Mamma Mia!

Went to see Mamma Mia.

Don't.

The Blues

Depression didn't run in our family. It was something that happened to other, less reliable people. It was for cooks and dailies to 'have nerves', not us. If someone felt a bit down it wasn't done to show it.

So when our daughter got it - or rather when we recently realised that this was what she had, and not 'hormones' or adolescent angst or 'going through a phase' or sheer bloody-mindedness - it was a steep learning curve. One we're still coping with.

I think...I hope...that we're doing all right. We somehow avoided, by luck or instinct, coming out with the usual knee-jerk stuff; "Pull yourself together, get a grip, we all go through it, think how lucky you are". When harshly treated we've bitten back the waspish rejoinders that reflect our own inadequacies. We've enlisted the help of a private counsellor/psychotherapist (there is at least a six month waiting list for help on the NHS, even though the potential severity of outcome for depression makes knee and hip surgery seem as crucial as hopscotch). We've seen off the jejune, chauvinistic half-wit who was her employer, and we've tried to provide a lazy, stress-free summer at home, with chocolate and entertainment and riding and laughter and no need for deadlines or decisions.

The thing about depression is that it is not a matter of personal choice; it is almost beyond an individual's control. It is an internal battle of self against self. A Sisyphean struggle, where luck and life erode progress like tide on a sandcastle. Where events and people conspire to undermine. Which no one who has not experienced it can fully understand.

Depression is probably not the result of a chemical imbalance, as is often suggested, but its characteristic cycle of emotional arousal and disappointment wreaks real clinical and hormonal changes which cannot be shrugged off. Cortisol and noradrenaline levels increase; seratonin levels fall; there is a debilitating imbalance between REM and deep sleep. All the manuals warn that the worst outcome is suicide.

K tried to go it alone, with the help of meditation and yoga and shedloads of resolve. For a long time she never even told us, as she cried in her room. She was determined to avoid taking any drugs, but although the therapy helped it wasn't enough on its own, and she eventually changed her mind. The notes for the drug she has now been prescribed include a long list of potential side effects. Chillingly heading the 'likely' side effects is 'suicide'. (This is a likely side effect?)

The treatment package seems to be working. There are still bad days, but these are fewer and less extreme, and the daughter we missed is on her way back to herself and us.

In the last fifty years depression has become ten times more common. Nobody knows why, but this is too large and too fast an increase to be genetic, so it must be related to changes in society and lifestyle. (Me, I'd put the UK's intensive exam regime in general, and AS levels in particular, high on the list of suspects.) Since this has happened to us - and it doesn't just happen to the sufferers, but to their families as well - it seems almost every family we meet has some experience of depression. They've just kept quiet about it.

Whatever, if you do come across someone suffering with depression, whether friend, colleague, employer or employee, unlike them you have a choice; your response can be part of the problem or part of the solution.

How to Make Out with Girls

When I was about seven, Fate threw me a hint that might have been life-changing. Like a fool I forgot it, and it went away.

It happened at a party in a big house, full of unfamiliar furniture and unfamiliar children. I think it was near Thame. In fact, I think it belonged to some people named Viney, connected with the book printers Hazell, Watson and Viney.

I was wearing my kilt, which my mother must have judged appropriate wear for Christmas in Buckinghamshire. We played sardines and postman's knock, and got wildly over-excited. After, there was a meal with jellies and little sausages skewered on sharp sticks.

I am not sure how the business with the cocktail sticks started. I think some of the boys began prodding each other with them. Perhaps being prodded in a kilt gave me the idea, but I started chasing the girls in their party frocks, threatening to prick their legs. As a shy, socially retarded child, this was uncharacteristic; I think I must have been pretty high on jelly.

Anyway, something puzzling began to happen. The girls shrieked and fled, as one might expect, but their eyes shone and I saw little breathless clusters of them laughing and pointing me out to each other. All of a sudden, I was a success. It was a new feeling.

