I went to a cosy picture house the other day and saw a long film.
Before the film began, they played a series of long commercials.
There was one, in particular, which I won't be forgetting easily because it was so long and everyone shown was so gorgeous and happy and life was just so perfect for them, that it made my blood boil. It was apparently trying to make me desire a particular alcoholic beverage, the name of which I have chosen to forget.
The next clip they played, however, was the following and it has rather a different flavour to it, let's say.
Sorry Jim, but we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this. Moving through space is all well and good but realistically the only outcome is winding up sitting on a different lump of rock. And if you’re lucky the locals, who may or may not have blue skin, won’t try to disembowel you for planting a flag on some of their prime real estate. Sounds to me like your just holding down a job and paying a mortgage somewhere slightly different. That said, “Sorry mum, I’m 20,000 light years away.” is a half descent excuse to avoid family gatherings. But it does leave you with the hassle of explaining to her that turning the warp drive off and on again won’t get you home any faster. I’m thinking time travel, that’s the big one.
In my infinite boredom I find myself wondering when I would go. Which is a much more interesting question than where I would go. The sad fact of life is that the practicalities ruin the innate magic. Traveling around the world should be an ideal thing to fantasise about while I sit at my desk doing very little work (but still probably on facebook). But the whole idea is tarnished by the realities. It’s a feasible idea, it’s workable in the world we live in. So when i think about traveling around the world my first thought is not of the magnificent rivers and breath-taking mountains but expense! Wham! The flashbacks set in from previous Ryan Air flights. You start a check list in your head; make an appointment with the doctor, buy travel insurance, find someone to look after the dog etc etc What started off as a fantasy has turned into a rather dull string of organisational tasks. Believe me, that’s not how I like my daydreams to end!
Wouldn’t mind swinging by the 16th century for a while. (Talk about needing you travel vaccinations!) A quick round of golf with a chap named Henry wouldn’t go a miss. I foresee (Actually, would you call it foresight?) a beautiful opportunity for an ‘Enjoying 18 holes / having 6 wives’ joke emerging. I suppose making it a quick round could be a tactical error, only playing 9 holes might scupper things slightly.
Having a gander at the future would be a laugh too. Not my own future, I have no interest in knowing how my life pans out. I like to encounter each individual piece of misery as it occurs. And don’t give me any of that changing your life for the better crap. I’ve seen enough sci-fi to know that it doesn’t work. I’ll end up making things worse, condemn myself to the lime green prison of an ASDA uniform and possibly even cause the universe to collapse in on itself. Only bad can come of it. I mean the real future. Robots, flashing lights, a Costa on the moon - the whole shabang! It’ll be reassuring to see that people are still screwing things up 400 years from now. America will probably be invading the middle east for its dilithium crystals under the guise of peace-keeping.
We’re wandering dangerously close to the realms in which people think themselves cool for knowing what “TARDIS’ stands for, so I’ll draw to a timely close. In the time it has taken to write this blog, the adventurer within me has been quashed and the rather dull, financially motivated side has arisen. I’m thinking I might pop back to the 90s and invest in a little company called google...
I saw some nuns on the train the other day. One of them was knitting some beigy wooly thing, and another was reading History Today. Most of them were seventy plus. I guess there’s not much of a market for nunning anymore, now that we have much more exciting religions, like Scientology. Er, hang out on a yacht with Tom Cruise, or wear itchy underwear? Hm. Tough one.
There was one nun who could perhaps be described as “young”, although she fell into that category of people who are just really hard to age. I’d say she was probably somewhere between 18-30, although it’s difficult to tell in those habits. Gok would not be impressed; “Get those tits out girls, show ‘em what you’ve got!”.
Anyway, she looked slightly awkward. You know when you end up in a room full of old people, and you’re all like “Shit, mustn’t talk about sex, alcohol, or drugs”, which is pretty hard when those are the sole components of your life… (who am I trying to kid? I’m writing a blog, obviously I have no life). Anyway, you’re all like “Oh yes, I LOVE crochet knitting! Please would you pass the Rich Tea biscuits?” Which is ridiculous, considering they’ve probably had more sex than you’ve ever had.
Well, not if they’re nuns I guess, but you catch my drift.
Hanging out with old people is just painful. And sometimes, when you’re trying so hard, you can’t help but slip up. It’s like the Fates are conspiring against you. Or God is sitting on a big white fluffy cloud in the sky and saying “Hey Jesus, come have a look at me fuck this bitch over! It’ll be well jokes!”
You drop the biscuit.
“Oh, fuck it!”
