As there's been so much bitching in certain threads over the past couple of days, with people getting depressed and people getting angry, I decided to post a true, and very recent, story of triumph over depression.

Many of you know that we recorded a Christmas album in aid of our charity, Health Help International – many Catters were supportive, and one even drove two separate 200-mile trips to help us perform it live (take a bow, the actress of Essex.).

Well, before the last show, 48 hours before Christmas, disaster. My favourite ex-girlfriend of the last ten years chose the festive week to tell me she'd gone to marry someone else. Black depression – you can imagine it, no sleep for days, bitter self-recrimination, and my faith punchdrunk and on the ropes, when I eventually turn up to play the show, at a church service if you please, unshaven, haggard, and in a dangerous mood. If the pastor had said 'bless you, my child', I'd probably have hit him.

And what happened? It all went into the show of my life. I could see my co-performers standing astonished at the raw emotion of it, and the audience/congregation were transfixed in their seats. All performers know that wonderful Nirvana moment when half your brain says, quite clinically: 'you've got them in your hands – tell them to go and jump under a bus and they'll do it', while your automatic pilot is carrying on with the show, and doing a great job at that.

So the church elders, stunned by our performance, hold a conference and write out a generous donation to the charity. And a couple of days later, something even more incredible happens. A quite unremarkable married couple, just two average people, who had been sitting at the back of the church, are so moved by it all that they give a donation to the charity of One Thousand Pounds.

I'm too old, cynical and manic-depressive to learn much, but this teaches me two things. One – that disaster and triumph are a hairsbreadth apart, and you can reach to one from the other. Two – that for every bastard you meet, the next person is quite likely to be an angel, and that most ordinary, average, everyday people, just like most of the folk on this forum, really are Wonderful People.

It really is a funny old world. God bless.

- Ian B