Swords, sorcery and spam

When I finally discovered my superpower last week during the visit to London, I remember thinking it had been a long time in coming.

I never really got superheroes as a child, I wasn’t that kind of kid. I certainly don’t recall any Marvel comics floating about the house when I was growing up. This is, like quite a few things, down to my father. When I was about five years old, he read us Watership Down at bedtime and I was totally hooked. It was, however, the next book that did all the real damage, because that’s when he read us The Hobbit. The moment he got to the end of the last page I just wanted him to go back to the beginning and start all over again.

It proved to be a worryingly formative experience, and kicked off what must have been a fifteen year habit of voraciously reading fantasy novels. First I read Lord of the Rings. Then I went back to the beginning and read it all over again. After that I read all the trilogies which had basically taken Lord of the Rings, changed all the character and place names but kept virtually the whole plot intact. You may be unamazed to hear that there are an awful lot of these; it appears to be the only genre I’ve ever seen where tribute bands have a legitimacy all their very own.

I even worked my way through the pretentious “edgy” fantasy novels. You could always tell these ones, because the hero was tormented or conflicted in some way. What's more, they usually involved complex words like “inchoate” which, at the age of ten, I didn’t entirely understand. One of them even had a leper as the main character, which was probably supposed to be a metaphor for something but in practice, appropriately enough, just meant that the quality dropped off as it went along.

The shades of morality in those books were somewhat difficult to get my head around given that in most fantasy novels the characters were not only questing for a mystical amulet but were also desperately in need of a second dimension, let alone a third. The ones you were meant to boo were usually distinguished by their names having the mildly telling prefix “The Dark Lord” or suffix “the Evil”. If only life was so simple - even now I sometimes turn to Kelly halfway through a film or TV programme and say “Is this guy a goodie or a baddie?” She generally responds with a look of exasperation; understandable, given that this is nearly always one of the stupidest questions there is.

As far as fantasy goes, I read the lot. If it formed part of a seven book series, each paperback comfortably big enough to stun a rhino, I was in. If the lead character was an enigmatic mercenary called Thrarg with a mysterious past, a cursed scimitar and a starring role in at least three separate prophecies, you can guarantee I had read it. If he was accompanied by a sentient war panther, so much the better.

One time on a caravan holiday in Devon we stopped by a bookshop only for me to find that the long awaited third book in a particular trilogy had come out (the classic The Wishsong of Shannara, in case you were interested, though I’m mainly ardently hoping that you’re not). I bought a copy and the rest of the holiday was spent finding every opportunity to slope away from my family to read it. I believe I read the last two hundred pages in the campsite’s communal toilet, the stench of diseased bowel movements not entirely managing to overpower the increasingly turgid prose.

After all, these books weigh in at six hundred pages for a reason, and only some of that can come down to the main characters having such long names. There’s a language you need to learn, too; in these books there was no such thing as “information”, only “lore” (nearly always ancient, or Elvish, or both - despite the fact that in every fantasy book you care to name the elves made Barbara Cartland look like a spring chicken). You were never “late”, always “waylaid” and that would be because rather than "fanny around" you had decided instead to "tarry". You never told someone to “piss off” when you could instruct them to “begone”. Adjectives like “gibbous” and “vorpal”, which I’m sure Lewis Carroll just invented for a laugh while out of his mind on laudanum, were used with a painfully earnest tone at all times.

Most frustrating of all is that adjectives like “gimp” were used by the normal kids at school to refer to people who read fantasy books. Harry Potter was many, many years too late to save the credibility of people like me. “I do wish he would read some novels which don’t involve goblins or extraterrestrials” said my English teacher’s school report one year. I was 15.

Really, I should have been into superheroes because however nerdy comic book readers were they still kicked metaphorical sand into the faces of all the fantasy fans. And the idea of being a bespectacled cipher who could go off and transform into an alpha male ought to have resonated with me. Maybe it would have done, if I hadn’t been so busy wishing I was a warlock of some description. I never did get to become a warlock; shame really, as it would have been a far better job title than any of the ones I’ve wound up with since.

But I’ve always been convinced that I must have some kind of superpower, it’s just that I’ve never known what it was. For years, I thought it might be my incredible ability to construct an innuendo out of practically anything. I had even worked out the name (“Captain Smut”) and decided that my superhero costume would be baggy jeans and an offensive slogan t-shirt. Then I realised that it didn’t involve any special effort or dressing up, which was even better because if you saw me in lycra “super” would be practically the last word to spring to mind, behind perhaps only “erotic”.

Then I thought my superpower might just be the ability to order badly in restaurants. What normally happens is that Kelly orders first and picks exactly what I would have gone for. Suddenly I am faced with the prospect of looking like one of those couples who wear matching cagoules and like folk concerts and wandering round National Trust properties every Sunday, so panicking I change plans on the spot and opt instead for my second choice. This is always, and I mean always, a mistake. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the dish I’ve ordered was a close second or a distant second, whenever it turns up the phrase “number two” acquires a very different meaning. Meanwhile Kelly chomps away looking not remotely apologetic. “You could have had the same thing as me.” she says between ecstatic mouthfuls, “I wouldn’t have minded.”

Anyway, my superpower is in fact a particularly virulent subspecies of ordering badly in restaurants. It came to me when Kelly and I were sitting in Polpo enjoying a delicious lunch and watching the clientele trying to work out if they were more pleased with the food or themselves. It was, in many cases, a close run thing. We had ordered plenty of tiny snacks to keep us going while we took on the serious business of running through the menu, but it was time to make a stand and pick some larger dishes.

“I’d like the sausage and salsa verde on a bed of lentils.” I said.

Kelly raised an eyebrow. When the dish arrived, her suspicion seemed justified. The lentils looked perfect, the salsa verde rich and pungent. It was the third element which proved problematic because it wasn’t recognisable as any form of sausage. There, quivering in a sinister fashion on top of the lentils, were thick pink rounds of gelatinous something. The penny dropped and I realised with an awful certainty that I had finally discovered my superpower.

I have an unerring ability to order things on a restaurant menu which are not billed as, but subsequently turn out to be, spam.

Like solving a troublesome clue in a cryptic crossword, all those previous experiences quickly fell into place. That “Italian sausage risotto” I once had in Carluccios on a rare lunchtime stop with Louise up in town. It looked like savoury rice with crumbled pink highlighter pen liberally scattered all over it, but the taste was pure spam. Or the chorizo pasta dish I had on a rainy afternoon in Dulwich Village with Kelly and Louise last year. They both went for the burger, but I didn’t listen because I had to be different. I was rewarded with a spectacularly disgusting dish that put the hurt into Herta; cubes of spam in an insipid tomato sauce the consistency of a thick sneeze.

Why couldn’t I have had a good superpower, like being invisible? At school a popular debate was whether you’d have chosen to be able to fly or turn invisible. Most of my friends were keen on soaring through the air, being able to see the world in a way most people never will. I on the other hand was keen to know exactly what people said about me when I wasn’t around, and if it didn’t work out in my favour there were always the consolations of the girls’ changing room.

