Mental problems

For two years I have managed not to take medication. My hypnotherapist Loraine has done a great job with me. Now a single thoughtless action has put me back to below where I started. I am going to the doctor in forty minutes to ask for medication. I feel like a total failure. I really thought that I had got it right this time. Thank you to all those who stood by me and still stand by me. It is a long road and I am going to take the first step. Please wish me luck. I know you all will xx

AT THE FRONT OF A MIND WITH NO BACK

This is the end 
Beautiful friend 
This is the end 
My only friend, the end 

Of our elaborate plans, the end 
Of everything that stands, the end 
No safety or surprise, the end 
I'll never look into your eyes...again 

Can you picture what will be 
So limitless and free 
Desperately in need...of some...stranger's hand 
In a...desperate land 

Lost in a Roman...wilderness of pain 
And all the children are insane 
All the children are insane 
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah 

There's danger on the edge of town 
Ride the King's highway, baby 
Weird scenes inside the gold mine 
Ride the highway west, baby 

Ride the snake, ride the snake 
To the lake, the ancient lake, baby 
The snake is long, seven miles 
Ride the snake...he's old, and his skin is cold 

The west is the best 
The west is the best 
Get here, and we'll do the rest 

The blue bus is callin' us 
The blue bus is callin' us 
Driver, where you taken' us 

The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on 
He took a face from the ancient gallery 
And he walked on down the hall 
He went into the room where his sister lived, and...then he 
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he 
He walked on down the hall, and 
And he came to a door...and he looked inside 
Father, yes son, I want to kill you 
Mother...I want to...fuck you 

C'mon baby, take a chance with us 
C'mon baby, take a chance with us 
C'mon baby, take a chance with us 
And meet me at the back of the blue bus 
Doin' a blue rock 
On a blue bus 
Doin' a blue rock 
C'mon, yeah 

Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill 

This is the end 
Beautiful friend 
This is the end 
My only friend, the end 

It hurts to set you free 
But you'll never follow me 
The end of laughter and soft lies 
The end of nights we tried to die 

This is the end

Tamtampamela

Tamtampamela

If you have not heard the name I am surprised, just when I thought a name really would go viral on the Internet it hasn’t. I won’t tell you this woman’s supposed real name, either of them, nor her address, but she kidded the internet and now the internet is trying to wreak its revenge.

‘Pamela’ produced videos on youtube of a fundamentalist Christian persuasion, which is putting it mildly. She came across as an eerie figure. It was hard to believe that she really believed what she said, but that was the problem.

Poe's Law states:

“          Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing.  ”

Poe's Law is an axiom suggesting that it's difficult to distinguish between parodies of religious fundamentalism (or, more generally, parodies of any crackpot or extremist belief) and genuine proponents of religious fundamentalism, since they both seem equally insane. Conversely, real fundamentalism can easily be mistaken for a parody of fundamentalism

If your work is a satire then at some point you must make it clear, otherwise it isn’t a satire. Tamtampamela had been posting videos for a year or more.

Suddenly it all came to a head with a video praising God for smiting Japan with an earthquake and saying that 24 hours of prayer and fasting had moved the Supreme Being to act.

All hell broke loose. The comments were really quite disgusting. I saw a comment calling for her to be ‘gang raped’, which I challenged… How soon we form ‘the mob’….

Then… too late Pamela said… wait it is all a joke.

May be it was, but in the end it just wasn’t funny.

The internet allows us to become viral, but if crossed it will try to destroy us. The people who want to kill or harm Pamela are much worse than she is. The driving forces of revenge and retribution seem to remove from people any free will that they may have.

Owlie and Pussycat - the true story

I have always been a traditionalist owl. Just as followers of Islam have the Hajj and die hard Soccer fans try to visit all 92 league grounds (are there still 92?), so owls have this thing about a certain coloured boat.

Imagine my surprise when twenty years ago I spotted an advert in the personal column of The Times Newspaper

Pussycat looking for travelling companion for boat trip. 

Tom cat preferred, no ties, other species considered. 

GSOH essential, must be prepared to row. Reply Box 343

Within an hour I had sent off a reply with a ten year old photo of myself, the only one to hand. Almost by return of post I received a reply containing the photograph of the most deliciously beautiful creature I have ever seen. (The original photo was lost at sea, I append a more recent picture taken professionally. That is me on the left, I think you will agree I was quite a handsome fellow)

A note, written on scented paper, informed me that after dismissing the applications from tired Lothario Tom cats of a certain age Pussy had chosen me as her companion.

