The Daily Novel

NBC has received some flak for publishing the video made by Chou Seung-Hui in interval between his first two murders and while planning the orgy of killing which followed. There is clearly a danger that it might encourage copy-cat murders by some other disgruntled American college kids. There does appear to be evidence that Chou was inspired, if that is the right word, by the Columbine spree killer.

My own view is that NBC was 100 per cent right to go ahead. Cynics will say that they just did it to raise their ratings. Like the reader who commented on my blog yesterday on Duncan Campbell’s exposure of Operation Ore. That reader told me that one of Campbell’s informers has since been arrested which indicates that his information may have been wrong. Thanks for that information. But the reader then adds this comment.

Still a story like that does help to sell a few more newspapers.

Which attacks the story by impugning the motives of the story teller. Now Duncan Campbell has to pay the rent like all of us, so obviously he writes partly for monetary reward. But it is pretty clear to those who know him, and those who read his work, that he is driven by all sorts of passions and beliefs in what he does. And that monetary gain ranks pretty low on his list of priorities.

Similarly the wall to wall coverage the Virginia tech killings have received is an entirely appropriate response. Most people do want to know the details of mass killings, in the hope that there may be lessons, which will help the police, teachers and the medical profession, to identify potential killers. And most people want to try and understand what drives a human being to extreme violence. We want to understand why devout Christians and Muslims kill on behalf of faiths based on love and non-violence. And with those killers who are driven by their own personal grudges we want to find out whether they were mad or bad.

Journalistic organisations should not just pass on such material to the police and let them decide what to do with it. Particularly in this case, where there is certainly room for doubt about whether the police response was fast enough to deal with the situation.

Andrew Marr came to the same conclusion in an article in the Daily Telegraph.

One of the endless problems of journalism is the awful, big event which is basically resistant to analysis, as in the Virginia university massacre. Rightly, any newspaper or TV organisation thinks it should show respect, and “proper news values”, by describing the killings and the killer at some length. But it’s also one of those stories which, frankly, tells us absolutely nothing about the human condition we did not already know, and has nothing to say about life here in Britain.

Some of Marr’s reasoning in this paragraph is distinctly woolly. Far from being ‘resistant to analysis’ such events benefit from analysis. There was an excellent article in The Independent by a criminologist, explaining that most spree killers are loners and contrasting them with serial killers.

There is another good bit of analysis by an American psychologist, Dr Lillian Glass, on her web site. She uses the evidence in the video, Chou’s attempts at fiction and the reports of his behaviour by his class mates in an attempt to understand why he did what he did.

Former classmates of the grade school he attended reported that he was picked on, pushed around and laughed at over his shyness and the strange way he talked. In fact some of his former classmates when he attended middle school recalled Chou getting picked on whereby children would push him down and laugh at him.
One former middle school classmate was quoted as saying “He didn’t speak English really well and they would really make fun of him.” –Other classmates recalled how Cho was pushed around and laughed at because of his shyness and the mumbly way he talked, and his awkward attempts to strike up a conversation.

Glass builds up a convincing case that Chou was a victim of bullying. This is a much less comforting analysis than saying he was mad or bad. It reminded me of how resistant I was to the picture of children painted by William Golding in his Lord of the Flies when I read it about fifty years ago. I did not want to believe that children left to their own devices could behave so nastily.

But of course they do. Glass may not be right. But if she is Andrew Marr is wrong. This incident in far off Virginia has something to say about life in Britain, where teachers are worried about an increase in bullying behaviour amongst schoolchildren. And those of us who remember Dunblane cannot believe that what happened at Virginia could only happen in America.

Acoording to an investigation by Duncan Campbell, extracted in the Technology section of this morning’s Guardian, the police have been targeting the wrong people. The investigative journalist has gathered a vast pile of evidence in preparation for acting as an expert witness to help those accused in Britain’s biggest ever computer crime investigation.

