There have been unprecedented, widespread mourning and tributes (notably in football circles) to Wales manager Gary Speed. By all accounts, he was a much loved and respected man and these are fitting.   However, a massive question-mark remains: why did he commit suicide when so much in his public life seemed to be going well? Only that day he'd spoken on Football Focus about the future of Welsh football and even the most cynical of fans could only agree with his optimism.   It's not just about stars like Bale, Bellamy and Ramsey, but the achievements of the team to play as a unit with a system which suited them to perfection. This should be seen as one of Speed's greatest legacies.
  Why did it happen? Nobody has referred to bouts of depression, so we can only assume something truly terrible was happening in his personal life; something which may never be revealed. Perhaps he was a person who internalised everything and who, when it came to his own problems, felt he had no-one to turn to.
   It's one thing to have friends you associate with and discuss the game, but another to have someone to confide in and trust, who can listen and proffer sound advice.
   Though he appears not to have suffered from clinical depression, his action would certainly suggest that his mind was totally imbalanced. I think many have been close to that, but haven't taken that final step which shuns all rationality.
   One year in particular in my life , I was  often close to such despair.
   I had left university with no idea what I was going to do next. I returned to live with my grandmother, who was rapidly deteriorating with Alzheimer's disease. In the same house, but living totally separately in the living-room he had commandeered, was my father.
   He had always suffered from mental illness though it had never (looking back) been successfully diagnosed. He continually lived on the edge and was ready to take those nearest to him with him into the abyss. His violence was invariably of a verbal rather than physical kind, though he had been sacked from a few jobs for assaulting bosses.
   I managed to get a job 'on the pumps' at  a local garage and two lunchtime incidents illustrate the trauma of that period.
   I returned home once to find my gran flat out on the kitchen floor. At first I thought she was dead, but quickly realised she was unconscious. A nurse lived opposite, but when I ran across she wasn't at home, so I phoned for an ambulance. The paramedics soon brought her round and it was only then that I smelt the strong stench of brandy.
   Normally she drank sherry and forgot she'd had a glass, so would take another and another......the bottle had run out and she'd turned to the medicinal brandy, in the cupboard alongside the Rennies and TCP.
   My grandmother had been a highly intelligent woman, a dedicated Primary teacher and literature-lover and it was tragic to see how this disease took over her whole life and destroyed her last days.
   Another lunchtime and my father was unusually at home. After an altercation, he stood at the doorway preventing me from leaving. As I went to brush him aside, the next thing I knew we were wrestling on the floor. We'd never fought before, though he had threatened with knives and ,more often, used the car as a weapon by driving like a maniac when he completely lost it ( in Cambridge, he once ran a policeman down!).
   He could be most charming and credible, a well-read person who was interested in both sciences and arts. He was also a total egomaniac, whose idea of conversation was a long monologue, without a pause.
   That year, close friends saved me in Barry, but drink was also my regular companion and I used it for vital release  as well as a need for oblivion. It was the latter's dark danger which made that year so close to the brink for me. I could easily have become dependent on alcohol to escape my predicament.
   My father took strong tranquillisers to lessen the effects, while my gran could only turn to sherry to numb the pain. Like her, I followed that way all too regularly.
   Looking at my family, I'm astounded how commonplace mental illness has been and how unresolved. It seems like the brain is the last undiscovered continent and for all our drugs and therapies it's probable that , in the future, our methods will be seen as akin to Medieval trepanning!
   My sister fractured her skull falling on a mountain in Israel and was very fortunate to survive. She has never recovered from this and epilepsy has been one of the many awful consequences.
   I was shocked to find that my mother had become addicted to temazepan in the 1970s, when she should have been weaned off it instead.
She had been someone who regarded mental illness as a sign of 'weakness' and all pills as unnecessary, so it was even more appalling to learn about this and her later admission into a psychatric hospital must surely have had something to do with those tablets.
   When I think of my mother's addiction now, I 'm reminded of her scream. I was occasionally woken by its screech-owl pitch when I shared a house with her and my step-father. It seemed like all her repressed emotions had found a way out in the middle of the night. 


                                     NIGHT   SCREAM

We lived in a house of bones then :
it was a white house.
Bones of animals ground for glue,
a smell which clung like petrol fumes.

I always felt like a lodger there.
My shelf of books alphabetically ordered,
any adventurous dust rounded up
and marched into the garden.

A stain was a direct insult.
Sometimes I'd kick the walls
and try out new swear words
just to see if the bones would break.

My mother polished them every day
so they resembled chair legs.
My step-father ordered them
so they hung like a skeleton.

I was woken by a scream in the middle
of the night, my mother's scream;
as if she was being murdered,
a scalpel to her brain.

The house of bones became
a house of nerves and the white
became the face of my mother,
whose voice tore at walls and doors.

The morning after in that place
the gluey stench came back
and stuck my questions down.
Dust rose, like fo