Another Page From The Diary Of A Well Lived Life

My stony heart is gone. I feel a great wish to help the poor people round about, especially the children and the old.

There is plenty to do. There are my lunatic friends at the asylum. I go and see them on days when I am in Cork for organ lessons.

Last week I had a picnic lunch for forty women women lunatics. I arrived with Con and there the poor things were, ready. Two or three nurses were of the party and we all shuffled off as far as we were allowed to go and sat on a bank under trees in the asylum grounds, out of sight of any buildings that reminded them of their sad lot.

The lunatics had made themselves very smart for the occasion; their hats were wonderful in colour and shape; each wore a clean pinafore or apron with an assortment of coloured bows. and a large bunch of purple phlox pinned in the middle. They were very good and Oh! so happy. 

Thompson had sent up a wonderful tea. sugar cakes with mice on them, and plum cakes and barmbrack and bread and butter. They all had one idea which was that I should not be allowed to get sunstroke. One or another mounted guard over me with an open parasol, even when I sat in the shade. If I protested they all patted their heads, signed first to me and then to themselves. Do they think that they are in the asylum because of sunstroke? 

Mrs Leary, from Castle Freke, was there. She calls herself Lady Carberry as a rule, but when others are there she tells the others t call her Lady Glandore. 

Jane Tyner came too. the girl with whom I play duets. She was engaged to marry a curate. When he heard that her mother had died in an asylum he broke off the engagement Jane, heartbroken, went off her head. 

Here is the old dear who jabs one with a knitting needle, if one does not look out, and then is so sorry.! Her beliefs are complicated, she believes a picture of her is being made in Heaven. If she on earth she is cross and jabs people with knitting needles, then the picture will be ugly; if she is good and patient and, doesn't jab it will be lovely. When she dies she will go to Heaven and she and her picture will be one.

There is a priest's sister, a very beloved woman, dark, beautiful, who knows she is "queer" and takes it as her cross and tries to show love to rest.

One woman, the nurse told me, they dared not bring, tho' she cried and promised to be good, because on my last visit on my last visit she had followed me about (I didn't know it) threatening to "send that lady west". Two nurses shadowed me all the time that day.

We talked at the picnic exactly as if it was a garden party at Castle Freke, and if one of us gave a sudden shriek or laughed at nothing. or even rolled over on the grass, no one took any notice. It was a lovely day, and no one enjoyed it more than I did; except for the kissing at the end. Lunatics, like nuns, are fond of kissing people they fancy, whether they know them well enough or not. And with lunatics one can never be sure they won't bite.

Dr Woods gave leave for them to be photographed and Herr Kraft, the photographer, arrived looking quite pale. The nurse had to pose us, for when Herr Kraft approached the patients shrieked or else wanted to kiss him. So he entrenched himself behind the camera, but it was ages before they would all sit still, several of them wanting to know why he had put his head in a black bag, before they consented to settle down.

Thirty Kilogrammes

is quite a small but significant weight,
physically it is quite a small volume.
Nowadays it is what passengers carry,
as hand luggage on international flights.

But eighty five years ago that same weight
was what European Jews, and other 'undesirables'*
in up to eight different categories were allowed to pack
in small brown suitcases, as the sum total of their lives.
When their homes were stolen and they were sent
to they-knew-not-where, but their captors did.

Imagine that-all you carry for a holiday
being all you have for your future life,
and that your future life is so uncertain
that the last thing you were allowed to know
was how small were your chances of a return, after your exit.

*The yellow triangle was for the Jews,
the pink triangle was for homosexuals,
the brown triangle was for the Roma,
the Jehovah's Witnesses got purple,
the politicos, including Freemasons, red,
ordinary criminals got a green triangle,
emigrants were given a blue triangle,
and anti-socials, including drug addicts,
the homeless, and lesbians, got a black triangle.
Finally. it was quite possible to be
in more than one category and to wear
one triangle, inverted, over another. 

The European Carve Up Of Africa

In this date in 1885 an agreement was signed in Berlin
 then in newly unified Germany, now an imperial power
where fourteen countries agreed with each other 
 how to divide up an entire continent between themselves,
and remove from the natives of these former trade outposts
all sense of autonomy and self rule.
These countries were The USA, Austria/Hungary,
The UK, France, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy,
Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands, Sweden/Norway,
and Russia, who between them agreed that their greed
should surpass all historic human expectation.
Such that nearly 140 years after the agreement was signed
the continent of Africa remains maimed and blamed
for it's poor self government when how it has recovered
is nothing short of miraculous.       

 

Which Way Does The Wind Blow?

