Everyone is getting married this year. By everyone I mean two of my friends and one of my sisters, but that's enough people I know for me to feel like I've not really been concentrating on what's going on. Me and my friends were 15 years old a few days ago and, as far as I was aware, my sister was 8. But in 2013 they're all suddenly being joined in holy matrimony. To different people, I mean, not the three of them to each other like members of a cult.

Friends and family getting married means responsibilities and considerations. I can't just turn up for the after-party or wake or whatever it's called and steadily get drunk enough to ruin everything; I have to do stuff. In the case of one of the friend-weddings I've actually been designated best man, which shows a tremendous amount of trust and an even more tremendous lack of foresight on the part of the friend getting hitched.

The first major hurdle is suits. Myself and the groom have to wear matching suits because tradition dictates that the bride must be confused like a rube in one of those swindle games where they ask you to keep your eye on a card as they're all shuffled around for you to find it. "Oh no, which one is he?!" What makes this complicated is that the groom and I are from very different physical moulds - he's just over 9 feet tall, whereas I'm barely 4. It's going to look like a wizard and his hobbit, particularly since the suit is brown with coat-tails, adding heavily to my Shirefolk aspect. I still have to get measured for this suit too, having to get it carefully cut due to my Tom Cruisian stature, which means standing in the musty atmosphere of Dyfed Menswear with an old man using a measuring tape as an excuse to brush his knuckles against my balls. Just a little bit.

There's also a stag night to arrange. Between myself and the groom we have a total of one friend, so there's little potential for a wild time with this one unless I really try and pull out all the stops. I just have no idea how. There must be a website out there where you can rent Lads who turn up in sports-related polo shirts and stonewashed jeans with fake paint-splatters on them. You get on a bus with them and they accompany you to Swansea, drinking WKD and going "WAAAAAAYYYY" a lot, and the night ends with the groom being shaved completely hairless from head to toe and sellotaped to a church spire. If there isn't some disaster, if blurry iPhone footage of the groom shagging a dwarf isn't on PornoTube by morning, you get a discount. This is the kind of story about his stag party I'm supposed to be able to proudly tell people years from now, rather than "we sat around playing wrestling games on my old Nintendo 64, drinking Carlsberg and getting nostalgic about the dial-up noise computers used to make."

Perhaps the biggest concern for me, and this wedding is all about me, is the best man's speech. Speech? Holy shit. I have to make a speech. I could knock something out in five minutes if I was only going to deliver it to him, but there are other people involved. Lots of other people, many of whom I've never met. You can't be a niche, elitist Stewart Lee at a wedding attended by ruddy-faced, hard-working welsh people - you have to be a warm and universal Bob Monkhouse. This means I have to temper my usual urges to talk up our bromance and acknowledge the fact that it's not me he's marrying, but an actual woman. I also have to think up a nice way of saying that I'm frankly amazed he's found one willing to deal with him for the rest of her natural life. In fact, do I even make any jokes? A lot of people take weddings very seriously, often attending specifically to cry. Do I make it really serious and meaningful? All wistful, poetic prose about the rising and setting of the sun, the swift and thoughtless flow of time, the swelling sentimentality that comes with advancing years as people settle down and invest their time in teaching the next generation what it means to truly live. Or can I just talk about COCKS?

Similarly, I must scribble down something for my sister's wedding too. Thankfully I don't have to read that one out myself, so there's no need for me to stand in front of a judgemental room in a rented suit that doesn't fit quite right and spew my own overwritten wankery for their acidic assessment. Someone else can secrete my mouthfuls to the masses and if it all goes arse-shaped I'll shirk all responsibility and let them take the fall. The third wedding, later in the year, holds no special tasks for me at all other than turning up and looking sharp and not shouting out "I LOVE HIM" when it gets to the part where anyone can air their objections. I don't have objections, I have Tourette's.

How all these people can afford to get married I have no idea. Everything costs a lot of money. If a sandwich from an M&S at Cardiff central station is £4 (not even part of a meal deal or nothin'), then I can't even begin to imagine how much a whole ceremony about how you're going to put up with each other and each others' awful friends and family until one of you dies or kills their spouse costs. At this point I'm fairly sure a wedding runs somewhere in the region of a tidy £1 million, with suits, dresses, venues, photography, food, transportation, police surveillance, armed guards, psychiatric care and a honeymoon on Europa or wherever they go. Where is this money coming from? Is there a wedding fund that I haven't been told about or do you just accept it as part of being a grown-up? That at some point you're going to hold hands and jump into a great big pool of debt like a pair of destitute, denial-plagued Scrooge McDucks, just so that everyone knows you're willing to even hold hands at all?