And all their little beady eyes turn to stare at you, like you might as well have shagged Pete Doherty on the Persian rug in front of them, at 4.30pm (which is when Countdown was always on - don’t pretend that you didn’t already know).
Obviously the young nun didn’t drop a biscuit and shout “Fuck!” really loudly. Because that would’ve been hilarious, and a brilliant punch-line, and actually made this blog somewhat interesting. She just stood there looking awkward, and was probably at that very moment wishing she hadn’t signed up to be a nun, or however you do it, and was metaphorically shagging Pete Doherty instead.
Nuns have a sort of collective aura. People give them a wide berth, although given public paranoia on transport, this may simply have been concern that it was a consignment of Al Qaeda terrorists in disguise. Because yes, every terrorist secretly desires to blow up Pontefract Boghill station… (I’d better write “jk” after this, just in case some government organization reads this, and gets the wrong idea). JK. No wait, I mean, er…
That’s one thing that I don’t get, people (namely my grandparents) are so furiously against the hijab, because, well, they’re racist (they can’t help it, they read the Daily Mail). And there are all these intellectual arguments that the hijab is degrading to women rather than empowering, yet no one really thinks this of nuns.
But yeah, you might as well be a llama in a station, for the amount of attention nuns receive. Some people just openly stand there and stare. At least I had the decency to buy myself a latte and pretend to be reading the paper… albeit with two eyeholes cut out. But hey, the Russians got away with that trick for 9 years! Cunning Russians…
And one or two people will wander over and talk to them. Generally old men with beards, who probably think the tales about nuns being pent-up sex beasts who’ll willingly service the needs of any man, even those with dodgy beards, are actually still true. Not that I’m pogonophobic or anything…
Ok, way too many of these paragraphs are ending with ellipses now. Not cool. Possibly a reflection of my wandering and erratic mind although.
It’s like being a nun offers instant celebrity status, simply for having bad dress sense, no sex, and believing in God. Ok, that’s quite a lot of sacrifices one would have to make simply to get noticed, so I’m fairly sure they don’t take their vows for the attention. It must be pretty weird actually. I mean, “Baby Nun” looked like the kind of girl who had always been on the edge of the stage all her life, hanging around where they keep the scenery and props. And suddenly, everyone is watching her wherever she goes. Not in a mean way, more in a mildly interested “Ooh, look! It’s a nun! Don’t see many of them these days!” kind of way. It’s a bit like they’re a species of rare bird; Bill Oddie will be hanging around next with his binoculars. What can I say, he does have a dodgy beard after all. (This would be the perfect place for an ellipses, but no, I refuse to fall into the punctuation trap…)
An ex-boyfriend of mine once told me he wanted to become a monk. I mean, having your BF/GF tell you that they are gay is pretty bad. Not because they’re gay, for all you moral crusaders out there who were about to lynch me, but because you’d feel like you were so repulsive in bed they couldn’t bear to sleep with another woman again. But having them tell you that they want to give up sex altogether is off the scale; “She was so hideous, I was like, I cannot sleep with another human being EVER AGAIN!”
He didn’t become a monk by the way. I think actually, in retrospect, he probably just wanted me to beg him not to. I just punched him and told him not to even fucking dare.
In conclusion, maybe I lied; nuns aren’t really that cool. I’m certainly not planning on becoming one any day soon. But I have a certain amount of respect for them; someone who believes in something so strongly that they are willing to give up so much in life maybe fairly stupid, but they are also very brave. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to make such a giant leap of faith, and in many ways I wish that I could. It must be such a wonderful feeling to believe in something so completely, and to be so free of doubt.
That’s right folks, a guy sat typing at his laptop is going to moan about technology. He’s going to tell you it’s evil and ruining our lives, yet doesn’t want to be too far away from his emails all the while. He might miss a 75% off DVD sale at Amazon, not to mention that new PS3 controller he’s watching on eBay!
There is good technology. Good technology is the type that does it’s job but you don’t consciously acknowledge. You walk into a room and turn the light on without really thinking. I don’t really notice the central heating that much either, slight whirr from the boiler but nothing major. I’m also rather fond of running water. That said if they were ever to stop without warning then you’d be looking up numbers in the yellow pages so you can find someone to shout at down the phone. Of course these days, you’d be scouring Yell.com and firing off angry emails. These three are akin to Yakult’s good bacteria and so, by extension, the rest could well kill you! Or more commonly just give you a dodgy stomach.
I think it’s time that we face the fact that the internet is one big conspiracy to distract us from what’s really important in life. I don’t know what this mysterious important thing is, I’ve had a facebook account for over 3 years, I’m too far gone. But I know that it’s out there.
