This is a response to a comment left in the comment is free section of the Guardian. The commentator hailed Ms. Jackson's remarks on Lady Thatcher as "Dignified".
These are my thoughts in response, in my reply to him.
"As a liberal, Jackson's speech may have been truthful - As one of "Thatcher's Children", and growing up in a family directly hit by the effects of the miner's dispute, then later affected by Clause 28 as young gay man, I have no truck with Thatcherism.
But Glenda Jackson's shabby homily was, perhaps unsurprisingly, unadulterated staginess and second rate amateur dramatics. Now I understand why she switched professions.
With respect, your usage of the word "dignified" is conceivably misplaced:
Definition of Dignified:
To invest with honour
To exalt
To lend an air of dignity to (as in dignify with the name of)
Ms. Jackson's PR stunt was contained no elements of Dignity. What it revealed was the stark truth that she had no sense of understanding, unlike many of her brethren in the political agenda of all colours and stripes, that regardless of one's own feelings regarding another politician's policies or agendas, they are human beings, with families, thoughts, emotions, faults, follies and qualities. The moment Ms. Jackson broadcasted this tacky wheeze, she immediately disposed of her humanity.
I have a serious illness which sees me fighting against ATOS for ESA and DLA, and for which I also fiercely advocate against. I have no issue with protest, indeed it is essentially the only way small voices are heard. But the death of Lady Thatcher has become a conduit through which people are venting misappropriated frustration, and a dead woman strung up on high has become the focal point of the anger many feel towards this car crash coalition in the manner in which it has dismantled the Welfare State and left the most vulnerable to be hung out to dry. I feel this anger too, but I think I know where it should be directed.
Collective hate and childish revelling witnessed at the likes of a song from a kid's film getting to number one, about a witch is not only misogynistic, it is simply mindless spite - again the immediate dispensing of humanity in a fast switch for a puerile, foolish titter at the death of an old woman who ceased to be relevant politically 23 years since.
No, there was nothing "Dignified", or come to that humane, about Glenda Jackson's naff, pompous yet ultimately throwaway little "broadcast". It was simply tacit encouragement for others to engage in the kind of actions, devoid of critical thought, reasoned analysis or humane reflection - replaced instead with sheep mentality and venomous invective. Hysterical hatred is the poor relative to a reasoned debate and protest with peace as it's intent - even if anger is it's motivator, unless one wants to simply tip their humane sensibilities down the plug hole."
Saturday 13 April 2013
Thursday 11 April 2013
Phantom or Friend
Mental Illness could almost be the Leprosy of the developed, modern world. In response to those who suffer it, many are reduced to a paralytic silence. Some, induced into insensible platitudes. Others simply turn their backs. A few venture to breach the gap of confusion and decode the puzzle within, and attempt to take the time out to understand. But it is only a few. Unearthing them isn't about pot-luck - it's far more atomised than that. Often the people you imagine will reach out, don't, and on the extremely rare occasion, one is surprised by the solitary individual who does.
This can be problematic for the individual with Mental Illness. This is because once the clarion call is heard that all is not well, a spiral of isolation can quickly ensue. The troubled person reaches out for hands he or she assumes will be there, to discover they have been hastily withdrawn. This compounds the individual's sense of isolation, and increases their perceptions of the stigmas attached to mental illness. From the perspective of the unwell individual, very frequently the most distressing element of all of this, is that those recoiled hands are from those they assumed were allies, friends and often family. Phantom hands. Fair Weather Hands. Accompanied by a deafening silence.
There are other illnesses which still provoke these kinds of responses - HIV still has that throttling ability to torpefy and immobilise other's empathic or active reactions. There a quite a few people I've spoken to with HIV who have recanted that unnecessarily predictable but disheartening observation, "When I was diagnosed with HIV, I learned who my true friends were".
Mental illness, in a completely different orbit of pathology to HIV, is slightly more insidious. This isn't to say there aren't people who don't have a completely misplaced, ill-educated fear of HIV in the Western World, there are many, many who do. But it's an equal, but different type of fear. In the minds of some, they feel mental illness has an almost Gothic, very-ever-so-slightly-sinister Mad Man quality about it - an unknown quantity. Which is sadly a complete inversion of the truth. Those with mental illness are more than seven times as likely to be a victim of abuse, harassment and violence than an individual without mental illness. The overwhelming majority of those who have committed serious violent crime in the UK are perfectly, utterly sane.
It can be difficult to reach out to a person when they are suffering mentally. There is a remarkably simple reason for this. When a person is psychologically troubled, or their thoughts are fractured, their mood is extremely low, or whatever is driving their distress, the entire ebb and flow of communication alters. And dealing with this takes patience and understanding, and sometimes shrugging stuff off.
I lived for almost three years with a man with Unipolar-Bipolar Disorder (basically meaning he never became depressed, but often became psychotic and manic concurrently), and Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). He was an extraordinary person in many ways, but it took Herculean patience (about one of the only virtues I've got) to weather his cycling between normality and mania, hospitals and home. But he was my friend and my lover, and I owed it to him to try and see beyond the illness when he was well, and see him through the illness when he wasn't. In the end it wasn't the illness that spelled the end of our relationship, but something else entirely. I will never regret my time with Lindsay, because to many people he was nothing but a nuisance, and many times I silently felt I could have concurred with that view. But I've learned with hindsight that the nuisance was the illness and the chaos and distress it caused in Lindsay's life, not the person.
And, you know, very often, people with mental illness, have an awful lot to give - time, love, a listening ear, and whether they find lasting wellness or not, can be a worthwhile addition in a person's life. Mental Illness will affect one in three people in their lifetime. That's a three sided die. It's extremely doubtful that a person having gone through mental illness would ever pull their hand away in response to the feel of the fingertips of someone else in distress. It does that to you.
This can be problematic for the individual with Mental Illness. This is because once the clarion call is heard that all is not well, a spiral of isolation can quickly ensue. The troubled person reaches out for hands he or she assumes will be there, to discover they have been hastily withdrawn. This compounds the individual's sense of isolation, and increases their perceptions of the stigmas attached to mental illness. From the perspective of the unwell individual, very frequently the most distressing element of all of this, is that those recoiled hands are from those they assumed were allies, friends and often family. Phantom hands. Fair Weather Hands. Accompanied by a deafening silence.
There are other illnesses which still provoke these kinds of responses - HIV still has that throttling ability to torpefy and immobilise other's empathic or active reactions. There a quite a few people I've spoken to with HIV who have recanted that unnecessarily predictable but disheartening observation, "When I was diagnosed with HIV, I learned who my true friends were".
Mental illness, in a completely different orbit of pathology to HIV, is slightly more insidious. This isn't to say there aren't people who don't have a completely misplaced, ill-educated fear of HIV in the Western World, there are many, many who do. But it's an equal, but different type of fear. In the minds of some, they feel mental illness has an almost Gothic, very-ever-so-slightly-sinister Mad Man quality about it - an unknown quantity. Which is sadly a complete inversion of the truth. Those with mental illness are more than seven times as likely to be a victim of abuse, harassment and violence than an individual without mental illness. The overwhelming majority of those who have committed serious violent crime in the UK are perfectly, utterly sane.
It can be difficult to reach out to a person when they are suffering mentally. There is a remarkably simple reason for this. When a person is psychologically troubled, or their thoughts are fractured, their mood is extremely low, or whatever is driving their distress, the entire ebb and flow of communication alters. And dealing with this takes patience and understanding, and sometimes shrugging stuff off.
I lived for almost three years with a man with Unipolar-Bipolar Disorder (basically meaning he never became depressed, but often became psychotic and manic concurrently), and Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). He was an extraordinary person in many ways, but it took Herculean patience (about one of the only virtues I've got) to weather his cycling between normality and mania, hospitals and home. But he was my friend and my lover, and I owed it to him to try and see beyond the illness when he was well, and see him through the illness when he wasn't. In the end it wasn't the illness that spelled the end of our relationship, but something else entirely. I will never regret my time with Lindsay, because to many people he was nothing but a nuisance, and many times I silently felt I could have concurred with that view. But I've learned with hindsight that the nuisance was the illness and the chaos and distress it caused in Lindsay's life, not the person.
And, you know, very often, people with mental illness, have an awful lot to give - time, love, a listening ear, and whether they find lasting wellness or not, can be a worthwhile addition in a person's life. Mental Illness will affect one in three people in their lifetime. That's a three sided die. It's extremely doubtful that a person having gone through mental illness would ever pull their hand away in response to the feel of the fingertips of someone else in distress. It does that to you.
Sunday 7 April 2013
The Debate That Opened A Door.
Last week, in a rather heated debate with a cherished friend and a friend of her's, I suddenly realised how one tend's to feel they are part of the world they inhabit, and know it too, but with it came a risk that this knowledge, imagination, and reality are based on somewhat precarious ideologies.
I consider myself, in my own world, to be perfectly "normal". Many of my friends remark that they perhaps feel I don't quite fit that descriptor, but like me, they might feel that nobody is normal. I secretly think that none of my friends and family are anything approaching normality, and I hope they would receive that as a compliment. What is the gauge of normality? Even embracing the miasma of neuroses, which most of us possess, yet many hide, or the rainbow of psychiatric disorders, the cast chosen as normal, by a massive trial, stood before us on a stage would, probably look and behave, well, as un-normal as you or I.
