Here's a treat for a cold grey February morning..........Kassav, a favourite 'Zouk' band of mine

Zouk is all the medicine you need and you will never fall ill!

Turn it up .....and if it doesn't have your toes tapping and/or whirling around your living room ......why, I'll give you your money back!

Kassav - Zouk La Se Sel Medikaman Nou Nis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ0BpzVRQPc

Jacob Desv who wrote it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ajx1jwcgJQ

Well, the holiday season is finally over and normal service is resumed, a sense of trudging back to the drudgery of daily life, wondering what the new year has in store for all of us, recession and double dips, government trying to sell off what forests there are left (even Thatcher knew she dare not) Egypt and the Arab world in upheaval, two men job sharing in Downing Street who I wouldn't trust as far as I could spit, phone hacking, Wikileaks, student riots on the streets of London and I saw this the other day on our carpet - it summed up the state of play, a piece of tiny tinsel glitter on the carpet. It seemed like some comment upon the festive season just passed, if not on the story of Three Wise Men following a star...........this tiny star a little piece of shiny glister in a grey, dull grey oppressive repressive world

The weather meanwhile after the snow finally cleared looked largely like this..........................

That was a few weeks ago...............this morning the view from Coombe towards the Wytham Woods at 8.30am looked like this

A summary commentary on the political climate, dull grey and with a certain sinister sense of foreboding.........here's wishing everyone a healthy prosperous and safe 2011 

"The Wolves Are Running" - J Masefield

John Donne quotes
Inspired to check by a quote on a Van Morrison bootleg (available over in 'Music') I present some of my favourite John Donne  quotes - some were my Dad's favourites too!

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.

John Donne

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

 John Donne

I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.

John Donne

God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice.

John Donne

Busy old fool, unruly Sun, why dost thou thus through windows and through curtains call on us? Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?

John Donne

Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.

John Donne

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, the element of fire is quite put out; the Sun is lost, and the earth, and no mans wit can well direct him where to look for it.

John Donne

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

John Donne

John Donne's House - Pyrford, Surrey

DRUGS & DIOGENES

 

J.W Waterhouse 'Diogenes' 1905 . Oil on canvas
    Art Gallery of New South Wales - Sydney, Australia

Now, ….(well, at least that’s a better start than “So….”. Makes a change for your reader. “I haven’t got any readers” Well I know THAT! I was speaking hypothetically. Ed.) I have left the drop-in for the homeless where I was based for the past fours years and am employed somewhat on an ad hoc basis and peripatetically over other such services in the town. From another Drop-in open in the evenings for food, comfort, shelter and succour where we regularly see upwards of 85 local folk a night, no questions asked, to a 62 bed hostel for people moving up a step from the sleeping on the street. Both places book me sessionally which largely has come to mean when no-one else can be bothered to turn up (not quite fair) – when they have a need of a professionally qualified staff member to fill a gap in the duty rosters, is how I should put it perhaps.

This latter place is amazing the staff fantastically committed and the hostel itself astonishing to the uninitiated. There are clearly folk suffering from all sorts of lack of ‘life skills’ not least their domestic ability. There are clearly some suffering from Diogenes Syndrome – the affliction common to the ‘bag-lady’ ubiquitous in our city centres that is the anti-social compulsion to collect detritus suffered by many previously high functioning people in the their late fifties to sixties. Largely considered to be untreatable, this condition makes for rooms that are, what shall say, somewhat in urgent need of a good tidy-up! A hose wouldn’t be amiss either. As a visual guide, one of the clients who I will call Linda, of whom I am very fond (I have known her for years) has a room that consists of a pile of rubbish covering the floor about half a meter high and has recently dismantled her bed completely so that no recognisable evidence remains save for an increase in the size of the pile in the centre of her room. I found her once on ‘room-check’ reclining upon this pile, smoking a roll-up so much like the Queen of Sheba with a friend sitting on another corner of this pile that wouldn’t go amiss on the local town tip, blithely watching the football on a small portable TV perched atop a quivering heap precariously balanced so as to increase the signal reception.

There is an issue in both places, indeed all over town, and that is the use of illegal substances. In the hostel there is such a need to contain and maintain the ‘bums on seats’ (‘bellies on beds?’ Ed.) aspect of the beds being filled with ‘clients’ that a ‘blind eye’ is turned to drug use on site – in theory there is a policy no doubt but largely the function of staff is one of containment, staff acting as glorified janitors. My first session was a back-to-back shift over a weekend of some 26 hours and I found myself having to answer the door to known drug dealers asking if ‘So‘n’so is in and can you go and get him?’ This rankles with me but am being paid to do a job and I scamper off into the building, up three landings and knock on the clients door and, as cheerfully as I can muster, tell them they have a visitor. They then come down and see who it is and go off into the street and after a few minutes come back smiling. To the uninitiated this may appear perfectly reasonable not to say innocent and ‘normal’ but to the trained eye this has been a door-to-door drug service. This means that rather than do any constructive interventional work with the residents and their substance misuse or heaven forfend take any punitive actions for use of illegal substances (if you bar them then you lose the funding for a bed!) then one has had to see a dealer await their customer and effectively sanction a drug deal!

