I didn’t mean to answer but I did; what would my mental health team be asking this time? It had to be them as they are the only withheld number that phones me.

It turned out that instead of me going into the clinic for my jag, my depot CPN was going to come to me. Seemed good to me. It reminded me of those times, many years ago, when this was how CPN’s worked. Instead of us going to the hospital they came to our homes. To my mind that is what the ‘C’ as in Community; for Psychiatric Nurse is all about.

I was pleased, really pleased. Maybe he would meet my partner or the children or Dash the dog. That would be lovely. I would like them to know something of my life, my family. I would like them to know where I live and what my sitting room looks like.

I woke really, early the day of my jag, all tense. Maybe they would actually try to speak with me. Maybe they would have read my letter in which I explained why I don’t talk to them at the clinic. Maybe, though I had told them I knew they were too busy for it, maybe they would be wanting to give me access to someone I could learn to trust and maybe even learn to speak to. I have yearned for that for so long and can so clearly remember those nurses I did indeed speak with and confess to, nearly a decade ago.

As I lay in bed, even before the sun had risen on this summer’s day; so, very early indeed. I remembered what else I had told them in that email; that small reaching out to let them have a hint of my thoughts. As I waited for the dawn, my throat tightened and unshed tears threatened.

It is a paradox to say you don’t want to speak and yet to be desperate to be heard. It is difficult to know that I am blissfully happy, so delighted at my life and yet worming in my stomach I want to bring forth all the thoughts I refuse to have; the feelings I cannot acknowledge, the bitter self-hatred I try to smother.

How to describe the joy I feel each time I cuddle into Wendy, or speak with the children, the pleasure of walking with Dash the dog, the awe of the richness of the flowers and plants of summer? The fact that at least, for the moment, I can enjoy my work and do it well yet still with those thoughts and that knowledge that if I let it flourish would rip myself from myself and destroy not only my safe place but bring an awful reality to those I love more than ever I thought I was capable of.

As I lay there, I felt the hint of the brimming of tears in my eyes and shook them away while hoping for the right words from this nurse who I was not sure I knew; the right words that would bring release away from the loneliness of coping in that way that never is coping. I dared to think my letter to them had spurred them into some sort of action; some sort of realisation that medication alone is no solution at all.

I thought of this with a hint of dread. What if I burst into tears when Wendy was there and she was not prepared for those tears, maybe even felt betrayed by them?

In the end they arrived bang on time; just as I finished my coffee. Two of them; a nurse who I recognised, but whose name I do not know and a student who I also recognised, but whose name I don’t know either.

They didn’t mind Dash leaping up in welcome and asked to go into the kitchen, loaded as they were with their bags and their sharps box.

While they got ready, they asked me if I had any side effects from the injection and if my injection site hurt. ‘No’; I told them. They asked what I was doing in the day and I told them I was on holiday. They asked if I had any symptoms and I said ‘No’ again.

I sat in a chair; the nurse’s placement of the needle was less of a stab and more of a slide. It didn’t hurt that much and then it did, as he pressed harder. It stung and it ached. He made a joke about how the hardest bit is unwrapping the plaster and said the next date, which I cannot make, would be rearranged by another nurse whose name I did not recognise.

On the way out; after a good five minutes in the house; he wished me a good holidays and said I deserved a decent break. I said ‘Thank you’; shut the door behind them and texted Wendy to see if she wanted coffee.

In my letter to them I said that if they wanted to get some idea of how I feel they should look here on Substack where I am more honest than I am when I am face to face with them. I doubt they do. But it would be good if they did.

It wasn’t a good start to the day. I still have faith that some of these nurses do have real conversations with people like me. I still think the only reason they don’t try to speak to me is because they think there is nothing wrong with me, but a few hours ago I had been blinking back the tears; thinking maybe this time, this time after so many years of just plain old nothingness there would be some connection, some brief liberation in being seen in a way I cannot be with those I love.

But there wasn’t. Instead, I got to work making Wendy breakfast and the day was, as I had hoped, lovely and we smiled and laughed and nattered while my trust in those whose job it is to help me crumbled just that little bit more.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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I have been thinking, which is not always a good thing. Not long ago I mentioned some of the books that Elif Shafak has written, which, very late to the party, I have just started to read.

They have made me think of my life and my interpretation of my life and the more I think of it the more I realise how cold I have been in my approach to it.

When Elif talks of love, I glow a bit, remembering the utter joy I experience with Wendy and the times when I have spoken out for the last few decades, for love to be a part of health care, an intrinsic part; especially for those of us with a mental illness and especially those of us that health care workers force to keep on living when we seem determined with every fiber of our being to destroy the lives we have.

I believe in it but the more I think, the more I wonder, if I believe in it despite myself.

Way, way, back in my childhood I was taught in a very religious boarding school which seemed to say that only those of us who were Saved, who ideally saw the Light and one day spoke in Tongues would reach heaven. In those days; as a nine year old, I desperately wanted to be saved and was terrified of what would happen to me, because I knew I had not remotely seen the light.

The teachers told us that some of the swear words we used which, even in those days, were innocuous, were terrible blasphemy. To say ‘Bloody’, or ‘Christ’ or ‘Blimey’ was an awful sin. To disrespect the Bible and treat it as less than sacred was to deny God. I remember my tears and horror when once a fellow pupil ripped a page out of the Bible without thinking about it at all.

I knew I was a sinner and I knew I was bad and though I wanted to be a missionary when I grew up, I knew I would never reach heaven.

Since then, I have rarely sworn at all, and, for a multitude of reasons, think I am markedly evil.

At some point, again many miles from home, at another boarding school I, who had aspired to grace and belief, lost my belief and lost it so thoroughly that, in my late teenage years, I embraced a new faith; this time of Atheism.

Initially this disturbed me. I was a committed atheist and as an atheist felt that there was no meaning to life, no purpose and that any morality we had was purely created by the evolution of our societies to enable us to live amongst each other in as harmonious and efficient way as we could manage.

There was no higher purpose to things; goodness was not a thing, evil was not a thing. They were, in many ways, just constructs of social control.

In those early days, this horrified me. I could not see how there could be any joy in a meaningless life. It seemed to me there was no point in being alive if life had no purpose. My first suicide attempt was, I thought, a reaction to that. That barren vision of life. It is only, many years later, that I have realised that this distress was more a hangover of my past faith than a way of living without the actuality of God. And now in my gathering age, what it was I don’t know, I am inclined to a gathering crisis all around growing up, but maybe it was the early days of what people call my schizophrenia.

Now? I still don’t believe in God, but I am less worried about the need for purpose and meaning. The idea that we might not exist one day does not worry my hugely. Or so I say. I treat it in much the same way as knowing how much I prize sleep. That void I enter every night where I am in absence. Sometimes absence is wonderfully appealing. But sometimes so is a smile or a hug or the sun coming from out of the clouds.

However, at the same time there is what everyone calls my mental illness; where despite being an atheist, I know I am a devil and entrusted with the chaos of the final days of humanities existence. As far as I am concerned, I am worse than the worst dictator, the worst child abuser. I am the worst of the worst and bring despair to everyone I love and help initiate the famines and wars and prejudice that make up our world nowadays.

It is exhausting believing this but much of the emotion is masked by the medication I have been forced by the State to take. When I manage not to take my medication or when life gets more stressful, that reality overwhelms me and makes me determined to die and then people step in until, back on medication, I agree to face life again.

Given the choice I would not take medication in the hope that I could one day, gain the courage to act in the only moral way I know and get rid of me.

To help me cope with this reality it is easier for me to pretend to myself that I buy in, as far as I possibly can, which is not very far, into the no blame approach of mental illness.

A confused take that says my beliefs might be the delusions other people say they are; that my self-hatred and disgust at myself is most probably caused by a mixture of genes, the past, my culture, upbringing and all that rich quagmire that has turned me into what I am. It helps a little, but despite that, my heart knows the truth of what I am.

To me it also explains my absence from myself, my lack of emotion, my lack of spontaneity. It explains why I struggle to trust and why I struggle with joy and abandon. Why I don’t dance or sing or tell jokes. Why I live, in many ways, absent from life. Why I seek the oblivion of alcohol or sleep. It explains my constant fear, my insecurity, my lack of confidence and my constant need for validation and praise.

It is a life where I say there is a reason for the way I am and that there is very little I can ever do about it; very little I could act on to have a better and more fulfilled and active life.

Reading Elif Shafak and others has made me question this. Made me think my submission to the explanation of psychiatry and my unquestioning rejection of anything other than the meaningless of life; where emotion, morality, love, faith are just complicated mechanisms by which we adapt and learn to survive in complex societies and relationships.

These late thoughts have helped me think that my life is mechanistic, capitalistic, materialistic and with this bedrock of meaningless, I have been determined to hide from the wonder and mystery that surrounds me which I don’t want to see but maybe once felt.

Maybe if I find out that goodness is an actual thing; love is real. That my darkness is not just mental illness but an aspect of my being.

It is a bit late in life, but I think I might want to dare to see more. To find out that beauty and joy are real and that sadness and despair are too and are part of the same thing.

I doubt I would understand them but maybe I could learn from those teachers who have a faith which stretches beyond heaven and hell, sin and purity, and the one true God into some realm where perhaps wonder can enter and trust and the possibility that simple equations do not always make sense. That life is one of contradiction and that even if my conviction that I am pure evil is a product of mental illness that, while acceptance of this might help, so could an acknowledgement and a facing up to the power and liberation of love and laughter and tears and grief.

Maybe evil does exist and but maybe so does goodness but not in the way I was brought up to believe in it. Maybe for fear of the power of my sadness, I have closed a trap door on living at all.

For a long time, I have said kindness and practicing kindness is perhaps the best and most political act we can carry out but I am not sure I have known what I meant by that.

Now I might seek to find out, through the sanctuary of different places of worship and the mystery of different ways of thinking which I will probably always question and never really understand. Maybe I will find something new for me and, despite my skepticism; more genuine.

I will make a start by not hoping I can explain my existence by mental illness and the past and not returning to the hope of salvation but something less dogmatic and less certain but maybe more liberating.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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I had been awake for ages, but very happily; lazing, vaguely listening to the radio and in between hearing it; slipping into sleep so that the words became garbled into an underwater hum. Eventually, after a good ten hours in bed, I decided to get up. Wendy was upstairs so I texted her to see if she wanted coffee. She didn’t reply, so I phoned her and she didn’t answer.

For a brief moment I remembered her illness of the evening before, the one that meant we slept in separate beds. I wondered if she had died, told myself off and wondered again. Within a few moments I was thinking of the fact that she has not made a will and imagined myself homeless in the next few weeks. Then, I thought of her cold skin and how I would tell the children and whether I would ever function again if she was indeed dead. At that point she called on me, told me she had been texting someone and that was why she didn’t answer and back to the real world I came, with some relief!

While I organised myself. Wendy came downstairs, tousle haired, to lean into me for a kiss and an embrace to ask me to go to the door when Dougie came as she couldn’t do people just then. I almost rebelled as I was in jammies and a dressing gown. However, he didn’t even notice when I opened the door for Dash to rush down to him and leap straight into his car, presumably having guessed he was off to make puppies.

We had a big breakfast, it was tea to drink for Wendy because that is what she has when she is under the weather even if this under the weather was due to a change in HRT dosage. Scrambled eggs, veggie sausage, mushrooms and tomatoes. So, she was definitely getting better.

After that we talked. These are my very favourite times. The best is when we are in bed together nattering away; but some mornings we talk and I manage to join in. These times when I find my words are wonderful. It didn’t matter what we talked about, I think we wittered about harnesses for dogs, the children and their happiness or not, some of the people we have met who, in the name of justice knew only how to bolster their own power and ego and learnt how to ignore those who once they spoke with. A whole litany of an amble of the sharing of stories and memories and ideas and thoughts. We talked so much I missed my bus and had to settle for the next one which, being a Saturday, was an hour distant.

Just as I was getting ready to go, Dougie came back with Dash, who looked very pleased with himself. We decided he could come out with me for the afternoon as he always enjoys himself in Jeans Bothy.

There are rarely people at the bus stop I go to and it is often late. I didn’t recognise this particular driver; Dash snuggled up into my legs and panted slightly, a lady said he looked lovely.

I could smell the BBQ for the Open day way before I arrived. The Garden was crowded with people, seats everywhere, gazebo’s, a pile of prizes for the raffle. I didn’t know what to do initially so I found a spare chair and sat there with Dash. It had rained in the morning but now in the afternoon the sky was studded with white clouds blue sky and sunshine.