At once I set about making preparations. That evening I purchased off EBay ‘practically brand new rowing boat in pristine condition, buyer collects’. When I went to collect the vessel I did not at first recognise the rotting hulk from the picture on the internet. Clearly I should have put my spectacles on before bidding. Nil Desperandum is the motto of Owlie Owl and so I placed the boat on the back of my trailer and drove home.

After ten solid days work I had restored the boat to seaworthy condition and was looking admiringly at my work when my next door neighbour Barney Owl poked his head over the fence.

‘It’s the wrong colour mate…’

Barney was right…. I had painted it red…. when it should have been peagreen. Well, that was easily rectified and a trip to my local branch of B&Q proved successful.

Artist's impression

Shortly after the boat was ready and having got all the other provisions I texted Pussy to tell her I was on my way. 

As I arrived she looked somewhat surprised and said kindly

‘It appears preparing for the trip has aged you slightly Mr. Owl!’

Pussy on the other hand was the beautiful stately creature in the picture in my pocket.

To cut a long story short we made it to the little island that we purchased together in the ocean. It was hard journey and in the end Pussy did quite a bit of the rowing.

We became very close during the journey, particularly after being frightened by a shark. I will not go into the sordid details suffice to say that when we landed I was determined to make an honest Pussy of her.

On the island we found a shipwrecked sailor who, as chance would have it, was qualified to perform inter-species marriage ceremonies. We got half way through the ceremony when the question of the ring was raised….

I was singularly unprepared, but one of the witnesses was a rather camp and colourful pig with a ring in his nose. He suddenly piped up that I could buy the ring from him for a shilling, which he assured me was cost price. Unfortunately I only had in my possession a Newark Civil War Siege Shilling of 1645, 

but although it was valued at £2500 my only thoughts were of my Pussycat and so I handed over the coin and we were duly married.

And to this day have lived happily ever after….

Goodbye Palm Tree.........

Goodbye Palm Tree

I really should have given our magnificent palm tree a name many years ago…. now she has died.

Dad spent so many hours in the garden. He planted the tree 30+ years ago and in those years it has risen to 14-16 feet high. (I could use trigonometry Sean to calculate the height exactly, but somehow it just doesn’t matter any more.)

The tree has flowered and flourished continually shedding its dead leaves, then a few weeks ago the green leaves suddenly drooped… and a few days ago they started to fall.

I once saw a squirrel leave an apple neatly placed in the recess where the trunk split into two… and just a few months ago I saw a beautiful green woodpecker in apparent shock at the hardness of its bark.

All the gardens for one hundred yards seem to have children of the tree… and there are at least ten in our garden…. all now dead or apparently dying.

Killed by the exceptional cold spell that nearly finished off me and mum when we were rushed to hospital in December.

But the real victim is a tree… perhaps the last great memorial to dad’s skill as a gardener and my lack of it.

I will never forget you tree and I am sorry I never gave you a name.

Burning the plane – my dad and me

Burning the plane – my dad and me

Anyone who knows me will say it is hard to shut me up. I love talking to people and listening to their stories. There was one person in my life I never did talk to until it was almost too late, my dad.

You may find it hard to believe that I did not have a genuine one to one adult conversation with my dad until three weeks before he died aged 88.

But, because we had those conversations, all the demons went and I was able to organise and take his funeral service and have never had negative thoughts about him since.

Dad was a terrible mental bully, but he was also a very angry man. The anger welled up in him and he would take the littlest thing as a slight and a harmless conversation would turn nasty in seconds. I had realised that by the age of 15 and never really spoke to him again for 30 years, even though I spent most of those years in the same house.

A few months before he died he stopped reading and doing his puzzles. As I was cooking the dinner I would have Radio 4 on in the background and every day I would latch on to something and pop my head round the door and we would exchange four sentences and I was gone.

When dad went into hospital for the last time (although I first thought he was dying 20 minutes before he did) I went to see him every day bar one. The first day it was just long silences. I decided that this could not go on and went in on subsequent evenings ready to talk about a particular subject. The next three weeks we discussed everything we had never discussed.

