I took a personality test recently.

It told me I was very low in compassion, enthusiasm, and that I didn’t like people very much.

Ironically, that hurt my feelings a little.

Then I did some unpacking.

Paul Simon’s riff on John Donne’s famous line that ‘No man is an island’ has always resonated with me.

Because often I feel like I am a bit of an island.

And not necessarily one of the fun ones — Ibiza, Lilliput or… Barry? — more like the Isle of Man.

A sort of weird, slightly detached place that drifts in and out of relationship with the rest of the kingdom when it feels like it.

Since we stopped hanging and torturing people in this country, solitary confinement has been the worst punishment the state has had to offer.

But I honestly sometimes think I’d quite enjoy it.

Give me something good to read, maybe a piano, a cryptic crossword, a bit of fresh air, and something decent to eat every now and again and it wouldn’t be totally dissimilar to the way I spend my time now.

I could happily go days without speaking to anyone.

Sometimes — when I don’t have a gig to play between the end of Sunday and the beginning of the next weekend — I basically do.

Having said that, I’ve always managed to get on pretty well with people.

I’ve never been too short of friends or girlfriends; I was in all the sports teams growing up; I play music in busy bars every weekend, and my brain still loves a boozy night out even if my liver can’t really hack them any more.

In my former life as a disorganised high school English teacher I managed to get groups of aggressive teenagers to sit quietly, talk to each other, write about their feelings and even understand Shakespeare (sometimes) without too much fuss. I even ran departments and helped train other teachers.

What I’m trying to say — and I’m aware I already sound like I’m protesting too much — is that I’m not some sort of asocial psychopath.

At least I didn’t think I was.

Until these test results gave me a bit of a shock.

Because it wasn’t one of those five-minute Facebook quizzes.

It was a detailed test, backed by decades of replicable scientific research. It took me about an hour. I even paid to take it.

Back in the 1930s and 40s, social scientists began with a simple idea: if human personalities really differ from one another in meaningful ways, we should be able to break those personalities down into their component parts.

They started with language, extracting every adjective they could find that described a person’s character and asking huge groups of people how strongly each one applied to them.

Predictably, certain words seemed to travel together.

People who rated themselves highly on words like outgoing also tended to rate themselves highly on words like talkative, confident and social.

You get the picture.

Over decades of analysis those clusters kept resolving into the same five broad traits — what psychologists now call the “Big Five”.

They’re still the dominant framework used in personality research today because, however inelegant it sounds, they actually predict things in the real world.

Those five traits describe the main ways people differ from one another: how drawn you are to ideas and novelty, how organised and disciplined you tend to be, how energised you are by people and stimulation, how cooperative and emotionally attuned you are, and how sensitive you are to stress and negative emotion.

And each of these is a continuum. We all fall somewhere along each spectrum — higher or lower.

For example, I’m very high in the trait ‘openness’. According to the test, if I was stood with a random sample of 100 people, I’d be more ‘open’ than 93 of them.

Which makes sense. I’ve always been more interested in art and ideas and concepts than concrete things.

I’m also a bit impulsive — I like change and I’m not afraid to take risks.

That’s a pretty flattering outcome for me. There’s something quite sexy about it.

Some of my other scores were noticeably less sexy.

Apparently I’m pretty disagreeable.

I’m also unenthusiastic and low in compassion.

Now these words have to be read in their Big Five context. They don’t necessarily mean I’m rude, lazy or heartless.

More that I’m fairly comfortable doing my own thing in the face of social expectations, I’m not easily energised by people or situations, and I’m not always instinctively drawn into other people’s feelings.

When I read it like that, it starts to make a lot more sense.

I’ve always considered myself an extroverted introvert.

I can outwardly project affability and confidence in group settings, and I have no trouble speaking in public or performing for crowds of people.

But I think the reason I’ve always loved being on stage so much is that it lets me be in a social situation without really being in one.

I’m both there and not there.

I’m in the room, but I’m not.

I can be playing music in a cool bar full of people having a good time and, whilst I can be a part of their good time, I don’t actually have to talk to any of them unless I really want to.

My brother still regularly mocks me for playing in the band at my own 30th birthday party.

He argues that it’s yet another symptom of my relentless narcissistic urge to have people stare at me and clap.

But actually, the idea of everyone I know and love together in a room — including people I haven't seen for months or maybe years — sounds utterly exhausting.

The endless small talk, the meeting and greeting, the questions about my life I don’t want to answer, the answers from them about their lives that I do care about (I promise) but often don’t quite know how to respond to.

Awful.

The same event but I can just watch them all having a great time whilst I get to play some music?

That suits me perfectly.

I also think it’s probably the reason that my songs are so full of regret, broken hearts and existential crises.

It’s just the way I process and communicate such things — at an artistic distance, out there in the poetic abstract where I can explore them without necessarily having to feel them directly.

Because, as the test will tell you, I’m not a classic sort of “feeler”.

But that’s just who I am.

I think we are all islands to some extent, but we live in a globalised, interconnected world where we've had to get used to one another.

And some islands are better at that than others.

Some of us are Ibiza.

Some of us are wild and exotic like Madagascar. Some of us are Greenland — vast, cold and remote.

I’m the Isle of Man.

There, but not there.

In the union, but not especially interested.

Floating out in the Irish Sea, staring back at the familiar strangers on an opposing shore.

Keep dreaming,

Rob