'And finally'

What is depression like? What is being a depressed teacher like? I can't help you, I don't know, or at least I can't extrapolate my personal experience for others all that easily. I can see similar behaviours in others, recognise generic responses to questions. But the tendencies, symptons and codes I experience are intermingled with personality traits and genetic predispositions which stand as unique indicators of my identity.

Or is that just a cop out? I am me and you are you. My tendencies towards order, symmetry, patterns: are they really so unique? Also that ridiculous work ethic I got from my parents. But now that I'm a suspended depressed teacher I am learning to shake that off. Learning to relax. Learning to enjoy the absurdity without running away from it.

And what about that emotional distance that seems both partly cultural and a feature of working class upbringings in the austere 1950s and swinging 1960s? Not that the 1960s swung in Grimsby and Cleethorpes. Nothing ever swung, gyrated, wriggled or frollicked in Grimsby. It was as dead-eyed as the diminishing cod.

Some days I wake up and there is a heavy, leaden lid clamped over my world, or a dense fog dissolving all that's real as though in an acid bath. My despression, running like a thread through all my thoughts and actions, is like the weather, running through all our inconsequential conversations.

The days of light breezes, interfering suggestively with my clothing, and scudding clouds, like sheep on a mission, are a bonus, a perk, akin to reaching the summit of a mighty hill on the bike and taking a deep breath of smug satisfaction: wow, I got up here under my own steam. Aren't I clever? Ever since we climbed down from the trees we've been aiming to reach this, the culmination of sapien endeavour.

But it's not about wanting to be happy. Happiness - a word I am leaning to detest (blame Ken Dodd) - is merely a relative term, seasonally adjusted, calibrated with other factors, and hopelessly, desperately sold to us by the media as an ideal.

Read any newspaper on any day - and one day I will close this avenue of pleasure and seal off the addiction - and it will become apparent how fleeting, how ungraspable, the concept of happiness is. We think we've got a handle on it in post-enlightenment Western society, yet we are all on pills and holed up with our therapists.

Even as a child, sleepily watching Reginald Bosenquet on News at Ten, I felt that the last, singularly cheerful item of jollity after all the bad news (bodies unburied!) to be desperately unconvincing. 'And finally, here is your little slot of happiness.'

People call my tablets 'happy pills', which is about as unhelpful as to become libellous. Amphetamines, LSD, speed maybe: something to make the whole day and the world around us sharpen with edges of irridescent chromium and pulsate with a surreal organic spark of life... That's a happy pill.

Instead we get prescribed a slight re-shading of reality, like adjusting the screen settings on a phone.

'And finally, a man has discovered the secret of happiness. He has stopped trying with all his might to be happy, like the Coca Cola people addicted to eight spoons of sugar, and now he sits in his small garden and waits patiently. And sure enough, a robin, with its cheeky and assertive chirp and sharp eye, comes to him each day, and moves closer and closer. The relationship is unforced, unfeigned, mutually beneficial. Thank you, and good night.'