Stop Press. (Seriously, just stop)

The Premier League footballer, Steven Gerrard, has been involved in a car accident in which a young boy was injured. The ten year old schoolboy, named as Jamie Halliwell, suffered a suspected broken leg when he was knocked to the ground by the Liverpool captain's Bentley near a Merseyside primary school. The footballer's agent said he was driving slowly when the boy ran out into the road. (Sky News rolling headline, October 2nd 2007)

Hmm.

Footballer Steven Gerrard has been involved in a collision after he accidentally knocked down ten year old schoolboy Jamie Halliwell whilst driving his Bentley, slowly. Halliwell suffered a suspected broken leg near a primary school.

A ten year old schoolboy, Jamie Halliwell, suffered a suspected broken leg when he was hit by a footballer driving slowly in Merseyside today.

Jamie Halliwell may have broken his leg following a collision with a slow-moving car near a school. He is ten.

Someone you don't know possibly broke their leg in Liverpool today. 

Unknown boy suffers tiny setback.

That's not news. It doesn't matter which way you look at it - that's not news. It will be of interest to the boy's family (one hopes) and to the shaken driver of the car, but that's not news.

Learn some manners, you uppity burger....

I'm starting to seriously dislike this cow.

There is just nothing I can say or do that seems to make any difference. I've thrown food up to it, waved, smiled, said good morning, whistled and made mooing noises. Not a flicker. Mooing paid spectacular dividends one time in France, you know, when I passed a very enjoyable few minutes in conversation with a receptive - and polite - cow. We just mooed at each other, over and over again. Total result. But this cow (in the picture) is having none of it, for some reason. It's starting to get me down, actually. What the hell is wrong with the thing? It barely even registers an interest in El Doggo - most unusual for a cow. Most unusual.

It just looks at us with a beady suspicion, if it looks at us at all.

Fidel sticks (and Tutu, too)

Castro lives! I can't quite believe it, but the man is still alive. I just saw him on the news, talking and blinking and moving (slightly). Wow. When did that happen? I am absolutely positive that he was dead. 

The last time I saw him on the telly he was taking a very painful (and super inelegant) fall into some folding chairs at a heap big swanky ceremony for dignitaries. I remember kind of thinking "well that's that, then". I'm sure he was dead shortly after this. Jesus. One can only hope he doesn't begin to overstay his welcome and chip away at the feelgood factor generated by his revolution and Cuba's subsequent economic ascent towards an average wage of $15-a-month. 

On the very same news bulletin, not two minutes later, Desmond Tutu popped up to say that the Burmese monks were assured of ultimate victory in their horribly brave (and quite possibly doomed) protest. Wtf? There is no way that Desmond Tutu is still alive. (Incidentally, why are Buddhist monks protesting over rising fuel prices? Do monks drive and stuff? Are they not, you know, monks? I'm not so sure, come to think of it, that I've ever seen a monk as a passenger in a car, let alone driving one, so how come this fuel thing has made them a bit ratty? It's almost like there are some other issues at play. Spooky. Anyway, never mind, I'm still rooting for them big style - go monks, go - but couldn't resist placing a wager on the Junta killing them all. Terrific odds on offer at Ladbrokes, terrific. It kind of softens the blow of your team taking a pasting to have a pocket full of cash from the bookies. Every cloud, every cloud....)

So Desmond and Fidel both seemed full of beans. Fidel maybe looked a wee bit pasty and very close to death, but this is a significant improvement, nevertheless, from where I had him placed in my mind's eye. It's all relative, really.

The thing that properly threw me into a tailspin, however, was the appearance (straight after Tutu) of a living and breathing Benazir Bhutto. Now I know that she's dead. She got killed in an ambush, I think. There was a car, some skidding, dust, fireballs, guys hanging out the window with guns, she went down. Or she was bombed up all dead on a train, maybe? She definitely died, because that's what I'm telling myself and because that's what I've got fixed in my mind.

I don't like the uncertainty, it makes me feel anxious. I don't like not being able to trust my mind, it makes me feel mad. I told someone about all of this, but I think they thought I was trying to be funny or, much worse, kooky and off-beat. I wasn't. I'm not. I don't like being so hideously out of synch. It shocked me to discover that they were alive.

And I mean Jesus - who else isn't dead?

Tick Tick Tick and Talk

According to The Internet, my whispering friend in the lonely wilderness, post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms may include:

Flashbacks (check)

Reliving traumatic events for minutes or even days at a time (check)

Shame or guilt (oh, check)

Upsetting dreams about the traumatic event (check)

Trying to avoid thinking or talking about the event (checky doo-dah)

Feeling emotionally numb (sometimes)

Self-destructive behavior, such as drinking too much (ha ha, I gave up drinking ages ago. I win. The fightback starts right here, right now.)

