Break it to me gently, doctor, how long have I got?

Also published on HuffingtonPost.co.uk here: http://huff.to/19ePKsI

A notice on the wall of my GP’s surgery reads, “Do not discuss more than one problem per appointment. Remember, you are allotted only 10 minutes.”

It was a message reiterated to my dad during a consultation in early 2011 when he mentioned a second concern: a lump on his head. The primary concern was a larger, as-yet-undiagnosed lump on his shoulder.

“This is a 10-minute appointment,” the GP said firmly. The implication was clear: he didn’t have time to look at the growth on my dad’s head.

Three months later, Dad was dead. The lumps were cancer that had spread from his lungs. 

I’m not blaming the GP for my dad’s death. The cancer had metastasised and there’s little chance it could have been halted by swifter medical intervention. I am not blaming; I am asking: when did GPs run out of time for their patients? What changed? 

You don’t need to know much about biology to realise that the body is a holistic system: the component tissues and organs interact and affect each other. It’s not uncommon for a symptom in one part to be traced to a root cause in another. 

We rely on GPs to be crack detectives of physiology, seeking out as many clues as possible to home in on the underlying malady. Our lives are in their hands, and that shouldn’t be an unsettling thought.

For many of us, it takes guts to book an appointment and tell a stranger about our worries. (Not to mention the added stress of negotiating time off work, etc.) We’re often scared, especially if we fear it might be something serious. We also worry that we’re wasting the doctor’s time, even when we know deep down something is wrong. We’re easily put off by brusque treatment, made to feel feeble and even more apprehensive; next time something hurts, we think twice before seeking advice.

A detective wouldn’t cut short a witness: “Stop blathering about the colour of his clothes and cut to the bit where he pulls the trigger.” So why does a GP in pursuit of diagnostic pointers discourage a patient from describing fully their concerns?  

Yes, I know time is money (a GP’s time, lots of money) and money is limited. I know too that some people waste GPs’ time with untreatable sniffles etc, but that can’t be helped except through patient (in both senses of the word) education. If the system is buckling, let’s at least take notice and fight to save it. Institutional cursoriness isn’t a solution, it’s surrender.

Postscript
I’m a sniffling time-waster, perhaps: there’s probably nothing seriously wrong with me, but a couple of times lately while running my heart rate has leapt up to 220bpm. My usual ‘maximum’ is 185bpm. It didn’t hurt but I felt a flutter in my chest and running suddenly felt harder. The first time it happened I wrote it off as a one-off glitch and did nothing; the second time, I figured I should get checked.

The GP referred me to the practice nurse for an ECG, which came back as abnormal. The length of time between the electrical signal telling my heart to finish a beat and the beginning of the next one, to start the next beat, is longer than it should be. Having an over-long QT interval is associated with dropping dead while playing sport. 

“I want some advice from a cardiologist on this,” said my GP. “We ought to get an answer quite swiftly, so I’ll have a fax sent today. In the meantime, don’t push too hard.”

That was a fortnight ago. I’ve heard nothing. I phoned the GP’s surgery and the receptionist told me to contact the hospital cardiology department directly. So I rang the hospital, and was told that the relevant paperwork would be impossible to find unless I knew the name of the consultant to whom the fax had been sent.  

“Which consultant was the fax sent to?” I asked the GP’s receptionist.
“We never specify a consultant, we just send it to the department.” 
“But… But please, I don’t know what else to do.” 
“Well, I shouldn’t be doing all this chasing-up. We’ve been told not to. We don’t have time,” she huffed, before reluctantly agreeing to resend the fax. “Try calling us next Monday to see if we’re heard back.” She didn’t sound confident.

I don’t feel entitled to urgent attention; I suspect my heart is OK – I’ve been running for years and I figure that if my ticker were going to fall fatally out of rhythm, it would have done so before now. Even so, what if there were a serious risk? What if I did have a timebomb in my chest? Would the NHS have the time to tell me? Who knows.

Not seeing: the funny side

First published on Guardian.co.uk on 17th May 2013, under the heading 'Facing blindness by seeing the funny side'.

The film Come As You Are depicts blindness, disability and illness
with humour, compassion and a striking lack of queamishness 

What would you do if you were told you were going blind? Quit your job, cut loose and rush to live out your most lurid fantasies? Nice idea, but your mates are still at work, and wealth doesn't increase in inverse proportion to eyesight, alas. Still, you'd be expected to react, so what would it be: fury, despondency, soul-searching, or would you try to see the funny side?

