Writer-insighter – Page 18 – Maybe it doesn't matter if it's true. So long as you believe it is.

Following yonder star

I was brought up with Christmas carols. I went to Midnight Mass two years ago, at Blythburgh, in the church they call the Cathedral of the Marshes that once a year has its carpark full of Porsche Cayennes and RangeRovers and Bentleys as the houses that go without lights most of the year suddenly boast a tasteful wreath on their Colefax & Fowler-tinted front doors. I even had a girlfriend called Carol once, who I met in the Christmas holidays. How much more Christmas can one person be?

For me, there has to be a journey. A physical one. Or it’s not a proper Christmas. And I have absolutely no idea why.

It’s taken me to Lyme Regis, 130 miles from where I lived, for a magical break that lasted into the new year. We very nearly died on that one, forced to climb cliffs marked “Impassable” on the Ordnance Survey map, one step up and sliding several more down on shale that came away under our feet. I’d read the tide tables wrong. It was that or drowning, but somehow the map was wrong. They weren’t impassable. Not quite. We went to Midnight Mass that year, in a tiny stone church shining like a beacon on top of the sea-cliffs, the church packed with teenagers, couples, old people, children, a huge crowd we had seen hurrying past the windows of the Volunteer as we sat inside. I’ve never seen anything like it. But I’d never seen anything like English police acting as if they were in the Dukes of Hazard on New Years Eve.

Two police cars came into town in opposite directions, passed each other on the main street and half-pulled a bootlegger turn, sideways, blocking the road so that everyone who poured out of the pubs to hear the landlord of the Bolly play Auld Lang Syne on a saxophone in the street didn’t get run over. The few cars that wanted to drive through had to wait. Quietly, if they had any sense and didn’t want to be breathalysed. It was fabulous, real community policing with no fuss or fanfare.

Most of the other Christmas journeys weren’t quite as dramatic. Two Christmases in Spain. Last year a trip out into rural Suffolk, the year before that a trip back ‘home,’ to the West Country I never wanted to leave to see a friend I was at school with. My, those ten years have just flown past.

A trip to Leicester, when we’d been working there and left a sound recorder in a hall next to the enormous market I didn’t know even existed. I drove up the old roads, not the motorway in flat grey December weather, coming home with a bed for our big new cat, adopted in a hurry and with nothing to call his own. I think that was the best one, somehow, driving up through Towcester along A roads laid out by the Romans, back near the first Christmas time.

I’m not religious. But it’s still Christmas. And every year I dream of being in Bath Abbey for Midnight Mass, the stone angels climbing up to Heaven, floodlit to help them find their way. I won’t be there again this year.

Days are hastening on

In not even three weeks now it’s going to be Christmas. Somehow. Just as I’d bought a new scarf to replace the brilliant one I found maybe five years ago, hanging on the door of a pub where it had been for more than three months, the one a Scottish girlfriend loathed on the grounds, big, triangular, gold, red and brocade with tassels on it as it was that ‘THAT’S A WIMMIN’s SKERF!’

Somehow, the words ‘Aye, wittabootut?’ didn’t seem to calm things down at all. Rather the opposite, in fact.

I’d got my fingerless gloves out of the drawer this morning, pausing once more to regret not buying those elk-skin ones in that shop in Dam Square must have been fifteen winters back, but they were about 150 euros so there were reasons.

scan-9-version-2 But more than that, the last few days I’ve been waking up thinking it’s Christmas. The first time was because I’d left the heating on and being British and of a certain age and type of person who just does and doesn’t do certain things, and I suspect, probably from not having had children, I turn the heating off about an hour before going to bed. Unless, well, you know. If I have guests who might feel the cold, as it were.

The second because I’d lit some scented candles because I’d forgotten to take the bin out after making a fish thing and it was that or set light to the house and walk away from the smell.

But the rest, I don’t know. I’ve been teaching, the last intake of students were the best and worst I’ve ever had, their behaviour got so bad that my class was actually moved so we didn’t disturb other classes and I came home that day feeling I had to either stop teaching forever and do something else or sort out what was going wrong that evening. I did the second, to the extent that for the rest of their course they worked solidly, hard, well and as near as makes no difference, in silence except when they should have been talking.

And then it stopped. No more students this term. No more commute. And no teachers, books, Alice Cooper or evening walks around a crisply cold Christmas Fair in the reflected glow of floodlit a Norman tower solidly brooding the centuries into millennia.

