Handsome, Successful, 33, & Depressed

By Gluk Vanstone

Stupidity can come in many forms, but for Bertie, the stupidity that is heavily linked to his immaturity hides a very dark problem-successful, a City of London–based investment banker by day, center of attention at parties by night, and a miserable fucking mess on the inside that he hides from the world at all other times.

Bertie has the life that may appeal to most; however, as he deals with the massive highs and lows of what is his version of life, it reveals a very different view.

Read the fucking book. You never know, it might help.

Cheers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781649521149

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Handsome, Successful, 33, And Depressed

Gluk Vanstone

Copyright © 2020 Glük Vanstone

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books, Inc.

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2020

ISBN 978-1-64952-113-2 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64952-114-9 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

About Two Years Ago

About Twenty Months Back, I Reckon

Ten Months Ago

Five Months Ago, Nearly Christmas

Three Months Back, Sunny Month of May

Now

Doctors

Dinner Date

Blackpool

Christmas

It’s Getting Too Much

Spice Time

Is This It?

Part 1

If everything’s so fucking great, how come I feel so shit? Two cars, two houses, and two kids. Maybe De La Soul were right? Is three the magic number?

I’m currently going through these times, times when in which, these sad clouds seem to just hit me; they overcome me, and I sink into what feels like a total numbness. A dark miserable holiday arrives, and I’m booked in—first-class, all-inclusive—for the whole cruise trip. and there seems to be no getting off. So far I think I’ve managed it quite well so that the people around me don’t notice. I’m good at acting like everything is fine; I hide these clouds from the world, and I hide them well. Saying that, I do cry a lot, inside and out, and here lies a problem. You see, when you cry on the inside, no one can notice and no one can help. When you cry on the outside, everyone notices, but no one wants to help. People aren’t programmed to help a fully grown man who cries. Nor are they programmed to care. So when these times arrive—without much warning I hasten to add—your personality drowns and suffocates from an onrushing wall of darkness. Inside you die, and let’s face it, no one feels empathy for the dead, just for the people left behind. So when the clouds come, I end up just walking around in a bubble of despair. Distractions don’t help as there is nothing that can distract you from your own despair. The TV’s on; I’ve been watching it for over an hour, but I couldn’t tell you what’s happening or the name of the program or anyone who’s in it. Work’s a day-on-day battle split between drinking, meeting friends, and crying outside on the stairwells or upstairs where we have empty floors that are above the one I work on. Our building isn’t full by any means; we have about ten empty floors that someday will be filled by an international newspaper.

I’m not always under the cloud; I just have episodes which I call Wobbles. They just sort of pop up. I’m not taking drugs for it either because drugs are for the people with real problems, where there’s a real issue. For now, I just carry on; I’m sure it’ll go away at some point. I hope it’ll go away; I pray it’ll go away.

So why me? What did I do? Who am I to be the lucky winner of a shitty feeling lotto ticket? I have a decent job, a job so easy a monkey could do it. A job that, for no reason I can fathom, pays a ridiculously large salary. I have a beautiful wife and two nice kids—all the markings of a happy life. A quick note here: when someone says beautiful wife and kids, their views are usually clouded. In this instance, it’s the whole truth and nothing but the truth. My kids, for example, people are constantly telling me how beautiful they are. Other people actually like my kids. Seriously, no one likes other people’s kids, but people like mine. They’re handsome little fellas. They play nicely and have friends at nursery who also really like them. Even the teachers like them!

My wife, I adore. Plus she’s gorgeous, sexy as hell. I know this as I wouldn’t go out with (let alone marry) a Munter. I know this as I have an internal issue where I can’t actually speak to ugly people. If the situation ever arises, I just have to walk off. Ask Mo Decon, he’s seen this issue applied during social outings. We, me and Mo, once had a mutual colleague who was very funny, intelligent, and had great stories from around the world. Everyone liked her. She had a boyfriend and was an all-round popular person. But I couldn’t talk to her. I happen to find something that was wrong with her face that just said to me Minger, and I couldn’t talk to her. Does this mean that I am shallow? Yep.

From the moment my wife wakes, she’s beautiful. I don’t know how—some genetic bodily setup thingy I guess. If my wife were to have gone out on a night that would’ve killed Oliver Reed (before he did it himself), she would wake the following morning looking better than Angelina Jolie attending the Oscars.

When we first met, I had to up my game—basically lie—just to get any sort of attention from her. She is very much out of my league, so I told her I was a firefighter. It seemed to do the trick. I have fessed up since. I couldn’t realistically carry it off for long. I’m too unfit, plus I’m not the real-life hero type. I do, however, actually believe that I was a firefighter for about an hour or so on that fateful evening. We both just got on. We had a nice time and enjoyed our company straight off the bat, if you will. I think it was down to the fact that we had a common ground from the start: she liked me and I did too.