Responsibilities and badly bruised bank balances aside, I am quite looking forward to these weddings. At their core - the actual brides and grooms - they're weddings between fun people who don't take things very seriously. The bride and groom are the most important people there on the day, and if they're fun to be around, as all six of this lot are, then that day has a lot of potential to be a good one. Particularly since we're all still overgrown kids pretending to know what the hell we're doing.

It's incredibly hard to talk about having a mental illness without coming across all self-pity/woe-is-me, not least because there are always people far worse off. For each one of us who exists in self-imposed exile for a while because we can't face the world, there's someone else who has boiled their eyeballs with a blowtorch or tried to saw off their own head with a bread knife in a fit of suicidal rage. Be that as it may, it's my blog so I can talk about whatever I want.

I'm Monk. I am Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets. I'm not a master detective or a creepy elderly uncle whom everyone says is still attractive but really isn't anymore, but I do have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. As diagnosed by a doctor and a clinical psychologist, as opposed to WebMD or Wikipedia.

OCD is a funny thing. On the surface it's a comical personality quirk that has you checking switches and locks forty-odd times a day. The deeper you go, though, the stranger it gets. People tend to think OCD is related to neatness, a fear of germs, a phobia about getting burgled, and so on. But washing your hands after doing something to make them dirty (I know what you're like) isn't obsessive, it's just sensible. People don't realise the spectacularly bendy logic that goes on in the head of someone whose brain has been put in upside down. They're not checking they locked the back door for the 19th time because they're worried they didn't the other 18 times and someone will come in and steal all their cutlery to sell in a terribly uninteresting car boot sale - they're worried that their not checking the door is locked the "correct" number of times will affect how good or bad their day is. It's magic.

Magical thinking runs through the OCD-afflicted's brain like a river of sewage. Ever see someone avoid sets of drains or cracks in the pavement? Sometimes in great, embarrassing strides? If you've walked anywhere with me you have. Don't step on three drains in a row, don't step on the invisible lines that shoot off from the corners of certain squares of concrete - anything that suggests a pattern or a cluster must be avoided. Why? Because all sorts could happen. It's an unpredictable world out there and there must be some way to control it. Apparently a person's trivial day-to-day actions dictate whether or not someone they know is killed. By lightning. Or whether a dragon will materialise from the air and burn down their house, doing no favours for the surrounding area's property values.

It's frustrating for someone who tries to apply logic to everything to have part of their brain be so illogical that it's shameful to explain the details of a problem, especially when that part is so powerful that it influences the way they act. It doesn't keep to itself like a polite person in a lift, it permeates every level of them until it dictates everything they do, like an impolite person farting in a lift. This is where things have the potential to get sinister, which is not a word people associate with OCD. The disorder is something of a joker in the pack of mental defect playing cards.

Obsessively flicking switches and feeling a bit sick about having left the heating on are things anyone can cope with, but left to its own devices the disorder can mean that you're doing the same thing with thoughts themselves. Your brain gets caught up in itself like someone with braces struggling to chew bubblegum. A person left with the disorder unchecked can get so lost in their own head that they become an empty outline of themselves floating about in a daze because they're too self-absorbed to realise what's going on. They won't sleep and they'll forget to eat, or at least neither of those things will seem as important as keeping an eye on their thoughts in case the bad ones creep in.

Bad thoughts are a big deal. Have you tried to not think about something? Try not thinking about umbrellas right now. Go ahead.

What was the first thing you thought of? Don't be a smart arse, it was an umbrella. It might have just been one, it might have been several, but they were there, as soon as you tried not to think about them. This isn't me expertly messing with your head like a much less talented Derren Brown - this is the exact reaction anyone with a functioning brain will have. Now try it again, but with something truly horrible. Like waking up to find Eammon Holmes looming over you in your bed.

You'll have forgotten about it soon enough, probably seconds after you finish reading this (if you've made it this far, that is - if so, well done!), but someone with OCD will fixate on an unpleasant thought because it got a reaction from some other area of their mind. The bigger the reaction, the more of an emergency it feels like. Instead of letting it drift away like leaves on a river pleasantly floating downstream, they will try an actively eliminate it, to deliberatley not think about it or think an opposite thing. I don't know what the opposite of Eammon Holmes is, but, as you've just seen, it's impossible to force yourself to unthink a thing. In the same way someone with OCD reassures themselves that a plug is off by turning the switch back on, then off again, they will repeatedly try to expunge an unwanted thought. Over and over and over, just making it come back stronger. And so the snake swallows its own tail.