Sad to say, and seriously here, I discover that there are several mentally ill residents, nowhere else for them with their ‘borderline personality disorder’ the post-Thatcherite ‘care in the community’ means that they languish away in such places. Now they are largely on DLA (disability living allowance) that means they are given more weekly money than someone merely on JSA (Jobseekers) and other residents are aware of this. Not least those dealing drugs to make their own ‘raise’ and score their substance of choice. One of the residents is clearly very mentally ill, wandering the halls talking to himself and on occasion with violent outbursts of anger and distress and on the first weekend I had to help when we received a phone call and were asked to tell him his mother had passed away. This man is in his forties I guess and he has a drug habit. The dealers around and about having realised he is a regular source of ready cash, introduced him to the ‘joys’ of injecting this dirty brown water into his veins and the resultant warm and woolly feeling becomes attractive to him. To the extent that when not flush with money he empties the ‘sin bins’ or finds a discarded needle and injects himself with water, somewhat mystified and disappointed when the resultant feeling of pleasure is absent this time. This has been going on for so long now we have need of the opportunity to clean out his room when he has gone back to visit his family and find out about his mother’s funeral arrangements, apart from wrestling with huge piles of dirty clothes on the floor I am given the task of emptying his three drawer chest of drawers, each drawer of which is full of used hypodermics. When I say full, I mean full. They are full to overflowing! Tipping them into so many sharps bins is precarious work requiring concentration, deftness and huge rubber gloves. I have never seen so many needles in all my life.

Now the drop-in where I work evenings has similar problems but this is a wholly different atmosphere. As the clients appreciate the place is providing food and comfort entirely free of statutory service function and restrictions. There are known drug dealers hovering around and some are small time cannabis dealers distributing their wares to make a raise of enough for themselves [all too common, these are not the scary business men with guns who are in it for the money, these are people scrounging their own drug of choice by making their own cut by dwindling the weight of what’s sold to make enough for themselves to smoke themselves into a stupor) One in particular I have had my eye on since I started there last year. I know he is ‘at it’ I just can’t catch him in the act. I regularly check the toilets for evidence of drug use and find glue packets and the ubiquitous Rizla packet tear off to make a ‘roach’ (curled up card board sliver in place of a filter) and cigarette papers screwed and discarded along with remnants of tobacco and little brown dots of cannabis or grass seeds on occasion.

This time however there is an added factor. If you are going to sell cannabis to the drop-in’s clients it might help to recall that some of your customers are mentally ill. This dealer having sold a ‘short’ order (scant and skimpy weight for the money) to one of our regulars, Richard, who has been given to talk intently to inanimate objects on occasion or burst out laughing for no apparent reason, confounds the ‘dealer’ in his nefarious activity when Richard comes to talk to staff only to complain about the dealer’s prices!

Result! 

The Drop-in will bar him for a fortnight …..

and then normal business will be resumed………..
  

~ 

'Night in Town Homeless' 1860  Oscar Rejlander -British Photographer

GARDEN LEAVE - The Disabled Squirrel and the Poisoned Mouse

Firstly I should perhaps point out that I am NOT on ‘garden leave’, the ubiquitous British expression for being sacked. I am merely taking a week off as annual leave before the Drop-in for The Homeless where I have worked for the past three years goes totally to the wall and is shut down. (It's the cuts you know! The homeless don't need ineffective places like this anymore. Under the new regime they can get on their bikes and find jobs and therefore afford somewhere nice like David Cameron's gaffe up the road in Witney) Technically I am now redundant and have been paid off as such. So for the aforementioned period of annual leave I have not had time to plan what to do with it and therefore anticipate spending a goodly portion of this time sitting in my garden [with an umbrella if necessary] and watching the birds and the bees [literally not euphemistically there’s not any level of such action going on my garden THANK YOU!]