I think dad was angry because of the war. He lost all his friends. Having been a communist before the war and remaining a lifelong socialist, he split with the communists over the Hitler/Stalin pact.  He volunteered for the Royal Air Force to avoid the horror that Granddad had encountered and somehow survived in the trenches of World War One. He became a Squadron Bomb Aimer and won the Distinguished Flying Cross. As it happens the service with the highest level of attrition in World War Two was Bomber Command.

Dad hardly ever mentioned the war, so I will share his few stories with you.

He fired a weapon just once when he fully discharged a pistol without success at a snake in the latrines in India.

He was reprimanded for paying his Indian servant above the accepted rate.

He kept only one photograph of his bombing exploits a superb triangle of bomb craters neatly destroying the main Burma Road. His only instructions…. Don’t hit the road….

He said to me in his last three weeks, I hope I never killed anyone. Well odd though it may seem he may never have killed anyone. Almost all of his bombing was strategic against bridges, roads, waterways etc. He didn’t believe he hadn’t killed, but he wished he hadn’t.

Dad told me once that he was the navigator on a flight across Egypt and the pilot told him it was ok he could put his head down. Dad woke and found that the pilot had gone into shock and flown 100’s miles in the wrong direction. He returned him to his senses and they got to their location just before the fuel ran out…. Or this page would be blank!

Somewhere I have a piece of shrapnel that dad found inside the trousers of his flying suit, although there were no holes and no marks on his body – can you imagine if the conspiracy theorists got their hands on that….

There was only one story that dad loved to recount. He was flying to Gibraltar as a passenger when his plane was blown off course by bad weather and forced to ditch in a field in Spain. The superb pilot landed in a belly flop with no undercarriage and no injuries to the crew. Dad and the rest jumped out just as a group of angry farm workers waving pitchforks advanced towards them. The crew never carried loaded weapons as there was a risk of explosions at high altitude. Dad removed his pistol from its holster and held off the advancing mob with a gun with no bullets. In the background the crew set fire to the wooden plane with petrol.

The Spanish Army arrived in Jeeps and arrested them. As they were about to drive off a contingent of the Spanish Air Force arrived. All hell broke loose as an intense fist fight developed between the two branches of the Spanish military. The Air Force was victorious and the crew were whisked off to their base. For two days they lived the life of Riley in the Spanish Air Force mess until Military Police arrived and removed them. Eventually they were interned in a 3 Star hotel which held several crews over the war period. Although Spain was in theory neutral they were ruled by a fascist Dictator and there were German Gestapo Officers sent to watch over the crews. The Gestapo were old and fat, well relative to the young and fit British Airmen. Dad and the crew would walk miles up the steepest hills in the locality. The Gestapo would follow them wheezing and panting before the crew would run down past them shouting and swearing. It brings a smile to my face thinking about it now.

Eventually the British Government bought the crew back for 20000 gallons of petrol each. When they returned they were told off for burning the plane, apparently the government would have swapped it for the crew and saved all that vital fuel.

I racist?

I racist?

When I started this blog I wanted it to be light hearted, somehow it has become far too serious.

For many years I had a wonderful friend and he was the most overtly racist man I have ever known. Wait a minute (interrogatory), you were friends with a racist?

This man would say the most disgraceful things about people… then one day I was driving down to town and saw him striding up the hill carrying four large bags of shopping and engaged in an animated discussion with an elderly Asian woman. Was I surprised… no, it was exactly what I expected.

I was talking to a friend of his some months later and was told of an incident where my friend, who was an ex-boxer and trained in martial arts, had seen off four youths who were trying to intimidate an Asian shop keeper.

Then at my friend’s funeral I found myself standing next to a young black man of West Indian descent – a man who would certainly have been the butt of many of my friend’s off the cuff remarks. I got talking to the guy and he told me that he had had trouble with a couple of his neighbours… and my friend, who was a work colleague, had sorted it out for him.

You see my friend was a verbal racist, but when it came down to it he was a thoroughly decent guy who believed in fair play. I always knew that if he saw anyone in trouble, black/white, man/woman, young/old he would intervene.

Would I?

Was he the racist or am I?

For many years I was connected with the Anti Apartheid Movement.

I suppose more than anything I think I am an egalitarian and a co-operator. My local branch of the AA set up a Youth Section and I asked if I could join. I was told I was too old. Fair enough, because at one point I was young enough. Then they set up a Women’s Section… and I couldn’t join… so I suggested may be they should set up a Black Section. No one saw the irony of my remark.

