Am feeling a world away from the slump of the last few days and the illness of the week before. After the sensation of being knocked to the bottom of life’s staircase one time too many, then seeing the stairs shift and transform into a sheer slide – as escalators do in common nightmares – something has clicked or cleared. The stairs are no longer terrifying, and the idea of lightly picking my own funny way up them (and at my own speed) seems natural once more.
I put this recovery partly down to publishing my own unseemly wails in the diary: a selfish unburdening which was purely a last resort and which I will do my utmost never to repeat. Public admission of depression for me – once I’m on the other side of it – now seems embarrassing and tedious. That I might sound like a typical depressive – or a typical anything – appalls me so much, the recovery is accelerated a thousandfold. I have effectively shamed, bored and embarrassed myself out of my own predicament. Or at least that’s how I prefer to see it.
What also helped was meeting Ms S in Islington, and going to the cinema (Vue) to see ’27 Dresses’. An unabased fluffy romantic comedy – a genre which, it’s easy to forget, evolved directly from the Restoration ‘comedies of manners’ – with just enough quips, social observation and ripostes to justify its stay: it’s exactly what the doctor ordered. Sometimes one wants a film or book or piece of music to take oneself somewhere new, sometimes one wants to be told ‘me too’, and other times it’s a slight variation on an familiar journey that the soul requires. I’m an unabashed admirer of Richard Curtis’s films for the same reason. Though when I confessed this to Ms Stone in Sweden, she replied, ‘That’s because you ARE Hugh Grant.’
I have photos to upload. A selection of Sweden, plus my short brown hair. Tomorrow, then.