I sat and looked at the flowers in the flower bed and by and by people joined me and we wittered. I met the granddaughter of one of our members who spent much of the afternoon coming back and forward to play with Dash. She has a Husky Alsation cross called Deisel who apparently would not manage along to an event like this. I was offered ice cream and burgers and juice and for some reason refused them all. I talked about the zoology museum in Glasgow and about creative writing. I wittered about photography and training psychology students. I met someone who was interested in the sewing group and who wanted to donate books to the Bothy and who had an Irish Setter. I talked about dogs a lot! I wandered inside at some point. I saw some officials. I watched as some people tried to avoid a bee that had mistaken their earrings for a flower. I saw Ruby the dog and Rocky the dog who is possibly related to Dash and another dog whose name I didn’t catch. I realised that I had left my raffle tickets at home. I briefly wished I had agreed to a can of juice. I realised people were smiling and ebbing and flowing around the garden and that this day felt like a gentle celebration of belonging and connection.

I heard about Helensburgh Pride and mentioned Oban Pride where I will be in a few weeks time. I heard that there had been some horrible comments on a photography group where Pride was featured but also heard how many shops in Helensburgh had had Pride displays. I wondered why I, a heterosexual white middle class male, might be drawn to the Pride movement and thought maybe it is because it is a community that will overtly challenge all for love and the right to be who you are whether that is accepted or not and knew I would be so delighted if I knew what I was and how I could be me. I pondered my determined conformity even though I have felt apart and different for as long as I can ever remember and that made me sad. I looked around me and thought that though I did belong in that garden. Also I do not. I wondered if I had ever felt safe and a part of and free to just be, to relax and laugh and not worry about the reaction.

I thought how I curate every move I make in order not to be cast out and must appear to be perpetually awkward and ill at ease even if I am held in affection. I realised that I still expect Wendy and the children to get fed up with me and ask me to leave; for my family to reject me, for my friends to stop putting up with my foibles.

Among the sweetness of the grass and the smell of cooking I fell into the past and into the recesses I try to avoid and then I came back again and people were still talking and still smiling and, for some strange reason, lots of those people wanted to speak to me; to exchange greetings and kindnesses and though I didn’t dare to hope for it I thought even if I don’t think I belong, everyone else thinks I do and when I go home on the bus Wendy will still be glad to see me and will still enjoy my company and no one anywhere will be trying to get rid of me and it didn’t really help, not much, but maybe a little. Maybe my heart became a little less weary and uncertain and maybe my smiles were a bit more genuine than I thought they were.

I remembered Elif Shafak’s book in my bag, about Rumi and a Dervish and love and wondered if I would ever be kind enough to learn to love myself. I thought of churches and wondered if any of them are now open for people to sit in and be silent and I wondered if there might be Ministers who would be happy to talk about my devils and not just dismiss me as illness but maybe help me address the dark and the good which is in me and around me.

I saw people who I will interview soon for podcasts and we smiled at each other. I caught the bus home with seconds to spare. Wendy was a bit better when I got home but ready to sleep. I was too. But instead, I wrote up some interviews and then started to stir the rice and soak the mushrooms for risotto later on.

As I listened to the radio again, I felt calm, peaceful, free from the worries of earlier on, glad of the day I had had. Glad that I am surrounded by love and that bit by bit I reach out to hold the kindness that seeks me.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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Some things are not understood that readily by many people; not surprisingly because some experiences are not commonly shared.

One of these is suicide and wanting to die. I mentioned it in a comment on someone’s Substack page recently and was thanked for this and also asked how I have got to the place I am in nowadays.

You could probably get more considered comment and memory from me, if you read one of my memoirs, especially START, but for those who cannot spend hours and hours reading. I will revisit those times, as it seems, explanation might help those who are close to us and who cannot understand what sometimes must almost seem like a grotesque act of violence, that can destroy the world of those that love us.

It is violent but, in my case, it was not aimed at harming those I love, or at least I don’t think it was. I am hoping the following may provide some weird comfort to family members of people like me but as I am going to talk of attempts to kill myself maybe be cautious if you read on.

I have attempted to kill myself in the past and I have been detained to stop me from killing myself on a number of occasions and I am treated compulsorily because some people think that without that treatment, I would kill myself and they are probably right.

Even now, with a life I am delighted by, there will be many times in a day when I think of dying or think I deserve to be dead. I don’t act on it nowadays and hope I never do.

Those times when I have been determined to die; maybe a couple of perspectives to help people understand. Many of us who are seen to have psychotic experiences or who experience awful depression see ourselves in ways that most others don’t.

If I pause even for a moment, I see someone who is utterly disgusting; so revolting and evil. If I look into my beliefs or if I stop my medication I fall into a place which most people say is psychosis and which even now, I think is my real status in the world.

When I am in this place I become more and more aware that I am the manifestation of evil and that by being a devil or whatever we term it; I am part of the final ending of everything. I realise even more than I normally do, that I emit pure evil that harms everyone I love. I remember vividly that I am responsible for the wars and the famines, for drought and disease and hatred. I understand that I am worse than the dictators who cause suffering to so many people. At these times, when this reality floods back, I think I need to die, to kill myself and rid the world of what I am.

If I don’t decide to kill myself, I tend to think I am so toxic I need to be placed in a bunker secure enough that it could withstand the worst of all explosions to keep my toxicity from the world. If not that, I think maybe I can escape my evil and my destiny and become a beautiful loving spirit. In order to become this spirit, I tend to try to burn myself alive or starve myself to reach some vision of purity.

In this world, which I still struggle to see is illness, but which I can see the people around me see is very much mental illness; it seems that by dying, I will be doing something wonderful to the world. I will remove the blight I am and those I love will become happier and more content, or if I don’t die, I will live in the air and beam an all encompassing, love to those I love but was not able give to them properly as a human.

I will be terrified of what I am doing but I will be sure that if I succeed that I will give a great gift to the world and those I have treasured in my life. It will not occur to me that people will be hurt or distressed. Or if it does, only in a vague way.

This is what schizophrenia can be like. I am aware enough to see that this could be the illness which professionals and my friends and family say I have but my heart does not agree with this. My heart, despite my wonderful life, believes the things I have just told you. I still wait for the day that the public realises I am not really ill, and that I really am the devil and come to the door to drag me away for a public execution. It worries me a lot.

Sometimes it is exhausting; sometimes I think how wonderful life could be if I was free of this knowledge. Sometimes I realise that living with this daily is horrific and not normal.

Most of the time I drift, slightly disconnected, and because of this, not as distressed as at those times when this reality forces itself into me and dominates my every thought.

At these times, morality and perspective and sensitivity, all these things become meaningless. I am lost in the place I am and the concerns of those I love, become hazy and abstract. Most things become abstract.

I will probably not be sleeping, or washing, and I will struggle to think or read. The fact that I have been sectioned and taken to hospital will not feel like some great infringement of my liberty. To my mind I will have far more important things to deal with than the paper work and administration of my freedom.

I will be in a pain of my heart and it will blot out my awareness of the suffering I am causing to those around me. Every moment that I am awake I will want to harm myself or kill myself and the realisation that others might suffer because of this will not reach me. It will not occur to me that other people are being harmed by me or could be harmed when I die.

Maybe this sounds horrendous; makes me seem less than human. But maybe if it is indeed illness, which if I could believe it, would be such a relief. It might help people understand that people like me are not consciously trying to harm those we love in these states of mind. We are in places and landscapes that we did not seek to create and we are usually suffering terribly.

I am sixty three now. I have to confess it was only when I reached my fifties that I realised just what this has done to those I love more than anything. That I can’t explain. I do not know why I was not aware of the pain my family and friends have been through and I cannot explain why I was unaware of how closely they have held me in their hearts for all their lives. So many people I care for so much, have spent nights almost as sleepless as mine when I have been in hospital.

I think, for whatever reason, I have spent much of my life believing I am unlovable and so could not imagine that my absence would harm or trouble those around me. It is only relatively recently that I have become aware of how devastated those close to me have been again and again when I have been desperate and how hard it will be for them even now, if they read these words when they are published.

For many years I was angry and I was unaware how much those around me kept me safe in the kindness of their hearts, even when I was saying how much they had harmed me. I do not know the depths of what people have gone through to keep me in my life, when like some of us, I have blamed people for how my life turned out.

I know some people have had a terrible existence and may, with justification, feel real anger towards others but the more I think of it, the less I can see that I have any need to place my sadness in the laps of others.

I was asked what got me to the other side of this. Unfortunately, life is not one of happy endings or lessons or great reveals. I would still stop my medication if I could. To those around me that is a sign that I am, to some extent, still ill, and maybe they are right.

However, I am still alive and though I am sometimes blurred in my presence in life I am incredibly happy.

I do not understand why this might be the case but I live with Wendy my partner and am loved by her and I am loved by her children, and I am loved by my family and friends. Sometimes I am utterly confused that they love me and put up with me but the fact that they do brings me great joy.

Sometimes people say lovely things about my character and though this confuses me it does bring me a great deal of pleasure.

Some people would say it is medication that has given me the quality of life I have. Perhaps. It will also be the love that surrounds me that I mentioned.

And it will be the fact that I am not as ill as many of my friends and so can work and can earn and have enough energy to write and cook and walk the dogs.

I live in a place of beauty. Just getting off the train today, I passed the flowers all along the station which volunteers at the organic garden have planted. I paused to look out to sea and saw geese and oyster catchers and smelt the smell of it all. I walked up the path through the trees to my house and stooped under the leaning elderberry bushes. I brushed against the brambles and their ripe fruit.

I kissed Wendy when I got home. We spent a good hour talking of work we had done and realised courtesy of Chat GBT, that some of the work we have both done has made a great difference in our communities which, I think, pleased us a lot.

Now I am in bed. I don’t have to get up till nine tomorrow but soon Dash the dog will come upstairs and sprawl beside me.

On Wednesday I will go for my depot injection and will probably scowl about it but nowadays the nurses are good at getting me smiling so it won’t be that bad.

I do hope that helped a little for those of you who put so much into loving people like me.

Since that revelation, in my early fifties, of the effect, I have had on those I love, I have become very close to those I either avoided or blamed for my sadness.

My Dad, who I was most cross about, I grew to love very much indeed. We held hands and both cried when we were able to say how much we loved each other the last time I saw him before he died. I speak to my mum every day on the phone. I love my brother and sister and my nephews and nieces and my ex-sisters and brothers in law.

So, to answer the question again – it is you, the people who did not desert me and did not give up on me and who love me and even manage that without having to nurse or pity me who have made all the difference.

I am very, very, lucky. So many of my friends do not have this.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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I read ‘This book made me think of you’ a couple of weeks ago. It is by and was the book club selection for Jeans Bothy; the wellbeing hub I go to when I have the time. I wrote about it a while ago but at the risk of repeating myself will return to it.

It struck a chord with me, I too am a man who likes romance, like one of the main characters was and I like books and I would love to be the sort of man who thinks with insight and thought of the sorts of things I could do to make my partner’s life a better happier one.

It made me book extra holiday to spend time just with Wendy when the children are away with their dad in a few days time. I am hoping the spark I had when first we met might come back where I too can have ideas of what to do, that might make us laugh and bounce a little. In recent years I have skirted the glaze of depression so often that I fear I am sometimes more of a burden and a responsibility than the vibrant partner that Wendy is to me. It is very rare indeed that a book inspires me to do something.

Over the following two weeks I read all the other books that Libby has written. I liked them very much. I am not sure that they are categorizable as they do not seem to be romance at all, much more a celebration of female friendship. They make me sad in a way. I have never understood why men are not meant to have the same close friendships with women even though they are heterosexual, that many women seem to have with each other and I have never really understood the attraction of male friendship. Though now I think of it, more and more, the men I meet are far from the image of the men I fear and distrust so maybe there is some hope for me.

I do not really understand Libby’s world view either. I fear I am too cynical. She writes about difficult topics; grief, mental illness, homelessness, addiction, loneliness. But she does so in such a wholesome way. Her characters may cry with snot and tears and they may contemplate suicide and they may have no connection with their babies but they do so in a positive way. I like it. It reminds me of Wendy’s approach to life, where she too witnesses many of the worst of things that can happen but has not turned angry or bitter or cynical and much as I hate to say this, by being positive, in some ways, happy endings become more likely. I have seen this in a few mental health workers; those who, despite intimate personal knowledge of despair, and being a witness to even greater despair, bring laughter to the darkest and saddest of psychiatric wards. I do not know how they do that but I do admire them.

On my Substack page I say I am an Author but the more I read and the more I learn the more I doubt this. I can sort of see the devises that Libby uses to create her story and I can sort of glimpse the sort of life she might have had to create her stories and maybe some of the kind wisdom that allows her to make the things that lead to suffering also become things we can overcome or live with and, even if some people are cynical and do not like the sweetness of the stories she tells; I like them very much indeed.

I could no more think of a plot than I could tell you how to write a sentence that is grammatically correct and I do not know what a story arc is or how to develop character or write dialogue. I have written books and I write pieces like this all the time, but I sort of launch myself into the words and hope for the best. I have extensive experience of severe mental illness which is what I mainly write about, but am minded of someone I know who has said in the past, that people like us are the last ones you should consult for good health because we have successfully managed to be miserable for decades and still have no idea how we could change that for us or anyone else, so my one sort of expertise is maybe not that helpful to anyone at all!

