Well, that was a weird night. You’d have thought someone had looked inside my head and decided “Right. Enough with pontificating. Now you get the practical test.” A lot of the stuff that I’ve been pondering over the last month came up in all sorts of odd ways last night. The entire night felt faintly surreal.

Topic #1: Humans are scum.

So Stu, Andrea, Joseph and I are swapping relationship horror stories, because, y’know it seemed like a laugh at the time, and I come to the conclusion that I will never, ever understand how people can think that it’s normal or acceptable to treat other people like this. It really can’t be a minority of people who can see that there are just some things that you do not do, can it? I mean, I can’t imagine any of my friends pulling the kind of crap that we were talking about. What really chilled me about a couple of the stories is that these were people that had apparently seemed trustworthy.

I dunno how I’d handle it, were something like that to happen to me. I mean, I’ve had people treat me like shit, and like everyone else, I’ve had my heart broken. But I’ve never had someone I trusted stick the knife in and twist. I’ve had people I trusted do it to my friends and leave me to pick up the pieces, and that was shitty enough, thanks – even aside from what it did to the person they did it to, it left me wondering about how I could have trusted such a complete shitbag, and what the fuck was wrong with my judgement. And that was when I wasn’t the one with the sucking chest wound as a result.

I’ve been pondering the obligations that trust places on a person lately, because I’m taking yet another crack at writing that love story. On the one hand, it’s unreasonable to expect people to deny themselves in order to make another person happy. In a perfect world, it wouldn’t be, but sadly, we’re only human. On the other, if someone puts their trust in you, they’ve made themselves very vulnerable to you, and it’s incumbent upon you to do your damndest to make sure that they don’t get hurt as a result. If that means you don’t get everything you want out of life: tough. Life sucks, get a hat. Yeah, sometimes it really is inevitable – if you can get through life without hurting anyone, you’re very, very fucking lucky, or just simply not human. But you can do your best to minimise the hurt. You can put what you really want on pause for a while, in order to do what you have to do gently. Most importantly: you can have the courage to be honest and forthright. Make no assumptions about others, and don’t allow them to make them about you. Maybe you won’t always manage it, but you can give it your best shot. 100% achievement is not required

Isn’t it nice to be able to theorise like that, when you don’t have to shove it up against the harsh reality of the world? I have no idea how well I do in applying that sort of thing to my own life – I hope I do OK, but I’m always suspicious of someone that claims to be nice, or to not tell lies, or any of the other usual self-aggrandising “I’m a nice person, you can trust me” shit that people come up with in a relation to stuff like this. It smacks of both arrogance and self-deception. Anyway, enough on this subject. Humans can be thoughtless arseholes, and it’s really bad. We ought to try and do better. End.

I’ve just found out that my ex-fiancee, Ellie, has just finished her (Biology) degree, got an excellent mark, and is now looking for places to do a PhD. This news makes me happy – she’s very bright and deserves to go far in her subject. She was the one that convinced me that science wasn’t the dull, dull stuff I’d been taught at school, but was vibrant, fascinating and utterly marvellous, for which I owe her a massive debt of gratitude. She also managed to convince me that history was interesting, too, after a slew of teachers had reduced it to dull dates and political movements. (I have an almighty chip on my shoulder about the way I was taught some subjects in school, now, although no-one has yet succeed in my challenge to make me interested in geography…)

I’m currently reading Age of Bronze and have just finished Surely You’re Joking, Mr Fenyman. The odds are pretty good that I’d never have looked at either of these books had it not been for her bullying me into sitting down and reading some of the books she owns. Mind you, she also forced me to watch both Pride and Prejudice and Titanic several times, so y’know, it all balances in the end.

What leaves me slightly saddened about all this is that I didn’t hear it from her, but from a mutual friend, in passing. I mean, yeah, I know we’d have been a disaster as a couple, long term. Yes, and all those other cliches that people trot out to explain why a relationship didn’t work, and convince themselves that it’s all for the best really. Bullshit. I’ve no way of knowing. It didn’t work out, and that’s an end of it. But anyway, this news kind of drives it home how we’ve manged to drift apart – we’re at opposite ends of the country, and haven’t spoken in something like six months.

I kind of regret that, just like I regret losing touch with so many of my friends up there.

But life moves on, I guess.

God, it’s hot. I hate weather like this – it makes me lethargic and useless. Give me something chill and fresh, and I’m full of life and vigor. In summer, I hibernate – my brain shuts off, and even reading takes up more energy than I have to spare. I hate it. I hate being asleep by half ten because I simply haven’t the energy to do anything else.

