Under an orange sky

The sky turned orange.  Was this Armageddon?  Was it the result of Brexit, or the fault of the orange buffoon squatting in the White House, as these are the two Modern Social Evils most often linked with catastrophe, usually for good reason?

No, it was the result of storm force winds picking up dust from the Sahara and the wildfires on the Iberian Peninsular.  Thanks to Google, everyone knew this, and so there wasn’t the sort of low level weather anxiety that we would have enjoyed twenty years ago, religious awe that we would have experienced a hundred years ago or primal anxiety and possibly the sacrifice of the Most Unpopular Member Of The Tribe that would have been the result a few thousand years ago.  And in some ways we should mourn the passing of those simpler, if not happier, times, before the Internet spoiled wonder, awe and a primal fear of clouds.

Just because we knew the cause didn’t make things less impressive.  From about two o’clock onwards, the sky did start to go a very odd colour, normally only found in the 80s action films of directors who loved a bit of a tobacco filter.  By three o’clock, it was unusually dark and cars were driving along with their lights on.  It was not unlike that sort of sickly yellow light you occasionally get before a thunderstorm, or in any city where the regime in charge think a climate accord is just another way for the rich nations to oppress developing countries.

It was actually very impressive.  Everyone loves an unusual weather event and even if this one didn’t result in an alien invasion or a rain of badgers, or rain of rain for that matter, it was still odd enough to be unsettling in that creepy fun way when you know the reason for something, but the part of your brain that’s not that long out of the cave is thinking that if this doesn’t end soon, we might have to sacrifice Darren from Accounts to appease the gods and make the sun shine again.

All about ocd...no, that should be OCD, get it RIGHT!

A lot of work is taking place to de-stigmatise mental illness.

This work is taking place on two fronts.

The first is to get people to recognise that mental illness is a real thing and just because the person suffering from this sort of illness doesn’t require one of those fucking mobility scooters to terrorise people with in shopping malls because their Greggs-related-condition makes walking difficult, does not mean it doesn’t exist.

The second front is to educate people about mental illness, essentially, not all people with mental illness are nutters, some are escapologists who wear straightjackets as part of their acts, but most people who suffer from mental illness genuinely need help.  Of course, there are a few people who are just fucking nutters.  Symptoms include reading the Daily Mail and being able to hold forthright views on immigration.  There is no cure.

Alistair Campbell tweets a lot about mental health.  Of course, as a megalomaniac who helped start a war he’s probably an expert and is part of a support network for people who, in another age, would have had an undersea volcano base and a taste for world domination, instead of just a Twitter account, so probably knows whereof he speaks.

There are many flavours of mental illness but by far my favourite is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.  Or should that be Obsessive, Compulsive Disorder?  Damn!  I would Google it but have had my allocated five minutes of internet time today before the Voices started.

The thing about OCD is this, it’s bollocks.

It is.

It really is.

It really, really is.

OCD is such bollocks that the cure for ODC should be a bloke who grabs the person suffering from OCD by the lapels of their no doubt meticulously ironed shirt and bellows ‘FUCKING PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER!’.  I reckon even the bastards at NICE would fund that.

Oh, and please don’t start in about the benefits of OCD.  So, you have a potential flatmate who tells you that they are so clean that they are practically OCD?  Best case scenario, they quietly run a vacuum cleaner over you while you sleep.  Worst case – they are suddenly sole tenant in a flat that is forensically clean.

In my five minutes of Googling, I learned that OCD is all about control and ritual.  Apparently, people who suffer from OCD do things (rituals) to prevent terrible things from happening.

So here’s my question…why is it only preventative?  Why not positive?  Why doesn’t a ritual result in a lottery win?

And here’s the litmus test.  OK.  You have mild OCD.  So does your pilot.  Before boarding a flight, one of you doesn’t do your ritual.  Does the ‘plane crash?

NO!  Of course it fucking doesn’t!  A 747 is not going to be kept aloft because you sang ‘fly me to the moon’ under your breath whilst checking your baggage.

Obviously, we need to take mental health seriously.  Even OCD.  And I do.  Hence…the app!

Because ODC is fucking ridiculous.  Rituals which are, essentially, a profoundly exaggerated sense of self importance, are (serious face) tragic when they affect and afflict the lives of others but are (more serious face) bloody debilitating on a day-to-day basis.

So here’s my idea for an app.

OCD swap.

(Ooh, genius idea, we could get it fronted by Noel, the last 70’s DJ standing!)

OCD sufferers swap rituals with each other.  So, have to say ‘monkey’ 500 times whilst spinning counter clockwise otherwise that reactor you’re responsible for will go tits up…but it’s your daughter’s wedding and you don’t have the fucking time?  No problem, GingerMum1974 has to have her first sip of tea of the day from a mug with the handle turned left.

OCD swap puts NukeDad and GingerMum in touch with one another, he does her ritual, presses ‘done’, she does his, presses ‘done’ and they are both good to go for the day.

And the best bit…neither actually does the other’s ritual!

Why?  Because people with OCD know it’s fucking mental.  But can’t stop it.  But are buggered if they will let it blight other’s lives.