It makes me think of Christmas holidays years ago, at school and just after, when everyone I knew drove out in a cavalcade of cars and motorcycles people pretend are classics now to a pub that’s become someone’s house, deep in the fields, to sit under gas space heaters in sub-zero temperatures, marvelling at each other’s new coats and stories and boots and leg warmers and jeans and the certain knowledge that as Chris Rea put it, in so many ways, like the time a girl said no, don’t open this gate down a lane you think is a shortcut, just no. A lane that turned out to lead to an unfenced quarry late one night; past here there was no place to go.

And everything, as Ben said.

I wake up every morning right now, thinking it’s then. Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe it’s because people are showing some interest unexpectedly in Not Your Heart Away again. Maybe it’s because I’m writing again, properly, doing the thing I should always have done.

I don’t know. But I like this feeling, these ever-circling years on the wing.

Scavenging

Because I never had much money when I first started riding motorcycles and driving cars; because once when I was a student I took a car to a garage and the brakes failed leaving (I mean none. At all. After it had just gone for its MoT. In Bath, at a garage renowned for the foxiness of the mechanics’ girlfriends if not the mechanics’ other manual skills); because another garage charged me a couple of hundred pounds i didn’t have to not fix something I fixed myself using a £10 part from a scrapyard, I always at least try to fix things that go wrong with my vehicles.

Sometimes of course, you just can’t. I never even tried to fiddle about with the really seriously annoying fault on the Mercedes I had, that would just shut all its systems down, apparently for good, if you left a window open when you locked it. Everything. Nothing. Zilch. Zip. Under the bonnet everything was covered in plastic shields to stop you even thinking about having a look, so I left that.

This year though, I’ve got an old Saab convertible I’m strangely fond of. It suits me. And like apparently a lot of Saabs of that time, the cutesy information display that tells you how laughably few miles you’re getting to the gallon if you use the accelerator the way the Garett turbo likes you to, never worked properly since I got it. Given that it’s an older car and this was an electrical thing to do with pixels, I assumed it was going to cost hundreds, wasn’t worth doing and was best left well alone.

So obviously sooner or later I had a go at fixing it. Equally obviously, it didn’t work. You pry the display out of the walnut dashboard with an old British Army REME pocketknife (assuming your pockets are the same size as King Kong’s) which has a nice thin and wide flat blade, making it ideal for this and yes, that’s why it lives in the glove box officer, what about it? Then you pull the box out, go into the kitchen, switch off the radio because it’s too distracting and fit a new data cable. Clean all the glue off the contacts with a wooden lolly stick and meths. Carefully tape the contacts on the cable onto the metal contacts they need to mate up with exactly.

Which does nothing. So order a new data cable joined to a new screen. Which leaves you with a big line of no pixels across the screen worse than before. So give up and watch the instruction video on YouTube.

And realise that someone, at some point, had a go at doing this before. And left two screws out of the reassembly. Which means that however new the parts, if they aren’t joining up then it’s not going to work properly. Which is where my box of parts came in.

This is a plastic box full of stuff so odd and useless even I’ve thought of chucking it. But where else would I have found two screws just exactly and completely the perfect fit for the job? Not in B&Q or Halfords, that’s for certain.

So given that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone, nor when it’ll come in handy, the box stays. Along with the other five. I’ve got a double gallery lamp standard to fix, after all.

Among the ruined cities

Thomas Mair in a hat, who obviously had nothing to do with Britain First.

Back in June a man called Thomas Mair shot MP Jo Cox. He denies murder and everything else he’s been charged with, despite there being a dead woman, lots of witnesses and his words to the effect that ‘it’s me you’re looking for’ when he was arrested.

Witnesses say he was screaming ‘Britain First,’ a fact that not one single MP has felt it necessary to mention let alone condemn. Just in case anyone was in any doubt that the attack was politically motived, in court Mr Mair announced that he was ‘a political activist.’

Today’s revelation in court was that Thomas Mair had quite a collection of books about Nazism. Which gave me pause for thought, because between you, me and the internet, so do I.

Last year I finally wrote a screenplay called Janni Schenk, a story about a very normal boy who had the misfortune to be born in Germany in 1930. I’d heard the story at first hand from the old man I always thought of as Janni, although that wasn’t his real name; now I very much doubt I’ll ever know what his real name was.

