Having A Moment

As a blog­ger — even, dare I say it, as a writer; except of course I’m not a writer, in that I’m not paid for my writ­ing, but I do some­times con­sider myself a writer when I’m feel­ing pre­ten­tious enough, and I’d love to be paid for my writing …

Oh, stop fuck­ing over-explaining and etern­ally cla­ri­fy­ing yourself.

Let’s start again.

As a blog­ger, then, I take great pride in my words. And as such, one of the most hein­ous crimes for me is appro­pri­at­ing phrases from other blog­gers, other writers. It’s so des­per­ately unori­ginal. But some­times one’s own phrase for some­thing just doesn’t work, doesn’t cut the mus­tard, doesn’t put it elo­quently enough. And then you have to beg, bor­row or, for­give me father for I have sinned, just steal from other bloggers.

That’s why, for the pur­poses of this post, I am steal­ing a phrase from Cap­tain Anna Pick­ard of the famed HMS Little Red Boat. She doesn’t know this yet, but I’ve agreed to pay her the princely sum of ten shiny new pence every time I use it.

Any­way, the phrase I am beg­ging, bor­row­ing and steal­ing from Anna is “fallen into a hole”. I’m sure you know what it means. It’s very pithy, yet won­der­fully descript­ive at the same time. You don’t really need to know any more. In that way, it’s rather like those Ron­seal products advert­ised by the almost scar­ily down-to-earth man on the telly — it does exactly what it says on the tin.

Of course, I used to have my own phrase for times when I’d fallen into a hole. I used to say, “I’m just hav­ing a moment”. Hav­ing A Moment. Hmm. I con­fess, though, that I had prob­lems with this phrase, mostly anally retent­ive time-related ones. I pic­tured myself hav­ing the fol­low­ing con­ver­sa­tion with vari­ous people:

“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. But I’m just Hav­ing A Moment.”

“Oh dear. I’m sorry that you’re sorry that you’re Hav­ing A Moment. Don’t be sorry, though. We all Have Moments.”

“Thank you.”

“Except — ?”

“Yes?”

“How long will this Moment last?”

“How long?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m not really sure. Moments don’t have a habit of inform­ing me in advance how long they’re likely to stick around. And like dis­tant rel­at­ives vis­it­ing at Christ­mas, they gen­er­ally out­stay their wel­come any­way. So I couldn’t really say.”

“Go on. Try. Try and give me an estim­ate, because it will give me a clearer idea of how long I should try and avoid you.”

“That’s thought­ful. Thank you.”

“So?”

“So what?”

“How long?”

“How long what?”

“How long will the FUCKING MOMENT be?”

“Oh, that.”

“Yes. That.”

“You want to know how long the Moment will be?”

“Well, yes. I actu­ally said Fuck­ing Moment. But that’s because you were begin­ning to irrit­ate me. And you’re cry­ing. And I don’t like crying.”

“Sorry.”

“Please.”

“What? Please what?”

“Tell me. Before I kill you. For exactly how long will you be Hav­ing A Moment.”

“I don’t know. But work­ing on estim­ates based on pre­vi­ous Moments -”

“Yes? Yes? Oh fuck­ing hell, YES?!”

“Some­where between a blink of an eye and an eternity.”

This ima­gined con­ver­sa­tion helped make it clear to me that I should never use the phrase Hav­ing A Moment in pub­lic, because it would lead to all sorts of con­fu­sion; the sort of con­fu­sion that my mind, which in times when I’m Hav­ing A Moment really needs to seek out order and clar­ity, simply could not cope with. So I kept it to myself. And when the Moments happened, I told only myself, in my own head, that I was Hav­ing A Moment.

But Hav­ing A Moment never quite suf­ficed. It spoke to me of Vic­torian ladies emo­tion­ally over­come by see­ing a man’s elbows, and hav­ing to dab their fore­heads dain­tily and fan them­selves to recover. It was inef­fec­tual. “Fallen into a hole” says it so much bet­ter, in my opin­ion. There’s another ten new pence gone to Anna’s boat. If I say it enough, maybe she could buy a new mast. Wouldn’t that be nice of me?

Gosh, long explanation.

So any­way, I’ve fallen into a hole.

And it’s odd, because I’d been doing so well recently. There have been lots of oppor­tun­it­ies to fall into vari­ous holes, but I’ve man­aged to neatly sidestep all of them with a tri­umphant cry of “Oh no you don’t! You’re not going to get me to fall into you by sud­denly open­ing up in the ground in front of me! That old trick, eh?”

But then I woke up a few morn­ings ago and there it was. A big hole. Even though I’d decided only recently that the descrip­tion of a big hole was a very apt one, the hole itself, its sur­round­ings, already felt very famil­iar. Deep sides. Very dark. Damp (with the cry­ing, obvi­ously, rather than any sort of struc­tural damp­ness). No lad­der. And not a lot of light com­ing in from the top either.

It was also utterly pre­dict­able that it was the morn­ing when it happened. Me and morn­ings have a long rela­tion­ship. They have always been the worst for me, strangely enough. I mean, even­ings are bad too. Of course they are. Par­tic­u­larly just before sleep. But then I think even­ings are bad for many people who fall into holes on a reg­u­lar basis. We’re the people for whom duvets and pil­lows were inven­ted — and I bet you never knew that, did you? — because duvets are essen­tial to pull over you at such moments, and pil­lows are even more essen­tial to bury your head under and stifle, well, stuff. Stuff. Oh, you know. I’m sure you don’t need the graph­ic­ally miser­able details.

So. Cry­ing. Apro­pos of noth­ing. In the morn­ings. Yes. Wel­come back. Like an old friend. An old friend you don’t par­tic­u­larly want to see, gran­ted, but an old friend non­ethe­less. I’ve been doing a lot of all that in the last few days.

