30.01.2010
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I heard the terribly sad news about an hour ago that depression has claimed another life; that someone else couldn't live with the condition any longer. It's an illness that can be the cruellest widowmaker of all as it leaves the bereaved with a lifetime of questions, of wondering if there was something, anything they could have done differently, something they'd missed, something that would have prevented this happening.
There really wasn't.
One of the cruellest aspects of the condition is that you feel a burden on those you love and who love you back. Once you're in that downward spiral of depression and guilt your rationality can evaporate and you feel that the only way back is to stop being that burden in the most irreversible, final way possible. You really think you're doing everyone the biggest service you possibly can. Once you decide on that course of action then there really is nothing anyone can do, nothing at all.
If I should ever wantonly destroy
This mechanism which is all my world
All other worlds beyond my world - all stars
All things remembered; unremembered; lost;
Imagined; dreamed of; calculated; loved;
Hated; despised; looked forward to; desired -
If I should ever wilfully escape
From what my conscience calls responsibility
From this strange unexplained necessity
Of living life. If I should fail,
Run whimpering to death because some fear,
Because some sudden sharp neurotic dread
Some silly love, some ....
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19.01.2010
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I’ve been overwhelmed by the response to my posting about depression here a week or so ago. From simple ‘good on ya’s’ to heartfelt and detailed accounts of tussles with the ‘black dog’ I’m utterly humbled by all the reactions and deeply moved by some of your e-mails, although I feel a bit of a fraud fielding the good wishes and pats on the back as I’ve not had a proper, serious depressive episode in a good couple of years or more.
Several people have told me I was ‘brave’ for posting what I did. I’m really not, oh dear me, no, I’m really not. In general I am the biggest yellow-bellied scaredy-cat there is: you have to peel me off the ceiling whenever the doorbell rings and I still shout, “it’s witchcraft I tell you!” when the toaster pops up.
The difference is that I’ve learned to live with depression by treating it as an everyday thing. Even when I’m not actually shrouded in the dark cloud it’s always there somewhere, lurking away like the navy blue sock hidden in the white washing ready to turn everything dark and spoil all the good things. As far as I can see depression is nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be self-conscious about. It’s an everyday thing, an unfortunate part of who I am as much as my big nose and hilariously oversized head.
It’s a cruel condition all right – I’ve been dipping into The Kenneth Williams Diaries lately, and at the weekend I read his descriptio ....
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06.01.2010
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I am heartily glad that Marian Keyes has posted on her website about her continuing battle with depression. It’s a condition I’ve suffered with for many years, possibly even as long as I can remember.
Depression is a word that’s often bandied about to such an extent that it can lose its true meaning. “What? The Old Speckled Hen’s off? Now that’s depressing”, “this weather makes me so depressed”, “I won’t come to the pictures tonight if it’s all the same to you: I’m feeling a bit depressed - maybe tomorrow?” all that kind of thing, it can make depression seem trivial, like it’s just a bit of a glum mood that’ll pick up after a good strong cup of tea (that same dilution is happening with the word, “iconic”, incidentally, with people using it when they actually mean “quite well-known”, but don’t get me started on that now or we’ll be here all day).
Depression is cruel, vicious, teasing and debilitating. It occurs often when you least expect it. It dances around you, convinces you of things that aren’t true, pokes at you, tugs at your clothes, envelops you in a pool of darkness and laughs in your face while doing it. It tells you you’re worthless, useless, that nobody loves you, that you’re a burden on anyone stupid enough to love you, that your very existence is utterly pointless. It’s so good and convincing at telling you all this that you believe it, you believe all of it. ....
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10.12.2009
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Today I noticed that my friend Ian had signed up for the Facebook fan page of Ivor Cutler. I hadn't thought about Ivor Cutler for a long time, yet he was a big part of my youth. So, this being the twenty-first century, I signed up too.