Chernobyl is now under direct Russian control 

after thirty years of Western waste management

The world is holding it's breath, as not just
a democracy gets squashed and a nations hopes
are tested yet again, but dare Putin use Chernobyl
to blackmail the world with a dirty bomb
so powerful it would destroy all anyone
might hope to gain? 

 

This Blog Is Taking A Brief Break

 To adjust to jitters in the media as President Putin's troops show no sign of retreating from the front line with Ukraine and Putin makes false claims about 'Nazis in the Dombass' region, which he knows the west will never get near confirming or denying. 

  Sometimes when we feel things they are real; we have to decide.  

Pity The Modern Satirist

Pity the humorist who takes aim
at the grandeur of their government,
seeking to reduce it's pomp,
when the scale the pronouncements
they seek to reduce is that vast
that gov't have permanent poker faces
to  help sell the most absurd arguments
and even more, be shameless as liars.

It is not just that the comic writers
have to be better in their reasons
than the governments they criticise,
but to make mirth so consistently
with their reasoning is quite some trick.

It must be depressing at some level,
to have harvested this weeks laughter
only to find that the government
you moulded it from does not care
as long as it's permanence is assured.

It believes it will outlast not just you,
today's satirist who will be gone tomorrow,
but it will outlive all the humour in the world
and to live so long without humour
is to live well beyond depression.

Charles de Gaulle On Good Writing

Of the authors mentioned here I have read
Roth, Zweig, Junger and Schnitzler
and 'The Master and Margarita',
but I have not read Bley's 'Petersburg',
which out of curiosity I shall be looking up.   
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The Laughter Of Recognition

Once every decade in my country
a writer writes a new comedy
that skewers afresh the vices 
that my country likes to hide
how much it is at ease with.

The vices don't change,
lust, envy, pride, and sloth
gluttony, greed and wrath.
But as the presentation of life
changes, through technology
if through nothing else, then vice
has to reformulate itself
to reaffirm it's place in our lives.

The comedy writers job
is to make such reformulation seem funny,
so as we laugh as we recognise 'This is us, our life.'.

But even given the historicity
of how we cannot/do not change
I still feel embarrassed at my vices
being put up as an entertainment,
stylised for the screen, for all to enjoy.

I'd still rather imagine that my sins,
and my country's vanities,
were somebody else's.    

It Was Thirty Years Ago Today; 4 - Arrival

This is part four of a four part memoir. For part 1 of this memoir please click here. For part 2, here, for part 3, here. Enjoy.

I decided that I had waited long enough. I made as if to leave. Without realising I'd done it, I caught somebody's eye as I left. To my surprise somebody my age started following me, a few yards behind, as I left the toilet, The fresh air smelled good after the wait. Most of the men I had anonymous sex with were not so anonymous that I could say absolutely nothing about them. Most of them had a ring on their finger, which meant that they were married and they had a script which worked for them better than who they went with; if the sex is not with another woman and is non-procreative then they have not committed adultery. That the sex might be non-relational, well that is okay. That makes it less to disown should the need to disown where they had once put their willies later arise. 

Marriage was clearly a very leaky vessel for it to require the exceptions it did. I was one of the men who covertly maintained other men's marriages by meeting the male partners need for non-relational sex. But I was frustrated, less by the sex or absence of it, and more by how I'd become more aware of getting myself into the position of some sexual equivalent of 'The Samaritans' but without the virtue of being recognised as being supportive.

The man who followed me out did not have a ring on his finger, as he followed me into a nearby field, where I knew there was a log to sit on. In relative comfort, in the dark, we talked enough to negotiate the sort of sex we thought each of us wanted. We talked because we could, because we were on our own, well away from the toilet which acted as a sexual library, where, library or cruising site, silence was a given. We undid each other's tight jeans and both had a fumble, attempting to please each other. But between the cold, the dark, and where we had first found each other, our ardour had gone. But we could talk, and we both had beards, something I found attractive. Mine was slowly growing back again after being shaved off the previous November, in the hope of the shave symbolising a change of life. Who knows? Maybe this was the change of life I shaved it off for His beard was fuller than mine and in good light I could see it was ginger against his pale skin. He was not the first bear, gay bearded/hairy man, who I had sex with. There had been a few of them. But he was the first bearded man to remove from me the expectation that gay sex always had to be anonymous.

 I said to him 'Would you like to come back to my house and share some soup and I want to be able to talk to somebody. Would you listen to me?'. Probably somewhat overwhelmed, and not knowing what else to say, he said 'Yes'. He followed me the ten mins walk to the house where I rented a room. Part of me did feel as if I were bringing a stray cat into the house, something that it took no words to say was against the rules that I would not know how to explain if caught. Thankfully, nobody saw me smuggle Russell in and I never had to explain.

