As an avid English cricket fan the two results in Dubai and Abu Dhabi over the last two weeks have been nothing short of catastrophic. As an English cricket fan that is. For it is nothing like a real catastrophe.

This result is nothing like Michael Atherton’s melodramatic statement: “This is as bad as it gets.” Nor is it, as Geoff Boycott, in a similarly emotionally aggrandized reaction – as is usual – said: “You had to see it to believe how bad it was.” And nor is it, to complete the standard ballyhoo the English media perfunctorily indulge in following a bad England loss, what BBC correspondent Stephan Shemilt described it as – “abject”. You would have thought these pundits were witnessing the Battle of the Somme.

A real catastrophe would be more than 100 people dying from contaminated heart medicine prescribed to over 40,000 people in a nation’s capital city.

And this is the same nation whose international reputation is now menacingly overshadowed by a largely unwanted affiliation with the Taliban in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s assassination.

And this is the same nation who, in trying to reconcile a hostile public with political operations, only exposes the deep-rooted and everlasting polarity between the people who are run by the regime and the people who run the regime.

And this is the same nation whose cricketers cannot play a match of test match cricket on their home soil for fear of a suicide attack.

And this is the same nation whose inability to play a home cricket match is the consequence of the actions of three of its most promising, in terms of talent, cricketers – Salman Butt, Mohammed Amir and Mohammed Yousuf.

Test cricket needs a rejuvenated Pakistan

So in an attempt to reclaim an objective perspective in the aftermath of another woeful test match performance by England, it is fitting to consider the freedoms that my country of birth confers on its citizens, in contradistinction to Pakistan.

Of course there are observers who find many faults with the British political system; not least myself. But I can’t remember the last time widespread disease in Britain was a news topic with fatal conclusions. And I can’t remember the last time an English citizen was so outraged by his country’s performance that he irrationally threatened to take the lives of his own countries representatives – other than in some ‘local’ pubs with ‘local’ people whose right wing extremism is fuelled by Strongbow rather than political sensibilities.

It’s also good to see a Pakistan team mixing it with the top-dogs in international cricket again. I can’t think of any cricket fan who wouldn’t want to see an emerging Pakistan team reach the level of its previous star-studded teams with the ability to challenge all-comers.

Indeed, test match cricket is in need of another major player as the ICC schedule becomes more jam-packed every year. But a bigger and more pressing entity than test cricket is in need of a Pakistan team filled with role models: the nation of Pakistan.

Just as Misbah’s team knelt down and kissed the Abu Dhabi turf one by one, so would his home country’s citizens have sent amorous blessings to Allah above for bestowing a marvelous victory on a profoundly unsettled nation.

An Arabain proverb from One Thousand and One Nights says: “He who has health has hope; and he who has hope has everything.” If only for a few fleeting hours Misbah’s Pakistan cricket team have provided a welcome and much needed ray of optimistic sunshine on the horizon of Pakistan’s rocky and uncertain horizon.

Yes Pakistan may be in the gutter, but some of her populace is gazing at the stars.

The combination of Pakistan’s mercurial cricketing talent and England’s lack of match practice produced an upset that wasn’t entirely an upset. That is to say that no-one, pundit or couch-analyst, doubts the potential the Pakistani’s have to beat the best in the world on their day(s).

The shock to the cricketing system – for an upset of sorts there certainly was – administered by this result may be due to the fact that England were so comprehensively beaten inside three days. Because if Andy Flower’s England has shown anything in test matches since their last loss to Australia in 2010 in Perth, it is a quality indicative of the hardy Zimbabwean himself: resilience. Yet such mental fortitude was scarcely visible throughout the first test against Pakistan in Dubai Sports City (DSC).

The laceration of reality the Pakistani’s inflicted on England is, however, not a mortal one. For, as Michael Atherton blogged: “It would be amazing if England produced a repeat of their truly horrendous first Test performance in Abu Dhabi.”

Indeed, to concur with Athers, the current England side is far too good a team to reproduce such a flaccid performance with the bat – with the exception perhaps of Matt Prior’s first innings efforts. Thus we can expect a revived and more steadfast approach in the forthcoming test in Abu Dhabi (25-29 Jan).

On the other hand, it is important to note that England’s bowlers did perform well, restricting Pakistan to a total of 338 on a pitch that would have provided a suitable ironing or driving surface.