The most unprepossessing, ordinary, urbane, even boring people can be abnormal, simply in their excess of their boringness. I do know one extremely boring person, so fascinatingly, tediously stultifying, that he transcends Mr. Average and becomes instead a human barbiturate. That surely can't be boring? He is a kind-hearted, well intentioned person, but his every motivation becomes an arduous romp through a thick soup of boredom. If he attempts to tell a joke, you know it will it be a found Christmas Cracker affair, circa 1973. If he shows you his holiday photographs, they have all been taken by an unwitting tourist, of our friend, pulling the same bored expression, stood afore a variety of oddly boring backdrops - like a parking meter, or a funeral directors, or perhaps if he's feeling a little bit excited, an Ice Cream Van. In being boring he has actually made himself a curiosity.
Boringness put another way could be caused by a severe lack of imagination. Imagination is not only creative fuel, it's conversational fuel, thought fuel. And having too much can be paralysing if taken to extremes, where imagination rules and realism is reduced to a few neurones in the brain, screaming "For God's Sake You Idiot, What On Earth Are You Thinking?" My school reports always picked up on my fecund mental creativity, but they also picked up on my lack of self-controls, often worded in excoriating terms. I love creativity, but on my terms and my terms only. An extract from a school report: "Recently the children were asked to make clay snakes. Matthew spread his clay all over the floor". Perhaps if they'd asked "the children" to spread the clay all over the floor, I would have made a clay snake, or a clay porcupine, perhaps.
Childhood does so much to inform imagination, and I understand a little better now why my mind was left wander in all manner of directions, to creatively explode outward into to the clouds above, the rolling woodlands, the endless fields and rivers. And my direct surroundings affected my imagination too. We weren't a wealthy family, just comfortable, buy we did have an acre of gardens, with outhouses, old cucumber houses, chicken sheds, and what was once another house, at the bottom of our garden, which became a garage. Along with two green-fingered parents, well tended gardens, and a plum and apple orchard and a garden my brother and I had for our own devices with a gigantic fort-like climbing frame that straddled the stream below it. It remains in my mind a kind of Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie part of my life - deeply whimsical, where my body as well as mind were as free as a bird. A freedom never challenged by my parents - winter or summer, as long as we were "in" by the time darkness came, all was well.
My mental illness, I don't believe is caused by an excess of thinking too much, or creativity - though I recognise the colour and contrast are turned up to max. And there are certainly times where my imagination hinders it. Because now a weird kind of reversal has occurred. My mind is still allowed to run free, but because I don't go out, my brain has to create the imagery itself. And of course in the real world, you can reach out and touch that shadow, and realise it's a shadow. You can not stick your hand into your mind and do the same.
Trying to begin to untangle our perceptions of the world around us is a fundamental question philosophers would ask themselves. But to begin to understand ourselves this can not be separated from the above process, and this is something I learned last week. To begin to understand this seemingly fathomless question, perhaps, for myself at least, I have to observe as much as I dream.
I consider myself, in my own world, to be perfectly "normal". Many of my friends remark that they perhaps feel I don't quite fit that descriptor, but like me, they might feel that nobody is normal. I secretly think that none of my friends and family are anything approaching normality, and I hope they would receive that as a compliment. What is the gauge of normality? Even embracing the miasma of neuroses, which most of us possess, yet many hide, or the rainbow of psychiatric disorders, the cast chosen as normal, by a massive trial, stood before us on a stage would, probably look and behave, well, as un-normal as you or I.
The most unprepossessing, ordinary, urbane, even boring people can be abnormal, simply in their excess of their boringness. I do know one extremely boring person, so fascinatingly, tediously stultifying, that he transcends Mr. Average and becomes instead a human barbiturate. That surely can't be boring? He is a kind-hearted, well intentioned person, but his every motivation becomes an arduous romp through a thick soup of boredom. If he attempts to tell a joke, you know it will it be a found Christmas Cracker affair, circa 1973. If he shows you his holiday photographs, they have all been taken by an unwitting tourist, of our friend, pulling the same bored expression, stood afore a variety of oddly boring backdrops - like a parking meter, or a funeral directors, or perhaps if he's feeling a little bit excited, an Ice Cream Van. In being boring he has actually made himself a curiosity.
Boringness put another way could be caused by a severe lack of imagination. Imagination is not only creative fuel, it's conversational fuel, thought fuel. And having too much can be paralysing if taken to extremes, where imagination rules and realism is reduced to a few neurones in the brain, screaming "For God's Sake You Idiot, What On Earth Are You Thinking?" My school reports always picked up on my fecund mental creativity, but they also picked up on my lack of self-controls, often worded in excoriating terms. I love creativity, but on my terms and my terms only. An extract from a school report: "Recently the children were asked to make clay snakes. Matthew spread his clay all over the floor". Perhaps if they'd asked "the children" to spread the clay all over the floor, I would have made a clay snake, or a clay porcupine, perhaps.
Childhood does so much to inform imagination, and I understand a little better now why my mind was left wander in all manner of directions, to creatively explode outward into to the clouds above, the rolling woodlands, the endless fields and rivers. And my direct surroundings affected my imagination too. We weren't a wealthy family, just comfortable, buy we did have an acre of gardens, with outhouses, old cucumber houses, chicken sheds, and what was once another house, at the bottom of our garden, which became a garage. Along with two green-fingered parents, well tended gardens, and a plum and apple orchard and a garden my brother and I had for our own devices with a gigantic fort-like climbing frame that straddled the stream below it. It remains in my mind a kind of Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie part of my life - deeply whimsical, where my body as well as mind were as free as a bird. A freedom never challenged by my parents - winter or summer, as long as we were "in" by the time darkness came, all was well.
My mental illness, I don't believe is caused by an excess of thinking too much, or creativity - though I recognise the colour and contrast are turned up to max. And there are certainly times where my imagination hinders it. Because now a weird kind of reversal has occurred. My mind is still allowed to run free, but because I don't go out, my brain has to create the imagery itself. And of course in the real world, you can reach out and touch that shadow, and realise it's a shadow. You can not stick your hand into your mind and do the same.
Trying to begin to untangle our perceptions of the world around us is a fundamental question philosophers would ask themselves. But to begin to understand ourselves this can not be separated from the above process, and this is something I learned last week. To begin to understand this seemingly fathomless question, perhaps, for myself at least, I have to observe as much as I dream.
Tuesday 26 March 2013
I'm Alright Jack Has Done A Runner.
Last year was the worst year since the first recession hit in 2008 in terms of redundancies and failing business. In the retail sector alone, 4000 stores closed their doors, leaving over 50'000 people jobless. This is just one area of business.
There is one thing worse in life than apathy, and that's sleepwalking. Whilst I don't want to be a harbinger of doom in this blog, what I would like to point out is that there used to be a lot of people who snugly fitted into the slot called "I'm Alright Jack". This blog is a warning if nothing else, that "I'm Alright Jack" doesn't exist any longer. Jack has done a runner.
Those who are in employment currently should seriously be counting their lucky stars. But what concerns me are the amount of those in that group, who are like mannequins coming off a production line - forward facing, looking neither left or right, with a rictus grin on their faces, and certainly not daring to look down.
I'm not able to work at the moment through illness, and if anyone in employment thinks this is a cushy number they are living in a parallel universe. Because of the level of the stress applied by ATOS, the company outsourced by the DWP to process those seeking ESA - disability benefit - I had a mental breakdown that was so severe I'm still recovering from it. So, that gives you some indication of how stressful they've purposefully made the system.
A lot of people in employment don't think that the draconian measures put in place with regard to the bedroom tax, universal credit, capped housing benefit, the evidence of league tables with regard to JSA - meaning that every Jobcentre Advisor has to eject a percentile of it's clients into penury, regardless of how hard they've been looking for work - so their income of £67 per week is reduced to £0 per week, simply to hit targets to satisfy Jobcentre managers doesn't effect them.
The fact that Government has a mantra of "We Have To End This Culture Of "Something For Nothing"".
Ponder on that statement for a moment. Then think about a man who might have worked loyally for twenty years, paid substantial PAYE, taxes and NI. His company goes under. He's rendered jobless.
Then a message is given to him loud and clear that those who claim Jobseeker's Allowance must "work" for it, when he's already paid for the right to be looked after in his time of desperate need. Was it his fault the Americans played Snap with the Sub-Prime Market? Was the deficit his fault? He's being told he shouldn't get something for nothing, when his taxes have paid for many years worth of Jobseeker's Allowance.
And now he finds he is the unwitting player in a game of Russian Roulette as every time he enters his Jobcentre, he'll have no idea whether he's for "sanctions" (no money), simply to satisfy these previously secret league tables, pushing him into the gutter.
What bothers me is that I know that too many people are blithely ignoring the warning signs, even though they're employed. But what does being employed mean? It means you have a job today. And maybe next week. And just because your own company seems to be in good in health, what about the company that owns it? We are all walking on very thin ice. And when that's the case, we need to have our eyes and ears open.
I post a fair amount of stuff on to Facebook, some of it inane, some of it relating to what I've been talking about here. And I've noticed a pattern. None of my friends or family are unintelligent people, yet they almost always comment on the banal, and never, ever comment on the articles I post up about what is actually happening, and what the threats around us are. The only exception to this is my blog.