Operation Ore was launched on the back of information supplied by the Americans. They supplied the names of over 7,000 British residents who had signed up for a Texan porn site, Landslide.com. Campbell’s investigation has found, for instance, that details on the Landslide computers included those from no less than 54,348 stolen credit cards. The full story is quite complex but Campbell has found ample evidence to back his conclusion that the criminals rate much higher on computer expertise than the police.

Well over 5,000 people have been investigated in this probe. Thirty-nine men have kiled themselves under pressure of the investigation. We shall never know whether some of them were innocent. But this investigation was not worth the thousands of pounds spent on it, because it has never been established that the the guilty ones - that means those who actually did sign up to the porn site - were pedophiles or in any way a danger to the public.

One of my oldest friends was targeted in the first months of this investigation. The police came at the crack of dawn (why was that necessary?) and carried away his computer. My friend admitted to the police, his family and friends that he was guilty of downloading the offensive pictures on to his computer. He immediately resigned from his job, because he was a university lecturer and knew that there was bound to be publicity and that this might harm the university. His resignation was accepted and he has not worked since then.

Despite excellent character witnesses he was sentenced to four months in prison. He did not kill himself. He served his term and resumed his life with his one and only partner, who is also a friend of mine.

Their ‘marriage’ has lasted since 1968. And since I have kept in touch with them since then, I know that it has been a happy marriage. Much happier than the marriages of several of my other friends, who have gone on to other partners.

So, I am pretty sure, that if my friend had been heterosexual, it is entirely likely that he would have received a suspended sentence.

There is still prejudice against gays in Britain. And the media and the universities help to fuel this prejudice. Not least when they deny its existence.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am very pleased that my own university, City University, has appointed the first openly gay Vice Chancellor of any British university. Malcolm Gillies is due to take up post next September.

I am hoping, in my ever optimistic way, that he will address the obstacles that still face gays in Britain in 2007. It needs someone of courage to make sure that universities advance knowledge and combat prejudice. And City needs a Vice Chancellor who will nurture its journalism department. And encourage them to combat the homophobia which is so rampant in many sections of the British popular press.

So that’s my rant. But I minded to end this polemnic on a different note. Although I have not suffered too much from other Robert Joneses, Duncan Campbell, and his namesake, who is also a journalist and a longstanding employee of The Guardian, have been dogged in their careers by public confusion, because they share the same name.

When I was teaching I used them as part of my lessons to my students, stressing the importance of getting names right, and also dealing with the problems of two people who have the same names. Which has in the past landed newspapers with huge libel damages.

In my cavalier way, I described the Duncan Campbell who wrote the article I am commenting on here, as the ‘cycling gay’ Duncan Campbell. I stereotyped the other Duncan Campbell as the lover of Julie Christie, who, as it happens, was one of my celluloid passions.

As I write now, I realise that I do not have documentary evidence for either of these assertions. If I was writing this blog for The Times the libel lawyers would want to cut out these paragraphs for this reason. Since I am only responsible to myself I will take the risk. Either, or both Duncan Campbells, may be sueing me in the courts tomorrow.

But I am prepared to take the risk. Because I think my information was accurate. Because if it was not, I shall find out what the truth was. And because I believe that the interests of students and readers are best served if they have teachers and journalists who are prepared to risk their own reputations for what they believe to be right.

Certainly not in the new Arsenal Emiriates Stadium where I went last night, along with nearly 60,000 others, to see the end-season match against Manchester City. I had a bird’s eye view of the pitch from my seat on the top row of the top third tier of this rather splendid 21^st century temple for those who worship the gods of footballing. And to help me observe what was going on the pitch and amongst the crowd I had a choice of two giant television screens.

The veteran Arsenal fan I talked with thought it was a vast improvement on the old ground up the road. But there were a couple of things that irritated me. Despite the vast improvements in technology the sound system was even more discordant than the tannoy systems that were the norm in my youth. And the stand cover magnified some of the discordant noises, like those produced by the drum of one Arsenal fan who were more concerned to make a loud noise rather than make music. His frenetic beating drowned out the few Manchester City supporters who were singing Blue Moon, from a similar Hollywood stable to the one which gave Liverpool You’ll never walk alone.

