The man who do what you don't dare do

A darkened tunnel inadequately lights up. An alarming riff rings in the beginning of the madness. In a siding off the tunnel stand two men: one is stock-still, waiting, watching; the other, his body is swaying as he stares unflinchingly at the camera, his boldly patterned top – a deconstructed and reshaped American flag – at odds with the double Mohican hairstyle and eyes blackened with make-up.

There are men in the tunnel, what are they doing? As we get closer, we’re not sure we want to know. Each alarming riff is followed by a warning crash of bass and drums. It’s coming, it’s coming, what is coming? The still man in the siding is sat down, the other man twitches at the crash of drums. We are getting too close to the men in the tunnel, they stare at us. The still man is standing again. The other man is jumping unnervingly. He’s ready now. The men in the tunnel start to run. The chaos begins.

I'm the trouble starter, punkin' instigator
I'm the fear addicted, danger illustrated

Having been iconic and omni-present for some 23 years now, it’s hard to express the impact that The Prodigy’s Firestarter had on me, my peers, and popular culture at the time. It was, to put it with no exaggeration, a revelation. It was a much needed release during a period in which me and my peers were still coming to terms with both the raging hormones that were ravaging changes to our bodies, and the growing and seemingly inexplicable anger inside us, that, only with hindsight decades later, we can put down to the growing, unconscious realisation that the adults around us and in power weren’t the clever, knowing and authoritative individuals they’d have us believe. They were fucking everything up.

I'm the bitch you hated, filth infatuated, yeah!
I'm the pain you tasted, fell intoxicated

Culturally it was a revelation as well. With rave becoming commercialised, grunge becoming radio fodder, and Britpop starting to eat itself, Firestarter’s aggressive blend of rave and rock (it sampled relatively obscure alt-rock, synth-pop and house tracks) was a breath of fresh air. With its melding of genres, it was the beginning of the breakdown of the tribal barriers that had separated music fans for so long, a band that any of us could get behind.

“I keep coming back to @stuwhiffen DJing at the Bullseye when I was 17. It was an odd night, Indie/Metal/HipHop/whatever but there’d be a moment each Friday night that everyone would dance together, that moment would always be for The Prodigy.”
Music producer Dan le Sac on Twitter

The song’s lyrics, written by Keith Flint, the maniacal vocalist in the video, are shockingly violent, and the pummelling backing track, orchestrated by the sampling magicianship of still man Liam Howlett, is, to this day, an abrasive, triggering pleasure. In The Prodigy, producer Liam was the fuel, and growling vocalist Keith was the fire we were all drawn to. Firestarter shocked the establishment, with both song and video only allowed to be played after the watershed. But the people loved it and lapped it up, making it the band’s first UK No 1 – where it stayed for three weeks – and their first big international hit.

I'm the self inflicted, mind detonator, yeah
I'm the one infected, twisted animator

You can see the roots of what The Prodigy were creating with the Firestarter video, mashing together the aesthetics of the two biggest youth movements of their lifetimes: punk and rave. Keith Flint was mesmerising not least because of his performance, more on which in a bit, but also because of how he looked: punk haircut, goth make-up, chunky BDSM necklace and pierced tongue, contrasted with that boldly patterned (political?) top, and short trousers that added an unexpected and uncomfortable sense of the little boy lost. This on-the-nose mash-up of alternative cultures might not have worked either, were it not blended together by being filmed, disconcertingly, in black-and-white.

But the video was much more than just a show and tell of Things The Prodigy Love. Keith took his obvious admiration for Johnny Rotten and ran with it, taking it to a darker and, conversely, more fun place. It’s a classic punk frontman performance with deeply disturbing flourishes.

He’s troubled, trapped – literally at some points, in a web unable to move legs or arms, his body waving around uselessly. He twitches at every crash of bass drum, banging his head on the empty space in front of him. There’s something inside his head he’s trying to shake out, scratch out, but nothing works, the fire keeps burning inside. There is no respite. Sometimes he loses himself in the music and there’s a pleasing campness to his performance, a Freddie Mercury strut, juxtaposed with terrifying aggression as he punches the air between you and him and stares, challenging you to look away. 

