Yesterday though, I received a call from a middle-aged woman and I let her speak.  She sounded a little nervous, the kind who doesn’t expect to be allowed to speak at length without getting interrupted.  So when she does have a free run she gets nervous and speaks herself down blind alleys.  I sort of empathised.  I also let her speak because I wasn’t too busy and, it transpired, what she was talking about actually sounded like it could potentially be of interest.

That was another thing.  They usually didn’t say interesting things.

A full-time permanent role which actually didn’t sound too dull.  An unspectacular salary I’d hope to negotiate up a little.  Suddenly I was flung into an alternative new life of a career; purpose and ambition and people and the egotistical “busyness” I so revile.  Would it be so bad?  Wildly premature thoughts, clearly, but you can’t help them.  Like after a good first date, of which I dimly remember one or two, once upon a time.

Despite investing a lot of time and a small bit of cash in a new venture – a thing I enjoy doing, it’s unsurprisingly not showing any signs of flowering at all.  Meanwhile the main breadwinning activity continues to shrink, my final supplementary client looking like fading out in the coming months, leaving all my eggs firmly in the one basket.

From time to time I engage in idle thoughts of a conventional career: an office, new relationships, colleagues I’d see and be irritated by every day.  Perhaps I wouldn’t really mind it if it was something that would engage me, stuff to get my teeth into, new subjects to learn about in a new industry.  I feel increasingly less towards a technology space which has outgrown me, not that I was ever wildly passionate about it in the first place.  It was better a few years ago when my knowledge was specialised and relevant, but now it feels like there’s too much to know, and everyone has an opinion anyway.  Like your secret favourite cult band had made it mainstream and was now boring.

While being standoffish and acting like I neither needed or was that interested in what the lady on the telephone was talking about, I felt myself getting seduced by the idea.

Just think about it: A Life!  Having a routine.  Not sitting on your flat on your own all day.  Not “medium filter coffee to have in please…   little space for milk…   there you go, thanks a lot” ..being the only thing you say in real life to another person on most days.  The potential to win recognition from people you might even respect.  The ability to completely disconnect for an evening, a weekend, a week.  It would be a more interesting life, wouldn’t it?

But slow down, brain.  Try not to ever hope.  You’ve learned that now.  Hoping is a horribly dangerous business which virtually always ends in disappointment for you.  This lady on the phone might think you’re a prick, your CV might not make the cut, an interview panel might think you’re underqualified or an unmanageable risk.  It’s massively likely that there will be shinier, more assured candidates who smile easily and plainly look better suited.  The same type who you constantly lost out to in your mid-twenties when performing reasonably well throughout countless interviews.   No.  You’ve no chance.

Was it really *you* anyway, anymore?  That imagined new lifestyle; having bosses?  Wouldn’t you flounder and crack under expectations and pressures, quickly grow bitter and resentful?  It would only be more interesting for a brief period before it became habitual, boring, a thing to despise.  Wouldn’t you miss all of that navelgazing time you had and complained about having but sort of liked as well?

If everything just carries on as it is, with the one main client and work which enables you to maintain this generally lazy, undemanding and wholly unsatisfying lifestyle, that’ll be fine too, won’t it?  You’ll just be opening yourself up to another fall otherwise.

Kissing children makes me uncomfortable.  Upon meeting and parting I much prefer to pat them on the head, ruffle their hair or, if it seems as if I must, kiss the top of their head.  Kissing their faces just feels a little ‘icky’ somehow, for me, a bloke with little experience of small people before these particular small people came along.  Of course it’s different if they’re yours or if you have parental experience.

But then, I find kissing grown-ups on the cheek to often be a little icky too.  While I naturally affect breezy confidence when kissing cheeks, in truth I’d prefer if the casual convention for males to kiss females upon meeting didn’t exist at all.

There’s far too much jeopardy, too many variables, stuff that can go wrong.  She doesn’t present a cheek or doesn’t expect or want a kiss – stay the hell away you creep, and just accepts a hug instead, leaving you almost head-butting the back of her head and not knowing what to do with your face, or dangling out into thin air, or kissing her ear, or what if you both turn your head in the same direction and accidentally kiss each other’s lips instead?  All of these things have happened and sporadically return to haunt me.  I remember them far too well.

