Truth.

Upon his emergence from a day of giving evidence at the Chilcot Inquiry, Tony Blair was inevitably heckled by the families of some of those who died in Iraq.

Amongst the accusations levelled at him were that Blair never apologised for his part in instigating the war, that he had disgraced himself, and that he had failed to tell the truth. The latter of those is the most interesting to me.

There are some situations in which 'the truth' is seemingly not a matter of debate such is its self-evidence but, as we think about the paths which lead us towards that conclusion, matters inevitably become more complicated:

• The Tories won the General Election with an overall majority of 37 seats.

Such a broad statement effaces all the detail from a reasonably competitive election night. It serves as a (very) poor opening paragraph to a news story, in the sense that no word is extraneous - every single one earns its keep. It does, though, convey a fact which is indisputable, at least assuming that the Tories had won the General Election with an overall majority of 37.

• A 37-seat majority? That was a pretty bad night for the Labour Party!

The truth of the above statement is somewhere in between 'a pretty bad night' and 'could have been a lot worse.' Which of these eventually holds true in 'the public consciousness' depends on, amongst other things, the political persuasion of academics and opinion-formers, and the long view gained when events have been allowed to settle for ten years, twenty years....

• The deficit would've been less than 20 seats if Gordon Brown hadn't apparently mis-spelt the surname 'Janes' as 'James' in a letter to the family of another deceased soldier back in November 2009. That was a public relations disaster - you don't recover from that in this day and age.

Now we are guilty of extrapolating a macroscopic fact from an event which, although newsworthy for a good couple of weeks, is hardly enough to be significant in itself as the outcome of an election. We are guilty, also, of assuming that the outpourings of the media are in any way influential. Any number of other government decisions, or opposition decisions, may, or may not have, swung the result one way or the other.

There exists, then, at the intersection of human minds and recorded history, upon a river of supposition littered with ideas that died almost before they were born, acts of genius and utter stupidity half-planned or half-carried out, that are the unspoken truth behind the true, less true, and unverifiable statements written above.

That is: there exists an unidentifiable truth behind any situation of complexity which it is never possible to resolve. The British legal system know this - with 'on the balance of probabilities' and 'beyond all reasonable doubt' being the standards they apply.

Like looking for the truth of his own death in Umberto Eco's infinite library, Blair could well have stumbled upon the.... the.... the.... vectors..... all of them.... which combine over and over again to produce one version of the truth - not necessarily the most logical, or the one that we want it to be, but the one which (there will be another blog about this at some point) proves itself the fittest, in the manner of a Darwinian imperative.

Paradigm.

Put very simply (because I only understand it in a simplistic and trivial way, and not because I'm dumbing down for my handful of readers) science progresses because of the falsification of existing theories.

In the giant laboratory that is the universe, experiments are conducted and tentative hypotheses drawn up based on the results of the former. To be truly scientific, though, the hypothesis requires something which can later falsify it - the seeds of its own destruction.

Hence, all cats are black is a legitimate scientific statement, based on the observational evidence collected during my walk home from work last night. To falsify it, all that is needed is a single example of a non-black cat, and my careful drawing-up of a feline worldview is dead in the water. I can stave off defeat for a while by claiming that you must have been on drugs (ie the instrument you used when you conducted your experiment was faulty) or that the 'cat' you saw was just a shadow - a trick of the mind after a stressful day.

As the evidence mounts, though - ginger cats, brown ones, grey ones with stripes - I am forced to concede that my scientific statement (that I staked my career on, no less) is fit only for the bin, and retire to the margins with my reputation utterly in tatters.

The damning thing here is the single example of falsification which brings, in principle, the whole thing crashing down. In our everday lives, the margin for error is greater before we declare that we are in the midst of a crisis. It might take three or four late arrivals home before we begin to fear that our partner is having an affair; it takes a few heavy defeats at the start of a season for us to conclude that our football club is on a fast-track to relegation; several significant errors are required at work before the boss asks: is everything alright at home?