There are ways to train yourself in dealing with OCD. The big cheese among them is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), developed by Dr. Aaron Beck. The specific element of CBT used in teaching someone to live with OCD is exposure therapy - exposing yourself (lol) to something your disorder finds unpleasant, whether it's leaving switches on when you leave the house or imagining someone being sick on your pizza, without indulging in the associated coping mechanism (going back and checking the plugs, trying not to think of pizza sick) and forcing yourself to deal with it until your brain gets bored and forgets about it - which does actually work, despite being incredibly hard. It sounds counterintuitive, like teaching someone broken glass is sharp by making them eat it, but in the right circumstances it's very effective. Granted, in some situations it's not sensible - if you feel a germy phobia about touching a crusty seat in a public toilet it's probably not best to get on your knees on the piss-damp tiles and lick it, but if you find yourself feeling nervous about the number 13 then the more you deliberately do things 13 times, without doing anything afterwards to remedy it, the less you'll care.

The downer on all of this is that there's no cure. Like most brain problems it's a chronic, recurring illness. Whenever a certain obsessive/compulsive cycle is defeated, something else will replace it eventually. Everything the affected person does will always be influenced, if not totally dictated, by the back-and-forth, to me-to you, Chuckle Brothers relationship they have with the broken bit of their gray matter. A lot of the time it's just white noise buzzing away in the back of your mind, but sometimes it might mean you're a bit quiet because you're too busy ruminating, it might mean you get stuck in a loop and can't leave the house when you need to. It can be extremely easy to handle, or it can quietly and insidiously take over. The best thing to do is embrace it - to acknowledge it and make a joke of it until the brain gets bored of it. I mean, you're bored of reading about it now, aren't you? Exactly. That's how exposure therapy works.

He stepped out into the cold and stood under the jutting block of stiff material that stuck out above the double doors. The hospital loomed up behind him, its face lit from inside by the electric buzz of fluorescent lights, candles in a vigil for those who might leave, or had left, without stepping through the door.

The hospital was a haunted place. Inside was a dizzying hum of white walls and bright lights and black windows. Rooms full of beeping appliances in plastic casings, expertly constructed and invented tumours that sucked the sickness out or pumped the life in. On wards, between rooms and in halls ambled some of the sick, those who were more able and recovered, their slippers sighing on the tiles, and between them shuffled those who had passed there, memories looking for someone to remember them.

He was there to visit her and he remembered her younger and stronger, someone with a jetblack beehive and a quick-witted and firey nature. Now she was defeated and small, thin and papery in an alien bed, stiff white sheets with tubes running under them from mysterious machines with flickering green lights and still more artificial arteries fed under her skin, hidden beneath dressing so that the bulge of the valve beneath the whisper of skin would not offend. She was alright and he was glad. She was talking and sitting up and, though weak and slow in her movements, she had her wits about her.

Others around her were not so alive. Some lay staring, others appeared comatose with their own technological organs wheezing life into them as they slept unaware. Now and then some quiet, gentle alarm would sing out and he'd crane around to look in some morbid act of rubbernecking, watching a nurse in her blue garb slip subtly behind curtains. The alarm would stop.

The walls of the hospital seemed constructed from the unspoken concept of demise. He thought it perhaps unfair that Death himself was the only being in the understood universe who had been granted eternal life, allowed to forever dance from one living thing to next and snuff them out with wild abandon. Perhaps one day time would stop, the lights of every galaxy would be put out and the reaper would finally feel the blessed sting of his own scythe. There was some great justice in all this that was hidden from him.

But she had been alright and now he was outside. He pulled the hood over his head to shield himself from the weeping night sky. Outside reality felt as if it was settling back in, the shadows creeping about inside, looking to prey on the sick, could not follow him. He thought of her having to sleep in that place and remembered what it had been like. He and everyone else he knew would have to face this again and again as time wore all their bodies away. He hoped she could go home soon and he left.

A lot of stuff happens. Stuff is happening all the time, it never seems to stop.

Twenty-seven isn't that old. So people keep reassuring me as I grind toward thirty like a belaboured flatbed truck weighed down with all sorts of scrap metal and rusty bent things. I suppose they're right, thirty isn't that old considering I'll live until about eighty or ninety odd, as long as I'm lucky and behave myself and don't insert anything into my head that shouldn't be there. Twenty-seven isn't even half way. Granted that a good five or ten of those years will be spent shuffling about stiffly, unsure of what's going on and secretly pissing myself in Marks & Spencer while I browse the cardigans, but I'll still be alive. If I'm lucky.