His bandmates move around him like moths to a flame, not getting close enough to be burnt, but unable to draw themselves away – his madness is inexplicably intoxicating, appealing. Dressed normally, wearing the baggy tops and trousers most of us boys and girls were wearing in the mid-90s, the rest of The Prodigy represent us – the young and the jilted, just before Tony Blair and New Labour came along in their blindingly shining armour to give us some hope. They represent us, drawn to an idea, no matter how terrifying, of the freedom of madness and the chaos and uncertainty of rebellion, waiting in the dark, waiting for the opportunity to spill out on to the streets above.

I'm a firestarter, twisted firestarter
You're a firestarter, twisted firestarter

It’s this aggressive and unflinching passion for life, and making it something worth living, and living it on your own terms, that makes it so hard to reconcile with Keith Flint’s suicide. As I write we have no idea of the circumstances that led to it. He has talked in the past of his battles with depression and the resulting, gargantuan intake of drugs and alcohol that led to the collapse of The Prodigy in the mid-2000s. But the band had regrouped, continued to have No 1 albums (last year’s No Tourists being just the latest) and sell-out tours (one of which they were in the middle of when he died) – Flint’s performances leading to much overuse of the word ‘incendiary’.

Personally, he was married – to DJ Mayumi Kai – and lived in a nice house in Essex. He seemed to be embracing a sober and fit life, describing his live performances as his “drug. You've got to go out there firing. There's nothing sadder than watching a heavyweight boxer and he's out of shape and getting bashed around.”

That all seemed well is substantiated by his own bandmates’ reaction to his death. Announcing it on the band’s Instagram page Liam Howlett said: “The news is true , I can’t believe I’m saying this but our brother Keith took his own life over the weekend , I’m shell shocked , fuckin angry , confused and heart broken ..... r.i.p brother Liam”.

In recent years there’s been a number of well-known men who have taken their own lives, and some of them – Robin Williams, the double sucker punch to alternative music of Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington – I’ve been quite stunned and moved by. None of them moved me quite like Keith Flint’s death has though.

I’ve had my own issues with suicide ideation, which I won’t go into here as I’ve written about it before. But these events are certainly triggering and I’ve had to become adept at managing my own mental health and bouts of depression. I’ve found the best way of dealing with my sensitive reaction to the unexpected deaths of people I’m a fan of is to write about it (hence this blog) and to talk to friends about it. There was a flurry of messages I swapped with them in reaction to the news of Keith Flint’s death. This was a man and a band that had soundtracked our teenage and adult lives. As one friend said: “this makes our youth seem a long time ago.”

But, while The Prodigy’s 1994 album Music for the Jilted Generation was a seminal album for me (here’s the self-indulgent paragraphs) – one that showed me pop music didn’t have to be limited by genre, its cinematic scope and profound energy firing my imagination like few other albums have – The Prodigy’s impact didn’t stop for me and my peers in our teenage years.

I’ll never forget one couple I’m friends with picking Firestarter as the first dance at their wedding, much to the shock of their older guests and the amusement of the younger ones. The first time I saw Keith Flint in a live situation was not with The Prodigy, but with his short-lived punk band Flint at the Scala in London. The music might not have been fire-starting, but there was no escaping his mesmerising energy. Even in the quieter (for The Prodigy) ‘00s I remember the grinding funk of Girls kick-(fire)starting a party I was attending. They never lost their power even when their career seemed to be winding down.

Then, during their comeback in 2009, I finally saw them live (they’d been a long and conspicuous gap on my gig-attending CV) at the Big Day Out festival in Melbourne. Pogoing and head-banging in a tent in the Australian heat, it was one of the sweatiest and most breathless (from yelling “breathe with me”) live shows I’ve ever attended. Their show at Alexandra Palace in 2015 was similarly visceral – a beer-soaked blur of noise and adrenalin, mostly remembered amongst my friends now for one particularly amusing photo of me straddled on a friend’s shoulders, my arms thrust into the air, lost in the pure energy of the music.

Their music has continued to soundtrack our lives – last year’s No Tourists album providing a thought-provoking and incensing musical backdrop to the continued polarisation of politics we’re seeing, and unsure how to respond to. (Unintentionally, it seems – Liam Howlett has said the album is more about “escapism and the want and need to be derailed and not to be a tourist and follow that easy set path” and back in 2004 he told The Guardian: “Politics? It’s never political for us. We just write music for people to go ‘yeah!’ to. To be honest with you, I’ve never been angry about anything in my fucking life.”) As one friend said to me: “[No Tourists is] so good! They are so relevant and I hope it puts some energy into other [bands] to make something to wake people up.”