I wonder if we need to be more ruthless, like scientists, in order to limit the damage early. People are good at spotting patterns, and the natural thing is to extrapolate them, asserting that what holds today holds forever.

So when, towards the end of December, I got out of bed and the world around me held no interest, it was at that point - at the beginning of the 'first bad day in a row' - I should have sought help, for it falsified the hypothesis that 'everything is okay.' I didn't, of course, and now, a month down the line, the scarily passive has transformed into the comfortably numb, and I am less likely than ever to cry for help.

Socialising.

Groups of people are fertile ground for the writer: pick up on their speech and mannerisms, witness the intra-group tension that pushes somebody or other to the centre of events, around whom the rest gather like moths orbiting a naked bulb.

Meanwhile, someone else is flung to the margins, ignored except for a friendly 'y'alright?' every so often.

Writers collect observations like this as the squirrel collects nuts, to be exhumed at a later date and used as fuel when there's not much else about. The remnants of a night in the pub become the power struggle for the soul of an entire religion, the coarse language of the former is the spirit of the latter.

I should, then, be jumping at rare opportunities to socialise as part of a group, yet quite the opposite is true. At the eleventh hour, I turned down the chance to be part of the meat traffic in Lincoln on Friday night just gone - indeed resorting to a blantant lie in order to extricate myself from the prospect.

The evening had been planned for weeks, and I'd grudgingly committed myself to going along at an early stage, happily pushing it into an unused corridor of my mind and locking the door behind me. As weeks until t=0 became days, though, the usual panic and horror about what was to come set in, and I knew it was a matter of when and not if I delivered an excuse (however implausible) to wriggle out of my duties as drinker, dancer and raconteur.

Friday morning, then, I was struck down by a non-specific, vague illness. It's my head. And I'm cold. I just want to go back to sleep. Of the three symptoms I complained of, one of them is certainly true: it is my head.

The usual pantomime of omniprotestations ensued, and I rebuked them all with a sad face. assuring everyone who commented that I really did want to go, and I certainly would have if my body hadn't let me down.

All weekend, I have been filled in on what I have missed - one man drunkenly confirming himself to be gay, and subsequently asking our manager whether he planned to come out of the fucking closet any time soon? This was apparently followed by a toast 'to gays!' and some topless male dancing. This hypocrisy - the marginalisation of people who live different lives as we pretend to incorporate them into our own - is the bread-and-butter of literature.

Yet I'm not sorry I missed it, for all the repetitions of 'you shudda bin there!' which I've been on the end of for the last two days. I only wish I understood better exactly why the prospect of a heavy drinking session, alongside those I spend a quarter of my life with, fills me with such revulsion.

Entertainment.

The realities of my day job: watching flags and buttons on a computer screen, and knowing that everything is alright with the world as long as they remain green.

As soon as a flag or button turns red, it's time for me to leap into action with the calm precision of an assassin and do whatever it takes to make it green once again.

It's dull, it makes the days seem overly long, and I've been known to sit there with a red flag or button for, oh, minutes, because the nature of the task is so mind-numbing that there is some part of me which refuses to concentrate on it properly.

The red and green objects relate to sales, incidentally - when they're green, the company I work for can continue to sell things and the money can keep rolling in. When they're red, I need to amend something or other to bring about the optimum state once again.

It occurred to me on Wednesday morning, as I was cursing the fact that my life had turned out this way, that there's no difference between my job, which I complain about without end, and computer games, which I enjoy.

Thinking about it, both have an ideal or goal state which must be reached, less-than-favourable initial conditions, plus obstacles which make reaching the former a challenge. Both have in-built warnings (implicit or otherwise) when performance is not up to the required standard, and both are embodiments of real*, physical situations encoded in the language of machines.

Yet one is considered to be 'work' (boring work, no less) and the other is 'entertainment' (in some cases, so entertaining that it can eat up an hour.) It goes to demonstrate that it's perception which is the key to progress in an individual's life. Perceive the sales machine as a terribly interesting computer game, and eight hours a day will fly by in a haze of traffic-light coloured symbols.

