14th January 2008 09:34
    
     It’s a grey day today, one of many when the sky broods and hangs low in the air. Everything is damp, everything is wet. The ground is sodden underfoot, and the rivers are not far off full. There is more rain forecast for the rest of the week.  I need to fuel up the wood burner just to remove the patina of damp which has infiltrated the room.  I can see the clouds becoming an ominous purple to the north. It will not be long before that rain arrives, pattering hard on the roof a few feet over my head.

     There are many things I could and should be doing. There are people waiting for me to turn up and tame their gardens, cutting back hedges and clearing ground for the new growing season. There are dishes to be done, housework to tackle and dozens of other small tasks which now fill my time. Today I have decided to write again, and have begun.     

     I am free, you see. Free and imprisoned at the same time. Free to follow my heart’s content with my daily activities, and which office-bound salary-man would not cast a sideways envious glance at that?  Yet I am imprisoned by an illness which on its worst days confines me to my bed neither willing nor able to see anyone or anything.  Days like this are torture, collecting the children becomes a dreadful task. Standing in the playground of the village school, wanting no human contact and feeling like an exhibit in a freak show. 
    
     The other side of the coin is irrepressible energy which must find an outlet, and which can do so in destructive ways. It seems from modern physics that the total sum of matter, such as stars and planets in our universe may be very close to nothing.  Stars and planets have positive energy, but the negative energy stored in forces such as gravity cancels out those things we can see and calculate. Michio Kaku, a leading theoretical physicist, describes this perfect balance in detail in his book “Parallel Worlds.”  It is the balance of that energy which keeps everything in check. Should the energy within our bodies and indeed within all matter, the plants trees, animals, planets and galaxies deviate by 0.00001% from that balance between positive and negative, we would all be instantly ripped asunder and thrown into outer space. Ask a bipolar person about that one, it’s a familiar feeling.
    
     Occasionally there are moments of brief balance, of stability. This seems to be the aim of modern psychiatry; to produce stability through medication.  It’s one hell of a juggling act. None of the drugs are “clean”. They all have side effects – the list of possible consequences of taking medication designed to make one better is extensive and frightening.  Nevertheless, most of us take them. Bipolar can be fatal. Its excesses can lead to personal injury, drink, drugs, arrest and sectioning. In extremis it leads to the only sure individual relief; suicide. 
    
     Suicide. The thoughts have become a constant, unbidden companion to me. They pop into my head at some time on most days, and all the time on some days. I try to acknowledge them, examine them and let them go in the Zen fashion, but when they keep coming back again and again, it becomes like trying to hold back a flood with your hands. 
    
      The first time, before I knew I was ill, was on Waterloo Bridge, heading over the Thames  to and from work. Day or night I would stand and look into the running waters and feel a calling, a promise of peace and an end to pain. It’s not a feeling unique to me on this bridge, according to Peter Ackroyd in his “Thames - Sacred River”. It has been common knowledge since the bridge was opened in 1817; “In the middle of the nineteenth century the average number of suicides each year from this vantage was thirty.” Ackroyd quotes German poet Heinrich Heine, writing of a visit to the bridge in 1827. He describes  “the black mood which once came over me as toward evening I stood on Waterloo Bridge, and looked down on the waters of the Thames...At the same time the most sorrowful tales came into my memory.”
    
      Another lonely suicide spot of my acquaintance is Beachy Head in East Sussex. I lived nearby for a couple of years. I once walked to the bottom of the sheer 500 foot cliffs. It is an eerie place with an atmosphere as thick as treacle. People on the top of the cliffs appear as tiny specks. The chalk is a dazzling light. There are parts of motor cars and engines strewn around the rocks – the vast majority from those who have driven off the top of the cliffs in their isolation. Engine blocks last for a long time in the water. 
    
      Crossing the plank bridge out to the red and white banded Beachy Head lighthouse, only a few yards but over a swirling tide, left me completely disorientated and almost paralysed. I could scarce put one foot in front of the other and it took a great mental effort to walk on to the tower itself. It was a great relief to turn away from there and back along the beach to Eastbourne.
    
       This last week has been one of the hardest I can remember. My brain seems to have acquired a processor which runs beyond my control. It has now calculated which beams in the old barn would hold my rope. It knows where the fields give access to the swollen, flooded river. It is working out where the sharp blades are. It is betraying me. My weapons against it are weak and the blackness of despair seeps over everything like the swirling rain.