Libby’s writing is something I could maybe have aspired to if I had been a different gender and lived a different life and if I had at least a smattering of imagination but the other writer I am reading at the moment is . Currently I am reading her book The Forty Rules of Love’.

I am loving it. It too makes me want to change my life, to seek a more engaged and vibrant connection with the world, to maybe ignore what I have been taught and see schizophrenia not as the weight that removes my spontaneity, my essence and laughter and being and instead to examine my life outside of science and genes and environment; to embrace a spirituality I don’t understand and find hard to trust.

Her words make me yearn to live and her words make me grieve all these years of greyness and fear. I worry about such promise because I have too many friends who did ignore the drugs and the caution and reached for something more and didn’t reach it at all. Instead, they are now long ago dead and buried and I mourn them.

If I am honest, although I can get Libby’s words; Elif has a wisdom and an understanding I will never grasp. Even with the words sat on the page for me to read all I can do is glow with their beauty, but I cannot imagine how she shaped them and I have hardly any knowledge of the rich history of countries and philosophies and lives that she gives us. Her books make me realise that there are many possibilities and remind me that maybe love is not a naive concept at all. They make me wonder how people can learn so much about the world and the people who make up our world and of course the animals and plants and rivers and stars around us.

Naively; I used to hope my knowledge that I know very little might mean that I am wise because, somewhere, I read that this understanding is a mark of wisdom but now, reading more and more people, like these two, who know and have learnt so much and who can even place their words among the knowledge and stories of a richness of so many others; I realise I am not at all wise.

I know just enough to grasp that I know almost nothing. I can see enough of other people’s craft to know that I was never even an apprentice in the art of writing and that at sixty three, with my dyed in the wool obstinacy, I never will be.

I like to read; I rarely understand much of what a writer is trying to say and I really couldn’t ever give a critique of an idea or belief, a book or a work of art or a jewel or a meal but in a moment I will shut down my lap top, look up the weather to see if I can put my lap top beside my bed under the open window and then I will go back to Elif’s book; not so much to learn just now, but to curl up and hope for happy endings which I know are not the point but I like and hope for them anyway, even in the cleverest and most wonderful of books.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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I tend to look at the future sadly. For most of my life I have been trying to help create a future for people like us that is better and fairer and more hopeful and now, maybe with old age, I am cynical. I do not see, not really, much evidence of a better world. Actually for many of us it is much worse; we do not get support, it is hard to get into hospital and it is hard to get treatment and increasingly the reality of mental illness is doubted and wild cruel policies seem to be being floated to get those who clearly cannot work back into work. Attitudes? I encountered perhaps the most humane and delightful approach from nurses in an Asylum over forty years ago and sometimes nowadays in the weariness and dogged approach to procedure with stock questions each time I get my depot, sometimes find it hard to summon an ounce of trust for those that help me.

With the publicity about recent terrible murders in England, I am more frightened to disclose my diagnosis than ever before and when I look at schools where once I helped speak with thousands of young people about our lives, I am saddened that one of our young family members entire education about people like me has been a lesson analysing the crimes we have committed.

I am writing not long after the riots in Belfast and Glasgow which were inspired by falsehoods, distortion anger and hatred and feel worried. I looked at the extremists in America and never thought we would see them flourish in our country. I do not like prejudice and hatred and bigotry. And I do not like the idea that people already marginalised in our world, increasingly live in fear. It is for those sorts of reasons that I objected to the assisted dying bill. I have almost lost faith in goodness and see us only steps away from a return to eugenics and the removal of those of us seen as disabled or unproductive and that bill, that in some ways could have been good for some of us, to me, threatened the return of something awful.

Despite that, I read a post recently by a Muslim family man who met up with a die hard Reform family man. I am not sure I would have wanted that encounter. I do not really want to speak with those who espouse hatred, but the account of the encounter was uplifting. Two men, who are light years apart in politics and values, met and found a common humanity. They talked of their children and partners and their work and where they lived and what they loved and no, they did not change their politics but they found a connection that was valuable and precious.

For many years now I have thought similar, in a way. I see so many people highlighting what they think would create a better world, shouting, marching, desperate to be listened to and vindicated and all it is really, is anger and rigidity and fear. I tend to hate those people who vilify those they consider different to them because they have a different culture or colour skin or because they are disabled or gay but then I also feel very wary of those who scream ‘Out, out, Nazi scum.’

Maybe that ideological violence could be quickly smoothed away if we could put down our rage and see those around us as fellow humans with quirks and foibles, pluses and negatives. Some of my closest friends increasingly say they have gone off humans and that the world would be a better place without us. They say animals, particularly dogs, are more loveable and less horrid but I think when we open our eyes and smile at each other and give of our hearts, then we are wonderful and that this is possible for all of us.

I said I worried about the future but the kindness I met from a small number of workers forty years ago when such a thing was a rarity has been replicated throughout my life with a mental illness. When I am dismayed by the impersonality of corporate health care, I still meet people most days, who work in it who are, despite policy and procedure and defensiveness and the need never to admit fault; wonderful. Their humanity and their love and their respect and their ability to preserve our dignity when we have lost most of it, shines through and because of them (and us) it is possible to think we might have a better future than I fear it could be.

I am not sure I would really want another huge strategy from the government with goals and targets and false reassurance, instead I think I might ask them to measure, in every helpers supervision session and appraisal how they have demonstrated kindness to us; their clients, and how they have brought love into their work and how they have left us with dignity and respect, even when we have been sectioned or admitted to hospital.

If they knew that was their most important contribution and that their service would be measured against it, I think the future could be brighter for all of us.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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I don’t like fate as, for some weird reason, it seems to smack of knights on some fairytale mission or equally a meeting with a predestined ‘One’ with whom we were born to fall in love with for ever and ever. I still have a school boy ‘Icky’ feeling over the whole idea; it speaks of a fake romanticism that makes me shudder.

I can get the oily determinism of the chance of the grain of our genes, the smell of where we were born, our family and its arguments and occasional slaps, the silence of a place far from home, the chemicals in our stomachs, the politics of the world and the terror of the playground, the jinks of our education making whatever we turn out to be plain old inevitable. To be honest I find that easier to accommodate, this rush, being forced along in the flood of the combination of circumstance and atoms into those who smile at the day or languish in prison still surprised that that is how life worked out.

In fact, I prefer this to agency and autonomy. This idea that there is some force in us with which we can carve our way in the world. That we shape our destiny and determine where we end up and who we love and who we cherish and those we discard without even noticing the hurt that we have caused. I do not believe in some greater force of being. I do not particularly like courage or will or hope and the idea that those with it are somehow better than other people because of the force of their personalities. I do not like the idea that we are independent and responsible. Such ideas are for those who glory in privilege and who like to think they and they alone are the reason for their success and status in life. It seems arrogant. It seems wrong.

I am part of a web of the world. My thoughts are determined by such a multitude of events, from what I just saw on twitter, to what Wendy said to me at breakfast, to the dreams I had last night and the dinner I ate when I was nine years old. To the mud I scrabbled in as a toddler and the aubergines I once ate in Sabah.

To be honest I want to push it all far, far, away from me. Am I really master of my own destiny? Does my refusal to say yes just mean I do not want to take responsibility for my life and the effect it has had on others? Or is it a more nuanced acceptance that life is complicated in ways I will never understand; that my perceptions and direction are as clouded now as when I was born and had hardly learnt to open my eyes to the world.

And pause.

I just listened to a friend talk of fate and defying fate and just now, that makes me think. For so many, many years I have felt I have had no control over my life and that what I strive for is possibly meaningless.

It makes me think back decades to those years when I didn’t accept. Back to when I was a patient in a hospital with thousands of patients. The management of despair and horror seems a barren alien concept but still it goes on. I remember those wards and those damaged unhappy people who lived within the set confines of a bed in a dorm where the best thing ever was to get access to the cigarette buts of more fortunate patients. They were meant to be places of asylum and of safety and compassion but for me, in those days, they were the embodiment of a system ordering emotion and chaos, clamping down on freedom.

And my response, just as it was to my age and the days of Thatcher and the miners strike was an act of rebellion, an incoherent shout of

‘This cannot be!’

In exchange of the bare floorboards, the drugs, the interviews with suited officials we said to each other that we could have better. We could have community and kindness and belonging. We could create places where we felt safe and could flourish.

I am still shocked that, for a brief time, we did indeed create such a place. A place where the despairing looked after the despairing and the dreams we had became slight possibilities.

Maybe we did indeed challenge fate; challenge how it is meant to be and maybe we didn’t. Our centre is no longer talked about or remembered by more than a tiny group of people and yet the system we spoke against is bigger now than ever.

Somehow, in the arrogance of youth and optimism, I thought we could change the establishment and officialdom. For years and years and years I banded together with my friends and acquaintances to speak out; to make difference acceptable, even celebrated. We laughed a lot, we were passionate.

Latterly, we realised that there were many within the system who agreed with us, indeed were part of us, and for a time life was bright with hope.

Even later we began to accept the ‘system’ we thought we hated could bring hope too, could bring peace and brightness and the occasional kindnesses we had been seeking. Our anger adapted itself; we began to plead for some of these kindnesses we had overlooked, began to see the humanity in some of the workers we didn’t trust and sought more of it.

I have not stopped doing it. I still shriek against pain and grief and sadness. I still think that if we are kind and loving we can change the world but now I temper it with a realisation that some pain is inevitable and that a helping of drugs can sometimes also sooth the cry of horror.

Now, now, late in life I collect the stories of those I love and care about. I write them down; I share them in the hope that bearing witness to pain will change our world, will change the minds of the officials who still administer despair but, increasingly, I realise that our voice, our words, our films and reports and speeches will not create the revolution we need or hope for and maybe they shouldn’t.

Nowadays, though I record and write the examples of lack and of need and misunderstanding and abuse and cruelty, I am learning that our liberation lies more in the conversations we have, the tears we shed, the learning we share when we speak with each other of those things that are not spoken of. I have realised that pleading for connection and belonging can be replaced by creating it in the encounters we have with each other.

In my personal life, though I do not know how you can make such a division, I do not rebel and I do not say this should not, should never have been my fate. I cannot conceive of any way of changing the life I lead.

My central preoccupation, which is meant to be delusion, I cannot change. It is too immense, too powerful and controlling. I prefer to hide from it and pretend it doesn’t exist than to confront it.

And that life of despair I banded together with my friends to change. It easy to say we can create a kind world but far harder to be kind to ourselves.

In many ways I feel incapable. How to bring a smile to my face, how to joke, to laugh, to giggle, to think of things to say? I haven’t a clue. I cannot just tell myself to be different. I cannot empty the disgust in my backbone or the tightness in my throat or the lost expanses of my soul, and I cannot just ignore the past and the chemicals and the world that have made me who I am.

But maybe there is a different form of rebellion, a different way of living, a different way of challenging our fate. In the last decade and half, I have learnt the joy of loving and being loved. I knew it too before, but I lost it in the wounds of words that can never be unsaid, and actions that cannot be forgotten.

I would like to say I am trusting but I am not sure I am. I still cannot believe that this life is possible; that I walked into the house just now and Wendy was dying to tell me what she had done today; that Louie will actually want to go to the falafel stand with me in the holidays and that Dash the dog is really at this very moment at my feet on the bed and that James will say good night when I pass his room on the stairs.

I find it hard to believe that I have spent an afternoon with friends and that when I left the room to catch my bus home, they waved a chorused, smiling, goodbye.

This soft and soothing drip, drip of healing is the opposite of the torture of loneliness I was used to, the opposite of the dark hours where I ached with the roar of my self-disgust. Often, I am tired beyond tired. I still think I should be dead, but I am so glad others keep me alive; so glad that I am thankful for the days I live and love in.

I didn’t seek to change my own life, but the love of those around me has, despite my efforts to the contrary, given me times I dare to call joyous. I did not expect that at all.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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I am feeling particularly dissatisfied today, mainly with those who seem to conduct and shape the National Conversation about what a good citizen is.

I have been reduced to using stereotypes but increasingly, it feels that all the leaders (with a few exceptions) want a productive, growing economy in which our standard of living grows and grows and for that they need a productive, very hard working, committed workforce, who will work beyond exhaustion.

We are not necessarily so committed now and maybe that is why they spend so much time exhorting so many of us to do more and more.

I like the fact that some of us now don’t do that. That we are in effect putting down our shovels and swearing at the foreman and disappearing off to sit on the verge of the road to stare at the daisies or whatever it might be we want to do.

Covid seemed to be one of the catalysts for this.

For a time, we didn’t know how many of us would survive. Most of us knew someone who died as a result of it and the majority of us were isolated and worked from home.

I think many of us woke up then. We thought to ourselves

‘Why do I go on a long commute to work every day to work in a bland office I don’t want to work in with bosses I don’t respect only to get home too exhausted to do anything other than stare at a screen?’