Unfortunately at the end of this epiphany the spam was still there, balefully squatting on the lentils. I cut off a rubbery piece and reluctantly put it in my mouth. The closest thing I can compare it to, odd though it might sound, was the time I went to see Doctor Harrold for a so-called routine appointment and she ended up sticking her finger up my arse. It was nowhere near as unpleasant as I thought it would be, but that didn’t stop me thinking that in a cosmos more perfectly ordered than this it would simply never have happened at all.

The odious group next to us ordered it too, to my immense satisfaction. Part way through, one of them said “I never knew this would turn out to be spam and lentils.” You and me both, I chuckled to myself. Then a couple arrived at the table next to us, towards the end of the lunch sitting. The waiter told them they’d have to order in a rush. They looked like proper tourists, up in London for the day, who had accidentally stumbled upon one of the hottest lunch joints in the city right now without the faintest idea it was any better than a Pizza Express. I’m sure half the clientele was looking down on them, but I wasn’t. They were a total antithesis to the couple who’d occupied that table before, talking about modern movements in cinema like the ultimate Guardian-reading mutual masturbation disguised as a lunch date. They didn’t fit, and I loved them for it.

“The sausages and Italian lentils sounds nice.” he said to her, keen to impress, clueless and endearing. My heart went out to him.

“Don’t order it, it’s just like spam.” said Kelly, leaning across in their general direction.

“Really?”

“Yes." I said, “The best thing I had on the menu is the wild mushroom piadina.”

They thanked us effusively from the moment that the waiter took their order to the moment we threw on our coats and headed off down Carnaby Street. And maybe that’s how I can use my superpower for the forces of good, by warning people that they’re about to make a ghastly gastronomic mistake.

I recounted the story to Louise over a cocktail just off Bond Street later that afternoon. It was the least I could do, given that she was normally present when my superpowers were invoked. My cocktail was a delicious fruity concoction, rich with apple, cinnamon and brandy. At first I was disappointed. I was really in the mood for a Bloody Mary and I couldn’t find it anywhere on the drinks menu. I even considered asking them if they could make me one, but I eventually thought better of it. They probably would have ended up fixing me a Spamtini anyway.

100 Words: People watching

This man's hand is on the back of his far more attractive wife's neck, as if it's the only way he can stop her running away.

This woman's a jarringly violent orange; she makes the front of Sainsburys look rendered in pastel shades.

There's something surprisingly touching about the eager incompetence of unaccompanied dads.

A girl screeching past the phone shop calls her friend "babe". Without looking, I know she isn't one.

These men practice their blank expressions. They'll need them when they're abandoned outside the changing rooms.

My coffee was finished ages ago. I could stay here all afternoon.

100 Words: Coffee

She won’t come near me when I’ve had coffee, can’t stand the stuff.

“How would you feel,” she says, “If I tried to kiss you after I’d eaten peanut butter?”

It’s the sort of unbeatable logic I always hoped I’d have the monopoly on but, in this house, I only have a monopoly on sulking.

She’s away on a girls' weekend; I can drink all the coffee I like, so I will.

I’ll stay up, wide-eyed and wired until the first daylight flirts with the Roman blinds. Wishing she was here, telling me to get the hell away from her.

[Suggested by my friend Esther - hi Esther!]

Word limit

It’s a running joke among most people I know that I am always ill with something. It’s invariably fatal into the bargain; I’m not one of those common or garden people who has a headache or a bad stomach, I’m one of those rare people who has brain tumours or inoperable cancer. Actually I should correct that; I’m even rarer than that because I have all those things wrong with me but am still, for reasons which the medical fraternity simply cannot fathom, in the land of the living. In fact, Hypochondriacs Quarterly recently voted me Most Likely Not To Die which, I’m told, is considered quite an accolade.

Despite this I remain largely convinced that hypochondriacs are just poor unfortunates who get ill more often than most people. And I’m incredibly squeamish and sensitive about illnesses, too. If I watch somebody on television having a heart attack, I clutch my chest. If I hear someone complaining of feeling dizzy, the room spins. Strangely, if I happen to watch somebody on television inheriting a considerable amount of money from a distant relative they never knew they had, or romping with two women in a hot tub, the same thing never happens.

I’m sure there’s a very significant lesson to be learned from this but I can’t work out what it is. This might because I also have early onset Alzheimers.

The thing is, when it’s happening to you it’s not at all funny. I’m told it’s quite far from easy to live with either. “No, you’re not ill. No, you’re not going to die. Yes, it’s going to go away.” It sometimes amazes me that Kelly hasn’t recorded the whole spiel on a Dictaphone to play during those especially taxing moments. Maybe when she eventually leaves me she’ll record an MP3 of it before she goes, just after dividing up our CD collection and immediately before loading her gargantuan collection of handbags onto a waiting removal van with the engine running.

I’ve always been this way. As a teenager we had a medical encyclopaedia in the living room. Shortly after I discovered it, I started reading it much in the same way that you might flick through a film guide deciding what to watch next. My mother confiscated it about five minutes after I became convinced that I had meningitis, and it never reappeared. Nowadays, I have to get Kelly to do any research for me online, because it’s not safe for me to go on medical websites trying to self-diagnose. The internet is a place where you can find a bad review of practically anything in the world, and that includes your own life expectancy.

One thing is rendered especially complex by this, and that’s what happens when I am genuinely ill.

I’ve been struggling with RSI for the past two years and it doesn’t ever seem to get any better. I’ve been humiliated by a physiotherapist – well, asked to take my top off, but with my physique they amount to the same thing – I’ve been prodded by various doctors and nobody seems to have a clue what to do about it. Last week I sat in a corridor in the hospital watching people lurch past sporting the paraphernalia of genuine sickness; casts, wheelchairs, those odd bags of fluid hanging from a giant Zimmer frame. I felt ashamed not to be more obviously ill, despite having spent many happy hours in front of Kelly clutching my arms and doing my sad face that doesn’t work any more. Happy for me, anyway. Actually no – honestly, they weren’t even that.

Eventually, the specialist saw me. He had a distracted, academic air about him and looked at me as if I was just a tricky quadratic equation in a carefully chosen slogan t-shirt. But he couldn’t figure it out either. Said in his rich tones, you could almost imagine the words “We really don’t understand much about it” hammered onto the tablets as the Eleventh Commandment, so convincing was he. On one level I can identify with that - it’s always been an unofficial commandment of mine anyway – but I expected slightly more from a medical expert.

So now I have more tests, but nobody sounds particularly hopeful. And if they don’t work, the main thing the specialist was suggesting was acupuncture. When you find your doctor banging the drum for alternative treatments – well, it seems an awful lot like giving up to me. And in the meantime the act of typing some days just isn’t fun at all. It’s sadder than I can possibly describe; I love writing, and I don’t think I properly realised that for a long time. For years I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life, and now I have a vague idea circumstances are conspiring to make it more and more difficult. So if I’ve been writing less lately, or not responding to comments, that’s why.

