Here's to you......

After the news that Iris Robinson is suffering from acute depression, I was struck by reading the words of one of my favourite writers about the hell she has been going through these past few weeks because of her own depression. 

Writer Marian Keyes. Her books have helped me through some rubbishy times in my life, made me howl with laughter, cry big fat tears and generally feel better for reading them.

But while Keyes' writing was making me feel better, it seems cruel that she can't do the same for herself. Writing on her website this month she says that she has been "laid low with crippling depression". It's a very candid piece of writing. "I can't eat, I can't sleep, I can't write, I can't read, I can't talk to people".

This wasn't the woman I met a few years ago in her house in Dun Laoghaire. I was there to record a major interview with her for the radio arts show. And she was in flying form. Full of anecdotes, the sofa she and I were sitting on was bought from the sales of the first book, she kept saying "thanks a million" every time I said I loved her work, which was, on reflection, a bit too often, and she wasn't fazed when our sound engineer asked could she sign a copy of one of her books for his daughter and proceeded to bring out a rucksack full of her back catalogue!

The response to Marian Keyes' posting has been as expected, a mail box full of hundreds of wellwishers sending her speedy recovery good wishes and the bizarre one saying they wish they could rub her back (!)

Meanwhile, despite the fact that Iris Robinson is now getting acute psychiatric treatment from the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, the revelations about her private life have opened the floodgates to jokes, songs and doctored images of The Graduate.

But the strangest cultural shift has come in the form of an internet campaign to get Simon & Garfunkel's Mrs Robinson into the download top 40, Apparently it only takes 1500 sales.

As of writing this it looks like it's working.

While the winners and losers of the Rage against the Machine versus X factor for the Christmas number 1 were obvious, this latest one isn't so clear.

Is it a step too far? A use of cultural democracy that isn't that funny? And will it just be Simon & Garfunkel the only ones really laughing?..... all the way to the bank.