However, to focus exclusively on, and bemoan England’s performance – as have Messrs Atherton, Willis, Lloyd, Flintoff and of course Botham – without acknowledging what was a very good performance by Pakistan would be anathema to objectivity and tantamount to biased and insular thinking. It is important therefore, to pay the necessary homage to some sparkling performances by the ‘Men in Green’.

Ajmal has leveled the playing field

Saeed Ajmal beguiled England’s batsmen with the ‘teesra’; Umar Gul bowled well throughout, and although his wickets were either unlucky (Strauss) or plain stupid (KP) from a batsmen’s perspective, he bowled many jaffers that went unrewarded; Mohammed Hafeez showed the dogged and controlled attitude one is used to seeing from Trott; and Misbah Ul-Huq played sensibly through a tricky phase to ensure Adnan Akmal was able to reap the rewards of some old fashioned application at the crease – not a phenomenon one is used to seeing from many Pakistan batsmen in recent years.

Significantly, Misbah’s current trajectory could see him supersede the record for the most test wins as Pakistan’s captain – currently held by Javed Miandad and Imran Khan with 14 a-piece. And Misbah’s success may well be symbolic of the new world order of Pakistani cricket.

But one should wait to see what the future holds for this current Pakistan team before unthinkingly mentioning Misbah in the same breath as cricket legends such as Miandad and Khan.

The much anticipated duel leading up to the series is the face-off between the spinners – Ajmal and Graeme Swann. And despite Saad Shafqat’s point that: “There is a feeling that Swann’s psychological arsenal is more potent than Ajmal’s,” the teesra seems to have leveled the playing field.

Indeed Ajmal has drawn first blood, claiming match figures of 10-97, as opposed to Swann’s return of 4-107. But it’s not a ‘first blood’ match. Rather, it’s a two-out-of-three falls contest: at least it has become so. And the series is much the better for it. A series that some had expected to be an uninteresting and predictable affair has suddenly aroused a sense of intrigue and excitement.

Pakistan can expect a backlash from England, as can the whole cricketing community. And the fixture in Abu Dhabi now promises to be an absorbing contest where England has to start playing catch-up in a three match series – a tricky mission to achieve, and one they haven’t been faced with for quite some time.

England may have been caught napping, but the catcher must be awake to catch the napper. It is harder, as we well know, for a giant to climb down a beanstalk to reclaim his pride than it is for an adroit young lad called Jack to run away with it to his Motherland. And in this version of the fairytale, Jack is wearing a green cap.

Dorkington began by denying the myth that dorkonomy emanated from the very first concept of a flying machine. No, he claimed with his right scapula struggling to remain attached to his clavicle, Leonardo Da Vinci was not to blame. Not that blaming would solve dorkdom. Rather, dorkdom shouldn’t be solved. Dorkdom has in fact evolved into an unstoppable mechanism that has ‘rightfully’ been embraced as a via regia to a prosperous career and prestigious social status. Exuding an existential pride as his justificationof the dork-state rolled off his tongue and into the dust-dry room, Dorkington excitedly explained, in substantial digression from the origins of dork, that a new hand-held device that can measure levels of dorkaché in a given space is now extant. And it just so happened that he had one in his possession: ‘Behold the all new dorkometer XV37 type 1.29!’ he rallied out in a sudden euphoric frenzy. Agape and breathless, the devoted dork dwellers stared in awe-struck bewilderment at the shiny aluminium device. So intense was the wonder of the congregation you could hear dork-hearts palpitations as dork-shirts started to stretch as Need took physical control of the dork-bodies, filling all their organs and muscles with Want and Longing – those insidious forebears of Greed.

To be continued…

The outspoken Brit’s performance has divided Hollywood A-listers and celeb commentators alike. Robert De Niro and Alec Baldwin were on the verge of tears with laughter throughout Gervias’ routines, while Messers Downey Jr and Carell took a less appreciative stance, the latter pushing past Gervais’ attempted embrace to present one of the evenings awards.

The celeb columns of British and American papers seem equally split. The Los Angles Times claims Gervais invoked a ‘corrosive tone’ throughout the evening with the guardian and the telegraph seemingly supporting that view, while Entertainment Weekly said that Gervais’ performance is what makes live events like the Golden Globes so entertaining, and TV critic Mary McNamara said that Gervais “was making many audience members and presenters uncomfortable and even angry”.

Neither the Los Angles Times nor Entertainment Weekly actually hit upon the important point that emerged as a result of last nights film awards. The main point is how easily upset these multi-millionaire celebrity’s become when a few near-the-knuckle jokes are thrown their way.