Hopelessness about the future (oh)

Trouble sleeping (well, yes.....check)

Memory problems (excruciating memory problems, yes.....check. I can still do that thing where you memorise an entire box of Trivial Pursuits questions in a few hours, flawlessly, but useful stuff remains elusive. Getting better, though. No, it's not. Just trying to be positive.)

Trouble concentrating (sometimes)

Being easily startled or frightened (occasionally, but less so nowadays)

Not enjoying activities you once enjoyed (check)

Hearing or seeing things that aren't there (they are there)

"Post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms can come and go. You may have more symptoms during times of higher stress or when you experience symbolic reminders of what you went through." 

That sounds about right, yes. Check. 

I tell you what, The Internet sometimes really knows his stuff. What a good boy, what a lovely friend.

Eight Random Facts

I've been "tagged" by Reading The Signs and Mellifluous Dark. (thank you, both, that was nice of you.)

Here are the "Rules":

(Note from Signs: Please adapt or ignore as you see fit).

1. Let others know who tagged you.

2. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.

3. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.

4. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them.

Right.

1) My (maternal) grandfather worked in counter espionage during WW2. He was a very good man.

2) My (paternal) grandmother was an actress and staggeringly efficient at being a hypochondriac. She would often talk in tongues, sometimes to the family dog. (why not?)

3) My mum (before she retired) was a clinical psychologist.

4) My dad (before he went to jail) was a criminal.

5) I honestly believe that my dog is more attractive than most people's children..........

and she certainly has better table manners. That isn’t a joke, she really does. She will sit on the chair, even after she has finished her food, and happily wait for me to finish mine. No, this is not something to be encouraged, obviously, and I only let her do it occasionally.

6) My younger sister has written for The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Daily Mail (for shame) and all the usual suspects. Now she does something with slebs, though. She is an astonishingly gifted little creep, and I feel like telling people that fact. Even strangers.

7) When I was fourteen, I got picked up on a bus by a woman who was thirty-eight. She took me to her flat and totally devoured me, wild, like her life depended on it, completely and loopily crazed. She really just sort of used me dementedly for a three week spell of weirdness - angry, I think, in her own destabilising lusts. I know what she did was wrong, but I don’t care, because I liked it and thought she was lovely as well as being a total ride. I was still exchanging Christmas cards with her right up until a couple of years ago.

8) I used to have a guinea pig called Grassy.

These are the eight people I'm going to tag. Two of them don't have blogs, but we'll see how it goes:

Nicola - blogger profile/00112821049194722614

Political Umpire (still the very best - I love him and want to have his children)

Danielle De Barbarac - profile/03238002356465013397

stacy68.blogspot.com

Benticore - aeshemafury.blogspot.com

Claud (you know who you are - come back, come back)

And 2 others, of course.

She may worry her tongue smells of lemon .....who knows?

My dog has started to lick my legs as I take a shower in the morning. I don't really mind too much, I suppose, but I have to shoo her away at the end so that I can properly clean myself. She just stands there getting drookit and laps away like a loon. Happy as a bastard, really. And I just stand there getting drookit, not so happy, worrying if my legs smell like dog. They don't. I know this, because I asked my girlfriend to check.

My dog is A Very Good Thing and that's just a fact. My girlfriend is also A Very Good Thing because she will sniff my legs to see if they smell like dog. Who actually does that?

"I don't like this, I don't like this....."

Damn. I seem to have fallen behind. It’s pretty brilliant the way that time just ticks on, though, thrillingly aloof to its frozen inhabitants. You may fondly believe that you’ve come to a standstill - but you’ve not, because you can’t. Result.

You know how sometimes you just sort of slip into a trance and find yourself talking to the colour green, say, in a fantastically complex language that sounds a lot like music, but isn’t? And you know how this language is lost to you just the minute you start to hear the distressed voices of others asking you if you are okay? Well, time doesn't care about this at all. 

Or if you’ve been doing happy stuff with the outdoors and the wind and dogs and then suddenly things just start to change? Weird, isn’t it? Such a short step from frisbee to a nameless distress and a dreamlike retreat up the stairs. Two hours later and it sort of feels like a good idea to start asking yourself what the fuck you are doing curled in a ball saying the same thing over and over again. 

That sort of thing, you know? Anyway, time doesn't give two hoots about any of that - and nor should it. All attempts to temporarily opt out of time are completely ignored by time itself. What a ruthless bastard. Time is maybe a wee bit like some poorly drawn cad from a Jilly Cooper novel who treats women badly and yet somehow leaves them wanting more. We’re all women now.

