Hero.

It was my grandmother's 90th birthday last week, but on the big day itself she was so unwell that she was unaware of the great age she had reached.

She spent the day collapsing in on herself, akin to a great dying star whose own weight is too much for it. She too has the distance and aloofness of a star, unmoved as others orbit around her.

For lack of anything else to do, I started to look around my grandmother's room at the assortment of photographs and heirlooms put there for her.

There's a photograph of my grandmother on her wedding day with my late grandfather. In recent months, gran's illness has caused her to confuse my father and her late husband:

Father: Who am I?
Grandmother: Walter.
F: How can I be Walter? Am I as old as you?
G: I don't know how, but you're Walter. You always get me raffled up [confused].

In addition to the photograph, there is my grandfather's commemorative plate, given to him after he'd completed 36 years at the steelworks:

THE UNITED STEEL COMPANIES LTD
FOR LONG SERVICE
W STEVENSON 36 YEARS
SAMUEL FOX AND COMPANY LIMITED

My father saw me pick up the plate to have a closer look and commented: "That's all you get for giving your life to them - a bloody plate."

It reminded me of the spoils of war. Go into battle, and give so much that the body is irreparable; and the reward for this is a to become a piece of metal with your name on, the hero who was taken all too quickly.

The best years of a man's life, and the sweetness of retirement, exchanged for the proletarian's equivalent of a medal. Toil and sweat, endlessly, but at least you're given something upon which those left behind can rest your ashes.

Insanity.

When assessing the level of insanity suffered by a madman, one can and should do so by comparing the hold which his unstable cognitions have upon him, as against the true world, characterised by sense-perceptions, which the non-mad majority of us experience.

The true madman, then, regards the byproducts of his sickness as inscrutably normal. Less severe cases accept that their intense visions and thoughts are, whilst agonisingly real, nevertheless just the unfortunate consequence of a particular condition.

It was with these sorts of ideas preavalent that I caught a late train into the city on Friday night, for the purpose of meeting a woman about whom there remains much to be said.

Your author has long held aloft the primacy of the scientific method as far as differentiating between competing ideas; and of course long ago jettisoned religion. Yet the imprint of belief and irrationality remains, not far from the surface, and needs little excuse to rise through the pores.

It so happens that I mentioned feathers to the woman about whom there remains much to be said. I mentioned them to her, and therefore the feather, for the two of us, became a symbol, a directional arrow pointing into the future.

On Friday night, then, I was waiting for the late train, the 9:49pm service. It had been a last-minute decision to meet at all, and I couldn't be sure that she would go through with it; and even if she did I'd no idea where she'd be.

Pacing the platform, I needed a message from my own insanity, dropped into the arena in which I live. I required a symbol which connected the two - and, of course, there was a feather at my feet as I looked down.

I put it in between the pages of the book I was reading to kill the time. Little white flame that it is, licking the pages and inextinguishable. The bridge between madness and regularity; between man and woman.

Later in the night, I should need the feather for sustenance. My shadow hugging the walls of side-streets, looking nonchalant as the policecars Döpplered up and down beside me in the early hours.

Two cats, one black and one ginger, retreating at the gunshots my feet made. Blowing kisses - come here, beautiful. I won't hurt you, but the serpentine cats were eaten by the darkness.

Drinkers disgorged by the bars, shovelled out onto the hot roads. Are you from around here? What a fucking shit night out this is, eh, pal, and stumbling away when I said I hadn't a clue where a better time could be had.

Drinkers teeming out of doors, introduced to their own cut-off, senseless monologue. I had not had a drop, and yet I believed that the fruits of my own lunacy had developed legs and could be found somewhere in one of those bars.

Earlier, I saw a woman with a bleeding arm in the station, having tried to kill herself with a broken bottle. She dripped all over Beckett but not Lorca, and I had to cancel the ambulance when she ran away from me, screaming: ME FUCKIN' ARMS! TELL THEM FUCKIN' BASTARDS!

I told the policewoman - you need to get her, or she'll bleed to death. They caught her and pinned her up against the wall, wrapping the slashed limb with a purple bandage. She was still screaming. She cuts her fucking arms all the cunting time because she's ready to fucking die. I'm 29.

Later, I was upset with the woman about whom there remains more to be said. But as the night ate the serpentine cats, it emitted her and I was mollified. We hugged underneath a streetlight, and I apologised for losing my temper.

Pornography.

The radio coverage of Raoul Moat's last moments made me realised that we are, in general, more interested in the outcome of events than the processes by which those outcomes are reached.

I've come away from football matches uninterested in how well the team played - whether they won or lost was my only concern. When I got an infection in my finger, I didn't concern myself with the medical properties of the antibiotics prescribed. As long as they worked, I could carry on in ignorance.

It's analogous to the western view of sex; to generate an orgasm in any way possible. There is an initial state, and there is a goal state, and the route betwixt the two is quite frankly for the birds.

So it was on the night Raoul Moat died. The radio presenters had decided their preferred goal state was for Moat's life to be ended, and agitated for this possibility as often as possible. Audible pornography - give us the money shot, complete with its final, corroborating scream, and then we'll return to the conventional news cycle.