I think many people who remained in public spaces maybe thought

‘Why am I being made a scapegoat for the folly of politicians, when I am risking my life and my families life for pretty much no reward at all?’

It doesn’t surprise me that increasing numbers of people who can afford to, have chosen new lives. They looked at their family, their children and thought

‘I am not giving you the love you need.’

They have looked at their work and thought.

‘This is exhausting and I don’t enjoy it and can only look forward to managers asking me to do more and more and more yet again.’

And I think they have said

‘What sort of life is this? Do I need this? Who benefits from this other than obscenely rich people who do not even value people like us?’

I am glad that people do work from home and do listen to music as they work or wander into the kitchen to get a coffee or work from the garden and despite that are more productive than they were on their daily commute. I am glad that parents can now take their children to school and are home before they have gone to bed. I am glad that some of those who provide essential services are saying that they are going to work part time now, even if that is hard financially and I am really glad that more and more people have realised that they do not need as much as they are told they need.

Some of us are lucky enough to be able to afford to work part time and to have realised how much better our lives become for that.

Even if I worked full time I would earn less than the average wage but on my part time salary, I am close to the minimum wage.

In our family we are incredibly fortunate that we have paid off our mortgage and therefore, despite having a slightly less than average income we do not lack; not particularly.

We live simply, we buy second hand, we have very cheap holidays and as far as I can see we are far, far, happier than if we were both on a high wage but with no time and energy for living and loving our friends and families and communities.

I would like those policy makers to recognise this instead of stamping their feet and saying

‘Get back to work, knuckle down; we have an economy to grow, a world to destroy and you are integral to that mission.’

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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From here, where I lie on my bed with the breeze cooling my skin, I can see the leafy branches of the birch trees in the garden and if I stand up and look out the window behind me I would see the trees across the road, the beech trees and sycamores, the holly and a host of others whose names I don’t know.

At the moment the crows are squawking their unruly late evening noise, settling, rising, finding just the right place for the night. It is summer so occasionally we find confused fledglings on the ground with their parents guarding them from the branches above.

If I were to listen, I might hear the sound of their feet and of pigeons and seagulls on the roof above me and if I wandered over to the other window, I might see the doves bathing in the bird bath we filled yesterday because of this prolonged hot spell.

I didn’t realise how surrounded by nature we are here. When the windows are closed we only vaguely hear the birds outside, only occasionally hear horses in the street or the bark of Morag the dog next door.

It is due to rain tonight. I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a thunderstorm, but I think I will leave the windows open anyway. The waft of fresh air and the sound of the world, is so much better than the stagnation of indoors or the aimless chatter of the telly.

With the windows open the flies come in, and at nighttime, the moths. I confess I find them annoying but they are real and vibrant.

I have spent a lot of time locked away from the world, not just the world of flowers and trees and the breeze, but the world of my heart and my feelings and my family.

I do not know who to blame and imagine Wendy might ask me why I would want to blame anyone. At the moment, I am pondering my life and my work and the writing I do here.

A condition of my work is that I have lived experience of mental illness. I bring that into all the work I do.

Last week I talked about depression and schizophrenia and that litany that is so important and so needs to be said but I am thinking about its effect on me.

Next week I will tell the same story again to two more groups of people and, some of the people I will tell the story to, will be hoping for something; some sort of hope for their offspring from the story of my life.

I will also go into detail in another meeting about what it is like to be restrained when your life is wild and all you want to do is die or harm yourself and that will be important too.

I think on the Wednesday a Substack post will come out in which I laugh about the anxiety that plagues my life and as I scroll twitter I will see all the responses to the Timm’s review of disability benefits which, though it doesn’t apply to Scotland, makes me think maybe one day people will realise there has never ever been anything wrong with me and somehow those benefits which make such a difference to me will be clawed back and bankrupt me.

I am being a bit long winded; but I am, currently, reading a book from the Jean’s Bothy Book club called ‘This Book Made Me Think Of You.’ It is by and is a romance I suppose. Tilly’s dead husband gives her a book every month and she comes to live her life again -well I think she does; I haven’t finished it yet.

It made me think of my life and how rarely I celebrate Wendy and try to make her life as wonderful as I wish it could be. It made me think of how intense I am and how rarely I laugh or giggle in that free way where you glow with the joy of life and who you are with. Wendy does that all the time with me. The joyful, living, vibrant stuff.

The first thing I did after putting the book down last night was to decide to take another holiday in two weeks time, when the children are away with their Dad. I want to spend time just enjoying life with Wendy. Whether we go on day trips or out for ice cream or go away for a few days I do not know. But I want to find a way of giving Wendy the chance to feel as delighted by the world as she makes it for me despite all the effort I go to, to remain miserable. It is a pretty easy task as she already buzzes with the delight of life but ideally, I will add to that by making an effort too.

A few Substack posts ago I lamented the emphasis that is put on will power and responsibility and us changing our lives when we are mentally ill. I still hold to that. I know I have a condition that might make it impossible for me to ever smile properly with my heart again but, just for the moment, I don’t want to accept that.

I may have a job that reminds me every day that I have one of the most disabling mental illnesses there is; one that means that one in ten of us kill ourselves because it is so horrible and it may be that I help and make a difference by being open about my experience.

I met some people last week and asked how they can be sure that I will value what they say and they said;

“You are one of us”

As though that was all that was ever needed said and it is, but it is exhausting and so maybe I will take some chances to be kinder with my story.

I write twice a week here and have a feeling the few extra followers I lose; I lose when I go into my trite and sentimental tales of life with Dash and the flowers and trees or when I plead a cause like climate change and that I gain when I talk with indignation about our lives with a mental illness.

However, when I was looking through START for a reading for Ben’s funeral, I realised I really like the sections where I write about life where I love being with Wendy. It reminded me how rarely I have ever been able to replicate the lyricism of some of those chapters, since writing that memoir.

So now; now that I am back upstairs again, this time in the afternoon, with the windows still open I am going to let myself believe that a life where I talk about illness, where my work is about illness and abuse and rights, a world where I need to be ill to get benefits is not always that healthy.

If I was into marketing, I might think my USP is the awfulness of my life and just now I am thinking that is not healthy for anyone, especially as my life is also full of wonder and joy, despite my experiences.

I like writing about the sadness and the injustice, but I am also going to seek out those wonderful moments.

I am going to hope I can laugh and make Wendy happy. I am going to be glad that I like flowers and blue skies and the mist on the water. That romances make me happy, and that I too can think up mini adventures to make our family happy which is exactly what Wendy is doing at the moment; now that I hope I have found my extra week of holiday.

I hope that I can write articles on Substack which are joyful too, and I hope I don’t feel any need to finish with the phrase ‘This is schizophrenia too’; my life does not have to be a political statement or an education lesson, despite my innate desire to preach.

I am tempted to stop my anti-depressants in the hope that it is them which keeps my feelings far from me, but I won’t; however, I will seek some joy.

I will seek the bravery to live; just a little and if I don’t do that well; well, I won’t blame myself for failing either!

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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To talk of this is difficult. That full glass, that I have rarely admitted I needed to take.

My life with alcohol started when I was about fourteen, if you exclude the watered down wine we got on holidays.

It set its own scene with begging other students to get us bottles of the cheapest most potent drink they could, which we would furtively take to the fields or woods to drink, thinking if we used a straw, we could get drunk quicker. To go back to school; mints for the alcohol and cigarettes, trying to check we could speak coherently, walk confidently. Knowing we could be expelled.

To now; forty eight years later, never being aware, not really, that it was a big problem.

Yes, I had been told to cut down by psychiatrists and even referred to an addictions one for advice. Even seen, for a very short time, by an addictions CPN with whom I had the briefest and most unproductive of relationships and of course the endless questions from those who gave me my fortnightly jag.

There was the time I lost my license for a while, well over a decade ago but both my psychiatrist and nurse said the GP, who I had never met, had wildly overreacted and so; well; I paid little attention.

Until the time nine months ago when the routine tests that I get because I have a severe mental illness came back and this time it wasn’t OK at all.

This time my liver was in a mess and it seemed very likely to be caused by my drinking. This time when I sat down with another unknown doctor, she said if I didn’t give up my driving license she would write to the DVLA to make sure they revoked it. She also talked about my life span and how short it was becoming. Wendy was sitting beside me and I didn’t know what to say. She said she would refer me to addiction services, and I didn’t know what to say to that either.

Now, I have been and gone to addiction services. I think I am seen as a success. I have hardly drunk in the last few months; usually drinking no more than six units in a week and never more than nine. I gave up my license but have now applied to get it back again. I have a liver whose results are all looking good. It is pretty rosy in a way.

I’ve saved a lot of money even though zero alcohol beer is pretty expensive!

Last night, with these glasses beside my bed. I was pretty happy. I had my zero beer which tastes good. I had my diet coke which once I sneered at but now I realise I quite like, and I had my two measured units of malt whisky.

I look forward to those three nights of two units so much and wonder if I should see that as a warning sign for the future.

I am not sure why I drink them, but they seem like a lovely end of the day treat even though they do not seem to have any effect on me, which is maybe even more worrying.

My addictions CPN was lovely; more for his positivity than anything else. We never really did talk about any of the reasons I drink or my internal life. I was focused on drinking less and less and that was all I was really interested in. He was fun, talked a lot, and seemed non-judgemental, which I liked.

Now I wonder at all those years when, the moment the day ended, I opened the whisky with relief. Why did I need it so much?

This morning Wendy and I were lying in bed talking and giggling and ended up imagining a series of street floats created to depict our lives when we died. Hers were wonderful. The sort that you would pull a bystander aside to say;

‘Wow! She sounds amazing!”

Not because of the achievements but because of the parties and the dogs and the friends, the children and the constantly curious mind, the whimsy and the films and the chocolate. When we looked for mine, we struggled; even Wendy who is always so positive about me struggled.

We found the awards stand on my float embarrassingly awkward. I was unsure about the writing one. The silence one was fun to populate with a monotone actor but sad. The cooking and food one beckoned some wonderful meals but really? The schizophrenia one added some interest and the kindness one? Wendy liked that one, but I was less sure, not certain I am that kind. We didn’t have work floats for either of us. They just didn’t seem relevant to our lives.

I think that is why my six o’clock start time for a drink existed. The work one that we both avoided. I can’t really remember a time when I have reached an evening ready to wake up and enjoy myself. I am always so, so, tired at the end of the day.

When I am not trying to achieve with my paid work, I am doing things like this which in its own weird way is an attempt to achieve and yet each day I reach the evening with a sense of failure as though I haven’t done enough or enjoyed myself enough; I reach the end and I do not know how to relax. I may walk into the house wanting to kiss Wendy or hug Louie or say ‘Hi’ to James but more often I divert; put the shopping away, look at my emails, scroll or start making tea. That need that doesn’t allow me to love the end of work and the day and the people who are, despite my rudeness, still waiting for me to greet them.

I will reach the evening exhausted by work and people and just that need to be approved of which can never be met enough for my satisfaction. I don’t think I have ever reached an evening delighted with myself; wanting to dance in circles and the lovely, lively day we have had.

Instead, until recently, I have wanted to blot myself out. I’ve wanted to stop; to avoid and zone out and alcohol was ideal for that.

I haven’t replaced that six o’clock glass of whisky with anything I approve of. Instead by the time we have had tea; I am seeking the end of the evening when I can seek my bed without anyone feeling rejected.

I have such a need to be alone and be by myself; to wind down while at the same time wanting to be hugged and kissed non-stop, to lie down and talk and talk, If only I knew how.

I think maybe, when we look at the floats that we said represented me, there is nothing much that I would miss if we took them away but if I look at Wendy’s then I am very jealous. I do not know how to live containing the zest and joy she does and wish I did.

I think sometimes I drink to stop being aware of how I see myself. I think, when I look back on my life; even though I have had some of the most wonderful and extraordinary times and been surrounded by the most loving of family and friends and, now I have reached my sixties, am, at last, delighted that I am alive.

I think despite that, I have been sad or depressed or whatever you might want to call it for as long as I can remember. I know I loathe and hate myself and cannot really explain why I do.

To be honest I really struggle with being alive, or at least truly alive. It’s such hard work and enjoying myself ? It takes so much effort!

It was so much easier to sip from my glass and become more and more glaikit as the evening progressed.

But maybe there are glimmers. My new wish to be alive coincides with reducing my alcohol intake; whether that means my meds can now work better or I can function better I do not know but I am glad I am alive and though I doubt I would deserve it; would like to be prevented from dying.

Wendy says in the last few months I have become more alive, sharper, alert, engaged and that sounds very good to me.

I was going to say something about the effect my drinking has had on others. I am not too sure now.

Wendy has always been polite; said I was never nasty with the drink but that she hated the smell of drink on my breath and hated my snoring.

More telling is who she thinks she has got back now, which is a different person to the one she had and, even more telling, is that she absolutely loathes alcohol.