I heard the story about 20 years ago. He was old then. I didn’t know how to write it. I’m not sure I do now, but I gave it a go after 17 years of thinking I couldn’t do it. For two years I read everything I could find about then and there. I knew a German girl but despite her describing herself as ‘the third generation of the war’ naturally she didn’t have any first-hand knowledge; neither did her parents.

I read about what people ate, the clubs they joined, the clothes they wore, all of which I thought was probably more important than what battles were fought. Each week the shelf grew. Another week, another book with a hakencruz on the spine on the bookshelf.

It wasn’t something I was very happy about but I couldn’t see any other way to find out the things I needed to know. I don’t have any other Nazi stuff, apart from a cap I found for pennies that I needed for a photo-shoot.

l1000901 — Shot last year, not 71 years ago. And only with a camera.

Admittedly, I do have a stabby German knife my uncle gave me when I was fourteen. He thought it was a “Commando” dagger but it was far more interesting as well as older. Rather than being the Birmingham-made stilletto my uncle presumed, it turned out to be a recognised model of First War German trench knife instead. Nothing whatsoever to do with Nazism.

l1000848

I beleive

I was reading about RAF Watton. There’s a website, where people who remember the base like to write the things they remembered about it. It was the same as any other base, full of people uprooted out of their lives, ordinary people doing extraordinary things, usually not by choice.

One entry was this:

“one of the pilots who did not return that night had been in the habit of taking his dog, a golden Labrador, on missions. But the C.O. stopped it. The dog used to lie up on the airfield, waiting for him to come back. On this occasion, it lay up there for about four days. It refused water, and food. Then one evening, approaching dusk, a plane flew low over the airfield, and the officer in charge of the guns alerted the crew and gave the order to fire. Suddenly the dog started jumping up and down and barking in excitement. The officer in charge had the sense to tell the gunners to hold their fire. Somehow the Labrador had recognised that his owner was flying the plane. If the dog had not been left behind, they could have been killed as they returned. A few of the men who were shot down had parachuted out of their planes and were still fit to fly. They managed to commandeer planes to get them home, and some had landed at other airfields. We were so glad to welcome them back.”

I used to do a lot of travelling. I remembered a day when I really didn’t know when I’d be back at all, because of the three trains and a taxi I had to get to get from the airport to home.

My old cat knew though. He went to the front door at about the time my plane landed, 120 miles away. He stayed there until I got in the door. Maybe the dog on the airfield saw his owner through the windscreen in the dusk. Maybe. Maybe my old cat just wanted to sit by the door, although he never did at any other time except when this happened on another trip.

But 300 years ago nobody knew what electricty was, either.

The price you pay

Once upon a time, in a land long ago, I was at a rodeo.

No, seriously.

It was in a place called Greencastle, In., and the only way you’ll ever have heard of it is if you work for IBM, know where one of two V1 rockets in the USA are (apart from Werner von Braun’s den, obviously), or you’re an alumni of De Pauw university. Or you know something about Dillinger or the way any old bank robbery in the 1930s got attributed to the famous robbers if the actual robbers didn’t get caught and escaped in a car. Or maybe, like me, you were chasing a red-haired cheerleader called Nancy-Jean and driving a ludicrously big old car that probably extinguished three species on its own.

Anyway, it was a Saturday, Nancy-Jean was out of town, I was staying at her folks’ place in her room with the rainbow painted on the wall (as Werner used to say, ach, it vas all so long
ago…), I’d done a week’s worth of pretending to be in a Springsteen song working in a sawmill the other side of the tracks and apart from golf, which I don’t do because I don’t, there wasn’t a whole lot else to do. As we used to say.

I sat there on the bleachers (oh because that’s what they’re CALLED, ok?) and had myself a darned fine time. The steer wrestling was good. They got a steer and let it loose and anyone who thought they were hard enough grabbed it by the horns and wrestled it to the ground. Then they let it go. They didn’t have a whip or a gun or a stick, just their hands. It looked pretty equal to me.

Look, I know, ok? I’m not like that now. It was the past, it was definitely another country and they did things very differently there. But actually not so much, speaking as someone who had to get a lorry load of bullocks out of a pen and into a truck one dawn at Bridgewater Market. I was fourteen. I learned that bullocks are more scared of you than you are of them but it’s close. That if you twist the ring in their nose they’ll go anywhere you want. And that if you don’t you might end up sneezing your lungs out of your nose after they’ve slammed you into a metal fence and trodden on you.

