It’s 1987 and I’ve been a patient at Park Clinic day hospital for a few
months. There’s been some suicides and the mood in the place is pretty
sombre. I decided I’d had enough of it all and it was time to check out.
The only question was how to do it. I knew it wasn’t going to be an
overdose as I’d made an unsuccessful attempt at that when I was 14. I
remember with great clarity being rushed to A&E in a panda car
through rush hour traffic. The siren was knackered and it made a sound
like the amplified noise of a goat being strangled. When I got there,
they took me into a large room and laid me out on a table. There was a
bunch of medical personnel in gowns and they put a rubber tube down my
throat and pumped my stomach via a funnel for what seemed like ages. I
found out later they called it gastric lavage. I definitely didn’t want
to go through that again, so after much thought I decided that carbon
monoxide poisoning was the way to go.

I nicked the hose from my mum’s hoover, stuck it in a carrier bag and
put it in the boot of my car. I waited until dark and headed off looking
for a suitable place. I eventually found a field a few miles out of
town and parked up. I got my torch and took the hose out of the boot.
Looking good so far. It never occurred to me that the exhaust might be
hot after all my driving around, but it was, and I nearly burned the
shit out of my fingers trying to attach the hose to the tail pipe. So I
tried again, carefully, but the fucking hose wouldn’t fit. It was a
fraction too small, but not small enough to fit inside the exhaust. It’s
not like this in the movies. I had some insulating tape in my toolbox,
so I got that and tried to fix the hose on without touching the tail
pipe.

Odd, I meant to end it all but I didn’t want to hurt my hands. I just
couldn’t manage it and I just stood there, looking at the hose. It was
like that film where the guy tries to top himself, but keeps fucking it
up, with hilarious results. I was never further from laughing then
though. At that moment I saw approaching headlights, so I thought I’d
better call it a night. Somehow, the entire episode put me off the whole
killing myself idea and the next day at the clinic I gave the hose to
my psychiatrist and told her to keep it from me. My mum never did find
out what happened to her hoover hose.