I’ve just had a Goth revival. In my room, by myself, with the door firmly shut against the world- just the way it happened the first time round- in true Goth fashion. I unearthed and dusted Sisters of Mercy and Rosetta Stone. Dug out Bauhaus and Alien sex fiend and The Virgin Prunes. Fifteen years on, I didn’t succumb to the appeal of the make up box - white base doesn’t look too good on wrinkles and anyway I threw all that greasy stuff out a long time ago, albeit with a heavy heart.
Good times, people, good times.
So I gazed longingly at shots of Daniel Ash - the cheekbones, the hair, the leather pants- and reminisced about it all; and also about that time when my uncle and cousins came to visit, and mindlessly ventured into my cave-like, cobwebbed bedroom (thanks are due to the London Dungeon souvenir shop). They stayed for about four seconds and were later heard pondering over my sanity.
Yes, good times.
Bauhaus were gods.

On a completely unrelated topic, (no, really- Goths do not really want to hang themselves), some new and obviously very controversial study was published by some guy – whose name I don’t remember –who claims that suicide can be positively correlated with intelligence — in other words, the smarter people are, the more likely they are to kill themselves.
Whenever something like that surfaces, I can’t help but feel mildly offended, being still alive and all.
Anyway.
It would explain why geniuses often end up offing themselves, and I ‘m not planning on it. Much.
But I digress.
So. That guy argues that the higher rate of Western suicide could be because people are, on average, more intelligent in the Western world. He’s compared national IQ levels with suicide rates. And the thing is, wherever you look, and whatever the culture, the same pattern can be seen: in Azerbaijan, Greece, Kuwait and Chile there are lower average IQ levels and lower suicide rates; in Austria, Korea, Singapore and Norway there are higher average IQ levels and higher suicide rates. He claims that for suicide to take place, a certain threshold of intelligence must be crossed.

I say, balls.
First of all, writers, psychologists and philosophers have long argued over the reasons for suicide. The problem is that statistics on the subject are notoriously slippery.
Take seasonal variations. I’ll bet anything that more people will feel the attraction of the six-storey building on a cold February morning in Hull than on a sunny August day in, let’s say, Cannes. Winter blues, climate and light and all that. Apparently suicidal thoughts reach a peak in January (when the Samaritans get most calls).
Yet in the West the peak months for actual suicide attempts are, universally, April, May and June. Yeah, I had a little brother who, last April, illustrated that data pretty well.
Also, most sociologists have argued that high suicide rates are caused by modern Western life — that something in urbanised, industrialised society alienates us from friends, faith and family, the mainstays of human happiness. Ok, fine. I’d give faith a beyond-the-religious definition.
So, I’m tempted to add that it’s not intelligence but self-awareness that, in my mind, pushes someone to suicide. Self-awareness, which comes, often but not always, with education – of which intelligence is only a corollary. The more educated we are, the more able to see just how crap it all is? What about the dissatisfaction growing into despair at the constantly growing gap between what we have and what we want, in a world when the condition to happiness is to be just about everything the media we created throw at us? Always young, always fertile in one way or another, potent, able, bouncy. That’s my way of saying a 19-year-old blonde with bleached teeth, big tits and lots of cash.
Well that’s not very clever; I just got myself all depressed now.