Since we met, we got married, had kids, and have filled our lives with meaningless crap—filled it with lots and lots of meaningless crap. We have a sports car; a family car; a motorbike for fun; a holiday home; and whacking great big HD, 3D, fucking double-D plasma screens all over the house. Granted, I wanted most of that; my wife prefers sofas and nice bedding. We live in a smallish village, which I like and my family likes. We have local stores in which you get overcharged and have to wait forever to get anything, but you do get a nice chat thrown in. There’s no real crime; I think that the last big criminal activity issue was damage to a pot plant near the fountain. It has a spacious beach that is kept clean, and we even have an award-winning chip shop!

So I’m lucky I guess. Am I lucky…am I…? There are people a hell of a lot worse off than me. But I have different forms of luck. Most of my luck is a creation of my own doing, good and bad. On the strength of this prognosis, I’m pretty sure I’m lucky. But also, on the strength of it’s my own doing, then I’m positive I’m a bad-luck generating machine. I constantly have bad ideas but usually fail to realize the badness until it’s too late. If there were such a machine as a bad-idea generator, it would be called the Martin Alberts bad-idea generator. Or a play on those words, you know, something a bit snappier. I do have good ideas; they just turn bad. The meaning is always (or usually) to do good, but it all tends to go pear-shaped at some point. Like the time that I set fire to the pond of my friend’s father. I’ll explain that later. Maybe my ideas are good and my luck’s just bad. I hadn’t thought of it like that before. Maybe. One of the big problems is that I’m not young and stupid, I’m middle-aged and stupid. The benefits of this are as follows:

You always think you’re right, straight off the bat.

You don’t have to be home early so you can see the bad idea through.

You can financially fund most bad ideas.

You can afford to run away from most bad ideas.

Anyway, I digress, my life’s not just about bad ideas and good or bad luck. I also see myself as a crusader, a man for the people! Someone who stands up for the little guy, mainly against London transport, but still… My wife would say I complain, I say I crusade. So here I am, a middle-aged bad-idea generator, having Wobbles and saving the world. My family does put up with a lot I guess, but I provide—I work, sort of. And seeing that I do, what’s wrong with chasing the odd bus driver across London Bridge? I’ll explain that, along with the pond fire, later also. My wife would say I’m immature. An emotional cripple, she once called me. But if you can find a woman who doesn’t think men are in general a bit nobbish, I’ll give you fifty quid. Fact is I’m probably just like most. I just happen to lack a few things, like tact and subtlety. Oh, and I can’t keep secrets—never, never, never tell me secrets. Ranting. I’m now ranting, this is how the Wobbles start. Rants go on and on. The only way I can stop them is to sleep. Sleep stops me from thinking, stops me from crying, stops me full stop.

I ask myself, how did I get to where I am now? When did the Wobbles begin? When did I start getting hit with these clouds of doom that suck the smile from my face and the hope from my soul? Sounds dramatic, right? Well, you sit through one of them and then tell me any different. These Wobbles manage to stop me from talking aloud to others, yet they make me talk constantly to myself. Sometimes there doesn’t seem to be room for the talk outside of my own head. Conversations going on and on, around and around, inside my head—it’s like a chat room full to the brim with me’s in it, hundreds of me’s nattering on or screaming or shouting or crying. I recall this one event when the times went from good to bad. This has to be the starting point, must be…

Part 2

About Two Years Ago

I should have been a pro at this by now. This was round about the tenth time I’d moved houses in the past five years or so. Sadly, I had greatly underestimated this move. I had underestimated the size of the van needed, the level of crapness the solicitors would be at, the battery power of a mobile phone, and my wife’s reactions. Also, having a six-month-old who had only recently been allowed home from the hospital, a postnatal depressed wife, and a mother-in-law all in tow didn’t help. I guess, looking back, the signs of this being a challenge were all there. But hey ho, I didn’t see them. The sun is shining, so onwards and upwards! I thought.

Somehow, we had managed to get the keys to the new house a week or so before the move day. I say somehow—I knew how we’d got them just not how we’d managed to keep them. My wife had asked the agents if we could borrow the keys so we could have another viewing and to clean it up a bit. The place had been empty for the best part of a year. Mice and dust were running rampant, so we took the keys and never gave them back. Ever. We had spent the week nipping back and forth, cleaning and moving a few items in and out—nothing major. This was all done before completing on the property with the mortgage company.

The morning of the move was a bright one. We were getting set to leave suburbia and enter village life, and everyone seemed excited. I had already taken one van load the one-hundred-mile round trip the night before to break the back of the removal. I don’t like paying for things that I think I can do myself; hence, I hired a van and got stuck in. I had initially thought the van would be sufficient for one if not two trips; I was wrong.

My brother rolled up to help out that morning, and upon his arrival, I declared, I’m not used to all this manual labor, I’m an office bod.

Well, stop moving house then, he said.

Made sense I guess. Although a tad on the chubby side at the time, my brother is as strong as anyone I’ve ever met; and he really, I mean really, can put in a day’s work. I just made sure that the team remained well fueled and laughing—a happy worker is a something-or-other worker! Well, rather smiles than tears.