But this is an urban garden well OK a suburban garden really but the conurbation of what is laughably called a ‘village’ [PS the biggest in the UK!] is really just a stretch of estate that extends the limit of Oxford city and is separated only by a golf course [this IS the South] Its feels urban – we have had much bigger gardens when living in the city and the current one is about the size of a comfortably large gentleman’s handkerchief

Sitting down the other day to enjoy a latte in the garden, the first thing that caught my eye was a mouse! Fantastic! Wildlife in all its glory you can just hear me thinking! Then the behaviour of said mouse began to concern me. As it ran it was clearly disorientated, occasionally bursting into phases of chasing its own tail. You know like an idiot canine. Sometimes however augmenting its repertoire by flipping straight over onto its back and in moments of respite seemed to have a head tremor worthy of the most afflicted dystonia and MS sufferer [no disrespect intended here…merely that this was distressingly violent head nodding and clearly …..not natural……..do mice get Alzheimer’s? MS? Dystonia? Or Cerebral Palsy? Not being medically qualified to diagnose I leave it to the experts to pass judgement] Suffice to say I have seen similar behaviour before.



When infested with mice in various dwellings [it would be pompous to call them flats or apartments] I have had call to but traps down and then resorted to poison. The first time in Leicester; ‘dead centre’ of England in more ways than one - the place became so infested with mice even the local feral cats of some five generations inbreeding [i.e. the size of small panthers] were too afraid to enter. The second time after moving back to Oxford we rented a property that frankly crack den owners would have been ashamed to be seen in. The mice population here was so virulent when we moved in that I could set seven traps about the ground floor and before I got my feet into bed, I had heard all of them go off!

This bijou little apartment had a hole in the corner of the living room so huge I could get my leg down it. To the hip! This place was so over grown, the slugs could make it easily up to the bedroom window in their hundreds and the hole in the living room meant that upon one occasion I had a shrew run in and straight up my trouser leg. The funniest bit is I am not joking here! Now a mouse will avoid humans at all costs but Shakespeare knew his British Wildlife and a shrew is a different creature entirely and whilst smaller than a mouse has the courage and temperament of a lion or perhaps a wounded Water Buffalo and a shrew will not back down when confronted with 6 foot of 13 stone idiot.



Now this all became highly distressing, as my wife demanded that I be the one releasing said mouse cadavers into the waste disposal system [a dustbin!] and it was getting ludicrous to fill up a dustbin with more wild life than used teabags! I resorted to poison. Not a decision taken lightly you understand and upon waking one morning to watch the effects of the poison on a mouse at the top of the stairs with my one eye open [I was not disposed to open the other for some considerable time] I watched as this creature shuddered and twitched, its body seized by spasm and jolted till I could bear it no longer.



Now I have been on ‘outward bound' courses as we laughingly call it as a youngster and learnt enough of the ways of the natural world to understand that when coming across a rabbit with myxomatosis the best thing to do is to brace the heel of your stalwart walking boot upon its neck and snap its neck. Indeed was almost forced to do so by some hairy arsed Country yeoman type at the age of 13. Here in suburbia we cannot bring ourselves to do such hearty rustic endeavours. We considered our course of action as put said mouse in a box [my good lady wife’s suggestion] and I watched it spin like a pair of tights on the fastest spin cycle in the washing machine.  Until my wife could bear my inactivity no longer, so she took it in its box to the field opposite [we call it a field – it’s another piece of handkerchief sized scrub that might have once been going to have a railway station on it] and she let it go to enjoy its death amongst the tooth and nail of the feral community of cats that congregate over by the railway tracks.



Here he is! (well, I know I can''t vouch for his gender but it helps me to think he's a bloke OK?)

Now today we had a visitor seldom seen in the back garden haven for wildlife we have cultivated [I say we…..that means my good lady wife, I rarely venture out into this wilderness you understand] This visitor was what appeared to my untutored eye to be a young squirrel and he was tempted down the branches of a large shrub, rescued when we moved in from the council planning ‘green areas’ after someone decided it needed way too much upkeep and decided to concrete it all over. This chap was what at first appeared to be a fine figure of a bushy tailed rodent [not indigenous I grant you and a psychotic little bastard at the best of times having muscled out the British Red Squirrel several decades ago. I understand the interloper comes from the Western United States wouldn’t ya know it! So we are still suffering the ‘Over paid, Over sexed and Over here’ debacle we ever did with our American ‘cousins’ – Yankee Go Home, I say!

As we watched in admiration the sheer invention of this little chap, I said to my wife as we gazed upon its wonderment and beauty, that if recent events were anything to go by it probably didn’t know what it was doing in our garden because doubtless it was poisoned or in its final death throes and about to expire at any minute anyway. Just as she had told me to “Shut up!” I noticed it dragging its rear right leg. Great! It doesn’t know what its doing because its disabled probably starving and has hustled its way into my garden because he can suss out the hanging bird feeder and the somewhat nonchalant garden owners look the type who would know what to do with a blunderbuss even if they owned one.