No, time is nothing like a lusty cad from a Jilly Cooper novel and I'm not entirely sure why I just said that it was. Plus, not only is the analogy rubbish – it doesn’t hold anywhere near true for the diseased. Time is our friend, not our tormentor, because it relentlessly takes us towards the place we so bitterly long to be. Far, far and still further away from the teeming hordes of potential disasters, with their careless lies, genocides, dodgy shoes and limitless capacity to wound. Plus some other stuff, of course. But yes, you.

There is no sense to this. None at all. So very far from being edifying that it perfectly takes the breath away, there is no honour here. How pathetically obscene to watch one's own mind racing in on itself, frantically scrambling for options, lurching to every outpost and finding dead ends. And then, with a relentless lack of originality, heading towards the opening at the end. It just feels so warm and soothing, though, to reach out to something tangible, terminal, terrible and real. It makes it feel okay to know that this option exists. It just does. Only it doesn't.

Each time feels a little bit closer - no point in pretending otherwise. Such a searing and filthily seductive temptation, whispering incessantly of how things could be. Goading, beseeching, demanding, insisting that this is the way. I’m trying not to feel embarrassed, but it’s a bit difficult.

Look, don’t be searching for reasons to hurt yourself, because they’ll find you soon enough, anyway. Trust me, it’s true.

Cricket fans make better lovers - official

Sport is weird. Men who take sport seriously are weirder still. Men who call other men weird for taking sport seriously, whilst all the while taking a particular sport seriously themselves, are perhaps the weirdest men of all. I take cricket seriously and say that other men who take other sports seriously are not only weird, but stupid. This makes me both stupid and hypocritical. And last, but by no means least, it irrefutably makes me weird as hell. I'll live.

Because there are so many different sports in the world - the official figure is 13, but this seems pessimistic - I would find it impossible to compare all of them to cricket to prove my point (see the title of this post for the point in question). Thankfully, I don't need to bother myself with such a task, because someone else has just emphatically made my point for me. Happy, happy days.

Researchers at a university in, I think, Warwickshire (although I'll need to check this out further before saying so for certain) have made the gratifying discovery that the sexual performance of men who watch cricket is demonstrably superior to the "performance" of those men who don't. Result. I'm not really sure if it is possible to feel happier than I do at this moment in time. I may very well be doing a sex mistake in my trousers as I type. What do I care, though? Boffins assure me that I'm a (considerate and patient) tiger-brute in bed and so, for once in my life, nothing else really seems to matter. This sweetest of revelations helps to confirm a few suspicions I've long held about tennis, say, or football. Especially tennis, though. (De nada, Mr Z)

But now is not the time to gloat over the sexual inadequacies of men who like tennis or football or, I don't know, tennis or something. They will be feeling wretched enough tonight as it is, I imagine, as they lie slumped and guiltily sated beside their depressed and frustrated partners. Why oh why, they must be asking themselves, did we not just go to the cricket and learn all about patience and delayed gratification? Why oh why indeed, you selfish little grunters.

There is just too much to say about all of this. However, I'm going to exercise some self-control (thank you, cricket) and restrict myself solely to bringing this wonderful news to your attention. See you in April.

(I'll put up the relevant links just as soon as I can - and may also add some other stuff to this post, too. I'm tired now, though, and need to go to bed. My lucky, lucky girlfriend.)

Esto nobis praegustatum in mortis examine

Wow. That last post of mine was brilliant. So many words, so few spelling mistakes, so very glad I'm me. I am in a hurry, nevertheless, to put some considerable distance between that most splendid thing I've just written and my gifted, most handsome, self. I just want to, okay? Okay. Oh music come and light my heart's dark places....

I enjoy an uneasy relationship with music, and this is not all down to mild synaesthesia. Certain passages contain a residual potency that makes them capable of inflicting an agonisingly beautiful pain. They just worm their way inside of me and go to work. I actively seek this out. These fragments, these moments, these glimpses of higher ideals. These things, my darling and elusive God, allow me to believe that this search for something may one day lead me to happiness, and that happiness itself is what I've been craving all along. (Although I doubt it, to be fair, because the very concept of "happiness" makes me feel queasy.)

Searching, looking, listening, hoping. I can feel the yearning in the music of Bach and in the wounding genius of Mozart. Denied the comfort of faith by my stubbornly firm grip on our bleakest of realities, I still find it possible to imagine the face of God being touched by this ascending and all too pitifully human noise. How is it possible to remain untouched by this searing and deadly beauty? It is agony. A view partially revealed, an itch almost scratched, as you hurtle with hope and reach out, preparing yourself to believe, daring to look for a lightness. Why does this have to end? Why on earth does it never quite take you there? You are left hanging, spent and alone, returned cruelly once more to the aching void, as the music dies in your soul.

