Can you recommend an extraordinary book?

“Can you recommend a book that I’d find extraordinary?” I asked the woman in the book shop. “It’s a game I sometimes play.”

The Chapel , Broadstairs made me optimistic about this gambit. Tiers of second hand books that you smell once you cross the threshold. Teas by day, real ales and live music by night. Yet at midday on a Winter’s Tuesday I was the only customer. Perhaps that’s why the assistant responded with such diligence. As  I watched, she drifted from section to section, toying with books, considering then rejecting several possibilities. Eventually, she handed me a battered copy of The Dice Man.

It only took a few moments to know. “That looks perfect. And only a pound?” The rules are that I buy whatever I’m proffered. She could have recommended an old Readers Digest for £25 and I’d have had to buy it. A while ago in Washington DC, I ended up spending about $140 in one shop when I played the game. So, not only did this seem like a potentially interesting read, but also a bargain.

Tonight, I grin as I think what a prescient choice she made. A main character filled with ennui and self-loathing, with writer’s block, who turns his life over to the dice. Maybe more randomness might disturb whatever permutation of depression that has seen me shift from bed to sofa to bed again for the past eight days. Monosyllabic. Self-pitying. Miserable.  A pedestrian condition, yet utterly disabling.

And I badly needed something to help me get unstuck. Just the night before, Sonia had quite reasonably pointed out that she was barely able to cope with the demands of the household on her own and that my emotional and practical absenteeism was unsustainable. It was a fair point.

Then this morning my son Manny had given me a talking to, urging me to get up and do something...anything... rather than just moping. “Please don’t close your eyes when I’m talking to you,” he said at one point. I was surprised by his assertiveness, and quietly pleased. Though I doubt he’d have registered this from my resentful grunt.

Later that morning, as I slumped in her chair, prevaricating over choices for the rating scales on her laptop, my psychologist Eleanor was unsurprised by my PHQ-9 score. “Severe depression. That fits.” She was concerned when I told her  I had planned to drive to the coast for a walk. I could sympathise. Suicidal ideation and 50 miles of A roads with oncoming traffic that I could swerve in front of at any time probably troubled her, but although I’ve been a self-indulgent cunt lately and thought about swerving a couple of times on the journey, I’m not that cuntish. And if I hadn’t made the drive I wouldn’t now be feeling invigorated by the possibilities of throwing the dice.

The first throw then. More than <6> and I’ll upload this as a blog tonight...

Double <3>.

It can wait.

14^th January 2014.