What we’re all struggling with though, more than the loss of Flint as a presence in our musical worlds, is the inexplicable nature of his death. It was the same with the deaths by suicide of Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington in 2017. And the same with any high-profile suicide – Anthony Bourdain, Avicii, Verne Troyer, Robin Williams, Alexander McQueen, and way back to that most talked about of rock suicides, Kurt Cobain’s – whether you’re a fan of these people or not, that question of ‘why?’ sits uncomfortably and stubbornly unanswered.

If even Keith Flint’s bandmate Liam Howlett, who he’s just spent weeks on tour with, can be “shell-shocked” and “confused”, what hope do we have of understanding the sudden death of a man who has been a familiar and invigorating presence for nearly 30 years? As one friend of mine put it: “It’s just awful. Makes you realise that anyone you know could end up taking this path.”

“The word that you hear is ‘selfish’. That used to get bandied around quite a lot: ‘Why would they be so selfish, look at the people they’re leaving behind.’ But they literally think that everybody else around them will be far better off without them there.”
Tony Robertson in ‘Horizon: Stopping Male Suicide’

That question of ‘why?’ is what recent BBC documentary Horizon: Stopping Male Suicide, aired in August last year, tries to explore at its start. In interviewing survivors of suicide attempts, and the friends and family of those who succeeded, they establish a number of key factors that can, and do, lead to men attempting or committing suicide. But before I describe them, here’s some stats for you:

• In the UK ¾ of people who commit suicide are male.
• Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK, causing more deaths in this group than car accidents and cancer.
• In the UK, someone takes their own life every 90 minutes, and it’s estimated that for every person that succeeds, there are 20 more attempts.
• There are higher rates of suicide in the north-east of England, where people are 35% more likely to take their own lives.
• It’s estimated that each suicide death costs the economy £1.5million.
• It’s UK Government policy to reduce suicide deaths by 10% by 2020.
• Funding for research into suicide prevention is much lower than many other areas of health: there is 22 times more funding for each cancer patient than for each person affected by mental health issues – suicide prevention funding is even smaller.

The Horizon documentary explores a number of factors that can contribute to suicidal thoughts or even lead to suicide. Not least of them is mental health issues, but the difficulty of using those as a predictor of suicide is that the majority of people with a mental illness never attempt to take their own life. The factors are more complex, and people with suicidal thoughts are often not in touch with mental health services. As one doctor puts it, “it’s like looking at a car and asking how it broke down – you need to know so much more about the car before you can work that out.”

Shirley Smith of suicide prevention charity If U Care Share, while talking about the larger numbers of suicides in the north-east of England, says there’s three factors that are common: bereavement, finances and failed relationships. The high unemployment rate in that area is also undoubtedly connected. If you lose your job, she says, that will have a knock-on effect on where you live, your relationship: “it’s a domino effect.”

That domino effect continues after someone has committed suicide as well – people are statistically more likely to attempt suicide if they know someone who has taken their own life. This is all within the context of diminishing friendship groups: the big gang you spend time with at school or university and into your 20s grows smaller, with many men relying only on their partner as they get older. If that relationship breaks down they are left isolated – many men not having the emotional support network that women nurture.

In 2017 Men’s Health magazine conducted a study “to better understand how mental ill health affects ordinary men in ordinary ways.” An astonishing 15,000 men contributed, with startling results. More than half (56%) said they have had suicidal thoughts, while 70% of them said that their mental health 'wasn't good'.

As Men’s Health editor Toby Wiseman describes it, what was revealed by the survey was a “conflict between notions of masculinity.” All the respondents subscribed to the idea of the ‘new man’, but found that hard to reconcile with the hard-wired, older idea of masculinity – defining yourself by your career, being the bread-winner, etc, which results in panic. “They know where to go for help but back themselves into a corner where they don’t feel able to, fighting some internal dialogue between the man they feel they should be and the man they can’t help but be.”