The cut-and-dry of it, which emerged through the cracks of sincerity countenanced by the West’s greatest living actors, is the god-like status and impenetrable bubble that hollywood’s finest feel that have an essential right to. The expansive ego’s that pervade the atomic properties of the celeb’s protection-from-the-outside-world bubble is alas! sensitive, and pervious when any fun is being poked with a lewd stick at itself. And alack, therefore we cannot make fun out of these heralded heroes of today’s big screens.

The Mail online, endorsing the banal passivity of other online paper columns like the guardian and the telegraph, actually branded Gervais’ humour as ‘acerbic’.

Now the word acerbic is an adjective that has been used by philosophical commentators when discussing Friedrich Nietzsche’s controvertible idea that he deems “Christianity the one great curse, the enormous and innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge for which no means are too venomous, too underhand and too petty – I call it the immortal blemish of mankind”.

There is acerbity a-plenty in Nietzsche’s polemical poetics – there’s bound to be when you refer to Christian morality as ‘perfidious’. And I think most would agree that contextually, this was indeed an acerbic approach to moral philosophy. It upset many Christians; it ruptured their metaphysical perspective beyond repair; it overturned what was “good” and what was “evil”; it asserted that Christianity had created “good” and “evil” in order to manufacture their own “goodness” and thus preserve their right to power and oppression over the “badness” of society; it turned Western religion upside down and inside out.

Now, the label of acerbic on Nietzschean terms is understandable. But Gervais as an acerbic? This reactive hyperbole on behalf of writers, commentators, and particularly some actors is what confirms the utopian, self-aggrandizing unrealistic realm the acting world par excellence exists within.

In being confronted by viewpoints offered by Gervais – viewpoints that I dare-say many many people are likely to share – some just found it too overwhelming that their deity, their totem, their via regia to the divine life of cherubs who must be protected at all costs from the vulgar chaos of normal life would be emotionally destabilized after an empty joke was sent their way.

If there is anyone you should be able to poke fun at it should be the rich and famous. How many old men do you know that would be offended by a joke about their teeth falling out? How many alcoholics would take issue with their libidinal mishaps? The reason Philip Berk and Charlie Sheen (not sure of Sheen’s response – he is still incoherent) took issue with Gervais is because of their contorted misperception that they are untouchable, reified entities whom shouldn’t be openly mocked. Did they never go to school?

These people do not live in the real world. They pretend they do in many great films. But after filming is over and they receive their ridiculous sum of cash for well performed pretense, they resume their position of worshipped neo-Athenian. God help them if they were to be confronted with any real-life acerbity.

What I have emphasized is the disparity between the real lived world and the fake, pretentious world of celebritology and how one word can have such a different paradigm of essence in either. The fact that Nietzsche’s acerbity dealt with a morality that has subtended Western culture and society to its profound depths, and the fact that Gervais’ purported acerbity “with mildly sinister undertones” attacked a group of people who are so far removed from the profound realities of existence highlights something even more important.

That ‘something important’ also happens to be a Nietzschean concept. As highlighted in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche says that art (extended to the realm of film for today’s subject, and for the purpose of my metaphor), although not truth is vital in creating a life-affirming duality. The fact that you have existence and art as opposites is important, not in their prospective alignments with truth, but in their interaction which may or may not be truth and which therefore does not resign the individual as subject to the morbid becoming of existence.

So yes, just as Richard Wagner was important for the fin de siècle, Hollywood is important as a life-divergence. But the difference is this: the rarefied personalities of Hollywood are in the position they are because of the working class folk who pay to support the entertainment industry – as Nietzsche said they need these interaction between life and art. But just because they are in this exalted position of being on the screen rather than watching it makes them no less important to society than the people watching rather than acting.

The ash covered no-mans-land of McCarthy’s novel reduces the very essence of human living to one of barbaric animalism where only the depraved survive. This shocking reduction of the human condition to its animalistic basis essentially highlights what makes us human.

The Promethean like imagery of the father and the son “carrying the fire” through the eternal, barren, grey landscape is a persuasive metaphor that foregrounds man’s ability to endure and furthermore I think captures McCarthy’s message that the human will is stronger than the destructive becoming of a nihilistic universe.