Excess.

In my experience, psychological harm is always caused by excess, or duration.

A surfeit of winter; spending too long being unable to separate one pertient thought from the morass of hundreds of intrusive, irrelevant ones.

The incessant impact of winter on disposition; eating through to the bone for longer than I can stand, poisoning every action with its clear, crisp killing mechanism. A poor sniper, the cold incapacitates you, without ever injuring you enough to bring about the end.

Too much winter, for longer than I am able to tolerate - this is the way back to the old self, silent, inarticulate and forever holding my head in my hands lest the gods of misery issue out through the ears which have heard it all before.

The old self, familiar in its blandness, at once understimulated and overstimulated. Complaining about lack of company, and despairing about the glut of information which competes for attention from every possible outlet.

The hiss of overinformation leads to the echo of my own breathing. I reject it as the mountain rejects its avalanche. Yet stripped of it, society expects that I fit into its norms, its categories. The first appalls me, the other ejects me from its midst.

I can't talk about the television, or makes of car, or the tardiness of the rescue mission in Haiti, or which singer's fucking which other singer. It all dissolves into meaninglessness, and I expel it from me like the convalescent ridding himself of a virus.

It seems that I must settle for the flatness of nothing, where not even a molecule of air stirs in the silence, or enough competing distractions to split my mind apart. I want neither, and this is why I am the way I am.

Eye.

If the greatest epistemological barrier of psychology is reconciling the fact that we are dealing with the almost self-referential idea of brains analysing brains, then the same element of surprise and mischief is at play with eyes.

When I look in the mirror, the seeing eye observes itself looking, a seeming paradox which is nevertheless resolved perfectly every time.

We assume that the brain analysing other brains is a sound one: not swimming in alcohol, not impacted by disease, not in such a state of depression that its judgement is impaired. For, of course, faulty judgement calls lead inevitably to faulty conclusions - and the whole discipline of psychology is laughed out of the room.

Similarly, a damaged eye stares at itself, and its findings are necessarily erroneous. This leads to infinite regress, until I can envisage a broken eye which collects no light, and therefore cannot start the loop of the observed observing.

Why not laugh the findings of the damaged eye out of the room? It is so bad that its pupil scurries into the corner like a terrified mouse back into its hole. It is so bad that on its own it can't differentiate one huge capital letter from another at a distance of a few feet - it needs the ballast of its partner, and both require the false perspective of glasses.

Others squint to resolve the regular flcker of distant stars - for me the optician's whiteboard is a periodic cepheid variable.

I hate the broken, toiling eye - it has sucked my blood for decades with its vortex. I can't dismiss it, nor its blurred findings, because we are yoked together until the end.

How many times have I wanted you to be extinguished; the Greek riposte to a crime? When I was four, the doctors tried to fix you by disabling my other eye with a patch, and they succeeded in terrorising the rest of me.

Stagnant, morbid eye, you discolour everything, deriving your useless conclusions from nonsensical hypotheses. You distort images and I, the living four-year-old trapped in a man's body, continue to despair at the world we create between your twisted light and my compromised critical faculties.

Mealtimes.

Society is only ever four missed meals from anarchy, according to an ontological statement passed down from MI5 to George Monbiot via indefinite channels - a damning assessment of the human regressed.

A day without food on a grand scale, then, is the kickstart a supine population needs to commence mass civil unrest - the realisation of the war omnia contre omnes.

Four missed meals is enough to scratch away the thin protective layer that we call society; customs, laws and heuristics which, when their curtain is removed, reveal the partisan competitiveness of six billion atomised souls.

Your sad-eyed author fervently wants to believe all the above, and internalise it as a reason to push back against the species that delivered me. I want to believe in the savagery and selfishness of men and women, and recite it like catechism.

