Oh, dear...

I was so proud of myself for putting up my first posting that I wrote to everyone bragging.

Then I realised they were the people I would be talking about...

Oh well, I love them all dearly and I'm sure they love me well enough to forgive me. It won't stop me if they don't.

The man who tried to hang himself had been in a bad blue at the pub earlier in the evening and has a list of assault convictions as long as the bit of string he tried to use as a widdy. He reckoned he was going to gaol and didn't want to. Suicide was his choice of avoidance.

I have stared through the dark window of suicide into its empty interior. You imagine it full of things that will never be and never where, ghostly images of what regrets dress themselves up to be, and beckoning. (And that's without drugs to distort things and make them worse...)

Something always manages to distract me: the pulse and colour of a butterfly resting nearby, the smell of gardenias, the creak of the brakes on my daughter's pushbike as she pulls up at the back of the house after work, the taste of an unexpected thunderstorm or sometimes just a little lie down and a good sleep.

I know the black dog bails up others, worrying at them without end - I feel for them. Mercifully, mine always ends up being a mini poodle with a deep voice!

Once upon a time...

There was me. And then I told my girlfriend I was going to have a go at blogging - she promptly told me statistics show that people who keep journals are more likely to die of heart attack...

That didn't stop me. What has stopped me is where to start, and a fear of my own banality.

This is my first footstep in the 1,000 mile journey.

Last night a man tried to hang himself in the park next to where I live. His mate ran in the middle of the road along the front of the flats yelling for help. It was quarter to two in the morning and I hadn't been able to sleep. At first I ignored him thinking he was drunk and just being a nuisance, but there was something desperate in his tone that made me get up and listen to what he was yelling. When I realised I grabbed my phone and stood in front of my louvres to shout out and let him know I was ringing for an ambulance. He came to my fence and looked up, crying and repeating "please help, he's hung himself".

Then I realised I was standing there stark naked. I don't think he noticed.

I didn't go over and help. I've never seen a dead body and didn't want a stranger to be the first. Like a vouyer I watched through my door as the police and ambulance came. I couldn't hear anything, but the two men that were with him stood and gesticulated to the police, describing with wide passionate sweeps of their arms what had happened. He had climbed onto a red granite rock, a war memorial with plaque, reached over to the ropes hanging off the flagpole beside it, wrapped the ropes around his neck and jumped.

As the ambulance wheeled him away he moaned loadly. I was glad he was alive - he probably wasn't.

This morning as I walked to work there was a council worker repairing the flagpole. I stopped and asked if he knew what happened. He said, with a shake of his head and large gold hoops swinging in both ears, that someone had tried to do something not very successfully. He showed me the rope and said it was way too fine to hold up anything but a flag.

And so it ends...