A wise friend of mine pointed to a passage of dialogue in the novel between the unnamed man and boy as the crux of the novel’s emphasis. The man, after effectively leaving a man for dead on the road (by our contextual standards an abhorrent act, but in McCarthy’s world it’s more humane than others would have acted) says to the boy, who is upset at his fathers moral negligence of another human being: “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything”, to which the boy “looks up, his face wet and grimy. Yes I am, he said. I am the one.”

While I do agree with this mentioned wise man that the armageddon-like thrust of the novel certainly resonates with modern concerns of the world we leave to future generations, I will say that I don’t think the novel can simply be categorized as a global warming warning. This is not what my oracle was advocating either, but it was a point worth raising.

I look at the book like this. The warning in those quoted lines is the vastly lugubrious backdrop of the novel’s atmosphere. Foregrounded on the bleak background though is the contingent theme of “the good guys”.

The unnamed protagonists’ epithet of “the good guys”, a label justified no less by their morality that won’t allow them to eat other humans or dogs, buckles the reader into the macadam-ravaged shoes of the characters and asks: are you a good guy?

Without the good guys, the morbid sky would subsume the hopeful twinkling of the unswerving humanity McCarthy preserves in the father and the son throughout their desperate odyssey through the implacable darkness of the intestate earth.

The ethos I derive from McCarthy’s The Road is that without the indomitable human will the implacable darkness would unceremoniously snuff out even the most optimistic of fires. The determination to preserve what is good in the human condition become the redemptive twinkling stars in the crushing black vacuum of the universe we have inherited.

A terrifyingly haunting piece of sparse and precise prose. But one that ultimately seeks the redemption of mankind. McCarthy’s macabre world is one of a convulsive fear of what might happen to us.

The contemporary world of television advertising is often as illogical as the circumference of a pringle pot. Just in the way the average hand is too big to reach the pringles at the bottom, the average, rational human being cannot understand the adverts he is witnessing on the box.

On my winter holidays in 2010 I, like most of you, enjoyed lazily slumping like the introjected sloth we all have inside us, in front of the television with no particular desire for anything intellectually stimulating to be in front of me.

There is of course a limit to what vacuous tosh I will tolerate – I refer to the advertisements that are as helpful as a steel-toe capped kick in the crown jewels and as inspiring as Ed Miliband’s political drivel.

I will look first at some good ads.

As a kid one of my favourite adverts (I bet some of you don’t even have a favourite childhood advert do you?… Sort it out) the Brazilian football Nike advert. The one leading up to the 1998 world cup, where Roberto Carlos and Ronaldo to name a couple exhibit their skills in an airport before departing for France to the tune of ‘Mas Que Nada’.

The overall feeling of the advert is one of freedom. It manages to encapsulate the very free-flowing spirit with which the Brazilian teams of old played their football. The fact that the rigorous constructs of the airport’s control are joyfully dismantled to the vivacious music imbues the same emotional pitch of the advert in the viewer. And it becomes an enjoyable experience.

From childhood escapism and frivolity to one of the modern greats in my view – the Honda ‘The Impossible dream’ ad.

On a different note altogether from the one struck by Ronaldo & Co., the Honda ad really does inspire and resonate on a ‘nothing is impossible’ level. It invokes the daring ambition of technology throughout the short history of the scientific era. It evokes the great dreamers of the past who’s visions became realities. Martin Luther King’s famous declaration that he dreamed of a racially equal future – a dream realised in Barack Obama. Human kind’s dream of exploring space (albeit fueled by the American-Soviet conflict post second world war). Eleanor Roosevelt majestically once said:
- The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Albert Einstein said a an idea is only a good one if at first it’s crazy, and if it’s crazy enough it will reveal the truth. All of these notions whir through my mind while the Honda advert is playing; all of which contribute to the sense of accomplishment that being human has conferred throughout history; and furthermore the accomplishments yet to be achieved. Ah, the power of dreams.

And then there are the ‘ad-turds‘. Adverts that are shit. I haven’t made that up – though I would have liked to – it’s a real thing.

What do I feel our sense of accomplishment as a human race is when I look (I say look because I mute the tele) at the Go Compare Soprano, or ‘Gio’, as I hear he likes to be called? Fast-food chains and superfluous university degrees.

The meerkat advert? A repressed bestial desire and superfluous university  degrees.