I still wasn’t gonna go an wrassle a bull and that ain’t no lie.

I just watched and listened. A guy who was about my age now, wearing a cowboy hat, was talking a few feet away. I liked him. He was one of those people who could turn pretty much anything he said into a story and a good-natured one at that.

Even when what he was saying was serious. And sad. He told a woman a few seats away and pretty much anyone else who wanted to hear about his daughter. She’d bought herself one of those fancy Japanese cars, a Honda or a Toyota or something. And in the real world of Indiana back then, you didn’t do that. So he stopped talking to her. It had been months.

He said it was for a reason. Sure, it was a good car. Maybe better than a comparable American car. In fact no, definitely. She was smart. And it was cheaper. But if everybody did that there wouldn’t be no car industry. And that meant Americans, real ones he knew, up in Flint and Gary not even a hundred miles away, wouldn’t have jobs.

I don’t have much sympathy for the people who voted for Trump for a lot of reasons, but this one is up at the front. Actions have consequences. The first time I went to the US all the clothes in shops were from the USA. The second time, 12 years later, I couldn’t find any that were and they were less than half the price. If you buy cheap import stuff I don’t think you have the option of complaining about the lack of jobs at home.

And before anyone writes that off as elitist, that people on low incomes don’t have those choices, they do. They chose to buy a phone made in China and a network data plan instead of a $40 shirt from the USA. But they still need a shirt so they get a $15 one made in Guatamala instead. Funny how that factory closed and there ain’t no jobs here no more. Dang Democrats and their elitist globalisation. Trump all the way.

Tom Petty had to live with some hard promises. Springsteen told us we could count so many foreign ways to the price we paid. And now I’m as old as the guy in the cowboy hat back at the rodeo, I know they were both right. And Trump and his supporters are wrong and always wrong. Because there aren’t easy answers. What you do comes back to you.

Life, as Dr Hook put it, ain’t easy and nothing ain’t free. And cheap stuff isn’t. Sometimes you have to do without the things you want because of what will happen if you get them. Don’t want globalisation? Then don’t buy its products. People like Trump always promise it’s about personal responsibility; Thatcher did it too. But their biggest message was always the opposite: the bad stuff, that’s always someone else’s fault.

I ate a hot dog, watched the men wrassling steers and drove my big old Chevrolet back to Nancy-Jean’s house, up on the hill by the golf course, the good side of the tracks. A week later I drove down to Bloomington to see her, then drove out west on I-70 into my life, leaving her to hers.

Where the poppies blow

I don’t know much, if anything, about football. I’m the first to admit it. But I do know just a little about poppies and Remembrance Day because I’ve always worn one at this time of year. Which is more than footballers have.

Football’s governing body FIFA has decided that in the upcoming England v Scotland match the players shouldn’t wear poppies.

I don’t know whether they asked to, but FIFA has decided they shouldn’t as they class them as political symbols. Footballers, or more accurately, the tabloid press, which decides it’s “the voice of the people” that poppies aren’t a political symbol and our brave, hard-working footballers are being prevented from mourning Our Glorious Dead. Presumably by the tabloids’ worst thing of all, un-elected bureaucrats.

The funny thing is that this is new. Footballers didn’t wear poppies in 1945, when anyone on the England squad would have either known first hand what dead people looked like or would certainly have known someone who did. They didn’t in 1955 after Malaya, or 1966, the last time the highest-paid footballers in the world won the World Cup (just to remind everyone, 50 years ago, which doesn’t seem to make them very good at international football, to me) or at any time at all until the last ten years when a new kind of fake patriotism has made them popular along with Help For Heroes, a charity that manages to collect money but doesn’t seem to do quite so well giving it to people. Ex-Army people I know personally wouldn’t spit on it, let alone give to it, for exactly that reason.

More to the point, poppy wearing isn’t about patriotism. Or it was never supposed to be. It was about remembering the dead.

So I’m with FIFA. I would be hugely surprised if the new poppy herd can name two battles of either war, count how many people died, name a single general who got thousands of people killed or has any experience whatsoever of either World War for the obvious reason that anyone on the England squad now was only born a fraction of the 71 years ago that WWII ended. Wearing a poppy at a football match isn’t about caring. It’s about being seen to noticed as ‘caring.’