When my mother came to collect me, the hostess made some remark about me having been the life and soul of the party - a comment which may have reflected tight-lipped irritation, but which I took at face value.

Sadly, I didn't absorb the secret that had been revealed - that most girls prefer a brash bastard to a prim goody goody any day. If I had only taken that in, I might have been poking sticks at girls' legs throughout those arid teenage years.

World Exclusive

Adam Redmond-Hall, bass guitarist with knock-out South-East rock band Cabaret Doll, caught on camera in casual clothing at a secret location last night.

Martin Stephenson and Helen McCookerybook

I came across this You Tube clip of two punk legends, Martin Stephenson (the Daintees) and my nice cousin Helen McCookerybook (Chefs, Helen & the Horns). Helen appears half way through the clip for the second song...looking somehow empty-handed without her guitar.

The Man Who Lives in the Woods

The man who lives in the woods knocked on the door yesterday. He is of a type that's becoming rare in Kent now; born and bred in the countryside, with a grizzled face, an ancient cap and a head-down demeanour, as if he doesn't have much self-esteem. He wouldn't be too proud to use bailer twine to hold his trousers up (but then, nor would I).

He had lost his cat again, and wondered if we'd seen it. Last winter when it went missing we managed to catch it and carried it back to him and his wife through the woods in the rain, in a recycling box.

In the course of the conversation he mentioned - diffidently, as though it might be of passing interest - that his wife had died last month. They had been married for 51 years. She hadn't been feeling all that well, but neither of them thought she was all that ill either. Then, one morning at breakfast, she said, "Hold my hand." And he took her hand, and she died.

Then he said something that rather took me aback. "I've buried her in the garden," he said. "My son is there too. That way I can tend them easy."

"That's nice," I said.

After we'd promised to keep an eye out for the cat and he had gone, I went online, and sure enough you are allowed to be buried in a garden. Or almost anywhere for that matter, as long as the hole is deep enough, and you don't affect a water course, and you have the landowner's permission, and the neighbours don't object. You don't even require a coffin, although you do have to keep a register saying which of your friends and relatives are buried, and where. But apparently having relatives buried in the garden may reduce the value of your property by up to 20%, and could put buyers off. Some people are so picky.

You can also be disposed of at sea, although only a dozen or so people in the UK choose this option every year, because there are Rules, and just tipping your loved ones off the side of the Dover-Calais ferry won't do. (I've never been comfortable with the phrase, 'burial at sea'. It conjures up an image of sailors with spades, vigorously shovelling seawater.)

The Social Secretary rather cares for a garden inhumation, although her suggestion that we put her on the bonfire first and then collect up the ashes is not such a great idea. Half the time I can't even get the hedge-clippings to burn, and if we had to relight her over a period of time I'd have to keep checking for hedgehogs.

I admire the funeral arrangements that Meg's friend made for her pet.

Bedtime Story

I once worked with an elegant and statuesque Armenian woman named Mona. She came in giggling to herself one morning. When asked why she explained that she had been saying goodnight to her two sons the previous evening when one of them told her that he was unhappy.

'Why are you unhappy?'

'I'm sad because the boys at school called me a paki.'

Her heart went out to him, and she sat on his bed in the darkness and hugged him. 'You should not mind that they call you that, because they don't know any better. We come from an ancient race that was civilised long before the English learned to eat off plates. We were the first Christian sovereign nation in the world, with our own language and alphabet and culture, and we have survived centuries of invasion and persecution. When they call you that they are acknowledging that you are different, and you should be proud of this difference.'

Her son snuggled down as she tucked him in. 'Thank you Mummy. I feel better now.'

As she got up to leave the room her other son spoke. 'Mummy, I'm unhappy too.'

She crossed to his bed and rested a gentle hand on his head. 'Why are you unhappy?'

'I'm unhappy because the boys at school called me a dickhead.'

'Well that's because you are one,' she said, as she hit him with his pillow.