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I was in Scotland this weekend for my Father-in-Law’s 70th birthday – of which more in the next post. He was terribly glum about it. Partly this is because he is Scottish and is therefore genetically programmed to love gloom as moss loves a rock. Today was also my birthday. Not being Scottish, I quite enjoy them and, here is a secret, despite having a miserablist streak of my own, things have pretty much got nicer from year to year.

Over the last 12 months, in particular, writing a blog has made me a lot of new friends. Not just any old friends either, but articulate, intelligent and funny friends. I don’t imagine you can ever have too many of that sort of person in your life but I certainly intend to try to find out. My birthday message, therefore, is “thank you”. Thank you very much. Thank you for your kindness; your patience; the happiness and the fun your company has brought me.

It is customary, however, to waste some of the internet’s spacetime mourning what ageing has taken away. In an effort not to disappoiny, I tried to think of things I said a lot in childhood that I never get to say now. Long gone, for instance, are jokes about “Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen” with punchlines that, thrillingly, involved “bogies” (or “boogers”) but on reflection made no sense of any kind. I have also had few opportunities in Court to say “He who smelt it dealt it! …. er … My Lord”.

After careful reflection, my top three “forgotten phrases” are, in reverse order:

(1)    “But I DON’T WANT TO!”

I used this a lot as a child with mixed success. I was irrationally convinced that if only I could make it absolutely clear to my parents that they were going against my wishes they would immediately repent. I would sorely love to try this with P, but frankly she is scarier than my Mum and I just don’t dare.

(2)    “Hello Mrs Bloom, can Julian come out to play?”

Any afternoon of ritual punching of one’s friend and throwing conkers at his head had to be preceded by a formal entreaty delivered to their parent at the doorstep. Often as not, the friend was to be seen hovering behind the parent hoping for the nod. The request was delivered in a standard formula which all parents drummed into their children (the ultimate fear in those days being not that your child might be carried away by a murderer but that your neighbours might think them impolite).

I get the impression that this has now died out altogether and that play takes place solely at something called a “play date” and that rather than sitting smoking and drinking booze in the kitchen, parents are busy implementing play plans with high educational content.

(3)   “FIIIIIIINNNNNNNIIIIIIIISSSSSSSHHHHHHHEEEEEED”

“Finished”  was a euphemism for “I have stopped shitting now Mum and would be much obliged if you could hurry along and wipe my arse for me”. I have experienced a slight reluctance in including this entry because I have an uncomfortable feeling that in a few years’ time I will be shouting this out again in a care home in Clacton.

It seems that terrorists are trying to kill us again. It must be my fault as, what with the bad weather and all, I may have momentarily let my vigilance slip. Just a little. The car bomb was left outside a nightclub in Central London. The car was filled with petrol, gas cylinders and nails. In the masturbatory fantasies of the would-be bomber, the blast would have burst through the plate glass window of the “Tiger Tiger” club, engulfing the dancers in a wave of flame, shards of glass and nails.

Attacks against nightclubs have long been planned. When the Bluewater bombers were caught it became known that one of them had proposed an attack on the Ministry of Sound nightclub on the basis that it was full of “slags” and that “no-one would be able to pretend they were innocent”. It is worth pausing and thinking through that last sentence. My instinct is to think that peace and understanding is possible if we all make an effort to understand other peoples’ points of view but I will confess to having some considerable difficulty getting my peanut around this one.

Apparently God is the kind of guy who thinks an evening in a nightclub is punishable by death and that violence and murder is nothing more than the crypto-judical delivery of a “just measure of pain”. Tearing the flesh from people whilst watching from afar is, I gather, the sort of praise-worthy act that makes a hero of a pathetic little tosspot with a death complex.

I think that sometimes one is best measured by one’s enemies, in which case I am pleased to offer myself as the enemy of any person, whatever their culture, race or religion, who thinks murdering others is a path to glory. I know what you fear; what you cannot abide; it is something beautiful, strong and simple – women dancing. You fear that beauty, fun and joy like a cockroach fears the light. It makes you and your shrivelled black heart irrelevant.

Join the resistance and dance.

When I first went up to University, I was allocated rooms on a 16th Century staircase. Over the intervening centuries it had been plastered and patched as the moment required with no regard for aesthetics and little for utility. The doorframes had sagged and twisted so that each sported an inner and outer door (the latter known as the “oak”) cut to the irregular shapes needed to match the opening. The floors were bare boards; worn and sat on beams that had shrunk and moved so much that walking across a room was like crossing a ship’s deck.

