Feeling a bit Graham Green this morning, ie thinking about life, the world the universe and um… Death. In fact I’m feeling distinctly mortal, possibly even valedictory and I’m finding that a tad morbid. I’m 39. That’s not a time of life when I should be thinking about shuffling off my mortal coil in fact, if some people are to be believed, it’s the point where life begins. There could be three reasons.

Change. Whenever things are about to change it’s like I pick it up a little in advance, feel it in the water and it manifests itself in dreams and thoughts about clinging on to life, ie what is now because I fear the unknown. Strong contender this one.

The Miscarriage. I think the fact my baby died has left me a bit raw with regards to my mortality. I’m thinking about stuff like how old I will be when my child, if I managed to have one, hits 20. 59. Eeek. I hope I’m a less arthritic 60 year old than my parents, then. I suppose it’s making me look ahead to my dotage in a way that I haven’t been until now.

People keep dying, or death and cancer keep cropping up. Hmm… the wife of a colleague I consider to be my contemporary has just died of cancer. Anita Roddick, doyenne of the Body Shop. Then there are a couple of Mr BC’s clients who are driven by it, because people they loved died of it or because they have it and are aware their time, though not quantified by a doctor in any “you have one year to live” kind of way, is limited.

There is possibly a 4th reason. I had a very depressing conversation with my brother about philosophy yesterday. You see. I believe that since we are here, there’s bugger all point in wondering how or why. We should accept that we are and try to find out as much as possible about how existence works. This has the added boon that in trying to discover how things work there is a chance science may uncover WHY we are here too.

This is just my view but sitting around gazing at your navel trying to come up with clever arguments as to why we exist serves no purpose other than showing how clever the person writing the argument is.

I know I’m a bit off the wall here especially when I’m dissing people like Jean Paul Sartre but it just seems like so much pretentious old bollocks. The kind of convoluted cobblers a person’s mind comes up with when they’ve sat on the bog thinking for too long because they left that nice thriller they were going to read on the hall table.

Here’s another way of putting it. If you end up stuck in a lift what are you going to do? Do you sit around trying to work out why you’re stuck and then, when you have worked it out, sit there, happily content or do you strive to understand how the lift works, which may involve finding out why you’re stuck and use the information to plan a way out. Me, I’m always going to be looking to understand my surroundings so I will always be looking to science for my explanations rather than some bunch of clever bastards’ navels.

So if you’re into philosophy the way my brother is, there’s no such thing as ghosts, premonitions, telepathy et al. They’re just delusions. Great!

OK, here comes the argument against this logical philosophical approach that you just can’t use – except on an anonymous blog – because it’s about things you can’t actually admit to in public.

Where does this, nothing else exists approach leave people like me?

I used to have premonitory dreams and they would come true. They came fucking true!  We’re talking pre-knowledge BEFORE the event! Please tell me, how is that a delusion?

These days I don’t have premonition dreams or at least, I don’t remember them – what’s the point, you dream about an earth quake or something but unless you’ve actually been to the place it happens you won’t recognise where it is so you can’t warn anyone or do anything useful with the information, it’s just distressing so I’m pretty sure they still happen but I blank them.

So these days I have a thought thing going on, instead. People say stuff I answer them and then they go a bit pale and swear blind I’ve just answered something they thought but didn’t say out loud. I may be a bit barking I may be fucking delusional but are all my friends, too? All those people in shops I don’t know delusional? Could be but it doesn’t bloody well feel like it. Bollocks to philosophy then, let’s try science.

Quantuum physics… now I’m not sure I’ve quite got this down pat but there’s a quantuum mechanical theorem called Schrodinger’s Cat. Basically, it says that if you put a cat in a box with no air and leave it there over night then when you open the box in the morning, whether or not the cat is dead depends on whether or not you think it will be.

The idea… I believe, is that at a minute level everything is connected and by appreciating and learning to manipulate this connection you can alter outcomes, even to the point of making physically impossible things possible. Now that makes it quite easy to explain people like me don’t you think? Add in the Stephen Hawkins stuff about ‘branes and holes in time and all this hocus pocus paranormal gobshite suddenly turns into science we haven’t explained yet.

Just as a man from the twelfth century would think a light switch was magic, so we think of science we don’t understand yet as paranormal. Maybe in some way it is. If you follow the Scrodinger’s cat hypothesis through to its logical conclusion then it would suggest that if you believe in God then for you, he will exist.

Final thing, a propos of nothing, really but I just thought I’d share this with you. I don’t know what I’ve been eating… well I do but I don’t see how it can have had this effect… I did a wee this morning which was literally fluorescent green! Amazing!

Right then, time to go get me and my glow in the dark bladder into town for lunch! Pipple toot!