Scar Tissue.

I have an innate built in mechanism to deal with emotional upset and distress, stemming predominately from when my Mother passed away when I was thirteen years old. I was never given any proper counselling for it, and at that age, that important developmental period of my life, I had to swallow and hold in all the grief, confusion and loss that the experience involved. Looking back (and hindsight is a fantastic way of understanding where things started to go wrong, alas no use for the present), it was the most single transformative event of my life, the main thing I believe that caused my life to go so tragically wrong in my later years. To try to understand some reasons why I failed in my later secondary school years in terms of not passing my end of school exams (just achieving mediocre grades apart from English Literature – the only subject I passed with any distinction) and from going off the rails during those last several school years, I must begin to look back at the lack of support I experienced when my Mother died. I did go off the rails, I did become a rebellious teenager listening to Rock music, drinking and suchlike, I had an awkward relationship with my Father who probably never understood me (and myself not understanding or probably respecting the grief he was still going through), and so on. Fundamentally, I ended up not resitting my exams and went to work, ending up being ‘encouraged’ to leave home at seventeen and moving into a large town, away from the village and peers I grew up with, having to make new friends in the place I moved to; the beginning of the bedsit years had its inauguration in September 1988.

And so I struggled. For a highly sensitive teenager to have to learn how to do his washing, pay his own bills, cope with having so limited money (I was working on a Government Youth Training Scheme in Catering at that time – and that was low wages), plus suffering the pain of not having anyone in my Family to talk to when I finished work, then it was a very tough, very lonely time. I never finished my apprenticeship in Catering as I could not afford to live on the wages it paid, and the other reason was suffering from eczema. I started work in a Factory afterwards, and yet I still found it hard and tough going on my own even with a small increase in pay. The Samaritans were involved with me at one point between the ages of eighteen and nineteen years old because I had become so depressed living on my own in a pokey, sparsely furnished bedsit and having no meaningful existence apart from going to work and living off, for example, cheese on toast for the majority of the time. A very dreary existence. It was only in later years, towards my twentieth birthday that I changed employment to a much more positive office based job and became acquainted with some really interesting people – those dreary, single unshaded lightbulb days faded fast. Lady luck came a calling, and that I believe changed my fortunes back then. Or at least it started to form a much more individual identity to base my own personal liberty and ethos around; less Metal, more Grunge and correspondingly social issues, please. Identity Politics were the rule. A pure Generation X’er, coming from that screwed up past to want to try and change the world, and back then it was a true ‘rags-to-riches’ story – there was much that was good about me I personally and vehemently believe when I look back, albeit with scar tissue.

However, I still struggled. I still had issues within my makeup that had become so deep and hidden and swallowed into my soul, that on occasion would plague me, like some outbreak of fever whose illness would occasionally burst through the defense mechanisms that I had learnt to build around my hardened, but still sensitive heart, stemming from shutting out heartache, pain and rejection. Big huge, barbed wire defenses. As I grew older, this time living with my partner (later to be my wife), life turned slowly into normality; less the radical, freedom and rock-music loving youth – the one who wanted to change the world – more now into a responsible adult. Knowing about my adoption as my Mother never held that information from me (she told me when I was quite young), my late twenties seemed like a good time to uncover who my natural parents were. There are rules about making contact and when I found out various organisations that dealt with this, the law stated that a period of counselling is required before you make contact. I did all of this, I remained within the guidelines, but when the first letter came from my natural Mother, then all the emotions broke loose, ripping asunder the pandoras box where they had laid dormant for such a long time. It was not a quick process, it took me quite sometime to find her, but find her I eventually did. Terms that come into my mind as I write this tonight are: confusion (I still had the bond with my adopted Mother in my subconscious); love (hence confusion) and elation (hence love). Still, even over fifteen years after finding her, it is very difficult to write this up, to put this onto paper, to explain the most intense emotional ‘fuck up’ I ever had to experience. And all those stories about how good some reunions are, the ones that mess up are hardly discussed, or at least feeling the initial excitement of discovery, the bad tales just do not register. I digress. It screwed so much with my emotions – my mind, feelings and long forgotten things came rushing to the forefront of my life; I felt confused about my relationship with my adopted family, feelings about my Mother dying, age-old issues resurfaced with a staggering intensity that smashed through my old defenses, throwing them aside as a whirlwind would blow away a hastily constructed shelter. I felt emotionally ravaged, torn asunder in feelings of severe emotional intensity. I ended up having a serious breakdown from this crazy period of my life, and that really is all I can say about it, or at least all I wish to publish on wordpress at this time. Looking back (again hindsight is wonderful), my partner pulled me back together, and about a year or so afterwards, I married her and had children. Fin.

