DEEPEST DARKEST DREADS

I don’t think it’s going to be a cheery one today, I’m afraid. Be warned. The glumps are persisting and I’m not much fun to be around (if I ever was…). As ever, I probably think about things too much, which is odd really, because one long ago morning when I accidentally drained someone’s heating system when I got up and found only one working tap to fill the kettle with I was told that I needed a more enquiring mind. Against all conventional wisdom, I persisted with my protestations that I don’t generally look into how the heating works in anyone’s house, or hotel or guest house that I just happen to be staying in, and certainly not at 6.30 in the morning when all I want is a brew up to kick start my day, but my words were all in vain and another day got off to a dreadful start that it struggled to recover from. I blame it all on the lack of a decent cuppa myself, but it was long, long ago and probably doesn’t matter any more.

So, where was I…? Ah yes, persisting glumps. I’m beginning to suspect that all the things that I have dreaded over the years are finally manifesting themselves into some kind of awful reality. I remember once being told about the power of words, that you should be very careful what you say, even in jest, because the words will weave and thread and knit, and those words will come back and haunt you for daring to tempt the fates. Perhaps this is also true of our inner fears and doubts. Somehow the subconscious transmits these thoughts into the ether and those things that you so dread, which are floating about looking for suitable victims find you and lock on to you like a dog with its jaws clamped a particularly juicy leg-bone.

It doesn’t matter who you are, your life is full of the things you personally most utterly dread. I’m not talking about the usual everyday fears that trouble us in our relatively affluent society, things like getting seriously ill or having an accident or ending up in abject poverty or homeless, or the kids being taken, or the loved ones being hurt or worse, or even the maniac on the loose or breaking into your home in the night and slaughtering you and yours. (Good grief! With all this angst, how do I even get out of bed in the morning? Well… it’s the insomnia, mostly, from all the worry…)

Those are just the fears that we’ve all got. Well, that is, I assume we all do. Maybe I am the only one who lies awake at night worrying about this stuff. Do you see the risks I’m taking here? All this externalizing might only achieve the result of the world going “Nope! I don’t do that. You’re very strange!” and the laughing and pointing starts all over again in a bright shiny new medium.

It doesn’t matter if you deny it, anyway, because I simply don’t believe anyone who tells me that they have no fear. Everyone has their deepest, darkest anxieties, otherwise the concept of Room 101 (The book version, not the comedy celebrity chat show…) simply wouldn’t work, and we all know it does. I’ve known seriously able ex-military types who’ve faced down the enemy around the world be reduced to jelly by the sight of a spider and otherwise cocksure young bucks to be seen quaking in their trousers at the thought of the slightest form of public speaking. The problem is that the things we fear aren’t necessarily recognised phobias as such, just those things that we’ve heard about and hope will never happen to us. Thankfully, history tells us, most of these things never actually do happen to us and we are statistically generally pretty safe from the dice that the fates roll for us, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief and stop worrying.

And yet…

Recent developments have altered my views on such matters. It now appears to me that in life we must always get lumbered with the things that we most fear. It has a certain inevitability about it. For example, although I’m not going to go into too much detail, one of my own personal dreads involves long-term responsibility with an unpleasant biological slant, and that seems to have become a huge and unpleasant factor in my life nowadays.

For years now, I’ve also had a terrible image that was once put into my head that grew out of a casual comment made decades ago about a someone’s elderly relative having had a face that resembled a field of mushrooms which had to be scraped away. Not a nice image, is it? It still gives me the creeps when I think of it, and I realise, I’ve been and gone and put it into your head too. Sorry about that. As I get older and another one of those strange little growths that seem to come with age pops up, I wonder when and where they’re going to start clustering and whether that this image that so horrified me was actually a vision of my future self. If my theory is correct now it would seem that this too must inevitably come to pass…

Maybe if you always get what you fear most, I should start to fear an optimistic outlook, the big house and a sense of financial security… but it doesn’t work like that, does it? You can’t put the ‘fix’ in, because then you get trumped by the ‘be careful what you wish for’ scenario…

Because in life, the house always wins, and nobody gets out of here alive.