But at twenty-seven there's so much to remember. Lots of stuff. Everything that's happened in those twenty-seven years, all the significant events, along with a hell of a lot of insignificant ones, rattling around inside my brain, bouncing off chunks of dialogue from films and choruses from angsty nineties alt-rock songs. Major and minor life events, people I've known forever and people who I met for five minutes at a party occasionally reappear in there like a relative you hate at Christmas. It's overwhelming.

I can vividly remember watching Tim Burton's first Batman film with my dad in the late 80's at an age when I was barely aware that I was alive. The colour scheme of the house was lots of different shades of brown and we had A Plant that sat in one corner. The film was on VHS and at the time videos came in massive boxes. A big yellow box that had a massive space between where the video was held and the outside of the box itself, because it was the 80's and no one gave a shit about natural resources so they used as much plastic as they could. There was a quiz before the film started and if you knew the answer you could call a premium rate number and win an Amiga, which was obsolete the day it was released, with a copy of the Batman game.

And games! Being a dork a lot of my memories are tied up in video games. The dizzying experience of travelling all the way to the big city lights of Swansea to shop for Super Nintendo games in Toys 'R' Us where you had to pick a ticket and take it to a special counter. Behind the counter was the room wherein the games were kept under lock and key, more valuable than saffron. I even remember my dad arriving home with the Super Nintendo for the first time after he'd bought it for himself, his outdated moustache bristling with excitement. It came with Super Mario World and the first time I played it I was chewing banana flavoured bubblegum that tasted nauseatingly like medicine. I remember getting one of those awful third-party controllers with that had a slow-motion button that just paused the game repeatedly as you tried to play. Years later it was Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64 that got me to finally watch a James Bond film (Goldeneye, funnily enough) after years of being adamant that I hated them, despite never seeing any. To be fair, I still hate most of them but about four are among my favourite films now.

Once again, thanks to my king nerd crown sitting at a jaunty angle on my oversized head, movies are of huge importance to my memories. My early teens were defined by watching cult classics like Blade Runner and Naked Lunch, or proper classics like The Exorcist and Apocalypse Now, and falling utterly in love with the medium. The opening shot of 2019 Los Angeles, with it's winking lights, flaming chimneys and flying cars set to the angelic synth score by Vangelis is so ingrained in my brain that it will probably be the last thing I think of before I die. I may even make Roy Batty's final speech my last words. I did all this film-watching as opposed to going outside and making friends.

I did finally make friends, though. When I was about fourteen, again - because of video games, I remember starting to actually speak to people because I realised they liked a lot of the things I did. I remember the buzz of being invited to parties, the excitement of being there, the gross, tangy taste of Woodpecker cider, the go-to drink of the underager. That smell of teenage sick - sour and aggressive - permeates the memories of a lot of these events like a reeking fog. One such event in particular, my own impromptu party at my house when I was 16. Only a few people were meant to come, but practically everyone I knew ended up there. Then two friends drank £90's worth of spirits between them and one fell arm-first through a glass partition and bled all over the bath while the other spewed chicken korma down the side of an armchair wearing my then-four-year-old sister's knickers over his jeans. The image of a pizza delivery man holding a stack of boxes for us as an injured teen was carried past him and out of the house on a stretcher by an ambulance crew will never leave me. Ah, nostalgia!

And that's just what the problem is. Nostalgia.

Nostalgia is a crippling disability. It can completely remove you from whatever situation you're in, much like a yawn, a stretch or an intense session of eye-rubbing. You'll be happily chatting away about the weather or the menopause or something when suddenly a smell or a sound will transport your brain back to 1993 and leave your body a hollowed out shell for your co-converser to yap at, completely unaware that you've now checked out to relive an episode of Fraggle Rock. It's almost impossible to recreate nostalgia artificially - if you specifically listen to an old song to indulge yourself in a trip down memory lane it's like trying to make a cat play fetch, but the same song will come on the radio in work or on shuffle on your iPod unexpectedly and that'll be the end of you. Openly weeping about your evaporated youth in front of the Co-Op listening to I Can See It in Your Eyes by Men at Work.

Why is this a problem? Because this happens to me now and I'm only ("only") twenty-seven. What the hell am I going to be like when I'm forty-seven, or sixty-seven? Don't get me wrong, I hope I live that long and then some, but I also hope I'm not so debilitated by my memories that I have to live on some kind of specifically invented life support machine for the wistfully disabled that drip feeds me liquefied nourishment while I daydream about Metal Gear Solid. I don't exactly want to live out Memento either, but I need to find a balance. One day I'll be looking back on my twenties the same way I look back on my childhood now. Why isn't anyone talking about how insane that is?! I've barely scratched the surface of even a fraction of my life in this post and it's exhausting to read already. I didn't even begin to talk about my discovery of all the terrible music I love, or all the friends who learnt to put up with me, how school scars everyone for life whether they're bullied or not, all the different houses and dirty flats I've lived in, the places I've worked and on and on seemingly forever. When people make fun of someone like Russell Brand for writing an autobiography at a fairly tender age I look at them totally non-plussed. What do you mean? He's a bit older than me and he's famous! Loads has happened to him!