I’m deeply suspicious of a patriotism or anything else that needs to be seen to be genuine, literally. You mourn, or remember, or observe, in your heart. It’s nothing to do with wearing a badge to say how much you’re doing it.

People on Sunday

On Friday, without changing the subject, I got out of work early enough to stop in Woodbridge on the way home. I was looking for some mussels for dinner but somehow never got to the fish shop and by the time I would have done I’d found what I was really looking for anyway. Down a little alley, next to a deli and a bulding society and an upper floor flat that’s been for rent for I can’t remember how long, according to the sign in the window, there was a church hall.

There still is, but that’s not the point. It had a sign outside with two fatal words on it:

Book Sale

For anyone pretending to be civlised, there’s no choice but to go in. Because apart from books, some of which you’ll want, for pennies, you’ll get a glimpse of a life of if not quiet desperation then certainly one that careers masters don’t encourage. The life of the church hall bookseller.

I found a Cormac McCarthy I didn’t know existed (Outer Dark, since you ask. About incest. It’s Suffolk, after all). A history of the English Civil War, which I embarassingly know next to nothing about, aside from the liturgic Edghehill, Prince Rupert, New Model Army, Naseby, which hardly seems adequate. A magisterial account of the Dunkirk evacuation, where a friend’s father spent a solid week in the water at the end of a human pier, before being rescued and not by anyone looking remotely like Jenny Agutter. A book about the last days of WWII, after Hitler was dead, a time that fascinates me, for reasons I don’t fully understand. I think most of all I have the hugest admiration for people who literally had nothing left, who unlike the British, managed to parlay that into a scuccesful economdy within 5 years. And before any rabid Brexit tries the ‘ah yes, but they got a Marshall. Plan bailout, true, they did. And Britain got a factually much bigger one, and spent it on works outings, chips and a massive investment in cloth caps to tug. /in fact of course, Britain chose to bankrupt itself continuining to pretend it was a world power, first squandering its reputation on Aden and squandering its cash on thermonuclear weaponry, a programme so spectacularly rubbish that it ended up buying American anyway.

I would say I digress, but I don’t. Because the other thing I got at the book sale, apart from a chat with the guy who has read more than 95% of all graduates anywhere, because he does little else, manning the cash box, was a DVD. Yes, I know, how quaint. When you can explain how I can buy a second-hand streamed film I’ll listen.

The thing for me about book sales isn’t just the feeling that life outside has stopped, and there can be days when that’s a bad feeling indeed. It’s the idea that you don’t have to risk huge amounts on books you’ve never read or films you’ve never even heard of. And I’d never heard of People On Sunday. Ever.

Maybe it was because everyone in it died years ago. Or because it was a German silent film made in 1929, or all of those reasons and more. I bought it to learn about telling a story without words. Nobody spoke. Or they did, but you can’t hear them. They were all amateurs. There are about five frames of explanatatory text, but really I don’t think they needed it. Five young people on a Sunday do the things they used to do. I did. They probably still do. Sleep. Get out of the city. Listen to music. Try to cop off with each other in a half-hearted way. Find something a bit more challenging when they succeed.

It’s a moving film. It opens at Bahnhof Zoo and instantly you know something they didn’t. The whole place was going to be flattened. Anyone left there was going to be caught between mass-raping Russians and devoted Nazi death squads acting out thier own personal Gotterdamerung. Hardly a brick would be left. And watching this, none of them know it.

They knew it soon. Most of the people in the film got out of Germany soon after. Thier biographies read like the midcentury itself:

Erwin Splettstößer (de) Himself (taxi driver) – The five leading actors were all amateur actors. He liked acting and appeared later in small roles in two other films also directed by Robert Siodmak: Abschied (1930) and Voruntersuchung. In an unfortunate accident, he was run over by his own taxi in 1931 and died.

Brigitte Borchert (de) as Herself (record seller) – Like her film figure, Brigitte Borchert (born 1910) also worked as a Gramophone seller when she was discovered for this film. It was her only film, she later married the illustrator Wilhelm M. Busch in 1936. She died in Hamburg-Blankenese in August 2011, aged 100.