There was so much amplified noise that when at least 50,000 people jumped out of their seats and cheered Arsenal’s first goal, it did not seem to raise the decibel level that much. Nothing compared to the full throated roar from the 70,000 Molyneux crowd which greeted a Wolves crowd in the days of Billy Wright and Bert Williams. That could be heard all over the town so that you could calculate the score from the crowd noise. When the visiting side scored the cheers of their supporters was drowned by the nasal groans of the Wolverhampton natives.

I saw no sign at all of hooligan behaviour either in the ground or in the streets coming and going to the match. It may be that all the hooligans have identified and banned. Or it may be that the hundreds of stewards manage to contain the potential trouble makers. Despite the presence of a far more women, children and babies than in my day, it is still a dominant macho culture. Though smoking is banned as soon as you are inside the gates, the consumption of alcohol, which fuels hooliganism, is encouraged. There a large bars at every level. The pints are lined up on the counter, and you cannot buy a half pint. It is a pint or nothing. And I saw huge quantities consumed both before the match and at half time. But strict rules are also enforced. You cannot take your drink to your seat and drink it slowly while you watch the match. (unless you lace your diet coke with a shot or two of rum).

By the time the second half begin I was beginning to join to feel again my own boyhood enthusiasm for the game and participate in the partisan fervour. I was, of course, cheering Manchester City. I have had so love for Arsenal ever since they poached Billy Wright from Wolves to manage their club. And, as it happens, City is the club of the father of my grandchildren, and of my lawyer.

Oh, you want to know about the match? Outside my expertise. But this link will give you the verdict of The Guardian sports desk.

I got quite a jolt at the breakfast table this morning when I turned to The Guardian obituaries section, a full two pages in the Berliner format. There staring me in the face on the lead item, was my own given name, Robert Jones. It was not quite the same feeling that caused Mark Twain to announce that ‘reports of my death are exaggerated’. He actually did have the unusual pleasure of reading his own obituary when some poor sub-editor pressed the button which led to the premature printing from the stockpile of obituaries newspapers always have ready for the deaths of famous people.

I am confident that The Guardian does not have me in their obits stockpile. The Guardian obituaries editor is far too young to remember my exploits as a journalist. For the last twenty-six years I have been a teacher of journalism. So if I do get any coverage in The Guardian it would be in the small section at the bottom of Page Two entitled Other Lives. This morning it was devoted, as it frequently is, to two teachers.

Nevertheless I got a jolt. It is after all MY name. And although these days I write under the name of Bob Jones, most of my written work has been by-lined Robert Jones. And amongst relatives, friends and colleagues quite as many people call me Robert as call me Bob. And I have noticed over the years that when anyone wants to take serious issue with me, they almost always address me as Robert.

But, it is MY name. It is a very common name but despite that I have not suffered much from mistaken identity. Because there has been no really famous Robert Jones during my lifetime. The nearest was Bobby Jones the golfer. But this did not cause any confusion for me. Because I have not been called Bobby since I was at school. And the only time I have been on a golf course has been when I have trepassed there during walking holidays.

So why did The Guardian lead on this Robert Jones in the death slot this morning. The first paragraph discloses it was a quirky decision.

Robert Jones……was the sort of politician of whom the public hear and know nothing, and about whom most journalists could tell them little more.’ The next sent gives a clue as to why he was chosen. ‘He was also one of the most intelligent and practical of recent ministers.

That message is re-inforced in the final sentence:

Jones was a politician who brought quiet credit to the name.

In other words it re-inforces a view that today’s politicians are interested in power and self-aggrandisement. Unlike journalists who are fearless seekers after truth and who never compromise their priniciples and beliefs.

