Proving Madness.

I read an interesting statistic this morning. Last year in the UK, 67,000 people were detained under the Mental Health Act. That’s very nearly one in every thousand of the population. So in a city of, say, half a million people, approximately 500 of them are mad.

And then it occurred to me that if I got detained under said Act, I would find it very difficult to protest my innocence since the powers that be would only have to produce my blog as evidence for the prosecution and the jury would declare: ‘this man is as mad as a March hare on LSD. Tie him to a tree in yonder wood and let the crows gorge upon the corruption that is his being.’ Or words to that effect. And I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on (not that you need one if you’re tied to a tree, but you know what I mean.)

(The first two sentences of this post could have led to a discourse of great depth and substance, but it didn’t.)

And I was reminded again tonight that there are few sights more compelling in this grey world made winter by the grip of psychopaths than that of a beautiful woman riding a horse at speed (which isn’t the same as a beautiful woman on speed riding a horse.) And such is especially true if her hair is long and streams in the draught to mirror the flow of the horse’s tail.

I had another post to make today but I’ve forgotten what it was. I think it might have been connected with hats in some way, but that’s probably because I’m still in thrall to the sight of a ghost walking past my garden with two women companions. I swear it was wearing a hat, and I had the oddest notion that it was a Paddington Bear hat. In all my life I have only ever once seen anybody wear such a hat. The memory of it is etched in gold (or blue to be precise) and stands unmoving and unmovable in my mind while everything around it crumbles to dust and is transmogrified into countless sibilant insects scurrying hither and thither.

And on the subject of hats, here is a picture of the only hat I possess (apart from the woolly winter type):

  

I have to point out, however, that at no time in my life did I look like the guy wearing it. This is closer:

 

Ah, if only I had the hair... And while I’m at it, you might as well have a picture of Esmeralda, aka She Who Shrieks.

You can see why I'm sans hope, sans charity, sans everything, can't you?