Wolfgang von Waltershausen as Himself (wine seller) – Born in 1900 into a wealthy family in Bavaria, he was a descendant of Georg Friedrich Sartorius. Waltershausen later had small roles in two other movies. During the Third Reich he worked in the mining industry, in post-war-Germany he sold books and audiocassettes. He was married twice and died in 1973.

Christl Ehlers as Herself (an extra in films) – Born 1910, the daughter of an harpsichordist and an artist. left Germany in 1933 and you know why. During the Second World War, she lived with her mother in the United States. She had a bit part in the Hollywood movie Escape (1940). She later married and had four more children, in addition to one child from a previous marriage. She worked with her husband in a family-owned aircraft company and also had her own vitamin business. Christina and her husband died in a private plane crash in New Mexico in 1960. All of her children are still living and reside in Northern California.

The one that haunts me most is the last, Annie Schreyer. The model. What became of her? Is she still part of the rubble under the new Bahnhof Zoo? There is no information about Annie Schreyer. Nothing on where or when she was born, nor where she died. Or when, or how, or with who. Just an hour of a girl in her early twenties, modestly but prettily enough dressed in a bathing costume, a skirt, a shirt, a hat, smoking a cigarette in the sun, laughing. Did she get out? Was she part of it? We don’t know anything at all. There is no information about Annie Schreyer. On this night when the dead walk I hope she may tread lightly, this black and white girl.

The cat thing

I always had animals around. When I was very small there were chickens and my collie dog. She probably wasn’t my dog really, but we used to go stealing together. From shops. She’d help me eat the things I got off the shelves when people weren’t looking. I was two.

I know this because we moved to Dorset when I was two and we were supposed to have had a black Labrador then. If it’s true I have no memory of it, whatsoever, which is an odd thing in itself.

Then we had a Pyrenean Mountain Dog because my demented father thought he could rent it to an advertising agency who were tired of the Dulux Dog. Despite being an accomplished liar and fantasist about whom my only regret is being dead he can’t actually read this, the Ad agency guys thought that a bit of consistency would be a better brand builder preferable to funding my father’s predictable progression from Ford Anglia to Mark II Jaguar.

Then the dogs stopped. There had been cats but they didn’t last. Until we adopted my feral cat, Fluff. At best she tolerated the rest of the family. But she got on with me fine.

When I got my own place a cat was one of the first things I got, long before a proper floor in the kitchen. Then another, to look after the first, and then came the Big Storm and suddenly two mother cats brought nine kittens in through the cat flap to the disconcertion of the residents, human and cat alike.

They were everywhere. When every alien in The X-Files was revealed to be basically a bald cat on growth hormones I wasn’t really surprised.

The funniest, Londonest Didn’t You Kill My Brother? time was on Green Lanes one dark, cold winter’s night. Back then it was a Greek area, mostly Greek Cypriots who had left in a hurry, but not so much of a hurry they’d forgotten their food. It was 1990 and local shops meant piles of fruit, gallon tins of olive oil and halva in plastic tubs, spicy sausages hanging outside the butchers and a Essex greengrocers who’d learned two extra languages so they could talk to the customers. You might call it an integrated community. We just called it Green Lanes.

Back on the Cypriot side of the street one night I went to get some vegetables in one of the open-fronted shops. There were two huge guys in their twenties behind the counter and a cardboard box on top of it. At any given time one of the guys was up close to the box, sometimes both of them. There was a gym bag on the floor. I looked to see where the baseball bat was, but they didn’t look as if they’d need one. When I got what I’d come for I got as close to the box as I casually could, trying to see what was inside. I thought it was the week’s takings.

The tiny kitten was something far more precious to two huge young men guarding it that winter night.

Up at the corners

Or; Why Anyone Saying That Needs To ask themselves why they’re in total denial

I didn’t smile much when I was a kid. It wasn’t some Dickensian horror-story about being made to be a pick-pocket or having to go round on a milk-float or frost on the windows inside in the winter. I only went round on a milk-float on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings, because that was my Saturday job.

OK, my Milk Clothes stank of sour milk and couldn’t be used for anything else. Jeans on their literal last legs. A white sweatshirt I’d properly grown out of. A horrible blue nylon coat with weird gold fasteners on the front that now, would pass as a diamond-quilted hipster jacket, but not in Trowbridge back then it didn’t. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t awful. The deal, not the coat. The coat was.