“If I knew 10% of what I know now, my son would still be alive.”
Steve Mallen of Zero Suicide Alliance

While showing that that factors that can lead suicide aren’t effective means to predict and therefore prevent it, Stopping Male Suicide does offer some advice to help us achieve what its title suggests, things we can do immediately and don’t need to be medically qualified for.

It all comes down to talking. Talking and listening; communicating better with your friends and family, and not skirting around the issue of suicide when someone you know seems down or troubled. Don’t be afraid to ask someone directly if they are feeling suicidal. There is evidence to show that this will help protect a suicidal individual – they will feel noticed and listened to. For guidance on how to do this, check out Zero Suicide Alliance’s free 20-minute suicide prevention training course.

Horizon also interviews Kevin Briggs, a highway patrol officer who has spent many years patrolling the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. He says he’s spoken to hundreds of people threatening to jump off the bridge – only two did. “Most people come back because of the glimmer of hope that folks need,” he says. “Many times folks are just looking for someone to listen to them: not to give advice, not to give them a prescription, not to say ‘you know what you shoulda done’, not to argue or blame, just to listen. Just to listen to what’s going on.”

I’ve no idea what all this says about the suicide of Keith Flint, or even if it can help me and my peers try and understand what he did. The factors that caused him to finally end his life will be as complex and inscrutable as any other – possibly even for those close to him. But I hope his death at least makes us all a bit more aware of what the people around us might be going through, more curious about their thoughts, and braver about asking exactly what is going on in their heads.

Gorgeous George

George Michael was the cause of my first encounter with musical snobbery. It was 1996 and I was at college. I was getting the bus from town back to the college with some friends, clutching in my hand a freshly purchased CD of George Michael’s just released Fastlove single. I’d been awaiting its release impatiently, back in those days when a song would have weeks of radio airplay before you were finally able to own your own copy of it. Now I could take it home and play it on repeat ‘til my heart was content (or I’d grown sick of it, more likely).

But my excitement was tempered somewhat by the reaction to my purchase of one of my friends: “Oh, are you one of those people that likes bad music?”

I knew immediately what she meant. This was 1996 – peak Britpop-era. Indie and rock music (so-called ‘real’ music) had conquered the charts. Oasis and The Prodigy scored No 1 singles. The likes of George Michael were sneered at by my peers. Those peak Wham! days were long forgotten and now irrelevant. 90s pop star Jarvis Cocker waved his bum at 80s pop star Michael Jackson at the BRITs and was proclaimed a hero.

But I liked all of it. To me, Fastlove was a really good tune; the way Don’t Look Back in Anger and Firestarter were really good tunes. That was the most important thing to me, although of course you’re influenced by what comes with it as well: I enjoyed Oasis’s almost parodic self-confidence; I loved the unhinged aggression of The Prodigy. There was something about George Michael that appealed to me as well, his cheesy 80s past aside. But at 18, I might have had difficulty articulating what.

I was never a full-blown fan. Only the occasional song from his catalogue would worm its way into my soundtrack, but when it did it was always a favourite. Also, he was too classically beautiful for me to develop a crush on. But I found a lot to admire in him. He was, like Madonna and Prince, very much his own kind of pop star. Although we now know he was holding a large part of himself back, his songs and image and interviews were all very much expressions of his own uncompromising personality. There was no shady Colonel Tom Parker or Simon Fuller type figure manipulating the wants and desires of his fans. 

And his vocal range was astonishing – with the ability to raise goosebumps with an even average song. But most importantly, he knew his way around a melody – no matter whether you like songs like Last Christmas or Wake Me UpBefore You Go Go or not, there’s no denying their craft.

Looking back now, if you listen to the tone of his songs, they tread that fine line gay men tread between the melancholy of our existence (A Different Corner, Heal the Pain, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me, John and Elvis are Dead) and the euphoric release of allowing ourselves to be who we are (Faith, Freedom ’90, Too Funky, Outside). There were clues in his appreciation of women as well. In his videos it leaned more to the aesthetic than objectification – the Freedom '90 video is a classy appreciation of some of the most beautiful women in the world, rather than the exercise in titillation it could have been.