Even as a child I had weird issues with it; one vivid memory of refusing to kiss “Auntie” Pat on the cheek and throwing a huge tantrum because it meant not getting a slice of my favourite chocolate cake and crying the whole car journey home.

Then there was the time when I’d just kissed one female former colleague and went to kiss a second I knew equally well but was so taken aback by her awful skin I just shook her hand instead, “oh hey you, aahh..”   As her limp, dead, hate-filled hand sat in mine I became the most evil person ever.

So in that moment at the weekend when my brother asked me to strip naked and then dress his daughter, 2, I was stung with no little terror.  We’d been happily playing with a Peppa Pig jigsaw I’d bought her for Christmas when he dumped a pile of clothes down next to us.  Was I cool with this?  I asked myself.  Sure, I mean, I suppose..  erm..   I asked her if she wanted to put some clothes on and my brother poked his head back around the door, asked if I was ok with doing that.  I’d never dressed anyone before, never changed a nappy, kept some discretionary uncle distance.  Actually I wasn’t ok doing it.  I was massively awkward.  I was jelly.  “Er not really,” I confessed.  “I am a bit awkward to be honest.  Don’t want her kicking off.”  I felt clumsy, inadequate, failed, relieved.

There was a similar feeling later that day when we visited extended family discovered in the last few years thanks to the internet.  Our families have met several times since and enjoyed a poetic symmetry.  My mother’s new found half-sister had two daughters, whereas she had two sons; the elder daughter had two children, a boy and a girl, roughly the same age as my elder brother’s two children, a boy and a girl; the younger daughter was single.

At dinner I was enclosed in a corner of the table against the wall and subsequently found it difficult to contribute to wider conversation further down the table, contending with children’s squealing playful noises and my brother’s commanding central seat.  After a few faltering attempts I gave up.  Conversation then moved towards the absent younger daughter who, it was casually mentioned, now had a man.  Terrific, I thought.  Well done.  How dare she shatter the hitherto perfect symmetry of our families?  The bitch.

I rose from the table, went into the garden to play football with a six year old and broke his goalposts.

Nonetheless it was disconcerting, being ejected from that dream – sitting on a train with your good friend of many years, and a stranger, an older suit – and waking with memories of a single day over ten years previously.  Wales versus Ukraine, a World Cup qualifier.  What was it, March sometime, in 2001?  The 17th or 21st: something like that.  You didn’t know why you remembered but your brain often did that, plucked from nowhere with a loose certainty that you were in the right ball park.  You’d been to something in the day, an event?  A training course?  It was at a Halls of Residence, a large one the furthest out of the city, a fair journey across town.  Had you won something?  What was it?  Or made a good impression?

Your mind lurched around for the event or the course or whatever it was, but failed to pin it down.  You’d been in a rush when you returned to the grubby second year student house you shared with two girls and one guy.  You had tickets for the match and were heading into town straight away.

Who did you go with?  Anyone?  Couldn’t remember.  Did you go out in town afterwards?  What was the score?  0-0 or 1-1, something like that.

Why were you remembering this day, you puzzled, now wide-awake in bed, eyes opened in the grey 4am light.  What significance did it have?  What had prompted it?  How was it related to the dream?

Perhaps something to do with the memories jerked by that old picture a friend had posted to Facebook, a group of you.  Your starey creepy piggy eyes looking on from the background; pale complexion, uncertainty and youth.  They weren’t great pictures of anyone.  You never felt you enjoyed university as much as you should have, didn’t have enough fun or success with girls.  Just staring at them and hoping never seemed to do the trick.

You reached for a device on your bedside table and Googled “Wales Ukraine qualifier”, which quickly yielded a Youtube video.  March 28th 2001.  A little later on in the month.  1-1, John Hartson and Andriy Shevchenko the goalscorers.  A supporting cast of average forgotten footballers from recent history: Oleg Luzhny, Darren Barnard.  Ten years can only ever be recent history but it’s a timespan with almost magical powers too.  It can feel both like yesterday and 25 years ago, especially when looking back to such a supposedly formative time.

The next afternoon you went for a walk to areas of studentsville you hadn’t visited for a number of years.  It was silly.  What were you hoping for?  Or was it just a pique of curiosity, just to see if any other memories would be prodded out.  You’re never exactly slow to navelgaze.