We had Radio One on all the time and back then, that was something worth listening to. We also had the Christmas Eve we started way before dawn so we saw the sun rise through the steely high-pressure-over-Sweden blue winter sky, fuelled by home-made mince pies and whisky left out for us in the porch of council houses, next to the empties. I was fourteen or fifteen. It didn’t kill me. I wasn’t driving the milk-float.

For Proust it was little biscuits that reminded him the past was a different country. Not just one where they do things differently, but one where you can only get a visitor visa that goes out of date too soon. For me, bottles chinking together makes me wait to hear the clack of the solenoids, the deep rising tone of the electric motor winding up and then the sound of the float coasting to a halt again. A pipe tapped out on the door of the float.

Frost on the inside of the windows wasn’t special in those days. Pretty much everyone I knew knew all about that, rich and not very rich at all alike. A friend whose house was so big that the first time I saw it I mistook it for a hotel and asked directions to her house there had her own apartment on the top floor of what looked like half of Yorkshire. Her father refused to install heating up there on the basis that heated bedrooms were “bourgeois.”

On the top floor, anyway. They weren’t bourgeois on his own floor. The other floors were fine. So was the £23,000 he spent on his Purdeys, back when that would buy you a flat in a nice part of Bath.

But little kids generally don’t need to be told to smile most days. I’m not a parent, but I think I can say that pretty safely. If they do there’s something wrong.

Because there was never anything acknowledged to be something wrong, and there is only a finite amount of internet so some other time for that, I didn’t work out there was something wrong. Instead I behaved like a dissociated, self-regarding arse for quite a long time. Sometimes I still do. These days I realise there’s a pretty big difference between self-regard and self-awareness. Usually.

The trouble is – and this is the bit that trips everyone up, including, if not especially, people trying to help – is that when you’re not thinking straight you don’t know you’re not thinking straight. Especially in a culture that doesn’t discuss it, criticises it or tells you to just buck-up and stop being so self-pitying.

It works like this. If you have a white hair in your eye-brow you can see it. When you do there are things you can do. You can accept it. You can dye it. You can pluck it out. But if you don’t know it’s there then you can’t do any of that. And the thing with depression is exactly that. You don’t know it’s there when it’s starting, unless you really, really plug in to what’s going on with yourself. Which sounds like the kind of yurt-hugging thing Kate Archer would say. Which doesn’t help.

Often, all you know is you’re getting in more arguments than usual. Or maybe that’s just me, but it’s a reliable reminder to go for a walk and crucially, don’t self-medicate, because as a friend rammed home to me after trying to drown her own demons, there’s no such thing.

I’ll say it again. There is no such thing as self-medication. When you drink too much and call it self-medication you’ve now got two problems, the thing and the drinking. Except you’ve actually got more than that, because you’ve now still got the thing, plus the drinking, plus the physical and social consequences of that and the stuff you did that you can’t 100% remember entirely, plus most people have zero, but zilch sympathy with drunks. Only drunks think they do. Especially if they’re buying. Obliteration doesn’t help. And it certainly isn’t medication. It’s more denial. Which is how we got here in the first place.

Churchill had it. He ended-up drinking two bottles of brandy a day and slurping mashed-up steak and kidney pudding out of the bowl. That and weeping at the thought of the charred cities the RAF were smashing and continued to smash, because he couldn’t get himself together to say ‘Stop this. Enough.’ A commander who couldn’t command, who couldn’t face down his own subordinate, Sir Arthur Travers Harris. Air Marshall. The man the press called Bomber Harris. The man the RAF called Butcher. This is real history. The nation’s hero was drunk most of the war. Nobody can drink two bottles of brandy and not be drunk. It isn’t possible. Idols always have feet of clay.

For me, trigger signs are not putting the lights on, or if I have to, to cook or wash, just one when a ceiling light would mean I could actually see what I was cooking. That and total silence, no radio, no laptop, no CDs, no noise at all. That’s when I know it’s coming. Just putting some lights on can stop it.

Now I think of it like flu. Once you get it you stand more chance of getting it again. It might kill you if you let it, but the thing is, you don’t have to let it. There are things you can do to make it feel better. Lots of them. And they work, more so if you’re blessed with real friends who watch out for you and spot for you. But first you have to realise you’ve got it. And you know that you can always get it again.