Again, what follows are more-or-less verbatim fragments of BBC Radio Five Live's handling of Moat's final hours - with the excitement building as the orgasm neared:

• Some people are laughing and drinking in a pub. We've had a wedding in the village and I don't think the residents wanted that to dampen their mood.



• A.....a.... bullet? If he did become suicidal, if he advanced on police lines, they may then be forced to use lethal force against him because they can't do anything else.



• They're going to precipitate him blowing 'is own 'ead off.


Then, at after one in the morning, the ejaculation.


• There has been a shooting just now while your colleague was on air. He laid down and shot himself. - I'm looking at it now. I think there were two. Paramedics are leaning over the man and, er, there's a cordon of police around and that's about as much as i can see.



• He laid himself down and the shots rang out. I believe there were two shots.



• I believe they are loading a body onto a stretcher. There looks to be very little, if you like frenetic activity - possibly holding a drip in the air. But they are loading the stretcher into the back of the ambulance and I'm sure it'll be leaving the scene very very rapidly.

No matter how, Moat must die. No matter how, I must give you an orgasm. No matter how, the team must win. The age of the internet and rolling news has reduced the world to a starting-point and an endpoint, in which we take pleasure or feel pain. Everything else is too complicated, or boring, and we feel free to overlook, pornographers that we are.

Failure.

The inevitable question, again, from my mother, posed in an amused tone but asked so many times by now that I know it is no longer a joke: when are you going to settle down?

By implication, 'settling down,' in my mother's vernacular, means 'when are you going to present me with a grandchild?' and I am forced to announce, for the hundredth, the thousandth time, that it isn't likely to happen any time soon, if ever.

I am a failure in the eyes of my parents, and whenever I have time to consider it for any length of time, a failure is what I feel. Yet, as always, things are never so simple, if we set about establishing a chain of reasoning:

• I am a failure


• to fail means that a goal or target must have been set, which I did not reach


• to veer away from this target is to veer away from the life which has been set for me


• to have a life which others expect you to live is tantamount to religion


• as someone who long ago rejected religion, I can think it through and conclude that I no longer need to feel as though I am a failure.

The Catholic predicate is a simple one - have as many children as possible, no matter what the consequences. The greater glory of God is all that matters, even as millions are riddled with AIDS for lack of contraception, even as abortion is still a sin as it robs God of yet another life.

This is the trap into which my unthinking - not thoughtless - mother fell, after decades of having it repeated.

It is better to be with anyone, so long as the equals sign after your sum is followed by children. Not a Dawkinisian imperative, but a Vatican one.

Marry, or not, whichever is more condusive to the creation of other, new lives, else you are a failure. Having seen through this theistic ruse, I have not failed, I am now aware. I have neither failed nor succeeded, and nor can I ever, because there is no external standard from which I can be judged either way.

Language.

The intersection between so many things that I can't even begin to sort them out yet, and can only write in a manner little better than stream-of-consciousness.

The intersection between pornography and language, the intersection between the inflation of news and the idea of celebrity as distinct from news, the intersection between silence and noise for the sake of noise; filling the void where conversation stalls with a repetition of an already-known piece of information.

For most of the past week, the main news story in England has been about a man with a gun who managed to evade capture by police. As well as allegedly shooting dead his ex-girlfriend's new partner, Raoul Moat is also alleged to have shot the aforementioned ex-girlfriend, as well as injuring a policeman and robbing a fish-and-chip shop.

On Friday night, armed police found Moat's hiding place, and surrounded him. The details of exactly what happened next are unclear, but ultimately, after six hours or more, Moat was shot - it's not yet been established whether he committed suicide, or whether the police were responsible - and pronounced dead on arrival at hospital.

The language of war, reduced to the language of sports journalism.

Football's World Cup is the 21st century's world war, at least if you read the newspapers.

It takes no great observational power to realise the leak of warlike language into the arena of sport - the team with the greatest firepower or heaviest artillery are installed as pre-tournament favourites. Footballers rifle shots into the goal, or blast them wide, and the players who do so are sharpshooters or hitmen, or even assassins, but always deadly.

Of course we know by now that being eliminated from the competition is a tragedy and a disaster for a nation - the war is lost, and this particularly applies whenever England play Germany.

The German national football team are the remnants of the Second World War, according to some members of the British Press - references to the Hun, and to Fritz, are not uncommon in the tabloids, and the Daily Mirror took this to its natural conclusion before the Euro '96 semi-final between the two countries.

It hardly needs mentioning that this trend not only gives football an importance which it arguably does not deserve, but it also trivialises war.

The language of sports journalism, confused with the language of news.

Sports journalists uses the language they do because it insufflates otherwise dull cricket and football matches with a sense of occasion.

In some ways, sportswriters are failed news reporters - they don't get to write about general elections or murder cases or the death of royalty, and so they feel obliged to compensate by making their subject seem more connected to other, more important events, hence in part the dramatic language employed.

So much for sportswriters, who ham up their disconnect world like actors. What excuse do news reporters have for over-dramatising their subject, for taking the events which (genuinely) affect people's lives, and turning them into theatre?

