Blogged down

I'm afraid I'm having a tough time finding the inspiration to blog right now. I'm one of those people who endure occasional bouts of severe depression, when my word world fades away and the colour drains from life -- and there isn't an original thought in my echoing skull space. The writer William Styron, author of Sophie's Choice, was stricken by a deep and chronic depression at the height of his powers and was unable to write at all -- or even function -- for years. When he finally did, it was to produce a terrifying, yet very valuable account of the experience. I ain't no William Styron, and I don't have attacks that bad, but the symptoms are quite similar. I've just noticed them coming on, and hence probably my failure to blog merrily. Well, that's my excuse. People who blow children up "in self-defence" may just have lit the touchpaper.

Update: now seems as good a time as any to post the speech from Hamlet which describes the classic symptoms of depression, or melancholia, and from which this blog derives its name (and which is, of course, Withnail's finest ever performance):

I have of late -- but wherefore I know not -- lost all my mirth, forgone
all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition
that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this
most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament,
this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other
thing to me than a foul and pestilential congregation of vapours. What a
piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in
form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in
apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!
And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no,
nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.