Repeat. Mantras and madness. Post traumatic stress. Repeat. Tap. Tap. Tap.

(This blog was also published in the Huffington Post)

Last Thursday, I wrote a blog about attending a Symposium at Lincoln University.

This Monday, I wrote a blog about being in a mental asylum when I was 18 after attempting suicide.

I only realised today that there is a link between the two, though tenuous.

One of the participants at the Symposium – a retired senior fire officer – said that, at one point in his life, he kept having a recurring image (spot the tautology) popping into his mind of a young girl with a hideously burnt face and body sitting in the back seat of his car when he looked into his rear view mirror

Eventually, he was able to find someone who could get the frightening image out of his mind. All that someone did was to tap their finger rhythmically on the senior fire officer’s hand.

It took three sessions, but it worked.

No idea why it worked.

Perhaps it was something to do with the rhythm of the distraction bringing the brain back to reality.

But, afterwards, he no longer saw in his mind the image of a young girl with a hideously burnt face and body in his rear view mirror.

The image he saw in his mind was eventually identified as the view he had had of a girl through the windscreen of the car she had been sitting in when it collided with another car, trapping her feet.  The car burst into flames and she burnt to death, while fully conscious. The senior fire officer had been in charge of the team that recovered her body, which involved him putting his face next to hers.

The repeated tapping on his hand somehow removed the repeated Post Traumatic Stress Disorder image from his brain.

I asked if the speed of the rhythm of the taps altered or if they were always at the same speed, because I thought maybe there was some connection with the fact that people can have epileptic fits when they see tsunamis of flash photography. I read once about people having epileptic fits when driving along a particular road in France.

It was one of those long, straight, flat roads with tall trees planted on each side at regular intervals. When there was bright sunlight shining through the trees at one side and a car drove at a particular speed, the trees caused the human eye to see flashes of sunlight at a rhythm which, I think, coincided with the brain waves of drivers prone to epilepsy and they had a fit. The solution was to replant the trees at irregular intervals.

I wondered if tapping at a particular speed was somehow replicating the speed of some brain waves.

I showed a rough version of the blog you are now reading to the retired senior fire officer this morning. He warned me:

“Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is somewhat different to the epileptic fit process you describe and it does not help those who suffer to confuse the two.

“In my case, I blame thirty plus years of emergency service work in both the Police and Fire Services.  Whilst a single traumatic (traumatic in the eye of the beholder, but not necessarily in the eye of someone else) event can have long lasting impact, the impact of multiple traumatic events over a period of years, (say daily or more frequently for thirty years) is more likely to cause problems for that viewer, unless they are emotionless.

“The impact of long term exposure to horror or stress has been described to me as being like placing books of problems on a shelf. At some point there will be too many books on the shelf for the screws holding it up, they will loosen and the shelf collapses. The shelf and books have to be re-hung and re-ordered. That’s what the tapping does. It re-tightens the screws and re-orders the books in the right place.

“My burnt girl vision came about some years after the event when my then employers sought to train me and five other officers in how to deal with traumatised fire fighters. To do this, they used a number of actors to play the roles of the said fire fighters and explain to us their feelings after a particular set of scenarios including a person being burnt alive. We had to recognise and treat their suffering. Four or five of the six of us receiving this training then experienced our own Post Traumatic Stress Disorder  symptoms, which had to be treated. The training method was then abandoned.”

It would be interesting to know why the repeated tapping cured his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder visions of the young girl with a hideously burnt face.

I have never tried chanting mantras morning and night – as someone I met the other week does. My sense of the ridiculous holds me back. But I think I read somewhere that it does not matter what you chant – you could chant over and over again Om mani padme hum – or Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare – or Scrambled eggs, see me eating, thirty scrambled eggs to the tune of The Beatles’ Yesterday – and the effect would be the same.

I remember lying in a bed in King George’s Hospital in Ilford after I had tried to commit suicide and I realised, without consciously having started to do it, that my forefinger was tapping rhythmically on the mattress under the pillow loud enough for me to hear it through the pillow though not loud enough for anyone else to hear it. For some reason, this helped clear my mind of thoughts, perhaps like some sort of repeated mantra.

It is the repetition not the content which is important.

The human brain must be an interesting thing.

I wish I knew something about it.

Perhaps those episodes of Doctor Who which had The Master going on and on and on about hearing a tap-tap-tapping in his head had some reflection in reality.

