Watch the Stephen Fry documentary on depression. The clips from him rehearsing to present some glossy awards ceremony are interesting. The director asks, “Happy, Stephen?”. “Happy???” he mutters as the crew moves to the next cue. “Oh, yes, ‘happy’. I remember that…”.
As ever, I find confessions about phases of despair from the massively successful both fascinating and infuriating. It’s hard not to shout “Oh just get over yourself, Mr Millionaire” at the screen, though one useful message persists: that of plunging oneself into work as at least one kind of cure.
I find myself wanting to shout the same sort of things at the passages of unrelenting self pity in some of Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories essays (especially ‘Written On The Body’, his unusually candid account of feeling off sick when Sex was handed out). Particularly as he himself dislikes the idea of The Artist As Tragic Figure.
Is the viewer and reader meant to think “Poor, poor Stephen” and “Poor, poor Alan”?
No, I decide, not really; both Bookish National Teddy Bears are several steps ahead of their audiences’ thought processes, and deal with any accusations of self-obsession in a kind of knowing pre-emptive manner, which of course just endears them further. Ultimately, they’re just being honest about their feelings. Which is very hard to get away with when you’re terminally English, depression or no.
Which is why Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, and self-help books are nearly always from America.
Sunday: to Heathrow on a mission from the Boogaloo circle. Given the generosity they’ve showered upon me in the past, I think I’m going to be asked something akin to being in ‘The Manchurian Candidate’. “We’ve done a lot for you, Mr Edwards. And today’s the day you pay us back. You must now kill the Prime Minister.”
Thankfully I just have to deliver some business documents to Victoria M Clarke as she changes planes en route to Tokyo, where the Pogues are touring. At the airport, she buys me lunch and gives me plenty of encouragement, contacts and tips for getting my so-called writing career going. While checking in, she is told she can bring her lipstick in her hand luggage, but not her liquid make-up. The ludicrous state of air travel in 2006.
Then to Camden where Ms Anna and Ms Suzi L have been drinking the afternoon away, while waiting for me. I can’t help thinking of that Noel Coward play, Fallen Angels. Anna cooks us all dinner, and we discuss what to do with Anna’s rodent infestation: it ignores her vegetarian mousetraps. Plus what to do with the old computer scanner Suzi has kindly given me: it refuses to work with my Mac OS X, and I can’t find a driver for Mac OS 9 which might possibly work instead, if I switch my laptop to something called ‘Classic Mode’. It’s a pain that technology only makes life easier if you keep up with it.
Pop in at the Boogaloo and chat to the Kashpoint kid Eddie, who I’d forgotten comes from Ipswich like me. We chat about what’s changed there (I’m dismayed to hear Martin & Newby, the long-running hardware store with the 70-year-old light-bulb in the toilets – has gone), and he asks me if I know of any jobs going in my London spheres of existence. I guffaw at this somewhat, feeling like the doctor who is more ill than the patient. But then I give him a few suggestions as to places to look. I don’t feel like I’m someone to look up to exactly, but I forget that some younger people view me as having Made It in some ways. If only having Made It to the age of 35, with all the osmotic dribbles of experience that engenders, simply by being alive for longer. Age is an illusion of experience:
Have cleared away the piles of clutter on my floor for the first time in about ten years. My landlady insisted on cleaning my carpet, and for once I decided to view this as an opportunity rather than an intrusion. Quite a transformation. I can actually have people to visit and not apologise for its state. Progress of a kind.