In the summer of 2006 I was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa (RP) – an inherited condition that affects the retina of the eyes, often leading to complete blindness. It was picked up by an optician at a routine sight test after I casually mentioned my exceptional clumsiness after dark (how I'd fail to spot big things like cars and ditches which, I'd noticed, everyone else managed to avoid). That's how RP begins, with night-blindness and accidents, followed by a gradual erosion of peripheral vision and more accidents.

When I told my family, they frowned gravely and muttered terrible portents like "devastating" and "life-changing".

But I didn't feel as though much had changed. I might go blind; I might not. I might walk into the path of a bus; I might hop on it and go on a fantastic journey. The future remained unforeseeable, and the splotches of peripheral vision whose absconding I had barely noticed remained unseen – as well as unseeing. Blindness was already here in a ghostly, imperceptible sort of way; I felt more perplexed than devastated.

My mum, realising that half the genetic flaw causing my eyes to self-destruct came from her, was overcome with guilt. Learning about the randomness and odds-defyingly bad luck inherent in inheritance didn't help. Nor did it help when I stressed that I was not merely unresentful, but grateful to her for having had the particular genetic accident – coding error notwithstanding – that made me.

None of this was funny. I don't remember crying, but I definitely didn't laugh. Now, seven years on, when kindly folk ask – as they do – "How are your eyes?", what am I meant to say: "Still rotting?" Hardly amusing, I grant you, but what else?

There's no natural or comforting response to sight loss. A couple of years back, a Channel 4 documentary-maker leapt to the presumption that I'd want to go on a grand sightseeing expedition to curate a memory-gallery of sights to console myself with in years to come – a proposal I turned down after emailing the blind academic John Hull (PDF).

"The supposition is that the life of a blind person will be retrospective, living in the past," replied the media-wary professor. "But one must affirm one's grasp of life as a present reality, not live in nostalgia."

I also emailed the American memoirist Jim Knipfel – who went blind as a result of RP in his 20s – who explained how he too was approached by a film-maker of a sentimental bent. "Upon meeting me she said, 'Oh, how wonderful it must be to be blind – you're living in a whole new, magical world.'"

What possible response? "My first impulse was to grab a letter-opener and let her find out first-hand what blindness is like. Instead, I warned her that her belief in magic might not survive watching me try to get across my apartment without tripping over anything."

In fairness to these film-makers, it's not easy to depict sight loss in a visual medium – and at least they wanted to try. All too often, blind people are omitted from film and TV for fear of depicting them in an insensitive way or unsettling the audience. This lack of representation is creating a problem for visually impaired citizens of the US, reckons Knipfel.

"Kids no longer grow up with images of bumbling blind people in cartoons and on sitcoms, and so no longer understand the white cane. This move to make everything 'nice' has resulted in an incredibly dangerous situation, as all those people I've run into can attest."

Which is one good reason among many to endorse the daring exceptions, films such as Come As You Are (to be released in UK cinemas on 7th June) – a funny, moving and distinctly unsentimental story about three young men, one blind, one paralysed and one who has cancer, who go on a road trip in pursuit of sex.

Knipfel's writing is a masterclass in seeing the funny side when you can't see much else. Now 47, he has honed a knack for dragging readers deep into the awfulness of a situation before bursting the pathos with an acerbic joke. His grimly mirthful memoir Slackjaw – lauded widely, even by the usually reticent Thomas Pynchon – details some of the dire predicaments Knipfel got into as a young man with deteriorating sight. The worst was when, aged 20, he collided with a lamppost so hard that it left him with a brain lesion and permanently reliant on anti-seizure medication. His vision continued to recede and he was registered blind by the time he was 30 – the age I am now – yet he remains relentlessly sardonic and self-mocking. Is that what I should do, take my sight loss less seriously?

"Well, humour has always been my reaction to a world I find absurd," confesses Knipfel, "especially when the people around me seem to take it all so seriously. When I went blind, that seemed as ridiculous as anything else, so I reacted to it in the same way."

But does it help to cope with sight loss, this refusal to take the world seriously? "To be honest, blindness has never really bothered me that much. It's an annoyance – like a head cold or hangnail. The best thing about mixing blindness and humour is that I can now get away with even more than I did before."

