I am going to make a meandering and circuitous route towards a point, so please bear with me.

This, in many ways, is a week that a small part of me thought that I would never see. Way back in the mists of time when I was still in high school, before even my GCSEs I was a very different person to what I am today. That person is very much a stranger. Admittedly we share similar traits and predispositions, but the similarity is that of freshly hewn marble and a finished sculpture. In these less than halcyon days one of my now tragically estranged friends made a prediction, an eerie prophecy that has rung down through the years. I suspect it was made in jest, a throw away comment, but it’s niggled at the back of my mind for an awfully long time.

“By the time you’re 25, you’ll either be dead or sectioned”

For years I used this pronouncement of my inevitable doom as funny little anecdote when talking to people in the pub. Normally people who still lingered in that awkward purgatory of “not being complete strangers but not yet friends.” We all laughed, fun and merriment was had by all. Then I turned 25 and suddenly it wasn’t quite so funny.

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