So I have been developing this theory that there are some days when it seems like there is something in the ether, something in the air that seems to cause everyone, all the world and his dog to ‘kick off’........ all at the same time.

Is it barometric pressure I have wondered? The weather contriving to put us under some universal headache, the pre-thunderstorm blues or some such? Is it the ‘vibes mahn’, the atmosphere in a building? Is there a group dynamic, which can set the tone for the next several hours and affect us all and thus making us tetchy,snappy and irritable, likely to get argumentative with each other? Is it our birth signs? That the phases of the planets should affect us thusly seems far-fetched to me but there is something in it.

Isn’t there?

No?

Well how come the affects of the moon tide's pull can influence half the planet?

Is there a rising sign issue, an influence affected by the positioning of the sun the moon and stars that can bring about these days?

What days, I hear you ask?

Well today was another ‘doozie‘ as they say. It didn’t start first thing but by about 11.00am we realised we were to have ‘one of those days’…………..

Firstly, as far as I can recall, there came a 'hubbub'. You can feel it flood the building.......It seemed someone's had their bike stolen.

Now this is Oxford, you will bring to mind, the city where it seems there are more bicycles than people. It is a student town!

There are bikes EVERYWHERE.

 There used to be entire departments of the local police service given over to the thefts of bicycles. This is not the town to live if you don’t have a bike lock………………………..a GOOD one!
So.........

We will call him Harry but he is a more senior client than most who has arrived today, it turns out, on “£1700 quid’s worth” of bicycle…………….
..............with no lock.

Can we allow him to put it down the side alley for 15 minutes so it stays safe? We do not allow this generally because it is too much of a pain to accept responsibility for the number of bikes that can go missing at any given time. He isn’t going to be long, so we agree at his own risk that he can leave it down the side, a fire exit, for quarter of an hour while he does what he needs to inside the building.

Ten minutes later it is long gone.

Someone says that they know who has stolen it. My heart sinks. It is one of my very favourite of youngsters, we will call him Kevin. Now Kevin I have known, or known of, since he was about ten. He is now in his early twenties, his brother and sister having been clients of mine when I worked at the Rehab nearby, out in the beautiful Oxfordshire countryside

All three siblings were born addicted to heroin. Mother died last year. I am fond of all of them, they are all cheeky and engaging, bright and funny. They have had, as you will appreciate, a difficult start to life and each have had their own troubles with substance abuse

A gang of the more hardened visitors to the Drop in are gathered out front and there is much muttering and threat making about ‘stabbing him up’, chasing after him and beating him to a pulp.

It would seem it went like this. Kevin, upon bumping into an old pal who owes him money, whereupon the pal says 'Well, I haven’t got it and you better take my bike', pointing to Harry’s £1700 bike.

(Yes, yes I know what’s someone who uses the Drop-in for the homeless doing with a £1700 bike? Just DON’T ask!)

So Kevin takes the bike and exits stage left. The guy who owed him money it seems then said, when the sticky brown stuff hits the fan, that he knows exactly who stole it and promptly grasses up Kevin.

Great fun! Scam and a half with full Brownie points for sheer cheek, right?

Meanwhile, Harry has gone straight round to the St Johns Police Station to report the theft, presumably leaving out the part about threats to kill, ‘wetting ‘im up’ and generally head bash murderous caving in technical details.

We take some 'proactive interventions' and inform Kevin’s Young Person’s Hostel that there are all and sundry chasing him for the nearly two grand’s worth of bicyclette! Staff call me back and say Kevin, whilst not EXACTLY acknowledging he nicked said bike, knows a man who has and has convinced said colleague to return said bike. I say “Well get it back round here sharpish and I will smooth things over with the owner and we should be OK.”

That’s when the police call. A really nice officer called Mike. We ascertain what has transpired and Mike seems a tad confused as to what to do with the crime details, as he has never had this happen before. That no sooner has someone stolen something, in the time it has taken to report the crime, the goods have been returned. The bike is being miraculously returned to outside the building as I am on the phone.

“Well, maybe you could put it down as crime solved, couldn’t you?” I ask helpfully

“Er, well I suppose so but technically we haven’t solved it, you have!’

“Well I won’t tell if you don’t and maybe it could help your crime figures?”

“Er, …….are you taking the piss?”

“No, no, no no….it just seemed that it would be a shame if it was to result in a lose-lose situation as unsolved crimes go and actually it has been solved and the goods returned to their rightful owner or will be shortly and it would be a shame if we couldn’t get a win-own out of this. Wouldn’t it Mike?”

The constable rings off……….

A see Harry wandering past the Drop in. I call him back and give him his bike, which by now I have put in the medical room, as there is nowhere to put it safely! It having no lock and all. I can tell that Harry wants to still stab someone up for the heinous crime and he is still very, very angry at this lack of respect. I calm him down pointing out along the way that this is Oxford and he has £1700 quid’s worth of bicycle unlocked in a drop-in for the homeless, that he has got it back and also point out to him the original scam whereby the person who indicated the thief was the person responsible for convincing Kevin it was his bike and in order to clear the debt he could have Harry’s bike. Kevin having heard rumblings about the nature of the retribution, it was returned so fast from across the other side of town I scarcely had time to blink. No mean feat in itself.