I admire Knipfel's insouciance, but it's not for me, I fear. The prospect of worsening sight scares me, and I don't find it easy to make light of the gaucheness it causes. Remember when Gordon Brown, who is blind in his left eye, roused hilarity by appearing to shun a handshake from a policeman on the door of 10 Downing Street? I felt a stab of vicarious embarrassment because I suspected that Brown's failure to spot the officer's outstretched hand had been caused by his limited peripheral vision – it's a mishap that has befallen me several times. OK, such faux-pas are comical, but isn't it just plain cruel to laugh?

Author Jim Knipfel wears a fedora - for safety reasons

"Not at all," insists Knipfel, who wears a fedora because the brim gives a "split-second warning" before his head hits another post. "All of us – blind people, sighted, disabled, mentally ill, whatever race, whatever religion – we all have attributes that can and should be amplified for comic exploitation. We're all fodder!"

It's hardly comforting, the prospect of becoming ever riper-fodder for ridicule, but I suppose it's preferable to being disregarded or patronised. "Damn right. The blind are, for the most part, a fairly hapless group. You deny that and, as I mentioned, before long no one will know what a white cane is or what blindness entails, and that's no good for anyone."

"OK, Jim, I'll do my best," I resolve to email back. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to buy a sombrero. Even if it doesn't save me from handshake blunders or lampposts, at least it'll hide my blushes."

This is not a running blog

Updated version of 'Why I run' – originally posted on 20th January 2011:

Running can be painful but not as
painful as running blogs

I’m not sure about running blogs. Running is what makes life worth living, that’s true, but people writing about their running, well, it seems to me the potential for being dull heavily outweighs the scope for being original, insightful and/or entertaining. 

What’s enjoying about running is running: the act itself. Like sex, it’s rhythmic, invigorating, animal and difficult to describe beyond the basic mechanics: one foot in front of the other, repeat. The enjoyment is the doing: absorbed in the moment, body in motion, mind quieted, undistracted. When I am running, I am running.

Writing about running for other runners of similar standard is fine – we indulge each other as a means to ever deeper self-absorption – but for a general audience? No, no way. The last thing I'd want to do is add to the web-swell of boring blather about split times, barefoot shoes (eh?), journeys and goals. I’d fail to capture the appeal; I’d be anal and puritanical about training routines; I’d pointlessly deride slower runners; I’d be that most loathsome thing, a running-bore.

But there is one question that people, including and especially non-runners, want answered: why? Why do we go outside for prolonged periods every day, come cold and rain, come leg aches and bleeding nipples, to get our fix? It is baffling, we must accept, and it warrants an explanation.

So, this is not a running blog; this is a one-off attempt to explain why.

Hitherto I’d not felt called on to explain it. It was just something I’d fallen into the habit of doing every day, like walking the dog, only faster and without a dog. Explaining why – accounting for being apparently as burden-tethered as a dog owner while not in possession of a dog – wouldn’t be easy. But then I read a book assessing why men read men’s magazines. No, not porn, but laddy-lifestyle mags such as Men’s Health, GQ, FHM, etc.

It was a sociological study by a trio of academics, exploring why men enjoy reading articles about how to ‘get ripped’, ‘craft a washboard stomach’, ‘dress to knock her dead’ and ‘steer clear of gold-diggers’, that kind of thing. I will make extensive reference, for reasons that will become clear, to the chapter entitled “Consumption and the sociology of the body”.

That’s quite enough preamble; without further ado, this is why I run:

1. Because my job is too easy

I run because my job doesn’t tire me out or make me feel manly and important. I do not earn money by digging holes in the ground, like my father did. His job kept his body lean and muscular (and tired); it was a job for life; it fulfilled a useful function with obvious benefits to society; it earned him money to feed his family. My job involves sitting at a desk all day (burning very little energy), fiddling around with words no one needs to read, earning money to fritter away on my own amusement. I run because it makes me feel as though I am doing real work, helping me feel fit and alive, and giving me a project on which to expend surplus energy.

“Capitalism is no longer dependent upon the condemnation of sexual and physical pleasure and the maintenance of strictly disciplined forms of manual labour. Instead, the body in consumer culture is both disciplined and hedonistic. In such a culture, the body becomes a vehicle for pleasure, youth, health and fitness; that is, it is increasingly viewed as a passport to the good life… Life itself is a project within modernity.”

