A Day in the Life (IP)

A Day In The Life

I wake up and wish I hadn't. God has let me down again. These days all I ask of him is that I don't wake up in the morning. He ignores me.

I wonder what time it is. Three o'clock? Four? Not that it matters, it's just that I get a little disorientated when my sleep time gets too much out of synch. I smoke a couple of cigarettes, washed down with cold coffee from last night, or more accurately this morning. Now I am ready, although reluctant, to face the day.

I pull on a pair of trousers and a thin jumper. My shirts are all in shreds and I can't face buying any more. I stumble into the lounge and look at the time. It's about what I thought - mid afternoon. Now I need some coffee so I head for the kitchen. Not here again, I think, please not here again. But here again is exactly where I am.

I make some coffee and head back to the lounge. Two anti-depressant tablets and one beta-blocker to take. I don't know what I'd do without them. Most of the day I feel absolutely nothing, no good and no bad. I can no longer imagine what it would be like to feel anything good. I haven't laughed in at least ten years.

I turn on the computer to see if anybody has commented on something I've written. If they have, I try to think of a reply. More often than not I can't think of anything to say. If there are comments it makes me believe for a moment that I'm real, that I might, in however small a way, be contributing a little to someone else's life. If there aren't comments it could just mean that a few people have read the first line, decided it wasn't worth the bother, and gone away. I look at a few things that other people have written but my mind wanders and I can't remember what I've just been reading. I give up and go and see if there's anything on TV.

There isn't ever anything on TV but pictures and noise. Often there are programs where somebody asks questions and others try to answer them. People who watch shows like that might consider taking a job as an exam invigilator. They could try to answer the exam questions themselves, then look over the shoulders of the candidates to see if they knew the answers too. Such fun they could have.

The program that brings me closest to laughing is Anne Robinson's quiz show, where she asks questions that sound difficult but are in reality utterly trivial. "In philosophy, Martin Heidegger was known for his investigations into the nature of being. Was he a man or a woman?" Half the time they get it wrong.

After a while I'm ready for another sleep. I wake up at shopping time which, for me, is just before the supermarkets close. In Waitrose they put all the food that's just about to expire in trolleys at the front of the store. It's like Christmas: you never know what you might find. Sometimes there will be a hunk of salami; I'm rather keen on salami. Those are good days. Otherwise there might be some of those absurdly expensive items put there to attract people who want to experience fine dining without having the first idea what it is. They are disappointments waiting to happen. They might come in the form of piles of salmon paste, smoked salmon, prawns, and so on. They taste of salmon and prawns - what else did you expect? I'm not idiot enough to pay £8.50 for one but for a quid I'll take it off your hands.

Having raided Waitrose, I cross the road to the Co-operative. Most of their ancient food will be gone by now but they often have some cheap meat. I like lamb, don't mind a bit of beef, not too keen on pork. I mean, pork is okay, but as a roast you have to eat it while it's hot, it's not all that nice to snack on when it gets cold. I can never think of much else to do with it. Lamb is versatile, I can make a mean curry with a bit of lamb shoulder, and you can just hack a bit off and fry it if you feel a bit snacky before the curry is done. Beef I can either eat fried, as long as it's not too old, or pop into a rendang.

Shopping done, I return home to see if the TV has got any better. It hasn't. These days you can't make a drama without Romola Garai in it. It's not allowed. The BBC keeps her locked up in the basement and wants to get full value from her board and lodging. If she won't do acting she doesn't get her sausages.

Now I have a long night to face. I can't sleep. I'm tired, too tired to do anything useful, but not sleepy. I play a couple of games of FreeCell on the computer, but that soon gets boring. The effort exceeds any possible reward. I try for a hundred straight wins. Not all at one sitting! When I get there I wonder why I bothered. I already know that the only time I ever lose is when I can't be arsed to think about it. Who cares? I don't.

Sometimes I think about things I might do. It's easy to fantasise in the middle of the night because you don't have to do anything straight away so you can't call your own bluff. But I know it is a bluff. I didn't enjoy going out to work much when I used to do it, long ago. I used to fall asleep. Sleep has always been a bit of a problem for me. I can sleep anywhere, anytime except in bed at bedtime. Falling asleep at work is particularly easy. I can sleep through meetings, in taxis, in front of the computer, while shaking hands with a client. I'm an expert.

Sometimes I wonder whether I'm me plus depression, and the depression part can be driven out, or whether I'm just me and that's all there is to say about it. Certainly nobody has had much success in ridding me of the monster. They've pretty well given up now. Nobody really believes there's anything wrong. "I spoke to him on the telephone; he sounded okay to me." So is that what you think depression means? That I'm down in the dumps and in need of cheering up? That if I don't burst into tears, everything is fine? It doesn't mean that at all. It means everything I've said here. It means it's an unthinkable effort to buy any new shirts. It means I wish I'd died in the night. It means I can't remember what it's like to be happy, or even mildly contented. But on the telephone and in my writing I sound perfectly normal. For me, this is normal.

The word 'depression' is just a convenience for doctors and pharmaceutical companies. You'll never find two 'depressed' people the same. With Ruby Wax it comes and goes; Sptephen Fry has manic episodes to compensate for the crap times; Winston Churchill saw his depression as a 'black dog'. With me it's a permanent, unwavering greyness.

Now it's about half past seven in the morning and I've been writing since - I don't know. I didn't look at the time when I started. It has passed another chunk of the night. I can't sleep yet, but about ten or eleven o'clock in the morning I'll be ready for bed and the whole cycle will begin again. I hope I'm not here again tomorrow, or this evening as you would call it. I fear I will be.