Confession

A few years ago I has having a drink with 47 and some of his weird friends from university in the back garden of a pub in Canterbury when there were the calls from a girl in the alleyway next to the pub. They were all clearly quite distressed, and they were all along the lines of "get away from me!", "leave me alone!" and "let go of me!" I an't recall whether the voice shouted "help!", but maybe it did. Eventually, the voice grew quieter, as if she had been dragged away.

I didn't do anything. Nor did 47 or anyone else. We exchanged glances and carried on talking.

It's a few years on and I still can't believe that I acted the way I did. Maybe there wasn't anything I could have done, but I could have at least looked. There was a fence separating the pub garden and the alleyway which I could have peeked over in order to see what the fracas was about. I could have at least said something to 47 and we could have looked together. I could have shouted. But I did nothing, because nobody else did anything.

Reverse crowd mentality.

I didn't know and never will know what it was. It may have been a trap - there was no second voice, and it could have easily (since it was next to a pub) been a set-up for an easy mugging of any kind passer-by who would attempt to intervene. But then, a big part of me knows that's a very unlikely possibility, and the guilty bit of my brain - the one that usually speaks in my own voice - consistently calls up the possibilities.

I could have stopped an abduction.
I could have stopped a mugging.
I could have stopped a rape.

And I'll never, ever know what it was I didn't look at. And I'll never know why I didn't.

I hate guilt.

Crash.

I got home from work a few hours ago. In an ordinary way, nothing particularly ostentatious. The trains were okay; my sister was in so I came home and had a chat with her, cooked some pasta with cheese, drank some lemonade and orange juice - nothing too strenuous, really.

Went upstairs, put my BlackBerry on charge and immdiately got two messages - one from my girlfriend and one from a work colleague - which it may have delivered earlier, had it had the charge to do so. Replied to my girlfriend, left the colleage until later. Went onto the internet for a bit, checked my e-mails... and crashed.

I stood up and found that, to all intents and purposes, I couldn't. My bed (it's roughly euqal to three feet away from my desk) seemed very far away, and this was exacerbated by the fact that I staggered one pace in the wrong direction before brushing aside the clothes that covered my bed and falling, face forward, onto it. Like increasingly desperate, delirious sex - but not as fun. Without as much energy, either.

Ignore that - without any energy. I was sprawled at an odd angle, my limbs everywhere, my duvet heavy and lumpy under various bits of me, Oxford (the rabbit, not the city) clutched in between my arms. My breathing, although it took me a while to notice, was ragged and heavy. And my body... was throbbing everywhere. Every part of my body was throbbing with a cross bwteeen pain, heat and radiation. Not the nice sexual throbbing. Throbbing which screams, "I've had too much, so I'm just going to lie here and throb for a while."

Thump, thump, thump.

I tried, at one point, to get up. I wanted to blog, I needed to shower, and that presentation for work's not going to research itself. (Note the order of importance in that last sentence... it's unintentional, I swear). But although I shifted and began to rise, this lasted for no more than one groan, a feeble remonstration against myself, and a collapse back onto the bed and entry into an even deeper torpor than I had already been in.

Eventually I managed to get up, fuelled by my desire to go the toilet. Everything was a lot darker than I remember. I tottered across the room and exited in the direction of the hallway.

I still feel slightly delirious now. Slumped, tired, unwell. Crashed. I'm upright, but this is typing while sitting at a desk. Anything else is likely to make me fall, once again. Although I do need that shower... and I have to make myself lunch for tomorrow...

Let's have a try.