You stopped in a small coffee-shop you used to frequent, possibly less as a student and more when you worked for the University.  There were young, fresh-faced, posh-voiced students everywhere.  You were never this fresh-faced, were you?  Those Facebook images suggest otherwise.  Although some had inflated and aged since then, while others had shedded a youthful puppy-fat and looked better now.

The second year street looked the same: anonymous, ordinary, a dowdy net curtain in the front bedroom window, a letting agent sign stuck to the outside.  You remembered your two girl housemates falling out, due in no small part to the thin wall between lounge and bedroom.  One had come back ranting, thinking her friend had been out.  It shouldn’t have been funny but it was.  You remembered walking back drunk with your housemate one freezing cold winter’s night to find his lovely but quite insane girlfriend curled up asleep on the pavement.

Nothing much of any note returned or jogged a memory as you aimlessly paced the dirty, waste-strewn streets replete with skips, half-eaten polystyrene boxes of fast food and discarded mattresses nestled in the front yard.  Shops had turned into other shops, a hypervalue had become a Sainsbury’s; your third year flat had a new front door; intimidatingly beautiful females wafted past, leaving you reeling, as frozen in your admiration now as you were then.

The truth is unspeakable, that much of office work and business isn’t always busy because the majority of people don’t have very important jobs.  What makes important jobs important and coveted is that not many people can do them, or even want to do them at all.  Not that I’m wishing to disrespect all and sundry.  I’m just saying lots of people probably could do most jobs that exist, therefore they’re unlikely to be all that critical in the grand scheme of things – however it may seem at the time.   (You could also legitimately claim that this is line is encouraged by the fact that I’m pretty sure I’ve never done much in my work that I think really matters, and others might think quite differently.  I’ll take the hit there).

But whether busy or (one might suspect) not, plenty of people feel the press of having to affect and even broadcast their busyness.  It’s a bugbear of mine, the amount of Tweets about nothing other than being bloody busy: “not enough hours in the day” / “where does the time go?” / “how is it that time already?”  The subtext of which is “gosh, I’ve been busy, ergo I am an important and wholly valid human, aren’t I?  AREN’T I?!  HEY, WORLD! KNOW THIS THING!

It makes me wither at the futility of it all or, if I’m in a different mood, want to commit wanton acts of vandalism.

And yet knowledge of the conspiracy also helps me to cope when I myself am not busy.  There will always be peaks and troughs.  I like to think that Barack Obama occasionally turns to Michelle at the end of the day and says, “you know, I did fuck all today.”  I think I’m gradually learning to cope with them a little better than I have done, notwithstanding the occasional panic attack at having nothing at all like any plan or vision of my future five years hence.  It’s an occupational hazard.

Looking wider at business I’m also growing more confident about the recipe for success, how its primary ingredients are confidence (also known as belief, bravado, bluster, the rigid unwillingness to consider any other viewpoints, and bollocks); together with basic luck (having that one key customer who comes along at just the right time, and who you can grow with).  Skill, ability, expertise, a clever idea: they’re important too, but smaller helpings are needed.  Also important is doing whatever you do a lot and working hard and not being lazy; that’s useful.

Belief is king though.  Without the belief, confidence, super ego and free-running bullshit, you’ll struggle to achieve much.  If you don’t believe yourself, if you think you’re a fraud and a chancer, that’s likely to come through.  Added to which, if you’re dealt a blow or two of bad luck that will impact confidence.  But if you carry on having just enough belief to get by, teamed with maybe a little over the average quotient of ability (arrogant bastard), everything should be fine.

Should.

Speaking to her brought it back:  the warmth of feeling, the painful sense that she might have been it; you shared so much, she was still damned cute, you had hurt so much and for so long when you parted, nobody has even come close since.  ‘Since’ has been a long time.

On Facebook she initially sent a friend request a few years back, which you falteringly accepted.  After a while quietly unfriended her because you didn’t like seeing and feeling those things.  Then a few months ago you sent another request to re-friend.  Odd behaviour.  An idea that any new friend is an audience expanded if you’re trying to subtly pimp business interests, combined with new unsubscribe settings that mean you can immediately opt out of someone’s inanities if they prove too idiotic, combined with curiosity and nostalgia, combined with whisky; all shaken into a nervous cocktail that made you tap the Add As Friend button.  You were still interested to know where she was up to – married yet, kids?  Just moved in, in turned out.  The photo albums hadn’t changed much.  Perhaps a few more looking beamingly happy and couply on mountaintops.  No messages were exchanged upon re-friending, as they had been upon initial friending.  Not a frequent user, you presumed by her activity, possibly wrongly.  She merely accepted the request.

