Our notions of “normality” are also formed through individual experience and knowledge My friend Anthea eats sardines and apricots for breakfast. I, who was brought up on cornflakes, think that’s deeply eccentric; she just says she’s coping as best she can with a dodgy digestive system. I dare say if an eminent doctor backed her up I might start taking her eating habits more seriously. We all think we know eccentricity when we see it, but do we?Into this subjective morass has stepped Dr David Weeks, a clinical neuropsychologist at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. Inspired by his research on gifted children (eccentrics start young), Dr Weeks has spent the last 10 years studying more than 1,000 eccentrics in Britain and America. The result is the first ever scientific survey of the field (Eccentrics by David Weeks and Jamie James, Weidenfeld & Nicol-son, £17.99).

“In the beginning,” he admits, “we had no definition at all of eccentricity. We were seeing anybody.” Weeding out hoaxers and practical jokers was one problem; then there were the “marginals” who displayed some eccentric characteristics sometimes. One of Dr Weeks’s most vexing diagnostic tasks was to distinguish between eccentricity and neurosis. “Simply put,” he says, “neurotics are miserable because they think they’re not as good as everyone else, while eccentrics know they’re different and glory in it.” After the research was completed, Dr Weeks and his team came up with a 15-point empirically based list of characteristics that define eccentricity.No single eccentric displays all 15 characteristics, but I decided to test the check list against John Ward of Wellingborough, an eccentric if ever there was one. With his jokey outsize glasses and Lord Longford hairstyle, John conforms nicely to the visual stereotype of the mad professor – although, oddly enough, an unusual dress sense does not appear on Dr Weeks’s list. A mechanical fitter by trade, who left school at 15, John Ward is famous for making “contraptions” out of junk. People come from far and wide to stare at him, something he tolerates with amazing good humour; although, even he was somewhat taken aback when a pair of German scientists parked their van outside his house for two days in order to observe him at work.

He hesitates to call his creations “inventions” since they have no earthly use (unless you call a mechanical bra-warmer useful). He has the occasional more serious idea and once wrote to the Innovations catalogue with a suggestion, but he didn’t get a reply so now he sticks to making safety nets for yo-yos and the like. Inspired largely by an object’s shape, John looks at, say, an old drinks dispenser then thinks “What can I make with that?” A rock launcher, of course Obvious, really. John’s most famous creation is his moon buggy, a one-man vehicle that most closely resembles Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on acid. He is, he says, “taking the winkle out of the system” and as long as he gets the GF (Giggle Factor) he’s a happy man.The first two characteristics that all eccen-trics share, says Dr Weeks, is that they are “nonconforming” and “creative” John Ward is clearly both Nonconformity takes many forms, however. Marvin Staples, a Chippewa Indian from Minnesota, walks everywhere backwards because, he says, it makes him feel younger and has cured him of chronic backache and arthritis.

Many creative artists – William Blake, Eric Satie, James Joyce, Beatrix Potter – could be considered eccentric, but high levels of eccentricity do not necessarily make for achievement.Eccentrics are an unusually curious, Dr Weeks found. “Of all human motivations,” he says, “the only purely intellectual one is curiosity, and eccentrics have it in bucketloads. For them, the process of discovery is its own reward.” John Ward, an inveterate letter writer, would wholeheartedly concur. “If I’m not sure about somebody or something, I’ll write and ask.” As the mind-bogglingly chaotic state of his work shed testifies, John loves pulling things apart. He also has a penchant for car manuals: although he has no desire to own or even drive a Porsche, he knows how one works.

Another curious eccentric, the Victorian explorer Mary Kingsley, earned the nickname “Only Me” on her first voyage, as those were the words with which she announced her arrival in the engine room, bridge, in fact anywhere passengers were prohibited from entering. Like John, she just wanted to see how things worked.Virtually all eccentrics are idealistic. Is John? He stumbles briefly over this one as he has no time for politics or religion (“the Americans have the idea – they sell it”). But what of his quest for the Giggle Factor? He would not put his simple desire to make people happy in such high falutin’ terms But perhaps it stems from the purest idealism. John shares that desire with, among other, Dr Patch Adams, an American doctor who dresses up as a clown and says that if we all had his attitude we’d eliminate Prozac overnight.The fifth most important element in the eccentric’s make-up is, according to the research, a happy obsession with one or more hobby horses.