And it makes me wonder, too: what would you type, if every word hurt?

If there were only so many words left in you, which ones would you say and which ones would you dispense with? Who would you tell your stories to, and your secrets? I don’t like to think of all the words I wasted, and the energy. The conversations I had with people I never really liked, the apologies that nobody was ever going to accept, the pointless, pointless one page summaries at work that I don't think anybody even read. Hopefully there’s still time for me. And for you too, because I'm not trying to tell you something you don't already know or end on a downer, but we should all think about this while we can.

We all only have so many words left in us, like it or not.

Being elsewhere

Coming back from London, for me at least, always induces a certain sense of feeling defeated.

I like to feel that I’m a natural city dweller. I can navigate a Tube map with unflappable finesse, I can mooch round edgy shops without seeming out of place, I can weave through pedestrians at high velocity and cross a busy street - just about - without being twatted by a bus. Not only that but I’ve also, after years of practice, perfected the look. You know the one, the paint-stripping glare you are supposed to do when somebody irritates you in a crowded place. This, I remain convinced, is probably the single most crucial thing you need in your armoury throughout your time in the capital.

I’ve even learned, after a few painful misfires, the dark art of not talking on the Underground. It remains an unwritten rule of London that nobody speaks on the Tube. Any conversation, however innocuous, is always greeted by the same reaction. It doesn’t matter whether you’re saying “Shall we change at Green Park?” or “That meal last night was fantastic”, because everyone in the carriage invariably reacts as if what you have really come out with is “That small child in the corner is especially sexy isn’t he?” or worse still “I personally reckon that Dancing In The Moonlight by Toploader must be the finest pop single ever made.”

Then they give you that look I was talking about, a look which I only really learned after I had incurred it many, many times. Maybe that’s how everybody learns to do it, like that dreadful story about giving monkeys electric shocks that they once used tediously at work as a parable to try to urge us to challenge cultural norms.

Yet I still never feel like I belong in London.

When you live in the provinces like I do (and all that “oh, Reading is practically Zone 8” piffle I come out with at parties is mainly to convince me rather than you, and it’s really not working so far) you always feel a little like a yokel who’s there for the day, pointing at bendy buses and saying “the giant metal horse is awful scaring me“. It might be partly about the path my life has taken; when I left university most of my contemporaries, like Dick Whittington, headed there to seek their fortunes and I expect more than a few of them succeeded. They would sooner have roughly fed their genitals into a shredder than moved to the suburbs of anywhere.

I on the other hand went back to Reading to move back in with my mother and brother, only to discover that nothing had changed one iota. London was at the cutting edge of everything, meanwhile we were busy getting excited about the opening of a Yates Wine Lodge. It was brilliant actually; every Friday night my friends and I - a constant fixture there back in those days - would be up on the first floor, at the balcony scoping out the talent (there never was any) and without fail at 10pm the whole building would reverberate to the sound of the theme from Star Wars for reasons I never managed to fathom. I was usually in an olive gingham shirt from Gap and had been so liberally doused in Eau de Suburban Desperation that you could probably smell me in Penzance. Oh, and you could get a pint of Fosters for a quid.

But that’s beside the point. Or worse still it proves my point, not sure which.

Even now, when I finally have the money to properly enjoy everything London has to offer, it somehow seems a little fraudulent to do so. We have a love-hate relationship with London you see, us folk who live outside the capital. When I’m there I simultaneously feel pleased as punch to be in such a wonderful place with so many incredible things to do and see - look, isn’t Liberty the most amazing shop in the whole wide world! Wow, I simply can’t decide which of the fantastic places on Marylebone High Street to have lunch in. I could sit at this café on the South Bank and watch the people going past for hours. All bookshops should be like Daunt Books, if I ran the world I would compulsorily purchase every Waterstones and give them to the owners - and painfully aware of the injustice of it all. It’s simply not fair that everything so truly marvellous is concentrated there. If something that feels remotely Londonesque makes it out to Reading, you just know the concept will be so diluted by then that it’s become truly naff and that, in London terms, it will have jumped the shark. Add to this a media that is written by people in London for people in London who don’t really appreciate that the rest of the country even exists and it can feel very lonely out here on the fringes of civilised society.

One of my first proper girlfriends was properly London through and through. Born near the Holloway Road she went to school in Camden and Oxford was the natural next step. She now writes mind-bendingly dull stuff about mergers for the Telegraph. When I visited her in North London I felt gauche and easily impressed. When she came to my hometown I was far far prouder of her than I ever could have been of it. But even then I wasn’t fully prepared for her take on Reading. “It’s all right I guess,” she said, “But I wouldn’t really want to participate.”

That attitude, I think, is rife among Londoners. There’s a feeling of entitlement and confidence that you are at the very epicentre of the universe which, it seems, is not inconsistent with complaining about it all the time. It’s very confusing, and it gets more confusing still when you realise that there’s a whole food chain of conurbations and that although Reading’s not at the top it’s also pretty far from the bottom. That there are probably people living in the truly awful parts of Britain - the Stokes, the Hulls, the Basingstokes - that may well look at my little town with much the same jaded envy. After all, we have a Pret a Manger and everything. In fact now I come to think of it, when I had to go to Warrington last year for a meeting - on pain of dismissal I might add - I was so overjoyed to find that they had a Caffe Nero that I almost dropped to my knees and kissed the tarmac.

On Sunday, my birthday celebrations a pleasant and proximate memory, Kelly and I sat outside Le Pain Quotidien in Covent Garden with a glass of wine apiece and a gorgeous platter of antipasti watching the tourists shamble past like sightseeing zombies and feeling all our cares had completely melted away. And yes, I know, this would be the height of naff for any of my Londoner readers. I bet none of you ever go to Covent Garden if you can help it and think Le Pain Quotidien is all over the place. But I’d happily sacrifice ten per cent of my Facebook friends to Satan just to have a branch open near me.

My birthday celebrations, incidentally, were a superbly raucous and not remotely highbrow affair in my favourite Greek restaurant which, this being Reading, is of course the only Greek restaurant in town. It was a deeply civilised affair in which the main three topics of conversation (as far as I can recall) were: how excellent the verb “to spaff”, which I was introduced to by my excellent friend Mikey, is and how it should be used at every available opportunity given that I’ve totally failed to popularise “clunge”; the origin and uses of the evergreen comic phrase “two in the goo, one in the poo”, which I was introduced to by my excellent friend Dave; and how there are a remarkably large number of websites devoted to the potential for extremely twisted interaction between deviant humans and exceptionally horny dolphins doing what appears to come naturally, which I was introduced to by my excellent friend Ivor.