This worries me. It isn't because I have a political view I'm trying to peddle. I don't think there's much to choose from politically. But I do have an alarm bell going off socially. And it's ringing very loudly.
Businesses don't slowly fail these days, they simply vanish without trace. So a person or a family who one month were living in relative comfort, the next month are visiting food banks. This is no exaggeration and it reflects exactly why we all need to be far more aware - if for nobody else's sakes than our family's. And if you want to go by the sensible, and sensitive view that we measure the standard of our society by how we treat the most needy and vulnerable, then something - many things - have to change. And for them to change you have to be aware of them before they hit you around the head.
Because I'm alright Jack isn't alright at all, it's downright scary, and we owe not just to ourselves but to our society and to those who have fallen to the bottom of it, to stop sleepwalking through it.
There is one thing worse in life than apathy, and that's sleepwalking. Whilst I don't want to be a harbinger of doom in this blog, what I would like to point out is that there used to be a lot of people who snugly fitted into the slot called "I'm Alright Jack". This blog is a warning if nothing else, that "I'm Alright Jack" doesn't exist any longer. Jack has done a runner.
Those who are in employment currently should seriously be counting their lucky stars. But what concerns me are the amount of those in that group, who are like mannequins coming off a production line - forward facing, looking neither left or right, with a rictus grin on their faces, and certainly not daring to look down.
I'm not able to work at the moment through illness, and if anyone in employment thinks this is a cushy number they are living in a parallel universe. Because of the level of the stress applied by ATOS, the company outsourced by the DWP to process those seeking ESA - disability benefit - I had a mental breakdown that was so severe I'm still recovering from it. So, that gives you some indication of how stressful they've purposefully made the system.
A lot of people in employment don't think that the draconian measures put in place with regard to the bedroom tax, universal credit, capped housing benefit, the evidence of league tables with regard to JSA - meaning that every Jobcentre Advisor has to eject a percentile of it's clients into penury, regardless of how hard they've been looking for work - so their income of £67 per week is reduced to £0 per week, simply to hit targets to satisfy Jobcentre managers doesn't effect them.
The fact that Government has a mantra of "We Have To End This Culture Of "Something For Nothing"".
Ponder on that statement for a moment. Then think about a man who might have worked loyally for twenty years, paid substantial PAYE, taxes and NI. His company goes under. He's rendered jobless.
Then a message is given to him loud and clear that those who claim Jobseeker's Allowance must "work" for it, when he's already paid for the right to be looked after in his time of desperate need. Was it his fault the Americans played Snap with the Sub-Prime Market? Was the deficit his fault? He's being told he shouldn't get something for nothing, when his taxes have paid for many years worth of Jobseeker's Allowance.
And now he finds he is the unwitting player in a game of Russian Roulette as every time he enters his Jobcentre, he'll have no idea whether he's for "sanctions" (no money), simply to satisfy these previously secret league tables, pushing him into the gutter.
What bothers me is that I know that too many people are blithely ignoring the warning signs, even though they're employed. But what does being employed mean? It means you have a job today. And maybe next week. And just because your own company seems to be in good in health, what about the company that owns it? We are all walking on very thin ice. And when that's the case, we need to have our eyes and ears open.
I post a fair amount of stuff on to Facebook, some of it inane, some of it relating to what I've been talking about here. And I've noticed a pattern. None of my friends or family are unintelligent people, yet they almost always comment on the banal, and never, ever comment on the articles I post up about what is actually happening, and what the threats around us are. The only exception to this is my blog.
This worries me. It isn't because I have a political view I'm trying to peddle. I don't think there's much to choose from politically. But I do have an alarm bell going off socially. And it's ringing very loudly.
Businesses don't slowly fail these days, they simply vanish without trace. So a person or a family who one month were living in relative comfort, the next month are visiting food banks. This is no exaggeration and it reflects exactly why we all need to be far more aware - if for nobody else's sakes than our family's. And if you want to go by the sensible, and sensitive view that we measure the standard of our society by how we treat the most needy and vulnerable, then something - many things - have to change. And for them to change you have to be aware of them before they hit you around the head.
Because I'm alright Jack isn't alright at all, it's downright scary, and we owe not just to ourselves but to our society and to those who have fallen to the bottom of it, to stop sleepwalking through it.
Monday 25 February 2013
Heroin: Why I Understand It's Allure.
If there is one form of suffering that almost creatures, apart from masochists, wish to escape from, it is pain. As humans, it is a universal, primal reaction to snatch our hand out of fire, to reflexively shield the vulnerable parts of our body - our face, for example, if we are under attack. The simple act of blinking is a pain avoidance mechanism.
There are a small - a very small - minority of people who have such control over their thoughts and their mind's interpretation of pain that they can sublimate these terrible signals to a higher plateau - above the range of sensation, through meditation and disciplined thought control.
When I had a stroke in 2005 and was briefly on an assessment ward before being moved to the Neurology Unit, there was a very elderly gentleman who was in the late stages of terminal bone cancer. Unfortunately, certain forms of bone cancer are known to be one of the most painful of cancers to endure. I watched silently as he repeatedly refused Diacetylmorphine (Heroin) or Morphine, offered on seemingly countless occasions by nurses, doctors and consultants. I heard him explain to a doctor that he didn't need pain relief as he had studied meditation for forty years, and he could merely think the pain away. The doctor, and the other medical staff were completely dumbfounded. He was completely at rest. I have never seen this before or since, and have seen people die of both AIDS related illness and cancer in abject pain.
A cruel juxtaposition of this can be read in Christopher Hitchens, "The Missionary Position". This searingly honest, and merciless book concerning Mother Teresa, paints this woman in a rather different light to the radiant, saint-like woman of kind heart that the Catholic Church sold to the world. In one horrendous excerpt, an inspector had gone to one of her Homes for The Dying, and had observed Mother Teresa tending to a man in his last agonising hours. They had an unspoken, but clear policy of not administering drugs such as morphine, and only basic over the counter medication, such as Ibuprofen was given. In a gut wrenching exchange, a dying man implored Mother Teresa for his pain to cease, to which she replied, "Ah, the pain you feel is Jesus kissing your body". He said in response, "Well, will you please ask him to stop".
As Britons, we are possibly the most fortunate country in the world with regard to our approach to pain relief. Much of this stems from the Palliative Care Movement, which was pioneered in the UK, and spread to other countries from here. And from Palliative Care, many of the drugs that were once reserved for the dying are now common place medications in treating acute and chronic pain conditions. Whilst for some of the older population, drugs such as Morphine still retain a stigma: that of hastening death, which is an untruth based on the principle of "double effect" seen in patients at the very end of their life. The basic concept being that extremely high doses of Morphine or Diamorphine (Heroin) and sedatives are needed to relieve end of life suffering, without the intention of hastening death, even though the chance of hastening death may remain a small possibility. However, overall evidence suggests that because tolerance has developed to such an extent by this stage to these high doses of drugs, the doctrine of double effect is extremely rarely invoked. One could say, in patients who are in great pain and psychic distress in these very final hours, that, quietly, a certain amount of clinical discretion is brought into practice.
Compared to France, who have always had an almost sadistically tight-fisted approach to pain-relief, or America, a country that relies almost exclusively on synthetic opiates compounded with Ibuprofen or Paracetamol (to deter abuse, apart from Fentanyl and OxyContin - both slow release drugs administered in different ways, the latter a tablet which, when abused is crushed and snorted), because of their infamous "War On Drugs" that wiped out almost all natural and semi-synthetic opiates and made them completely illegal, apart from Morphine, Britain has an extremely docile attitude towards Opiates and Opioids. It is one of only a few countries in the world that uses Diamorphine (Heroin) for non-terminal illness.
What makes Opioids (a catch-all term for all opiates) such interesting drugs is that they have only a couple of physiological effects on the body. The first, and most obvious is they slow down what's called peristalsis, or the movement of the intestines. The net result of this is constipation. The other effect is more profound but when taken medicinally, not problematic usually - they depress your respiratory system. They also give you a dry mouth and pin prick pupils. But they don't work on a physiological level when it comes to killing pain. Paracetamol does, by it's inhibition of COX, Aspirin does, by thinning the blood, Ibuprofen does by means of it's anti-inflammatory action.
Opioids, like Cannabis, Alcohol, Cocaine, Ecstasy, Amphetamine, and so on, works due to it's psychoactive properties. In other words, it's all in the head. And that gives away a clue as to why it is not only rather good at killing physical pain, but psychic and emotional pain too. Opioids work by sleight of hand. In a nutshell, and to put it quite crudely, they work by making you feel high. This is the good side and, and at exactly the same time, the bad side of Opioids. I've had recourse over the last seven years to take Dihydrocodeine, the next drug down in the pain ladder pain relief scale from Morphine. In fact, I've been on it more than off it. At one point I became horrendously addicted to it. I'm having to take it again now, whilst I await my operation on my teeth and jaw, and for a while after whilst it heals. Thankfully, I got the message, and I don't want to do another Cold Turkey again. They are horrible.
Because opioids, especially moderately strong, or strong ones, such as Dihydrocodeine and above, relieve pain, relieve anxiety, make you relaxed, make you feel warm, make all your arms and legs and tummy feel warm and fuzzy, as well as your head, they take away all your horrible worry loops and neuroses, when you are suddenly deprived of them, you get all the reverse symptoms to the above. And that's just Dihydrocodeine. I wouldn't have got through the last two weeks without them, because, most people can't stick toothache for more than a few days. I've had severe toothache in three teeth since last August.