You’ve heard tale, or maybe fable, of weak old men who once upon a time missed a boat, who didn’t struggle as much as they should have to stay afloat, and subsequently paddled off elsewhere, living out their lives on an island of dim regret.

Water came trickling in around the poolside and began to rise, over the edges of your slippers and socks.  Why were you wearing slippers and socks?  You couldn’t detect its source, the pool didn’t appear to be overflowing.  She was apparently unfussed, sitting in her bathing suit.  But it unsettled you and you sought higher ground, pleased at the meeting, heartened almost, yet also knowing it had meant nothing.  You wondered where your friends were and what you’d be getting up to that day, cycling the cobbled roads and coastlines of that island.  Later on you’d have a spat with a friend whose behaviour you deeply question, all the while faintly knowing that this is all just another nonsensical, cruel dream.  One which will leave remnant fug when you eventually wake up.

*

Wistful residue which results from dreaming about females is easier when the female subject is entirely fictional.

Many do it, a self-fulfilling prophecy, almost what’s expected of you.  In a podcast interview I listened to recently the successful Hollywood actor, Michael Sheen, from a small South Wales town of Port Talbot, confessed the same.  It happens a lot, so I’ve never beaten myself up for it hugely.  But it was still no reason not to try and be better.

And be better was, I think, what I achieved.  In fact, I was given fairly solid evidence of it by overhearing my Mum comment to my Dad, “he’s better company this year.”

Er, thanks Mum.  Success!

Recent exposure to horrible, tragic and traumatic real life stories enforces perspective too.  Look what you have around you, your family unit, your generally fit and healthy parents, your brother and his gorgeous kids and nice wife.  So you don’t see any of them all that often.  So they all have their quirks and oddities, some of which perhaps you wish they didn’t.  Who doesn’t?  You have tons.  It’s about learning to accept all of them as you get older, appreciate them – they’re less likely to change, to care less, to grieve less about stuff you don’t have.

It reinforced a belief and personal paradox: that it’s important to surround yourself by people, if you possibly can.  I was reminded of this again last night, after a curry and beers with my oldest school-friends, most of whom I only see a handful of times a year at most, but we all click back into our roles, helped by the large slabs of shared experience.  Humans are what matters.

And yet, here comes the paradox, I don’t like lots of them.  In fact I take an instant dislike to many, live and work very much alone so could legitimately be labelled a sad loner.  Despite the fact that I think humans are very important.

No, I don’t understand either.

This is beginning to sound like a slightly embarrassing, sanctimonious sermon borne of an unspectacular but perfectly pleasant seasonal period of reconciliation and acceptance – as well as a dash of broader perspective.  I’m sure I’ll be moaning and whining about the usual things before too long.

Although you like your flat and could have watched the match there, you were bored.  You fancied alcohol and more variables. In your flat someone might email you!  Or reply to a tweet!  Your phone may even ring!  These are all quite unlikely though.  Twitter’s weird.  More people replied to a tweet asking what to do with some eggs than they have to anything you’ve ever tweeted in two years of using the thing.

There a wider possibilities in a pub, although as an individual with no friends you’ll most likely sit in a corner intermittently studying the large screen showing live football and the small screen in your palm.  Still, there are other people in the same room to illicitly consider at and make judgements about.

It was raining as you walked to the pub.  You looked back over your left shoulder into a newish trendy bar, considered doubling back into there instead.  No.  It was too trendy to go into on your own and watch the football, wasn’t it?  Yeah..

-A metallic clang was audible a millisecond before the scuffing impact and the searing pain into the centre-right region of the forehead was felt.  gaahh.  Ouch.  Really ouch.  FUCKING ouch.  Shit.

Several yards down the street a handful of people at a bus stop looked towards you, remarkably none laughing, so possibly reacting more to your sudden halt, and swearing.  You took a moment out standing in an empty doorway, getting rained on a little less, waited for the world to stop spinning and the pain to subside.  You wondered if this would prompt a brain tumour to hemorrhage.