It is like a form of self-inflicted torture. Conclusive proof, if any were needed, that it is perfectly possible to feel both happy and sad, hopeful and hopeless, at exactly one moment in time. You know the end is coming, but for those few unbearably hurtful and uplifting seconds, you dare to allow yourself to believe otherwise. Or is that just me?

Anyway, I'm really going to need to write about football or sex in my next post, lest people start thinking I'm gay.

I am in an exceptionally good mood for some reason. It happens. I feel strong and happy and light in the head. I can deal with anything right now. Anything. So I'm going to try to get my March blogging chores out of the way all in one go - I had promised myself that I would do three whole posts this month. Not just one or two, you understand, but three. I am a hero. 

This undoubted heroism of mine, coupled with my happily exuberant state, ought to shield me nicely from the way-too-close-to-home nature of the subject matter. That's the plan, at any rate.....

Suicide rates in Scotland are on the increase, with men leading the charge. Good stuff. A lot of men feel unsure of their role in society these days, so it's nice to see some initiative being shown. Don't believe the hateful feminist propaganda that trashes the competence of men. Just take a look at the figures, lady. Between 1989 and 2004, the suicide rate in men increased to the tune of 22% - awesome. Silly lackadaisical women, probably too busy knitting or over-achieving in education or being lesbians or something, managed a measly 6% increase. How lame is that? Could you lot actually be any further behind in this particular field? Goooaaaal. One nil to men, I think you'll find.

It gets better, though. It's not just that Scottish men now have something tangible with which to lord it over Scottish women (at very long last). No. Scottish people in general can now lord it over the rest of the UK, too. Oh, you dirty Sassenach bastards, how I have longed for this moment. If I were a Jew-hating moron with nary a clue about history, any history, I should probably be painting my face blue and making a jaundiced anti-English film right about now - shouting Freedom in a most peculiar accent as I did so. Tempting. I'm going to have to settle for gloating contentedly, however.

According to The Scotsman (07/03/07) "rates of suicide in Scotland are the highest in the UK, almost double those in England". Did you hear that, you sorry bunch of English losers? - almost DOUBLE. That's got to hurt. But wait - "experts called for increased efforts to target those most at risk". Why? We're winning, you fucking idiots. Man, I really hate experts. So typical of Scots, as well, to sabotage their own success stories. Makes me mad, that does.

"The reasons for Scotland's suicide record remain unclear, although high levels of deprivation, alcohol and drug abuse and large numbers of people living in remote areas are possible risk factors." D'you think? 

"The 270-page report [sorry, I forgot to say, there was a 270-page report commissioned by The Scottish Executive] also reveals details of those who are most at risk of suicide in Scotland - showing variations between rich and poor." No way. You'll need to work an awful lot harder to convince me of THAT, you 270-page report, you.

"The Scottish Executive, which commissioned the report (told you) said its suicide prevention strategy - Choose Life - would now introduce more initiatives to target those groups most at risk." Phew. I'm sort of left hoping they do outreach programmes for expatriots, because I could do with feeling targeted every once in a while. Also, I am pretty certain that I would react favourably to someone coming to my door with a clipboard and recommending that I simply Choose Life.

We understand you are at risk, Sir.

Yes, that sounds about right.

Money worries, Sir?

Nope. None whatsoever.

Abusing alcohol are we, Sir?

Nope. Not touched the stuff in over a year and a half. 

Any other drugs you might be using, Sir?

Coffee and cigarettes.

Nothing else at all, Sir?

Nothing else at all, you nosey bastard, no.

Hmm. In some kind of trouble with the law, perhaps, Sir?

No.

Ever?

Never.

Are you maybe living in a deprived area, then, Sir?

Does it look that way to you?

No, Sir, my apologies, it doesn't. Do you live alone?

No. I live with my girlfriend.

Relationship falling apart is it, Sir?

No. Still going strong after 16 years. I don't want anyone or anything else.

Any family you can rely on in times of crisis, Sir?

Yes.

In regular contact with them, are we?

Yes. I speak with all three of my sisters at least once a week. We laugh a lot.

Any hobbies, Sir?

Yep, plenty.

Hmm. Most unusual. It says here that you are at risk, but....."

But?

You don't exactly fit the profile, Sir, that's all."

That is strange, yes, because I definitely do have very strong urges to top myself every once in a while.

This is all very complicated, isn't it, Sir?

Yes.

Here's a leaflet, anyway. Do be sure to read it, Sir. Good day."

I will read it, I promise. Good day to you, too.

Choose Life. A catchy title, to be sure, but not enough in itself to answer the question it raises of why?