I thank God that he invented the Opium Poppy. There would be so much terrible suffering in the world without it. Ask Mother Teresa. But it's also caused untold misery, and thousands and thousands of thousands of deaths. People chewing their Fentanyl Patches to get high, people dying from paracetamol toxicity because they're addicted to the small amount of Hydrocodone in the tablet. People dying from septicaemia through using dirty needles, or gangrene because they are riddled with with thrombosis' because they've run out of places to stick a needle. People dying from anaphylactic shock because they've tried to inject a very innocent drug called codeine.
But I can understand the allure, and I thank God that I've never known or been in that orbit of people who take Heroin. Because then they usually end up on Methadone, which is even worse. I don't look down my nose on anyone. I've made far too many blunders in my life to give me any right to do that. It's just the world of Heroin is a place of abject desperation, a place of chasing an ever receding rainbow, of ever diminishing returns. And a horrendously hard scrabble back up the hill to normality. But I can understand how people get there. And it is much easier than you might imagine.
Posted with BlogsySaturday 23 February 2013
DENTIST DISASTER NUMBER 1
Some People. Some People can't ever open a can with a tin opener. Some People can't drive from one end of a city to another with developing some form of minor road rage, or at least a little bit of frothing at the mouth. Some People can't help but avoid the cracks in the pavement as they walk down the street, so as to avoid triggering some unforeseen, yet terrible event. Some People, like me, can't have a procedure with a dentist without something going horribly wrong.
In the wonderfully charming and pleasant world of "nude modelling" (cough) that I undertook whilst I was studying sound engineering, you got to meet some lovely people... Well, no you didn't actually, most of the photographers were ok, but the other models thought were all Mark Owen from Take That. I actually found it hard to tell what they looked like and it was amazing they could keep their heads up with the poundage of foundation and mascara they wore. I thought they were more Atomic Kitten than Boy Band, I kept my thoughts to myself - I didn't tell them I had teeth like a donkey - as one of them said to me. I wanted to scrape "BITCH" on the grouting, I mean foundation, on his forehead with a sharp stick.
Around this time I developed a nasty abscess, and as usual, I had absolutely no money, or should that read - absolutely no concept of money. Many Warner Bros Cartoon ideas went through my mind - should I pull out the nasty tooth with pliers, tie some string to the door and get a friend to punch me in the face? But no, it had to be a dentist.
I eventually found one on Derby Road. It looked like it had been lifted out of one of those "working museums", those places that are like time-warp towns, like Blists Hill in Shropshire, where all the shops are period Victorian, and they have chemists and bakers and stuff. This dentists was more like circa 1950. I think his last customer had been 1952.
I let myself in, expecting to find a kindly receptionist behind a desk, but there was just a hallway with some very dusty looking seats and small coffee table. I'm sure someone must have heard me come in, because I heard footsteps above my head. I sat down and picked up a copy of a woman's magazine. It was from the mid 1980's. I was beginning to feel very uneasy.
Then, from above came an a extremely tall, slightly stopped man with rimmed glasses running down the stairs. I jumped up out of my chair. He said he was pleased to meet me, in an icky kind of go away, kind of way. I thought dental treatment was free, but he explained that it wasn't. I was in so much pain and after a lot of bartering he agreed he would take out my tooth for £10 and that in exchange for my home address and telephone number I could give him the money when I got paid. By this point I wouldn't have cared if Tufty the Squirrel had pulled the bloody thing out... Until I saw his treatment room.
I'm sure at the beginning of the 50's the esteemed dentist's treatment room would have been the height of futuristic dentistry. His dentist's console looked like a cross between a spaceship and a Cadillac that had been left out in the rain for years. The big arm with the light had rust all over it, the bowl for washing your mouth out was rust-riddled, the floor was dirty, the leather reclining chair had a huge wear split from top to bottom. Worse still, some of his instruments weren't clean and some of them were rusty.
I thought the only way of combatting this was to think about when I was a kid and all the things I'd eaten. Like when my brother had promised me 5p for every tadpole I'd swallow, so I swallowed about 25 of them. And he promised a few French Francs if I bit the head off a caterpillar and I did. Suffice to say I never saw any money.
Things got even weirder through the extraction. Suddenly, he be-straddled me, basically sitting on my crotch as he tried to pull my tooth out. Just at that moment, a shabby looking man came in. Wheeling a pushbike, which he propped up against the units in the treatment room and began chatting to the dentist. The dentist periodically stopped yanking on my half disengaged tooth to yak to this guy, as tried groan at him to get on with it. Then, the man, leaving his pushbike where it was, left through the back of the treatment room never to be seen again.
When the dentist had finished, I noticed my face seemed number than usual but didn't pay much attention, I tried to say than you of sorts, but my mouth wouldn't open and close properly because of the anaesthetic, and I started to make my way home.
I was feeling so much better, simply because I couldn't feel my face, and as I passed the shops on Lenton Boulevard I took my time and looked in the shop windows. But then I noticed people were acting strangely. They had frightened expressions on their faces. A woman walked past with a small girl and she pulled the girl away from me. Someone else laughed. People sat in the hairdressers all turned and stared. I was completely nonplussed. Even as I walked up Church Lane, a couple crossed looked at me in horror and crossed the road.
I finally got back home, feeling a mixture of confusion and relief. I sat down on the sofa to take off my trainers and that's when I noticed blood - on my t-shirt. I went into the bathroom, and recoiled myself. I had two channels of blood running from each corner of my mouth, down the sides of neck, which had soaked a two inch thick strip of blood all the way around the front of the neckline of my t-shirt. I think they must have thought I'd been bloodsucking goats.
My next (bad) experience at the dentist was to be far, far worse in every possible respect to this one....
In the wonderfully charming and pleasant world of "nude modelling" (cough) that I undertook whilst I was studying sound engineering, you got to meet some lovely people... Well, no you didn't actually, most of the photographers were ok, but the other models thought were all Mark Owen from Take That. I actually found it hard to tell what they looked like and it was amazing they could keep their heads up with the poundage of foundation and mascara they wore. I thought they were more Atomic Kitten than Boy Band, I kept my thoughts to myself - I didn't tell them I had teeth like a donkey - as one of them said to me. I wanted to scrape "BITCH" on the grouting, I mean foundation, on his forehead with a sharp stick.
Around this time I developed a nasty abscess, and as usual, I had absolutely no money, or should that read - absolutely no concept of money. Many Warner Bros Cartoon ideas went through my mind - should I pull out the nasty tooth with pliers, tie some string to the door and get a friend to punch me in the face? But no, it had to be a dentist.
I eventually found one on Derby Road. It looked like it had been lifted out of one of those "working museums", those places that are like time-warp towns, like Blists Hill in Shropshire, where all the shops are period Victorian, and they have chemists and bakers and stuff. This dentists was more like circa 1950. I think his last customer had been 1952.
I let myself in, expecting to find a kindly receptionist behind a desk, but there was just a hallway with some very dusty looking seats and small coffee table. I'm sure someone must have heard me come in, because I heard footsteps above my head. I sat down and picked up a copy of a woman's magazine. It was from the mid 1980's. I was beginning to feel very uneasy.
Then, from above came an a extremely tall, slightly stopped man with rimmed glasses running down the stairs. I jumped up out of my chair. He said he was pleased to meet me, in an icky kind of go away, kind of way. I thought dental treatment was free, but he explained that it wasn't. I was in so much pain and after a lot of bartering he agreed he would take out my tooth for £10 and that in exchange for my home address and telephone number I could give him the money when I got paid. By this point I wouldn't have cared if Tufty the Squirrel had pulled the bloody thing out... Until I saw his treatment room.
I'm sure at the beginning of the 50's the esteemed dentist's treatment room would have been the height of futuristic dentistry. His dentist's console looked like a cross between a spaceship and a Cadillac that had been left out in the rain for years. The big arm with the light had rust all over it, the bowl for washing your mouth out was rust-riddled, the floor was dirty, the leather reclining chair had a huge wear split from top to bottom. Worse still, some of his instruments weren't clean and some of them were rusty.
I thought the only way of combatting this was to think about when I was a kid and all the things I'd eaten. Like when my brother had promised me 5p for every tadpole I'd swallow, so I swallowed about 25 of them. And he promised a few French Francs if I bit the head off a caterpillar and I did. Suffice to say I never saw any money.
Things got even weirder through the extraction. Suddenly, he be-straddled me, basically sitting on my crotch as he tried to pull my tooth out. Just at that moment, a shabby looking man came in. Wheeling a pushbike, which he propped up against the units in the treatment room and began chatting to the dentist. The dentist periodically stopped yanking on my half disengaged tooth to yak to this guy, as tried groan at him to get on with it. Then, the man, leaving his pushbike where it was, left through the back of the treatment room never to be seen again.
When the dentist had finished, I noticed my face seemed number than usual but didn't pay much attention, I tried to say than you of sorts, but my mouth wouldn't open and close properly because of the anaesthetic, and I started to make my way home.
I was feeling so much better, simply because I couldn't feel my face, and as I passed the shops on Lenton Boulevard I took my time and looked in the shop windows. But then I noticed people were acting strangely. They had frightened expressions on their faces. A woman walked past with a small girl and she pulled the girl away from me. Someone else laughed. People sat in the hairdressers all turned and stared. I was completely nonplussed. Even as I walked up Church Lane, a couple crossed looked at me in horror and crossed the road.