Even if you accept that there is some truth in this, Jones was still a strange choice for The Guardian lead. Jones was not only a Conservative he was one of the first and most fervent apostles of Thatcherism, schooled at the strongly right-wing St Andrews university. Though one of the first Conservative converts to the green cause; he called for a 30 per cent cut in pollution emission in 1984.

There is a much better obituary in Telegraph Online, which gives Jones the number two slot (after Danny Barcelona, a drummer with the Louis Armstrong All-Stars). His support for Thatcher is evidenced by this paragraph.

It was in support of Mrs Thatcher that Jones delivered one of the most devastating put-downs ever heard at a party conference. At the seismic 1981 Blackpool conference, when Edward Heath displayed the depth of his resentment toward his successor, Jones raised thunderous applause by declaring: “Margaret Thatcher and Ted Heath both have a great vision. The difference is that Margaret Thatcher has a vision that Britain will one day be great again, and Ted Heath has a vision that one day Ted Heath will be great again.”

Nevertheless, he had to wait for John Major before he got a ministerial post. Reportedly this was because one of matters on which Thatcher was determined not to turn was:

I wouldn’t tolerate any minister of mine wearing a beard.

The Times, which used to be justly famous for the excellence and number of its obituaries does not give him any space at all. It is not easy to find any obituary in Times Online. There is no tag on the front page. And you have to guess under which heading it appears. Acutally it is Comment. So if you scroll down through the renowned columnists and the leaders you finally get to the Obituary section.

Perhaps this is a by-product of the switch to the tabloid format, which does not lend itself to the solemnities of death. Neither does it lend itself to many other serious articles. Is there not a man of courage on the present Times who will advocate a change to something like the Berliner format? The Times is a quite different paper than The Sun. It does not always follow the Murdoch line slavishly and under the present editor it is vastly improved compared with the paper it was in the early years of the Murdoch ownership.

Went back to bed for three hours. It is a grey morning. The kitchen is without the sunshine that has filled it for the last few days but I gradually realise my depression has entirely vanished. I am humming a tune in my head. One of those religious ditties my father used to tap out on the piano with two fingers. My grandfather, who was not at all religious, used to sing it. He used to ham it up with his powerful voice.

 ‘I see the Holy City there

Right before my bed.’

 So it inspired a giggle rather than a prayer.

 Janet has gone swimming in the pool on the heath, despite the change in the weather. So it just me and the robin, who must have heard me come down. It is all the company I need and he seems to putting on a performance for my benefit. Flying from the bird table to the wall around the centre garden, to the bird bath and then back to the bird table to have a little more breakfast.

 It is almost impossible to describe just how different it feels not being depressed. Yesterday evening I was unable to say a word when one of our neighbours dropped in for a drink. Which is not strictly accurate. I had not lost my voice but there was nothing I wanted to say. I wanted to hide myself away. But I seemed to have lost all will and power of action. So when the judge breezed in I did not make my excuses and actually go away. I just slumped back into an armchair, while I listened to the judge complaining about all the rain he had found in his place in Spain. To think he was paying good money for all that while his empty house had been basking in 80 degree sunshine according to yesterday’s Daily Express splash. (Yes. That was the entire main story on the front page. Even Kate Middleton and Prince William was relegated to a single column on Page One with a very small picture. Ah, the inscrutable news values of the tabloids.)

 Today’s broadsheet headline is ‘Massacre on the campus’, will also certainly be replicated by the tabloids. The killing of 33 students at Virginia Tech touches us all. I don’t want to read about it now in my current mood. It reminds me of the huge contrasts of American life. The culture that produces killers who turn their anger on the students and teachers where they have sat in the classrooms but which also welcomed people like Hannah Arendt.

 According to Wikipedia Arendt ‘raised the question whether evil is radical or simply a function of banality - the tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without critically thinking about the results of their action or inaction.’ She was a German Jew who had fled from Nazi persecution and found a refuge in the United States. She, like several other refugee Jews, was a powerful influence on my thinking while I was living in New York in the early 1960s.

