Television
Down but not out
James Delingpole
Even though I've pretty much given up writing digressive me-columns because there are too many people at it in The Spectator nowadays and I preferred it when I was the only Romanian at the party, I thought I'd start by telling you about my depression.
As my depressions usually do it appeared from almost nowhere. I could tell it was depression rather than just workaday existential angst because I could actually feel its evil chemicals seeping down through my brain, as if someone had poured cold custard into the top of my head. Don't worry, I'm not going to kill myself or anything. It's just a huge pain because what it means is that I don't currently have the energy or self-confidence to do much with the literary side of my career. And the literary side of my career is what really matters because, unlike journalism, it might one day stop me being poor.
I felt even more down after watching Home Stories (Channel 4, Thursday), which was about the enormous of amounts of money you can make if you happen to buy a house in the right area just before gentrification occurs and prices hit the roof. Typical of this was the Georgian terrace in Gibson Square, Islington, which in the 1960s was total slumsville but where now properties sell for upwards of £900,000.
Since I benefited from the Islington Effect myself, I suppose I oughtn't to complain. When the Fawn and I went looking for our first house together and discovered that we couldn't afford the Islington suburb of Stoke Newington we ended up in muchfeared Hackney in a street where there were still one or two of yer actual workingclass East Enders. Five years later, by which time Hackney was no longer considered a wild, lawless frontier, we sold our house for twice what we'd paid for it.
As I say, I shouldn't complain about this but I will because here's the annoying bastard part: if we'd hung on a year longer, we could have made at least as third as much again. Camberwell, where we moved instead, definitely has its plus points (er . .. ) but unfortunately such tiny bits of it that are habitable have already up-and come. I'll bet if you compared price shifts in the two areas, you'd discover that in the Last year we'd made a net loss.
Normally at this point you're supposed to say something pious about how houses should be places for living in not investments. But I'm not going to because, frankly. I think that when I move into a scuzzy area and my house goes up more in value than, say, that of a banker or a lawyer in an expensive area it's a form of divine justice.
Anyway, I want to move on to this terribly moving programme that I forced myself to watch even though I didn't feel like it at all called Positive Women (BBC 2, Tuesday). It was about three women with HIV.
Clearly, when you're making a programme like that, you've got about ten seconds in which to grab the audience's attention before they go: `Nope. Too depressing', and switch to Changing Rooms. This, filmmaker Todd Austin did very well by having a deeply straight, sweet and normal-sounding middle-class girl called Emma describing how in her final year at university she went to a classical concert and met the perfect man who was to end up giving her HIV. In other words: there but for the grace of God go we all.
The story that really got to me was Nicki's. I felt a lump in my throat when she met this lovely new man called Karl who didn't care about her infection, he loved her and that was all that mattered. Then, one night their condom burst and Nicki, who had resigned herself never to having children, became pregnant. Elation swiftly turned to apprehension as she learned that there was a 12 per cent chance her baby daughter Ellen might be HIV positive. And we viewers were left on tenterhooks while — clever editing this — the programme moved briefly onto one of the other girls' stories.
God, reality is horrible because of course baby Ellen did turn out to have the virus. After two blissful years of motherhood, Nicki had a vivid dream in which a radiantly happy Ellen was being taken away by two glowing figures. She woke up, hurried to her daughter's bedroom and found her cradled in Karl's arms, dying. Believe me, this is not the sort of thing you want to watch when you're giving your own baby daughter her evening bottle.
Perhaps it's a bit masochistic watching such things but I think that unless we remind ourselves occasionally how fragile and vulnerable we are and how easily our lives could go wrong, we are that much more likely to behave like shits. It can also be strangely uplifting, like the bit where Emma matter-of-factly described how she'd bought herself a flat-pack coffin kit, tried it for size, painted it because it looked boring and now used it as a window seat; and how knowing that you're not going to see 40 makes you that much less wasteful with the time you have left.
I'm still depressed, though, obviously.
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