I finally got back home, feeling a mixture of confusion and relief. I sat down on the sofa to take off my trainers and that's when I noticed blood - on my t-shirt. I went into the bathroom, and recoiled myself. I had two channels of blood running from each corner of my mouth, down the sides of neck, which had soaked a two inch thick strip of blood all the way around the front of the neckline of my t-shirt. I think they must have thought I'd been bloodsucking goats.
My next (bad) experience at the dentist was to be far, far worse in every possible respect to this one....
Thursday 21 February 2013
The Shock Of The New
Moving to a city after a life spent in rural hamlets crossed the rubicon between naïveté and eyes wide open. Although Southampton wasn't London, for me it may as well have been. I became a child of the night, roaming it's deserted back streets and parks at 3 and 4 in the morning, finding myself sitting down by the docks, watching the QE2 leave port.
My relationship with Clive began to dissolve almost as soon as I arrived. He didn't know who he was. This was his first "live together" relationship, he was a guilt ridden Catholic at the time, and even worse, he was a fanatical, with a capital F supporter of Southampton Football Club, and has his hand in their fanzine, the Ugly Inside. Football trumped everything. And, sadly, quite frankly, it bored the arse off me. Clive was also oddly thoughtless and weirdly parsimonious. I lived on a diet of microwaved poppadoms. Food shopping with him was a nightmare, but then again so was I.
He came home on one occasion to find his entire hall way and landing had been repainted with a mural - a bad one. My dog Boris, ate half of his sofa out of boredom, because I'd forgotten you had to walk dogs more than once a week. And I mean he ate it.
Clive had good intentions. He sorted out a college for me to go and do my A-levels at - he was friends with the principal, and I got in purely based on Clive's good word. This was no small feat, as I'd only got 2 GCSE's, due to the fact I'd spent most of my schooling doodling on bits of paper, arguing with Neo-Nazi teachers, day-dreaming or trying on my friend's nail varnish.
Although Clive was 32, it was though we were both emotionally 16 years old. I think Clive still hankers for the past. His Facebook profile picture is one taken of him thirty years ago. Clive is a sentimentalist. I've always been a futurist. The future is what really counts.
Around this time a friend of his, some horrible odious man, who happened to share my surname, came on to the scene, and claimed to be my long lost brother (yes it's true). And no, he wasn't. He did however procure for me my first ever LSD tab. Unfortunately, wandering around Bitterne Park, looking like a dishevelled zombie at 4:30 in the morning, walking in the middle of a main road caught the attention of the police. This made things even more surreal, and even more comical, until I told them my age and I was going out with a man in his thirties (thankfully I refused to give them his name or my address). At the time, the age of consent was 21, meaning that anyone "getting down" with me was committing a mortal crime.
I insisted that nothing sinful had occurred (lie) but this didn't stop them insisting on carrying out a medical examination (yes this is true). The purpose of which was to discover whether I had any scarring in my rectum that could indicate the fact I had been doing naughty and bad things with other men. This was all very peculiar, especially whilst tripping (those that have taken LSD will be sympathetique) and I oscillated between thinking I was in real life and on the set of some weird Australian prison daytime soap, as a be-gloved man hovered toward me with a rather salacious expression on his face. The oddest thing of all was, although they didn't find any "scarring", he said, "hmmmm, you have very good muscle tone", as he furked about. They eventually let me go, after quite some time, because by the time I got out, my LSD had all but worn off. This was not to be my last run in with the police.
Clive and me were to truly fall apart at the seams when, dressed quite inadvertently like a rent boy, I went to The Magnum Club - Southampton's answer to Heaven. I didn't think I'd stand a chance of getting in. But when you're only 16, it's amazing what doors open for you if you go to the right places.
My relationship with Clive began to dissolve almost as soon as I arrived. He didn't know who he was. This was his first "live together" relationship, he was a guilt ridden Catholic at the time, and even worse, he was a fanatical, with a capital F supporter of Southampton Football Club, and has his hand in their fanzine, the Ugly Inside. Football trumped everything. And, sadly, quite frankly, it bored the arse off me. Clive was also oddly thoughtless and weirdly parsimonious. I lived on a diet of microwaved poppadoms. Food shopping with him was a nightmare, but then again so was I.
He came home on one occasion to find his entire hall way and landing had been repainted with a mural - a bad one. My dog Boris, ate half of his sofa out of boredom, because I'd forgotten you had to walk dogs more than once a week. And I mean he ate it.
Clive had good intentions. He sorted out a college for me to go and do my A-levels at - he was friends with the principal, and I got in purely based on Clive's good word. This was no small feat, as I'd only got 2 GCSE's, due to the fact I'd spent most of my schooling doodling on bits of paper, arguing with Neo-Nazi teachers, day-dreaming or trying on my friend's nail varnish.
Although Clive was 32, it was though we were both emotionally 16 years old. I think Clive still hankers for the past. His Facebook profile picture is one taken of him thirty years ago. Clive is a sentimentalist. I've always been a futurist. The future is what really counts.
Around this time a friend of his, some horrible odious man, who happened to share my surname, came on to the scene, and claimed to be my long lost brother (yes it's true). And no, he wasn't. He did however procure for me my first ever LSD tab. Unfortunately, wandering around Bitterne Park, looking like a dishevelled zombie at 4:30 in the morning, walking in the middle of a main road caught the attention of the police. This made things even more surreal, and even more comical, until I told them my age and I was going out with a man in his thirties (thankfully I refused to give them his name or my address). At the time, the age of consent was 21, meaning that anyone "getting down" with me was committing a mortal crime.
I insisted that nothing sinful had occurred (lie) but this didn't stop them insisting on carrying out a medical examination (yes this is true). The purpose of which was to discover whether I had any scarring in my rectum that could indicate the fact I had been doing naughty and bad things with other men. This was all very peculiar, especially whilst tripping (those that have taken LSD will be sympathetique) and I oscillated between thinking I was in real life and on the set of some weird Australian prison daytime soap, as a be-gloved man hovered toward me with a rather salacious expression on his face. The oddest thing of all was, although they didn't find any "scarring", he said, "hmmmm, you have very good muscle tone", as he furked about. They eventually let me go, after quite some time, because by the time I got out, my LSD had all but worn off. This was not to be my last run in with the police.
Clive and me were to truly fall apart at the seams when, dressed quite inadvertently like a rent boy, I went to The Magnum Club - Southampton's answer to Heaven. I didn't think I'd stand a chance of getting in. But when you're only 16, it's amazing what doors open for you if you go to the right places.
Wednesday 20 February 2013
Madness, Sadness & Happiness
At sixteen, the first encounter of passion has the deadly force of a hurricane. In to the confused vortex you go, along with the whirling, spinning, heady emotions of obsession, infatuation, sexual preoccupation, what you think is love and common sense.
That first informative experience has no predecessor - there is no previous life lesson to draw from. Without rules or expectation, "first love" can segue into the realm of fantasy. Because we know so little about the construct of a relationship or it's mundanities, we allow it licence to stray into a Mills & Boon, Barbara Cartland fancy that can sadly bear only a slight resemblance to the nuts and bolts of it all.
I was sixteen when I met a man, very nearly double my age, called Clive, and developed a frighteningly intense infatuation for him. In retrospect I saw it as falling in love, but to do that demands reciprocity and an altruism of spirit. My feelings at the time, were, not surprisingly, that of a boy - selfishly immature. I met Clive whilst I was on holiday with my parents in Dorset, and I went off by myself to Sandbanks. A Bacchanalian Orgy of gay sex in sand dunes on a naturist beach. I can only say I was goggle eyed when I got there, and felt like a million dollars by the time I left. It was certainly my rite of passage.
Clive and I met again while I was still on holiday several times, he had some crumbly old vintage car and we trundled around visiting different beaches and places like Corfe Castle, which, combined with the sublime Dorset landscape and the beautiful weather, is a period of my life that will always remain vividly tinted and beautiful. However, in a way, our time together was a holiday romance. My mistake was thinking it was a relationship. I'll never regret leaving home at 16 and living with Clive in Southampton, because I would be writing a very different story, but holiday romances are always a bad premise for a relationship. Especially ones you conduct abroad. It's hard to find Greek Tavernas in Smethwick, and I don't think there are many decent beaches there either.
When we returned home, my parents had become aware of my new "gay" status. I told them while I was on holiday, which went down like a lead balloon. My parents evolution regarding the acceptance of my sexuality has been long and interesting. I've never sought to push my sexuality at them, but there have been times where my gay status has almost broke our family apart.
The only thing on my mind back in Shropshire, to the detriment of everything and everyone else was Clive, Clive, Clive. I know now it was nauseating. We had a telephone box at the top of our drive, and I spent most of the time in there, proclaiming my undying love for him, as I didn't want my parents to hear me proclaiming my undying love for him on our house phone. When I wasn't doing that, I literally spent hours gazing out of my bedroom window into the middle distance, with a forlorn expression on my face. This was BBC Jane Austen adaptation standard maudlin. Oh, and I did a lot of self-conscious weeping, with the bedroom door open, ensuring everyone else could hear my angst and distress.