2. To feel superior

Running makes me feel as though I have an advantage over others. I have no power over others in my job or in my relationships (unlike my father, who was indisputably head of our family). Running is an arena in which I can strive to dominate others, to try and be exceptional; keeping fit makes me feel less fallible, less likely to need emotional or medical help.

“[Running] prepares men for the atomised world of late capitalism, providing them with crucial ammunition in helping them gain a competitive advantage… The hyper-competitive social relations of late-capitalism manifest themselves in male relations at work, in friendships and in relationships. The need for intimate human relations that men have found so difficult to recognise within themselves are displaced through myths of self-sufficiency and independence.”

3. To forestall my body’s decline

I'm 30 now, so my body is about to begin its slow yet inexorable decline towards old age and death. My job is not tough or tiring enough to distract me from this awful truth. But, all the time I am getting fitter and faster, I have firm proof that my body is an anomaly, defying science – not only evading deterioration but improving. Working hard at running provides definite, measurable evidence – in the form of improving PBs – that my body is flourishing; I’m not just outrunning the Grim Reaper but lapping him, making him look stupid.

“Just as men face an increasingly uncertain future in the workplace, so their bodies become places of intense anxiety and scrutiny in terms of their inevitable decline. In order for this decline to be halted or at least temporarily arrested, the body becomes something that needs to be invested in and worked upon… The body becomes a new site for social discipline.”

4. It gives me an identity

How do you define yourself? Which single word best sums you up? The first adjective in my Twitter biog used to be “Runner” (until writing this made me self-conscious about it) – I defined myself by my hobby, first and foremost. In the past, most people defined themselves by their profession, but less so these days. Nowadays, it is not sensible to get too attached to one’s job (consider all those people employed in the public sector to whom the government has said: “You’re not required anymore, and probably never were”.) Our jobs are uncertain, unsafe and of questionable utilitarian worth.

“In the new world of flexible employment, the rules are made up as we go along, the ability to adapt and change is the most prized of possessions and the act of departure valued above that of reaching the destination.”

Indeed, some of my fondest memories involve handing in resignation letters and leaving jobs.

“… the idea that our skills may well become redundant in the future means that the workplace can only offer the most insecure of identities. The body, then, becomes a domain to be ‘worked on’ and regulated. The body requires finely itemised forms of labour in order that it might produce measurable effects. This process of physical transformation grants the masculine subject a sense of security and continuity denied him within the workplace… Uncertainty converts the body into a new project of identity.”

5. To be a machine

The fallibility of my body is unbearable. Consider my eyes – one minute, they’re fine, seeing everything normally; the next, they’re destroying themselves and I’m going blind because of some silly little genetic quirk. Being trapped inside a human body is ridiculously perilous. It is far better to be a machine. Runners look upon their flawed carcasses as embodied apparatus – hard, robust and responsive to fine-tuning.

“Men’s relationships with their bodies is often represented as being purely instrumental… The application of instrumental logics… [and] tips and advice keep the body ‘running along smoothly’. The most often used metaphor in relation to the body and sources of food and energy is that of ‘refuelling’… [Men] seek to convert the body into something that can be controlled by scientific forms of rationality protecting the self from having to develop a more vulnerable relation with the body’s own needs.”

6. To flee from death

As discussed above, my body is about to begin its decline towards death. I am unable to accept my own death, for it is too terrible a prospect. While I’m running and getting fitter, I feel very alive; so it follows that running is the opposite of death and, as such, keeps death at bay. I know that immortality is a questionable corollary to “feeling very alive”, but the illusion makes existence more tolerable and helps me forget the terrible truth. Besides, no one has anything better to offer. Religion isn’t taken seriously anymore, and “a problem shared is a problem halved” doesn’t seem to apply to death – believe me, I’ve tried; it’s my favourite topic of conversation down the pub.

“The culture of bodily fitness and exercise is bound up with a fear of death and mortality… In the face of death we often go silent, because we lack a common language in which to frame the experience… Death is something to be hidden away and privatised within modernity. Fear of death becomes… as Castoriadis argues, ‘that everything, even meaning, will dissolve’… Death is that which cannot be mastered and controlled, despite all our efforts to mould and shape the body. These concerns can be forgotten about, or at least this is the expectation, through daily regimes that invite us to keep an ever-watchful eye on our health.”

Source: Making Sense of Men’s Magazines, by Peter Jackson, Nick Stevenson & Kate Brooks, published by Polity Press, 2001.

Blogging: farce or chance?