Some examples of the terminology used on BBC Radio on Friday night, as the presenter waited for developments between the police and Moat. They'd not be out of place on the back page of a tabloid before an England v Germany football match, such is their appeal to the emotions - the following are almost verbatim, but I'm not sure I got down every word as I sat at the computer. A series of 'experts' comprising former firearms officers and high-ranking ex-police, as well as eyewitnesses:

• the lethal range of a shotgun against someone with full body armour is very, very short.


• people are trying to get as good a view of the scene as they can to see how it ends. this could end at any moment.


• for the first time the police are in control of this manhunt. they had been chasing shadows, scanning the land, but now they've got him surrounded. there are only two ways this can end.


• he must be getting tired, fatigued - the same applies to the police officers, by the way. this should be resolved one way or the other pretty soon.

The language of war and sport and news superimposed over one another with no single one holding sway, and thus no way of discerning the trivial from the threatening, and the outcome of a tennis match from the decision to take another's man life, or permit him to live.

Idiot.

The idiot is condemned to repeat the errors of the past.

In repeating them, he proves his idiocy by expecting a different outcome from his last attempt, only to be disappointed every single time.

This is the very opposite of science, where repetitions of events in the same conditions, with the same instruments deliver identical results. When this doesn't happen, science proceeds into crisis, and a new paradigm is required.

The idiot, then, is the anti-scientist, delivering up the same patterns of behaviour and being surprised and hurt when nothing out of the ordinary happens.

We need not, then, live one thousand lives, each exactly the same as the last, to initiate repetition. Instead, we can do it over and over, inflated with hope for a while, only for the same mistakes to issue through our pores; the same familiar gut-tightening sense of inertia.

If the idiot is condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past, then still bigger idiots consider this repetition to be normal. The ballast of errors, stored up and ready to be fed to the beloved at prescribed times, like pills, each one deadening her a little more, is a consequence of waking up in the morning, and is paid for at a later date with sadness.

Yet, hopelessly, the bigger idiot continues to prostitute himself to the same flame, and then protests bitterly when it burns through skin and bone and soul, for the hundredth time. Like all the other 99 times, it could never have been any other way - we already know this.

Octopus.

My grandmother, the octopus: a central body, and tubes coming out of her omnidirectionally.

I'd been fed second-hand information all week about how bad things had become - your dad let it slip that she might not survive; her kidneys have gone; she can't wake up and nothing's changing; no, hold on, she's sitting up in bed now.

When I saw it for myself, it was clear that things were pretty bleak indeed. Even with my head two inches from her mouth, hearing what she had to say was difficult, and translating it more difficult still. We went around in short loops, and I felt bad that I was encouraging her to communicate at all:

them's mi toes you're playing with
are we going home yet?
mercy! have some mercy

The rest of her monologue was unintelligible, and I didn't encourage her to weaken herself yet more by speaking further.

My grandmother now consists of skin and bone, with the flesh sucked away by years of illness and simple old age. Brainquakes, increasing in number and ferocity, have dimmed the intelligence which was earned by attending the school wi' a clock on t'top, somewhere in Sheffield, which was always my family's running joke. Inexplicable to outsiders, but nevertheless - you know your gran isn't stupid! She went to a school wi' a clock on t'top! The decrease in awareness has, in its turn, deadened the bright blue eyes for whom the mere opening takes now all her might. They are now turned towards I don't know where - not at me, not at my father.

Mercy! have some mercy, the whispered plea from a very sick old lady to her grandson who fears the worst, and yet welcomes its oncoming, because you've suffered more than anyone ever should. This vacuum, stripped of critical faculties and powers of recognition. This is not my grandmother; it is instead an impostor, devoid of nostalgia. It matters not if I am her grandson or the king of Spain's daughter (who had a little nut-tree), because everything that is not already long-gone will eventually be washed away by the pitiless tide of age.

It doesn't matter that you can't remember anything, oh impostor, because my mind recalls things freely enough. It remembers frying bits of banana and calling it 'Mexican food,' and it remembers cheating for all I was worth in order to beat you at Scrabble (I couldn't edge the woman from t'school wi' a clock on t'top by fair means), and it remembers ripping labels off tins, rendering them unidentifiable, and condeming you to pork chop for dinner with.... shit.... peaches! I'll kill him!

It remembers the song of the nut-tree which got me off to sleep more times than enough; how many New Year's Eves in your company when my parents permitted themselves a rare night out, leaving us to shoot tiddlywinks into an eggcup (you beat me at that, too) until it was time to go to bed, after the thrill of staying awake until beyond midnight!

It's all coming back to me, gran, and nothing can ever take it away. It's coming back to me that you used to chop firewood out t'back well beyond the age of seventy, and you'd get up at a bloody stupid hour to light t'fire so I'd not freeze when I woke up. I remember you liking John Parrott and Eric Bristow but never Steve Davis, and not so much Jimmy White, either, despite the balls disappearing at an unhealthy speed. I'm not sure whether or not you're a fan of John Lowe, but I recall that Richard Whiteley got up your cuff. A noise of disgust, somewhere between a sneeze and a sigh. Richard Whiteley!