Red Mist

Let's talk about the keys thing.

At the end of my first year of university, I was depressed. I was generally depressed throughout most of that year, but that doesn't have any bearing on this story.

I'd just finished my first year exams. You'd think that it would be a time for jubilation, celebration and various Animal House-style horse murders. But I must have had some kind of adrenaline dump, and the moment the exams were out of the way I wanted to sit in a dark-infested tank and grind my teeth.

This didn't really have anything to do with how well the exams had gone. I didn't know how they'd gone. (It turned out they had gone just well enough to pass. It was pretty close though.) I suppose the problem was just the general anticlimax that happens after any significant milestone. If you yearn for something so much, hoping and praying and willing it towards you, that when it finally arrives, it hits you in the face at a thousand miles an hour and you need a lie down.

So I was having a lie down. It was the afternoon, and I'd closed my curtains. My room was in a halls of residence, and was on the ground floor, right near the building entrance. This was not ideal for a life of peaceful study. Luckily, a life of study, peaceful or otherwise, was never on the agenda.

There I was, seething in the dark, when I heard the voice of Rob. I haven't changed his name to protect his identity - it was Rob. He was a fellow PPE student, was from Newcastle, and probably had other characteristics that I've either forgotten or never knew. He had come to ask me if I wanted to join the rest of the PPEists for a celebratory night of drinking and consolatory amnesia.

He knocked on my open window and asked if I was coming out. A friendly invitation, you might think. This made me angry. I ignored him.

He persisted. "Come on!" he might have said. "What are you moping around for?" This made me angrier.

I just wanted to ignore the world, and the world was shouting through my window. In a Geordie accent. Rage filled my soul and bed.

Then it happened. My keys were on my windowsill for some reason. Rob playfully reached through and grabbed them, and threw them towards me in a playful gesture. That was the idea at least.

But the keys hit me right in the face. Hard. They were really heavy. In those days, I had loads of keys (one for every door in Britain), several metal loops, four keyrings in the shape of anvils, a granite Ten Commandments fob...

Hard metal, hard in the face. Like getting punched by C3PO.

I totally flipped out. The post-exam depression, the invasion of my solace and the physical assault all added up. I lost, burned and buried my temper, and was out for blood. If he'd been in the room, I literally would have punched him.

But he was on the other side of the window. There was no way for me to hurt him physically. I could have tried throwing the keys back at him, but I would have lost the moral high ground and, more importantly, my keys.

In the end, the moral high ground was out the window, even if the keys weren't.

I swore at him, I insulted him. I was so desperate to hurt him like he'd hurt me that I tried every possible hurtful angle. But I didn't really know enough about him to be able to do that.

In the end, I resorted to insulting his dad by derisively referring to him as a miner.

I don't know if he was a miner. I think he might have been an old-school socialist. But why did I think that would be an effective insult? I like socialists and miners. I was just grasping at any hurtful straw I could find, but they were all made of soft plastic.

I think he just laughed.

It was scary though. If he hadn't been a white heterosexual male, would I have resorted to some kind of bigoted slur? Would I have insulted his country? Was I angry enough and impotent enough to resort to racism?

I really hope not. But at that moment, I was so angry that I might have used any weapon at my disposal.

I don't like to think that anger might make me stoop to such depths, but my rage was so visceral and overwhelming that rationality or compassion didn't come into it.

I don't tend to get angry about much, but when I do, you might want to stay away.

And, to recap, this anger came from a friend a) asking me if I was going to come out for a drink and then b) accidentally throwing some keys at my face. I don't think many courts would deem that sufficient provocation for anything beyond a polite rebuke.

I don't think the bad mood lasted too long. I'm sure Rob doesn't even remember this.

I've only been angry like that a couple of times since, and on neither occasion did I hurl any epithets at anyone.

I'm only human. I have a long fuse, but not an eternal one.

The moral of the story is:

DON'T TEST ME.

No, wait...

The moral of the story is:

If you're in a bad mood, don't leave keys on your windowsill.

It's a lesson worth learning.

My second year of university was much better. Though my rage issues might have manifested themselves in the Anger Monkey Chart I handed in that one time instead of doing an assignment.

I matured quickly, and continue to do so.

I don't have any problem with your dad being a miner.