So there we both were, and although it was pretty early, we were both dressed in Bermuda shorts as it was going to be a lot of lifting and an absolute scorcher later. We’d just finished loading the van outside my soon-to-be-old house and had also been hit with the realization that we would indeed need another van run after this one. So we hit the road and took off on the penultimate run. Traffic treated us pretty well, and here’s something you may not know but there’s not an office worker on this entire planet who doesn’t love driving vans. The pretend life you can adopt as a builder seems all the more believable in a van. I even stop shaving days in advance to gain extra ruggedness! I buy new clothes and make them all dusty to look the builder type, and I always keep a pencil behind my ear on such days. My brother, an actual builder, finds this hilarious and confusing.

As Radio 2 guided us through the early morning traffic and out onto country lanes, things were looking very rosy indeed. Upon arrival at the new house, the unloading took less than half an hour. We quite literally threw all the boxes in. Unloading is always quicker than loading—not sure why that is, it just is. We chucked as much stuff in the front room as we could fit, jumped back in the van and headed back. An hour and a half later, we were back at the old house for the few final and larger items. My wife, mother-in-law, and Oscar had already set off; it was just us builders remaining to close up shop and get the bulky items loaded. Out came the sofas, fridge freezer, and the cooker; and it’s all up and onto the van. My days in suburbia were numbered, and my new coastal village home at the end of nowhere beckoned…living the dream!

We started having problems whilst unplumbing the dishwasher. It just would not un-bloody-plumb, no matter what we tried. Was this the start of things to come? Did an alternative ending start there with the plumb? Probably. In situations like this when you have to make an executive decision in the home, there’s only one thing to do. I called my wife.

Hi, we’re having trouble with the dishwasher. Can I just leave it?

No, you can’t, she said.

It won’t come out the wall.

Make it come out the wall. Do not leave it.

I’m leaving the wardrobes.

No, you’re not.

Do you have any idea how awkward and heavy they are?

We need wardrobes, Bertie.

I’ll buy you new ones.

All right then, she said. We’re off to lunch now at Auntie Di’s, call me later, bye.

Okay, see ya.

I turned to my brother. Good news, bad news, mate, I said. Good—we can leave the wardrobes. Bad—it’s gonna cost me a new set and we have got to get the dishwasher out.

Okay, he said. We’ll unscrew it from the fittings and leave the fittings that way all you’ll need is some new pipes, and they’re ten a penny.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Let’s do that then.

With the van finally full, all we now needed to do was get back to the new house with the last run, unload it, get to the hotel as we weren’t completing till the next day, take my brother home the following morning, and then crack on with my new life. Onwards and upwards! I was feeling pretty positive. We grabbed a bucket from KFC, and along with a large jar of my dad’s homemade pickled onions for the journey, we were off and running.

At the new house I briefly met with the neighbors, and then my brother and I spent the best part of two hours struggling with a sofa that just would not fit into the living room from the entrance hallway. We tried taking it up the stairs and reversing it back down and in, fat end first, thin end first, legs on, legs off Daniel son, twisting as we walked. It was not going in. That sofa became our nemesis; it was as if it grew every time we picked it up. By the time we decided to take it and leave it upstairs, it was marked, scratched, torn, and covered in blood, sweat, and tears—so to speak. Plus I’d managed to smack a ruddy great big hole in the ceiling. Not the best thing to do. We threw everything else in the house after that as fast as we could and legged it off out of the summer heat wave and into the cooling air-conditioned bar at the hotel. This would be our home for the next few hours.

My phone rang as I was sitting at the bar, feeling pretty pleased with all that I’d achieved today. It was my wife.

All right, babe?

Martin, have you seen the front of the house! she said sternly.

Hmm, not even a Hi. This doesn’t sound good.

Yeeeah? I say, dragging out the yeah as I’m trying to think of what it is that I’ve managed to do.

Then you’ll know that you have knocked down the blinds, that they are hanging diagonally across the front of the window, and everything that you’ve just shoved in there is now on public display for the current owner, estate agent, and the rest of the world to see. We don’t complete until tomorrow. We’re not supposed to be in there yet!

Yeah, I had a bit of trouble with that blind. It fell off, I said.

God, you’re an idiot at times.

Hang on a minute. I’ve busted my nuts off all day doing that. Who cares if anyone sees it?

I care, Martin. I care that our new neighbors’ first thought is that we are breaking and entering.

I wouldn’t worry about that too much.

What? Why not? What’s happened now?

Well, I think I managed to call our new neighbor a dog, inadvertently.

Oh my good god—she paused, sighed, paused bit more—just tell me.

Well, it wasn’t my fault. I pulled up in the van, and this bloke and his wife were standing outside. I said all right, and they said hello. They started asking questions, ‘Am I moving in and how many of us there is and just generally being nosy. I said it’s me, you, and the baby. I then asked if they have any kids, thought it would be good for Oscar. They