A minute or two later you confidently ascertained that you were wet and throbbing and had a rucked, probably swelling forehead, your dignity was severely compromised – despite there being no evidence anyone had actually witnessed your calamity.  But there was no blood.  That was a good thing.  You’d live long enough to watch the Blackburn-Bolton game.  At least the first half.  So slowly, carefully, you made my way towards the pub.

Once inside the surprisingly crowded room and maybe still mildly concussed(?) you bumped into a shortish but burly, typical doorman.  Not softly either.  You thwacked a full shoulder of your frame and apologised immediately, a pacifying hand on his shoulder.  He glared back at you, up in your eyes, steely and unimpressed, two glasses in his hands, the level of one not up to the level of the other.  You apologised again.  His face was unmoved.  He probably enjoyed his moment, thinking you were shitting yourself and might get immediately ejected.  You were shitting yourself a bit.  He said nothing and you left him, continued on to the bar and got a pint before seeking out a quieter corner of the pub near a television screen.

Also near two separate couples on dates.  All handsome people.  The better looking pair were more polite and slightly less relaxed with each other than the other.

You’d developed a soft spot for bottom-of-the-league Blackburn Rovers, a luckless football team with numerous solid, experienced professionals who never appear to play that badly.  You admired the dignity of their besieged manager, Steve Kean, who received a barracking from his own fans at every match, home and away; constant abuse and hounding to quit.   You wondered about his domestic back-up, judged that there must be a strong woman at home who supports and believes in him.

A glance at a laughing couple below the screen.  Your wobbly, still-throbbing head went on to generate thoughts about the consequences of isolation, loneliness and perceived constant shunning by people.  How that can infect a person and ultimately lead to misogyny and misanthropy.  Hell, if nothing and nobody – literally nobody: females, friends, employers, family, lampposts – accepts you, then why the fuck should you accept them? Fuck em all.

Where does that leave you? A crazy lunatic who wants to punish the world?  A paranoia-wracked schizophrenic?  A person who scuffles with lampposts?

In spite of everything you feel an enduring faith in people, entirely devolved from religion or religious values.  And also an obligation to the belief that life must be about surrounding yourself with people, if you can.  You rarely see an artistic endorsement of happiness, contentment and oneness through total isolation.  Not in a relatively young person.  It’s commonly portrayed as leading to madness, self-harm and suicide.  Potentially brilliant art too.  But no, sociability is where it’s at.  It’s what seems to work for the majority of humans.  And it’s what you believe in, despite it being completely at odds with how you appear and how you live and how you instantly dislike a lot of people.

There are no guarantees though.  As painfully unfair as it seems, shit things happen to generally good people all the time and in lots of ways.  Good things you want might for yourself, through no fault of your own, might easily never happen.  They don’t happen for everyone. But you still have to invest in romantic ideals, or you could end up just wanting to kill everyone which, on balance, doesn’t sound like the greatest idea.

Blackburn lost once again by a fine margin to their near-neighbours and fellow strugglers, Bolton Wanderers.  A slice of luck in the dying moments could easily have seen them earn a brave point.  The wet ball skidded off Samba’s shining head and wide of the post.

Meanwhile in reality, our beloved PM, David Cameron is barking on about the sanctity of family and marriage.  Fuck off, Dave.  We’re really not allowed to be on our own then, no?  More penalties, taxes, single person charges, general scorn, invasive suspicions about our sexuality and public pity?  Cheers then.  Merry Christmas.

Singles, whether perfectly happy and well-adjusted in their status, or not (and I suspect that many of the former are secretly the latter), might easily be convinced that they are deviant.  There’s little out there to reassure the loners and the lonely that it’s fine, everything’s alright.  Especially at this time of year when everything is saturated with warmth and love and fucking tootsywootsy “Consider Yourself” BBC bumpers, and sociability, and the sheer volume of other people.

In contrast with this, news stories like the man who got bored with his fiancé, tazered her and buried her in a shallow grave make me feel an absently amused empathy (although I’m a deeply caring person, honest).  Although thinking that probably indicates that it’s best I stay single and very alone forever.