Two years to the month after I bought Fastlove, George Michael was arrested in an LA toilet for cottaging. His reaction to his abrupt outing was both hilarious and galvanising. He took ownership of his behaviour. There was no excuses, no playing down, no blame apportioned anywhere but with himself. He did what he did and he was what he was, so what. The funny and euphoric single Outside, and its accompanying video, were the perfect response to the world’s shock and distaste. It combined what the world loved about George Michael – his infectious pop songs, his sexy videos, his sense of humour – with this new element of his persona. He was saying: “I’m still me, this is just another side to me.” And it worked.

For gay men, his response was a revelation. For so long – literally a century or so, beginning with Oscar Wilde’s trial – the idea of being publicly homosexual had been steeped in shame. Occasionally, a gay male pop star punched his way through to the A-list, but Boy George was too weird, alien-like and androgynous to be too threatening to the mainstream, or relatable for gay men. Meanwhile, Freddie Mercury went from closeted everyman rock star to fulfilling the Tragic Gay archetype, dying as he did of complications from AIDS at the age of 45.

George Michael was different. The Outside video is the response of a naughty child who is quite pleased he’s been caught so he can show off about what he’s done. You can see it in the singer’s sly smirk over his shoulder as he purrs “I think I’m done with the sofa…” You can hear it in the sarcastic lyrics: “And yes I've been bad, Doctor won't you do with me what you can,” mocking the idea that homosexuality can be cured. He was showing us a new way to say “I am what I am”, now with added middle finger.

He took (and continued to take) ownership of both the ‘homo’, and the ‘sexual’. As he would say in a later interview: “Gay people in the media are doing what makes straight people comfortable, and automatically my response to that is to say I’m a dirty filthy fucker and if you can’t deal with it, you can’t deal with it.” Finally, a gay public figure we could relate to.

As such his loss is a great one. He was a frequent reminder to the mainstream of a gay life well lived, at least eventually, and the struggles mentally and socially we go through to settle into that life. His legacy is incredible, one that reaches beyond those perfect pop songs. I hope he continues to inspire and galvanise young people in death as he did me in life.

Gay spaces

I attended a gay boxing club in London once and it was great, right up my street. I enthused about it to a heterosexual colleague and he asked me, quite genuinely and interestedly, what the point of a gay boxing club was. He pointed out that there are boxing clubs, just go to one of them. You don’t get straight boxing clubs, why do you need a gay one? I pointed out that you do get straight boxing clubs, they’re called boxing clubs.

His incomprehension was frustrating but understandable. He’s grown up in a society that has validated his sexual orientation from before he even knew he had one. From that first pre-teen birthday party, to the first school disco, to hanging out underage in the local pub, to university balls, festivals and clubs, to work Christmas dos: at all of these he has been able to express his sexual preferences clearly and with only the fear of rejection to hold him back.

I and the millions of other Western gay people of my generation have only received validation of our own inherent orientations incrementally, reluctantly and so recently that often it has come far too late to ease or prevent long-standing and deep-seated mental health issues, or worse, suicide. While my colleague was holding hands with a girl at that pre-teen birthday party, I was repressing the urge to do the same with a boy I liked. While he was snogging a girl at the school disco, reluctantly so was I, because homosexual behaviour was wordlessly but quite clearly forbidden. While he was flirting with young women at college, I had to spend time gauging a situation with gentle questions, dropping miniscule hints, all with the fear of, not only rejection, but retribution and potential violence.

The importance of gay spaces, even in these seemingly enlightened times, cannot be understated. To be able to strike up a conversation with an attractive human being, to be able to hold your partner’s hand, to sit and talk freely about your life and desires without judgement, to behave naturally in public without fear of repression and disgust is something straight people take for granted. As they should. As we all should. But gay people can’t do these things unthinkingly. When gay people do these things they are political acts. Consequences have to be considered. Pros and cons weighed up. And often a repressive and unhappy decision made.

Until same sex couples and homosexuality are acknowledged with as little thought as heterosexuality, gay spaces allow us the freedoms straight people aren’t even aware they have. I was taken to my first gay pub at the age of 16, and I was overwhelmed, not only because I was a closeted 16-year-old, but also because I had to entirely rethink what a pub could be. The idea that a social venue or event could be somewhere I met a lad in the way that my heterosexual peers met girls, or even just made like-minded friends I could talk about boys with, was a revelation to me. While straight people are exploring their burgeoning sexuality, we are repressing ours. And the results are disastrous.