The internet’s always there, tempting us. You sit down to rewrite your CV at 6:30, but first you should just quickly check your emails. Nothing too interesting there, a couple of adverts, Travel lodge are offering you a room for £9 and NPower want a meter reading. Dull. You know how a CV is structured but still you decide that it’s worth looking up. It’s the modern form of an ancient art; that of feeling like you’re working whilst not actually working. Colour coding your folders and arranging them alphabetically, that kind of thing. Of course, your homepage is BBC news and it turns out that if the most interesting things to happen that day are displayed strikingly on a single page, it can be a little diverting. *An Indeterminate Amount of Time Passes* Now that you’re up to speed on the Pope’s travel plans, you look at the clock - 8:45. This leads you to the conclusion that the internet can warp time, and so you minimize Firefox as a precaution to avoid missing Top Gear. Which leaves you back staring at your word document. It states back as unspoiled as when you opened it. Reluctantly, you admit to yourself that enough’s enough, it’s time to crack on. You’re just about to start typing when suddenly you have a great idea for a Tweet (Or worse a blog) and that’s it. You’re stuck helpless on the intricately woven tinterweb.
Even the simple ones manage to aggravate us. Last week, I inadvertently stood on some blu tac and didn’t notice until the insidious little miscreant had become firmly entangled in one of my favourite socks. Many people would at this juncture be grateful that they don’t fix their wall decorations with drawing pins but I’d rather a hole in my foot than a tac in my sock. Who needs skin? At least that problem would have healed itself.
It’s okay for me, I’m a young man, probably in my prime (although that’s depressing for a whole host of other reasons) - I can handle it. But! There’s an entire generation sat at home right now wondering why they can only get one channel on the microwave and what time it’ll be showing Songs of Praise. Those are the real victims of our 21st century lifestyle. My gran can’t handle self service machines in Tesco! As far as she’s concerned touch screen computers are black magic. Realistically, at her age, being confronted by witchcraft after pushing that trolley for an hour is enough to make her cardiologist more than a little nervous. The poor woman is likely convinced that the voice reminding her to take her items is in her head.
Sometimes it makes me wonder, whose side are they one anyway? But then I think of those two beautiful words and I forgive the lot. Two words that literally send a chill down my spine. Air conditioning.
Ever had one of those days? You get dressed, go outside and it’s raining but you swear that a split second before you crossed the threshold it wasn’t. Seems unlikely that the universe is conspiring to make you slightly damp but you reserve the right to be suspicious. No choice but to go about your business, but you still check over your shoulder periodically for signs of further minor inconvenience. Never quite sure what it is you’re looking for, but you’ll recognise it when it comes along.
A couple of hours later the rain dries up and the sun starts to shine albeit from behind cloud. Maybe you’ve got away with it! Your good old fashioned stiff upper lip in the face of drizzle and stubborn refusal to seek shelter has shown the world that it can’t win. You might smell vaguely like wet dog but you’re 1-0 up. The whole damn macrocosm should just cut its losses, cash its chips and go home.
Turns out the universe is willing to go for broke. They’ve always run out of your favourite sandwich but none of the others. To make things worse, for reasons that you can only assume are beyond the comprehension of man, they have about 20 more tuna mayonnaise than any other. Do Boots not make more than 1 chicken and bacon?! How do we not have a law against this atrocity? Well, a chicken and stuffing isn’t too bad but it’s not the one you were already mentally eating when you walked through the door. So you start queuing with your second-rate sandwich in hand when you see the clumsily written sign “No cards today. Sorry for any inconvenience”. Your mentally envisaged self drops his sandwich, runs for the automatic doors and starts scouting the local area for a cash machine. But there isn’t one. There never is. By my count, it’s half time and its got you 3 times. Slightly more miserable than before you slump back to an afternoon of hard graft. We’ll call that 4.
It’s the end of a hard day and there’s only one reasonable solution to a man equipped with any sense; a cup of tea. Into the house and straight to the kitchen, you reach for the switch and FLASH. And then dark. The bulb’s gone and so taken a fuse with it. No time for that now, you stay on course for the kettle, praying it’s on a different power circuit. Dead. You decide to settle for a glass of milk. Lumpy. The cosmos got you 3 times in 30 seconds. Unlucky 7, and that’s it. Game over. Bed. You’ll need your rest if you’re going to beat it tomorrow.
It once occurred to me that I might be paranoid but I’ve come to realise that’s just what the psychologists say when they’re out to get you. They say that there’s always someone worse off than yourself. By my reckoning, that leaves one poor sucker at the bottom of the list deserving a bloody good sympathy card.
(Notice the blend of the Cadbury's Flake song and the gorilla drumming tune (kind of) in the background.)