The most annoying thing however is that we all know exactly what these adverts are selling. Which must constitute them being actually ‘good’ adverts. If you hadn’t seen the advert before, and all of a sudden up pops on your plasma a bilingual meerkat dressed in a royal robe trotting around a stately home selling insurance, you’re bound to be a little slow on the uptake.
So the fact that we all know by now exactly what he’s there for suggests to me that we as a race either watch too much tele, or we can see past the bizarre facade of a surreal set of circumstances and pick out the adverts’ premise first time every time. Unfortunately I think it is the former. The very fact that there exists such a bracket ‘adturds’, and the fact that advertisers are happy to categorised as such, implies that it is a desired medium.
The recognition the adturds gains is equal to, or more so than the good, thoughtful adverts. So why would you put the effort in to create something profound, when you can make something as bad and obscure as possible. Which option is more expedient? Which is going to return a greater profit margin?

Such ease and economic factors furthermore suggests that the spotty little nerds who produce these delightful vignettes know exactly what they’re doing. Thus rendering my point of superfluous university degree’s superfluous and erroneous. How ironic.

But as well as applauding these masters of modern consumer psychology, I think it’s a little upsetting that if you were to ask 100 people, like family fortunes but with dignity, to name either the top 5 news stories of the last year, or the top 5 adverts – which obviously depends of your paradigm of ‘top’ – the top 5 adverts, I’m afraid might just take the lead. So in a round about way, these advert-bods might actually be trying to help us by saying

- Look at the crap you will watch if we put it in front of you. But I doubt it.

Did I forget to mention the ‘Cillit Bang’ – shout and the dirt is gone – ads? Thank Satan for that.

The natural ambiguity which subcutaneously pervades life’s rough skin is surely nowhere more manifest than the desultory scenes of a new years eve gathering.

The contrived euphoria after the clock strikes the same hour it does 364 times elsewhere during the earth’s solar rotation is possibly one of the most perfidiously nauseating experiences someone with as sporadically nihilist cynicism as myself can have.

3…2…1… Happy new day of nothing-has-changed. As should be the declared idiom at 12:00 am on January 1st.

Never mind your a posteriori experience of hope and happiness, such abstractions are not (most of the time) observable on new years eve. You might also try becoming vegetarian or religious.

What makes this one night so auspiciously pulsate with prosperity in relation to all its neighbouring nocturns?

- It means we can have a better year than the one just gone, those hopelessly positive individuals say

- Why didn’t you put that right before tonight? we reply.

- New year new start, they despairingly implore.

- If you want something new to rejuvenate your attitude to life, try each new day: you get one of those every day, not just every year, you really don’t have to wait that long to create these false pretenses about changing the course of the future.

And the worst bit of all, is that you start the new year, or majority of people do (myself included) with a pounding headache and tempestuous stomach. And if you drunk any alcohol on your night out you tend to feel quite bad as well. Is there a greater anticlimax to the hackneyed tendency to rejoice the new year in anticipation of its forthcoming promise than with the mother of all hangovers? Such a continual paradox hasn’t been seen since Eric Cantona karate-kicked a Crystal Palace football fan. In one sense you applauded the temerity of the Frenchmen for doing something we all secretly want to do to many football fans. But also you have retain some humility and condemn what was ultimately an abhorrent act of maliciousness.

Rather than look to the commercial engine of the material world we now inhabit for hope, maybe we should look to those who have lived hopeful lives and shared their philosophies for our advantage.

Aristotle famously said that ‘hope is a waking dream’.

Surrealism posited the idea that lived reality and dreams are, and can be, the same thing.

Despite being approximately 2,2-300 years apart, Aristotle and the Surrealist’s suggest that dreams, in the dynamic sense, are conducive to abolishing notions of order and logic – giving free reign to unconscious desires. The purified freedom afforded by the processes of the dream work are precisely those conditions that inspire the individual to dream of a better, more adventurous, liberated existence. And no where in these emancipated pattern of utopia does the heavy fabric of new years eve weave its bland conformity.

So chin chin, here’s to alkaseltzer and the revolutionary regime of dreams.

So England retain the Ashes in Australia for the first time in 24 years.

Amid heroic performances throughout the series from Alistair Cook, Jimmy Anderson, Jonathon Trott and Co., there has been one constant, insatiable vehicle of support – the Barmy Army.

Of course, the players won the series, and they will be rightly heralded in a number of superlative ways, in a number papers, newsrooms and pubs, over a number of days, and so they should – they were fantastic. But if ever there was a more manifest example in sport of the positively infusing excitement, encouragement and exaltation of heroes than that exhibited by the travelling fans of the Barmy Army, I would like to have seen it.

