Ich Hab’s Ihm ImVertragen Gesagt - I Told Him In Confidence

Never tell anyone anything in confidence. Ever. No matter how impeccable their secret-keeping record may be, there comes a point where everyone has to blab to someone. The strange thing is we should have learned this from our earliest years at school, when in reception class you told a close friend you really fancied Gemma Lovell and he went and spread it faster than cholera in Zimbabwe. Actually, that‘s stupid. Cholera takes tons longer to get around than even the most tardy gossiper’s payload. Faster than, say, the time it takes to eat a bowl of soup while watching an episode of Rainbow in your lunch break. Or if I was unlucky, Rosie and Jim, which genuinely made me want to sneak aboard canal boats at night, piling up horrifically dismembered puppet effigies in the hope of scaring the freaks off air. I reasoned the presence of a canal-side marionette murderer might make them think twice about taking any further shit-boring boaty-romps down Britain’s dreary waterways. Incidentally, when telling my friends about this desire also in good faith, within days I was explaining myself to a concerned and quite disturbed child psychologist. After which you might think I’d have learned to keep my mouth shut about everything. But we never learn, and stuff always gets out. Don’t tell anyone anything in confidence. Ever. If you’re a chronic over-analyser too, paranoia always dictates that everyone knows everything already, so that every comment, wry smile or unintentional blanking is somehow related to whatever it is that’s been leaked. Anyway, given that I’m now obliged to post all these entries regardless of how shoddily they’ve turned out, as much as it pains me I can’t just hide this away and never speak of it again. Boo-sodding-hoo to me.