There’s a bit of a trend there isn’t there? And people say I’m a bad influence. How little they know.

So I’ve had a lovely couple of days in London. I loved dinner on Sunday night, eating delicious rich faggots in the whitewashed, spartan space of St John Bread and Wine. I even liked strolling up Sloane Street, feeling intimidated and impoverished by the preposterously chi-chi boutiques. I nearly laughed so much that I gave myself a hernia when I saw the Dodi and Diana memorial statue in Harrods, looking to all the world like Barack Obama and Robert Redford in a still from the campest musical of all time. Lunch at the magnificent Polpo was a particular treat, ordering delicious cicheto after cicheto, sipping Gavi and trying hard to overhear the increasingly odious conversation of the couple next to me without Kelly feeling comprehensively ignored. And of course I adored having cocktails off Bond Street after work with Louise before rushing off to grab some unbelievably moreish Thai calamari (they should give them to addicts to wean them off crack) and jumping into a black cab for a race against time to make it to the Barbican for the start of a mildly disappointing concert by the peerless Magnetic Fields.

The Magnetic Fields - You Must Be Out Of Your Mind

So I may not quite feel like I belong in London, but it’s not because I don’t love it there. Of course I love London, how could you not? I wonder whether what both appeals so strongly and feels so jarring is the concept of elsewhere. At coffee with Louise this afternoon I found myself envying her as she discussed her plans to jet off to Paris for Easter, and yet people from all over the world would dearly love to find London as easy to reach as it is for me.

I think that feeling of otherness might be what this is really about. This morning Kelly and I took breakfast at the Wolseley. The service was impeccable, the setting impressive. All around me I could see people having intense conversations, making deals and decisions and being part of a hub of something I couldn’t fully understand. I spotted one celebrity and at least three men to which the term “grandee” could have been convincingly applied. The food wasn’t bad either, although of course that’s hardly the point. But none of this was me - because I’ve spent the last two days, brilliant fun though they’ve been, borrowing somebody else’s life, trying it on for size. And I’m afraid it doesn’t fit, much as I wish it did.

100 Words: Routine

In the morning there's always a kiss at the doorstep; regardless of whether it was a good or bad night in the rear view mirror, a good or bad day looming in the middle distance.

Nighttimes, there’s always one final cup of tea carried to bed.

“I don’t want one.”

“Not even a small one?”

Pause.

“Go on then.”

There are always two cups of tea, two shipmates, two books, two lights illuminating them. Hers always goes out first, then his. Then, without fail in the darkness, comes the drowsiest and sincerest of goodnights.

He’d be nobody without these things.

[Suggested by Toca La Bocina.]

100 Words: Catastrophe

“Who does this numpty think he is?”

I was mailing Glenn slagging off a supplier, on a rare Saturday working from home.

Admiring my impressively scathing handiwork, I realised with a jolt: I hadn’t sent it to Glenn.

I’d sent it to the numpty.

I learned two crucial lessons that day. First, "fuck" is like "hail mary"; however many you say, however loudly, it cannot change the reality of your situation.

I learned that in the shower.

Secondly, when Kelly said that nothing I could do would put her off, she meant it.

We had only been dating a week.

[Suggested by The Flashing Blade.]

The girls

As a child I didn’t want to score the winning goal in the F.A. Cup Final, or walk on the moon or have a number one single. There would have been no point in me writing to Jim’ll Fix It, because he couldn’t have given me the one thing I wanted.

I wanted to be old.

I was rubbish at playing with other kids. I felt like I didn’t want to understand them and they couldn’t understand me. I wanted to be sitting up with the adults, drinking coffee and talking about the eternal verities. Of course, I now realise my parents and their friends were very unlikely to have been talking about those, but if only I’d got older quicker I would have found that out sooner.

And back then I didn’t drink coffee either. I remember the glorious day when my parents bought a coffee percolator. Suddenly there was a new excitement to being a grown-up; when Carol and Frank came over for dinner (making the enormous voyage from two doors down the road) the coffee would come out towards the end of the evening with, on exceptionally indulgent occasions, a box of After Eight mints. One time I was allowed to have a small cup of coffee, as a treat. As inductions to adult life go it was a painful one – pumped full of caffeine for the first time ever I eventually twitched off to sleep at around six in the morning.

At thirteen I went abroad with my family for the first time to Corfu. Stressed about end of year exams I insisted on filling our suitcases with schoolbooks, much to my dad’s exasperation. I didn't read a single one. The holiday was a revelation in many ways; the weather was stunning, the food fantastic and the dusty delights of Corfu Town exceptionally beautiful. But still I couldn’t throw myself into it. We befriended the people staying in the villa downstairs and my brother spent most of his time with Louise, the daughter of the family. For all I know he rubbed Ambre Solaire into her boobs and humped her in the arbour, serenaded by cicadas. Not that I would have realised even if he had put on a live sex show slap bang in front of me. I was too busy reading science fiction or – I’m afraid this next bit really did happen – playing chess with myself.

One of my abiding memories of that holiday is being abroad during the General Election of 1987. We went to the local store and my dad bought a two day old copy of the Daily Telegraph (then, as now, the crossword seemed to exert a magnetic pull on him). I on the other hand was in my bedroom poring over the election results, constituency by constituency. Most people spend their lives at home reading holiday brochures or literature set in exotic locales they will never see. I, only just beginning my teens, was hiding in a villa in Greece reading mind-bogglingly dry statistics about a country I was probably going to live in for the rest of my life. I’m not quite sure why I didn’t realise the wrongness of that.

So apart from me aged thirteen, nobody is ever going to want any advice on how to feel old. But in case anybody does, here it is: all you need to do is walk from my flat to the train station at quarter past eight in the morning. Usually I do this in a state only just approximating to consciousness, sporting an unfeasibly huge pair of headphones that make me look like a Soviet submariner. And maybe it’s because I’m getting old, maybe it’s because it’s my thirty-sixth birthday on Saturday and I can feel the label “late thirties” pressing down on me like an particularly cruel migraine, but lately I have noticed the girls.

Not in a creepy way, although if you were a pervert you could do a lot worse than walk this route. It’s just that to get to two of Reading’s biggest girls’ schools you have to head out of town, up my street and, it seems, right past me. The thing that strikes me first is the hair. Mainly that’s because there seems to be so much of it; giant overblown, overgrown, back-combed and swept-over structures that seem to dwarf their heads. But that’s a cosmetic thing, what you really get from even a casual glance isn’t the skinny legs or the labels or the fashions that seem frighteningly identical to the things that were in fashion twenty-five years ago. It’s the incredible sense of self-possession that I cannot help but notice as they swarm bouncily past me in chattering droves.

When I was at school being confident was very much a minority pursuit, usually linked to having some kind of sporting ability. But now there seems to be an aura of entitlement; not a feeling that the world owes them a living, more that they are easily capable of going out and taking whatever they want from the world. I’m sure they are a credit to their parents, to their teachers, even to modern life in general, but to me it’s more than slightly intimidating.