I must watch the repeats.

The story two-faced Tony Blair/Bliar successfully hid from the British public

The individual’s right to privacy, the public’s “right to know” and freedom of the press.

Now there’s a difficult balance to strike.

And then there are super-injunctions.

One of the reasons for granting one of the notorious secret super-injunctions was apparently that, if the man’s marital infidelity were revealed, his children might get bullied at school. I rather think that, if the guy’s kids get bullied because their father has been sticking his knob within someone other than his wife, then the guy should take responsibility. It ain’t for the public courts to help him try to hide his adultery.

But the protection of children versus freedom of the press can be a well-balanced problem – of which more later, with Tony Blair.

Yesterday, the Guido Fawkes blog ran a story that, since 2008 – unknown to the British public – it has been an offence punishable by imprisonment to reveal that Lakshmi Mittal, the richest man in Britain – who has donated £2 million to the Labour Party – has a super-injunction gagging all reporting of an unknown and unprintable matter.

And much was made in the press yesterday about the super-injunction with which former RBS boss Fred Goodwin tried to hide an affair he had with a married subordinate before the financial crisis of 2008. This was the super-injunction which also, technically, made it illegal to describe him as “a banker”.

There have been lots of worthy ‘public interest’ words about how the public deserved to know about Fred Goodwin’s affair because it may have affected his judgment in the period leading up to the point at which the British taxpayer had to fork out billions of pounds to save RBS.

I’m not convinced that Fred The Bed’s rumpy pumpy is too likely to have specifically contributed to RBS’s woes in any major way. I think that may be more to do with the near-meltdown of the entire world’s financial system – and, from my biased perspective, two Icelandic banks which stole the money I had invested in them. But stress, obviously, does affect people’s judgment in times of crisis.

If – let us say for argument’s sake – if… a Prime Minister were making important life-or-death decisions in a highly volatile post-war situation, the public would have a right to know if he were making those decisions under extreme personal stress, wouldn’t they?

Well, no, apparently the public would not have any right to know that.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think highly personal matters SHOULD be in the public domain if people – perhaps hundreds, perhaps thousands of people – might die because of a potentially wrong decision taken by a politician under extreme personal pressure.

Tony Blair – sometimes called Tony Bliar, a far more fitting spelling – the man who brought in the Freedom of Information Act – claimed he wanted ‘open’ government.

Yet, when his 16 year old daughter Kathryn attempted suicide on or around 13th May 2004, he and his chaps went to the editors of the main British newspapers and had all reporting of the attempted suicide barred from publication because it was a solely personal, private matter. Rupert Murdoch barred publication of any reporting of the incident in any of his newspapers worldwide; I do wonder what sort of political payback he could expect for doing that.

It remains one of many stories known by but not reported in the UK media. Many people who knew about the attempted suicide at the time agreed and still agree with the blanket non-reporting of the fact it happened. They believe that it was and is a family tragedy and there is no “in the public interest” factor involved; they argued and argue that the physical and psychological protection of the individual child outweighs any public right to know. I disagree.

In a recent blog I mentioned I tried to commit suicide when I was 18.

The Blair daughter suicide bid happened almost exactly one year after the invasion of Iraq, which was in an even worse mess and the Abu Ghraib torture pictures had recently been publicised. The suicide bid was rumoured to have been caused by a combination of exam stress and bullying by schoolmates about her father’s involvement in Iraq. Which is where that earlier reference to school bullying comes in.

The Blair suicide story is not an urban myth. I know someone who, at the time, was connected to the Blair daughter’s Roman Catholic state secondary school, the Sacred Heart in Hammersmith. I heard about it at the time because, obviously, the school knew it had happened.

I first heard the story mentioned in public by an Irish comedian at the August 2004 Edinburgh Fringe. The story had been published in Ireland and abroad but not in the UK and not by any news sources controlled by Rupert Murdoch.

At the time, there were unexplained stories in the British press that Blair was considering leaving office. No reason was given in the reports as to why Blair might leave office beyond, occasionally, some vague reference to “family”. And it seemed to me that Blair suddenly visibly aged at that time.

If those stories were true and he was indeed considering actually resigning for family reasons then it does not seem to be a vast leap of supposition to believe that he was making important decisions of life and death in an extremely volatile and unpredictable high-pressure post-Invasion situation while under extreme psychological stress.