Why haven’t we invented climate control yet? I want it to be fucking snowing! I might be able to get something done, then.

Two weird things happened to me last night. One, I watched The Avengers. Yes, the movie. The really bad one. I don’t know why I did it. Two, I not only remembered what I dreamt, but it was deeply bizarre. It wasn’t actually a dream. It was a replay of a morning in my life, from January 1997, while I was living in Edinburgh. Like, a complete one, as far as I recall. I woke up and felt totally disoriented, like the last 4 and half years of my life hadn’t happened. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should be in The Living Room in Edinburgh, spending money I couldn’t afford on cheering my girlfriend up. (And wondering where my hair had gone…)

I haven’t thought about that morning in years, and suddenly, it’s all there, like it’s happening right now and I’m waking up discovering that there are cresent marks on my palms from where I had my fists clenched in my sleep and and was digging the nails in, like I did that morning. I’d put it down to doing that in my sleep, and the sensation triggering the memory, except that the clenched fists happened quite late on in the morning, and I recall dreaming a lot of what lead up to them beforehand…

So I went out early on Saturday morning for coffee with an old friend in who happened to be in town for the day. Turned out that that was literally all we had time for. One coffee. Fifteen minutes to briefly catch up with an old friend, and off we we went, our seperate ways.

But I found out why they were in town. To see a heart specialist. They had to rush off to get to their hospital appointment, hence the rather hurried coffee.

So I wound up sitting there in Borders on Charing Cross Road, reflecting on this. That’s (possibly) four people I know with serious heart problems (excluding my Dad). Not one of them is over thirty. Two of them are younger than me. One of them needs a transplant. Heart and Lung, in fact. I haven’t spoken to her in over a year, something that leaves me feeling deeply, deeply shitty. The other two have been treated, and should be more or less fine.

The friend I was with Saturday morning, it’s too early to say. It might turn out to be nothing, or it could be something serious, but it’s sobering to realise that your friends may have serious health problems. It also leaves me wondering: why is it that it’s always the nicest people that these things happen to?

What is it about self-loathing that makes it so easy and appealing? I ask this having just watched one of my best friends dump out one of the most unpleasant pieces of self loathing I’ve seen in a very long time on a message board we both frequent.

I mean, I’m not exactly without my own neuroses, but generally it takes a prolonged hammering at my mental state before I become sufficiently off kilter as to really give in to them (like, for example, several months of self-inflicted stress… :) ). Most of the time, I’m well balanced enough to know that I’m probably not as [stupid/malformed/unpleasant/insert other self-pitying adjective in here] as I think I am on a bad day. In my experience, it’d be a great thing if everyone woke up to someone telling them that they’re better than they thing they are. Mind you, most people refuse to listen when they’re told that. We get shy, get embarrassed and in that state kind of forget that we’ve been complimented, or assume that the person saying nice things is either insincere (and wants something) or is in some way mad or defective. Basically, find an excuse to ignore the fact that they’ve been told something that doesn’t fit in with their view of themselves. God alone knows why. Frankly, I don’t get enough compliments to feel I can ignore the ones I do get…

Yet when someone deals our ego a blow, we listen. Much, much too hard.

Example: a little over eighteen months ago, I asked someone I knew out. She laughed in my face. I mean literally. The sensible reaction, and the view that I now hold is that she was, at best, a tactless and thoughtless cow, and frankly, I’m very glad it never went anywhere. Her view of me is no more accurate that my own most negative imaginings. Basically: fuck her, and the horse she rode in on.

The reaction I had then, on the other hand, was not so sensible, and involved an awful lot of misery and bitterness. Took me fucking ages to believe that I might actually be worth dating again (and of course, someone who doesn’t believe they’re worth dating doesn’t exactly do themselves any favours when it comes to letting people to persuade them otherwise).

I am, unsurprisingly, doing better these days, and lately, better than I have in a long time, having finally come to the realisation that self-deprecation is nor more attractive (or accurate) on me than it is on other people, and thus made an effort to stop doing it, both in terms of what I say out loud, and what I think inside my head. But given that it’s the same friend who made me realise this that is vomiting out self-loathing in public, I wonder why it is that they can see that my neurotic whinging is just that, and get really fed up of it (not that I blame them, mind you), and yet their own is apparently justified and accurate.

The moral of the story: No-one can convince you that you’re great but you. But y’know, other people might help, if you listen to them.