One girl stands out and I always pass her as I walk past the bank. She’s tall, gawky and awkward, almost androgynous with bluntly unfashionable short hair and a grey sports hoodie on. She looks a little as if she’s been made out of leftover limbs, a modern day Frankenstein’s monster. I ought to identify with somebody like that, because I didn’t fit in at school either. Girls who looked like that when I went to school were relentlessly bullied and judged for being different. If I’d had a brief respite from being judged, I might have judged her myself. Actually, I probably did anyway; it’s always dangerously easy to multi-task when one of the things you are doing is being unpleasant.

But oddest of all, she doesn’t seem judged at all. Even she is ganglingly carefree and surrounded by friends, admittedly far more glamorous than her. They don’t appear to mind, and any feelings of kinship I might have had are gone as quickly as they arrived. Maybe this generation is just nicer than mine, maybe they should have the world after all. Perhaps they deserve to run everything and the sooner we give it up, the way we gave up Top Shop and the town centre on Friday nights, the better it will be for everybody.

I duck into the newsagent and pick up a paper in order to have something to largely ignore on the funbus into work. Emerging, it seems that legion of teenagers has finally come to an end so I walk past the statue of Queen Victoria looking so profoundly disappointed with Reading and head down the home stretch towards the station. I pass a sea of strangers, my eyes flitting across their faces as if I’m scanning a succession of grumpy bar codes.

None of them bleeps back at me.

Some days it feels like everyone that matters appears to be going in the opposite direction to me. And now I come to think of it, it’s always kind of felt like that. I wonder if that, more than anything, is the thin yet tangible thread that links me at the tender age of thirteen to me now, teetering on the brink of thirty-six.

Sunday roast

My post today is a guest post and can be found at Clouds and Silvery Linings, the superb blog of the inimitable Eddie Bluelights.

Eddie runs a weekly feature called the Sunday Roast where every weekend he interviews a blogger from somewhere across blogland. This has been running for over two years and Eddie is the second proprietor, before that it was run by the highly regarded and much missed David McMahon who ran a blog called Authorblog. However, just like David Dimbleby succeeding Robin Day on Question Time or Matthew Kelly taking over from Leslie Crowther on Stars In Their Eyes Eddie has completely made the gig his own.

I was unbelievably honoured when Eddie asked me to be interviewed for the Sunday Roast and absolutely jumped at the chance, and this weekend is my turn.

So, if you want to know why I started a blog, what blog posts - of mine and other people's - I particularly like, which real life writers I admire and how I would sum up my ideal day in a single sentence (among other things), I recommend you pop over to Eddie's place and check it out. If you like it do leave a comment and while you're there I hope you check out Eddie's blog too. He's one of the true gents of the blogosphere.

The interview can be found here.

100 Words: Dog

Tony worked on our bank of desks. He was in his fifties, a good-natured innocent with wire wool eyebrows.

We had such fun with Tony.

“Fancy a cuppa from the vending machine?”

“That’d be marvellous!”

“I don’t know how strong you like it. Shall I leave the bag in, do you want to be teabagged?”

His eyes lit up.

“Oh, yes please!”

“The cups are flimsy. I’ll have to put one inside another - you okay with double rimming?”

You’ll be unsurprised to hear that he was.

A keen dog walker, in time he owned up to liking dogging too.

[Suggested by El Corte A La Inglesa.]

100 Words: The one who got away

Ten years on she barely looked different from the girl I gawped at in Biology. I’d surprised myself by calling her parents for her new number. I knew her parents’ number by heart.

I’m afraid I still do.

Because she was a trainee doctor I didn’t tell her I smoked. I didn’t want cigarettes, not that night.

Last orders concluded, we parted at the bus stop. I was too nervous to even attempt to kiss her.

“You have my number, so the onus is on you.”

I never called again; back then, getting what I wanted felt like cheating fate.

[Suggested by Judearoo.]

Loose change

As we settled into our seats in the pub at the end of an almost implausibly apocalyptic day at work, cider at the ready, Mikey had a can of worms ready to open for our delectation.

“What’s the lowest denomination of coin you’d pick up on the street?” he said.

Mikey’s friend Andy and I looked at each other for a second, suitably nonplussed. Andy is a large greying chap only slightly older than Mikey who looks a little like Harold Bishop from Neighbours and talks like he knows everything. Don’t get too attached to him, because I don’t think he’ll be featuring in this narrative very often.

“It would have to be a quid,” said Andy, “There is no way I would ever stoop for less than a quid. Unless it was a really shiny fifty pence piece, then I suppose I might consider it.”

“I’d do it for twenty pence.” I said, suddenly feeling a bit cheap and nasty. Uncharitably, to try and distance myself from genuine cheapness and nastiness I then saw fit to add, “I bet Kelly would do it for tuppence though. Her family properly know the value of money.”

“I’d do it for fifty pence.” said Mikey, “I can always find a use for fifty pence.”

That hung in the air for a long time. It somehow didn’t seem right to ask him what specific use he had in mind. It sounded sort of nefarious in a way I wanted to know nothing about.

“In the old days a penny used to be enough.” I said, “They used to say See a penny, pick it up. All day long you’ll have good luck. Nowadays it would be more like See a penny, there it is. Now you’re ever so slightly better off but the coin is probably covered in piss.“

That hung in the air for even longer. I’m sure I saw Andy gazing over my shoulder at the other tables to see if there was anyone he could even pretend to know well enough to make his excuses and leave. I decided to put this down to his perhaps justifiable disappointment that it didn’t really scan.

“Why do you ask?” I said to Mikey in the hope of rescuing matters.

“I saw an old lady stooping to pick up a one penny piece. I couldn’t quite believe my own eyes. I had been to Primark to pick up some gym kit.”

Gym kit. Sadly, it’s true: Mikey has decided to start pumping iron. Soon he will be taking the 5.45 bus because he’ll be spending his lunch breaks working out to the Vengaboys. It’s the end of an era, and all very sad. But it’s almost redeemed by the thought of poor Mikey having to listen to the Vengaboys for an hour ever day. You walk past our office gym on the way to the canteen. It sounds like one of those awful provincial nightclubs called something like Mirage or Masquerades where you can dimly make out, through the dry ice, a giant thicket of perms jiggling away on the dance floor with human bodies only vaguely attached to them.

“Maybe she needed the money.”

“It's worse than that.” said Mikey, “She practically had to stick her head down someone’s arse to get her hands on it.”

“The penny piece was sticking out of his crack?”

“Nah, some guy was in the queue in front of her, she spotted the coin on the floor just behind him and she was all over it like a bad suit. She must have been arthritic or something, it took her ages to get back up afterwards.”

Nothing about the story made sense, but rather unusually one thing about the story made even less sense than everything else.

“What the hell was an old woman doing in Primark?”