Yet I look around slow, snow-bound England, and everywhere the opposite is apparent. With the weather as it is, the routine of mealtimes are far more likely to be interrupted or missed, and altruism is bubbling to the surface.

I heard about the Scottish couple, frozen into their house since the 9th of December, whose food supplies would have long been consumed were it not for locals on quad bikes bringing them fresh rations on a regular basis. I heard about the newly-employed mobile chemist in Accrington who abandoned his motorcycle when the snow was too heavy to drive through, and proceeded to walk urgent supplies of medicine to patients' houses.

Indeed, civilisation has cast off its jacket and is baring the pulsating vein which is its most basic aspiration - to survive. Yet in times of crisis - from the highest terror of wartime to the lowest which comprises a thick carpet of snow - the instinct is to survive alongside, and not instead of, those who knit together our everyday lives.

January.

The machinery of England has frozen solid again, causing me to be trapped in the house for the past two days.

To go outside is to risk injury at worst, and the embarrassment of having to scrape oneself off the pavement uninjured at best. I’ve already gone over four times since the ground became a fricitionless hazard and so I remain here, like a caged animal.

Being alone for two full days with very limited human interaction - the odd phonecall, some correspondence from Bluefish to break the monotony - is how I imagine it must be in prison. Endless layers of time, blocking creative outlets and killing ideas before they’ve had the opportunity to fully reveal themselves.

When my surroundings freeze, I solidify with them to the point that I am incapable of thinking, writing. Banished behind walls, behind doors, and incapable of bleeding the cold from my bones, I am another victim of the cold snap.

The radio reports that there’s going to be another fortnight of this: another two weeks of sentences being frozen on lips; another two weeks of humans passing through one another like ghosts, the smoke issuing from their noses and mouths.

There is nothing to be done to prevent the final plunge into madness upon the back of this new, winter solipsism.

Schism.

Prior to the sacking of Rome, the Ebenistas drew up a controversial and divisive doctrine in the last decade of the 22nd century.

So damaging was the drafting of this document that what are here called 'Ebenistas' should more correctly be known as 'neo-Ebenistas' - the ones who reformed post-schism, leaving the rump of the church to practice their religion as prescribed in the old Manifesto of Zagreb, written in 2087.

The Zagreb document summarised and re-asserted the main points in the original Book of Eben: that the Master Fisherman had created the universe whilst in a very deep sleep, and that the fishes red and blue had been derived to negate His cosmic Loneliness, which stretched as far from west to east, and as far from north to south as any being has been ever capable of imagining.

It added some new paragraphs confirming that every new life is a gift from Eben, and stated that the universe can only ever truly be understood in all its majesty by the dreamer who simultaneously intersects a trillion, trillion dreams.

As a demonstration of a progressive religion, the Zagreb notice was a disappointment, and came in for criticism from several un-named higher priests in the e-papers: Zagreb was evidence of a meek, retarded faith which ought to be brought out of its medieval slumber, complained a bitter Portuguese delegate, and an African representative drily observed that, as a historical document, it was incomparable.

An uneasy truce took hold between the traditionalists and modernisers; though the latter group's annual meetings in Bratislava, chaired by Preferential Ninkovic, were increasingly rebellious.

Ninkovic and his like-minded associates felt that their faith was too backward-looking - able to speak with authority about the origins of humanity and the gift of existence, but unable to advise individual humans what to do with that gift.

What they should be doing with it, declared the bearded, well-spoken Ninkovic, is thanking the Master Fisherman for their existence by going out into the streets with the intention of marginalising, and then effacing, the atheists, who were no more than miserable apostates.

A Christian, a Muslim or a Jew might not wake each morning with purple blood flowing through their veins, but at least they recognised a higher power, albeit the wrong one.

The atheists, however, were a different matter. Without the glory of God in their veins, Ninkovic had it, they were no more than zombies living unfulfilled, broken lives.

Meanwhile, in Zagreb, a handful of traditionalists were debating the precise wording of a brief statement which would see their faith bisected, and ultimately lead to the progressives' arrival in Rome.