I made the tea and warmed some frozen chicken broth from my shelf of the freezer in the microwave, and we sat in my room. He ate and drank but with more interest in my story than the food. I laid out before him where I had come from and what had got me to the point of sitting with him, much as I have laid out the material in the two chapters of this memoir. He listened, and no doubt he thought me strange and wondered where the punchline was, and where story might go next. Much of what I said must have baffled and surprised him. To stop me saying any more he took on the simplest, most practical problems, first.

I told him that I had never been in a gay pub, did not know where they were, and I had been told 'They are very lonely places' by the church leaders who I had hitherto trusted enough to share with who I expected to know anything about such matters. His response was brief and immediate 'Shall we go to The Admiral Duncan, now?'. 

And we went. The walk to the city centre took most of an hour, which was a fine way of giving each other a more general introduction of ourselves before we found the pub. We arrived at The Admiral Duncan at near ten pm, the place was nearly deserted. The house-oriented disco music and fancy light show were both overwhelming. The music I normally listened to was bands like The Grateful Dead, who played real instruments with empathy to how each of them played. The dance music might as well have been the theme to 'The Magic Roundabout' for all I could pick out any empathy in the sounds. A lot of so called 'dance music' sounded like that to me. But The Magic Roundabout was my childhood memory of what used to enchant me on television and I understood how the music was made with the intent to enchant. With the volume of the music, the light show, and so few customers, there was nobody after last orders with a handlebar moustache to say 'Time for bed? said Zebedee' to me.

Russell and I kissed as we left the pub. He had to go his way home and I had to go mine. He asked me 'Will I see you here next Friday?'. Not thinking through what he said for even a moment, including that Friday was Valentines Day, I said 'Yes'.

Postscript; I have left a lot of loose ends here; Did I keep up the writing the therapeutic diary? Was sex ever as anonymous again? What happened to the diary? What happened with Russell? Did I go to The Admiral Duncan on Valentines Evening? Did I ever get the therapy on the NHS? These and other questions will be explored in future short chapters of a life a long time ago. Thank you for reading so far.           

World War Zero

The first world war, World War Zero,
was the Napoleonic Wars 1803 - 1815
-that was the first time in Europe
that the same large scale war
was fought so many times, six,
across so many fields of battle. 

On one side there was the French Empire,
and it's allies, including parts of Italy 
on the other the key players were Russia
and The Austrian Empire who fought all six wars
-they brought in the rest of Europe on their side. 

The biggest of these were Prussia,
Saxony, the Swedes, and the British.
In the last war, 1813-14, Portugal, Spain,
and several more German states climbed board,
and combined in one last push to defeat France.
Included in this last war was the battle of Leipzig,
which was the biggest single battle across Europe
up to then, and for the next hundred years.

The British set themselves to defeat Napoleon at sea.
Trafalgar was where Napoleon surrendered,
before dying on the island of Elba six years later.

The social displacement and economic ruin
that happened with the six wars over twelve years
must have been huge, complex, and long lasting.

Since no simple ceremony,
no shorthand akin to Armistice Day,
by which society could remember the dead
came out of the resolution of that conflict,
those wars are not remembered. Who won,
who bargained, who lost, and what was left
for the then near future is now the content
of history books that few people read,
though it would make for a good podcast.

To find out how good such a podcast might be click here.

Ghosts And The Sick

A friend of mine 'believes in ghosts'
and rarely shares what that means,
perhaps he thinks I would not listen.

I suspect that what he ascribes to ghosts
are the hostile atmospheres, odd voices,
and uncanny presences, that go beyond
his explanations for everyday life.

And since his world is human-centric
what is uncanny has to be of human origin,
even when it is not about present day life.
He believes in 'trapped souls';
people who need the living
to settle the debts they left behind.

I get debt part - quite easily,
The Grateful Dead made it their brief
early in their careers to share the songs
written by so many long dead singers,
and in their sharing repay any debts they left.

Between the folk tradition, and the blues,
the 'race music' that grew thru Jim Crow laws,
paying your dues as a musician was one way
of paying off debt another musician left.

It all seems quite simple and logical.

The nearest I have come to seeing a ghost
was to see somebody very much alive
but with an with an incurable illness,
who was haunted to silence about it.
I knew him too little for him to speak. 
I knew he was 'gay and out',
he knew I was 'gay and in the closet',
a place where I haunted myself,
with who I wanted to be, and who I was not.