“What the hell was I doing in Primark, more to the point?”

He might be onto something there. But despite his sniffiness it didn’t stop him buying a whole bunch of sporting apparel and walking out of that chav pit of hell with bulging carrier bags.

“The t-shirts are quite nice, if I hadn’t known they were from Primark I might have worn them out in town. And only two quid as well! I got loads of stuff and it only cost me twenty-two pounds.” Mikey said, beaming with an exceptionally unlikely pride.

I wonder if he’s getting to that age where getting a bargain becomes considerably more important than what you’ve actually bought. People like that, in my experience, tend to make extremely bad decisions in the January sales and always end up looking as if they’ve been dressed by their aunts.

“It could have been twenty-one ninety nine if you’d been quicker off the mark and beaten that old hag to the punch.” said Andy.

Don’t worry. We probably won’t be seeing him again.

Waiting game

I’ve never been the type to wait for things. It involves a self-control I simply cannot master, try as I might.

My mother, last time I heard, used to buy a box of mint thins and she would eat a solitary one every night, somewhere in the spartan space between dinner and bedtime. If it had been me I would have accidentally consumed the lot while barely noticing. I had friends at school who still had Easter eggs come June and when I visited their houses I would look enviously at them, foil-wrapped, boxed and gloating at me from the bookshelves. I used to wonder if I could sneak them under my coat and liberate them, whether anybody would ever notice. Mine of course were long gone; scoffed before bedtime on Easter Sunday, regardless of how many I had been given.

One time in Prague, Dave and I sat by the Vltava River and over lunch he told me how much he had saved up over the years for a rainy day, or to put his son through university further down the line. I said “blimey” and “well done”, but all I could really think is what I could spend that money on given half a chance. Not that there would ever have been a chance - if it had been me it would have been spent long before that. I never saved up for anything, not as a kid and not now. Every month begins with funds and ends with none, my own very small scale tribute to Brewster’s Millions.

Other kids had pocket money and squirrelled it away every week until they could buy something impressive. I expect they have ISAs now and mortgages that will be paid off in a couple of years. They probably tell beige people that at the sort of dinner parties I will never be invited to, round at their almost completely unmortgaged beige house with the long drive, the double garage, a new beige leather sofa and something I’d absolutely loathe playing on a big shiny expensive stereo.

Anticipation was rarely a good thing when I was younger. The scariest thing my father ever said to me was invariably uttered as we sat down round the dining table. Over a Findus Crispy Pancake or an impenetrable slab of my mother’s risotto he would say “I want to have a word with you after dinner” and suddenly food would go from something you ate to something you nervously forced to circumnavigate the plate with a shaking fork. The terror of the impending telling off was something I would have traded for any number of smackings. On the rare occasions when he did smack me, bent trembling over his knee on the stairs, it might have hurt but at least it was a known quantity.

The smackings would have been more frequent had I not discovered two crucial pieces of information. First, that the bathroom was the only room in the house with a lock and secondly that I could run faster than my father. Those frightening sessions on the stairs were soon replaced by my father chasing me up them before loudly and unsuccessfully trying to batter the door down, a fact not entirely unconnected to the fact that he had probably caught me goose-stepping behind him and doing Hitler salutes in a rather unsophisticated protest against his rod of iron.

The later trips to the family psychologist were a surprise to no one.

So there you have it - I associate waiting with anxiety. I’m used to waiting for something bad to happen; the horrible meeting at work, the stress of exams, the joke falling flat or the wheels coming off.

And yet, and yet… it’s not quite so simple, because nothing ever is.

On Sunday I sliced a beautiful dark steak into slender slivers and added soy, ginger and garlic. The marinade seeped into the gorgeous marbled slices and I knew that the very act of leaving it until evening would ensure it was meltingly soft, rich and delicious. It sat in the fridge all day, getting closer and closer to perfect in a way I never will.

On Monday night I ate chicken that had been steeping in lemon juice, garlic and thyme all day - full of clean, fresh flavours which matched the lengthening days and the unexpected sunshine which is making everything seem just that little bit more hospitable.

And then there was the trip to the supermarket at the weekend. There, on display, was the magazine with my writing mentioned on the cover and my piece inside and it became properly real for the first time: some people might walk out of here with a copy in their trolley. I wanted to inspect them all, in case the ones I had seen were an elaborate practical joke. This is the loveliest wait of all, that words I wrote on a Sunday last June with no real thought given to what would happen to them are suddenly sitting in buildings and homes I will never see.

But maybe this isn’t really about waiting, perhaps it’s just about consequences. I just don't know what I will do today or tomorrow that will have repercussions in the days ahead, what I will be celebrating or regretting months from now. The things that will shape my life by the time the summer draws to a close may be things I said today or yesterday with no thought, or too much thought, or simply not enough. And I am painfully unaware that I don’t think about the right things enough; I am clumsy and stupid, I blunder through the trees and sometimes branches get snapped off along the way. Things get lost and broken and sometimes so do I.

I want everything to turn out for the best but I worry. I worry that it won’t, and nobody wants to wait for that.

100 Words: Community

“Stourbridge is a hole but I love it.” said Mel, “I always run into people I know in the pubs.”

In a nutshell, there’s what Reading's missing. That and an arthouse cinema.

Waking early on Saturday, rueful and hungover, I slouch alone to the farmer’s market.

“I’ve missed you.” says the chocolatier, handing me a glossy mint truffle to taste.

Glenn spots me. We sit outside Picnic, he fails to tame his son in the chilly sunshine while the world meanders past.

Maybe I'm wrong after all. Perhaps something bigger than me joins up all these people, all these buildings.

[Suggested by Mrs Trefusis.]

100 Words: Ironing

Before we moved in together she’d drive me back to my mother’s house on Sunday night. And when we couldn’t bear to be parted - which was often - she’d stay, making the long trip to Oxfordshire early Monday morning.

She’d lie on the air mattress reading, I’d iron a shirt on the landing. The weekend’s only chore indicated our time together was drawing to a close. But everything would be okay, for a few more precious hours.

I was permanently exhausted back then. We both were.

I still iron last thing on a Sunday, and we are still okay.

[Suggested by Helena Halme.]

Undivided attention

The funbus engine is already running as I step out of the doors of the factory, free as a bird for the next sixteen hours or so. Mikey is hurriedly finishing off a cigarette and we climb on board, sitting in our usual spots near the back. The front of the bus is like the front of a lecture theatre, nobody in their right mind would sit there.

“I’ve got a topic for today.” says Mikey, “How come some people only seem to be able to have one conversation with you, over and over again?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I know one person and I talk to him about once every two or three months. Whenever I do, he always says the same thing. ‘All right Mikey, you going to the Reading Festival this year?’ Every single time. Doesn’t matter if it’s summer, winter or Christmas. All my conversations with him are identical.”

I guess some people can’t cope with the idea that somebody might have more than one dimension. I have exactly the same problem, though I have a sneaking feeling I partly bring it on myself.

