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It was a small mercy to be up and out of bed this morning. I could sense I was eager to get up as I found myself humming while putting on the eight indoor-only tops I’m still wearing as spring takes its time coming through. I tend to put the heavier tops in bunches of three. Three of them are zip-ups and the zips do cause some annoyance.
I didn’t sleep much last night, in part owing to the knee continuing to throb despite a couple of painkillers shortly before midnight. I walked a lot yesterday so chances were I’d aggravated it further.
Listening to a new two-parter on the Whitechapel murders 1888-91 was never going to help me sleep. This, owing to that connection to the Ripper murders through my first ever home having been home to one of the lead investigators in the hunt for the world’s most notorious serial killer some eighty years earlier, is something of an obsession for me. I have no theories as to who the killer might’ve been. The whole period just fascinates and unsettles me in equal measure, and I was also a big one for anything Victoriana anyway, gas-lit streets, night watchmen and all that, having done A Level literature and then spent twenty years devouring the classics.
I was then up at 3.30am feeling peckish, like the dark days of lockdown circa Christmas 2020. I raided the cupboards and satisfied myself with some raisins and walnuts. Unnecessary perhaps, ill-disciplined, certainly, but I was convinced an aching knee plus a hungry stomach would conspire to keep me awake even longer.
Yesterday was a fairly decent day. Weekends are always dangerous for me mood wise if there’s no gig. Even if there is a gig, who am I kidding. Anything that takes me out of my regular weekday routine, mentally, can leave me quite down. I had agreed to meet my friend who’d taken a look at the (full fat) milk-splattered laptop, and we were due to meet another pal, but they cried off.
We’re all in a very similar position in that two of us live on our own, while the other remains single, and at this stage of your life, even though I think it’s fair to say we’re all absolutely fine with never having become dads because we would not have welcomed that pressure/intrusion in our lives, clearly we haven’t found happiness. Last weekend we all met up for the first time in a long time, the three of us prone to cutting ourselves off from everyone, and we all benefitted from it mentally. The key is, always, don’t cut yourself off.
Yesterday, I could feel a listlessness settling in during the morning and it would’ve been easy for me to cry off meeting up, as one of the guys had already done. The injured knee was a ready excuse. But I also know enough about my situation now to know this would be a mistake. That once I was there in the café, I’d feel better for seeing my friend and breaking up my day.
The friend that had cried off has only recently accepted he has serious mental health issues. Those of us who grew up with him could see this over thirty years ago. He was always a very unusual character. There’s probably no one who has made me laugh more consistently in my life than this guy. He was the inspiration for one of the four lead characters in the first TV sitcom I ever had commissioned. But he was always damaged and as his friends, because he made us laugh so much and we always looked forward to seeing him, we probably never helped him as much as we should have. Having said that, to this day he rarely listens to advice so we would’ve been very limited in anything we could’ve done for him. I’ll never forget that at my mum’s wake he chose to reveal how he’d caught an STD in Nigeria, blaming the resulting lice not on the prostitute he’d slept with, but on the flight. The high altitude, in his view, had caused the larvae to hatch. Arriving back in south London and unable to cope with his groin being under attack, he had his mum cream the areas with the prescribed medication. Extraordinary. Still, while it was unusual to make such a revelation at a wake, it made so many of us laugh on one of the worst days of my life and I never forgot that. Maybe it was written in the stars that he would catch an STD so that he could help ease the pain at my mum’s wake one day.
Now he has accepted he has mental health issues, while still not accepting that smoking weed every day since the eighties might have played a part in that, he uses it as an excuse for anything. He reminds me a bit of the many comics on the circuit who bang on about having ADHD, some of whom I’m sure have self-diagnosed. He told us a couple of days ago that owing to the state of his wellbeing, he wasn’t able to go out right now. This is a guy who hasn’t quite grasped those are the moments when you need to attack this illness and be around the people that care about you.
His mental health issues have been so serious that just before the pandemic, he actually abandoned his flat and belongings and made an attempt to get into North Korea to begin a new life, via China, because the popularity of Dennis Rodman in North Korea convinced him that as a black guy he would be much loved in that nutjob pariah country. After one friend did the right thing and reported the worrying turn of events, the Home Office hauled him off his plane three years ago and he had to accept that he was never going to be the new Dennis Rodman.
Last year he bought himself a bike so he could get out an exercise but because OCD-wise he’s almost at my level, he won’t ride it outdoors in winter because he doesn’t want to get it dirty. For winter, he bought himself an exercise bike and rode that indoors, while hiring Santander bikes for any rare winter cycling. This guy’s behaviour can be extreme.
It was therefore just two of us for coffee yesterday in Brixton. This overpriced, well-known café in the middle of SW9 which I don’t quite mind, doesn’t offer tall glasses, but I can compromise given the prize was I returned home with a brighter outlook. Still, drinking from a cup never feels right to me though.
In Star Wars Football news, league leaders Rebels stay top after securing a point in a goalless home draw with third favourites Bespin. The draw for the League Cup has been made (via my go-to online fixture generator) and has thrown up a few choice all-top flight ties, including Apex Overlook against Death Star and Rebels and Empire. The first legs are already underway.
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