Chris Hunter's blogging success poses the question: Why go to work when you could sit
at home in your comfiest chair, drinking from your favourite coffee mug?

Why on earth would any sensible person write a blog? Unless you're a known brand (a 'celebrity') or can publish from a known brand's platform, no one cares what you have to say. "Another blog?" they'll groan. "No thanks, don't have time."  

... so I'd assumed. 

Then I wrote an article for Motorcycle Trader (a trade mag for bike dealers) about the sorry fate of mainstream motorcycle magazines* – and stumbled upon a successful blog written by a normal guy. Successful? Yes, getting loads of hits and making money and everything. 

My brief was to investigate: "What's next for the motorcycle press?" - are websites killing off paid-for print? The answer, to cut a long feature short (the long version: from page 28 of this), is yes. 

Bloggers don't make a living from blogging, of that I was certain. In fact, I'd assumed that not many websites make much money, either, unless they're the DailyMail.com or some such filth.com, getting a gazillion hits per second by publishing spy shots of Harry’s arse and Kate’s tits. But then I found Chris Hunter’s blog, Bike EXIF…

The Bike EXIF homepage

This one-man site publishes photos of highly trendy custom-built motorbikes – not the chrome-festooned cruisers favoured by portly, goatee'd middle-age-crisis victims, but artfully minimalist, stripped-down designs. They’re the engined equivalent of the fixed-gear bicycles so beloved of urban hipsters; the kinds of machine Steve McQueen might've kept shiny for use on the days he wasn't anticipating jumping any ditches. These bikes are sometimes called café racers or retro sportsbikes, but many of them are too quirky and cool to slot into a category.

Siegl custom Ducati 900SS, recently featured on Bike EXIF (Photo: Jason Brownrigg)

Hunter set up the blog in 2008 as an experiment, as bloggers do, to see what level of interest it attracted and “ready to drop it quickly if it didn’t work”. His gut instinct was that interest in these über-hip bikes was a) strong and growing; and b) not catered for by the mainstream press. 

At the time he was employed as a creative director in a large Australian advertising agency. His blog experiment struck a chord with bike fans and took off. It now attracts more than 400,000 unique visitors every month and rakes in a healthy amount of advertising income. 'Healthy' meaning more than enough to pay the bills; Hunter quit his day job at the end of last year. He’s now a full-time blogger; and it isn't that he's taken a pay-cut to downsize and sit around gazing at pretty-bike pictures all day. Not at all…

“It’s very much a business now, and has been for the past couple of years. I now run the site full-time. The income it produces doesn’t quite match my old salary yet, but it will do in the future.”

The first thing Hunter’s success story proves is that your blog doesn’t need a catchy or enticing name.
“Bike EXIF is a strange name, yes,” he admits. “EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File – it’s the data that’s stored in a digital camera image, a nerdy reference to our focus on photography. If I’d known the site would become so big, I’d have thought of a better name! Too late now…”

What’s more important than the name – as the Daily Mail knows too well – are the photos. Your images must be crisp and high-quality so that visitors can zoom-in and drool to their heart’s (or other throbbing bit’s) content. If the photos are too small or blurry or simply lack ‘impact’, people will stop visiting. More pictures, less text - always. More than 400 words is too much – one reason why this (my) blog is a dead canary.

Online content, unlike print, has a cost-free global reach, and Hunter knew that the appeal of funky, retro custom bikes transcended national boundaries. He also knew how to schmooze advertisers – not difficult, he insists.
“I have relationships with senior execs at most of the main moto and apparel manufacturers and their country-level distributors,” says Hunter. “There’s no secret to it… If you have the stats to back it up – and they need to be very big stats with the right audience breakdown – relationships can turn into advertising.”

Then there are the potential side-lines… Bike EXIF already produces merchandise – namely, an annual calendar that last year “outsold the official and licensed Harley-Davidson calendars on Amazon in the US”.

Hunter isn’t a smug web-geek who wishes painful death on print publishing; on the contrary, he’s a magazine-lover who thinks print will survive for many years yet, provided publishers learn how to fully exploit the internet to complement and market their hard-copy publications.
“The two worlds [print and online] will merge; they are getting closer as each month passes. The old guard in the magazines will move on, and the new guard will be more open to collaboration. I’m actually a huge fan of print, and it might be a part of the EXIF stable sometime in the future. I’m a total magazine addict… but if we go into print, it won’t be anything like the magazines you see on UK newsstands today.”