“Another guy always says ‘How’s the band Mikey?’ whenever I see him." he adds. "I’ve been in three different bands since we started having that conversation. He doesn’t even know their names or that I’m in a new one, it’s like it’s the only thing he has to say to me.”

“I got that after I eloped and got married.” I say. “When I got back people would say ‘So, how’s married life?’ And I’d tell them. Three months later I’d see them again and they’d say ‘So, how’s married life?’ They kept saying that even after I’d been married for three frigging years, it was getting beyond silly. After that long married life is just a fact of life, in fact it is your life.”

This is genuinely true, it really happened with more people than I care to remember. I always wanted to respond by saying something like, Married life is just hunky dory, thanks for asking. How’s being a biped working out for you? Are you enjoying breathing?

One of the many things I like about Mikey is his capacity to surprise. And he’s right; we all say much the same things to much the same people about much the same stuff pretty much every day. Pondering this shakes me out of my complacency, because deep down I know that I spend more than a couple of these funbus journeys partly listening to Mikey and partly fiddling with my phone, even though I am well aware that that’s unbelievably rude. In fairness, Mikey is normally doing that too.

“The one I can’t stand is one I do myself." I say. “I ask someone a question and I’m not even listening to the answer. I hate that about me, and I even know when I’m doing it. A couple of times I’ve asked you what your plans are for the evening, and you tell me, and then as get to the point where we go past the cemetery I ask you again. And you tell me again and then I have to make some feeble excuse or pretend I was asking you a subtly different question.”

“Yeh, you do do that. I blame these things.” says Mikey, gesturing at his phone. “I can’t watch a film uninterrupted any more. I find myself wondering about something and then I have to look it up on Wikipedia or something.”

He’s right of course. Undivided attention is the rarest quality in the world nowadays. I rarely give it, I almost never get it and I’m as to blame as anybody. Sometimes Kelly will tell me something and I hear it, the sounds go in my ears, but if you asked me five minutes later what she’d said I wouldn’t be able to tell you even if it was one of the latter questions on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. It’s rude and not good enough, and I can’t stand it when people do it to me.

Why am I telling you this anyway? For all I know you stopped reading a paragraph ago, or are wondering what to buy at the supermarket this weekend or worrying about where you left the house keys. And it’s hardly as if I would ever know; it’s not like I’m setting a quiz or anything.

But this funbus journey is different because Mikey and I are really talking, the way that friends do, and our phones stay in our pockets. The bus chugs through the traffic at a speed that would be acceptable if we were heading to work but is positively criminal given that we’re on our way home. We pass the multiplex cinema on the edge of the suburbs – I used to live nearby when it opened and I remember it being the most exciting event to hit town for eons. Now it looks tacky, plastic and ersatz and I live a stone’s throw from the cinema in the heart of town. The years have a habit of shifting your perspective, of changing all manner of things. Thank goodness for that.

On the horizon the sun has nearly finished the process of setting and the sky is streaked with gold. It is oddly beautiful to see something so gorgeous at the end of a motorway so repulsive. But what I’m really thinking is that even though the light is coming to an end, there is some light left at hometime and that is a new, good thing. Mikey and I know the implications of that; finally winter might be on its way out. Spring is coming not a moment too soon to rescue us all and that means sitting outside after work with a pint, braving the pavement cafes again at the weekend. The pot at the end of the rainbow is golden after all, but only because it’s full of cider. This is how it works - first the literal gloom will be banished, and then maybe the figurative gloom will follow suit. It’s about time.

At the other end we scuttle into the Oakford for several celebratory beverages, because it seems like the right thing to do. Later on I get home to find Kelly tapping away on her computer and listening to some music she bought recently. She has a talent for enjoying time alone which I deeply envy. I like the song playing in the background a lot, so I get her to tell me the name of the artist.

Ten minutes pass companionably and neither of us speaks. Then, all of a sudden, a thought strikes me out of nowhere. I turn to Kelly again.

“This record’s excellent. Who’s it by?”

I get a withering stare in return, and I can’t honestly say that I don’t deserve it.

Party tricks

[Another appearance from the Blue Italics of Housekeeping. I thought long and hard about whether to blog about this, whether to do a separate post on the subject or whether to just not mention it.

In the end, I decided just to say one thing and leave it at that: I have been published for the first time. I have a piece in the April UK edition of Esquire which is out at newsstands now. I am incredibly pleased and proud but I won’t mention it again. Promise.]

What would people see when they look at you in a gathering like this?

Ostensibly you fit in perfectly. You get on with everyone. You seem to be at the heart of things, and to the untrained eye you are.

To get a better idea, somebody would have to know you well. If they did, the first thing they would notice is the stories. You tell a lot of stories, you have one for most occasions. A hilarious drunken misdeeds story, a bad date story, an I’ve-got-this-friend-story. You rattle them off effortlessly at the slightest provocation, and if they shock some people all the better. That moment when you go ever so slightly too far is part of what you live for. Your stories are mainly good, and they’re mostly sort of funny, and they flow smoothly. They almost appear to be well rehearsed.

There’s a reason for that: they are well rehearsed. Somebody who knows you well will know that, because they’ll have heard them before, possibly more than once. They’ll probably also know that you are showing off, that a bit of you desperately wants to be centre stage doing this. If they know you really well, they’ll spot that maybe some part of you wants to be somewhere else too, but that you honestly do not know where that is. And since you don’t, you go through the motions instead, tapdancing away on familiar ground. You’ve worn a hole in it by now.

The last thing you would ever want is to be a bore, that is what you worry about most of all. But it might be happening already, because there are times lately when you bore yourself. Even as you are telling your joke, or dusting off your catchphrases you feel tired of being you. You wonder whether anybody has twigged this, if they will follow suit. Particularly astute observers might well have worked out that you worry an awful lot that the stories are all you really have, that one day everyone you know will have heard them all and that, stripped of your threadbare repertoire, you will watch everybody slowly walk away.

Speaking of walking away, you wonder if anybody would notice if you left the room. You put it to the test, by taking longer to go to the kitchen and refill your drink, or by drifting away from proceedings and sitting on the periphery of everything, opting out. In the morning you might be absent, or you might stay a little longer in bed than everyone else. You’re experimenting in seeing whether you will be missed but it’s not a good plan. Like reading somebody else’s diary, it can only end badly for you.

You’re lucky this group doesn’t know you well, that they won’t notice all of this. You’ll be better than this next time, you will pull yourself together and play nicely, stop beating yourself up. You need to, because you don’t altogether like what you see when you look at yourself in a gathering like this.

Happy pills

It isn’t right or normal to be unable to get dressed in the morning because you are crying too hard.

I should have known something was wrong well before I got to that stage. Back at home after my degree and a year working in Oxford, I was useless and scared of the future. The life I couldn’t cope with was partly a consequence of the choices I had made but mainly a consequence of all the choices I had avoided making. Of course, back then I didn’t have the faintest understanding of what I now know only too well, that failing to choose is a choice in its own right.