Looking back, I can see that I told Clive I was moving down there. I don't think there was much discussion. He certainly didn't resist, and he seemed keen. I think my parents were so utterly confounded by my am-dram rapid-cycling bi-polar moods, that tilted on a simple premise of whether Clive picked the phone up or not, added to what was frankly a deeply oppressive atmosphere in the house. My brother had suddenly become Charles Bronson (not the actor, the one in prison), acting ultra-hetero, anti-gay, who frankly made my life miserable (sorry Jason but it's true - I know you love me now, and all is forgiven), and my dad was behaving rather strangely, saying odd things like my handwriting was girlish or effeminate or something like that - obviously everyone was in a bit of a palaver. My decision to go was made easier by the day.
One has to look at coming out not as a 16 year old in 2013, where attitudes are are for the majority 180 degrees switched, but from 1990, 23 years ago, when I came out. The stigma around AIDS had pushed back gay acceptance ten years, we had a government pushing through Clause 28. I think my parents were fearful. I think my mother in particular was worried for the prejudice I might encounter and the obstacles it might put in my way. With hindsight, although her fears were unfounded, I understand them.
I did encounter many problems, but ironically, these came far more from the gay scene itself and from the relationships I had. I have never once received any hostility for my sexuality.
But the day came, on the 1st of September 1990 when I left my parents, never to go back. Just as the happiness of that time in Dorset is a vivid to me now as it was then, so was the awful sadness and loneliness I felt on the day I left, and for weeks after, and those days too are burnished into my memory. But they were the beginning of a new adventure, that would see me go to many incredible places and meet some truly amazing people.
That first informative experience has no predecessor - there is no previous life lesson to draw from. Without rules or expectation, "first love" can segue into the realm of fantasy. Because we know so little about the construct of a relationship or it's mundanities, we allow it licence to stray into a Mills & Boon, Barbara Cartland fancy that can sadly bear only a slight resemblance to the nuts and bolts of it all.
I was sixteen when I met a man, very nearly double my age, called Clive, and developed a frighteningly intense infatuation for him. In retrospect I saw it as falling in love, but to do that demands reciprocity and an altruism of spirit. My feelings at the time, were, not surprisingly, that of a boy - selfishly immature. I met Clive whilst I was on holiday with my parents in Dorset, and I went off by myself to Sandbanks. A Bacchanalian Orgy of gay sex in sand dunes on a naturist beach. I can only say I was goggle eyed when I got there, and felt like a million dollars by the time I left. It was certainly my rite of passage.
Clive and I met again while I was still on holiday several times, he had some crumbly old vintage car and we trundled around visiting different beaches and places like Corfe Castle, which, combined with the sublime Dorset landscape and the beautiful weather, is a period of my life that will always remain vividly tinted and beautiful. However, in a way, our time together was a holiday romance. My mistake was thinking it was a relationship. I'll never regret leaving home at 16 and living with Clive in Southampton, because I would be writing a very different story, but holiday romances are always a bad premise for a relationship. Especially ones you conduct abroad. It's hard to find Greek Tavernas in Smethwick, and I don't think there are many decent beaches there either.
When we returned home, my parents had become aware of my new "gay" status. I told them while I was on holiday, which went down like a lead balloon. My parents evolution regarding the acceptance of my sexuality has been long and interesting. I've never sought to push my sexuality at them, but there have been times where my gay status has almost broke our family apart.
The only thing on my mind back in Shropshire, to the detriment of everything and everyone else was Clive, Clive, Clive. I know now it was nauseating. We had a telephone box at the top of our drive, and I spent most of the time in there, proclaiming my undying love for him, as I didn't want my parents to hear me proclaiming my undying love for him on our house phone. When I wasn't doing that, I literally spent hours gazing out of my bedroom window into the middle distance, with a forlorn expression on my face. This was BBC Jane Austen adaptation standard maudlin. Oh, and I did a lot of self-conscious weeping, with the bedroom door open, ensuring everyone else could hear my angst and distress.
Looking back, I can see that I told Clive I was moving down there. I don't think there was much discussion. He certainly didn't resist, and he seemed keen. I think my parents were so utterly confounded by my am-dram rapid-cycling bi-polar moods, that tilted on a simple premise of whether Clive picked the phone up or not, added to what was frankly a deeply oppressive atmosphere in the house. My brother had suddenly become Charles Bronson (not the actor, the one in prison), acting ultra-hetero, anti-gay, who frankly made my life miserable (sorry Jason but it's true - I know you love me now, and all is forgiven), and my dad was behaving rather strangely, saying odd things like my handwriting was girlish or effeminate or something like that - obviously everyone was in a bit of a palaver. My decision to go was made easier by the day.
One has to look at coming out not as a 16 year old in 2013, where attitudes are are for the majority 180 degrees switched, but from 1990, 23 years ago, when I came out. The stigma around AIDS had pushed back gay acceptance ten years, we had a government pushing through Clause 28. I think my parents were fearful. I think my mother in particular was worried for the prejudice I might encounter and the obstacles it might put in my way. With hindsight, although her fears were unfounded, I understand them.
I did encounter many problems, but ironically, these came far more from the gay scene itself and from the relationships I had. I have never once received any hostility for my sexuality.
But the day came, on the 1st of September 1990 when I left my parents, never to go back. Just as the happiness of that time in Dorset is a vivid to me now as it was then, so was the awful sadness and loneliness I felt on the day I left, and for weeks after, and those days too are burnished into my memory. But they were the beginning of a new adventure, that would see me go to many incredible places and meet some truly amazing people.
Monday 18 February 2013
A Time Bomb In The Gay Community
In 2008 I decided, after a period of singledom, and following a short, interesting, but ultimately unsuccessful relationship that I would poke my nose over the parapet and look for a new boyfriend.
I was living in Doncaster at the time. I have to be ruthlessly honest about the place. It is a ditch. It also has a problem. Because it is so awful people don't stick around if they can help it. People with brains, talent or creativity leave for more promising lands. There were several reasons I stuck it out as long as I did - some good, some not so good, but I called it The Armpit Of England, and the one and only gay pub was the nasty boil right in the middle of it.
I did try twice to meet Mr. Right in that gay pub. To my credit, I didn't seem to have problems attracting suitors, it's just they were either a) hideous b) alcoholic c) conversationally limited to discussing Girls Aloud and/or Jordan d) bisexual (read: married) e) excruciatingly camp, in a non-natural way. The same people abounded when I went the one and only time to Doncaster Gay Pride, which was so soul destroying I actually wept when I got home. It was every gay and lesbian tired old cliche rolled into a carnival of gone-off beer drinking - simpering Nellies dancing around their man-bags and butch dykes grimacing with cigarettes clenched between their teeth. It was like fun without the fun.
So in my tentative scan of possible love on the horizon, I turned once more to Gaydar, which wasn't exactly "fresh" at that point either. But because I hadn't been on it for so long, and once I reactivated my profile, I started to get messages. Gaydar is quite explicit in listing people's preferences. One of them is a displayed preference informing the viewer of another person's profile whether the profile's owner prefers safe sex or unprotected. I vividly recall the first time I checked my messages and I had around fifteen unique respondents. All but one said they preferred unprotected sex.
This came as an enormous shock to me. The last time I had used Gaydar had only been a few years prior, and it was far, far more common to see on people's profiles that they were listed as preferring "safe sex". Something had changed.
This is why it came as no shock to me to read today that the number of men choosing to have unprotected sex with other men rose 26% between 1990 and 2010, according to the Health Protection Agency and University College London.
The terrifying cull of thousands of gay men that occurred in New York, San Francisco and London in the early 1980's, when AIDS wasn't even called that - it was called GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) and the ravaging effects it meted out on the bodies of previously fit, virile young men were utterly devastating. I'm old enough to remember those images, even though I was a young boy. The bravery of those ill men who were willing guinea pigs - who ingested, there is no other word, poisons, in the hope that the either cure or retardation of the progression of HIV into AIDS could be brought about. It was because of those gay men that knew they had no hope, but gave what little of their life they had left to further research into the very first effective drug therapy that slowed the evolution of HIV.
If we fast forward into the era when combination therapy began, this is when HIV was no longer viewed as a terminal condition. It became a chronic condition. But this is not to say that people do not die from HIV/AIDS. Some never find a combination that works. Men who have been reinfected several times can develop super strains that are immune to all combination therapies, and their prognosis is poor. This is what is so frightening in these statistics. It seems hard to compute, but many men have sought out HIV positive men, "Bugchasing", in the erroneous belief that if they are HIV positive they will receive the entire suite of disability benefits. Things are very different now. Unless you are ill from HIV, or your blood counts have pushed you into AIDS, you are deemed fit for work. Yet this practice is quite widespread. It seems an awful indictment on an individual's lack of self esteem to wantonly give themselves a lifelong chronic, potentially life-threatening illness.
What is important to note here is the word "choose". This isn't about forgetting to wear a condom in a drunken stupor, or after a night clubbing when you've both had Ecstasy and you're not thinking clearly. It's an informed choice, and that's why it's so worrying - over a quarter of gay men are choosing to have unsafe sex.
What this tells us is there is no fear around HIV/AIDS. That it is seen as something you simply pop a pill for, and you just get on with your life. But, as someone who's partner is HIV positive I know this is not the reality. Because people are not factoring the massive side effects from the medication which leave you exhausted, that cause you to gain weight, and the real symptoms - the constant colds, the immune system that's completely dependent on you remembering to take medication like clockwork on the dot X amounts of time every day. And the worst thing is the fear. Maybe my partner doesn't worry as much as me, but I'm constantly worrying that he is ok, that he's going to be ok. Maybe he worries more than me.