He had always been a big figure, well padded,
I fancy that a hug from him must have been bracing.
The last time I saw him all that was gone.
he face looked stricken, he was skin and bone,

No words were needed; his look said to me
'I have A.I.D.S. I don't have long to live'.

Incurable illness haunts the living, 
much more than debt unsettles the dead.
An incurable illness is the ghost
that haunts its host, it's carrier. 

It Was Thirty Years Ago Today; 3 - The Varieties Of Sexual Experience

This is part three of a four part memoir. For Part 1 please click here, for Part 2 please click here.

So there I was, in friendly lodgings, the old small town world in my head and a newer world around me that I liked, but I did not know how to feel like I was part of it. I was waiting for my letter from the NHS psychiatrist who I expected would invite me to be part of a group therapy experience. In the meanwhile I was trying to make my life seem useful whilst I found the paradoxical expectations of employers to be corrosive and absurd. I had my A4 pad to absorb the worst emotional blows that other people unwittingly gave me. 

It was in this period, between autumn 1990 and winter 1992, that I met the Franciscan monk who lived in a local flat on his own, he was on leave from his monastery and had been 'sent to work in the community'. I had a faith, like I assumed he had a faith. It turned out that he had similar problems to me, problems with putting empathy and appreciation into same sex sexual relations, where neither of us had been taught how to do that. One of his favourite videos was the 1973 Ken Russell film that put the 'grand' into 'grand guiginol', 'The Devils', a film which is still too dangerous today to be put out on home video in the form it's director intended it to be seen. It was both based on a true story, as accounted in English literature for in Aldous Huxely's 'The Devils', and a tale of seventeenth century religious hysteria where sex and religion combined in the greatest level of antipathy towards each other and misuse of power that anyone could conceive. I can't remember how he befriended me and I did not mind wanking him off a few times, in his flat. But I did wish that he was younger and more handsome than he was. In my A4 pad I was happy to file the experiences of meeting him so many times under 'mistaken charity'.

There were surely many other experiences too, both sexual and social, where I grew through the experiences, rather than being shrunk by them. The period 1988-92 is the one period of my adult life that I did not keep an everyday diary. Though as I have discovered looking back on the diaries that I kept, I had learned better than I realised at the time how to repeat the evasions that other people, particularly family, had taught me to live by. But now I was doing my best to correct these evasions, late in life, with the therapeutic journal.

Between 1988 and 1992 I had quite a lot of anonymous sex with other men, who valued anonymity as much as I had been taught to, though the sex happened less often than it had the previous decade. Somehow the need for the sex fell away, though I was slow to realise why; with hindsight it was obvious, I was physically and emotionally increasing my distance from my family. I still sought sex with random men in public toilets but with the new diary I could write about the sex if I wanted to, and also I could write about what was going on in my head that led up to me wanting the sex, and each time, well, the sex felt better because through writing I was learning to recognise why I wanted the sex and what I thought was best and worst about it. I began to recognise triggers for what they were rather than being unobservant of them. There was the experience of being close up with a well endowed body builder that was as overwhelmingly intense as it was brief, where I was happy with the brevity. Given more time I would not have known what to do with it. It was an old fantasy made that vivid in the brief time given to it, that the fantasy abated in my head after being experienced for real that once. 

Then there was the experience where after being a comfort to a man in a toilet cubicle that challenged my belief in mutual anonymity. I gave him oral sex and it was such a mutually tender exchange that he thanked me by name afterwards. When said my name at the end of the encounter I was so struck by his utterance that I did not notice that he withheld his name. I still remember enough of the details of the occasion even now, to look back with a certain fondness at the qualified anonymity of that occasion. it must have been between that occasion and the upkeep of the therapeutic diary that I thought to ring, and visit the local gay helpline, as an alternative to writing out my woes and worries when writing them out and keeping the sense of loss and inadequacy to myself seemed inadequate.

 

So, I am back at the public toilets and it is a cold, dark evening, 9th of February 1992. After several months of not going for anonymous sex I am gripped by the need to seek it and past caring as to why. If I am named by anyone as we have the sex then I have determined that I will sort that out after the event. I will learn afresh how to own the experience of being named when the name for what I was doing was so secret/anonymous.