She may occasionally have a drink, especially at celebrations with friends, but alcohol has killed family members and close friends of hers and, much has I hate to say it; it probably explains the last ten years of us, mainly sleeping in separate beds.

I used to think she exaggerated the smell, the snoring but this morning; waking up, lying in bed listening to Wendy sleeping while she breathed out almost musically, with Buddy the dog shifting his place on the bottom of the bed and Dash snoring from the floor beside us; knowing the children would be fast asleep and safe in the rooms below us.

That felt like bliss.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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I am on a train, a busy train. A hot busy train. A train I don’t like. The only good thing is that I am away back home to see Wendy.

Some hours ago; well; it already feels like over a day ago I gave my mum a hug goodbye. She is old now, not even she could deny that. When I hugged her, I could feel her backbone and ribs.

It has been a good, few days with her.

She has been very, very, silly on occasion, it should not befit a very old person but it does, very much. She says outrageous things; spends a lot of time humming and pottering around.

She had said she would insist on exercises to make my gammy leg work but actually was solicitous and did not walk too far with me. She did sometimes remind me that I am lazy and she did frequently tell me to stop eating potatoes and bread.

On rare occasions this annoys me as I do work very hard, harder than is good for either me or my family but usually it doesn’t. Usually, I laugh and tell her instead that she needs to learn to do nothing much at all and that she could do with putting some weight on.

There is, despite that, mortality in our words. I am beyond the age, people with my diagnosis are meant to live and she said this morning she would not walk to me to the station; would maybe not walk at all today. In our experience of my Mum that is extraordinary.

My Mum is one of those people who has to walk; has to walk even more than she has to go to church.

I wonder at the lack of conversations we have about the future and her illness over the last few days.

I wonder at the lack of a stories in our family.

We were talking about children yesterday and the pressure they are under and I was getting indignant at their lot and Mum was saying in her day you just needed to get on with it, you had no help and no support. She didn’t go as far as saying it did her no harm.

She reminded me that she was sent away from home in the War after her school was bombed. That she no longer remembers how long it was that she went without seeing her mum and that her sister was still a baby when they were sent away but she didn’t see her because she was kept in a different place on the property.

She told me that at her age she did not understand war or what being an evacuee was and then she told me the house opposite her was bombed later on in the war and that she still remembered the name of the couple who lived there and how confused she was that adults she knew could actually die.

It made me pause. There was lots I wanted to say but I didn’t. In some ways I wanted to hug her younger self and tell her one day she would not need to be so relentlessly positive and so determinedly tough but maybe not. I know very little.

All I know is I am on the train and it is slightly less hot and the hills of the north are appearing and apparently Wendy is out with her Mum this afternoon doing much the same as I was.

We are not looking after really but we are aware of a change in health and habit. A change in how we see security and permanence. It is alarming in a way, and it is making me realise how tenuous life is; how easily things can crash to the ground; making us understand how our everyday troubles maybe amount to less than we know despite how difficult life can sometimes appear to be at the time.

There are groups of cows in the fields outside the train. I am about to pass near my brother’s house.

I would like to be sitting on the grass or a log or a bench on one of these small hills next to the dry stane dyke walls.

I would like to be doing nothing; just listening to the sound of the cows crunching on their grass, huffing and puffing; shaking their shoulders and their tails but I can’t help thinking of the flies or their over curious presence.

Despite that and despite my panting breath, I want to have climbed one of these hills and I want to have a book with me to read and ideally, by and by, my brother would appear on one of his runs and squat down beside me with a;

“Hi Bro! What you doing here?”

And I wouldn’t be able to explain but I would pick up my book and put it in my bag and we would walk to one of the brooks where the stream ripples over the stones and there I would see Wendy walking with Dash the dog.

I would give her a hug and offer her a drink from my flask and maybe a bit later we would come across Juliet with Frodo and a tent in a field and at that, we would all lie down on the grass to natter.

I would chew on stalks of grass. Juliet would tell us the names of some of the flowers and butterflies.

Wendy would talk and laugh and Richard would hum and ha and we would talk of the children; even children we no longer see and we would talk of parents, even those who no longer breath and somehow the stories we haven’t heard from our parents would be told after all and they would warm our souls and the fact that we are also getting old and that we have parents who are even older, would be as every day as getting out of bed.

By and by Richard would get on with his run and in due course arrive at home with Kathryn and Juliet would say she needed another walk with Frodo before David arrived for the night and we would all say

“See you soon!”

As in next week and probably the week after that and I would get up and hold out my hand to Wendy.

We would walk hand in hand towards the train station and sometimes I would bump shoulders with her and give her a kiss and sometimes Dash the dog would find a stone to wee on. There would be meadowsweet in the fields and I would say it was once used to sweeten beds, especially marriage beds and Wendy would remind me that getting married once is more than enough!

On the train Dash would sit between our feet; we would share chocolate and peanuts and fizzy drinks and wonder what the children will want to do when we get home and it will all seem remarkably normal and every day.

The passing of time, the tiny events and the bigger ones. I liked what that fantasy told me.

I just glanced out the window and saw a line of sheep walking up the ridge of a hill. There are new trees being planted beside the railway line. The sky is rich with clouds unlike the bright sharp heat of the south.

I can see a red tractor with a trailer driving along a country lane; a row of council houses and now a row of older ones.

Soon we will reach the station we would get off at to change trains to see Karen further up in the North Lakes.

She has cancer too; like my mum’s it is terminal and like my mum she doesn’t seem too bothered about it, just so long as Dan is sorted and happy before she dies.

Now I am passing a stream bordered by marsh marigolds and above the fields are loads of crows. Here is what looks like an old almost stately home but too small and too run down, to be one and over there is an expanse of woodland.

There is a castle opposite the station we will arrive at soon. I visited it a few weeks ago on holiday with Wendy’s friends.

I have a good two and a half hours more of travelling before I am home.

I will enjoy those hours. I will look out the window and enjoy the view and look forward to walking up the hill and then into our house.

I will hope I will be lively enough to smile and hug and talk and I will think of the reading I am giving from my memoir on Monday at the funeral of the son of a friend who died far too young and who died of mental illness.

Yes, it is possible to die of mental illness and I will hope the yellow shirt I said I would wear to it will be big enough for my wide, wide, body.

Tonight my sleep might be good, it might be bad. More than likely, I will have lots of bizarre dreams and some of them might be nightmares and this really will not matter.

At some stage this evening I will phone my mum and tell her I am home and at some stage I might speak to my sister about when she is going down that way and at some stage I might try to arrange to meet up with my niece, Keri, and some of this will happen and some won’t and it will all be ok.

I have my phone with me. I will not look at the news or social media, not this time – I have no need to hear what those people are doing.

Oh! Look! more cows and sheep and horses.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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My bed is not lonely but I miss you. I would like to turn to you now that I am wide awake and the wind is blowing a blousy gale outside. I want to ask you to wake up and talk to me.

My bed is warm and it is comfy, the light in the room is soft, the dawn has been here a fair while because it is mid summer and what else would the dawn be doing at 4.30 am? I can hear the woodpigeons outside calling and a blackbird sounding its frantic alarm. I want to reach over six hundred miles and ask you to ignore my morning breath for a waking kiss.

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Last night my image kept on going sideways on my phone as we talked and talked. I liked that very much, I liked that you said I seemed to be tanned already from my trip south; that I could see the butterflies on the wall paper behind me while I lay on the sheets and wittered away and listened.

We talked of the children, a yearning for all to be well with them. To make it just right, knowing full well they are locked in the loneliness of becoming adult. We mentioned our own times at that age, the comfort of our rooms and of music. For me, for me I remember a growing disappointment and a growing anger at that age; so far away from home. It is so easy for us all to get it so wrong and then many years later realise we maybe got it right.

I wish you would phone just now. I would like to see your face, your smile. I like that our life is not as simple as a kiss and a walk hand in hand but sometimes I would like you all to myself. A day in bed just nattering and cuddling. Pausing for nibbles, pausing to be silly, to have a shower. Maybe a walk later in the gloaming as the dusk gathers and the bats come out and the crows settle in their roosts.

I want to get up and, at breakfast time, walk into town; without my wonky knee, or my bulging tummy. I want to find a café with croissants and lovely coffee. Maybe a corner seat in the window with cushions where you are already seated waiting to start the day.

I want to walk along the promenade with you. Maybe the sea will be high and seagulls will hold stationary in the wild wind, their wings twitching to manage the gale. Maybe flecks of spray will reach us, bring salt to our faces and joy to our wanders.

I want to turn to you and feel you press against me in that way you do when I know you yearn for my presence just as I do for you. I want to pack my few clothes, catch the train and magically arrive before you and the children wake.

Dash the dog will be there. He will wag his tail and stand up to drape his front paws on my chest. I will put down my bag quietly, do nothing for a while. Listen to the silent house. Just listen and sit and maybe the flowers the ex-in laws left the other day will still be fresh in their vases.

I will open some cold, cold, grapefruit juice, drink it down without worrying about my statins and by and by I will walk upstairs with pastries and the aroma of the coffee from the café in England. You will have had the most wonderful sleep and will wake relaxed with a smile on your face reaching out your hands for the mug I am carrying. I will slip into bed, we will drink and eat and fall back to sleep until we wake with no need to do anything at all.

And it will be dawn all over again and the curtains will be billowing in the wind and there you will be all over again.

Yep! Another version of schizophrenia!

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

I did not know this photo existed and have no idea who took it.

How long ago it was I do not know, maybe sometime over fifteen years ago. I did not know Wendy that well on that day. She was someone I occasionally encountered; she worked for an organisation I had once thought of working for, in fact she did the job I had contemplated applying for.

We were in Fife. A difficult meeting. We were there to give encouragement to the idea of a collective voice for people with mental health problems.

I had been to a few of the meetings and some of them were lovely but the organiser? She had a passion and yet she also had a raging anger about not only our treatment but really, pretty much everything. I had had to talk carefully on occasion for fear of what she might say.

Our treatment has indeed been harsh and the lives we lead are harsh, sometimes in the extreme, so anger and bitterness and confrontation can be common in the community I live amongst.

But some anger though it lives naturally in a person can sweep devastation into the lives of those it encounters. It is natural like a tempest or a storm but there is no beauty in the change it makes and in some people; it never abates and so the people who might treasure that person, can grow cautious and circumspect and may, in the end, leave the person whose rage populates the air well alone.

We knew this fine, I think, and yet nether the less we continued to travel across Scotland to her meetings to help create another voice for so many people who have no voice. But this particular voice had no brightness to it, instead it flared with a red glow and then vanished and I imagine the people at whom it was directed smiled a smile, shrugged their shoulders and said

“What did you think would happen?”

I did my talk, Wendy did her talk. I would have nattered with her. She didn’t drive, so I think I might have given her a lift to the station.

She was married at the time and yet did not as yet, have children. I was married too. I liked her, I saw that she was pretty I must admit, but paid little attention to her other than enjoying her company.

There could also be photos from a time a bit later when we were in Cardiff together, this time trying to encourage people across Wales to speak out for their community. Confusingly, the organisers of that meeting who had been charged with developing that voice, had the opposite of rage in them. They were cold and cynical and sarcastic. They openly said there was no point in the idea of a voice and seemed to have little interest at all in the community they said they were a part of.

They were part of an elite that might once have had credibility, but which now seemed to sneer at the people they themselves once were.

Their boredom drew Wendy and me together. I remember we were stranded in the airport for some hours, both with delayed planes to catch. We talked and talked.

Some years later Wendy tells me I got called by my wife while at that airport, and that overhearing the call, in which I was quizzed over who I was talking to and whether she was a woman and what I was talking to her about and why I was talking to her at all and, seeing my haunted responses, she realised that all was not well in my marriage.

And from those brief meetings and other encounters at board meetings where I sat by myself and read in the breaks and listened to music on my head phone and did not know how to talk to my colleagues, except Wendy, who would risk my silence and eat her sandwiches with me and just make me talk. It forced me to admit I was not as cold as I appeared and that I enjoyed the company of other people.

From these moments to a time many years later we come to this photo, and I cannot quite understand it.

How did that happen? How did the decorum of professionalism transform into the joy and laughter of love?

How did we get from a point where we talked about work carefully, to another point where we texted to say that the next time we met the first thing we should do was kiss each other.

A time where after that first kiss, we carried on kissing on the train and down the road to my small house where I had littered my bedroom with candles and rose petals and treats to eat.

I am cautious by nature, especially in how my heart works and at the time was still dealing with the separation from my wife, my long admission to hospital and the extra scars on my wrists and in my mind; that I gained there and yet somehow we leapt into the faith of love.

It is a long journey we have made now in the many, many, years we have been together since the twins were tiny. We have shared joy and grief and tears and laughter.