And stuff just keeps happening. There's no way to really stop and take stock and let yourself catch up with life. It'll just barrel ahead like its break line has been cut. There is an upshot though - it's experience. The better you remember things the better you learn from them. Everything - a night out, a game of pool, a partner, a friend, a fling, a job, a phone call, a driving lesson - is woven into the tapestry that makes up your history, so don't shy away from a dose of nostalgia unless you're operating heavy machinery - you might learn something from all the stupid things you've done. Like how to do them again even more stupidly. In fact, there's a quote from Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men that's perfect for just this sentiment:

"You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who's layin there?”

People always talk about having a "fresh start" or "reinventing" themselves, usually when they've done something really embarrassing they'd rather forget like farting with excitement when they met the Queen. But you never really can. Your life is basically all the stuff you've done, because you haven't done the stuff you're about to do yet. Just keep doing stuff, good and bad, and appreciate the fact that you can remember it most of it. It means you're still alive. And stuff.

Everyone hates Monday, right? Start of the week, a return to the mouldy old weekly routine. "Oh God I have to go back to work again!" you cry into the bathroom mirror, clawing out your own eyeballs. Garfield hates Mondays. Garfield's hatred of Monday is proportionate to his love of lasagne, and he bloody loves that stuff.

Fuck Garfield, the fat ginger twat. He never did any good for anyone - he just lolls around like every other cat, rolling about on the floor and getting hair all over everything and shitting behind the TV so poor, lonely John has to scoop it up while he contemplates suicide.

And you - you're just as bad for having the same idea about Monday. Fair enough, it's hard to get up early again after the weekend and it's very nice having time off, but Monday just feels like A Day. You know which day doesn't? Sunday.

Sunday is the worst day of the week.

On Monday things are getting started again. Granted it's not necessarily things you care about or actively want to do, but it's things. People are around, shops are open (properly) and there is (theoretically) productive activity. Sunday is the death of the week. Shops don't work like they're supposed to, everything is on hold and the world doesn't feel right. Like you've put your boxers on the wrong way round and haven't noticed yet, you just feel a bit funny. Down there.

I know some of you are immediately formulating your furiously sweaty defence of Sunday and how it's not the same for everyone because lots of people work shifts. Their weekend may come in the middle of the week. A lot of people aren't employed at all and, in theory, Sunday is just like all the other days. NO. I've been in both those positions - unemployed and working shifts - and Sunday is always the same. Sunday feels different. Even on a bank holiday Sunday still feels distinctly...well, Sunday. I can't enjoy a Diet Coke on a Sunday. Because it's tainted.

Like all the best neuroses this one was embedded in me in childhood. Sunday was the day before it all started again - back to school, back to the drudgery of the routine, nose to the grindstone, face to the fan, knee to the telephone. Once that routine actually started, as I said, it was never as bad as the anticipation. But everyone kept emphasising it - "Back to school tomorrow a-hurr hurr hurr!" And people do it now, too! "Sunday today - back to work tomorrow!" Keep reminding me. Keep reminding yourself. Sunday is that horrible atmosphere of the dentist's waiting room stretched out over a whole day and everyone keeps telling you. Monday is (usually) the check-up not being as bad as you were expecting.

On top of this was having to spend most weekends at my grandparents' house in Llanllwni. For those of you not familiar with Llanllwni: it's a small collection of houses in the countryside, all quaintness and vines and outside toilets full of cobwebs. A little patch of life in the country designed by Aardman animation. A shitty Hobbiton. There are no shops in Llanllwni save for one post office that sells knock-off action figures and wet sandwiches. To a little kid growing up watching Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and other American cartoons where giant cities represented the ideal modern environment, existing in a place like Llanllwni represented living death. To be in this pantomime of British adorability was like a spit in the face of my selfish kid dreams.

Then you had to DO stuff, too. Friday night and all of Saturday were yours, but not Sunday. Sunday was the Secret Weekday.