I go in, it is cold and dark and the lights are out, the bulbs have been smashed or removed. There is a large disabled cubicle, two small regular sized cubicles and three urinals and they are all rather smelly. One of the toilets may be blocked, it is a guess as to which one it is. There is also a queue for the use of each facility with probably five men, including me, waiting in row against the wall, and nobody knows how many men in the cubicles. We knew better than to be surprised if when one man left a cubicle the door closed again, and after a few minutes more another man would come out and then the door would stay open. The men who stood against the wall in the dark were starting to sort out with each other what they came there for; anonymous sex in a public toilet. In the dark nobody can see anything so why wait for a space that is no more private? Only not everyone is sorting themselves out with the others in the queue. Some, well, don't want sex with who is there, and might want sex but in better weather and in natural light, or may they have lost their sexual appetite because of the smell. In the silence and timidity of inaction who knows what the men there want? Not even the men involved can say.

Find the fourth and final part of this short memoir here.

 

Valentine Day Picture Special (2)

This is for those for Deadheads for whom love
means a sense of risk where the skull
and lightning flash of original 'stealie',
designed by Owsley Winstanley III,
is given a heart where where it goes 
is likely to be decidedly messy.  

 

Valentine Day Picture Special

Though quite how this egg and spoon race ends
is for anyone to guess, as is who the winner might be. 

 

Very Germaine

When Germaine Greer wrote her early feminist books,
they came replete with details of female anatomy
that were neither detached nor pornographic, but scientific.
She showed and explained what so many shied away from
in tones that were intended to be factual, common sense.

To help her readers apply themselves more easily to her texts
she made her chapters short, so that busy housewives
who wanted to be informed could read her books
in their shortest breaks, or whilst sat upon the toilet.

For many women the time they felt was most theirs alone,
the time that nobody else wanted, was their time on the toilet.
Thus in short bursts women could push away their ignorance
about their bodies amid pushing away bodily wastes.

Her lesson was clear; never disown any part of you,
or any part of your day. The times we see as least useful
may be the times when our learning is at it's most personal. 

She wrote so her readers could retain the knowledge
even when they read just a little and not that often. 

With her chapters much shorter
than many other authors,
she sought the readers others did not,  
to educate in personal development. 

Complimentary Medicine

In the age of google, patients believing they know
 as much as their doctor is a common phenomenon.
Google has improved medicine, and choice, a lot.
But patients whose strengths compliment their doctors'
weaknesses is a phenomenon yet to be recognised. 

 

It Was Thirty Years Ago Today; 2 - Is This The Life I Really Wanted?

This is Part 2 of a four part memoir find Part 1 here. 

I would write four or five sides of writing longhand in an A4 pad each day, and having exhausted the words and thoughts I had left unsaid to other people then I would sleep much better than before, when I had no exit for the thoughts that went round my head.

Was this life of being unemployed/unwaged, waiting for group therapy, and filling my time as usefully as I could on my own a good life? It was as good a life as I could make for myself, and from the time after the last job I felt as if I had a free space. I left others to be more anxious on my behalf about my unemployment than I could bring myself to be. My family lived forty miles away. As far as my day to day life went, they might just as well been in another country. They did not even have a home telephone line. They could write, asking me to visit, or invite themselves to see me. But they did not like leaving the town they lived in, and tended when they did visit to think as if they were still where they had come from. I was now a stranger to the life I once had in that town. The best comment ever given to me about my leaving the town I grew up in was given to me when I returned for a weekend visit, and somebody who knew me closely observed that when I walked I walked with a straighter back than I did when I lived in the town.

In my previous life in the town my family lived in I had cottaged quite intensely, sufficiently intensely for me to be unaware of how habitual and personal to me the habit was. I had anonymous sex with men in public toilets from 1978-87. I left the town in January 1988. I was unaware of why I sought sex with unnamed men in public toilets, beyond that it was the only way of getting any sex at all. I partially aware that I was not as asexual as other people preferred to see me as being. I knew that it was impossible to expect even the most veiled explanation from anyone who expected me to be asexual as to why and how, by what sufficiency of grace, I should be confident about who I was whilst being asexual, or as they would say, celibate. Every attempt at broaching the discussion got blocked from revealing anything, by the answer to celibacy being seen to be marriage. Any discussion where the path to marriage included the process of courtship was denied. Courtship was seen as the temptation towards adultery because the courting couple were not married. And whilst gay sex had been officially de-criminalised-which meant that men could not be blackmailed for money because they had had gay sex-plenty of men blackmailed each other for further sex after the initial encounter, because all the language around homosexuality was frozen, but the desire remained. All thought, or action, towards sex out of marriage had be excluded from being discussion. Nor was sex within marriage ever discussable in realistic terms.

Even as I lived forty miles away from that reality, and I had lived away from it for two and a half years, it was a world that had filled my head with itself, leaving no room for anything else. Such that in the city I now lived in, where to succeed I had to succeed on my own terms, that old world would not extend or adapt to give me a new life.

End of Part 2. Please find Part three here, and find part four here. 

