“…And he wanted me to do what? Pretend to pick his wife up! So that’s what it all boils down then. An off the wall comment thrown out by your over here, over paid and over sexed yank friend. So unsettling, so preposterous, and so damnably in your face American that you could n’t help feel that you had been let into some very exclusive club. Club Braggadocio. Club Devil may care. Club Macho. Why did n’t someone club me over the head the moment I heard Carson say it. If there’s ever a time and a place to where you can trace all your regrets to then that’s the place for me. I’ve been back to the headwaters of my despair more than once over the years. I know: you want me to explain his "request". Hang on a while, I'm getting there.

Our lives could not have been more dissimilar the moment he cooed that over ripe expression of bizarreness into my ingenue ears. I was Nineteen, fresh-faced and pudding-cheeked. A little rosebud blown in from the North that had fallen to earth in the Big City. My aura in those early days would have been green and probably visible at sea too. I was an elderly child; old, the consequence, strangely, of being young and over educated. Three years of too much reading and too many earnest, agitated late night conversations had ensured that I left Academia a weary, cynical know it all. Which, of course I was not; all I actually knew was studied responses, great for the Emma Bovarys that lived only on the printed page but beyond useless when it came to the cut and thrust of the real world. It was like being placed on a course of steroids in a way: forearms like cinder blocks whilst everything else just flapped limply in the breeze

What I was, Carson certainly was n’t: he was bold, brazen with an exuberant gift for that intoxicating phrase that would startle, but never leave the ears of any listener. A magician, really, and words were his charms, his incantations. No one ever left Carson without feeling somehow changed; for me, it was always the inevitable thunderbolt of a statement that he would let go that would roll around the inside of my mind for months. It was n’t just his boisterous, wild, fresh phrases that awed me. Somewhere in Henry V, there’s the line that “men of few words are the best”. Utterly impossible to believe in Carson's case.

There was something else and that I did n’t have too. He knew what he wanted from life and he knew too that he was going to get it. Maybe he would suffer for the first steps of the long march that he had set for himself, but he just knew that he would be swapping the hard road for the red carpet somewhere in his life. Self-assurance like his would have kept the Titanic floating if you could have bottled it.

It was n’t just temperaments that highlighted the difference between the two of us; there were our backgrounds. God himself could not have devised anything more incongruous. I was from a tough, little mining village in the heartland of industrial SouthYorkshire. Where the Pit head whistle calling the faithful to work in the early hours would wind and bend over the hills and dales. Where the rain lashed the streets almost horizontally at times. And where Men spoke hardly any words but let slip subtle, almost invisible gestures of communication by the nod of a head or raise of an eyebrow. Well, how green was Carson’s Valley? He came from the pulsing, throbbing, wise cracking heart of America, at least that’s how I saw it. Three monosyllables that even now work better than an aphrodisiac for me: New York City, as exotic as Bangkok and as alluring as Paris in this Greenhorn’s eyes.

How did we meet? As eccentrically as everything else that characterised our relationship. We were, dare I say it, grave-robbing, plundering a sacred monument. That’s the incident that catalysed it all, but some background first. We wandered into each other in the Lake District. I was on a week’s hiking holiday with a few friends. He, on the other hand, was on a solo European Grand Tour; one, though, with pattern to it. An English Lit graduate, his objective was to see as many of the literary places of worship, as he termed them, as could be slotted away in three weeks. If its Monday, then it must be Baudelaire; if its Tuesday, then it must be Rimbaud, it was that kind of tour. So, karma, kismet, fate, or whatever name you want to give to that spiritual centrifugal force that pushes the unlikeliest of individuals together was whirring away industriously in the background pushing closer and closer two very disparate individuals. And then it happened, the big encounter. Odd, but I can’t actually remember where exactly it happened, let alone the how. Maybe it was near Cockermouth. I only say that since I knew Carson could n’t stop chortling every time that particular place name came up. Nor would he stop repeating a conversation he had as a hitcher with a lorry driver about gobbling turkeys. He liked to bang his funny bone on those two.

Carson, I now realise, either did not consciously recognise boundaries, or saw them only as something to be climbed over. And that’s how the two of us joined a very, very exclusive fraternity. We became grave robbers. Not, I suppose the preferred career path for many impressionable seventeen-year-olds. Incidents never happen randomly. They may seem to do but they don’t. There is a ragbag of things that set the conditions for something to happen. What it took for this gintrap to be triggered was a cocksure young American with a younger starry eyed, easily led Brit bouncing along in his slipstream. The morning after the night before we had decided to pair up and do a little sightseeing. Whilst I had a motive: I wanted to catch a few more of his pungent comments, recycle them and pass them of as my own. He probably wanted someone just to pass the day with.