There is nothing to be gained by regressing to the scare tactic adverts of the 1980's - but the male gay scene needs shaking, because it's sleep walking into a catastrophe. They have forgotten that there are absolutely no guarantees as far as medication is concerned. And the more unprotected sex they have, and should an individual get reinfected and reinfected his chances of successful treatment recede dramatically each time.
We should all be allowed to live the lives we choose, but I think of those men in 1982 and 1983 who had no hope, and died in abject agony whilst a pioneering and tiny group of scientists and chemists dosed and injected them with the most awful drugs - the prototypes of the combination therapies that keep all those who have access to HIV drugs alive today. Part of me feels that we, as a gay community owe it to those men to contemplate why these drugs came to be - for what purpose. I think we could all benefit from reflecting on their true value, and more importantly on how we value ourselves as living breathing humans, partaking and interacting in this complex world.
I was living in Doncaster at the time. I have to be ruthlessly honest about the place. It is a ditch. It also has a problem. Because it is so awful people don't stick around if they can help it. People with brains, talent or creativity leave for more promising lands. There were several reasons I stuck it out as long as I did - some good, some not so good, but I called it The Armpit Of England, and the one and only gay pub was the nasty boil right in the middle of it.
I did try twice to meet Mr. Right in that gay pub. To my credit, I didn't seem to have problems attracting suitors, it's just they were either a) hideous b) alcoholic c) conversationally limited to discussing Girls Aloud and/or Jordan d) bisexual (read: married) e) excruciatingly camp, in a non-natural way. The same people abounded when I went the one and only time to Doncaster Gay Pride, which was so soul destroying I actually wept when I got home. It was every gay and lesbian tired old cliche rolled into a carnival of gone-off beer drinking - simpering Nellies dancing around their man-bags and butch dykes grimacing with cigarettes clenched between their teeth. It was like fun without the fun.
So in my tentative scan of possible love on the horizon, I turned once more to Gaydar, which wasn't exactly "fresh" at that point either. But because I hadn't been on it for so long, and once I reactivated my profile, I started to get messages. Gaydar is quite explicit in listing people's preferences. One of them is a displayed preference informing the viewer of another person's profile whether the profile's owner prefers safe sex or unprotected. I vividly recall the first time I checked my messages and I had around fifteen unique respondents. All but one said they preferred unprotected sex.
This came as an enormous shock to me. The last time I had used Gaydar had only been a few years prior, and it was far, far more common to see on people's profiles that they were listed as preferring "safe sex". Something had changed.
This is why it came as no shock to me to read today that the number of men choosing to have unprotected sex with other men rose 26% between 1990 and 2010, according to the Health Protection Agency and University College London.
The terrifying cull of thousands of gay men that occurred in New York, San Francisco and London in the early 1980's, when AIDS wasn't even called that - it was called GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) and the ravaging effects it meted out on the bodies of previously fit, virile young men were utterly devastating. I'm old enough to remember those images, even though I was a young boy. The bravery of those ill men who were willing guinea pigs - who ingested, there is no other word, poisons, in the hope that the either cure or retardation of the progression of HIV into AIDS could be brought about. It was because of those gay men that knew they had no hope, but gave what little of their life they had left to further research into the very first effective drug therapy that slowed the evolution of HIV.
If we fast forward into the era when combination therapy began, this is when HIV was no longer viewed as a terminal condition. It became a chronic condition. But this is not to say that people do not die from HIV/AIDS. Some never find a combination that works. Men who have been reinfected several times can develop super strains that are immune to all combination therapies, and their prognosis is poor. This is what is so frightening in these statistics. It seems hard to compute, but many men have sought out HIV positive men, "Bugchasing", in the erroneous belief that if they are HIV positive they will receive the entire suite of disability benefits. Things are very different now. Unless you are ill from HIV, or your blood counts have pushed you into AIDS, you are deemed fit for work. Yet this practice is quite widespread. It seems an awful indictment on an individual's lack of self esteem to wantonly give themselves a lifelong chronic, potentially life-threatening illness.
What is important to note here is the word "choose". This isn't about forgetting to wear a condom in a drunken stupor, or after a night clubbing when you've both had Ecstasy and you're not thinking clearly. It's an informed choice, and that's why it's so worrying - over a quarter of gay men are choosing to have unsafe sex.
What this tells us is there is no fear around HIV/AIDS. That it is seen as something you simply pop a pill for, and you just get on with your life. But, as someone who's partner is HIV positive I know this is not the reality. Because people are not factoring the massive side effects from the medication which leave you exhausted, that cause you to gain weight, and the real symptoms - the constant colds, the immune system that's completely dependent on you remembering to take medication like clockwork on the dot X amounts of time every day. And the worst thing is the fear. Maybe my partner doesn't worry as much as me, but I'm constantly worrying that he is ok, that he's going to be ok. Maybe he worries more than me.
There is nothing to be gained by regressing to the scare tactic adverts of the 1980's - but the male gay scene needs shaking, because it's sleep walking into a catastrophe. They have forgotten that there are absolutely no guarantees as far as medication is concerned. And the more unprotected sex they have, and should an individual get reinfected and reinfected his chances of successful treatment recede dramatically each time.
We should all be allowed to live the lives we choose, but I think of those men in 1982 and 1983 who had no hope, and died in abject agony whilst a pioneering and tiny group of scientists and chemists dosed and injected them with the most awful drugs - the prototypes of the combination therapies that keep all those who have access to HIV drugs alive today. Part of me feels that we, as a gay community owe it to those men to contemplate why these drugs came to be - for what purpose. I think we could all benefit from reflecting on their true value, and more importantly on how we value ourselves as living breathing humans, partaking and interacting in this complex world.
Friday 25 January 2013
The Lonely Echo Of Bindel's Voice
There may be just one theme that Julie Bindel and myself agree on, and that is gay men and lesbians have often made for a rather unholy alliance. The only glue holding these two diametrically opposed forces together being the "gay" epithet, and the shared experiences of coming out to family, friends and work colleagues. In every other respect we can be allowed to celebrate the fact that as gay men and gay women, we really are chalk and cheese.
Julie, it seems, has struggled for much of her life to get along with most anyone at all. She gave voice some time ago in a Guardian article, "It's not me, it's you", at her distaste at being dumped together with bisexuals, intersex, and, ironically, she genuinely seemed confused when she was rebuffed by the transgender community. This is hardly surprising after writing an excoriating attack on the transgender community, "Gender Benders Beware", in which she denied the difficulties and stigma faced by transgender people in the worst possible terms - in fact she decided to get the Transphobic-Cheerleading Pompoms out herself. She saw fit to treat this section of our community as fodder for ridicule and denigration. After all her bullying, not only towards the Transgender Community, but in frankly absurd and risible articles & interviews she accused the Gay Male community of wholesale misogyny - weirdly with no empirical evidence to back up this nonsense, the LGBT community were starting to snap at Ms. Bindel's ankles.
This caused her to her to go her room in a jolly old huff and pen, "It's not me, it's you" for The Guardian. The upshot of this article was that poor spoilt Julie had been ostracised because the LGBT community were sick to the back teeth of her transphobia and misandry, so Julie was going to throw all of her toys out her pram and go and play on her own. Suffice it to say, we all breathed a collective sigh of relief when she did.
Julie is what I'd call a Dino-Feminist - ideologically speaking; a carnivorous, male-gobbling beast, with forward facing, myopic eyes, unable to see the full horizon, but with a pathological, rather crazed scent for blood, and a herd mentality which includes other like minded Dino-Feminist lesbians only. Her coterie includes other misandrists, such as Gail Dines, Suzanne Moore and Julie Burchill, the subject of my last blog.
Some girls of Bindel's age would have had posters all over their bedroom walls of the Bay City Rollers or the Nolans, I fear Julie's walls would have been covered with pictures of saucy images of the feminist to eat all feminists - Andrea Dworkin, probably provocatively posing with a copy of Women Hating: A Radical Look At Pornography.
Julie's feminist ideals are really quite simple to grasp, which makes one question why they're so simple to grasp. Is it because she couldn't come up with anything more sophisticated, a là Camille Paglia, who really was twenty years ahead of her time in understanding New Feminism, and making it workable for women in the 21st century? After all, not all women want to wear sandals made out of bean sprouts, polo-necked, long-sleeve jumpers fashioned from biodegradable camel dung, knitted by a women's collective and fair trade corduroy slacks dyed with elderberry juice. No, Julie's mandate is this: hate and despise everyone apart from radical lesbian feminists. Simple! You could become a journalist with a mandate like that! Think of all the nasty, emetic, muck raking, bile-filled columns you could write! And this is exactly what Julie did.
For what seems like centuries, Julie has been an ardent man-hater of the first order, conveniently forgetting that if it wasn't for a man, she wouldn't be here in the first place. Articles entitled "Why I Hate Men", suggest more than dispassionate analysis, and point to a worrying, compulsive behavioural malfunction. Julie, the rebel, likes to write inflammatory pieces for The Guardian - which seems for some perverse reason to allow puritanical bigots such as Bindel to publish articles stuffed to busting with misandry, hatred towards other women who don't get her brand of misanthropic feminism, and other venom filled toxic rubbish.