 Arendt’s name was in my head this morning because of an email I received yesterday afternoon from one of the would-be purchasers of my house. He had a question for me: ‘When did the garden get any sun?’ The question puzzled me because when he came on Saturday morning the garden and the kitchen was awash with sunshine. Surely Paul must have noticed?

 He added a postscript to the email. ‘Glad you like Arendt. ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem‘ is one of my favourites.’

 Then, the penny dropped. He had spent much of the time in my house looking at the books on my bookshelves. There are no books on my shelves by Hannah Arendt but this had started us talking and I had told him that I was now writing a blog and he had asked for the web address. And I did mention Arendt in a blog I wrote a few months ago. So instead of getting on with the business of buying himself a house Paul must have spent the rest of the weekend reading my blog. Which all goes to show why I would never have made it as an estate agent.

 This kind of circuitous thinking has taken me away from the Virginia tech massacre and back to what Sunday Express editor Martin Townsend wrote about his manic depressive father. Martin was wrestling with the dilemma about how much weight to give to the well-being of the manic depressive and how much to the safety of society and to the peace of mind of the family of the manic. He writes of the relief his family got when his Dad, Ron, was locked up for three months in the loony bin one summer.

 But from what he writes Ron, although he was a pain to live with, was not in any sense a danger to society. His worst crime of violence was when he trashed a room in the house. In this Ron was like most manic depressives and most of the mentally ill. It is only a tiny minority of the mentally ill who kill.

 At the time of writing this I don’t know whether the Virginia tech killer had a history of mental illness, or whether he was one of the many such killers, who have had nothing in their previous biographies to explain why they suddenly went on a killing spree. Despite the vast volume of research done by experts in psychology and criminology there is no clear consensus about how to identify potential killers.

 Despite this the Blair government is locking up so many people in prisons that we have run out of prison space. Despite this the government is also bringing in a mental health law to make it easier for doctors to section the mentally ill and to thus increase the deficit on the NHS even more. Clauses in this bill, currently in its second reading before the House of Lords, are opposed by the Mental Health Alliance, which represents all the bodies who actually try and help the mentally ill live lives which minimise the harm they do to themselves and others.

 Problems like this cry out for the kind of thinking which Hannah Arendt espoused. She studied under philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. Obviously not bedtime reading for either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. Instead of reflecting on ‘the banality of evil’ they join with the new Christians and the tabloid press in fighting the evil men in Iraq and Iran and pandering to the fears of ordinary people who think they will sleep easier in their beds if their government is tough about locking up the mad and the bad.

 So I should really be re-reading Hannah Arendt. But I have not even found time to read the morning papers yet. Even while I have been writing this short blog I have been interrupted four times by the estate agents arranging yet more viewings of my house.

 Chris has just rung to tell me to meet her in the yellow section of the new Arsenal Emirates stadium tonight for the big match against Manchester City. So my next blog will be about football. Weightier matters will have to wait.

