IT`S ALL THE RAGE....

Apparently it`s mental health awareness week and yesterday was apparently anxiety day.   And whilst ever anxious myself to keep abreast of modern day trends and priorities, I cannot escape the feeling that I am somehow missing out on what seems the fashionable claim to have mental health issues.

Now, OK we all get anxious about things now and then.  Myself, I get anxious most Saturday afternoons around 3.00pm when the Saints are kicking off in yet another forlorn encounter with yet another difficult opponent.   To me, that might represent the sum total of my anxieties and I agree that, if that`s the case, then I must have fortune on my side.

But all this publicity, TV programmes, green ribbons and the succession of alleged `celebrities` declaring their support for mental health awareness makes me wonder why it is that I really, really don`t feel anxious about very much these days. 

 Maybe it`s being 80, which puts a different perspective on things but I suspect the roots of my nonchalance probably go back to my younger days.   Being born just before the outbreak of WW2 made me spend the first six years of my life in a wartime environment - I guess that`s how I thought life was, as I never knew anything different so maybe I was not as anxious as I might have been.  

And in my late teens rather than me leaving home, home left me.  My parents wanted to move away so they did but I didn`t, as I was content living in a village, playing my football and cricket and enjoying the company of the young lady to whom I have now been married for 58 years.   Who would move away from all of that?  So I wasn`t too anxious about being left to fend for myself.

But perhaps the biggest test of my acceptance of life`s twists and turns, its ups and downs, its triumphs and disasters came when I was called up for National Service.  The 300-mile train journey from the idyll of my Kentish village to the bleak midwinter of a North Yorkshire military training camp was itself a bit of a wrench.   I quickly learned to take things in their stride - to shrug my shoulders, accept that there was nothing I could do about it and metaphorically lie back and think of England.

And being hassled, shouted at, verbally abused - "You lad, what`s your `orrible spewy name?" - was just one of the jibes that still revolve in the memory and I suppose we conscripts had the choice of either toughing it out or crumbling under the strain of it all.   I suspect that choosing the former gave me the resilience and fortitude I needed to survive it all  and which doubtless stood me in good stead for later life.   

But if I had taken the latter option I might today perhaps be less critical, more understanding of the fashionable penchant for snowflakery and the raising of anxiety itself to the status of an accepted mental health issue.  We are what we are and no doubt the sum of our collected experiences, I guess.  But there is a difference between being depressed, for which I have every sympathy, and being, well, just anxious.

(If any of my comments have caused you any anxiety there are lists of agencies you can contact on the websites of the BBC (of course) and other media outlets.)