The reasons for his stress might well have been “personal” and “private” but, when personal, normally private events affect national and international decisions and potentially the deaths of hundreds or thousands of people, the public has a right to know the circumstances under which those decisions are being made.

There ARE cases where the public’s “right to know” and freedom of the press over-ride people’s “right to privacy”.

I am surrounded by people with newly-born pigs’ arses for faces

At school, my English teacher once talked to our class about the poet W.H. Auden.

“Just look at the lines on his face!” he told us in awe. “All that character! All that experience!”

Sometimes, for a while after that – still in my early teens – I would sit in a tube train on my way home after school and look at my reflection in the window opposite and raise my eyebrows to try to create wrinkles on my forehead… to absolutely no effect at all. I could not insert lasting wrinkles in my forehead.

I was very disappointed.

Of course, back then, I was too young to realise most lines are caused by emotional strain or pain and one single incident of strain or pain doth not a single line cause – it’s pain and strain repeated and repeated in various incidents in your life at different times that cause a single line and multiple lines are the result of… well, you know what I mean.

I was and am a great admirer of the writer Mary Anne Evans aka George Eliot.

That godawful writer Virginia Woolf once said she thought George Eliot’s Middlemarch was “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

In my opinion, it’s the greatest novel ever written in the English language.

So at least Virginia Woolf wrote something sensible on that one occasion.

George Eliot had a brilliant mind and somewhere along the way, I think in Middlemarch, she said something to the effect that suffering was never wasted because it led to sympathy for other people’s suffering. That’s not altogether true, as it can also lead to extreme callousness, of course.

Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi had lines on their forehead and they were perhaps just a wee bit unsympathetic to others’ suffering. I’m not sure whether to talk of Colonel Gaddafi in the present tense or the past tense. He’s present at the moment but this blog may soon be over-taken by events.

Anyway… we are talking in generalities here and, as always, I may be talking bollocks.

But I have always been wary of women over a certain age – basically over their mid-twenties – with no lines at all on their forehead, because it means they have had little experience of the shittyness that is life and therefore no understanding of or sympathy with other people’s problems. So they are even more dangerous than other women. (Men, as we know, are all shits without exception, so that distinction does not exist in the male of the species.)

A friend of mine has had lines on her forehead for as long as I have known her. I met her when she was 21; she is now 56. Some time, I guess when she was in her thirties, she told me she wished she hadn’t got them. I told her, perfectly truthfully, that I had always found them attractive because they showed she had a genuine, real, likable character; she wasn’t some mindless bimbo with a face like a newly-born pig’s arse.

Perhaps I could have chosen my words better. She didn’t take this compliment well.

But we are still friends.

Now I have lines on my forehead, my face and around my eyes – I even have old man clefts at the sides of my mouth so sometimes I leak spittle out onto the pillow when I sleep. It is not the most endearing of traits. I can’t get rid of the lines nor the old man clefts. But I don’t want to.

Well, maybe oozing spittle is not really ideal. Maybe I wish I didn’t do that.

But it’s an age thing.

When I was younger, the Carry On actor Sid James seemed to have an incredibly lined face. Now when I see his face on TV or in movies, I see personality engraved in his face, not lines.

To me, schoolchildren, who are all character-filled individuals to each other, now look like Invasion of The Body Snatchers type pod clones. They all look the same to me – like babies with newly-born pig’s arse faces.

A friend of mine (not the one previously mentioned) tells me that, in her teens and early twenties, she used to stick strips of Sellotape onto her forehead overnight to stop wrinkles forming.

“Once, I forgot to take them off,” she told me yesterday. “I was opening the front door before i remembered. I don’t know what people would have thought.”

A couple of days ago, a comedian’s wife told me that, in her teens, she used to sleep with a clothes peg on the bridge of her nose because she thought it was too wide. She too told me: “I cared what people thought about the way I looked.”

There’s not a lot I can do about the way I look and, about ten years ago, I gave up caring what people think of me in general. Not that I much cared what people thought about me before then anyway.

It was not and is not a positive character trait and it never proved to be any help in career advancement.

But scum always rises and the people with no lines on their forehead – the shallow bullshit artists – very often triumph.

The comic Martin Soan – admittedly drunk at the time – told me last week that my blogs sometimes show a cynical streak.

Streak? Streak? I would have said it was a six-lane super-highway.

I am surrounded by people with newly-born pigs’ arses for faces!