So, there you have it: Crap magazines are dead (or dying); long live the smart, web-savvy ones. And if you're a canny three-in-one writer/publisher/ad salesperson, you might, just might be able to make a living blogging about your hobby.

How to create a money-spinning blog
Bike EXIF founder Chris Hunter lists the five most important qualities needed if you’re serious about making money from a blog

1. A unique vision or voice. If you’re producing the same content as other people or constantly chasing their tails, you’ll always be playing second fiddle. 
2. A good marketing brain. There’s no point in creating an amazing website if you don’t have an innate understanding of effective promotion and search engine optimisation.
3. Generalist abilities. If you have to pay someone every time you need to change a line or code or restart a server, you’ll never make any money. Unless it’s a vanity project, you need to be a one-man band in the early days.
4. Lots of stamina. It’s hard work and late hours. Can you do that for several years? Do you have an understanding family?
5. Design taste. A lot of print magazines seem to get away with pretty average design, but online, there’s nowhere to hide. Good aesthetics and navigation are critical.

*The motorcycle press is dying a slow, agonising death. I know this because I used to work for SuperBike, which, when I joined in 2005, was selling more than 60,000 copies per month. At the latest ABC count, sales had fallen to 16,000 – a decline of 75 per cent in six years. And my inverse Midas touch wasn't to blame this time.

The title was flogged in 2010 by its then owner IPC Media to Vitality Publishing, who went bust earlier this year, at which point SuperBike was ‘saved’ (along with sister title Loaded) by a porn star. The mag's laddishness has increased; not so sure about sales - it's been withdrawn from the ABC audit. 

Gay boy from Damascus

First published on HuffingtonPost.co.uk on 26th October 2011:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/david-bradford/gay-boy-from-damascus_b_1021474.html

Hani Homsi (not his real name) is young, Syrian and gay. He now lives in the UK, and has agreed to meet me to talk about his formative years in Damascus, as well as his perspective on the current Syrian uprising.

But first I want to know what he made of the 'Gay Girl in Damascus' hoax - a blog purportedly written by a young lesbian living in the Syrian capital but which, it turned out, was the work of a 40-year-old heterosexual American man. Probably not the representation gay Syrians had been longing for?

"I don't think it helped in any way." Hani's voice falters slightly as he looks around the room, leans forward, and fixes his gaze on the tape recorder between us. We are in a secluded corner of a sprawling café but he is nervous, and I will soon appreciate why. I reassure him that neither his name nor any other identifying details will be published. He sits back, takes a breath and continues:

"A tactic of the regime has been to say, 'It's all fabrication'. They could have said about [about the blog], 'Look, this is something westerners are bringing you which we're sure you don't want'."

Hani provides further clarification when he tells me that the word "gay" does not easily translate into Arabic, and the notion of being gay is widely regarded in Syrian society as a "corrupting western invention". He believes that the hoax could have made it easier for anti-gay religious groups to advance their cause. As for the regime's attitude to gay people, "they have bigger things to worry about now" and don't meddle in citizens' personal lives "as long as you support them and don't interfere politically".

Political interference, as far as President Bashar al-Assad's government is concerned, means any detectable expression of dissent, no matter how peaceful. The regime's response to opposition demonstration, as we are seeing reported on an almost daily basis, is violent and merciless.

Hani has heard many stories from his family about "friends of friends" who have been brutally tortured, murdered or have simply disappeared. "It is just unbelievable the amount of cruelty they [the regime] are capable of. Really, you would rather die 100 times than be taken by them."

The last time Hani saw his parents was several weeks ago, when they met him outside of Syria. He was shocked by how anxious and wary they had become.

"When we were talking, they were just whispering. They said they were not used to speaking [at normal volume] even in the privacy of their own home - because there may be listening devices. I found that shocking - very, very different to when I last lived there [in Damascus]. Watching the news, on channels such as Al Jazeera, they drew the curtains, as they felt they couldn't afford to be seen watching these channels."

It is a stark reminder of Hani's bravery in speaking to me. He has spent many years keeping quiet, bearing a double burden of secrecy - about his dislike of the regime and about his sexuality - but he is not holding back now, spilling out vivid, articulate sentences in perfect English. I take my chance and venture a more personal question: when did he realise he was gay?

"I always sensed I was different," he pauses. "No, I knew I was different."

