Furiously depressed & sunrises

FURIOUS

I’m furious and depressed, let's do the fury first of all.

I don’t want to hate and vilify people. My hatred of bullying all my life would see me recoil away from internet hating, trolling, joining in the chorus on something like twitter, I just can’t understand it, I often feel sorry for those at the receiving end of it regardless of their views, so maybe could be accused of misplaced compassion, I don't like hate.  However it is a natural emotion. When you're angry, when you're furious it's all too tempting to do join in on the hate on twitter, oh and even more so lately hasn't it become a shamefully ugly and depressing place.
I don't click on hash tag trends anymore as much as I hardly watch any news programmes. I am furious with those who were desperate to govern without any idea actually how to, as well as how the infantile or more correctly backward the dislike/fear of anyone who's different is. Racism comes in all shapes and sizes and colours of skin and we really should have risen above it long, long ago. I just wish I had the skill as well as the intellect of many of the fine people I follow on twitter, and who are the sole reason I bother with it, to properly to take apart such areas that so trouble the world, but as lacking as I am in their incisive language I have to have a go myself here.
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My fury here is for my own therapy to get a few things off my chest on an anyway invisible blog on this my vanity website that no one else reads so isn't liable to hurt anyone except perhaps myself.

I am furious that in this mythological disunited kingdom that the covid crises could not have been handled worse. Johnson and his Gollumesque puppeteer Cummings, hence forth known as Cuntings, teeming with arrogance & seething hate working that over stuffed mop headed clown-glove puppet Johnson, hollow inside without his demonic makers presence to give him bumbling artificial form. Assisted by a bloody side show rentamob of pantomime racists & obsequious, smiling grotesques: Gove, Patel, beastly-Mogg, Rahb & Handycock, was there ever a more awful assembly of the worst kind of people in government, presiding callously over lies & obscene grand scale death?

I haven’t felt this angry about government since the darkest days of Thatcher’s heartless regime in the 80s but given the dubious choice between then and now, I’d dig up the mouldering bride of Frankenstein & sit her on the throne instead. 

I agreed with Miriam Margolyes who was met with shocked indignation from the all to readily whipped up media pouncing on her for daring to be honest and say that she had wrestled with feelings of not wanting Johnson dead when he was in hospital, now though I’m quite clear that we’d be better off he’d become another statistic of his & his masters utter complacency & neglect.
I have never been taken in by the shit that is Boris Johnson, he was a clueless menace as mayor, who sold off the skyline of London to obscenely rich investors, and wasted millions on a bridge that was never even built, by way of wasting money on buses etc. He has always been up to his shit stained underpants in self interest, narcissism and privilege. About the only thing this woefully unfunny clown is good at seemingly is getting women pregnant to the extent he couldn’t even say how many children he has. 

Johnson is the problem, the sickeningly artificial, cuddly brand that lulls everyone in when they call him just ‘Boris’. Boris is harmless because he’s a likeable bumbling buffoon who’ll get stuck on trip wires & play the joker, whilst his devious, starey eyed master soft peddles his nazi eugenics & racism. Boris can’t cope without Cuntings and his master is nowt without his glove puppet, though he clearly has delusions of grandeur, just lapping up all the attention he got sat in Downing Street’s garden with the press seemingly hanging on his every word was a nauseating spectacle. Johnson as has been seen time and time again is just a deflated, stuttering mess with a bit of school boy Latin without his master, so I say again, better that the fucker had died, then at least the comical, abominable Snow Rabbit from the old Warner Bros Bugs Bunny cartoon, wouldn’t be there to make palatable Cuntings new sinister brand of Conservatism that’s worthy of the EDL.
Anyone else in the aforementioned cabinet of the curiously awful wouldn’t have been able to con so many and Cuntings would be justly banished into political exile for breaking all the rules & not even caring if anyone believes his eccentric covering story but contemptuously trotting it out anyway because he is so confident he’d get away with it. Were it not for Cintings, we might have been saved the further untold miseries ahead of effectively imposing economic sanctions on ourselves with the hateful Brexshit plan. Totally unbelievable that these poor excuse for human beings have helped make this country one of the worst affected in the world for the covid virus with to date truthfully over 60, 000 excess deaths, dreadful term, 'excess deaths.' The stupid, stupid cunt Johnson going off on holiday in February when the pandemic had weeks before alerted and other countries were taking defensive measures, (serious speculation now suggests that if we’d acted early up to a third of those lives could have been saved, which is truly shocking) and of particular shameful and scandalous neglect, I would say is the sacrifice of the elderly in care homes. Imagine if they’d stuck to herd immunity at the outset as no doubt Cuntings wanted, just think how many thousands more would have died. Politics dressed up as  science has led their apathy all along. These murderous cunts have blood on their hands.

 I am furious with anyone who voted for these cunts, furious with the crap two party, first who legs it past the post, voting system that put them there, furious with the outdated houses of parliament, that should just be a museum and instead a reworked modern Proportional representation parliament should be instead located somewhere like Manchester or Birmingham, furious with Jeremy Corbyn for letting everyone down who saw him as a beacon of hope as he was such a weak and stupid cunt particularly over Brexshit which he wanted, more furious with the press, so powerfully by and large loyal to the establishment and unquestioning of it’s incompetence. 