Each set of rooms opened off a little corridor which was cool and dark in summer and cold and damp in winter. At night, the unlit corridors were ominous. I don’t believe in ghosts, but at times I found it comforting to remind myself of that under my breath. Stood with my back to the corridor opening my door in the early hours, it was easy to imagine that any second I would hear the usual creaking of the boards turn into the sound of feet pounding – an unseen person running towards me. I would race to open the door.

Halfway through the first term, the weather turned cold. The early evening pattern was already established: a miserable dinner in the hall, sat on benches and then continuing the conversation first in the snug college bar and then, later, in each others’ rooms over instant coffee. It was during those early weeks that I turned into a nocturnal worker. It’s a pattern I still follow. The morning became a stranger to me and essays were produced by a process of procrastination followed by crisis and early hours scribbling.

On this particular evening, the night was still. I had left the evening conversation early and taken my work to my room. One by one the other inhabitants of the staircase clumped their way to bed and by two in the morning it was silent but for the sound of the occasional car out beyond the college walls. I worked using my desklight – the rest of the set was in darkness, which I found tended to avoid me becoming distracted. At around 2:30, I heard a noise of a foot on the boards in the corridor and stopped working. Just one step. I realised I was holding my breath.

Perhaps 10 seconds passed without any further noise, so I sighed out the air in my lungs and went back to my essay on Roman Law. Then I heard two more steps. I tensed. Another step. Whoever was in the corridor was only a yard from my door. I sat as quietly as I could, trying to persuade myself I was hearing things. Then two more steps. They were at my door and they knocked.

As clearly as I have known anything I knew I did not want to open the door. It was foolishness of course; there were no ghosts, nor was a psychopath likely to have scaled the walls to pay me a visit. Nevertheless, I sat at my desk suddenly feeling more a boy than the young man I had been holding myself out as being and, most of all, very very afraid. I got up and crept to the door. Standing close to the wood, I could hear breathing outside. I stood still. They knocked again. I decided to stop being afraid and reached up and opened the door.

Standing in the corridor was someone I am going to call Stephen. Stephen was a history student: an intense man who sat at the edge of the circle of my new friends. He was a fiercely intelligent student and spoke, not with a stammer as such, but with a hesitation followed by an eruption of words. I caught his eye and found him staring at me from the shadow beyond my threshhold. He spoke first. He asked me if I would talk with him. I looked back to my desk and the work crisis but politeness forced my hand and I invited him in. I turned on the lights in the room, hoping that it would make the whole scene resolve into something friendlier; something less strange. I made him tea and he asked me a series of questions about God. As I answered he would sit, looking anxious and on occasions mumbling. I could not catch what he was saying but I could sense that most of it was dismissive and uncomplimentary. After an hour or so he stared at me again and said:

“I wish I was like Nietzsche: I wish I had the courage to be insane”

This seemed an absurd thing to say. Not just absurd but somehow self-regarding and self-piteous at the same time. It was keeping me from my work.

I told him that I did not think insanity was elective, nor did it take courage to acquire – it took courage to cope with. I told him I didn’t think mental illness was romantic. It blights lives and brings misery. He angered. His anger was instant, white hot and then gone in the time it took his emotion to flicker across his face.

He thanked me for the tea and left. I closed the door behind him and heard his slow steps down the corridor, past the staricase and out into the quad. I finished my essay and woke just in time for lunch. As I shuffled along the queue with my tray, a friend appraoached me: “Have you heard what happened to Stephen?”. I felt a sudden dread. “He went crazy last night. He smashed up his room, attacked a porter and was taken away by men in white coats”. Oddly, my first thought was to marvel at the fact that the cliche was true: there really were men in white coats and they really did turn up to take you away. My second thought was to feel I had had a lucky escape and only then did humanity and a proper concern for Stephen’s wellbeing assert itself.

We went to see him a week later. He sat mumbling, hands trembling, in his shared room. He had a black eye. He explained that he had racially abused his roommate, who had felt obliged to punch him. This time Stephen was not staring. He was not holding anyone’s eye. I remember thinking that now we were adults, problems were suddenly bigger. At school people got flu or broke up with girlfriends, they did not develop psychoses. The world sudddenly seemed big, and empty and locked from the outside.