I was at a meeting later and was nominated for a position. A black guy stood up and said ‘all white people are racists’. Racism he told us was all around us and white people never challenged it. He had a point. I never attended another meeting.

I racist.

Just to return to humour for a moment. I arrived at an Anti Apartheid meeting held at a Friends’ Meeting House and a man I didn’t know was sitting alone outside the hall. He stood up, shook my hand, told me his name and started talking in an animated fashion about himself. Anyone connected with such organisations adopted a level of suspicion and cynicism that was probably rarely if ever justified and as a result I was quite circumspect in my replies. Others arrived and we all traipsed into the meeting room. Our new friend introduced himself again and then sat down and remained silent for about 30 minutes of our in depth discussion. Suddenly he stood up, apologised, said he had accidentally come to the wrong meeting and walked out. When I left an hour later I looked on the notice board. There were two meetings that evening and the other was Alcoholics Anonymous…. I have always smiled at the incident, but still, over twenty years later, feel sorry for the poor man.

There I go again, I have reduced humour to pathos….. oh well… perhaps next time.

My Julie

My Julie

I met My Julie nearly nine years ago and have spoken on the phone to her on nearly every day since. She is part of my soul.

My Julie is the bravest woman; the bravest person that I know. She was born Spina Bifida and thirty three years ago today lost a leg through Osteomyelitis. I won’t tell you her medical history; suffice it to say being born Spina Bifida and losing a leg have been the least of her struggles.

In addition to her health tribulations five and a half years ago Julie was prematurely widowed and instead of giving up as many in her position would have, she remained relentlessly independent until today, refusing hospitalisation or institutionalisation.

The pain that Julie endures has shocked many medical practitioners who have come into contact with her.

Tomorrow Julie will be given a life saving operation at the Nuffield Hospital in Oxford, the leading hospital in the country when dealing with infectious bone disease.

That operation will be a success and after several months recovering Julie will lead the pain free life that she deserves. I believe that, but I also believe that the good thoughts of my friends and the knowledge that people are thinking of her, will help her through the next hours – and will help me also.

If you have a God, or a faith or a simple belief in goodness and fair play please spare a thought for My Julie tomorrow.

Not dead, just missing, Private Albert Herbert Street of the Yorks & Lancs Regiment

Not dead, just missing 

Private Albert Herbert Street 

of the Yorks & Lancs Regiment

I met a man today whose grandfather died in the First World War. Many men died in that awful conflict, but this man’s story was particularly poignant. He was given his grandfather’s three medals (1914/15 Star, British War Medal and Victory Medal – or Pip, Squeak and Wilfred) and his Memorial Plaque, twenty or so years ago by his grandmother, who lived to the age of 103 and never remarried.

On the 8^th May 1915, a week after arriving in France, Private Street of the York and Lancaster Regiment sent his wife a standard Army Issue postcard marked by him in pencil to indicate he was well. That was the last day that Private Street was seen alive. He disappeared, presumed dead whilst taking part in the Battle of Ypres (Wipers).

Just over one year later on the 13^th May 1916 his widow received official notification that, although his body had not been found, Private Street was now ‘officially dead’.

Mrs. Street never remarried because she was never quite certain he was dead and would not suddenly reappear.

It reminded me of a strange incident of many years ago

I was at an auction in Fife, Scotland, and I purchased a Memorial Plaque. As I collected my lot a small elderly man sidled up to me. ‘That’s me’ he said. I asked what he meant and he told me his name appeared on the local War Memorial. He deserted in Belgium, married a Belgian woman and did not return to Scotland until the mid 1920s. He had been presumed dead and then officially confirmed as dead, yet he was still alive. He had a wife already waiting for him in Scotland, was she happy to have a bigamous deserter home?

Private Street’s Army Card Index records

Street entered the conflict on 1^st May 1915, confirms his entitlement to three medals and is marked “Pres: D. 8. 5-15.”

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission notes

18330 Private Albert Herbert Street, 1^st Battalion, York and Lancaster Regiment, born Heage, Derbys, enlisted Chesterfield, official date of death 8th May 1915, killed in action in the Western European Theatre.

His name is recorded on Panel 36 and 55, Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial

His age unknown….. another life sacrificed for imperialistic aims.