Last week, I saw straight into the Heart of Darkness. But I'm not talking about depravity or some form of moral corruption, or in fact anything malign. Stop anyone in the street, and ask them to define this expression, and I'm pretty confident these would be the attributes that nearly everyone would expect to see sheltering under it's gothic eaves. That's the shrink-wrapped description it seems to bound with. Not here, though. I'm looking at an altogether different context.

I was on a late night ferry last week, returning from Gozo, the second largest island in the Maltese archipelago. In front lay Malta, our destination, to one side was Italy, and on the other, further away lay Tunisia and North Africa. It was the darkest night I've ever known. The deepest, blackest night I've been in. Deeper than ebony. No other pigment. Only this immense dark wall. Solid. Dense. Light had simply vanished, sucked away somewhere.

No visible break between the sea and the sky. Not a smudge of luminescence to mark the boundary of air and water. Disorienting, just to look at from the deck of a reasonably large ship as the one I was on; but to be afloat on the same night in something smaller and nowhere near as safe, barely imaginable. I've read plenty of stories about skiers and climbers caught in catastrophic snowfalls - whiteouts - where they can't tell up from down, it's that impenetrable. Terrifying? Yeah, they all agree there. To be on a small, scarcely, if at all, seaworthy boat, as no doubt people were that night, and nights before and since; huddled together, alone, all undoubtably frightened, and for some probably the first time they've even seen the sea, let alone been on it. Then how must that feel?

I'm certain that as I looked out into the mesmerisingly dark immense night there were people in the heart of it clawing their way to a new life. I hope you make it.

I've finally discovered Inner Peace. Taken me years. And it was n't Yoga or floating that got me there either. Much easier. This worked for me, and I imagine we could all do with a little calm these days. So here it is, some simple, straightforward advice that a friend sent me:-

"The way to achieve inner peace is to finish off all the things you have started. So I looked round the house to see all the things I had started and hadn't finished. And before leaving the house this morning I finished off a bottle of red wine, a bottle of white wine, the Baileys, three Bacardi Breezers, the Jack Daniels, the Prozac, some Valium, some cheesecake and a box of chocolates. You have no idea how good I feel"

Alternatively, I guess you could get around this unfinished bottle thing by just having daily delivery

The homeowner's Blues is the mortgage, it's always the mortgage. I'm starting to wonder about another - just how secure a place is it: your nest egg, your home, the space you merely sleep in, call it what you will. However you view it, don't you need the sense of emotional security as much as that of it being physical secure? You see, I've got a funny feeling someone is living in the communal parts of the block of flats that I live in, or has at least a key to the front door. I'm basing this on some very thin evidence, it really is. Just it's this feeling.

Here goes. Some weeks ago, I came home very late at night and found a coat hanging on the banister. Then last week, the front door was wide open one evening. Tonight there was someone I've never seen before just standing in the corridor. Unfortunately this is where I get judgmental, and I know I should n't, but this guy did n't look like a typical resident. And what do they look like, God that's too fraught a question to even start to consider. Feelings can be problems.

It's not just the blues, there's something else I have to reconcile: my social conscience, if it turns out my "feeling" is actually true, with another side of me - the homeowner, what will I do if this is the case? Incipient liberal guilt.

Of course this is more than likely me creating a "grassy knoll" theory. Yoking together random coincidences into a structure they don't merit. Hope so

When did chewing a toffee become an extreme sport? My views do change over time; I'm not dogmatic, nothing's set in stone. I'm human here. I don't know everything. Got to be candid, the foundations of some of the things I do know, might not be that secure; so if the argument is a good one, carries weight, and there's evidence underpinning any assertions as well, then, hey, I'm confident enough to recognise it and shift over to that side of the street.

Let's call these: "I'm a reasonable, rational adult" reassessments. Happy with those, part of growing. But last night, and typically it had to occur to me on New Year's Eve - apart from Birthdays, there's no other date around which can twist poignancy out of thin air like this one - it came to me abruptly and with a nip of frost on it too, that chewing a toffee is now a complicated, multiple meaning act. Once a pleasure, now virtually a studied decision. Full of angst from beginning to end.

"Got to be careful, don't bite into it, there's been some expensive dentistry done in the back there, can't risk that again. Keep it on my tongue, let it melt gradually, you can do it. Concentrate. Don't even think of using teeth... Why did I choose a toffee, for God's sake...Anything else but... They've got plenty of fruit in the house. Oh, yeah, you had to be different...There was plenty of stuff filled with cream, soft enough to eat...but no, you wanted to go off piste..."

So, we might acquire the capability to change intellectually, effortlessly, but what gain is that now when eating a sweet has become like juggling steak knives, a moment of anxiety, even potential regret. When did that change happen?