When my gran was still pretending to be religious we had to go to church with her. My granddad didn't go, which meant she would drive despite not being able to. She had a license, she just didn't know how. She would take myself and my sister to church at 98 miles per hour through narrow country roads made entirely of blind corners. We'd sit in church; me, my sister, my gran and several corpses while the vicar bored himself with his own sermon about Jesus and lemmings or something before we would break the sound barrier to get back to their bungalow.

Back at their house we'd have Sunday dinner, which was infused with some kind of sedative that makes you feel like you're on the edge of falling into a coma for the rest of the day while you try and watch TV. And TV on a Sunday, at least back then, was awful. It was like the scheduling execs were trying to express how you felt through the medium of Keeping Up Appearances and Last of the Summer Wine - watching Onslow's pasty flesh ooze out of his vest and Clegg and Co build a fully functioning robot out of old paint tins and lightbulbs. And now, of course, we have Eastenders: The Movie. Whose bright idea was it to put 3 hours of the most depressing soap opera on British TV, with lots of chunky Londoners mumbling and punching nightclubs or whatever, on a Sunday? Because I'd like to shake his hand. Then pull his arm off. In your state of food-induced hypnosis you would watch it all. Soaking it up. Yum.

Once we were full to bursting with Sunday dinner and Sunday TV it was time to be driven home. Back to Carmarthen and (relative) civilisation. My gran would plate what was left of the dinner to take back to my mum, putting it on the floor of the car with another plate covering it and resting her feet on it while my granddad did the driving. Occasionally my gran's feet would slip and the sole of her shoe would dip into the mash, but she'd just put the plate back on top and not say anything. Their old car, held together with masking tape, bailer twine and hope, had a strong stink of petrol and oil, like it was bleeding internally, that would make your head throb and your stomach turn.

We'd arrive home ill and sweaty and sleepy from the car journey, whereupon it would be time to do the homework that had been skillfully put off all week. The rest of the evening would be spent struggling over maths problems that I probably still wouldn't be able to do now and removing all the vowels from a sentence, thereby translating it into Welsh. Then it was bed early, despite having gotten up just before midday, and spending three hours trying really hard to go to sleep. In even younger years the arrival home was worse as it would mean going to bed when it was still light outside, seeing blue bleed through the curtains and hearing older kids playing football enthusiastically in the car park at the back of the house, taunting me with their laughter.

Moving into my early teens these trips stopped but new horrors emerged to take their place in the form of an alcohol-sponge stepfather who insisted on visiting his mum, with all of us in tow, every Sunday in Ammanford. Ammanford of all places. Again, for those of you who don't know, Ammanford is...there's nowhere for me to really compare it to. It's like an old people's home exploded and then a town grew from the rubble. No one under 70 has ever lived in Ammanford, people born there are born elderly. It's like the worst of the broken soviet towns that hope abandoned in the darkest years of the communist regime. Ammanford is the closest thing to a literal Hell on earth that Wales has. People don't even go there to die, they go there to pause time and be perpetually old, abandoning all memories of their youth and the outside world until time finally ceases and the universe collapses in on itself.

For a while I had to go to this forsaken, evil place and sit in an old lady's living room as she struggled to remember who any of us were and a clock ticked with dull regularity in the sickly, cake-smelling silence every Sunday. She had an ugly little dog that looked like a mop and barked like someone trying to start a lawnmower in a sewer. It was steeped in the kind of feeling that would inspire great poet to write their opus before taking their own life.

As I got older these obligations fell by the wayside, but the feelings that they created seem to have been etched into my brain forever. Now, every Sunday, it's as if I'm mentally going through all of them again and again. Even when I lived in a flat right in the very centre of Cardiff, living the aforementioned selfish kid dream, I felt like I did back in that bungalow in Llanllwni every Sunday, anticipating the smell of Matey bubblebath. Or I'd be back in Ammanford where everything is poisoned by a spiritual decay that eats away at who you are and turns you into one of Them. The Shamblers and the Moaners.

As a result, I can't get my mind wrapped around the way people can just deal with Sunday. They'll happily have a kip in a chair or go to the beach, have a pub lunch, visit relatives. They'll talk and laugh and be normal. Maybe they'll go for a picnic, ignoring the palpable sense of impending doom. I can't do it. This is too much what I imagine the Apocalypse would feel like. All I can do is sit and stew and try to distract myself. It's like being ten again and trying to play Earthworm Jim 2 and not cry over the loss of all my hope. God help me if I ever have anything to be legitimately depressed about.

Last of the Summer Wine may have been finally cancelled after nine decades on the air, but it lives on in my scarred psyche. Until Monday.

I have no idea if I will ever have kids. At the tender age of 27 I still don't really feel like a grown-up, so I don't feel like producing a living thing to mould into a functioning member of society is something I'm cut out for yet.

