Gary Speed's been dead 6 months......

Guest Mon May 21, 2012 1:02 am

This is still the best piece written on the subject.

HAVE you noticed how newspaper columnists often overhear snippets of conversation which conveniently relate to the topic du jour?

Perhaps not. You may have more important things to worry about than why these opinionated scribes always manage to catch buses full of animated chatter about current affairs, rather than the usual cargo of wailing infants and tired folk listening to iPods.

Well, I do notice, and I suspect such fabricated eavesdropping when the columnist holds an opinion which they are ashamed to admit.

I thought about concocting such a conversation to camouflage my own reaction to the inquest into Gary Speed’s death.

How much easier it would have been to “overhear” a man on the 86 bus asking why the Cheshire Coroner did not record a conclusive verdict of suicide on the former Everton footballer.

“Arr-ey!” he might say (these imaginary characters often speak in the vernacular), “if a man sends his missus a text about taking his own life, then puts a noose around his neck after they have a barney, that must be suicide, right?”

While expressing the deepest sympathy for Speed’s widow, my cipher might also ask why she was not pushed a bit harder to recall the detail of their final argument.

“She said it was over ‘something or nothing’,” he might say. “Well, which was it: Something or nothing? I mean, you don’t storm out of the house at 1am because they forgot to put the lid on the toothpaste.”

Before alighting outside the Brookhouse (even rhetorical figments get thirsty around payday) he might express incredulity over the coroner’s suggestion that Speed could have died by accident.

“So he put a noose around his neck as a cry for help then, what, he just nods off? Yeah, if you say so.”

Upon such foundations, I may have built an argument about the inherent weakness of the inquest system, particularly that grey area which apparently allows a coroner to probe a death in as much, or as scant, detail as he sees fit.

I might have ruminated that this understandable squeamishness about calling a suicide a suicide may be kind to the relatives of the deceased, but that massaging the true figure does society no favours in the long term.

I might even have thundered that clarity and truth should not be sacrificed on the altar of sensitivity to a grieving family nor a chivalrous desire to shield them from gossips and guttersnipes.

However, I did not hear any such conversation, except in my own head, so all these points are null and void.

Unless, of course, you thought the same thing?