I believe that this existence, this life we lead whomever we may be, whatever our social circumstances, either makes us or breaks us, and there is the famous adage that ‘whatever does not kill you makes you stronger’. This so much is true. When I do look back at the things that went wrong with paths I chose, or were chosen for me (or highly encouraged), and the fact that I survived some incredibly rough treatment on occasion, then it made me a much more thoughtful, intense and mentally stronger person; the gift of being able to express some of these emotions on a literal level is something I am grateful for because I felt, with the intensity of living through such difficult situations, I needed to write to find closure, to come to terms with issues. Also, despite the initial feelings of joy and euphoria on finding my natural Mother, I do not think I am such a good advert for adoption organisations; it went wrong for me so I truthfully should not endorse the tracing and finding of your natural parents. If you have a stable relationship with your adopted parents, if you have a secure life, if you are emotionally strong, then go ahead and satisfy your curiosity. If on the other hand you are slightly worried in any way for whatever reasons, then give it a lot of thought. Who will it be affecting? Will it damage your relationship with the family that chose and loved you? And make sure you get the counselling beforehand. I am not sure if the law has changed since the late 1990’s, but that was a requirement before any information about your adoption details were handed over, and rightly so.

To conclude this rather confusing (it seems) post, then I think my character has been formed through struggle. Life has made me what I am today. The power and intensity of life-experiences gave me a hardened shell, and much more tougher skin than I ever believed I could have had when I was that sensitive kid from the South Wales Valleys. I most certainly have frayed edges, but I have an inner strength that has kept me together for all these years, an inner determination to prove the naysayers wrong about my character, to counteract deceit against my person. Even the shock of becoming homeless after my marriage ended never killed me, but it certainly has probably caused a more permanent and deeply emotional scar than anything else I have been through – and that truly is saying something.

End of the year musings.

i) Emotional scars ii) End of the year iii) Some final thoughts.

Some famous author once said that you have to have a degree of talent to become a writer, but much more important is the ability to remember every scar inflicted upon you in this life. Each one of us has a small amount of baggage that we lumber around in our day to day lives; some of us have a huge weight to bear, some deeply rooted scars that, whilst being scars and hence have healed, still retain the marks of their being inflicted on your soul in the first instance. From whence these scars came from, for they being scars of some emotional pain or some great loss or hurt, is the most defining aspect of our existence. And we can, as this famous author once said, if we have a degree of literacy, put these unsettling experiences into words. This I believe can make your stories, poems – your creative writing – stand out from the crowd due to the power and intensity of your personal life experience and what made that wound so deep to leave behind a scar in the first instance. There is also a saying that each of us has a book inside, our lives being unique and individual that we all leave a blazing trail of a comet behind us in our relatively short time on this planet. Our time on this Earth I believe is meant to try and shape our future, to try and leave behind a better world for our children to live in whilst we learn from our own personal scars what hurt us and not to try and make our offspring suffer the same fate. Progress and healing seem good enough words to use to try and understand our existences here, what our material plane of being means in the grand scheme of things. Some of the most powerful authors whose works reside in our library’s and bookshops – some of the most intense novels – are usually the ones whose authors lives were marred with a tragedy or whatnot; some upset of an event they witnessed that made their creative writing convey a sense of depth, understanding and contain a humane outlook. I deign to mention any such authors here however, there are so many that I feel I would be doing a disservice to the ones I missed. Perhaps another post for another time to discuss the power of emotional distress and the authors who managed to put their experiences into form. So, each one of us has some unique aspect about our lives or families, that we all have the capability to actually try and creatively craft words to describe this uniqueness, this individuality – the very thing that may have caused a scar to form.