Whenever you say you're not sure if you want kids people jump to the immediate conclusion that you hate every last one of them. "Children?! Pah!" I imagine they imagine me shouting angrily, strangling fistfuls of disposable income, "only good place for them is the workhouse, I say!" This isn't the case. I like kids. Most of them, anyway. More often than not it's not the kid I'm getting annoyed at when I'm out and about getting annoyed at things - it's their stupid parents. Not all parents mind you, just the particularly bad ones I seem to encounter in Superdrug. Which is partly why I'm hesitant about becoming one - I'm afraid of being one of those parents. I can imagine myself being one of those parents who is just exasperated with their sprog all the time and continually throwing illogical rules and unfair telling-offs at them out of spite at their very existence. "Stop showing off!" I would bellow as they cry over the hand they've just lost in a thresher because I wasn't doing my parenting properly. Why does my child keep wailing? Why did I give my child access to dangerous farming equipment? What's wrong with me?

The fact that I like kids is exemplified in a relatively new addition to my cabal of like-minded idiots. My friends had a kid and I am fascinated by him. The concept of him amazes me. He's a living representation of how astounding life can be and he's going to be there forever. Like, that's it now, he's there and he won't go away. Not that I want him to, I'm just bowled over at the idea of there being a new human where there wasn't one before. He wasn't human when I first met him, though. Mere days after he'd been properly assembled he looked…weird. Not bad-weird like a pig with 'Hitler' written on it, just a bit strange. A little shaved monkey. All newborn babies look like that - as if they've only just read about evolution a week before they're born, in the womb-library, and decided they'd better catch up with the rest of us before they make their entrance.

What was also weird was the way he acted. Again: it's totally normal, but it's infinitely entertaining to watch up close as this little bag of reactions flaps his arms around, balls his tiny hands into fists that suddenly explode open like time-lapsed flowers, blinks (somtimes one eye after the other), sticks his tongue out and kicks his legs wildly in a fashion that seems to alarm him a bit. You get to see a new human experiencing everything you've come to take for granted for the first time. As time has gone on I've seen him regularly and every time he's bigger and more responsive. He's gone from shaved monkey to adorable, expressive tiny man. I've watched him learn that he is, in fact, in control of his body. Sort of. I've watched his movements becoming more voluntary as he's stopped simply reacting and started interacting - grabbing at things not because his body is reaching out for something to cling to for security, but because he wants to see how something feels. As long as it's not a ball of open scissors sellotaped together then I'm happy to watch rather than intervene. Now he doesn't just cry instinctively because his stomach is empty and his body is telling him to panic or die - he's making noises because he likes the sound of his own voice. He likes the sound of other people's voices too, doing his best to imitate the strange, multisyllabic bollocks that all the bigger people around him are spouting.

This looks like it's going to keep going, continuing on a steady course like a reliable tractor. Soon he'll be saying words. Not real ones, ones he's made up that sound vaguely like what everyone else is saying. But then he'll go and learn again. He'll start to repeat the words, he'll understand what they mean and he'll cobble together rudimentary sentences in order to make unreasonable demands. For a while he’ll believe that we all exist to serve him but, hopefully, he’ll grow out of it and understand that everyone else is a whole person with their own wants and needs too. I say “hopefully” because there’s an alarming number of folks who never seem to learn that particular lesson.

Pretty soon, too soon, probably, he'll be a 27 year old man like me. He'll do all the stupid things I did as I grew up - maybe even more, hopefully a lot less. He'll be a fully thinking, functioning, feeling human being with thoughts, opinions and a voice. He's now a permanent fixture, but one that shape-shifts every few weeks into something slightly more advanced like the ultimate Pokemon. I’m happy to have this addition to the circle of people I like to keep around, I’m happy to be someone who he always recognises and knows is there, and I’m happy to teach him swear words in secret for him to blurt out in front of his parents while I laugh in the other room.

I was always the fat kid. I was the fat kid who had “asthma” because he was basically too heavy for his own lungs to cope. I even had an inhaler that did essentially nothing. I had a natural aversion to sport because all the other kids were so much better at all of them than me. Aggressively so. While their muscles were developing in normal directions as a reward for their efforts my body pooled around my midsection like ugly rainwater around an overflowing drain.

When I was in secondary school I became adept at forging my mum’s handwriting and wrote myself notes excusing me from PE. I did this so frequently that eventually the teacher, a leathery middle-aged man with bulging biceps and a pregnant belly, gave up any hope of me ever taking part and just stopped asking. The idea of me ever getting involved in physical activity more strenuous than the very act of wheezing became laughable.