The Counters Keep On Counting

This is my 4000th blog entry,
on a blog that google tells me
has received nearly193,000 'hits',
where a 'hit' means a blog title
has been clicked upon,
when what I'd like more
is proof that it had been read.

I can't help but wonder
at what started
as a modest enterprise
using borrowed materials
where from day to day
I did not know
what I was going to say,
has now found it's own longevity.

I set out to be truthful,
more than popular,
and to test how that might work.

This blog may stop sometime,
they all do eventually.
It has taken many rests 
before restarting again,
but whatever the ride
it was never mine alone
I was never meant to know
The 200,000 who rode with me.

Here's to more characterful anonymity! 

It Was Thirty Years Ago Today; 1 - The Prelude

It was thirty years ago today that I started to put my life 'in the closet' behind me. I say 'started'. 'The closet' is for gay men what the unconscious is for Freudians; in both it might well be thought that we can clear it out by talking it though, such that we can never be surprises by it again. But whether it is the closet or the unconscious, thinking is what keeps it alive. Processing it is only ever partial. However much we have processed it, it always leaves something to surprise us with in future. Whatever the closet or the unconscious holds, and through thought releases, what remains never comes out quite the same way twice. 

But before describing the crunch moment, the pin moment that linked life before to life after as if they were different halves of a hinge, the reader should have the life immediately before. The story starts fifteen months earlier, in the Autumn of 1990. That was when I saw my GP, and I asked for therapy on the NHS and joined the queue for a place in a course of group therapy. Part of the process of being put in that queue was knowing that I could have no idea when I might get an appointment to be processed for a placement on a course. So whilst unemployed I started to do what I could by myself. 

From November 1990 I started a daily journal, where every day I forced out of myself, and on to a lined A4 pad, all the words and ideas I felt in my head that I had not share with anyone that day, all the words and ideas that others felt it was okay to not hear; they felt no need to hear them. These were words and feelings that I would normally have had to save for that hour a week with a therapist, had I got the individual therapy I had originally hoped for from my doctor straight away. But I was in this queue of unknown length and I had to find short cut through being so British as to think the queue was the point when I was in it. Filling an A4 pad with the intensity of my feelings was my way of enduring the queue, and refreshing myself so that by the time I was processed and allocated a group to join I could still remember what I had joined the queue for.

I wrote intensely personally, with no censor, such that the paper took the wanting out of the being made to wait. The paper I wrote on became the therapist I could afford and did not have to wait for. The paper I wrote on was true to itself when it reflected my words back to me, and that was all I needed it to be. Up to that time I barely knew how raw my feelings were, or for how long or how deeply I felt utterly dislocated from my surroundings.

The writing worked, after a fashion. After a short time the habit of writing down my feelings made it that I could say to other people what they needed to hear and I could think what I felt by myself with less of a sense of distance between the two. Not that improving how I felt changed my circumstances. I was unemployed, had a piss-poor work record, and if I applied myself in the right way I might get a last-in-first-out-low-pay temporary job, of which there were plenty. But the reason there plenty of such jobs was because everyone knew such work needed to be done, but the instability, short termism, and poor pay of such work made it that they preferred other people do those jobs. I thought the same way as those people, part of the time at least. The difference between me and many of those I knew who thought that way was that I had done two such jobs, if not more on supposedly more reliable government schemes. The people I knew who wanted this lesser employment for others all worked, worried, and had mortgages. I was unemployed, I rented a room in friendly house where the friendliness was a breathing space for me, and I was on benefits. I had been unemployed since the Autumn of 1990 when my last temporary job as a postman had ended.

I was helped by several therapy books. One in particular was 'Dibs; In Search Of The Self' by Virginia Axline (first published in 1964, my copy was a Penguin special paperback from later in the 1960's). It was a precise account of how a child who was totally blocked up by his own anger found release in spit of living in a world where the adult politeness he experienced left him feeling used and dismissed. He was given a course in 'play therapy' where he would be taken to a play pit, where he would play with the toys. As he played the therapist would gently talk to him about this situation or that family member, as she talked so he prompted himself to act out with the toys what he felt, with him being totally unaware of the therapeutic value of how the play pen acted as the space to expiate a lot of feelings of grief, anger, despair and so many other feelings that politeness forbade mention of. As I read the book so I wrote my own account in a parallel process on my own. I did not have a play pen, I had my A4 pad and sufficient space by myself to not have to self sensor my thoughts.