Oh, and checking Facebook every 30 minutes doesn’t make you OCD.  It makes you needy.

Very superstitious

10 October was world mental health day.  The statistic being bandied about is that one in ten people suffer from some form of mental health problem.  More likely the truth is that one in ten people suffer from a mental health problem that has been categorised and so can be diagnosed, the rest of humanity simply has aspects of their personality that they either manage to keep carefully concealed or which have not yet been nailed down in a medical text book.

There was, a few months ago, a discussion about mental health in parliament where a number of MP’s bravely spoke up about suffering from, for example, depression or obsessive compulsive disorder, although I noticed that none of them thought it was necessary to describe themselves as suffering from rampant meglomania.

Raising awareness of mental illness is part of the issue, removing the stigma is another which is why I thought that my idea for OCD Top Trumps was a great one until I was informed by the makers of Top Trumps that this was not only in very poor taste, but also that without a movie franchise to tie the product into, sales were likely to be poor.  I went on to argue that perhaps the solution was to tie the mental health edition into the ‘Top Gear’ brand in some way, as the continuing buoyant sales of Jeremy Clarkson’s paperbacks must surely be the result of a compulsion on the part of the shopper that defies reason.  I have yet to hear back.

While there is certainly work to be done in identifying and combating mental health problems, it’s interesting that the same is not done to try and deal with superstition.  This is possibly because superstition has a much, much better PR and marketing department and even though a fist full of anti-depressants may look colourful, they are unlikely to taste as good as the chocolate available in quantity at the end of the month.

31 October is that celebration of superstition, Halloween, and as well as the only thing more fun than chocolate, which is themed chocolate, appearing next to the advent calendars in the seasonal aisle, pumpkins have started popping up at the grocers.

Was there ever a vegetable as sinister as the pumpkin?  This is, of course, because of the connotations the vegetable has with Halloween.  Prior to the fashion of carving the pumpkin, the only time the British public had to deal with a terrifying orange face was when (insert name of television personality with fake tan addiction here) appeared on our screens.  There is something genuinely unsettling about a vegetable that is grinning at you in a knowing way and that has extended to pumpkins being rather unsettling when they are in their as yet uncarved state, it’s like they are hiding something.  Scary.

Of course the British took to the pumpkin head.  The British love superstition, we love superstition so much that we even call pubs ‘The Green Man’ - and naming a pub is more important than choosing the right name for your first born, because while little Clit can always use his middle name when he grows up, nobody is ever going to drink in the ‘White Van and Wanker’.  Superstition connects us with our heritage, that’s why people have a horse shoe above their door and shove cats up ladders or something.

And possibly why so many versions of the Green Man are available in plaque form as decorations for the outside of the home.  And hats off to the manufacturer, they have not compromised in the slightest - the look they have gone for is a pagan woodland spirit, and not even the sort who would safely lead a lost traveller back to the path, but rather one who would take you by the hand and lead you to the dark heart of the forest.  Because if you think a gurning vegetable is frightening, that’s as nothing compared to a bloke with leaves growing out of his ears.

We’ll never get rid of superstition, even if we wanted to the pumpkin growers and confection manufacturers would conspire to keep it going.  Or am I being paranoid?

Could it be magic?

What image does the phrase ‘papal audience’ conjure for you? Possibly you have an image of some Francis Bacon type pope sitting on a throne in a room lit by flickering firelight and intrigue, with plenty of gothic woodwork for scheming cardinals to hide behind, while you, slightly off your tits from incense inhalation, do ring kissing and ask that he use his influence to shave you a couple of years off your time in hell. Or have your views been coloured by too many ‘an audience with…’ tee vee specials, and you expect a few anecdotes and finishing on a song?

For the parents of Madeleine ‘Maddie*’ Macann, it meant standing with the crowd, waiting until the ex-nazi in question shuffled down the line to them and then a few words and the blessing of a picture of their missing daughter. On the one hand, the ‘tapas two’ must be feeling pretty grim, on the other hand - think what that picture will fetch on eBay.

I’m not sure exactly what the audience with the Pope was meant to achieve. My only thought was, if you wanted to understand the mind of a paedophile, you’d do a lot worse than speaking to a bloke who runs an organisation chock-full of them. It’s a bit like Clarice Starling going to see Hannibal Lector in ‘Silence of the Lambs’ to gain some insight into the mind of a serial killer…and a serial overactor in the form of Anthony Hopkins.

The Pope apparently blessed a picture of the little girl. What this is supposed to achieve I’m not sure - it smacks of sympathetic magic straight out of the dark ages. If they are resorting to that, are they also visiting a voodoo priest who is jamming nails into the photofit of the suspected abductor?

* The family are at pains to call the little girl by her full name, the tab tabbie tabloids prefer to use the abbreviated form - possibly because they can save space to put it in bigger print, possibly because they can save space to advertise their ‘save three tokens and get a free can of lager’ promotion. Probably because they realise that their readers will only hear family members addressed by their full names on rare occasions - christenings, weddings and court appearances. For funerals the shortened version is preferred, as it’s far more economical to have a wreath spelling out ‘nan’ than ‘beloved grandmother’.