I was a bit rubbish at being a rebel. Hence when I was fifteen, while most of my school contemporaries were listening to Madonna and Alexander O'Neal I was spinning Ivor Cutler's 'Gruts' LP. And it was an LP. I can still hear the crackling between Ivor's hesitant, carefully enunicated Glasgow voice as he imparted another faintly surreal tale of a stall selling old cups of tea (the colder and more sour the tea, the cheaper the price), or visiting the Hoorgi House where a man with wheels for feet ladelled soup into Ivor's lap from an enormous vat strapped to his back despite repeated entreaties to stop.
I think I first heard Ivor Cutler on John Peel's late night Radio One show - when I really would listen to a small whiny radio beneath my pillow and be introduced to all sorts of life-changing bands like the Shop Assistants, Laibach and The Fall - and I was immediately drawn in to his surreal parallel world where everything normal was different and everything different was normal.
In fact, Ivor Cutler really did change my life. And here's how. It was the night before my geography O level and I wasn't confident. I had never actually passed a geography exam in my life and had scored a mighty 26% ....
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08.12.2009
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Last night I made a cup of tea, put my feet up on the coffee table and watched a DVD about Oliver Cromwell's incursion into Ireland. I know, I know, it should have been a Wire box set or Bagpuss at the very least but, with an impending book deadline thundering Charlieward, the feet-up-with-tea moments are confined to work-related viewing. Apart from when Coronation Street's on.
The documentary had been made by the History Channel, so I had high hopes. They were soon dashed. The programme was apparently part of an American series called 'Conquerors' presented by a Captain Dale Dye, white of hair and lantern of jaw, and was quite possibly the worst piece of television history I've ever seen. The programme was a mix of reconstruction, talking heads and Dale letting fly with various period armaments with the enthusiasm of Prince Phillip let loose with a blunderbuss in a field of pandas, and it was rubbish.
The talking heads were apparently professors of history from US academic insitutions, but didn't sound like them. One solemnly reminded us that Cromwell's officers wouldn't have attended West Point military academy (founded a century and a half later on a different continent) and later that the people of seventeenth century Ireland would have found the noise of Cromwell's heavy artillery even more disturbing when you consider that they didn't have televisions. I waited expectantly for him to remind us that the besieged popul ....
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23.11.2009
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I don't have a pet. In fact, beyond the goldfish that always expired three days after bringing them home from the fair, I don't think I've ever had a pet. Animals to me are divided into two categories: food and not-food. I was, however, delighted into rapture when I saw this over the weekend - a little car that your hamster can drive around in. The principle behind it is that of a regular hamster wheel attached to a tiny car, meaning that the wee rodent's exercise efforts are no longer the existentially futile fixed wheel: he can actually get somewhere. He can drive around. In his little car.
On the fun-o-meter, this thing is off the scale. This is entertainment of the highest class. If anyone ever got tired of watching a hamster driving around in a little car then they are surely not human (I love the way the one-star customer review criticises it as being 'purely for entertainment' - what else does she think it's for? Delivering meals-on-wheels?).
Now, if they could fashion a little pair of driving goggles for Hammy and maybe attach some kind of klaxon horn that the he could press, the picture would be perfect - the pinnacle of entertainment.
You'd have to make sure the doors were shut of course as there's no telling what might happen if your hamster sped off out into the open: I've already got images in my head of Hammy driving through a haystack, or driving into a barn and coming out the other side surrounded by agit ....
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03.11.2009
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I'm up to my scurfy scalp in writing the new book at the moment with the deadline barely eight weeks away. In the past I've never really had a problem with writer's block; I've been fortunate enough to be able to turn on the writing spigot and see words appearing on the page (whether they're in an agreeable order or not is of course another matter), but this time I've found the actual writing to be harder than any book I've written before. It's quite a different approach to previous tomes and it's a book that I've been planning to write in some form or another since I before I even became a writer. And I'm finding it hard, I don't mind telling you. Don't tell anyone though.
