CHARLIE BROOKER IN TODAY'S GUARDIAN

This seemed at once so very true, and so funny, and it chimes with my experience to such an extent, that I can't resist lifting it from the Guardian's website, for prosperity.

"Hands up anyone who's had a great experience with romance. Now put your hands back down and stop lying. Romance never works. Romance never does what it says on the tin. Romance, ultimately, is bullshit.

If I sound jaded, it's because I am. I'm so sick and tired of love and its pitfalls I can scarcely lift my fingers to type. If love were a product, the queue at the faulty goods desk would stretch right round the universe and back. It doesn't work properly. The seams come apart and it's full of powdered glass.

Each fresh romance has two potential outcomes: 1. One of you falls hard, heavily, and quickly, until this helpless, unattractive neediness sends the other running for the hills; or 2. by some miracle, your desperate neediness levels balance out, and you stay together for several years - until the love between you withers and dies, at which point one or both of you will stagger away, howling like a wolf with a hook in its gut, wounded beyond reason.

When you're smitten, romance is a thrilling high-wire act over a looming lake of woe. Your head's full of music; the first few steps are a joyful scamper. Then the skies darken, the breeze picks up, the tightrope shudders and you fight to retain your balance. In your heart of hearts, you know you're heading for a tumble, but you're out and exposed and there's no turning back - and who knows, maybe you'll make it?

Imbecile. Of course you won't. Instead, the rope snaps and suddenly you're plunged back into the monochrome work-a-day reality of flowers in the dustbin and dogs being sick on the pavement.

At this point, wandering in a post-romantic shock, things get even worse. Being numb and distant somehow renders you magically attractive to others. It's sod's law in action, and before you know it you're abusing the privilege. Hungering for another go on the tightrope, you hurl yourself at the nearest admirer, but since the love canary's recently flown your cage, you're selfish, robotic, and doomed to wipe your arse all over their soul. Congratulations: you've become an emotional vandal. And you'll do it again and again and again until you meet another special someone - only this time, because of the last time, the tightrope's even higher up and more precarious, and you're so scared of falling that your feet shake the moment you step aboard.

On and on and on it goes, and there's no end to it. This madness must be stopped. We can medicate depression into oblivion; why not romance? A preventative tablet, perhaps, or an adhesive patch that suppresses the relevant endorphins, which you can slap on your skin at the first sign of attraction, killing romance dead, stopping you in your tracks before you make a fool of yourself or a hapless idiot of another. And sizzled on the back of every packet, embossed on every patch, just to keep things melancholic and swoonsome, you'd find the last line from Graham Greene's The End of the Affair - the battered protagonist's final plea, which sums up the absolute aching awfulness of romance so eloquently it makes your heart nod along with tears in its eyes: "O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.

Next week - some jokes"

TEXT MESSAGE

Received at a very busy outdoor summer festival...

"Where are you? I am about where we were before. If you can go somewhere easy to find, go there and text me."

Perfect! Could hardly be vaguer.

LYRICS 'WASTE OF PAINT' - BRIGHT EYES

"I have a friend, he's mostly made of pain. He wakes up, drives to work and straight back home again. He once cut one of my nightmares out of paper, I thought it was beautiful, I put it on a record cover. Then I tried to tell him that he had a sense of color and composition so magnificent and he said thank you please but your flattery is truly not becoming me. Your eyes are poor, you're blind, you see no beauty could have come from me. I'm a waste of breath, of space, of time.
I knew a woman, she was dignified and true and her love for her man was one of her many virtues until one day she found out that he had lied and she decided the rest of her life from that point on would be a lie. But she was grateful for everything that had happened and she was anxious for all that would come next. But then she wept, what did you expect, in that big old house with the cars she kept. Oh and such is life she often said, with one day leading to the next, you get a little closer to your death which was fine with her, she never got upset and with all the day she may have left she would never clean another mess or fold his shirts or look her best. She was free to waste away alone.

Last night, my brother he got drunk and drove and this cop, he pulled him off to the side of the road and he said officer, officer, you've got the wrong man, no, no, I'm a student of medicine, the son of a banker, you don't understand. The cop said no one got hurt you should be thankful and your carelessness, it is something awful. No I can't just let you go and though your father's name is known, your decisions now are yours alone, you're nothing but a stepping stone on a path to debt, to loss, to shame.

The last few months I've been living with this couple, yeah you know the kind who buy everything in doubles. They fit together like a puzzle and I love their love and I am thankful that someone actually receives the prize that was promised by all those fairy tales that drugged us. And they still do me, I'm sick, lonely, no laurel tree, just green envy. Will my number come up eventually? Like love's some kind of lottery where you scratch and see what's underneath. It's sorry, just one cherry, play again, get lucky.

I've been hanging out down by the train's depot, no I don't ride, I just sit and watch the people there. And they remind me of windup cars in motion, the way they spin and turn and jockey for positions and I want to scream out that it all is nonsense, oh your life's one track, can't you see it's pointless? But just then my knees give under me, my head feels weak and suddenly it's clear to see it's not them but me who's lost my self-identity as I hide behind these books I read while scribbling my poetry. Like art could save a wretch like me with some ideal ideology that no one could hope to achieve and I am never real, it's just a sketch of me and everything I've made is trite and cheap and a waste of paint, of tape, of time.

Now I park my car down by the cathedral where the floodlights point up at the steeples. Choir practice was filling up with people, I could hear the sound escaping as an echo, sloping off the ceiling at an angle and when the voices blend they sound like angels. I hope there's some room still in the middle. But when I lift my voice up now to reach them, the range is too high, way up in heaven so I hold my tongue, forget the song, tie my shoes, start walking off and try to just keep moving on with my broken heart and my absent God. And I have no faith but it's all I want to be loved and believe in my soul, in my soul, in my so-o-o-oul."


Looks like I have a New Favourite Band!