numbers for next week.

What advice can you give to people who, like you, lead reclusive, introverted lives?

Well, people who are naturally introverted, and especially those who are vegan and reclusive like me, have probably been on the receiving end of ‘advice’ all their lives and I expect they don’t need any more from me. My book, however, outlines how I have dealt with being an introverted reclusive vegan and animal rights campaigner, and I hope that in discussing my experiences so openly, I’ll be giving others the confidence and strength to continue their own introverted and reclusive lifestyles without having to feel guilt or remorse or any other kind of negative emotion. It’s just okay to be ‘you’ and draw strength from your own individuality and commitment.

I understand that you have always wanted to be virtually invisible — that’s even the title of your book — and as a result you’ve become something of an expert in fading into the background? Tell me about that.

It’s impossible to be invisible but we can be as invisible as possible. I automatically use a whole range of methods to blend into the background — usually very successfully, including my method of keeping meetings as short as possible so that the average introvert can get out of there as quickly as possible, and even how to remain virtually invisible, even when you’re the centre of attention. I do it all the time. It just comes naturally. I’ve even been mistaken for a shop-dummy, which can be a little disconcerting when they’re having an underwear sale, for example.

I explain my crazy methods in my book and they are all effective — some even prevent accidents happening at the most inopportune moment such as having one’s bottom sucked into one of those terrifying aircraft vacuum loos at 30,000 feet which, in addition to being a little irritating, would also be somewhat awkward when the captain suddenly announces that seat-belts should now been fastened because there’s turbulence ahead.

Invisible — the Essential Guide for Aliens Stranded on Earth has been published by Big Sky Publishing and is available through all major online book retailers in both printed and ebook form.

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Author’s website: drtonymatthews.weebly.com

Twitter: @tonytheauthor