It seems unlikely that Orlando shooter Omar Mateen was the puppet of ISIS he claimed to be. If he was driven by their orders, they show remarkable insight into the things I’ve been talking about above, by striking at the heart of what gay people rely on the most – a safe gay space to be themselves.

More likely it seems that Mateen was driven by demons many of his victims would have been familiar with, as he struggled to come to terms with his own homosexual desires. He was a regular at Pulse nightclub, he used gay dating apps, and he did that classic thing we all did as gay people growing up: deflect suspicion in friends and family members about our own same-sex attraction by showing disgust of it in others. All gay people experience some level of internalised homophobia, it’s an inevitable symptom of being brought up in a homophobic society. But Mateen’s upbringing via a religion that is at least dismissive of homosexuality, at worst murderous, and then confused by the reluctant validation of it he found in modern American society, sent him on a path most of us can’t comprehend, turning him against the very people who could have helped him.

It used to be that you might be scared of being seen going into a gay venue, but you were safe once you were in there. Now it feels like you’re safer outside. At least you can just fucking run. The Orlando shooting is an unwelcome reminder of the 1999 bombing of the Admiral Duncan, which made me step onto Old Compton Street with trepidation when I moved to London, rather than the joy and enthusiasm I should have experienced. But now as I did then, I will carry that anxiety right up to the bar of any gay venue I go to and buy it a (few) drink(s). I can’t stop going to gay venues, none of us can. We need them. 

Some notes on suicide

I often contemplate commiting suicide. I think about how I would do it with alarming regularity. At my worst, I have a recurring image in my head of stabbing myself in the stomach, like a mental GIF if you like, over and over. Different knives, different techniques, sometimes someone else doing it. But the same idea. Over and over.

I often ponder a (real-life) story I read recently about a British man who, after two failed suicide attempts – jumping off a building, which paralysed him from the waste down, and an overdose on pills – joined a gun club in Las Vegas, flew over, spent the day doing the induction course and then shot himself dead that evening. You've gotta love 'Murica,

About a year ago I visited the local Homebase. I'd gone in to buy some picture hooks. They didn't have the type I needed so I turned around to see if there was any more choice. Behind me there was a wide selection of rope. All the different types of rope you could imagine. More than enough to hang yourself with. Something clicked into place for me: that's how I would do it. I began to think about what rope would be best. Images of my nephews flickered in my mind. I pushed them away. I thought about buying the rope, realised I would be buying nothing else, no hooks. Paranoia flushed through me: the cashier would know. She would know what I was up to and call the manager. I rushed out the store as quickly as I could.

Is that shocking to read? That I sometimes want to kill myself? I expect it is, we just don't talk about this kind of stuff, you and I. It's taboo, and terrifying to think of. Easier done than said. And so those 800,000 or so people a year who do actually commit suicide, those 20 million or so people a year who attempt suicide, and those probably 160 million people a year who have suicidal thoughts are mostly going through that experience alone.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) lists stigma and taboo as the top challenge, or obstacle, in tackling the problem of suicide. And it is very much a problem, particularly among men. In the UK alone "13 men a day kill themselves, nearly 5,000 men a year, accounting for 78% of all suicides in the country". This year male suicides hit their highest rate in more than a decade.

The astonishing numbers have prompted a coalition of charities, including Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) and The Samaritans, to call for the government to treat male suicide as a public health issue and debate in the Commons the proposal that local authorities should develop and implement a suicide prevention plan and spend more money on research into the subject. Despite stigma raising its ugly head in the form of Labour MP Jess Phillips' incredulous snigger at the proposal, the debate took place in Westminster Hall today, International Men's Day.

So there's the social context. And I'm sure the statistics make you go 'ooh' and the seeming paralysis of the authorities in doing much about it makes you go 'blimey'. But really, unless you've been directly affected by suicide, this information is as abstract to you and your real life as the Beirut bombings were to Westerners in comparison to the Paris attacks. To feel empathy to a social or global problem, we need to put a face on it. A familiar face, if possible.