Last week I ran six miles through central London. And it was easy. This is a significant goalpost in what is (hopefully) an ongoing hobby I’ve discovered in running. I say “discovered”, I mean “have come to cling to desperately to stave off premature death.” A couple of years ago I had a blood test after my doctor became concerned by the fact that I had ludicrously high blood pressure, and when it turned out my blood was mostly syrup I decided I’d rather not die before middle age when my heart would finally decide it had had enough and force it’s way out my body via the mouth. So I started to bludgeon myself with exercise. After almost a year of regular running the opportunity to take part in a 10k run through London and prove nothing to anyone other than myself appeared.

The strategy guide that came with the runner’s pack before the actual run suggested checking with your doctor to see if you’re actually in shape enough to run six miles without your heart, or possibly your entire body, exploding messily all over the shop. I didn’t do this. How dangerous could running six miles be? Turns out it wasn’t, but that doesn’t mean my body wasn't still my most bitter enemy.

For whatever reason (getting up at midday) I had a hard time getting to sleep that night when everyone else retired at about 10:30pm, ready for the 5:30am rise the next day. I eventually managed to get about four hours after dropping off, dozing in a frustrated sort of way, waking up, being sweaty and uncomfortable and trying to will myself back to sleep again. I don’t know if it’s just me (it is) but when I’m tired liquid passes through me as if my esophagus is connected directly to my bladder, bypassing all the regular pit-stops on the way. That morning I made the mistake of drinking anything at all.

By the time we had trekked the 200 or so miles to the starting line, listening to BBC Radio Something’s Reggie (I don’t know either) talk a lot and having Heather Small serenade us with newly-divorced-but-empowered-single-mum anthem Proud from the top of a double-decker bus, I desperately needed a piss. I kept an eagle eye out for portaloos as we were herded like cattle to the actual start, sure that the race organisers would have thought ahead to cater for twats like me. They had not thought ahead to cater for twats like me, so I had to start running.

I’ve never experienced such a strange physical sensation as having to run with a painfully full bladder before, as I usually check myself before I wet myself before I leave the house to jog. The image of a lot of people jumping on a bouncy castle except for one who had to hold a pan full of water perfectly still kept swimming around in my brain. Once again, I was sure that the race organisers would have thought ahead to cater for twats like me and put toilets at several points around the track. They had not. I was smart enough, however, to pick up and drink more water from the venders on my way around.

Just when I had finally accepted the fact that I was either going to have to put up with my discomfort or have my bladder rupture and my body give in to toxic shock, the toilets – real ones, not a piss-retention induced mirage – appeared on the horizon. The toilets and their queues. Ten minutes I stood in that bloody queue. Ten minutes of shifting about on my feet so as not cramp up severely enough to turn into one of those creepy living statues. Ten minutes to find out that the guy in front of me, who had been locked in that blue box for so long, had had a horrible experience and no paper to help himself out with afterwards. The rest of the way around I kept thinking of what a terrible time that poor bastard was having.

That queue, that need to pee, cost me ten minutes of my finish time. I would have done the thing in under an hour if I’d subjected myself to nil-by-mouth for 24 hours before the run. I wouldn’t have been dehydrated since we were drenched by angry, stabby rain most of the way around the course and I assume that in times of desperation the human body can absorb what it needs through osmosis. Don’t correct me, I find this an oddly pleasant fantasy. All the same, actually finishing the run is an accomplishment considering that only a couple of years ago my head would have fallen off at the thought of such exertion. Despite my lack of forward planning I enjoyed it. I particularly enjoyed the ancient man charging through everyone with a gait like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. And the guy dressed like a giant tap.

It’s still weird to hear myself say it, or see myself type about enjoying running, but it’s now something I have to do, every day if I can. It still takes a bit of effort to get myself to go to the gym and lift heavy things, mainly because there’s a lot of tedious standing around, preparation and stretching involved that running isn’t hindered by. If I don’t get the chance to run I get edgy. I feel pent up and irritable. I might call you a name or punch a cat. Going running means disappearing, pelting up or down a road in a state slightly separate from the real world, at least until you’re bouncing off the bonnet of a car. There are also no other, sweatier, meatier men running with you. Well, maybe with you, but not with me.

This newfound appreciation of actual movement might mean that I get to live past the age of 40, assuming I don’t run into oncoming traffic or a volcano. If I lapse, if I end up being The Fat Kid with The Inhaler again, then you have my permission to kill me. Something fitting, like the guy who is murdered via food in Seven, or, perhaps more appropriately, filled with liquid until I drown. Pepsi rather than Coke, please.