In my daily coffee and current affairs crawl that I perform at work, I was disturbed and fascinated to read about the guy who opened fire in a gym in the States yesterday. The very thought of doing that is fucked up enough but what chilled me was the fact he had blogged his thoughts and feelings leading up to the day when he decided that shooting women taking a latin dance class in a gym would be a good idea.

The blog has since been removed from the net but basically it documented the feelings of a man who was lonely, depressed and hadn't had a shag in almost 20 years.

"Who knows why. I am not ugly or too weird. No sex since July 1990 either (I was 29)," he writes. "Last time I slept all night with a girlfriend it was 1982. Proof I am a total malfunction. Girls and women don't even give me a second look ANYWHERE. There is something BLATANTLY wrong with me."

Got me thinking about loneliness and lack of human contact and how it can literally make people crazy. We've all heard about studies that have been done on children in orphanages who weren't cuddled and held as babies and their failure to thrive, grow and develop.

"Touching an infant has also been shown to develop and strengthen the attachment between a parent and a baby. This attachment gives rise to increased feelings of security, trust, and comfort. The child learns that their parent is there to love and protect them. They will feel safer and more relaxed, and will learn to cry only when they have a need to be met."

So my question is this: do we still have the same needs for touch as adults as we did when we were babies but are too scared to express them for fear of the social response? If you don't have a partner in your life you can go for weeks on end without proper touch - either big long cuddles or just things like massages, little pats and general physical affection. It's one thing to get it from your girlfriends and mates and I make a point to kiss and hug all my friends as much as possible, but I reckon that this bloke suffered from the same syndrome as babies who don't get cuddled enough: he felt no sense of safety or comfort and hadn't in years so he had the biggest cry he could muster - one with an automatic weapon and a death toll of 4 including himself.

There is an obvious moral to this story. Everyone needs to be touched and cuddled so if you realise a few days have gone past and you haven't had any physical affection in a while, do what I do - find someone you like and ask them politely "Can I please have a hug? I really need one." You will feel much better.

As for not having a shag in 20 years, that is just ludicrous and no wonder the bloke went mad. But that's the topic of another post.