Sorry, but this isn't an on-topic post, a detective post, or a light, uplifting post. Sinisterians who only read posts with that sort of thing in should skip to the last paragraph, which has Ken in it. Instead, you have a rambly, train-of-thought post for your pleasure and delight. My little flat is on a council estate in the middle of the city, but despite that it's overlooked by a line of beautiful sandstone cliffs, a few hundred yards away. When I look through my living room window, I can see a small stretch of cliff in the gap between my neighbours' houses. Every morning when I get up and let the cat out into the garden for a while, I look up at the cliffs and see what colour they are, because they look different with every change in light. Some days, when I have nothing less important to do, I go for a walk along the top of the cliffs. I sit down at the edge and look out over the city. I watch the city sleep in the sunlight, and look out for all the places I know: the flats I've lived in, the buildings I've worked in, the places I've been. I look out over the river to see if I can identify all the towns on the opposite bank, and name all the islands in between. One morning last week, I got out of bed in the morning to let the cat into the garden, and I looked up at the cliffs. I could see people in green coats walking about purposefully at the top and bottom of them, and a Royal Parks Police van stood by at the bottom. I knew, immediately, what they were doing. The cliffs that overlook my home are one of the most popular places in the city, for people -- mostly students -- who have decided that they want to die. The policemen in the bright green jackets were collecting the parts of someone's broken body off the ground and taking it to the infirmary morgue. It made me sit and wonder, not "why would anyone want to kill themselves", but "how could anyone be brave enough to kill themself?" I'm not a very brave person, and there are many things that I wish I was brave enough to do. However, I'm glad that I'm not a brave person, because I clearly remember one afternoon, when I was at university, sitting crunched up with my hands round me knees on a beach in the far north-west of the country. I was sat at the head of a broad loch filled with islands, and in the distance I could see the narrows leading out into the Atlantic. I knew that beyond those lighthouses, there was no land until Canada. I didn't want to be there, I didn't want to do what I was doing, and I knew that everything would be better if I were to walk into the water, start swimming to the horizon and just keep on going. Nobody knows, incidentally, whether the man at the bottom of the cliff killed himself or not. His body was found at 8am, he had no ID, and his head was smashed open too badly to be identified. The rocks round about were covered in blood. Someone said recently that as this list has 1450 people on it, it's bound to have *someone* who supports any particular viewpoint. I want to say to all of you, therefore, who want to destroy yourselves: I hope you can rejoin the world of the living. Whether you are refusing to eat, whether you are gorging yourself on the entire contents of your local patisserie and vomiting it into the drains, or whether you are just trying to think of the easiest way to die. The life you have already isn't wonderful, but some moments of it can be. Go to the cliffs from below, and watch their colour change in the light. We might never recover from wanting to shut our bodies down, but we can at least put it to the back of our minds for as long as we can. I said earlier: I'm not as brave as I wish I was. I tried to do things about this when I was younger, but I'm still not *quite* as brave as I need to be. Back in the mists of teenage time when I was still religious, I tried to get into public speaking by reading the Bible out in church. Although I was by far the youngest of the lay readers, I was the only one who you could hear right at the back. I would stand at the front, at the lectern in front of all the rapt worshippers, and would boom out: "The lesson today is from the twenty-second chapter of the book of Deuteronomy, starting at the fifth verse." About that time, though, I started to feel guilty because I suspected it was wrong; then I realised that it's not something I should feel guilty about and I'm not going to hell whatever my lessons say. I guess that makes me braver in one way, even if it wasn't my intention. I still kept up the church readings even though I didn't believe in it, until I left home. It was good fun. The old ladies in the congregation all thought I would become a bishop some day. Maybe I should go back home and give them a shock. Um, I think I had a point when I started writing this. It was something like "don't all argue about how what clothes you wear affects *you* as an individual" That comes up every few months on the list, after all. I think I was trying to say that there are far more important things to bother about, like being nice to people just to show them that the world is a nice place. Don't be blinkered, don't wrap yourself in cliques, that sort of thing. Also, don't wear stuff just cos you want to be part of a scene. Just wear what you want to, if you're brave enough. And be as supportive as you can to all the people who aren't brave enough to walk outside dressed to match their inner selves. People always start leaving lists when you get horrible nasty arguments. I'm thinking of leaving Sinister---or at least, being more of a lurker---but it's not because of any of that. It's just because it's time I stopped posting neverending posts like this one whenever I think I'm starting to feel "deep". I might come back again before long, possibly in disguise, possibly in less of a disguise. Oh, don't *just* dress the way you want. Dress in a way that will get you into Chu's pants, of course! I'm sure every Sinister girl wants to do that; well, apart from me maybe. xx -- http://www.btinternet.com/~wpsalt/ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+