Some of my anger was about what was said about paid work and how people behaved. With work I felt the distance between rhetoric and reality was that vast, that self censoring, and that infuriating that it left me confounded and severely uncomfortable. Sarcasm and suicidal thoughts expressed as dour humour proved to be a weak respite from a life where promises fell apart well before delivery on them was due. Whilst I was officially unemployed I volunteered, serving lunches in dry house, a place where sober alcoholics could get a free meal, three hours a week, serving behind the bar in a Christian coffee bar on Friday night, five hours a week, where I served espressos and other non-alcoholic drinks to whoever appeared. I also undertook for an hour a week to visit an elderly disabled lady with a broad Sheffield accent from my local church who was bright and cheery in church, but who equally transparently expressed a sense of longing that was beyond the bounds of what other church folk thought it was apt for them to entertain. I did not have the fears or boundaries that other church members had, or their respectability.

I would write four or five sides of writing longhand in an A4 pad each day, and having exhausted the words and thoughts unsaid to other people, then I would sleep much better than when I had no exit for the thoughts that went round my head.

Was this life of being unemployed/unwaged, waiting for group therapy, and filling my time as usefully as I could on my own a good life? It was as good a life as I could make for myself, by myself. From the time after my last job had ended I felt as if I could use some free space. I left others to be more anxious on my behalf about my unemployment than I could bring myself to be. My family lived forty miles away. They may as well be in another country as far as my day to day life went. They did not even have a home telephone line. There was a shared phone for use by us all where I living, and if family had any urgent message for me, Mother would ring me from a public call box. Other than that they could write, asking me to visit, or invite themselves to see me. But they disliked leaving the town they lived in, and when any of them did visit they tended to think as if they were still where they had come from. I was now a stranger to the life I once had in that town. The best comment ever given to me about my leaving the town I grew up in was given to me when I returned for a weekend visit, and somebody who knew me closely observed that when I walked I walked with a straighter back than I did when I lived in the town.

In my previous life in the town my family lived in I had cottaged quite intensely, sufficiently intensely for me to be unaware of how habitual and personal to me the habit was. I had anonymous sex with men in public toilets from 1978-87. I left the town in January 1988. I was unaware of why I sought sex with unnamed men in public toilets, beyond that it was the only way of getting any sex at all. I was partially aware that I was not as asexual as other people preferred to see me as being. I knew that it was impossible to expect even the most veiled explanation from anyone who expected me to be asexual, as to why and how, by what sufficiency of grace, I should be confident about who I was whilst being asexual, or as they would rather say, celibate. Every attempt at broaching the subject of not being celibate whilst single would be blocked by the answer to celibacy being seen to be marriage. Any discussion where the path to marriage included the process of courtship was also denied me. Courtship was seen as the temptation towards adultery because the courting couple were not married. And whilst gay sex had been officially de-criminalised-which meant that men could not be blackmailed for money because they had had gay sex-plenty of men still blackmailed each other but the forced barter was for more sex after the initial encounter, rather than money. This happened the way it did because the language to describe homosexuality was frozen, but the desire remained-particularly in an alcohol culture like the one in the town I grew up in. All thought, or action, towards sex outside of marriage had be excluded from being discussed. Nor was sex within marriage ever discussable in realistic and empathetic terms.

Even as I lived forty miles away from that reality, and I had lived away from it for two and a half years, it was a world that still filled my head with itself, leaving no room for what was around me. Like the city I now lived in, where to succeed I had to succeed on my own terms. That old world would not extend or adapt to give me a new life.

End of Pt 1, please find Pt 2 here.   

Gonna Make The Mountains Be My Home

 

Patriotism Redefined

The bigger the scam
the more people it will take in,
where the greater reward
will the money taken from them.

That a scam is built on a lie is a given,
the only choice left is the covering reason,
and the best reason has always been
redefined and updated by patriotism. 

Great Turn Offs Of Our Time (24)

'Once and for all' is a phrase
used by disagreeable people
who can't win their arguments
and use the phrase to draw a line
under the latest disagreement
they have started, and cannot stop.

Only Eternity is 'Once and for all',
but only for those who believe in it.
And like all disagreeable people,
people who believe in eternity
need to believe that they are right,
and that they are the only right side
of what there is to be believed,
for one or all to believe anything.
.

Risk And Risk

I used to hitch lifts when I could,
where the roads were narrow
and drivers drove at speeds
where they they could stop,
where there were places
at the side of the road.

I made a substitute for a career
out of travelling hopefully,
whilst I was unemployed-
I had to do something
to will both my self,
and my reduced money,
to make both go further
than others predicted they should. 

I wanted to make the best
out of the less allotted to me.

I would always arrive somewhere,
even if where I arrived stopped short
of where I wanted to be.