And it’s dur­ing those morn­ings when I’m Hav­ing A Moment after Fall­ing In The Big Hole (oh God, I’m mix­ing my depres­sion meta­phors now — this could all get very con­fus­ing) that I won­der about the Little Tab­lets. More pre­cisely, I won­der whether I should go back on them.

I gen­er­ally come to the con­clu­sion that I shouldn’t. And I haven’t. Look, really, I haven’t. If you don’t believe me, let me allow you to look in my medi­cine cup­board. All I have in there is a plastic con­tainer of mul­tiv­it­am­ins, about five half-finished pack­ets of Ibupro­fen, some warm­ing muscle relief spray and a small bottle of eardrops. None of these are par­tic­u­larly good for bouts of depres­sion, and I’ve been spe­cific­ally advised not to drink the eardrops in a des­per­ate attempt to cure myself of being in a hole.

But it can be tempt­ing to think of the Little Tab­lets, and think of knock­ing them back with a glass of water when I wake up. They did make my morn­ings, and my days, more bear­able. Yet they also had hor­rible side-effects. Of par­tic­u­lar sig­ni­fic­ance was the drowsi­ness imme­di­ately after tak­ing them. For an hour or so, I’d be com­pletely use­less. A vir­tual zom­bie. This does not help you to speed out of the house to catch your tube in the morn­ing, I can tell you that much.

So on the occa­sions when I was pre­scribed them, I worked out a routine for this par­tic­u­lar side-effect. I would wake up at five, six or seven o’clock in the morn­ing, depend­ing on the time I’d set my alarm for, and take my Little Tab­lets then. Drowsi­ness be damned, because then I’d go back to bed and sleep it off. If I slept. Which I often didn’t, because by then I was awake. A bit. A bit awake and a bit drowsy. Res­ult? I got far less sleep whilst on the Little Tablets.

Oh, and the other side-effect was that by tak­ing my Little Tab­lets so early in the day, by the even­ing they were inev­it­ably begin­ning to wear off. If I had a drink — and here I’m talk­ing alco­hol rather than weak orange squash, you under­stand — the effects would be quite odd. One chem­ical exit­ing the body slowly, whilst another filled it up. When they met in the middle, it was … well, I’m sure you can imagine.

There was the dead­en­ing too. The numb­ing. Yes, I had more emo­tional equi­lib­rium, but at what cost? At the cost of (to quote Pink Floyd, which I’ve never pre­vi­ously been known to do) feel­ing Com­fort­ably Numb. Numb. Oh, that should upset me, it really should. But it won’t because I’m numb. You could prob­ably repeatedly stick nails in the back of my hand and I’d be fine. Numb. OK, maybe the nails would hurt a bit. But hey, I’ll have another Little Tab­let in the morn­ing, doze off the drowsi­ness for an hour or so, and then revel in every second of that numb­ness. Mar­vel­lous. Mmm.

Except I don’t like being numb. For all the lev­el­ling of emo­tions that res­ul­ted from chem­ical inter­fer­ence with my brain, it just wasn’t me. I’m all about emo­tional ups and downs, swings and round­abouts, holes and not holes, moments and not moments. So rather than chem­ical inter­fer­ence, I tried to develop ‘cop­ing mech­an­isms’ with the help of some ses­sions with a nice woman in a book-lined room in Eal­ing. These mech­an­isms are less reli­able than the chem­ic­als, to be hon­est, because they rely on me inter­fer­ing with my brain non-chemically. Some­times they work, some­times they don’t. They’re not work­ing par­tic­u­larly well right now, though, which is how the hole sprang up in front of me and I man­aged to fall right into it — hook, line and sinker, arse over tit. There we go. Wheeeeee. Ooh. Ouch.

Which is where I am now. Cry­ing in the morn­ings. Under a pil­low in the even­ings. But no, I’m not going back on the Little Tab­lets. Not this time. Not ever, I hope. Not if I can man­age it.

One other thing: this is the first hole that I’ve fallen into since I moved into my new flat, in a new and unfa­mil­iar area of Lon­don. When I had a ten-minute jour­ney to and from work, a simple over­ground on the Cent­ral Line, I must con­fess that some­times I let the big hole and Hav­ing A Moment get the bet­ter of me. I was one of those strange people you some­times see cry­ing on the tube. Sorry about that, I know we’re ter­ribly embar­rass­ing and you never know where to look. But it was right at the end of the Cent­ral Line, and there weren’t many people around to see me. Occa­sion­ally someone did see me, of course, and they would ask if I was OK. Which was nice. I have to con­fess, how­ever, that I’m not quite so sure about my fel­low com­muters on the North­ern Line between Clapham South and Tot­ten­ham Court Road, where I change to the Cent­ral again. The train’s more crowded, and the pas­sen­gers look a little more scary. (I apo­lo­gise if you’re a North­ern Line com­muter and you’re not scary; do please intro­duce your­self if you see me look­ing espe­cially mor­ose.) This means that I can’t leave my flat until the crying’s def­in­itely worn off and my eyes don’t look puffy. This also means that it’s cur­rently 8.58am and I should really be on the tube. But I’m not. I’m still at my desk in my bed­room, writ­ing this excess­ively long post (which even I’m bored with by now; you, dear reader, must be vir­tu­ally comatose). I shouldn’t be. I really should go now. Have to get to work.

I’ve just checked. I’ve stopped cry­ing. My eyes are def­in­itely less puffy — and besides, it’s sunny out­side, so I could wear dark glasses and no one would ever know, would they? I’m going. Really going. Now. Gone.

Updates from down in the big hole as and when. Or prob­ably not, because you don’t want to hear about them and neither do I. Oh, and I think I prob­ably owe Anna about fifty shiny new pence. I’ll send her a postal order.