Its December, hence the final month of another year. 2014 inevitably approaches and again I am pondering just what I have done this year, like the one prior, and nothing really comes to mind. My days sometimes become so hazy that each one carries no unique or different life experiences, they all seem the same like a groundhog day that has lasted for me for nearly three long (but relatively speaking, short) years. I think also this is one reason why I stopped regularly blogging here on WordPress; I felt I wrote what I needed to make clear about my life and there seemed not a lot else to say from what I had written down here. So it seemed that if I did carry on blogging, nothing new would be said, the song would remain the same so to speak, and for this reason I stopped because there was no new experiences to write about, or any part about my past that felt I needed to explain and make clear, originally stemming more from a sense of defence that someone somewhere had slighted my character or did something terribly wrong behind my back. I have a high level of intuition and also, especially when I was younger, an innate sixth sense (and sometimes that is never such a good gift to have) which is why I picked up on things. Its hard to explain. So, a new year rears its head in the next few weeks and I did actually give up making resolutions years ago, I took a fatalist outlook and just accepted that I wouldn’t make anything worthwhile from my life; there appeared to be too many obstacles out there to trip me up, and hence, carrying this fatalist self destructive attitude within me allowed me not to try and put my life into some modicum degree of order and discipline. Perhaps I will try this coming year to try and rectify this.

I have been deeply thinking a lot about the concept of time. Maybe this is due to being in my middle-age; also it could be because I have a lot of spare, wasted time on my hands; possibly because I have always been fascinated with History and Archaeology – digging up the past and discovering how we lived centuries and millennia ago held a deep fascination within me, something I always had from an early age. Its obvious I believe that we are a progressive people, that the whole purpose, as I mentioned above, of life appears to be some form of evolution or maybe intelligent design. We have an actual purpose in our world and that purpose, to me at least, seems to be to develop ourselves and evolve, to progress. I believe that our ultimate aim, like the Age of Discovery inaugurated in 1492 by Columbus, is to explore the universe, to reach for the stars so to speak. It must be. It seems the only logical conclusion to our existence on the Earth, on our home planet. But whilst this may seem a lofty ambition or goal, we must also not ignore the suffering that this world contains, the poverty and starvation, the conflicts that displace people, as well as our unbalanced eco-system. This surely must be the main priority that we face, more important surely than reaching for the stars? I need to think and read much more about this. Maybe for the new year?

Time.

Something I wrote, a few words, stuck my mind last evening. These words were ‘…nearly four decades old’. It caused me to ponder over my life for a while, whilst I was sat in my chair nursing a glass of wine with an open notepad and pen in front of me. I decided to write a few notes about my life, trying to summarise what I had experienced in each decade, or at least starting from the 1980’s, the most arguably important decade I had experienced. My life is quite unique in many ways and again I would argue that compared to most of my peers I spent those adolescent years with, it contained more hardship, trials and tribulations than any of my old school friends.

You see, during the mid 1980’s I lost my Mother to a long illness. I believe somewhere on my wordpress blog I wrote about this, so there is no need to retrace old ground and besides it is too upsetting; my memories are sacred of those early years. However, three years later when I was at the tender young age of seventeen my family probably could not deal with my rebellious attitude caused as a symbol of discontent from the total rupture of my life due to my Mother passing, and so, probably for wrong reasons and because we were all pretty distraught, I ended up leaving home. I spent my most important formative years growing up in bedsit-land and it was only when I reached nineteen that I started to form proper friendships, work for a good company and experience a degree of happiness that I never have experienced again since the age of twenty one onwards. That is a long time, no? They say the brightest light burns brightest but goes out quickest, and this I can relate to because I never ever was happier in my whole forty years than when I was dating, fucking good Women, working and having friends that back then I believed I could trust in for those brief two bright years, years for me which were an awakening that I have never ever experienced since.