I am still not used to it, not in the slightest but I am delighted. I am a person who has a sadness embedded deep, deep, inside me. I have knowledge or beliefs or as most people say, delusions, that are close to a sort of torment and I still do not in any way understand why or how I could be attractive to Wendy.

But she will lie in bed and giggle or cover parts of my body in rosemary lotion until I am fragrant while telling me ridiculous stories and laughing until, all of a sudden, she decides it is time for sleep and curls into herself and demands I curl in my own particular way which for a while will keep my snoring at bay. And at some time in the night, I might find her snuggled into me; at another Dash the dog might leap on the bed and on another I might wake from dreams and be glad she is fast asleep beside me.

We talk of so much or she talks and I try to talk; life is a wonder and I fail when I speak of Wendy because the image of someone that is adored can be something cloying and trite and also embarrassingly awkward to witness. As I have told you in the past, she is funny and very, very, clever and endlessly curious. She finds adventures to undertake all the time. She has a heart for everyone and can talk with anyone. She can be wild and rude and invite confidences no one else would dare to share.

She will take risks with her future and makes our children laugh even though they are fifteen years old and sometimes inclined to silence. Like me she admits to blaming me in her head when things go wrong and like me also admits neither of us is to blame. We trust and care for and treasure each other.

She is also terribly untidy, and some simple things would never happen if she had to organise them. She can hide from friends she treasures because she gets exhausted being entertaining. She can distort the truth to make people feel better. She hates to cook and to be honest does few domestic tasks but then she sorts the bills and the holidays we take and makes sure that everything that needs done with the children’s school happens and, embarrassing as it is to admit my lack of role in this, creates a family that is wonderful to be a part of; a vibrant, loving, silly, exuberant family that sometimes goes quiet when visitors arrive.

She has a delight in snacks and chocolate but will periodically declare a ban on sweet treats like this and goes on and off diets with the frequency of how her mood varies. She is pleased that I do my work well but scunnered by it too, so we do not talk about it much. She is delighted by my writing but rarely reads it; usually just enough to check I haven’t been too revealing about who she is as, despite her openness, she is very private.

She has no need of recognition and awards, in fact looks at them as petty. She is no respecter of power or status or fame and feels no need to win an argument because of principle or because she knows she is in the right.

I struggle to know what I bring to our partnership, but I know I bring something. I think despite my tendency to pomposity she is pleased that I can laugh at myself. She thinks I am kind and gentle and non-judgemental.

She can get resentful of my silence, but I also get hugely frustrated by it too. Maybe my need for order and safety and security makes for some bedrock to her need to live for the moment and to make up her mind to do things on a whim. Maybe knowing that though I love my work I know family is more important. Maybe perversely, my need to get everyone their meals on time, despite their groans or weirdly, despite my lack of vigour; the extra-ordinariness of my mental health issues stops me being as dull as I can sometimes be.

I don’t know. I do know I am presently six hundred miles away from her and would love to be with her just now even if we were sat at different ends of the room ignoring each other as we scrolled on our phones.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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Sometimes anxiety is useful and fun, like this morning trying to get my tickets printed to get to England, I woke early and worried the trains would be cancelled; found out there were none going to Helensburgh where we had planned to find a ticket machine. Instead we went the opposite way to Dumbarton.

Along the way I manged to worry about the length of the train; the opening hours of the ticket office, a myriad things; until Wendy told me to sit on the bench on the platform, took my phone from me and went and got my tickets printed.

Even then I wasn’t sure I had the right tickets. It is only now, now that I am away on the train to Ediburgh and she is away home that I have properly checked and confirmed everything should be all right.

I think I will finally relax when I have arrived in London and got on the Brighton train but this anxiety. Though it is exhausting has been almost fun. I have had Wendy beside me to tease me and laugh and snuggle me while, each time I resolve one thing that might go wrong; I find another than might go wrong.

This anxiety is fine, a hollow stomach, a slightly jiggering leg but none of the deep dread and feeling of sickness and doom I often have when I am really struggling.

Somehow these times are lovely, when Wendy is with me, sorting things and giggling at me; just that closeness at my silliness. Also, the knowledge that it probably wouldn’t all go wrong even though I was sure it would.

We left each other, full of giggles. Dash the dog was with us too, so he made it fine as well. We also talked to some French people who were on the way to Oban and unsure how to get there – we showed them the platform and explained that the ticket office would open at 9.00 but when I left at 9.10 it was still firmly closed. I remember those times in foreign countries where it is all a bit alien and you only have a bit of the language and it is both exciting and very confusing.

Now my main worry is whether I will have anywhere to sit on the London train as we did not manage to reserve a seat on it last night.

I got back from a horrible day yesterday. I had intended to fly to London; had a lovely morning when my brother and his wife arrived for coffee and arrived at the airport very early as they were going past it and a lift would save two hours travelling for me.

The flight was delayed and then at five in the evening, just as we were about to board, it was cancelled.

Back home I wanted to get new tickets straight away. I started off trying to get them; this time by train and thought I had bought them, but it turned out I hadn’t. That wasn’t good. Two hours latter when Wendy had bought them; I was a quivering bitter wreck even more so as the site wouldn’t accept my bank card and so we needed to use Wendy’s; only to realise she needed to be present at the machine in the morning when I went to the ticket machine.

I was so miserable!!!

Then we got a takeaway, then we watched the film Awakening on the telly and I loved it.

I wish I had stayed up later with Wendy to natter and witter but I was tired to my core. I am always tired now.

It is a strange thing this anxiety. It is not my principle issue with mental health but it pervades my life. I worry about work, about Wendy, about the children, about family. I worry about what to eat and if we have enough food in the house. I worry every time I travel. I worry each time I meet someone. I especially worry if I meet someone new. I worry that I will say the wrong thing, think the wrong thing, do the wrong thing or not do the things I should do.

I worry that I am awful at the work I do, and I worry that I offend each person I work with. I worry even more if I am doing something new. I worry about global warming and wars and natural disasters and poverty and disabled people and racism and about writing things like this.

Wendy says that maybe I would do better with some Valium on a day like this but I think not.

I am on my train. I started writing when I was west of Glasgow and now we are east of it. I did do a great deal of laughing at my anxiety earlier and that has left me pretty delighted with life.

I really, really, love being silly about this stuff, without the laughter; doing it alone with no room for the balm of silliness to take me out of my world I don’t think I would get anywhere or get anything done.

There is no moral to this story. The conductor just checked my ticket and had a conversation about how far I was going today. We talked about the heat in England and the thunderstorms we had the other day which meant even the trains had water coming in the windows and that one was struck by lightening and had to be evacuated. Later on I saw him trying to swing from the grab bars by the door of the train. I think he was in a good mood and pretty bored. That was nice.

I am someone, or I think I am someone who people do not see inside that easily.

Unless life is horrendous, I do not look anxious or in a mess. I can appear to function right up to the last moment.

The last time I was in hospital I was planning my work and the coming days meetings with my boss two hours before I got sectioned. She hadn’t a clue what was happening inside me.

I do not know if that is an advantage; the ability to pretend you are coping or not.

Sometimes at work I wish people knew how utterly shattering I find some of my work, how I strive to get it right and doubt and doubt myself all the time. How, come the evening, I can often barely function, or after a zoom call I sometimes need to lie down and not think.

It would help if people knew what it was like but then if people saw my inner turmoil all too clearly, I very much doubt I would have ever been employed, just as I doubt I would if I had had a different accent or come from a different class or had a different education or been a different colour.

I will arrive in Waverly in about forty minutes and will stop now. If I was how I would wish I was I would relax, look out the window or read a book or sleep, as I slept badly last night, but instead I will probably scroll my emails and my social media to check first of all that no one hates me and secondly to see if anyone has liked the daily posts I make as part of the routine I never deviate from.

I am contemplating getting a vegan sausage roll at Waverley for my trip south, but they are very expensive so I will make that decision when I get off the train. I also need to work out where the platform will be and get there early so I can find the unreserved carriage and make sure I have a seat for the long trip south and I need to make sure I have my ticket ready to hand and that it really does work for the LNER and that I won’t be overcharged. And I better check there is a plug for my lap top and whether I can get across London in time to get the Brighton train. I must save the charge on my phone so I can phone my Mum when I am nearing Seaford… and will the books I have downloaded to my Kindle open and is it bad that I am denying Authors an income by buying their books so much cheaper on line....?

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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I took a photo of a log on the way home yesterday and the light of the sun on it made it shine like a mirror in the shade of the woods I was walking through. I liked that.

This heatwave; we even have it in Scotland!

I have been away from the tropics for so long that the current heat feels pretty unbearable and the thought that I am going south next week to see my Mum where there will be even stronger heat dismays me. I have expanded so much recently that my shorts which were already a big size are now too small, so I have bought new ones to fit me, I find all of this a bit depressing.

Once high heat was exciting; meant time to strip off our tops and get sunburnt, gave us chances to go swimming in the sea which, for once, was cooling rather than perishing. It implied picnics and summer and remembering that time a tree burst into flames with no warning back in the summer of, what was it? ’76?

Now it makes me worry for our parched earth; for the crops, for people who are not healthy.

It makes me listen to the news when it reports that in some parts of the world excessive heat is becoming life threatening for millions of people. It makes me try to imagine what it must be like to rely on crops and livestock, not only for income but survival and to know that the greed of people like me means that we seem to be casually destroying our world, for what?

So we can finance the latest war? The next massive AI centre? The air conditioning people in the south are saying they better get now that summers are getting hotter and hotter?

I think to myself that we have known what we are doing to the climate for as long or longer than I have been an adult but that our need for more and more and more and the petty competition to create the greatest dividends means that, if we are lucky, one day our descendants will look at the remains of our cities just as we look on ancient ruined cities now and feel sad at the arrogance of those who, likewise, did not want peace or co operation or less than they were born to and thus; sealed their own fate.

I say lucky, because I do like humans. I would be sad if we disappeared because, in the scheme of things, we are really an evolutionary cull de sac which has worn itself out as we spread so quickly, unchecked, to each corner of the world.

And of course I am a part of it. It is easy to preach and harder to take responsibility. I am now diabetic and there is no avoiding the fact that this is because I am unfit and weigh far more than I ever have before in my life.

I see the adverts on telly that say obesity is not our fault but a disease but note that pharma who finance the adverts do very well out of the weight loss drugs that may help us. I get the movement against body shaming and I get that the determinants of our weight are, in some ways, out of our control: the whole of our culture is about consumption.

It takes a rare human to buck that trend. I give myself the excuse that the medication I am forced to take has made a generation of people with my diagnosis vastly overweight but despite that I would wish for something different.

I am old enough to remember when we only ate strawberries and raspberries in summer when they were ripe in the fields and how peaches and nectarines were a delicacy you looked forward to if you were lucky enough to go to France in the holidays. I do not know if I want that again.

I am not sure I know much about the agriculture of the world but I wonder if, in some parts of the world, the people who produce the delicacies that are mounded in our supermarkets and so commonplace that they often go to ruin when piled up in our kitchens. I wonder if they sit down after a day’s work and have enough food on their table and enough money to send their children to school, even though the fields they work in glow with the richness of their produce.

I think many people think much the same as me. Most people would not deny a person life because of where they lived or because of the colour of their skin. Most people would not drive a hundred yards to the shops every day if they really knew in their hearts that, collectively, that will lead to the storms and droughts and famines that we are already experiencing.

Most people when welcoming or not welcoming immigrants, would, I hope, feel a sense of shame when they knew our casual consumption was the part of the web that led to war and dried up watercourses and the need to find some alternative place to live. Maybe people would I hope, grumble less if given the gun and told to fire it at the immigrant who is fleeing from those wars we are responsible for or if made aware that our economic migrants are just like us; beckoned by every television advert, every post on social media, by our relentless need to better ourselves, to have a bigger house and a nicer car and as many clothes as we can put in our wardrobe or as much data as we could possibly need for our phones or holidays in cool hotels to be waited on and spoiled and, for a time, made to feel special. Often, I imagine, their beckoning is more the hope of a job in a country where you can be sure you can eat three times a day and sleep in a house that doesn’t leak and manage to give your children an education or proper health care or clothes in the drawers.

I feel naïve writing this and also a bit stupid. Sometimes I think our politicians know more than us and are well aware that our society is self-destructing and rather than panic us, are happy for us to carry on until the waves lap at our doors and the wars we watch on television abroad, come in mobs with guns and knives in our streets. More often I think they just don’t have the time or the integrity or the support of people like you or me to even make an attempt at making a difference.

I look at young people now and wonder. If I knew for certain my words were true and really, if I think for a moment; they are indeed true. I am not too sure how I could look them in the face and say;

‘We willingly let this happen to you.’

Once people said they did not know about Auschwitz, but we know full well nowadays. The one thing we do know, if we care to look; is what is happening all around us.

I like to make excuses. I like to say I have no power against the oligarchs and dictators but maybe that is just easy. I like to say we need to practice kindness to everyone while knowing full well how selective we can be with our kindness.