It hit me between the eyes. I felt poleaxed. It was very sudden. It happened some time in the middle of the afternoon.  It was a very physical feeling.  I felt stunned. I had written two blogs earlier in the day.  Now I did not feel capable of writing anything.  The trigger was SlimStats the programme I use to find out how many people are reading this blog. The section labelled search string, which allegedly reveals the words people type in to Google which leads them here, was entirely full of Kate Middletons. Nothing else. So now I know the truth. The readers are reading me because a few months ago I must have written something about the tabloid press obsession with the antics of Middleton and Prince William. It is as if they had gone into the newsagent and asked for The Sun. ‘Sold out, guv. Why don’t you try this instead.’  And out they walk with a copy of The Times, The Guardian or the Daily Telegraph.Kate Middleton is not my type. I find Prince William boring. At least his Dad talks to trees and his mum had the guts to kick over the traces. And I certainly don’t want to read reams of speculation by all the hangers on around the Royal Family about what is going on in their love life. If that is what the public wants to read about I might as well give up.These are thoughts. But the effect on me is entirely physical. I leave my desk and literally slump into the armchair. The telephone goes. It is Chris, the partner of my ex-accountant, who usually makes me feel cheerful since she radiates a zest for life. She has a ticket for the Arsenal versus Manchester City match tonight and wants to know if I can come. I am about to say No when I remember my manners. Football tickets cost as much as the Opera these days. So I say yes but without enthusiasm. I don’t want to do anything or go anywhere.The phone goes again. It is Kathy. She wants to know if I have heard about the latest American mass killer who has shot thirty students. She is watching News 24 and wants to talk to someone about it.  I don’t make much response. She asks if I am tired. I say yes. I feel very very tired. I turn on the television since it is now just after 6 o-clock. Huw Edwards has an even more solemn expression than usual. There are pictures of American sheriffs rushing up in cars to a building.  The pictures and the words seem meaningless and I can’t feel anything at all.This is written the day after. I woke up early, about 5 AM. Still intensely depressed. Still without much energy. But what got me to the keyboard was the realisation that it is a long time since I have had such an initense depression. In the blog I wrote yesterday about the book that the present editor of the Sunday Express has written about the effect on his boyhood of his father’s manic depression,I also mentioned my father’s attacks of the glooms. He would sit in his armchair for days it seemed, inconsoleable. Impervious to the efforts of my sister and myself to joke him out of it.I am still my father’s son.And also I can theorise and speculate and interpret these matters. So I can now see that the main trigger for this depression is the fact that we have still not sold the house. Yesterday I was feeling that it was all my fault. I still have not managed to refelt the sheds so the view of our garden is spoilt. That is a job my father could have done easily. Whereas I am not even competant enough to find a local craftsman to do the job for me.But I can blog. And  what does it matter if my readers are all frustrated Sun fans. What does it matter if what I write about depression is all speculation and rationalisation. It passes the time while hopefully the depression passes. And so just possibly I might manage a cheer at the new Arsenal stadium tonight. This match might even re-kindle my enthusiasm for football. And Wolverhampton Wanderers have a chance of making the play-offs.Now that is a cheering thought.

Our present car is a most beautiful green, which is one reason why we chose it. Our taste must be unusual because although the Honda Civic is still selling well they no longer sell one painted green. Even worse our existing car, made in 1995, is not at all green in the sense that everyone is talking about. Including the environment minister, David Milibrand, who has just been lauding the virtues of inner greeness on his blog site. And, Yes Minister, we are taking your advice.

We are changing our green painted Honda for a blue Toyota Prius, which according to Milibrand rates 102 on the carbon emmissions scale, which is pretty close to his target of 100 by the year 2020.

It is the least we could do, because when we start dividing our life between the bungalow in Dorset and the flat in Gospel Oak, we shall be increasing our annual mileage. The great advantage of the Prius is that when we get into interminable traffic jams in London and near the seaside we shall be purring noiselessly on the electric battery. We shall be causing no more fumes or noise than a milk float or the trolley buses of my youth.

This, I hope, will be the first of our efforts to do our bit for the environment. In Dorset we shall have a place halfway up the hill, where the wind can be pretty strong. Moreover it is one of the sunniest spots in Britain. So I shall start looking at the possibility of wind turbines or solar roofs as soon as we get down there.

I still cannot bring myself to abandon my Yamaha 250 cc scooter. But maybe in a year or two some enterprising manufacturer will produce the equivalent of the Prius in a motor scooter. The only electric scooter I have seen thus far has a top speed well below that of a pedal cycle and well under half that of the BSA Bantam of the 1950s. Going up a steep hill on the Bantam you had to ask your girl friend to get off and walk.