If I could turn back time, if I could have the opportunity to speak to myself when I was twenty years old, if I could listen to my old young thoughts and try and influence him, if I could make HG Wells’ Time Machine and turn the date back to 1992, then I would. I would probably then kidnap him.

‘Changes’

I grew up living in a detached house, an old Station Masters house for the Train Station that used to service the village we lived in, a product of the old days of Industrialisation, the village bearing witness to the growth of the coal mining and steel production centres of South Wales, leading to more and better ways of transportation to take these goods down the valley and eventually to port. The village my parents moved to and where I spent my childhood was a junction between the end of two valleys, where two rivers fed into each other; one route came from the north and another west, both leading from the Industrial heartlands of the Ebbw and Sirhowy valleys, places where coal was mined and steel furnaced. The relics of Industrialisation littered this small village and its surrounds, in terms of both remains from old mines and also chronicling the rapid growth of industry and better and more advanced transportation techniques; we had a canal, railways and later on they built a bypass though the village as all the old train stations had long since fallen into disrepair and ruin, the canal overgrown and neglected. In many ways the whole area was like a living history book; you did not have to walk far to witness the relics of Industrialisation where I lived, from cordoned off old air shafts servicing the old, long gone coal pits, to a communal grave in a field recording a coal mine disaster of the 1860’s – the area contained such a rich source of the past.

Nothing really showed the evolution of our society more so than the place I grew up. The remains of two-hundred and forty or so years, from the early beginnings of Industrialisation to our modern society is recorded in the hills of my childhood; from slag heaps now landscaped and covered with foliage, with really nothing to remind you that these irregular humps once came from the bowels of the earth, to mobile phone masts allowing wireless communication looking like something from a science fiction film of the 1960’s – two-hundred years of history, from an industrial past into a technological future grace the landscape, and all this change stemming really from the past twenty or so years, and especially the last decade. How fast have we progressed compared to the relative slow period of change experienced since the beginnings of Industrialisation from the late eighteenth century onwards? In the space of ten years, roughly, most households are now connected to high speed internet and use mobile devices – a true communications revolution in no uncertain terms along with the free availability of knowledge and a wide variety of different news sources from the internet have never ever been easier to access. Two-hundred years ago, or not even one-hundred years ago, this was the realm of fiction; probably inconceivable even for those times. One-hundred years ago HG Wells wrote The Time Machine, but would he have predicted today?

I noticed that two years ago on this blog I made my first post, a work that I created for a Creative Writing course I was studying, writing about what I remembered from my childhood, or at least the most prominent memories of growing up. Its strange when you think about your childhood that you usually remember sunny days, no? I do, but I also remember the rain on school days, or more specifically, the days I didn’t like going. My memories of growing up were happy ones and the area we lived in was quiet and pleasant, full of wildlife and animals, freight trains on a regular basis, etc.

It maybe also why I have such a love for history, as it was all around me, from finding the old green bottles with the glass ball in the neck in our back garden, to seeing the remains of old railway tracks that used to belong to the old pit, the whole area was an industrial-archaeologists paradise, but today most of this has been cleared away to make room for ‘the new’, or at least that’s how it was several years ago when I last visited. I think it is important to remember our past and preserve as much as we are feasibly able to, so future generations can look back and see how we lived all those years ago.

A year in review.

I guess its that time to write a yearly review, an analyses of the preceding twelve months of our life’s, our ups and downs, the ins and outs of a year of our existence. Some of us may have a load of things to say, a lot of activity, a lot of good events that may have occurred since January 2010. This is a good thing, because we do not want to have to write a review of 2010 being centred about a slow demise, even worse than 2009, and especially preceding from the last several months of 2008. So, what I am trying to say, for my own reasons, is that I cannot really write about 2010 just as an subjective thing. I must also look at this past year from an objective viewpoint; I must take a step back and look at the past two years standing as a bystander, a person overlooking events that have occurred in my life since August 2008. I cannot take, for instance, one year, this year, and look at it without looking at 2009 and the latter months of 2008 without being able to fit them into place, to find the right pieces of my jigsaw, to allow the progression of the puzzle, the huge one-thousand piece one which is a puzzle of my destiny, my life; jigsaw pieces that are so small and challenging that to find the right piece to allow us to move ahead requires great skill and knowledge of putting puzzles together, working out what actually makes this jigsaw work.