Lack of things to write about? Certainly not, although the narrative structure is quite different this time to my previous stuff. Fear of failure? Quite possibly. Whenever I hand in a manuscript it's always with a feeling that I could have done much better, and this book is a very personal one to me so there is probably that extra pressure. Having said that, I would never want to feel completely happy with a book. I think the day that I am a hundred per cent pleased with a book I've written when I hand it in, it's probably the day I should pack it all in.
Fear of failure is all I can think it is. I'm always terrified that a book's going to bomb or not even be good enough for publication. It's a pressured business: one stinker of a book means the end of ....
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31.10.2009
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Let's not thump around the shrubbery:on the face of it, spending an evening listening to twenty-four amateur poets reading their own work wouldn't be high on most people's list of ideas for great Saturday night out.
Last weekend I was in Loughrea, Co Galway, having been invited to speak at this year's Baffle Poetry festival. I was, I confess, surprised to be asked as, as anyone who has read anything I've written will point out, there ain't nuthin' poetic about what I do. Now, I'm a massive fan of poetry, and some of you will probably have heard the programme I made for Radio 4 last year about Noel Coward's poetry, but I really am no poet. Not even close. One look at my twelve-year old's Emu poem confirms this. Could they, I wondered, have mixed me up with someone else?
But the organisers reassured me it was me they wanted so last Saturday I headed down to Galway on the train and found myself in a small and crowded pub waiting to hear the second heat of the competition.
The standard was amazing. Utterly amazing. A whole range of people passed in front of the microphone to read their work, and there was not one stinker among them. A whole range of styles and subject matter were covered under the broad umbrella of the competition's theme 'turning a blind eye' and I was absolutely blown away by the quality of the pieces.
In addition, the quality of the performances was immense. There is probably no more personal form of wri ....
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30.08.2009
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For some reason,probably to do with my own technical incompetence, every update here since the end of April has disappeared somewhere into the ether. That means, ooh, two things have vanished at least.
I'm just returned from a brief jaunt to Edinburgh where I put in an appearance at the book festival. So, in order that visitors here don't think, ooh, the lazy sod, he's not updated his website since April, and because every newspaper and website is chock-full with people's 'Edinburgh diaries', here is my Edinburgh Diary for Friday 28 August.
12.40pm. I'm standing at the bus stop at the end of my road. I'm on the coast in the north of Dublin and feeling entirely underprepared. For various reasons, instead of making my leisurely way to Edinburgh in the morning, wandering around, drinking the free whisky in the author's yurt, holding forth about my favourite subject - myself - in front of a bored and comatose audience for an hour before exploring a couple of pubs with my pal Pat, an old friend from London now living in Edinburgh, and falling into bed in a swanky hotel (in the modern travel vernacular, an 'Embra-cation', if you like), I shall be zipping in by plane, collected by car and raced through the streets hopefully in time for my 5pm talk, then whisked back to the airport and be tucked up in my own Dublin bed around midnight. It's going to be a challenge, all right.
1.00pm. The bus drops me in central Dublin. One of the ....
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10.08.2009
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As you'll no doubt be aware, August 23rd is the 130th birthday of the ukulele. You weren't? Really? Oh.
Well, it's also the day after my birthday and, most excitingly, the premiere of my new one man show How The Ukulele Saved The World. Oh goodness me, yes. It's all part of the frankly snazzy Happy Birthday To Uke: Dublin Ukulele Birthday Party taking place at Bewley's Café Theatre on Dublin's legendary Grafton Street at 8pm on August 23rd.
I'll be guiding an undoubtedly agog audience through the history and culture of the ukulele, a history that includes such unlikely bedfellows as Peter Sellers, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Spongebob Squarepants.
As well as me banging on about the uke (infinitely preferable to my actually playing it, incidentally) there'll be appearances from Ireland's top solo ukulele singer/songwriter Peter Delaney and the frankly outstanding Sick and Indigent Song Club, arguably Dublin's finest live band featuring Greenock's finest ukulele chanteuse Angie McLaughlin.
All for ten of your European Euros. Booking info can be found here.
....
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