All that ended with Covid,
when the risks were no longer
'Will I be late to get where I want to be',
or 'Why does this man want to feel my knee?
Am I his opportunity for a secret
and rather humourless exchange? 
The risks had changed
into something more serious,
where all strangers are a risk.
And the people we presumed to know
could not be trusted to bear their face value.   

The Wall Of Kindness

Jesus answered, and said unto them who were present,
“He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that
hath none. And he that hath meat, let him do likewise.” 

 

Luke Chapter 3 Verse 11. The spontaneity of Belfast
City Centre always surprises me, even
outside building sites they leave the means
for others to give and receive anonymously.
Long may Belfast show it's open heart
to those in need of such open-ness.  

Indigestible, That Is What You Are

I have seen renewed interest
in the writings of James Joyce,
Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf,
a century after their landmark works
were published. 

I can't mind Modernism in literature,
my problem is how difficult it is,
for the basic reader to grasp.

I can imagine that a century ago
Proust and Joyce accepted a literary duel;
I can write a sentence that is longer,
and is harder to digest, than your longest, 
your least digestible, sentence.

Each set to work in different languages,
each with mutually agreed translators.

The problem was that as each sought to win,
and impress the judges with their endeavour,
each got so immersed in writing of the sentence
that they lost themselves in competing to win the bet.

The bet got rewritten
as a celebration of the mark
each left on the world of literature.     

A Page Of A Diary From A Well Lived Life

 I had gone out chiefly to see old Dinny whose wife died early this morning. Mrs Leary, the fisherwoman, brought the news. Mary Dinny was a plain woman, with squinny eyes and snaggle teeth,; coming from the county Kildare, she was looked upon as a foreigner. Dinny and Mary loved one another very much but they were lonely for the four children who went very long abo to America. At first they wrote often and from time to time sent home little presents of money. They were "getting on fine; they were going to be married; they had babies; they were lucky to be in good places.". Then times were not so good. One by one they left off writing. Then perhaps a neighbour's son or daughter "out there" might send a word of news. After that, silence. I tried one way and another to trace them, but in vain. "If we c'd know how it is wid them ... if they be living or dead, or what way it is at all!".

The door was open, letting in a long beam of the westering sun. A turf fire smouldered on the hearth under the swinging kettle, a loaf' and a twist of sugar were on the table beside a battered tea-pot. The room was empty but for a couple of hens.

From the inner room came the sound of Dinny's voice. it was dim in there, for the pane of glass fixed into the wall, which did duty for a window, let in little light. The air was stale and acrid. Dinny sat on a box wedged between bed and wall; his gret head was on the pillow. Someone had shut his wife's squinny eyes and laid pennies on the lids; her arms, her toil-worn hands were lying stiffly either side of her. Her lips were drawn up showing the wolf-like fangs.

"Me darlin', me Darlin'," the old man was murmuring, "Me lovely one ... whatever'll happen me widout ye?". he looked up and saw me, "Here's the ladyship come to see us" he said to the white thing on the bed, getting up. Poor Dinny! Poor dazed Dinny! He squeezed along the wall and stood beside me at the foot of the bed; we looked at her together. "An" she  to be tuk from me that have the great need of her ... 'tis a quare thng," he said. "An' what will I do ... och! what will I do alone in the house wid meself?"

One of his neighbours has come in to make his tea; there is minced beef in a jar which James McCarthy brought from the well of his car, to be spread on his bread, or to be heated in the embers. Katie will comfort Dinny with her homely words better than I can. He comes out to the car with me, a dirty dishevelled old man, with fine manner for his race. "you'll forgive me for me being a bit moidhered , " he said as he put the rug over my knees. Then he looked up to the angry sky. "Get ye home, James McCarthy,", he said "For there is a great rain a comin' on the dark wind of night, a dark wind an' a great rain, an gloom all over the world. 

The above is practically a short story and Ireland circa 1900 in microcosm. But it is just one page from the diary of an Anglo/Irish country lady, published in 1998. It was edited by her grandson, the writer Jeremy Sandford. 'Mary Carberry's West Cork Journal 1898-1901' is a well respected book in Irish studies. It describes rural life, the ease with which pietism combines with wealth as easily as it works with poverty, and describes the gilded life of the landed classes with a gentleness that half makes the reader think we could go back there, and it would not be so bad for everyone, even though that life was for the few. It has compassion as it's underlying narrative even when oprobium might seem apt in describing certain characters.  

Picture Set Of The Month - February - Doorways Of Caylus

The point about the doorways of Caylus

is that you never know who lives behind them 

 

Or what they would have to say - they are very quiet that way.