So let this be a look back of my life since August 2008. I fail to see how else, rationally, I could write about my life in 2010 without analysing what has occurred since that time, the time I became homeless and I became separated from my wife of fifteen long years. This year has seen me move from temporary accommodation (as I was homeless) into a slightly more secure place, but not by a huge margin. I still immensely dislike where I live, considering that I lived in a really nice area, in a secure home, bringing up my children, working part time as website designer as well as an IT professional (building and fixing computers as well as being an IT consultant), and oh well, blah blah blah. Its a moan and I will not go into what I was before the marriage disintegration. I think this blog I set up in December 2008 describes enough of what I went through and how plain wrong I thought the whole situation. Its there for all to read. I have nothing to hide or lie about.

2010 – a decade since I was an IT student studying for a computing science degree, a degree I was flying through. In that decade I experienced getting married, having kids and sacrificing my career in raising my two sons. Fast forward to late summer 2008 and everything I worked for in the preceding fifteen years goes down the drain, down the pan, into the gutter, into a slow but very sure, demise, stemming from my experiences when I became homeless. I do not think I could ever literally describe the horrors of being homeless and the adverse effect it had on my psyche and wellbeing. It begins to make me wonder about things very deeply indeed. I can now fully appreciate the problems of being homeless, more so than ever before. I wish for those who made me homeless never to have to go through the hell I experienced, because I am not an vindictive creature, which I would like to argue, the ones who made me suffer are. C’est la vie – I suffer and cope, as I always have done as it is not new to me.

I have to start anew for the next year. I really have to do something instead of continuing along this self-destructive path that I am currently following, a path, that whilst may seem to offer brief respites during my evenings via alcohol, and is probably some form of protest against injustice, is slowly but very surely taking its toll on me. 2011 is the year that I reach the age of forty. A middle-aged man. A time that for most of us sees us planning towards retirement, seeing our children grow up, our careers blossom and flourish; the half way mark of living, of life, of our time on this Earth. I was headed towards this two and half years ago until my whole life, lifestyle, family and so on becomes ruptured from me, pulled from under my feet with such force that it left me reeling and unable to regain a balance, form another relationship, trust again, find a new job and a new home. I was totally unprepared for it, although in hindsight it was probably on the cards for sometime but I became blinded to its inevitability, as I always have been blinded to things and events surrounding me.

2011 occurs in two weeks from when I write this. Perhaps this post is a sort of new years resolution, a method of literally expressing a vain hope for a better year than the previous two, but fundamentally it will come down to what I do with it, how I will alter the way my life is turning out and the direction that I have let it become, the path I chose. I must put aside the wrongs that have been inflicted upon my mind, body and soul and try to start again, to let the past finish having its say (and it has had its say over two years), and from my inner depths I must find the strength to continue onwards, upwards, and try and halt the screaming path downwards, the one I have a one-way ticket for. If I can jump onto a path back up, if I can abandon this floundering ship being hammered by uncanny winds, then I might, just might, stand a chance of recovering. Thank you for reading.

A Poem and an update.

I have missed a month in posting or updating this blog. I think my muse is either dead or drunk in some gutter howling at the moon with a gang of winos, which is where I am headed myself if I do not sort out my life. I guess I need to start doing something, but again this is always easier to talk about or discuss rather than actually taking steps to rectify the situation I am in. Actions speak louder than words they say, and this is true. I could probably write a few hundred words moaning about my current life situation like I have done previously on my blog, but I shall spare you the moan this time. Two years since my marriage disintegrated, and I have more or less turned myself into a wreck because I am still quite frankly reeling from what happened to me when I became homeless. They say forgiveness is divine – after all they claim Jesus forgave his abusers and his betrayers, and that would have been a very strong thing to have done, especially if Mel Gibsons film ‘The Passion of the Christ’ holds any semblance of historical truth, which is a very barbaric and disturbing movie of the final days of Jesus. But I digress. Some things I find hard to forgive and probably always will. I also presently feel as if I am under some kind of Sword of Damocles. I find this hard to explain, but I have this ‘feeling’ of impending doom, as if something bad is about to happen. My sensitivity picks things up and always has done. I try not to dwell on it however.

