Signs of madness

It's hard sometimes to distinguish between the mad and the sane in a city environment. There is the man who sings loudly to himself as he walks down the street at six in the morning. If you're lucky enough to be awake at that time of day, you can hear the tunelsss no-word song echoing down the empty morning street.

Then there are the unkempt, seemingly unloved and defiant figures who wave, gesture and shout on corners and in doorways. A small twinge of, what? Guilt, pity or fear for one's own mind - is quickly overtaken by the preservation instinct that tells you to move away, but not so obviously that you draw attention to yourself. The currents and eddies of movement on a city street will often tell you where these unfortunates lie.

But there are some more difficult cases. Take, for example, the people who stand in the park and shout in the air, barking officiously at nothing in particular:

"Arthur, Arthur. No, Arthur no. No, no NO!!!"
"Berkeley... Berkeley..."
"OUT!"

I swerved in an unconscious reaction to one of these frenzied screams on my run this morning, only to realise that it was just another dog owner, trying to retrieve their pet from a rhododendron bush, the corpse of a bird or something even less appealing.

It made me think that if only the crazy people had a mobile phone, pet or child to shout at, they wouldn't seem mad at all. And if the dogs in the park all disappeared, it would just be full of sad, angry, mad people shouting at the air.