I’m obviously an endlessly fascinating and engaging individual, which makes me such a magnet for other people and both of you readers. But some people – in fact the majority of other people who aren’t me – I find can get really boring.  This poor tazered woman might have got really boring, though it’s highly unlikely I would have taken the extreme actions of her groom.  Guess religion was behind it somewhere.

Thresholds, compromise, tolerance, acceptance. The spectrum and where we land on it makes us humans great and happy and sad, and all the places between. It’s what often influences a person’s social gravity, or magnetism, or success, or willingness to accept and settle.

The tazered lady escaped by carving herself out of an inadequate cardboard coffin using her engagement ring, which I thought was beautifully romantic – obviously in an unconventional, inverted sense.  Plus her survival made it possible to be amused.

Maybe being amused is the answer, because it’s a frequently used device for deflecting scorn, concern and general attention.  More usually though, the lonely look inwards and are generally miserable, however they present themselves externally.  It almost requires a public broadcast by a gratifyingly dour comedian like Jack Dee or Jon Richardson.

Hey losers, don’t worry about all those wankers.  It doesn’t matter if you don’t have decorations up; if your weak number of Christmas cards lie in a sorry pile; if you live and work completely alone so haven’t been to any Christmas parties of any kind at all; if your small handful of friends seem to have been particularly elusive recently so you’ve barely even spoken to anyone for a week; if you go home for a few days and play out the charade with your parents before swiftly returning, burying yourself in booze and fake internet friends, the vapid artifice of which may just spiral into even more self-hate; if you’re not quite confident enough in your cashflow to book a trip away somewhere different and forget about the time of year.

No, that’s all fine.  We’re with you.  In fact there’s loads of us.  More than you think.  Don’t beat yourself up about it.  Just get it over with, do the awkward seasonal shuffle, blot it out with alcohol, art, culture, sleep; it’ll pass.

Before you know it we’ll be well into January, Valentine’s Day looming.

Single women often affect an exterior of confidence but when it comes to making decisions about men, even to meeting, they seem to almost subconsciously erect obstacles or barriers.  Of course this could be because they specifically don’t want to meet me.  I’m wide awake to this possibility, of course.  But I sense that other common factors are often at work too.

My hunch is this.  The one serious, possibly but not necessarily previous relationship, left them crushed and almost critically low on confidence.  Particularly if it was a small town childhood sweetheart upon whose word they hung unconditionally.

Particularly if that childhood sweetheart was an overbearing, oppressive, insecure twat who wanted to demolish them for anyone else.  Men do this.  It’s most effective if the women are left on the cusp of middle age, maybe with a child or two in tow.

Advancing through the emotional wreckage and feeling recovered, a remnant nervousness or flaky uncertainty can still exist, particularly when it comes to relating with men in real life, on that level, in meeting them, at that point when convenient cosy barriers must come down.  This frequently leads to them making excuses, overthinking and bottling it.

Merely a theory but I’m sure there are many like this.

Also unhelpful is the devilish deception of virtual communications.  That feeling of effectively being in each other’s pockets all the time; the blithe underestimation of the non-verbal, which itself carries masses of information.  Words are all we need, right?  That and the odd bloody “LOL”, an emoticon here and there.  Sorted.  Actually meeting can come later, even if you have to wait forfuckingever.

Still I find myself being held prisoner to virtual online communications.  It leads to a protracted period of unsatisfying and insubstantial communication about fluffy things which may easily have no bearing upon liking one another.  Opposites who appear to have little in common with each other can attract too.

Right now I’m again exhausted by the amount of time and effort which needs to be expelled in the virtual world, for nothing.  Months of time and effort and hope so regularly (basically always) turn out to be completely pointless.

You can chat to several people at once, even though doing so can feel oddly duplicitous, but everyone does.  You develop favourites.  You try to take it somewhere, and it eventually flumps on its disappointed arse and you realise your time would be better spent reading books or taking more photographs or playing on your Xbox or watching shit telly or doing practically anything else.

What instead?  Pretend like real life is an episode of Friends and talk to people in coffee shops?  Can you imagine the excruciating results?

I’d still like a dog.