As such a notorious name on the political lesbian political scene, she endangers all others in that field who are reasoned and non-reactionary with the risk of being tarred with Bindel's taint of fanatical brainwashed extremism. Here's a little extract from "Why I Hate Men", just for us boys, to cheer us up a bit:
"Before the misogynists start ranting on about how many men are abused by women, how many women kill their children, etc, etc, don't bother. Every piece of credible research produced in every country in the world where this work has been done shows that sexual and domestic violence is committed overwhelmingly by men against females. The men who regularly get very offended on this blog, protesting that they have never hurt a fly, probably do not do an awful lot to stop other men harming women. Where are men's voices of protest in this war against women? When can we expect your support in reducing numbers of females killed and raped by men? I will not be holding my breath, but in the meantime, I will say loud and proud, yes, today I hate men, and will tomorrow and the day after. But only the men who perpetrate these crimes against my sisters, and those who do nothing to stop it. Are you in either one of those categories? If so, then I despise you."
I left a response to this in the comments section, but of course it would have fell on deaf ears. I said that no one had screwed up my life like my birth mother had, due to her neglect and abuse prior to my adoptive parents taking me in. No man had caused anywhere near the kind of damage that had lasted until I started receiving psychoanalysis. But as you can see from the above, Ms. Bindel doesn't give a shit. She's only interested in her one woman freak show feminist agenda, not humanity, not small babies, as I was, who are totally defenceless. She's just interested in Radical Feminist Lesbians. She's a caring soul, isn't she, our Julie?
But, wait... It gets, well, worse. Very recently our Oracle, our Esteemed Julie of The Mighty Vadge took to Twitter and merrily tweeted away. But I ought to give a bit of a back story. Julie claims to be a champion for women who have suffered at the hands of men. She has helped women find safety in refuge centres. So she's not all bad. Or so it would seem. But her kindness is highly conditional if this tweet is anything to go by:
"Those women that proclaim “I’m not a feminist” should be paid less than men, have no maternity benefits, no access to refuges, and no vote"
Read another way, any woman that did not proclaim before her that she were not a feminist would not receive her help if her life were in mortal danger at the hands of a murderous partner - that she would turn her back on someone in an incredibly needy and vulnerable situation, simply because they did not agree with her ideologies. I assume by that she'd turn away prostitutes because they wouldn't fit into Julie's scheme, or a young seventeen year old that didn't understand what feminism was - or more accurately and pertinently, what Julie Bindel's kind of feminism was.
I'll leave it up to you to make up your mind about the rest of that tweet, but I know what I think of it. What it says to me is there stands a woman so consumed by her own grandiosity of thought, a woman so deviated from the path of simple humanity by the iron rod of feminism for feminism's sake, that she has forfeited her own conscience and empathy in exchange for a fascistic empty and worthless set of ideals. Ideals which she has used to barter the value of other women's safety and value against the currency of a devotional obsession to feminism - which, clearly, to Julie Bindel, is nothing more than a word: F-E-M-I-N-I-S-M.
In that one tweet she has betrayed womankind in one fell swoop. I'm not a woman, but if I were, my response to that tweet would be, "shove it up your tofu-filled arsehole, Julie".
Because Miss Bindel belongs in Dworkinland, a bit like that place where the Teletubbies live, you know, not real life, because the strategies she has for living are so far out there, she really is on the next planet and can wave to Po and La-La - the feminism she tries to sublimate onto other women simply bounces off. Women don't want to live like Julie Bindel. They want to be free, not miserable, with their noses stuffed in their belly buttons, raging with anger towards other men, other women - exploding with misanthropy. That's exactly why Camille Paglia was so ahead of her time, because she realised that women liked to have fun with their sexuality, with their bodies. They didn't want to be like Julie - registering all the passion of a parking meter and the sexual allure of a body bag. Paglia saw that in women that they didn't have to be commodities for men by dressing how they wanted to - they could dress for themselves, to make themselves feel great, and still be a feminist.
But like everything she does Bindel has to go too far. Whether it's offending others, or sticking to her feminorexia-nervosa. In doing this, Bindel has become a very weird anachronism, a not-so-quaint relic - a voice that has, curiously, become a little like Julie Burchill's. Antiquated, irrelevant and something no woman I know of today, in 2013, can relate to in any shape or form. Her radicalism has turned into hate speech, akin to Burchill's - perhaps that's why they get along. With Gail Dines, another utter irrelevance of the 21st century, they form an Unholy Trinity of Neo-Mary Whitehouse Gorgons - Thou Shalt Not Watch Pornography, Thou Shalt Not Show Thy Breast, Thou Shalt Not Lay With Both A Man And A Woman, Thou Shall Be Miserable All Thy Life, Thou Shall Only Be A Bloody Radical Bigoted Lesbian Feminist.
Thursday 24 January 2013
It's Time Julie Burchill Put Down Her Pen
Julie Burchill has been oddly quiet this week. Or maybe not so odd, after the gigantic backlash witnessed in the wake of her recent Observer piece, which has been received with wholesale revulsion. This time, Julie went way too far. Her targets this time were perhaps one of the most misunderstood, marginalised and vulnerable people in our society - the Transgender community. The entire article can be found here (it was taken off the Guardian website, where it had originally appeared, along with the Observer newspaper, but the Guardian removed the article after widespread complaint. Ms. Burchill then happily gave her permission for this pile of stinking prose to be reprinted in the right-wing press):
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100198116/here-is-julie-burchills-censored-observer-article/
Some of her more offending remarks include referring to transgender women as a "bunch of dicks in chicks clothing", "screaming mimis", and "a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs", amongst other disgusting stuff. All of this was embedded in a manure of bigotry and prejudice that had seemingly been rotting away since the times of "Love Thy Neighbour" and a Bernard Manning T.V Special.
The whiplash from this event was swift and sharp. The Guardian received hundreds and hundreds of complaints in their comments section, and over 200 emails. In a contrite appraisal of events, the Guardian editor acknowledged that many of the complaints had not emanated from the Transgender community, but from others, who were astounded that the article had been passed as editorially safe, and had so clearly broken the Guardian's own journalistic editorial code. There was a sense from many that if the article had been written about disabled, black or gay people it would never have been printed. The editor apologised in no uncertain terms, and conceded that a dire mistake had been made in allowing such a dreadful piece of bigoted commentary through.
In two paragraphs, Roz Kaveney so succinctly put into a nutshell everything that was so wrong, and so upsetting about Julie Burchill's article:
"Once you decide that some people's lives are not real, it becomes OK to abuse them; for people without the outlet of writing for a national newspaper, it becomes OK to shout things in the street, or worse. The trouble with Burchill's list of negative epithets for trans people is that she legitimises the basic currency of hate speech. Trans people are one of the very few minorities who some progressives feel entitled to mock and misrepresent – but then Burchill parted company with the left a long time ago. By now, she has parted company with common decency.
What I would ask Moore and Burchill is this: do you think that what you've written makes it more or less likely that an elderly trans woman living on a housing estate will get jostled on the stairs by her neighbours? Or that a teen trans man will be punched in the street? It's not anger-fuelled tweets, but that provocation, done with malice by people who should know better, that is the real bullying."
Whilst there is no doubt great damage was done by the editorial staff in letting Burchill's diatribe slip through the net, we see the real Modus Operandi of Burchill in her reaction to the Guardian removing her article - by her then giving permission for it to then be reprinted in the right-wing press. This is an act of revenge, of spite, and damn the consequences. Because the consequences won't affect Julie Burchill. As Roz Kaveney reminds us above, it will be the elderly transgender woman, or the young trans boy, trying to wrestle with the Dysphoria that so often comes before decision that will suffer at the hands of bigots, educated on the fodder of Burchill's monologues. This is dangerous stuff.
There was a time when Burchill could write her short snappy commentaries, always a bit shocking, but never cheap or brain dead. But more than one thing in Ms. Burchill has died. One of these things is her ability to use her nib as a scalpel - now she can not write without resorting to the lowest common denominator - the cheapest thrill, that horrible cheap perfume that makes you gip. Now she writes the equivalent of "I hate Tracey Drew", with a biro on those wooden school desks you got in the 70's.
The second thing that's died is her sense of time. She's still lost in Fleet Street. She even references it in her article, like some ageing demagogue with a weird kind of selective dementia, her stance and attitude is clearly the key that fits the lock of the Loadsa Money era, when bad jokes were good, and even better when they got printed in a newspaper - preferably the Red Tops, as she forever reminds us until we fall off our social club stools that she's a working class girl. She doesn't even notice how out of time she is. I can imagine her dating Alf Garnett - they would have a lot of common ground. If you imagine the article she wrote on the Transgender community being written in 1982, you wouldn't be shocked by it, and poor old Julie is probably wondering what all the fuss is about. She's probably got a mobile phone the size of a breeze block too.
On a serious note, what is heartening to see is the sheer might of the Transgender community and how interlinked they are. Julie Burchill doesn't stand a chance. Even more heartening are their supporters, the you and me's - and there are more of them than there are less of them. And this just goes to show just how out of touch that old Fleet Street hack Ms. Burchill really is. She should be writing period dramas, not ersatz commentaries, spewing bile on current affairs. Julie, for God's sake, put down your pen.
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