An Elephant of One's Own

"So the Swedes are at it again," said a man with straw hair and a parallelogram for a nose, "voting for a number of different political parties, including one that the Guardian doesn't like. There have been articles, comments, pundits and Punditssons, all stalking around this obscure tragedy, peering into the flames, trying to understand. I know no Swedish, yet happen to understand perfectly, free of charge, because like the Swedes, I am a yes man." "A yes man," he went on, lighting his moustache and waving away the proffered crumpet, "is a man who says yes while miserably dreaming the alluring no. A man for whom 'free choice' is an alibi rather than a motive, something you just invoke to get out of the fix of explaining. A man whose choices - because actually unfree, constrained to binary by a maritime git's bony legs round his neck - lead to diminished and dismal outcomes, the sort that garner distracted smirks, and the odd Irish ...

In later years he would wonder how close he’d been to death, that afternoon when, home early from school and to a Jerry Garcia soundtrack, he’d downed the full bottle of Gordon’s and three cans of Carlsberg Special Brew, dappled by the fidgeting tree-shadows of a suburban bedroom. There were no explicit suicidal intentions behind Project Drink-Myself-into-a-Coma, but equally, as he remembered it, his adolescent consciousness was burdensome enough for its irreversible cessation to seem, at the time, a risk scarce worth examining and easily worth taking. Strange, though, that forty years on, he could so clearly recall this accelerated descent into the carpeted Hades of paralytic inebriation, at least from the point at which he found himself, finally, lying on the floor, surrounded by vinyl silence, unable to move a single useful muscle. Strange because the paralysis that had overtaken his body might be expected to lead, as drinking often does, to amnesia: yet he could still remember, a...