Next month is National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo) and I have one or two ideas floating around to maybe take part, to try and write fifty thousand words in thirty days. That is just under two thousand words a day, and if my muse sobers up then I would like to give this a go. Someone once told me that we all have a book inside us, and this I believe is so true because I think we are all just slightly unique, each one of us has different experiences we can draw on. I see it as a way of producing a first draft, or at least a method of actually getting one of my ideas down on paper (or rather Microsoft Word), and I am not in it to ‘win’ anything, or even probably to find a publisher, but rather I think I will attempt it for my own sake, my own challenge. Wish me luck.

I was going through some old poetry, and I suppose this is what sparked me to update wordpress. After all it is national poetry day today. I try to update this blog at least on a monthly basis, sometimes that doesn’t always work out. But re-reading some old things made me want to share one of them on here. There are a few poems currently on this site,  and one of the old ones is at the end of this post. This particular poem I wrote several years ago when I was reminiscing about my youth; it deals with a time of my life that was very important to me. A time when I was starting college and learning about society whilst I studied a Social Studies course which was an Access Course that allowed me to go onto University. That was nearly two decades ago. That, when you think about it, is a long long time  but to me it seems like it was almost yesterday  – such are the vagaries of time.

I am reading a lot of historical fiction presently. Bettany Hughes book on Helen of Troy is a must read, and puts new light onto who Helen of Troy could have been and her status in Bronze Age society, a status that Bettany Hughes argues was just as equal as men back three thousand years ago. An interesting read. Also reading a lot about King Arthur and the formation of Britain during the years after the Romans left these Isles, when the then Roman Emperor Honorius told us to ‘look to our own defences’, to defend from Anglo Saxon incursions. Really interesting period of UK history. Anyway, time to go. Poem below, titled ‘The Age of Enlightenment’. Comments are always pleasing!

The Age of Enlightenment
dawned
during youth;
questions about the rights
of man and beast
(but mainly about beast)
swam around the receptor
and archive of memories.

Diet was altered;
dead animals now
never entered the lithe, sprightly
holy temple,
causing an enhanced awareness
with a permanent fix.
Oh, dear narcotics
don’t you wish you were as clever?

Questioning words
flittering across wide open eyes,
creating a Brave New World
of alternate thought.
Mr Huxley, sir,
you lit the match
to start the fire
which spread fiercely,
consuming old habits
and thoughts,
turning to cinder
the ‘muck of ages’.

Like tendrils of smoke rising
and vanishing in the wind,
The ancien régime of
hindered thought
unhindered itself.
Enlightenment was here!

—

 

‘Add a couple of years…’

It has been over one year since I blogged and wrote ‘A Brief Testament’. In that blog I described how I was mainly the sole child-rearer, almost from the day both my two sons were born, and my subsequent marriage disintegration and how I felt wrongly cheated. It was me who was the primary parent during the day; doing the main tasks (changing nappies, taking to nursery and school, doctors appointments and so on – all those little essential, important things) whilst my ex-partner was at work, progressing her career, which she did remarkably well. Not wanting to tread old ground here, but yes, later a feeling of being housebound was making itself present in my life, a form of frustration that I could be offering the world more, earning money and using my skills. It was not anger against her (I am the least aggressive man you could ever wish to meet, truth), but it left me feeling a dreaded sense of helplessness against the direction my life was leading. Why this was so is probably because I was a professional IT worker, studying nearly two years for a Computing Degree – I considered myself a really skilled worker within the IT sector – but I never gained full time employment from it. I do not know why and it certainly was not through want of trying. I think that is another search deep within myself to find those, more or less, elusive reasons which led to my predicament. And there are many, so many.

