Well, you really should have learnt that if you ever click on someone's name then you either get an E-mail screen or a potted biography. This, in case you haven't yet grasped it, is the former.
As is fairly obvious, I am William Ramsden, the creator and supreme ruler of this little website. In full William James Ramsden, William to my friends and my mother, Will to those of my friends who haven't yet grasped that I really don't like the diminutive, W.J. Ramsden to my devoted readership (well, one can dream), Mr Ramsden to everyone else, and not at home to any evil government scum trying to steal money from me.
Assuming you're here, one supposes you will actually want to know something about me. Well, I can't tell you my height or weight because I haven't recently checked. I live in Norfolk (that's in Eastern England for those of you from that big noisy place on the other side of the Atlantic), and am currently reading French and Philosophy at Oxford.

The photo on the right is the only webbified picture I have of myself at present. I'll try to fill in its omissions and innacuracies: my face has two sides, my eyes are grey-blue, not red, and the beard of evil has long since been hacked off and sent down the sink.

Well, personality-wise I'm not really sure how I'd describe myself. I'm a firm believer in the principle that, in fact, each person is the person that knows him or herself the least. At least, I hope that's the case, since if all my darker images of myself are true then I really don't want to know me.

Part of the problem is of course that we can't ever describe ourselves without resorting to dramatisation, to the creation of what, no matter how detailed, is basically as sketch. Calling myself serious doesn't mean I never laugh, but it looks like it. We are different people in different environments and trying to find a middle way that describes all these is almost impossible.

I'm sure that, as an audience, you couldn't really care less about this. That's fine, of course, scroll down and click on the appropriate clickable thing and go where you're going. This is more for my own self-analysis than anything else (it's four minutes to one am as I write this), although obviously I am aware that it is open to the public (hence this is probably only 90% of my personality anyway).

Well then, who am I? I would give one answer when depressed, and quite another when happy. My friends in Oxford would give one answer (I hope closer to the 'happy' description, but I can't really tell for sure), my friends back home quite another. My mother, tutors and old school teachers would again, probably all give variously different analyses of my personality. Are any of these in any way 'more real'? Probably not. So, am I a sort of amalgam of them all? Probably, but this doesn't really help when they contradict one another. "William Ramsden is sometimes loud and opinionated, sometimes quite and withdrawn." It, changing the name, applies to us all really, doesn't it?

So, considering it again, who am I? Well, I suppose I could be said to be whatever is not contradicted in any of my personas. Politically cynical, yet something of a romantic at heart, introverted, slightly supercilious- although not nearly as much as the persona many people receive, prone to wild swings of temperament, paranoid, suspicious, and... having rather a tendency to insult myself before others get a chance to do so. I don't know what compliments I could pay myself, and doubt if I would have the brashness to compliment myself in public anyway, but I do care about people- probably rather too much, and like humans whilst despising humanity.

Well, as you may have guessed, I don't really think that much of the art/science of characterisation. Obviously I do have a personality- no giggling at the back, please- I didn't say whether or not it was an interesting personality, but whether it's equally true to say that I have a character is possibly a different matter entirely.

There's an interesting theory propounded by an author, Nathalie Sarraute, who suggested that rather than character, our personalities are consisted of tropisms, rather like plants. Good theory, clever socio-psychologist, diabolical writer. None the less, maybe that is getting closer to the truth. To say that in situation X I will react in Y manner is a gross simplification, but it's undeniable that I have certain tendencies to react in particular ways. Let us take, for example, as it's probably my defining trait in term-time, misanthropy.

To say that I hate human life is not entirely accurate. It may be true in certain conditions, but to say it as an umbrella statement is false. A truer version might be:

William Ramsden hates humanity when he is trying to get along a crowded street and hasn't been placed in an extraordinarily good mood prior to this.

That's certainly true.

Well, progress at last! Of course, it doesn't actually help you understand my character very much, but it's a step forward in our understanding of personality, per se, isn't it. Now, fresh from our success at that little sub-topic, let's tackle the issue of personas, shall we?

Well, they are at least an area on which quite a bit of background consideration has already been done. However, there's one important point I would like to make. Most thinkers on this subject hold that the adoption of persona is, except for the hypocrite, who exaggerates the persona until it conceals the truth, rather than simply distorting it, an unconscious process. I would argue that, whilst the unconscious certainly has a part to play, there is always an element of conscious 'tailoring' of the personality to suit the intended audience.

In the company of certain people- my juniors, academic tutors, members of the peer group I wish to snub, I adopt a very withdrawn, psychologically opaque emotionless persona- a face which only smiles when I tell it to smile, a perpetually ever-so-slightly-worried tone to the voice; just enough to convey the impression that I've got enough to worry about without them adding to it. With most of my friends, I try to go the other way, 'bouncing' into life with a shallow, mask-like avuncular jollity that makes me seem, I have no doubt, intensely irritating. However, whatever glee or irritation may be expressed on that mask has nothing to do with the emotion beneath. I can feel on the edge of absolute despair and be smiling and 'mad' in the company of others, or sit in silence 'monitoring' them, not because I'm depressed, but because I'm happy anyway and don't need to try and cheer myself up by pretending to be so. The emotion within, the 'self', as it were, has hardly any connection at all with the persona, unless I wish it to. I can open the doors, if I choose, but I very frequently don't. Only a few people, to a small degree, have seen the 'self', and given that that 'self' is the self chosen to be revealed at a time of my choosing, it's equally questionable whether even they get a proper representative glimpse of the real me.

All the above sounds rather as if I'm trying to make myself out to be some kind of special psychological case. Well, I'm not. Whilst I definitely do have mood swings between mania and depression, amongst others, they are hardly at the clinical level, and I rather suspect that every one of you out there suffers the same things. I'm not certain of course, but I'm rather suspicious of it.