Having had enough of podcasts and interviews during my walk, I opted for newly discovered mellow music on the drive home, Lia Ices and Agnes Obel.  It proved a beautiful, almost too lulling soundtrack for the twilight, pink-hazed drive back between the mountain valleys and along the A470 back to the capital.  My mind was still simmering well enough to keep my concentration on the winding rural roads though.  I pondered again about the underappreciated medium of podcasts, how public figures can be thoroughly engaging interviewees even if you’re indifferent to their work.  I wondered too about that peaceable rambler culture which makes everyone cheerily greet each other on the hillside, but immediately ignore each other when back in the car park.

So I was feeling relaxed enough upon returning home, flicking on my digibox, hot mug of tea in hand, and beginning to fast-forward through the Swansea-Aston Villa pre-match build-up.  The presenter looked strangely ashen face but Gary Neville looked like he always does, as did Graeme Souness. Then the fast moving pictures whizzed through a still black and white image with a date: an image of the kind used in obituaries.  Who’s died then? I thought, interest piqued, rewinding back to before the image.  Some old, vaguely heard about footballer?

No.  Gary Speed.

Wait.  Hang on. 

Gary Speed?

Graeme Souness went on to burble emptily about not knowing him very well.  Gary Neville too had no direct dealings.  Both were fittingly respecting.  Speed had been found hanged at his family home earlier that morning.  There were no “suspicious circumstances”.  I was brain-dead.

Speed was an inauspicious character whose omnipresence in football most football fans almost took for granted.  Could you ever remember an interesting quote he’d given?  Anything he’d said?  Any act of petulance or remarkable emotion on or off the pitch?  Not really.  And yet you almost didn’t need to acknowledge how impressive he was.  He was solid, firm, reliable, dependable, measured; simply always there.  His consistency, fitness and record-breaking number of Premiership appearances helped cement him as a permanent fixture in the world of professional football, part of the furniture.  His growing stature as an international manager delighted many but surprised few.

Like many, I was numbed by the news.  I watched Neville and Souness and failed to fully compute what they were talking about.  Football would massively grieve the loss of somebody so prominent, possibly more than usual because the man, for such a public figure, felt so unknown.  Why?  This would be the question on everyone’s lips, for how long nobody could know.  Maybe forever.

To me, and possibly to most football fans, you felt like you knew Speed without ever knowing him.  This was because he seemed to give away very little character on or off the pitch; or even standing on the sidelines as an increasingly successful manager of the Wales national team: never overly animated or emotional.  Unknowable, impenetrable, professional almost to a fault.  Mario Balotelli he was not.

Those who know him – team-mates, colleagues and friends – they say what you would expect to hear in giving tributes, of course.  In an interview Robbie Savage listed all the things he had going for him, others said he had everything ahead of him, the world in his hands..  On top of everything he was a strikingly good looking man.  One who, conversely, usually scored ugly goals, arriving late into the box to leap high and score scruffy headers from a few yards out.  You could script the responses because people click into a subconsciously known type of script when such sudden, shocking things happen.

Mental health is a dark beast.  People wear convincing alternative masks in public, in front of other people and in front of those they love.  They hide away the darker sides so as not to hurt others or damage their own reputation.  But there was something different with Speed’s pokerface.  It would have been extraordinary, though not impossible, to be so constantly public and active, for so long and around so many people  – his players and staff at the FAW, to give a long BBC interview just hours before he hanged himself; and to apparently leak nothing at all.

There was a hollow, sinister chill about this which, for me, didn’t ring of mental health issues.  His agent has claimed that Speed was not suffering from depression, and his family have denied it too.  Although you can argue that nobody can ever truly know.  Yet I had an immediately harrowing gut feel that  it wasn’t mental health, a feeling the recent rumours are doing nothing to quell.  They remain rumours and it’s possible the truth may never be publicly known but if true – and there’s a sizable football community of people who are likely to know one way or the other, then it’s evidence of another social stigma which football has always failed to address.  One which has cost life before and could easily do so again.  Just like mental health.

I remained numb, watching the football matches and reading the reports.  Wilting with sadness, I went to bed early and read a book.  Late at night and failing to sleep, Speed and the events of the day – events I felt weirdly guilty for not knowing until so late – still swirled around my head.  I turned to Twitter and saw that sickening rumour.  I wished it wasn’t so believable.  It was possible nobody would ever know, or that the one or two who do would take a secret with them to their own graves.