But since then, Cadbury's have come a long way. The standard in their advertising has improved vastly. They've managed to create adverts which really stick in the public's mind.
This is the latest version of the advert above:
I really thought it was a perfume advert at first and was impressed they'd gone to that much effort for a chocolate advert... mmm
I have depression, and although I’ve never seriously attempted suicide, there have been points in my life when I have genuinely been afraid of myself.
Before I started taking medication, I used to go to sleep with images flashing before my eyes of me shooting myself, throwing myself out of a window, slitting my wrists, downing pills, jumping off cliffs, and putting a noose around my neck and kicking the chair away.
And although my rational side reassured me that I would never attempt these things, I worried when I walked down a street that I would just lose control, and step in front of a bus. I threw out all my paracetamol. Sometimes, I would stand in the kitchen, shaking and crying with fear, too afraid to pick up the knife to make myself a sandwich.
It all sounds ridiculously over-dramatic, I know, but depression is often a far more complex array of emotions than just feeling “sad”. Often it feels like you are drowning, and you're reaching out for someone to grasp onto, but there is no one there. It can leave you feeling isolated and alone, even if you're in a room full of people. And for me, the pain would often manifest itself physically; it would be like someone twisting a knife into my stomach. And all you can do is curl up into a ball, and scream, and cry until you eventually fall asleep.
The fear that the depression installed in me used to make me have panic attacks. I would hyperventilate to the point where I would start to black out.
And all this was very exhausting, both emotionally and physically. I became withdrawn, I lost all sense of self-worth and confidence. I became frustrated at myself, because I wasn’t able to function properly. I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. My work began to suffer. I stopped being sociable. The smallest of things would upset me.
My sole focus in life was to survive, and keep my “insanity” hidden. Sometimes I would just shout at myself, which sounds cliched I know, but I was in a state of genuine confusion and denial. I didn't really know what was happening to me. I thought I was going mad, which was terrifying. I didn't want to admit I needed help, because that would make it real. And I didn’t know who to trust. I was scared that if people found out, I would have to leave university, and drop my history degree, which despite everything I still loved.
And even when eventually, after two years, I went to the doctor and was put on a course of psychotherapy and prescribed antidepressants, things didn’t immediately get better. In fact, they got worse. The antidepressant my doctor prescribed caused me to have what I called “episodes”, where I would become paralyzed, and then start jolting uncontrollably. The loss of physical control was terrifying. Then, one night at about 2am, I climbed out of a top floor window in my uni halls and was inches from jumping off.
After that, I went back to see the doctor, and he prescribed me a new type of antidepressant, and thus far I haven’t experienced any major side-effects.
And, with the help of my counselor, close friends, and family, I have gradually got better. I still have problems, I still have ups and downs. Sometimes I’m scared that the depression will return, and there is not a day that passes that I do not think about it. I will be on antidepressants for the foreseeable future - they give me a feeling of control over myself. Although they do make me feel quite emotionally numb – I feel incapable of expressing extreme happiness or sadness. They just keep me in a steady state of ok-ish-ness.
Sometimes, being depressed feels like there is a stranger in your body, who is possessing you. I’m not schizophrenic, but sometimes my irrational side takes over. And it tries to make me do things that I don’t really want to do.
Obviously, there are causes for all this, but I won’t go into that.
In recent years though, it feels like depression has become somewhat of a fashion accessory for those tragically cool artsy types. Sure, depression brings out emotions in us that are otherwise unimaginable, and this is possibly why many great artistic visionaries have suffered it. Although I’ve tried to explain what it feels like here, I don’t expect you to properly understand. And that’s ok.
But people who purposefully act depressed, so that they can seem all the more like these troubled geniuses, are devaluing it. They cause depression not to be taken as a serious medical illness with serious, possibly even fatal, implications. And rather than being treated as such, society disregards those who genuinely have depression as just pathetic, whining, attention-seeking losers.
The difference is that people who have depression have no control over their emotions, they can’t just “snap out of it”. I’ve been told to do this in the past, by a number of people, and it takes a great amount of patience to explain to them why that simply isn’t possible. So if you’re feeling a little sad about life one day, don’t just say “Ohhh, I’m just SO depressed”, just like it wouldn’t be acceptable for me to go around pretending I had cancer or something. (Of course, if you feel awful every day, go see a doctor.)
My intention here was not to whine about my life problems. In fact, I rather like the anonymity that this blog gives me, because it means I can express how I feel, without incurring any extra unwanted attention. Rather, I wanted to try and raise awareness of an illness that will affect one in four of us in our lives, and educate those who perhaps don't realise how serious it is.