He performed various acrobatic procedures to get at my nuts and I was so impressed I was minded to photograph the little fellah! [See below] and then it occurred to me being disabled couldn’t account for some of his more eccentric behaviour. That is he didn’t seem at all afraid of us. Now we might put this down to callow youth but it suddenly occurs to me that it could be poisoned and the injury to its leg caused by its many and ever increasing psychotic episodes. We decide to shut the patio doors and lock all the windows





By now we definitely need a cup of coffee.











But maybe indoors.......this time

It's jungle out there people.

A jungle, I tells ya!

So...... (oh come on! Ed.) I am minded to say something about Volunteers. Now lots of the social care network, locally at least, has cause to rely on volunteer programmes and this is of course highly laudable and gets boxes ticked and little brownie points everywhere but as a colleague pointed out to me today this can result in …..er, well what shall we say, certain communication difficulties.

Aforementioned colleague told me the tale today of a hostel not too far from the Drop-in I now find myself working in about their taking on a Japanese volunteer who it would seem had absolutely no English, ….well none to speak of [oh very good! Ed.]

Now it came to pass that someone took the enlightened view that a colleague had cause to know a teacher of TEFL [Oxford is full of them! TEFL teachers that is] After a while my colleague asked the teacher how the Japanese volunteer’s lessons were going and how they were progressing as engaging with our clientele can be a bit of a stretch even if we can speak full blown Queen’s English [not that it’s hers really ed.]

The TEFL teacher explained that there was a hitherto unforeseen problem dealing with a Japanese person working in the social care field that involved not so much learning but rather a certain aspect of un-learning.

‘How so?’ my colleague enquired

“Well when asking my Japanese student volunteering for your good offices, what she had learnt in the way of phrases or words she may have heard that day she replied rather proudly, that she had learned the following –

‘Today I have learned “ I put a fucking bet on a fucking horse down the fucking bookies and the fucking horse fucking lost!

Blenheim Park Woods

So it goes.......it's Friday and this exchange is real.....

 One of our most frequent visitors is a gentleman who I will call Pablo, he has a distinctly Spanish handle and his surname is, lets say Smith, the most ubiquitous British last name possible....he is a delightful man and given to imaginings, specifically that he is a member of staff and frequently given to telling me what to do and give me directions, that we are to attend a meeting together later at the Town Hall for example. He has of late been given to wearing a table cloth size scarf as a head scarf almost 'shemagh' style Arabic headgear, scull cap stylie with a tied back knot which causes it to drape down his back. His behaviour can also include him making copious notes, when he is the mood, which get stapled to the walls, he has seen us do this therefore he puts up his own, they can be lists of tasks to be undertaken before the end of the day, they might be recipes for example or just some detail he has logged from the news, etc
 This afternoon he has this exchange with a fellow staff member

He chooses to point out that he has been admiring the "Avocado tree" in the back garden

'It's a fig tree, Pablo'
 "Oh, I know THAT! But that's where 'advocadoes' come from. They turn into advocadoes'
"Oh, that's........er.......... interesting Pablo, I didn't know that' says my colleague understandingly
"Oh yes, its well know. When they're small they can be figs but they grow and turn into 'advocado's'. Mind you, you have to watch out for the chickens."
'The chickens, Pablo?'
"Yup, the chickens. You need to keep your eye on any chickens wandering about in case they turn them into eggs"
'Sorry Pablo, what are you saying? The fig tree....over there......."

"Yeah, the fig tree is where you grow 'advocadoes', I've seen them and if you let chickens climb the trees they'll turn all the fruit into eggs."

He leaves the drop-in satisfied he has illuminated another ignorant soul about the fruiting trees in our back garden and the vagaries of chickens and their ability to turn figs into eggs.
He passes me on the front desk and looks rather sternly at me.

'Oh, are you off Pablo? Cheerio!'
Perhaps slightly dismayed at my familiarity, he increases the severity of the stern expression, check's  what I am writing and issues a clear and direct

"Very good. Carry on!"

and walks off into the sunny street, smiling.

As he walks away, it crosses my mind to wonder whether his headgear is in fact a tablecloth

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

So a caller came to the airlock today and said he was new to the area. I explained that we had to take some simple details name, date of birth and whether they are sleeping rough or not.

He said his name was Stephen Rea

So I said, "Oh, like the actor"


 and he said "Who?"
"Stephen Rea, the actor?"

and the young man said,
"Never heard of him."

and I said


"Well, you HAVE!" and I smiled

Stony faced he just looked back at me, expressionless, unsmiling, unmoved.


I don't know, perhaps it was me, but I thought this was extremely funny.