Backing down and coming out

    It was heartening to read that the world's most famous atheist professor Richard Dawkins is only 6.9 out of 7 sure there is no God and denies he is atheistic. Billions of people worldwide have believed in the existence of God and billions probably will after him, yet here we had two academics 'battling' it out (Rowan Williams) in tv debate where no new punches were pulled and I suspect it was mainly intellectual one-upmanship.

     Then I learn that Lord Melvyn Bragg has come out about his depression. I first wrote about my own autobiographical novel 'Glass Wall' (now 'Missing Jean') over fifteen years ago and depression has largely sapped my energy to get it published! Macmillan publishing was interested but then said it wasn't quite their bag. I have come to the conclusion that only those who have suffered the terrifying depths can understand it and many fear it is a plague that could knock on heir own front door so shun its existence. It is not something one would wish on one's worst enemy and is sure to chase away all but your very closest friends. 

    As Bragg says it is an elastic term and for some an excuse not to go into work and a form of negative self pity. What is important is trying to cope with it and hang on to the extremely fine straw of hope that things will ever change and improve. One strategy I have tried that works to a degree is to make a friend of my enemy depression on the basis that if I can't fight or change it I can try to accept it. Going to bed and surrendering to it is in a way, for me at least, a way of letting nature heal as the worst of the storm can pass by sleeping it off but at other times it makes it worse. Nutrients, exercise and laughter can help and watching a Charlie Chaplin movie can take the sting out of the terrifying silence of isolation which is a major cause of depression.

      I read today Esther Rantzen's soul-bearing piece about prolonged isolation after the loss of a loved one on the MailOnline and she is particularly brave because if you are famous you meet even more hostility if you challenge our odd taboos. But we are still living in the Dark Ages and the problem ain't goin away. If you've got a broken leg you get it fixed and everybody signs the plastercast but if you have a broken mind (which probably mean a broken heart as well) then you walk alone!  

Ankle Deep in humanity

    Many many years ago a friend told me there is no place in this world for sensitive people. Indeed the sensitive particularly suffer in this involuntary confusing journey. The problem is that in an insensitive world compassion, the very thing that surely binds the human race together, disappears. Compassion is bound up in 'doing the right thing' and sometimes in the flash of a second, anybody would do the right thing, when for instance a man is drowning?

     Many years ago I was in Australia swimming off the famous Bondi beach. I am not a strong swimmer and was being pulled under by dangerous rip currents only a few metres from the beach. Just as I was struggling to swim ashore I became aware of a man on his back fully clothed bobbing up and down in the water and purple looking (I am colour blind so thats what he looked like to me). He was basically drowning. Another swimmer and myself immediately went to his rescue. The other man, much younger and fitter than me (I was 43) attended to the drowning man in this dangerous water and yelled to me to get help so I swam using all my reserves to the beach, bobbing under as I did so. 

    Exhausted I managed to scream 'help, man drowning' and was just stared at by motionless beautiful people in the prime of their youth, beautifully tanned just sitting there in their vanity and doing absolutely nothing (this shock haunted me for years afterwards). However, quite quickly the rescue guys came in their red motorised rubber dinghy (or was it orange) and in the meantime the hero in this story had pulled the man on shore and gave him mouth-to-mouth. As the lifeguards took over and applied an oxygen mask to the nearly drowned man, his rescuer just quietly walked away, through the beautiful people just sitting there unaffected. I followed him and grabbed his arm  'Hey, you just saved that man's life - well done mate'.

    Back in Britain, in fact yesterday, I read in the newspaper a man had drowned in a boating pond as fire rescue officers stood and watched. They were not authorised to go into water more than ankle deep. A police officer was about to wade in but his superior fiercely reprimanded him apparantly. So the man drowned while our rescue services just stood and watched. He was trying to rescue a capsised model boat I think.  

Great - Britain!

Marathon

     About five years ago I met a talented harmonica player in Dordogne on a working holiday with some woodworking friends from Bristol. His name is Kristof and he invited me to participate in a 1500km canoe trip through Mongolia the following year, to film it and then play guitar to his harmonica around the campfire in the evenings. 

    He organized these survival marathons drawing globally for his victims. I thought hard and not so much about my age but more my lack of physical fitness as at the time I was in very slow recovery from a serious bout of paralysing depression. Two years earlier I was doing well to spend two hours per day out of bed as I had lost the will to live and there were no hospital beds when I 'fell down' so it took many many years to stand up again. I also feared I would get bored canoeing over such a long stretch.

      I have just completed a similar marathon of primarily mental endurance (the complete opposite of the deeply depressive state) and also physical endurance in that since October I have been working mostly on average fourteen hours per days on a film project called 'Furniture Today Part Three'. It took a long time getting started, had no support of funding, nor did anybody ask me to do it, most people in Britain are tuned into furniture yesterday and I had no proper 'business plan' or strategy to sell the film other than a confidence that the story I was telling would one day be heard (seen). 

       Curiously at school, whilst not much good at academic stuff I always came first or a close second at cross country running and the distance was something like 20 miles as it was an outward bound type progressive school. The film has been made single handed breaking all the rules as it is a team based profession. I'm also self-taught as six UK film schools turned me down as being too old at the age of 43.

        Computer software crashes, glitches, etc meant I probably spent at least five days on every running minute of the film. The documentary is 70 minutes long and will have its premiere screening at the University of Bath on the evening of Thursday 15 March 2012. A 200-seater lecture theatre has been booked and improvised jazz music will be played by a legendary rock guitarist to welcome people as they sit down. I am pleased with the film. It is my best shot. 

        I therefore extend my invitation to you, my reader as there might be one seat left. Visit my website www.furnituretodayuk.com for details. My You Tube channel WOODOMAIN includes videos of the film trailer, how it was made and also a short one including the harmonica player Kristof.