Martin Townsend’s moving story of the effect of his father’s manic depression on his growing up extracted in The Observer yesterday provoked a number of reactions in me. The most important is that it demonstrates how slowly British society has advanced in how it deals with this condition. He raises in the first paragraph the difficult question. How do you balance the rights of mentally ill with the security of the public at large? He notes that in his own career as a journalist (He is currently editor of the Sunday Express) he has had to deal with countless depressing stories about mental illness and says the most infamous ones almost always involve assault, rape or murder.

He goes on to write about the effect on his own boyhood and the lives of his mother and brother of the effects of having mental illness as an unwanted third partner in the marriage. The emotional harm he suffered as a child comes over but despite this he writes, as he says, ‘to demonstrate the peculiar indestructibility of father-son relationships and my mother’s courage.’

In the manic phase Townsend’s father, Ron, tyrannised his family. He flung open the windows of the house whatever the weather, complaining that it was too bloody hot. He played Frank Sinatra records at top volume. On one occasion he turned up at Edgware General Hospital, where he was working as an electrician, and hung a huge wooden cross on the tennis courts. More seriously on one occasion he smashed up everything in the front room of the house.

The last episode led to Ron being taken away to the Shenley Mental Hospital, where he spent the summer in a rural idyll, giving his family a respite from his rants and from his depression. This seems to have been the only treatment Ron got apart from the heavy doses of lithium, which he received regularly, despite the terrible side-effects.

The lithium, which does help some, was not available to the previous generation, of which I was apart. Only a few, of which I was one, were fortunate enough to have the talking therapy, which I discovered when living in New York. My father’s manic depression was never diagnosed and our family coped as best as they could. It was his terrible depressions which most blighted our lives. His manic side, was by contrast, lived through as his eccentricity. Like Ron he showed religious zeal in the manic mode and would play Moody and Sankeys endlessly on the piano.

His family suffered less than my grandfather’s, who had a series of poorly paid jobs and spent his money at the pub where he was in high demand for his story telling talent. When he came back home he often knocked my grandmother about. But like Ron he had some extraordinary artistic talents, though he was never stable enough to use them consistently.

Fast forward to 2007 and most manic depressives are being treated by a mixture of drugs and spells in mental hospital wards. But there is at least a rising number of organisations who are pushing for the talking approach, whereby manic depressives are helped to understand and control their condition. One such is the bi-polar foundation which now has its own web site. Amongst other things they run a feature called the testimony project, through which manic depressives write about how it has been for them.

This site is a help, both for manic depressives and for those who have to live with them. Reading it underlines how manic depressives, although they share a common temperarment are vastly different from each other. They find different ways of coping. What works for some does not work for others. By co-incidence my own contribution to the testimony project has just gone up. This link should take you to it.

Since my last post was called ‘Shattered tranquillity’ I should tell readers that it does not seem that way this evening. There was a knock on the door at 7 PM. Standing outside was a young French woman, who demanded to know, ‘Where was the estate agent?’ I explained that British estate agents did not work at 7 PM and she would have to make do with me to show her the house. There was a slight awkwardness because my wife was out. But she decided she would come in without a chaperon. And she must have realised as I climbed the stairs once again to my attic that I was in no condition to ‘take advantage of her’.

 By the time we got down to the main bathroom she had warmed to the house and I had warmed to her. She extravagantly admired the picture on the wall, which is a print of an American bathing pool scene rather stylishly done which we picked up some years ago. I bathed in her praise. And I realised that there was a huge plus to this house selling business. In the last two days we have had a procession of people who have said how much they liked our house and the things in it.

 Earlier today a couple shown around the house by the estate agent burst into my room and demanded to know who the artist in the house was. There are several of my wife’s paintings scattered around the house, propped up on the dresser and piled up in one of the bedrooms. And several on the wall by my wife’s Uncle Alec, an art teacher and a substantial painter himself. When I first met him, in the 1950s, he was into abstract paintings comprising meaningless little squares of varying colours. In the last phase of his life, when they used our attic as their London pied a terre, he entered a new creative phase. He painted gritty northern industrial scenes around Newcastle, where he had gone to live, and livened them up with colourful inflatables, with which he was obsessed. My favourite features a Coca Cola ballon.