I first dabbled in suicide when I was 17. Pills and beer. It was a naive attempt, that resulted merely in me being ill for a couple of days. I remember waking up the next day quite distraught I was still alive. I was gay in a community where it was considered abhorrent to be so. I was desperately in love with my clearly heterosexual best friend. I didn't know what else to do. The thought of going on was too much. The thought of killing myself in any other way too terrifying. I buried my head under the pillow.

I had another wave of depression in my mid-20s. I had suicidal thoughts, but the closest I came to acting on them was contemplating the likelihood of death while standing on the edge of London tube platforms, something I've done many times since and read about often with macabre curiosity. They never report the details of those "fatalities on the line" that often delay our London travel. Or even name it suicide. These "train deaths" are usually "not being treated as suspicious". The Australians are the same, while the Americans are a little more liberal with the s word. 

In my mid 20s I lived with a loving group of friends. In my mid 20s there was still potential in my life, it was still early doors. Now in my late 30s that potential feels like it's fast waning. I've seen my peers travel the world, find their life partners, buy houses, have children, start businesses, get divorced, marry again. I've done only one of these things (although I really did the hell out of it) and as such I feel like I've been left behind, trailing at the back as I usually was in the races on school sports day. 

Every gathering of peers now features conversation about relationships, house renovation, career decisions. I feel the stigma of having been single for 5 years. I feel the stigma of not owning my own property. I feel the stigma of having been in my job for three years and not being ready to move on. All this life stuff is too hard, I think. I don't know how to achieve any of it. Maybe that death stuff would be easier, for all involved. But then I feel the stigma of that, and keep that to myself as well.

I think I've always been depressive, and I've never really learnt how to talk about myself or the things I've been through. The British part of me has been taught it's not the done thing, that it's self-indulgent. The male part of me has been taught that talking about your feelings and things that are affecting you is weak, laughable. The gay part of me has been taught that being open about it is abhorrent, disgusting. Even today I find it rare to meet people, gay or straight, for whom homosexuality is normalised. I can count on one hand the friends I have that I know homosexuality itself won't be a point of conversation when we meet.

Basically, men talking about their feelings, or talking about the traumas we've been through, is wrong. According to Professor Rory O'Connor of the Institute of Health and Wellbeing at Glasgow University, we're a 'buffer' generation caught between fathers for whom dealing with life meant keeping a stiff upper lip and that chin firmly up, and sons who are growing up more able and used to talking about how they're feeling. We don't know how to do that, so we don't. And it's killing us.

UK rapper Professor Green, real name Stephen Manderson, made a bold attempt to counteract that social stigma in his recent BBC Three documentary Suicide and Me. In it he attempts to make sense of the suicide of his estranged father, who killed himself seven years ago, aged 43. It's a hard watch, not least because it focuses an unflinching gaze on (in this case British) men's inability to talk about themselves. The interview with Manderson's father's best friend of 30 years is heartbreaking. He just had no idea what was going on in his friend's head. The suicide was baffling to him.

It's the interviews with those left behind that stayed with me. While suicide is mostly not a selfish act – on the contrary, most suicidal people genuinely believe the world would be a better place without them; I've certainly thought that often – it does leave a dark hole in the lives of loved ones. The pain of their loss, and not having any understanding of why their father, brother or son did it, is etched clearly on their faces. It's this horrible, inevitable result – the grief-stricken, confused look on my sister's face – that has stayed my hand in recent months, that made me neck just that bottle of wine, without the codeine chaser.

Manderson doesn't really get to the bottom of why his father killed himself, but he does get plenty of hints: an insecure childhood, inability to face up to his many responsibilities, the suicide of his brother, the death from cancer of his sister. In Manderson's interview with the aforementioned Professor O'Connor of Glasgow University, O'Connor describes the rapper's father's situation as a "perfect storm".

"What your story highlights is that it's never, or very rarely, just a single factor, but a complex set of factors which come together. And sadly for too many men in our country... that perfect storm of factors comes together and leads to suicide." 

I won't delve into the numerous factors that cause me to have suicidal thoughts. I have touched on some here, kept others to myself, as I am wont to do. I just want you to know that I do wrestle with those thoughts, as do many men, and women, around you. I have been wrestling with those thoughts more intensely for the past two days and now, having spoken to you, I'm feeling the fog clear a little.