My doctor mentioned the D word and gave me a factsheet, a list of symptoms. She said I didn’t have to make any choices there and then, and asked me to go back in a couple of weeks and talk about it some more. The factsheet was more accurate than any horoscope could ever be, but that didn’t help matters. I put it in the bin but my mornings didn’t get any better. My world was folding in on itself and each day it got smaller and smaller, darker and darker.

It’s the hardest feeling to describe to somebody who has never been there. Of course, if you have been there you know all this already and I cannot hope to do it justice. It’s as if absolutely nothing is possible and that all you are doing is picking between dead ends, every option brimming with the grey absence of any potential except the potential to disappoint. That is only how it starts, that’s the nursery slopes; after a while you don’t even feel disappointment. You expect things to be bad and so they are. Then you no longer have a concept of bad, bad is a relative term you don’t understand any more and you are sitting on your bed crying like a child while your family are in the car waiting for you to accept a lift to your dead end temp job.

I fished the fact sheet out of my waste paper basket and I looked at it for a long, long time. Then I tore it to pieces.

On my second visit, my doctor and I had a very long conversation and still I couldn’t go through with the prospect of medication. I couldn’t face having that badge applied to me. There are some things you know but provided you never say them they aren’t truly real. Nearly everything that makes me me is going to waste. I don’t love her any more. He is an alcoholic. As long as they never hang spoken in the air in a room or sit there like bullet holes in a page we can just about make it through.

But I couldn’t make it through.

On my third visit I left holding a prescription. It was simultaneously my lowest point, the moment where I became a state diagnosed failure, and the only comfort I had known in months.

I still have my first box of Prozac, folded flat in the pages of a diary full of numb scratchy paragraphs. On the back in simple, plain text were a number of comforting statements like affirmations. You will feel better, it said, it won’t always be like this. There was not a single person in my life saying those things to me back then. I had to take my moral support in the only place I could find it, on the back of a packet of medication. By contrast, the messages on the back of a packet of cigarettes were repeatedly drummed into me by my mother.

I didn’t know what the pills would do to me, and I was scared. I wasn’t sure if I could drink any more, or if it would be like having the subtlest of lobotomies. Being depressed was my overriding, defining characteristic. I didn’t know who I would be if it was magically taken away. I didn’t know if I was treating a disease or surgically removing the single biggest part of my personality. I was scared they wouldn’t work, I was scared they would work. I wanted to be like everybody else, I was terrified of being like everybody else.

On my last night before breaking the foil on that first packet my brother, Ivor and I went for a long walk to the pub at the edge of town, my last night of drinking before the pills kicked in. Heavily drunk we weaved back up the road after midnight and they regaled me with a rousing rendition of “You’re Shit And You Know You Are”. Saddest of all, I genuinely believe they were trying to help.

As it turned out, the side effects were an odd and unexpected bunch. One of them was called anorgasmia. What this means is that if I had ever managed to get any action I could finally have achieved my lifelong ambition of shagging like a porn star. But of course that never happened, which is partly because of the second side effect - that after about three pints my personality completely altered. It was like The Mask and I became the sort of drunk I could never have been the rest of the time. I danced like a maniac. I chatted up strangers. I was a better, odder, more fun version of myself, a cover version which vastly improved on the original.

One night I was staying with my friend Becky in Nottingham and we went clubbing with her boyfriend and some other people. Heavily inebriated I decided to tell Becky that her boyfriend was a complete waste of time and that if she was honest she had always fancied me. The latter factoid could only have been the conclusion of someone with a pharmaceutically altered take on reality.

I encouraged Becky that she ought to get off with me and that her boyfriend need never know. Given that he was standing right next to her throughout the whole of my soliloquy it’s hard to see how I could have thought this sales pitch would be successful without the benefit of that drug induced worldview. Under the circumstances, her unsurprising rejection of me was a bit of a shame considering I could have gone for hours - another point which I apparently made to her at great length.

I didn’t care. I wandered off and snogged someone else, a complete random, before having a flaming row with her about god knows what. Later that night I passed out on the floor of the taxi while Becky looked on aghast and, presumably, Becky’s boyfriend successfully fought the urge to repeatedly kick me in the head. Even if he’d given in to temptation I would have been far too wasted to know. The next morning I awoke with no recollection of events and no real understanding of why the atmosphere in the house was so frosty.

That aside, what happened while I was on Prozac was complex and strange. Absolutely nothing changed, except very gradually it did. In the tiniest increments, something turned the dimmer switch up on my life, one day after another. Every day was only infinitesimally different from the day before and in that long string of days something slowly happened which could pass for an improvement. One day I forgot to take a tablet. Then another. And then I sort of forgot to take a tablet every other day. Finally, one day I stopped completely.

How all this came up was that I was away this weekend in a cottage with lots of fantastic friends. And at one point, one of them told us he had been depressed, that he was on Prozac. He’s a proud man, a proper man, not like me. He’s been in the military since he was young, seen and done things I wouldn’t have the resolve or moral fibre to even watch a film about. Since he left the air force, his life has lost its structure and he has had all sorts of trouble with his family. From what I know of him, owning up to something like this took an awful lot of guts, guts a so-called new man like me would never really have or need. I was proud of him, for all that's worth.

Our friend Mel, a psychologist, said something very clever at that point, namely that Prozac was like a plaster cast on a broken limb. It’s not the thing that makes you better, it’s the thing that holds everything together and enables you to heal in time. I like the simplicity of that analogy, and I think it’s what he needed to hear. But I don’t know. Some things never completely heal, and I think that might be because they were never completely right in the first place.

So am I better now? Of course. Am I all better? That’s a different question.

I am a lot happier now, but once you’ve been in that place you always know you can find the way back. It’s a language you never forget, a way of thinking that is impossible to completely unlearn. Some days it’s far off on the horizon, some days it feels uncomfortably closer than that. The world you see when you’re depressed is like the image hidden in the magic eye pictures that were so popular back when I was crying in my room all those years ago. It’s always there, it’s just about whether you can see it. Most of the time you can’t, but if things mount up, if you drop your guard, if you’re tired and you unfocus even for a minute it’s there slap bang in the foreground, the only thing you can see, greeting you like a very old, very false friend.

I sometimes think it would be nice to be like my wife, happy from the moment she wakes up to the moment she falls asleep, operating in the middle of the spectrum without ever getting the highs and the lows. And then I think that maybe I couldn’t cope with that and would lose myself and my identity completely. The most vexing thing of all is this: I couldn’t even say with any confidence that I would change anything about me or the whole sorry saga, because I never resolved that battle of wills before I put that first capsule on my tongue and knocked it back. I still don’t know whether I did end up just like everyone else, or for that matter whether everybody else is exactly like me.

I suppose I probably never will.