I am not sure if this is relevant, but it feels like it might be.

Sometime after breakfast today, when it was still cool, I got dressed, yes with my new shorts and yes Wendy is still quite shocked at their in-congruence when looking at them, wrapped around my pale legs, and walked with Dash.

We set off up the shady side of the street. Up past the bird feeders some parent has put up for their children to look out at from the windows at breakfast time. I peered in the houses but only sideways. I peered to wonder which house the man who takes his daughter to school every day and who I sometimes speak to on the train, lives in and I looked to finally work out which house a work colleague whose work really does connect with mine, lives in. When we found out the coincidence of where we live, we said we must visit each other but still we haven’t and still I am not too sure if I would recognise her in the street.

I didn’t work out where either of them lived so instead I turned right into the woods by the golf course.

It was immediately cooler and kinder to my skin. While Dash sniffed determinedly at some grass I looked down over the houses, past the red acers to the sawmill and the wide water of the Clyde and the ships and houses on the other side.

I love it in the woods when the path is dappled with sunlight. It is soothing. The contrast striking and the knowledge that this means it should be cool here and the world bright outside, somehow delightful.

I passed well manicured lawns for the golf with sand traps and flags on the greens. I walked under fallen trees amongst choking ivy and up small paths where I saw so many summer flowers, so bright I could hardly photograph them.

I veered into deeper woods among the oak and beech trees and in the smell of earth scuffed up by Dash, caught a long ago deep and loamy scent that reminded me of things I could hardly remember but which reminded me of childhood.

I came across a pile of old webbing and chopped up trees and wondered at the determination of the groundsmen to pile the rubbish here, deep in this corner. I saw another fallen tree and thought it was beautiful.

Back on the path I met golfers with buggies who I thought might look askance at me with my dog; instead they smiled and nodded their heads and the one at the back grinned; reached out to me with a friendly gesture and apologised for day dreaming when he suddenly saw us.

I had a full poo bag with me; the flies seemed to quite like it. It occurred to me that the bag will not degrade. I didn’t like carrying it and was tempted to throw it in the undergrowth but instead, took it home for our bin while wondering about the destruction it might eventually contribute to when it ends up in landfill.

Now I am upstairs. It is late afternoon and even with all the windows open the room is painfully hot. I am listening to pop music and enjoying it. In a moment I will open my kindle to read Elif Shafak who is my latest gasp of wonder at those who can write and think and celebrate the planet we live on.

I will, as usual wonder, if I can keep to my promise to buy no more e books and instead buy from independent bookshops and I will wonder what I can afford and what is the most eco and what is the right thing to do and I will come to no conclusion.

I hope that is a lesson in being kind to ourselves even though we all get it wrong over and over. Every moment of my walk, each tree and plant I passed was there because of people like me, the rubbish was there because of people like me and the houses and the luxury of a golf course, even Dash is, in a funny way, a man made product but the trees still give oxygen to the air, they still harbor a myriad insects and birds. The golfers smiled at me and me at them. The music soothed me and the book delighted me. As in a previous post, I hope I am no evangelist but, inspired by , maybe I can dare to believe in and write about something kinder for us wherever we might come from and whoever we are.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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A side turn off the blaring street of heat; up the small bank of earth and into the woods. The cool is immediate. Dash the dog finds his favourite clump of grass to sniff at and a bit later; trees to wee on.

My skin relaxes, the tightness of the heat dissipates, my shirt feels a little less sticky. Ah! This was such a good idea.

Momentarily we burst into the blare of the golf course. I think we are at the top of a tee, away down the hill is the clubhouse looking like some sort of colonial whitewashed mansion, behind it is the grey shimmer of the Clyde. A small tanker is steaming down it followed by an even smaller tug. Up on the hill at the far side, I can see the wind farm with stationary sails. The green out here is stunning but the heat starts immediately, my eyes wince at the brightness.

We skirt the hole and look anxiously for golfers down below who might be annoyed by our presence. None there; brilliant.

We pass that white dotted vision of a petalled tree which I love to see and then, back into the gloom.

Gloom is the wrong word. Back into the softness of the gloaming of this sudden cool of the day. The path is dappled. One moment a darkness and then a bright patch of sunlight spearing down through the trees but more often, cool, dappled.

I worry about clegs and midges but there are none. The path is dry, almost dusty but not quite. We walk under the fallen tree that is covered with ivy. I love the ivy and am always surprised that it is considered a strangling pest. Its dark leaves, and the pale green of fresh growth; they speak of new life to me.

There is a side path that takes us to the estate. We follow it. I have my shorts on, a rare concession to summer. I worry about ticks but there are none. Butterflies flit on their erratic path; bring colour, Out here, in part sun, the flowers are beautiful. The brambles with their determined bees lovely, as long as I don’t have to tangle with them.

We (me and Dash) walk and I think of how this would be such a lovely route for Louie to take to Orlaigh or James to Aidan. I don’t want onto the streets beyond the trees.

Back on my dappled path I see another tiny one, this one going into the woods on the right.

This could be a lovely route for Wendy I think, remembering how bored she gets with the same walk. Dash brushes his head against my legs.

We stoop under a holly bush into a world where there are not even dapples. Beech trees and oak trees, a rich carpet of leaves piled up over the years. It feels almost cold but with just the tiniest hint of heat. Not a breath of wind. Some birds singing; far off the sound of people talking to each other. Small holly bushes, scraps of bracken and way above, the height of the trees above me. It smells rich and loamy; sharp too, dark and spicy and full of memories.

Did I spend so much time in woods like this as a child? Did I scuff the leaves? Did I hold my father’s hand and go running up and down leaf strewn hills?

Dash takes to digging at the ground. Parchment leaves fly up followed by dark fine dirt, it has a sour but healthy smell. He gets bits of leaf on him.

At the end of the path, I can see through to the golf course again. Another fallen tree is here; this one illuminated by the sun, its branches still with leaves on, its roots high in the air. It is beautiful and a tiny bit sad.

Back on the street Dash starts to pant, I would do too, if out on a day like this with a thick fur coat on.

I wonder what you are doing at home?

We wilt at this time of the year like the plants in the vases whose water has wicked away.

You might be upstairs, lying on the bed, trying to get cool, trying not to move.

I wish we had a cool pool of water to slide into; to swim across to join together at the edges for a momentary kiss and the feel of our slippery skin under the cool fresh liquid.

I have found a new path for you! I am delighted; looking forward to walking through the door to say.

“Guess what I found?!”

This is life with a mental illness too.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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Yesterday I was on my screen early for work. I had really struggled to wake in the morning and struggled to put the coffee on or say much more than

‘ Did you sleep well?’

When Wendy came downstairs.

I can go through times where my dreams interfere with my waking life. Sometimes I wake from them upset and disturbed and not entirely sure what they were. That mornings dream was about someone I knew who was dying from an eating disorder. She was in a sort of see through coffin in some snowy woods and going in and out of consciousness. Me and a friend, Chris, had been asked to watch over her in her last hours and give her some comfort as no one else would. Many things happened involving doctors and family. I remember at one point she opened her eyes, but they had no pupils and I reached out to pat her shoulder in comfort, but she winced away in revulsion which upset me. At the end of the dream, I found out that, though she was dying and had given up this was not as bad as me; as I had no essence, no spark, no brightness inside me and people hated me for it.

I can have dreams like this on various themes, some of which are unpleasant, for many nights in a row. Sometimes I think I have this vivid dream life because I think so little in my waking life and sometimes, I think it is the medication I take that damps down my thoughts and that at night I can surge beyond its limits and then I wonder if that is a good thing.

I wonder, now that I am writing this, that maybe I was also tired and ill at sorts because the son of someone I work with but who I am proud to know is a friend and who I have now known for almost a decade. Her son left the psychiatric hospital he was a patient in, a few days ago, and walked onto the train tracks and is now dead and though I am glad he is now free from torment, it makes me very, very, sad even though I only met him a few times.

I am so weary of suffering and maybe weary that again, it is only many days later that I realise I probably did need to talk to someone about it, instead of saying to someone who asked me how I felt, that I was so used to people I know dying this way that it is no longer remarkable.

I finished breakfast, went onto my teams call made a few small jokes, let drop some good news that I can’t be public about for a while, got some nice clappy hands floating on the screen but I felt so, so, tired.

I switched off my screen and retreated across the room and just listened and did much the same in the next meeting. My stomach was hollow by then.

Wendy had finished her zoom call by then, so we took Dash for a quick walk up what we now call Poo lane.

In the last few days the whole world around us has become even more lush; everything is busy growing. There are flowers everywhere. I loved that, it took me from my sadness; made my heart kinder to the world.

Back home we put in a huge order for a Morrison’s shop that should arrive in about an hours time (now it is today.)

I was delighted that we did it before having to stock up from the local shop at the bottom of the road and even more delighted that Wendy did not mind that we did not worry about what we were buying and made jokes when I said each time that we needed more than she said. So, four garlics not two, or three haloumis and not one. But as we spoke my stomach became more white, more hollow and my throat tighter.

I had promised myself that I would do a work task in the afternoon which I have been putting off and dreading; by the time I was back on the computer, I just couldn’t face it; just all edgy and fizzing with anxiety.

Instead, I looked at another piece of work and sent people what I thought were interesting but maybe a little challenging, emails.

All of a sudden, I got a call from a private number and for some reason chose to answer it. I vary rarely answer such calls. It turned out to be someone from my mental health team asking where I was, as I was meant to be getting my depot.

Ages since I missed my depot regularly.

So, off to the next bus, already getting angry with the nurses in case they were angry with me. Already wanting to say

“Why are you asking me questions when I don’t even know who you are?”

Already getting angry about my next scheduled appointment when I will be away in England.

At the bus stop there was a youngish woman with a pure white husky. The husky must have been old, as it had trouble walking. It was easy to tell the young woman adored her dog. That was both lovely and sad.

At the Clinic, the person who showed me in was lovely. The person giving me my jag already had the syringe filled, was cheerful; not bothered that I was late. The jag didn’t hurt and my arm didn’t bleed. The student nurse was also cheerful. No one seemed bothered about the questions so my “I am fines” seemed to go down well. The next appointment was rapidly shifted and soon I was on the bus again.

I went to bed early that night, had more weird dreams. I got up late, and though it was a day off, apologised for yesterdays emails.

There are aspects of family life that however content we might be; can also cause anxiety and tiredness. This is not a good world to be young in or for that matter, old and it tells on all of us. It even tells on me, the one with the least responsibility of all the adults but that lack of responsibility carries its own pressures.

As the non-dad, the non-father but in small ways, one, nether the less, I have learnt to keep in the background in some ways. Although I have lived with the children for most of their life I could never go to a parent’s day, or for that matter speak to the teachers if there was a problem at school and likewise, I mainly steer clear of how the children should be brought up. They have perfectly good parents and my presence is not always required and my opinion not necessarily as important as anyone else’s.

I see my job as being more about being supportive of Wendy and about the domestic tasks than trying to stamp my presence on the family, which is just as well as I would be pretty useless if I was more central than I am, but am aware that if everything incomprehensibly went wrong I would theoretically have no rights to see the children, even though I love them dearly. It is not something many people talk about; the position of the extra parents if ever life goes wrong. Luckily I cannot imagine that happening.

So sometimes I feel tired in a different way to the children’s parents, emotionally involved and trying to be supportive but maybe thankfully, not able to be completely responsible for their welfare.

The last few weeks have had small elements of that in our life. Most families have something similar. If one of the children is not struggling with something then maybe we will be worrying about Dash the dog or the Bunnies or parents or other relatives or friends. That is life for any family.

But today I felt that keenly, trying to make a difference, wishing I could help with the grief of my friend, wishing I could help our lovely children who are exhausted after an intense year at school, but feeling helpless and therefore tired and unhappy that I wasn’t enjoying my day off.

Now I am in bed. I walked by the sea with Dash today. It is my right leg that hurts when I walk now but wandering through the trees, brushing the nettles and brambles away as I walked into the open air, looking at the sea and the poppies. Like yesterday, that felt wonderful. I wouldn’t say it gives me perspective. I am not wise enough for that but it helped me pause my thoughts; feel the smirr of rain on my face and the warmth of the summer air.

I will look at my phone and see what the forecast is. If there is no rain I will open the window and let the cool night air waft across my skin.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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This is my room at my parents house. It is also my brother’s room and anyone else who visits room. My sister has a room across the hall. That is definitely her room as she lived her for some years. I had left home by the time this room became mine and so it never really was my room; not really.

However, I have slept in this room many times, many, many, times and somehow It feels like mine, even though the walls are crowded with pictures of the fighter jets my dad flew and boats he sailed.

It is only in the last decade or so that I have really appreciated this room. Before that it was the site of arguments about whether I had defended my ex wife enough, or whether we should pack in the night and go home, or if I had been too awkward or if we had been treated as we should have been. It didn’t hold good memories.

