mostly david ephgrave

The last few days have been punctuated with some perhaps overly-honest tweets. Put simply, I've been having a tough time lately; really tough. And in my bleakest moments, I've needed help. This isn't a new experience - by God, I've been in this position more times than I'd like to count - but the nature of depression is that when it hits, you feel you've never felt this way before; it somehow wipes the slate clean to leave you with a new one even messier than the first. Now, as I've intimated, I'd usually keep this to myself. But sometimes, for whatever reason, you need to reach out a bit. We are not infallible, much as we disguise our foibles, and it is probably this tendency to play down our vulnerabilities that spreads the message that to show weakness is wrong.  Put simply, that's a load of shit. There's nothing wrong with letting your guard down to be open about your mental health (says the man who, despite a lifetime of trying to gent...

There’s a woman who lives near me who I can honestly say I’ve never once seen not on the phone. (Brief hiatus for you to work past the ‘never’ and ‘not’ to understand the gist of this sentence.) This isn’t an exaggeration. She’s on it every time she walks past (and I’m going to apply the oft-misused word ‘literally’). I see her every day, usually more than once. I don’t want you to think I’m spying on her - I am , I just don’t want you to think it – but it’s very hard not to notice her telephonic proclivities, particularly as most of her conversations take place right outside my window, any time of the day or night. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was addicted to speaking to people she can’t see; if there’s such a fetish, it’s sick . I’m not the only person to notice it. My wife has spotted it too. It happens so often, it’s comedic. She may as well have a handset skin-grafted to her palm. She usually adopts that annoying hands-free technique favoured by teenagers ...