In the twenty months since I have been separated, I have gone through the most brutal time I have ever known in my whole thirty-eight years of life. To find the reasons why this is so is no easy task, and it goes back a long, long way. To live with a Woman for fifteen and half years, being married for seven of them and producing two of the most gorgeous, happiest children I could wish for and then ending up in, quite frankly, a hell that I never ever want to discuss, really began to make me question everything I was and had become – and that is no small task for someone who had never had an easy life. When you begin to reminisce about your youth, your happiest times and see from beyond those years, in your mind, a time of wasted opportunities, then I think we start to become ‘unhealthy’, both in our minds and in our soul. What you perceived yourself to have been in those early, formative, character-making times and what you became before your life took a direction that was forced off the beaten path, then it does not become easy to fit the right jigsaw piece into place. They become two different opposites, pieces from two different puzzles, two alternate directions; the one path screaming at you, the other enticing you into certain demise and ruin.

And I suppose we are all guided by our own instincts, or our own moral code, with our behaviour and personality being the main character formers. Looking back, it sometimes seems as if I was led down that wrong path with deliberate intentions to ruin, becoming misled and ending up being misguided. For me however, it is pure conjecture on the reasons why I ended up in such a messed up state. Again, as I mentioned above, it becomes unhealthy to dwell on these matters and alcohol addiction does not help things either. So, nearly two years since I split from my wife and I am left asking the question where does it go from here? I have had one failed relationship since then – it lasted all of about three months – and in view of that I have not really looked for anyone else. Perhaps I feel too hurt with what has occurred in my life since 2008, possibly I find it hard to trust anyone anymore? Maybe I don’t know how to form a relationship because I still am reeling from what happened to me? Whatever the reasons, whoever the culprits, I feel deep down that I am really, utterly hurt with what has gone on. I feel a wreck.

We have just had an election over here in the UK. Thirteen years of New Labour has now ended with a hung Parliament with the Liberal Democrats forming a new Government with the Conservative Party. If this was the correct thing for the Lib Dems to have done, I don’t know. In my opinion, I see rifts and divisions in the future – I think that is certain – but how they deal with the economy will, I think, be the key factor to their success. I may blog a bit more on this. Perhaps it may give me something to focus on.

‘Has the moon lost her memories?’

Memories have a habit of resurfacing on experiencing things, such as smells, sounds, pictures and so on, that we are subjected to on a daily basis. All these small little events that happen day by day for instance can send you back decades to when you remember it as but a mere child. Those hastily grasped recalls through the maze of your memory can cause you to shudder as they send their brief but shocking kick into your consciousness. It appears sometimes as if your memories are stored up within a vault, each contained within their own little safety deposit box with those small little daily remembrances being their own personal keys into the vault of your personal depths, the museum of your life.

And our memories are the most defining thing about us, being formed from our experiences throughout the path of a lifetime. A life’s journey forms you, makes you what you are, becomes you even. What type of personality you develop probably is made, formed, set into stone from your early years as a child, the love you receive from your parents being a very fundamental aspect, a character forming one. No one can really rupture these formative years however, even though some may try hard to belittle them, to plainly forget what you once were. Those early memories are timeless, never to be forgot, a most treasured possession.
As we travel through life, as the years pass by offering new experiences, we accumulate both knowledge and possessions, a material reminder of our lives. What I believe to be most sacred however, in the time I have lived, is memory. Material items and possessions come and go, but nothing can replace your childhood memories, nothing at all. This is not to say that possessions have no importance, on the contrary, they are most certainly fundamental too. But to me, my childhood recollections are like gold dust, something so valuable, so treasured, that their memory is invaluable, a priceless artefact buried deep within the sands of time – their archaeologist being relived incidents that occur throughout your life.