Since then, there have been days here with Wendy when we have snuggled in and whispered to each other. She used to say how much she liked my dad, how you could see a glint of mischief in his expression and how, despite what I had told her, he was always lovely to her. Here we retreated when there were too many people in the house or we had just been on show for too long. I enjoyed and enjoy those times.

But maybe more to the point are the times when I come here alone and wake in the morning to the light coming in the windows as dawn breaks. I tend to sleep late if I can, vaguely aware of wood pigeons calling and maybe the drapes of the curtains wafting slowly in the breeze as I like to leave the window open at night.

I like to lie here comfy in bed with no work to go to and no children or dogs to look after and luxuriate in the peace. Like I said birds calling but when the curtains are opened the sight of the trees in the garden and the sun on the grass.

Not so long ago the cherry tree that grows just outside the window would be covered in a profusion of pink blossom that not only clothed the tree but also carpeted the grass below. Now it is less abundant, maybe like us, it is growing old.

This room is a place of innocence regained. It is a place of refuge and peace and the thought that maybe there really can be days spent sitting in the garden reading books and eating lunch with a pint of cold beer at the table that my parents spent so much time around and which my mum now sometimes sits at with other people.

It is where I come to giggle and gossip with Wendy and it is where I come for peace and it is symbolic of that transformation. Once I was a reluctant duty bound but sullen visitor; even in my middle age and then, partly through my own doing but more through the influence of Wendy, I learnt to love my parents in a way I had forgotten to do.

Here is where I visited as my Dad grew increasingly infirm with his Parkinson’s. Here is where my dad held tight to my hand with both hands, one of which had missing fingers on it from an old injury and, crying, said how much he loved me which made me cry and say the same thing back. That was almost the last time I saw him alive.

Here nowadays, I visit my mum, more and more often, now that she is older and ill herself and here, we also giggle and gently pass the time together.

This week I am doing the cooking; we don’t make extravagant dishes like my brother does and we do not do spectacular things.

We tease each other and make fun of each other and we read the papers and our books and sit in the garden and I spend a lot of time in this room, much to my mum’s confusion. I don’t think she has ever understood how much I need time to myself, even when around those I love.

I come up here in the evenings to phone Wendy. I come up here to write and to work and do zoom calls. I come here to escape and to rest.

We went to Lewes today. We had intended to go the cinema but it was fully booked which made us both laugh as we had wondered whether to book it yesterday but were sure that on a school day in the afternoon it would be almost empty.

Instead, we wandered round the streets and then, when we got the train back home, my mum pretended the train had wings and was taking off each time the engine note changed.

She was very tired when we got home; you would be if you had cancer and the side effects of the drugs make you ache and wince.

I am up in bed and she is downstairs. She is used to my ways. This will be a week of laughter I hope, silences, pauses, time spent watering the lawn and going to the Coop for food.

One day, maybe not too long from now, but more likely many years from now, I will no longer come here. The curtains that stick when you open them will have been changed, the photos and pictures taken off the walls.

The clothes I keep here for my visits will be back in my wardrobe in Scotland.

But I have these pictures which will remind me of the joy of waking, sleepy, muzzy, watching the light stream in the windows, feeling safe and relaxed. It won’t be enough but to have experienced this is such a privilege.

This is part of a project with Kath Polley at the Jean’s Bothy Photography group – thank you so much . I love doing these things.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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I have a confession to make. I come from a background where contribution is a measure of worth. To do good and to make a difference is somehow assumed to be the mark of a proper person.

Even now my mum, who is eighty eight, does two or three, three hour shifts at the Samaritans every week and visits friends who are struggling, to make their days shine a bit brighter. I see this as a good thing but not necessarily everything we should be about.

I think much of my contribution whether it be at work or in my voluntary stuff or just with friends is a reflection of how abysmally I see myself. I constantly try to prove that I have worth and value. I seek out reward and affirmation to help deal with my self loathing.

I do this all the time. I regard myself as deeply unloveable; it seems inconceivable that people can love me and yet it seems they do. I am learning from this; learning that my need to have value can be arrogant and that to accept the gifts of those around me is also wonderful.

To be brave enough to accept friendship or help or support or even love carries huge risk for some of us and yet it is sometimes a bigger gift we give by daring to believe in someone’s love or friendship than if we constantly tidy the house or do the cooking or for that matter give to the community.

To give, it seems to me, also means being able to accept kindness and love in return and sometimes it means accepting without thinking there is an obligation for the people you are accepting things from, to one day return the favour to them.

Sometimes it is enough to accept a meal, or a hug or a conversation or friendship without making it a contract in which you need to deliver back in order to even up the balance. It is a hard thing to do and I fail all the time at it; feel guilty for all that people do for me but I am practicing.

However, It does me good and it helps me recognise the beauty of what others have done for me.

We do not all need to deliver all the time, sometimes we cannot and sometimes by accepting from others we are at the same time giving a great gift to those who make it their mission to contribute.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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I am in a right wee mood and for all the wrong reasons! I had tagging me in a post here on Substack saying that I was one of the male writers that are actually worth reading and then I discovered writing; also on Substack which is wonderful

I am not too sure what I can say about Marianne’s writing except it seems to be full of soul and rhythm and spirit and says the sorts of things I would like to say but never remember to or didn’t know I wanted to until I read her words.

And so why am I in a mood? I don’t think I have got my soul, my music into writing since I wrote START and I am just plain jealous of Marianne, and, with Rebecca; her passion shines so brightly, she speaks with such a need for justice and community, while I doubt everything but in all the worst ways.

I found Marianne’s writing on the writing site. That site got me riled up too; just because it is so good. Having read a few stories and essays I thought to myself.

‘Take some time, relax, feel the rhythm of life and you can do just as well’ but No. No way!

I still say I never got an education in literature as if, at the age of sixty three, that is an excuse for not knowing the ways in which people structure essays or stories. I think maybe that would have been valid when I was about forty and started putting words down seriously. I could have got myself educated; I could have done the research but no; I am happier blundering along in my own way.

I am trying to think what it is that brings music to words or makes it hard to create that flow and sketchily, I remember that even though, when I wrote Start, I often worked fifty hours a week or more; I was in love but yet I was almost beholden to no one.

I lived alone and had a whole world to reach for, and it was a wonder. I didn’t censor my thoughts from myself or not much and I didn’t worry, not that much, about how people I knew, would react to what I said. And I had time! Time to do whatever I wanted without needing to check if someone else wanted my presence. It was liberating.

For years I had been writing as part of a voice of a community and yet now I was free to be me; just me, with my own thoughts, my own opinions; writing in places and at times where I could dare to be just that little bit more abandoned with what I said than I had been for all the years before.

And I was so old fashioned and so out of touch, that in those days I didn’t really go on social media. I didn’t drown myself with the images of myriads of people all trying to prove something I didn’t understand.

Instead, I walked on the sand at East beach and I sat at the harbour end with a flask of whisky at sunset and was delighted with that. I found the bench on the bend in the river and watched the crows across the other side bouncing animatedly in the trees, and sometimes stroked excited dogs that came up to sniff at me and knew that in a few days Wendy would be with me. The person who had helped me realise that relationships can be full of fun and laughter and that you really shouldn’t be in one if you are scared of saying the wrong thing to your partner because of what they might do, in return; to punish you for it.

The person who made me think that even I could enjoy and laugh about sex and tenderness and know it didn’t need to be a thing of intense concentration, like some sort of complicated project; needing signed off as successful.

And maybe I was so recently out of psychiatric hospital and getting such good care that I was more delighted by life than I had been in a long time and maybe it was because for nearly the first time in my life, I found myself surrounded by friends who I almost always believed enjoyed my company.

In my memory and my memory is always suspect; I had energy and joy and hope and such certainty about what I wanted.

At such times I think I dared to step off the curb and not worry about what I said or what I wrote or who would read what I wrote. There were times, maybe after work or in the early mornings when everyone was sleeping or on the weekends when I had come home from the Links café when I fell into something almost lyrical without even noticing.

I would say that I am probably even happier now than I was then. Life has grown wings I never knew it could, but I am more circumspect. More cautious; rigid almost in how I dare to question.

This thing about being a male writer who should maybe be listened to. I think maybe the only thing I am proud of when I think of my gender and writing is my uncertainty. I was inspired to try to seek my male perspective after reading Caitlin Moran’s ‘What about the men?’ But even then, I was part of that irritating sub set of men who tend to say;

“This is not me; I am not as awful as you think or maybe, if I am, there are very good reasons for that.”

I do not know, not in the heart of me, what male experience or voice it is that we seek and would like to celebrate. Maybe that is part of male arrogance. I have never, until recently, tried to live with or understand my gender identity. I have just been me, speaking and writing away. Maybe that implies a security few women or other people have.

That was a lie, those words above; but not quite. Back in the 1980’s just as I was becoming adult, I did question my role; my purpose as a man. Most of my friends were feminists and some of them were lesbian and we did indeed take on the phrase ‘A woman needs a man like fish needs a bicycle’ and take it close, but with unease; to our hearts. I did learn that what I had been taught as a boy was not necessarily how I now wanted to be as a man, but that teaching was not necessary for my survival. It was a choice and maybe that is what I mean by the security us men have.

To be fair I have only recently become aware of just how horrendous some of my fellow men have become. I came across a thread on twitter just an hour ago that shocked me to my core, the visceral anger and the hatred and the violence of what men (mainly) were saying was something I have always preferred not to know about, something I don’t want to be a part of.

At the same time the hurt of women about what men do, and maybe I need to include myself in that ‘men’ word and their fury at what so many of us stand for, makes me cautious about what I say. I don’t want to get it wrong, but I don’t know what is right and so when I explore that world, with which I should be intimate, I do not do so with freedom and joy. I do so, worried that I will harm by what I say and therefore I caution myself in the same way that people tell me to delay sending emails when they know I am wound up and emotional and likely to say stuff I do not mean.

I really better admit it. I tend to prefer reading what women say about men; they seem more genuine and more insightful, which is weird. I read some men, who are anxious to be whatever a liberated man is called nowadays, and cringe a little. When we are so self-aware and so determined to be so clean and unlike most men. When we have to drop into the conversation that we have cleaned our partners pants of the blood stains of their periods, I wince, not because we might do that but because of the

“Look at me, look at me; aren’t I good!!”

Message I feel comes with their posting. I do not want to be an evangelist and I do not want to think I have the answer to anything.

No having the answer to anything is another thing that takes away from my music and my writing. In the last decade I have become more dogmatic and at the same time more uncertain. I am pretty much your woke man in many of the ways people have started to like to disparage but at the same time I am painfully aware that the fascists and racists and everything ists that I tend to despise think, with all their soul, maybe with more soul than I have, that they are good and right and trying to create a world they think would be more moral and just better. This flips my music and ability to express myself; far, far, from me.

It means that I scurry away from opinion and belief and try to understand when maybe understanding is no longer at all helpful.

And the other things that dull my music?

I now share a bed with Wendy again; for years I didn’t because I drank too much and snored too much.

I would write about sharing a bed when Wendy is curled into me and her legs are tangled with mine, or when she is snuggled and talking and talking or when she is making her hands dance beautifully in the air above our faces.

In fact, I would like to write about that more than anything but having found my voice, I have found that other people do not always want their voice bound into it. That my tendency to be completely open about everything is not what everyone wants. It is one of the many reasons I am quiet in company because I struggle to know what you can say in public and one of the reasons I am circumspect here is because those I love or am close to, may share their and my music privately but do not necessarily want the whole world to be aware of it.

And lastly, my music is lost because I am lost. Whatever the reason; I live a long way from myself. I often don’t know what I am thinking or feeling. Often, I view my landscape as flat in all the worst ways, not like the expanses and vast skies of Norfolk where life is one of wonder; more like an endless car park among another hundred endless car parks, with me buried somewhere underneath it but where that is, no one knows including me and I am slow. So slow!

I am sure once I yearned for knowledge and insight and debate and conversation and learning but for me, despite now having access to the learning of billions, I am content to scroll on my phone until I am so sick of the mundanity that I take myself away to bed to blot out the world.

And of course, music comes with life but sometimes life gets in the way of music. I knew what I wanted to write about today and it was not this and it might have contained music in its words but we spent much of the morning trying to work out what to do with children who cannot get into school and that is far more important than tapping away here. Although I love some of my work and would be delighted to write about it; I work in the sort of organisation where anything that was clearly about it or the work we do, would need reams of permissions before it could appear here and those permissions would take all music from it as does the constant travel and the stress and the frustrations everyone feels when the world is just not quite what we have been seeking.

As I said; Life gets in the way of music but sometimes, sometimes I am tired and weary and; doing nothing, while hating what is on the telly, seems much better than waking up and giving Wendy a hug or walking out into the evening sunshine or ever writing something kind and beautiful.

Sometimes it is easier to sleep and dream and wake for coffee and start work and make dinner; to sleep and make coffee again in the morning, yet again.

To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.

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