The Bodmin Wassail

(Written for the Bodmin Wassail website, originally published here.)

Each year on 6th January (or the 5th, if the 6th falls on a Sunday), we (a small group of local men) make our way around the Cornish town of Bodmin, singing wassail songs to the locals. We dress in top hat and tails, smart outfits comprised of “gentlemen’s hand-me-downs” – clothes acquired from the local gentry and passed down from one wassailer to another over the decades. 

Our day begins at the offices of Bodmin Town Council, where we sing for the mayor and local councillors. Following this, calls are made to residential homes, local businesses and public houses of the town, but most of the day is spent calling at people’s homes, announcing our presence at the door with one of the three wassail songs we sing. 

There are two types of wassailing. One is the house-visiting wassail, such as Bodmin’s tradition and has much in common with carolling. The other is orchard-visiting, found in the cider-making regions of England, which sees wassailers singing amongst the trees to promote a good harvest for the coming year. The beginnings of the custom are unknown, but it has elements of Anglo-Saxon traditions – the word itself comes from an Anglo-Saxon toast ‘waes hael’, meaning "be in good health". As such, it is likely the rite pre-dates the Norman Conquest. There are different versions of these traditions found all over the country, each taking elements of one or both forms to develop their own local tradition. In this respect Bodmin’s is no different. However, it does have a special significance in laying claim to being the oldest surviving heritage in the country, running unbroken for centuries. 

The first known record of the Bodmin Wassail was in the will of one Nicholas Sprey, a three-time mayor of Bodmin who died in 1624. As well as providing for his family, he also bequeathed the sum of 13s 4d for an “annual wassail cup” to promote “the continuance of love and neighbourly meetings” and “remember all others to carry a more charitable conscience”. Sprey – who was also Town Clerk and the MP for Bodmin during his career – directed that the wassail cup be taken to the mayor's house each year on the 12th day of Christmas, raising funds as it passed through the town. In 1838 the stipend was withdrawn, but the custom has continued to this day. 

The Bodmin Wassail’s relationship with the town’s mayors has continued as well, and we call at his or her house each year. In 2008 former mayor John Chapman cemented that relationship further by presenting us with a specially commissioned bowl. Drinking out of a wassail bowl is an oft-mentioned element of the tradition in the songs, and as this type of wassailing increased in popularity throughout Cornwall in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the vessel used was a cup made of wood and decorated with holly, laurel and tinsel. In Bodmin, however, it was always made of pottery, as recalled by Mr Tom Green Snr, who wassailed in the town for over 70 years until the late 1980s. He told his fellow Wassailers it disappeared following the outbreak of the Second World War. 

The current bowl was made by Lostwithiel potter John Webb, and is displayed throughout the year in the Tourist Information Centre in Bodmin’s Shire Hall. Its creation marked a new era of recognition by the council of the town’s ongoing tradition. Mayor at the time Bob Micek told the West Briton newspaper he felt it was appropriate for the council and the Wassailers to re-engage with each other: "It's a unique part of the town's and Cornwall's heritage and should be supported." Since then, thanks to the efforts and enthusiasm of Town Clerk Paul Callaghan, we have been made welcome in the Mayor’s Parlour by the town’s councillors, to toast the health of all at the start of the day. 

Recent years have also seen a refurbishment of the collecting box, which the Wassailers use for collecting money for local charities. The box was based on a church collection box donated by Wassailer Paul Scoble’s father, an old box which had been used for decades by the bell ringers of St Petroc’s Church. It is a marked improvement on the previous incarnation – an old plastic ice cream box with a hole cut in the top. Also, in 2014, a new leather purse for collecting money was generously donated. It was inspired by the lyrics from one wassail song: “We've got a little purse made of stretching leather skin. We want a little of your money, to bind it well within.” 

The songs are the most important element of the wassail. Bodmin’s tradition has three, which is unique amongst wassail traditions – they usually have just one. The first is sung on arrival before we enter the house or premises. The second was passed on to us by Mr Charlie Wilson, and is often sung during the eating, drinking, storytelling, fundraising and singing that goes on at each stop. The third is sung as we leave, thanking our hosts for their hospitality: “So now we must be gone to seek for more good cheer, where bounty will be shown, as we have found it here, in our Wassail.”