David Icke does not exist. That is just a name for what my infinite

Sunday Herald, The, Dec 1, 2002 by Vicky Allan

"BY THE way you're not one of them," David Icke says as if he thinks maybe the question of whether I'm a reptilian or not has been preying on my mind. "You're big time not. Totally different energy."

Actually I would be a liar if I said it hadn't occurred to me. Earlier that day, sitting at a lonely, windswept bus stop having travelled to the Isle of Wight on the understanding that he would pick me up when I rang, I found myself leaving more and more frantic messages on his phone, which was permanently on call minder, cursing his name and those of all conspiracy theorists. Icke, I began to assume, was avoiding me. He had, perhaps, had an intuition - from everything I knew about him, I understood this was the way he conducted his life - and had come to the conclusion I was in league with the reptilians.

Well, who knew? Maybe I was. In Icke's alternative vision of reality, the planet is ruled by bloodline conspiracies in which the Queen, George Bush, Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Kris Kristofferson and others, are really multi-dimensional shape-shifting reptilian entities who practise secret paedophilic satanic rituals.

This is not fiction; this, he says, is really happening (though the only real evidence he has is the testimonies of certain psychics, healers and mind-controlled slaves). And, while I'm not a great one for conspiracy theories, not long into reading his books, I found myself studying footage of George Dubya for reptilian shadows, reading newspapers in search of illuminati connections, and staring into the mirror for signs of the DNA corruption that would make me "one of them". After all, who can really be sure of anything? And if you follow Icke's logic we're all mind-controlled and indoctrinated from birth anyway, we are all "children of the Matrix".

Actually it turns out he had just got "a day out of sync" and had been sitting with his laptop hooked up to the internet all morning, thinking he wasn't meeting me till the following day.

"I'll come and get you," he says. "I'll just be a few minutes. You wouldn't like to see me in the state I'm in now. Just got out of the shower." Five minutes later, he turns up in a worn, old car, droplets of water still clinging to his slapped-down hair. He takes me back to his home and, to start with, shows me his steam engine pictures.

"The trains are the reason I came here," he says, waving at a series of paintings. "I fell in love with them when I came on holiday here as a child. I used to stand on the pier just down there and I used to watch them go past, and it was like Thomas the tank engine."

Apart from these, and the miniature rail track running round the living room, Icke's flat is oddly characterless. There are framed photos on his mantlepiece of his three children, and of Pamela, his second wife, a fan he married two years ago. "Great, great friend," he says, when I ask about his first wife (of 29 years) Linda. "You know some people make better friends than lovers."

At 50, Icke himself is no longer the fresh-faced BBC sports presenter he once was. While he has lost none of his charisma, the years of ridicule appear to have worn him down. His skin is pale and greyish, and his hands painfully contorted by years of rheumatoid arthritis. I could tell he was a little wary at first, aware that most journalists come to mock. "None of that Son of God crap!" he said. These days he prefers to declare instead, "David Icke does not exist. My name is just a name for what my infinite consciousness is experiencing." His main concern is "the manipulation of humanity's imagination of itself".

But I'm not here to laugh at Icke. He's had enough of that. The first few years after his revelation were played out to the continual soundtrack of distant laughter. "I had little kids taking the piss out of me because their parents said they should. I would stop at the traffic lights in my car and be laughed at by people in the next car. I'd come home and turn the television on and a comedian would only have to say my name to get a laugh. You know, they wouldn't even have to say anything funny."

During an appearance on Wogan, at the height of his revelatory period (when he was still wearing turquoise and declaring himself "Son of the Godhead") the chat show host pointed out that the audience were laughing. "The best way of removing negativity," Icke said, "is to laugh and be joyous, Terry. So I am glad that there has been so much laughter in the audience tonight."

"They're not laughing with you," Wogan famously replied. "They're laughing at you."

It was a tough time. He recalls delivering a lecture at the University of Nottingham. "It was 15 minutes before I could start to speak because of the noise and things being thrown. And I remember that night, when it all died down, I said to them, 'You think I'm mad, don't you?' And it was all, 'Yeah! Woah!' And I said, 'You think I'm mentally ill, don't you? What does that say about you? You've paid to come and take the piss out of someone you think is mentally ill.'" It's a story that reveals a lot about how our society treats the independent-thinking and eccentric. The way, rather than simply argue with their assertions, we ostracise and discredit with claims of madness. If you don't believe this, broach a few of his ideas with your friends and see what happens.