Maureen, Martin, Jess, and JJ Maureen Why is it the biggest sin of all? All your life you’re told that you’ll be going to this marvelous place when you pass on. And the one thing you can do to get you there a bit quicker is something that stops you getting there at all. Oh, I can see that it’s a kind of queue-jumping. But if someone jumps the queue at the post office, people tut. Or sometimes they say, “Excuse me, I was here first.” They don’t say, “You will be consumed by hellfire for all eternity.” That would be a bit strong. Martin I’d spent the previous couple of months looking up suicides on the Internet, just out of curiosity. And nearly every single time, the coroner says the same thing: “He took his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed.” And then you read the story about the poor bastard: His wife was sleeping with his best friend, he’d lost his job, his daughter had been killed in a road accident some months before. . . Hello, Mr. Coroner? I’m sorry, but there’s no disturbed mental balance here, my friend. I’d say he got it just right. Jess I was at a party downstairs. It was a shit party, full of all these ancient crusties sitting on the floor drinking cider and smoking huge spliffs and listening to weirdo space-out reggae. At midnight, one of them clapped sarcastically, and a couple of others laughed, and that was it – Happy New Year to you, too. You could have turned up to that party as the happiest person in London, and you’d still have wanted to jump off the roof by five past twelve. And I wasn’t the happiest person in London anyway. Obviously. JJ New Year’s Eve was a night for sentimental losers. It was my own stupid fault. Of course there’d be a low-rent crowd up there. I should have picked a classier date – like March 28, when Virginia Woolf took her walk into the river, or November 25 (Nick Drake). If anybody had been on the roof on either of those nights, the chances are they would have been like-minded souls, rather than hopeless fuck-ups who had somehow persuaded themselves that the end of a calendar year is in any way significant.