How did he know? How does a gay Syrian explore their sexuality, given the prevailing attitude among fellow citizens?

"This is a bit private. Do you want to know about it?" He grins at my enthusiastic nodding. "I did have an underground affair with a next-door friend of mine. We did actually have an affair. Our families knew each other; he was just one year older than me; he went to the same school."

Hani's eyes light up and he giggles as he remembers the guileless way in which the affair began.

"I was 14, and I remember it was winter. We were all watching a film, me, him and his sister... Suddenly there was a power failure, as there had been a snow storm - every time there's snow, the city gets completely cut off... so we decided to play hide-and-seek. We [Hani and his male friend] ended up hiding together, under the bed, we were really close. And we felt something, and it started then and there... both of us were so sort of thrilled by it. It was almost a surprise and so convenient - he lived just next-door. I remember saying goodbye, and saying 'I'll see you here tomorrow'."

The clandestine relationship lasted for six years, throughout the boys' school days. Once he was old enough, Hani would occasionally borrow the family car and drive with his friend into the mountains north-west of Damascus - preferably in mid-winter, to maximise the likelihood of getting snowed-in. Was it a love affair?

"We never talked about each other as a couple, let alone using the word gay to describe ourselves. At one point, he even started going out with a girl." So his friend wasn't gay? "I think he was worried about his social image: he wanted to have a girlfriend. And he was very, very good-looking, so any girl wanted to go out with him. Thinking about him now, I think he might have been bi [-sexual], if you want to use that categorisation." 

I am surprised that the pair's illicit rendezvous continued so frequently over such a long time, not least because I had always assumed that in less tolerant societies there is greater pressure on gay people to curb and conceal their sexuality. Hani turns this supposition on its head, explaining that the scarcity of "gayness" in Syrian culture and public discourse equates to a certain degree of obliviousness. Male relations are "more queer" inasmuch as they are "less defined" (as straight, gay or otherwise); men kiss when greeting each other and may hold hands in public "without anyone really noticing". 

The boyhood friends keep in touch but have not met for more than three years. I detect no sense of regret in Hani, who is now in his late-20s and openly gay among his British friends. I wonder what it is like living so different a life now, and watching from afar the escalating troubles in the country that remains his family's home. Does he believe the Syrian people will manage to overthrow their oppressors, as the Egyptians did?

"It's difficult. The difference is, the Egyptian army wasn't being controlled by the government. In Syria, the state is everything; whether you're from the university, the hospital, from anything, you are all controlled by one entity. The army is very much the heart of it, and they have the power."

If President Assad's time is running out - and surely it is - will his departure mark a hopeful new beginning for Hani's family and former neighbours? I am surprised by the cautious, ambivalent tone of the response: before the uprising, Hani explains, the regime had been slowly loosening its stranglehold on civil liberties and was consequently gaining support among "an emergent class of relatively wealthy Damascene and Aleppan merchants". The president was beginning to seem almost 'progressive' (in the western-capitalist sense) - at least in comparison to his father Hafez al-Assad, whose leadership style was shaped by Soviet communism.

"They [the regime] were starting to allow lots of things" - such as private TV channels showing satirical drama (satirical in a "disguised, Shakespearian" sense), and some non-state-controlled newspapers with articles criticising the government.

Assad's fatal mistake, according to Hani, was to ignore the discontent in poorer areas of Syria, "where people thought, 'No matter what I do, I can't improve my living circumstances, I'm just going nowhere - but the people next door have done it, so why can't we?'... The fact these people have been neglected is ironic, given that Hafez al-Assad's revolution [when he became president, in 1971] was pretty much a peasant uprising against the landowning classes of Damascus and Aleppo."

I want to ask Hani about his hopes for his family and whether they know he is gay, but it is getting late and café staff are shuffling in around us, wiping down tables and preparing to close for the day.

We exchange emails the following day, and he makes a startling disclosure: his parents have suspected he is gay since his father "found some stuff in my diary", about five years ago. This "stuff" revealed nothing about the affair, but Hani's mention of having felt attracted to other men was enough to elicit furious non-acceptance.

"We had massive row... They were some of the worst days in my life. I really thought I'd lost them forever." An uneasy truce was reached, whereby Hani "was made to promise to change and become 'normal', i.e. heterosexual - otherwise, I would have been disowned".

To this day his parents remain "very suspicious" and "don't dare ask questions" about his personal life. When his mother expresses her wish that he one day marry a woman, he plays his part in "a game of perfect pretence".