Harry goes off muttering still about violent retribution and the 'young people of today' and beating people up and yet I imagine I have allowed him to reclaim his bruised dignity and he offers a begrudging ‘Fanx, Andy’ as he weaves his way back toward the town centre.

I had an appointment with a client today whom I haven’t seen for some months and to cut another long, long story short she is an unmarried mother of two, twenty years old and has custody of neither child, the second being taken from her at birth, the eldest in the custody of its grandparents.

She has been away, in Scotland, for three months trying her darndest to rekindle a major crack habit but she will drink and drug to almost eye-watering levels in pursuit of release from her pain and anguish with almost any substance known to humankind. She has called to say she is coming at 11.00am, she calls again to say she has just got up and will be here by 12 noon, she finally turns up after the bike debacle excitement at 1.00pm and stays till nearly three to bring me up to speed with her story to date.

This proved to be a rather taxing session and bringing me ‘up to speed’ is the most unfortunate and ironic pun possible.

 Unsure as to what she is doing at all back in Oxford, unsure where she is even going to stay tonight although frankly that is the least of her problems.

She has no idea where her relationships are heading, including that with her father who has forbade her to see her daughter, his granddaughter of whom he has custody and she can only have access visits through Social Services [the child is a toddler] My client therefore cannot live at the paternal home by order of social services

She seems very chaotic – her thought patterns are all over the place but curiously she looks well! Good skin. Lost weight [don’t even go there! The crack diet is not one I recommend) whilst she has been away for the past ten weeks she has been smoking crack, heroin and doing speed - at times when there is none of the above, drinking to excess [1-3 bottles spirits or ‘anything really’ per day] To enlighten me as to the scale of her ‘problem’ she tells me cheerfully she did a gram of speed on the train from Scotland the day before yesterday. It’s a long journey…..and she was bored.

She says she has attended AA and NA meetings whilst away across the border but she argued with the fellowship members and started challenging them as to their drug use and size of their habits and was repeatedly asked to leave. She seems to have told them that they did not know what they were talking about and that she took more drugs than all of them put together, that she had a drug counsellor in Oxford who could teach them all what they ‘should’ be doing with their problems. (ed: “Oh dear!”)

She turns to address the last meeting as she makes her way out of the rooms wuith a cheery "Fucking Amateurs!" and leaves them to it and she will not be returning there any time soon.  She did seriously seem to think that there were people at his Scottish NA who did not take “anything more than cannabis”!? This seems highly unlikely to me so I put this down to her still being under the influence of crack or speed ................or both.

She shares with me that she had been very depressed about the baby who was taken off her at birth and, in a more seriously depressed moment, destroyed all her photos of the child and set light to them all, in some kind of drug fuelled ceremony in a garden, then says she tried to take an overdose but was found herself throwing it all back up and bemoaning her fate to whatever guardian angels she felt were lloking over her, that they wouldn’t even let her do that properly

She says she has mostly come back from Scotland because she didn’t want to go to court on the 15th for GBH on her stepfather! I am by now speechless. Now GBH is serious as you may imagine and is likely to bring a prison sentence of some magnitude ............and she has only been out of Holloway a year

I had thought her family up North might be a calming influence (sic) but she discloses she discovered that not only had her cousin been sexually assaulted like she herself had, at 13, but that the perpetrator of this act upon her cousin was her own father when the cousin was 12 – my client tells me they both were ‘fed drugs’ by this man [coke speed and alcohol] and that her stepfather passed comments about the cousin’s figure specifically her ‘bottom’ as not being as shapely as when she was 12’ [sic] & further sexually inappropriate comments whereupon the cousin hit him in the face with a wine bottle, hitting him in the chin,  knocking him down and that then they “battered him” – adding that whilst this did not knock him out as such, he had been coming towards my client, she had reached around and struck him with the wrong end of a cricket bat that had mysteriously come to hand, until she switched it around and finding it much more efficacious, took a strike with the cricket bat hit him round the head thus speedily bringing about the desired affect. That is to say, until he was unconscious and bleeding from the ears. 

My client also wanted to get away to Scotland as she wanted to talk to her sister (13) who had lost her third pregnancy from fighting and my client is concerned for her safety!

                                           

I am still not saying very much…..well anything that I can usefully recall……………..

                                                              

Whilst she was away she went back to HMP Holloway to visit her own mother who is doing 10years on drug charges. They do not get on generally and because my client refused to bring in drugs secreted into her body (again please don’t ask) for her mum, there had been a scene and she had ‘launched’ herself at her Mum and had to be restrained and taken off the premises…. as opposed to retained I presume

 Otherwise apart from an incident where she went into a local job centre to try to transfer her benefits and then the council offices to ask for a three bedroom house, she is now barred from Scottish Council offices for racism & threatening abuse of an Asian member of staff for being less than helpful, she thought about covered it for the day!

By now it was getting late and I suggested we reconvene tomorrow so that is how we left it, that she would try to ‘settle down’ and I ask that she at least try to control her drug and alcohol consumption, that she said she would ‘keep her head down’ from the authorities and hope she does not get sentenced to a custodial sentence in her absence as it seems highly likely to be a number of years………….

I will see her again tomorrow!

Curiously at the same time she was due today

11.00am.

……………………………….we'll see


update ~
11.00am today....she doesn't show.....this is not unusual