We all are subjected to life’s hard knocks at some stage in our lives, and I suppose how we deal with them really depends on how tough we are. It is easy to fall to pieces over harsh, unjust, wrongful treatment, and, I expect many people do. I believe it is a true test of Faith whether we succumb to these discriminatory occurrences, maybe dealt by an unlucky deck of the playing cards of life, or maybe something working deliberately against you, and that Faith could be either a belief in a higher authority, God if you like, or even a strong conviction of who and what you were prior to this treatment.

I write this now, at a stage in my life where I have been dealt a bad hand. I suppose I write to keep myself relatively intact, but I believe, or at least I sincerely hope, that we are all strong enough to overcome the difficulties presented to us in life. In my case, my difficulties arose I believe because I had a pretty traumatic childhood, loosing my Mother when I was just a young teenager. My Mother was everything to me, my whole world, the one parent who guided me, taught me, read books to me as a child, loved me unconditionally as her son. She showed me love and warmth; she made me feel that I was such a special, special child. Loosing her when I was just a mere thirteen year old boy had an effect upon me that really, when I search deep within myself and look back, totally ruptured my life – and still has an effect on me to this day that is so profound in its significance that there rarely is a moment that goes by that I do not think of her.

Again, these are memories, and to me they are relived through daily events, their safety deposit boxes searching for the key that sets them free. Sometimes these keys are old photos, pictures now faded through the passage of the years, images that expose a time of happiness and joy; faded, certainly, but never ever forgot, cemented into memory for all of eternity, or at least your time here on this Earth. Memories that I believe that are so vital to your soul, sanity and existence.

A brief Testament.

As I briefly pose a cursory glance over my last few years of life, I can deduce that in many ways it has been wasted, in the sense of not really having a career, or a stable method of employment. In other areas too it has been fraught with problems which I have had, or never had, any control over whatsoever. And I suppose, in hindsight, we can look back, blame others and see our own faults as not being of our own volition. But not all was wasted; in this instance I think that bringing up my children almost from day one, changing dirty nappies, feeding bottles, taking to school and all the other little rigmaroles of child-rearing were never ever in vain. I did it for several reasons; the main one was that my ex-wife had a better paid job than I did – I was not working so, in my liberal attitude towards life, with an ethos of understanding and a degree of compassion (if they are the correct words to use I don’t know at all now), did not find any problems in doing this; besides, they were my children after all! I thought I suppose that I was being the ‘new man’, whatever that term means today (post 80s interpretation), being some kind of feminist, but I did it mainly out of love, although there were instances that I nearly teared my hair out and thought I was going mad from the stress of it all, especially after my second son, Toby, was born. That was hard, dealing with both of them. Incredibly so on some occasions. But rewarding in others, seeing them grow up- for the best part of six of Harvey’s years and three of Toby’s.

So in many respects, even though I had no stable career (although my profession was in the IT field), I don’t think all was wasted during those seven years. And I did not waste myself totally however, I built the odd website, fixed a few PCs, taught as a tutor teaching people how to use computers (which I enjoyed considerably) and so on. I kept my skills up to date. But again, there were some problems in doing this. In many respects, I felt trapped; I did feel that I could be offering the world more than I was able to other than in bringing up my kids. And looking back, it was a form of entrapment. But for the love of my children, I persevered doing this task, and, as any parent can tell you, it is a task that goes without recognition in many areas, many, an unthankful task, but you try and bring your kids up to the best of your ability and teach them good manners and so on, how to be polite and caring towards others. And I brought them up in complete trust to the best of my ability, based around memories of my own upbringing and what my Mother taught me, and, at the age they are at now, they are caring, good, kids. This is one of my Testaments.

I always hoped however that one day, that delusional fictional moment in the future, things would change for me; a job would be offered in recognition of my talents (which were never inconsiderable – I can cook, write and am skilled in IT), or something might happen. The only thing that did happen was a marriage split up, a very acrimonious one at that, and that led to several months of hell. So once again, I am alone in temporary accommodation, living out a nightmare. This is like being back to 1988 when I left my family home, and in the words of Fish I am in ‘the playground of the broken, damaged, hearts’. And Psyche. Some reward. Eh?