Except it is not a game - games are fun, like hide-and-seek. Syria may be drawing near to a new era of free expression, but for gay Syrians like Hani one realm of secrecy will remain as compulsory and oppressive as ever.

Having a go, un-heroically

Alcoholics' Corner: site of 98.6 per cent of crime committed in Lewes (roughly)

As a child, I dreamt about getting my chance to act like a superhero. I had the strength and bravery, I was sure; all I needed was the occasion. The fantasy never completely died. Since becoming a keen runner, I’ve often thought: Wouldn’t it be great to put my fitness to heroic use? – to run down a criminal and teach him a harsh lesson about the foolishness of committing crime while in a state of mediocre cardiovascular health. Well, my chance came today.

It was meant to be a routine, easy run. I’d set out from my house and was jogging along Southover Road when I heard some commotion.

“Oi! Stop! Come back here!”

It was a male voice, urgent, almost frantic.

He’s yelling at his runaway dog, I concluded, uneasily. But the shouts grew louder. The fugitive, it soon dawned on me, was a man, not a dog. I looked back.

Not one man, but two, both middle-aged, grey, and gaining on me fast. How could this be? I was running yet being caught by old blokes in overcoats. The leading veteran runner, I realised, was being pursued by the other, but it wasn’t so much a race as a chase. “Stop him, he’s a thief,” shouted the chaser.

By now, the pursued was a mere 20 metres away. I had a decision to make. Questions and doubts shot through my mind: 1. Is the chaser telling the truth? 2. Is the chased dangerous? 3. Should I help? Damn it, am I superhero material? 

My ad hoc answers revealed a fair few prejudices, I’m ashamed to say. 1. Yes, the chaser must be telling the truth – he isn’t dropping consonants. 2. No, the chased isn’t dangerous – he’s puny, pallid and probably a smackhead. So hell yeah, 3. This is your chance to be a hero!

What happened next I can’t quite explain. I made an attempt. Or did I? I stuck out an arm with about enough purpose to intercept a wafting balloon. He palmed me off, easily, and kept going.

Across Station Street he dashed, and then, for some reason, just sort of gave up. The chasing man clinched him in a bear-hug and wrestled him to the ground. It was impressive, heroic even. 

I’ve repressed whatever might have happened next. I can only assume I was standing around, leaning on something, dazed.

My only excuse: confusion. Was the chasing man’s allegation genuine and correct? What if it had all been a mistake and the chased man was innocent? In hindsight, it was no time for moral ambivalence; after all, the chased man ran away – people wrongly accused of theft don’t run away.

The next thing I remember: two stockier, less ambivalent citizens arrived on the scene and helped pin down the alleged thief, while I stood around shivering in my running kit – clingy base layer and flimsy gilet – trying to assume an “I’m on hand to help if help is needed” expression. 

Meanwhile, the accused man moaned (though didn’t swear) about being uncomfortable, pinned down on the pavement. Another bystander, a smartly dressed woman, kept him informed, at regular intervals, that she had no sympathy, in light of his (alleged) offence – though she didn’t qualify it ‘alleged’. 

After an agonising wait of at least 10 minutes, one police car arrived, then another. The officers - two calm, seen-it-all-before women - handcuffed the accused and bundled him into the car. “He ran like an athlete,” the accuser told them. I couldn’t help but worry about the context: Like an athlete compared to the skinny, limp-wristed jogger whom he so effortlessly deflected. 

The accused had stolen a woman’s handbag from the family history bureau, alleged the accuser, and had discarded his swag in an alley before the chase caught up with him, and me.

Still, it’s one man’s word against the other’s. What if the accused man was innocently researching his mother’s uncle’s mysterious estranged son when the accusing man – who, let’s conjecture, is a paranoid fantasist – shouted at him “Oi! Thief!” The accused man simply panicked – his mind full of Victorian family feuds and barbarism – and fled in fear. Perhaps. 

Or what if the accused man is the long-lost brother of the accusing man and had stalked him to the family history bureau to steal his historical documents (stashed in wife’s handbag) in an attempt to prevent the uncovering of a dark family secret? 

Hard to believe? That depends. Some people reckon super-heroes wear Spandex…

            

Why I run

Updated as 'This is not a running blog' - 4th February 2013

A Sunday morning, fighting futilely against a brick-wall-strength headwind.
Why? Not sure really...