Of course the Barmy Army have had plenty of reasons to cheer and sing tongue-in-cheek colonial songs at the Aussies, and why wouldn’t you when your team is so clearly on top. But even at Perth, when England were comprehensively beaten, ‘Jerusalem’ was still being belted out so Russian satellites could pick it up and mistake it for a threat on post-Soviet supremacy.

It seems to me that the indefatigable spirit of the official England cricket supporters club has provided that extra bit of encouragement a coach or a captain cannot. And it is the spirit in which the joviality is conducted which is striking for sports fans worldwide.

Only in rugby and cricket will you see such harmless and blithe, but intense passion in a sports stadium between two rival countries whose history weaves a richer tapestry than any multi-billion dollar, pound, dirham infested footballing outfit that ever existed. I can’t imagine an away team expressing their passion in a way akin to the Barmy Army on many football terraces without there being violent repercussions in the post-match beer-swigging pubs that so clog-up the drains of Britain’s swarthy street life.

Of course the fans have introduced the art of singing and chanting – an ostensibly football qua football thing to do. But the are vast differences. For one thing, a bit of decorum in the shape of a trumpet appears to be at the heart of the music – how civilized! But mainly, it is the act of inclusion, not exclusion that the supporters display. And ultimately the respect they show for the opposition. Yes, Ricky Ponting, and Kevin Pietersen have received the odd boo here and there, but when it is all said and done, nothing but admiration is expressed by the fans towards the players. (Excluding the Australian press of course)

And Satan forbid, but if the English football team ever accomplished a feat similar to this – how many fans would have stormed the pitch to show their avid stupidity and loyalty?

Well played lads. Well supported men!

Supposedly there is nothing stronger than the human heart. Contrary to this tremendously sickening metaphor however there is something stronger. Namely the hand, arm and mind of the person who can reach into the chest, and tear the symbol of human love asunder, slice all its straggling sinews, and render it a deadened irreparable heap of something resembling a bloody French stew.

I apologise henceforth if this is not the warming sentiment so desired by many from writing in all its emotive prowess. Or maybe I don’t apologise.

What is this investment we have and transfer to others called ‘love’; and why do we invest it? Is it to constantly remind ourselves of the cruelly capricious nature of the human will? Or, is it an attempt at recreating the benevolent attitude and spirit Yahweh exhibited on the day he bestowed the pain of child birth to women-kind? Or have we created this invisible entity to try and experience first hand the suffering our Saviour undertook when he died for the love and salvation of the human race? Or is love an absolute that is never actually attained – is it something that one merely experiences a propositional variance of, which in turn imposes the belief that we have attained this mystical entity. Or like Prometheus did we steal some of this divine essence and pass it on to other mere mortals who await its destructive impulses, mortals who, can use of this idea of love to live a life buffeted by, encouraged by, inspired by an ideal – and then suffer the consequence of being chained to a stolid rock to have our own hearts, not merely livers, eaten by an eagle of unemotional reality day in day out.

There arises a common theme – pain and suffering. For if there is one thing that is a certainty in love, it is its ability to cause an arbitrarily perpetual hurt and woe, which in turn breed those wonderful creatures Malevolence and Envy – just as Satan spawned Death and Sin.

For just as love is acquired, it can also be lost or transformed into a foreboding nakedness like the winter trees whose leaves whimsically desert them – leaving them to confront the inclement impulses of the biting weather alone and cold.

For having tasted the pure drops of love’s rain, our thirst becomes insatiable; our desire for its constancy increases; the pleasure principle screams wildly in our dry, cracked faces for more. For before the fall, the overdose, the obsession, we know not of the internal agony awaiting us after loves well runs dry. Or as Thomas Hardy points out retrospectively:

We now know more of thee than then;
We were but weak in judgment when,
With hearts abrim,
We clamoured thee that thou would’st please
Inflict on us thine agonies

I’m sure there are many who construct  a totally different paradigm of love – which probably involves a focus on its positive side. But for every ‘it was the best of times’, there is also an ‘it was the worst of times’.

Or maybe I should err towards what Nietzsche saw in the presocratic philosophers as life affirming. While in the mist of recognising the fundamentally terrible nature of reality and existence, they struck a balance between this meaningless becoming of the external world, and had the courage to be positive in approaching reality. So maybe, in Sophocles’ words “We become better through suffering”. The jury is out.

Disclaimer: I do not refer to filial love at any stage. Libido is more like it, however Freud would have us sometimes believe these are the same things.