 Two other couples were deciding where in the house to put their grand piano. One had a one hundred year old Steinway grand. They demanded to know who was the pianist in the house. I had to admit that it was my wife and that I could manage nothing more sophisticated than Chopsticks. Our upright piano, inherited from Janet’s mother, stands immediately behind my computer table in the downstairs sitting room where I also work. They decided they would get rid of the work area and install the Steinway there. My wife was delighted. She has been trying to persuade me to go and work somewhere else for years.

 And I indulged in pleasant fantasies of the new owner of our house playing reams of  Chopin to entertain his guests.

 I shall have to wait until tomorrow to discover whether he will actually make a firm offer for the house. I can’t wait to get the deal done so that I can arrange our last party here climaxed by the final rendering of American Pye by my daughter’s friends around our piano. So my tranquillity is not yet fully restored. But at least I feel somewhat less untranquil than I did over the Bank Holiday weekend.

Yesterday morning (I think it was yesterday morning but I am so punchdrunk I have lost all sense of time) the estate agent called. ‘Bad news, I am afraid.’, said Nigel. He was not exagerrating. My buyers have withdrawn. Since for the last three weeks I have been finding all manner of documents for them and answering their detailed queries I was not best pleased. According to Nigel they are withdrawing because they don’t like the idea of being next door to a house owned by Camden Council. If only they had read the detailed stuff I sent them over two weeks ago they would have found out this long ago. And I could have gone on to one of our other prospective buyers.

I was stunned. Particularly since I had just put the phone down after talking to the vendor of the bungalow we are buying in Charmouth. She had cooled down. The previous day she had phoned me in what the psychologists would call a fit of hysteria. The people she was buying from would commit suicide if we did not exchange contracts by the end of March. In her cooled down state she assured me that the people she was buying from were resigned to taking out bridging finance while they waited for our deals to go through. But please would I hurry up my lawyer and the lawyers for my buyers, an old-established gentlemanly firm of Hampstead solicitors.

Now (now being probably yesterday) I had to take some decisive action. So I told my estate agent that I wanted some more buyers around pronto, despite his protestations that this was the Good Friday weekend and so they were going to be closed until Tuesday. But he did call back and say he had arranged two viewers for today.

So we have to tidy up yet again.

Meanwhile I have checked my diary. We accepted the bid from our would-be purchasers on Thursday 1 March. Ever since then I have been bombarded with demands from them for info on one thing or another. Much of it was to do with fact that they were planning to let the house for two or three years, before they moved in themselves, when their children were old enough to run up the road to Hampstead Heath on their own. So they were seeking to spend money remodelling our house to satisfy the bland demands of potential renters. Rather than come to this neighbourhood for the thing the people who live here, of all classes, most value.

It is a neighbourhood, with an annual street party and an annual barn dance. In which neighbours mix together. It is not a middle class ghetto. Although a few of the recent immigrants are people who have bought as a cheaper alternative to life up on the hill in Hampstead. And they are only waiting for more City bonuses so they can move to Reddington Road or Well Walk or Downshire Hill.

Next time we shall try to choose purchasers who want to live here because it is a good place to bring up kids. And because it is extremely tranquil for 99 per cent of the time. And because there are no gates and mostly not even barred windows.

Many of us don’t even have burglar alarms. Including the judge across the road and us. We have both been here for thirty-one years and we have not been burgled. Although occasionally our tranquillity is disturbed by the burglar alarms of some of the newcomers going off.

I shall write more about all this when I have had a chance to reflect. Because my commitment to this neighbourhood, and to my friends here who share such views, is to vibrant inner city neighbourhoods, about which Jane Jacobs has written so eloquently. I knew her when I lived in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s when she was writing her seminal works. 

Despite the headline as I write this my tranquillity has returned. The only noise I can hear is from the dishwasher.