Anyone trusting the governments advice now on anything would probably trust a stranger coming to the door and saying I’ll mind your house if you want to go on holiday, I wouldn't trust them to burst a balloon in a needle factory that had been infested with hedgehogs!

And where do I even start about the dumb nazi in the White House? Beyond analysis the reasons why the cunt is stoking the flames of racism, after the sickening and deeply upsetting murder of George Floyd in Minnesota, his last conscious moments filmed as the so called protector of law and order inexplicably knelt on his neck for almost 9 minutes, a disgusting spectacle more reminiscent of torture than law enforcement. President Cunt routinely uses heavily armed riot police to break up peaceful demonstrations shamelessly breaking their first amendment right to peacefully protest. Even Johnson in a rare moment of truth before he became prime minister described Cunt-Trump as completely unfit to be president, and being supremely unfit for pm he should know. Of course our dangerous clown of a pm now in an even for him, staggeringly ill informed & insensitive way describes the US as a bastion of peace & freedom in the week when peace & freedom never seemed further from the American dream!

Trump is a dreadful creature, the worst excesses of everything bad, from orange blusher to white supremacist! Isn't it always bizarre that white supremacists from Hitler & Himmler to Trump are the complete antithesis of being physically supreme, state of those cunts. What racism really all about is fear and cowardice, ugly little shit stirrers who have to make an unpleasant noise to stop themselves pooing their pants about their very insignificance.
If I was a black woman or a man in America, I’d be terrified. The police are systemically racist and I’d never trust them. I’d be so angry at the moment I’d be blaming the establishment and smashing the windows of Maceys department store to see what things I could never afford. 

​America for all it’s mythology of being the land of the free, still denies it’s vast majority freedom through obscene inequality and racism. It is an incredibly divided country, never has a country been named so badly that has the word United in it, united in racism against Black & hispanic Americans, a country that was founded on the gun and violence, the genocide of native Americans and the seizure of their land, and giving it to white European immigrants only, not to black people once emancipation of slaves had occurred.
What do you do with America? Start again, it needs radical change, the kind of change that might push it to civil war, like taking away their guns, racism like the gun is engrained in the USA regrettably and depressingly under dangerous imbecile President Cunt it has regressed to it’s worst instincts again after so many improvements had been made.

When I was in junior school I loved history, the Romans, the Vikings particularly, by senior school mistrust of school had seeped in, hatred was to follow after woeful neglect to nurture, brutality and physical abuse. History like everything else became a casualty. I do though remember a teacher, I think she was called Mrs Pimlott in a humanities lesson, playing a recording of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a Dream’ speech. I was maybe 12 or 13 I think but I remember it’s power.

Dr King has fascinated me all my life and last night I watched a reading broadcast on The Royal Exchange Theatre's youtube channel of 'The Mountaintop' by Katori Hall, a truly beautiful play set on the eve of Dr King being murdered in Memphis in 1968. So brilliantly acted & realised, definitely the most powerful reading I have ever seen. If you're reading this I urge you to check out.

Anyway back to school, I don’t remember much analysis in the lesson of the civil rights movement, but I do vividly remember the name Rosa Parks and the infamous bus incident. I couldn’t understand why black people were being treated so badly. We only touched on this area, without any context about the deeper, darker history behind it, that of the slave trade. Slavery was just not talked about at the time, we were taught about how much Britain had given to the world and the industrial revolution and with gleaming pride how we were the greatest empire the world had ever known.
I remember my older sister talking about British imperialism in South Africa and I think that was the fist hint I got that all was not as shiny as it seemed with Great Britain and her empire. Also Roots was on tv in the late 70s, the series about slavery. It was uncomfortable, I didn’t like it, it was like is this real did that really happen? Did they really treat other human beings this badly? Surely not , it was an unpleasant eye opener,  a rude awakening, a guilty disgusting secret behind British empire glorification and everyone was seemingly in denial about it.

I was growing up though in the 70s where black people were the object of humour on television nightly, comic racism was common place and seemed cosy without malice behind it. I don’t remember a single black or even mixed race person at the Poynton County Shite School where I did time between 1975-1980. In the Vernon junior school previously, there was one black lad, not in my year but above and my only memory of him was that he was frog marched out of assembly every morning to stand in a corridor outside. His daily crime? He was a muslim, first time I heard that word, no attempt was made in the Christian assembly to explain why he had to be removed so insensitively, inevitably to impressionable minds he must be bad by nature. I remember feeling sorry for him and I’ve never forgotten that. I had friends in school who referred to black people in the same way that the popular sitcom ‘Love thy Neighbour’ did, or the way inexplicably popular Jim Davidson did, and I admit I probably went along with it to fit in, thinking it was funny, without understanding that it was racist abuse. One thing though I’m proud I never joined in with was any kind of bullying.
Of course any lads or girls for that matter who were perceived wea, not what was expected of their sex or came from poor backgrounds were bullied. I wasn't bullied but I was made fun of, I felt for anyone who was bullied and would never join in the chorus just t fit in as so many did, and so was as a consequence vilified myself. I hated bullying & bullies very early on, gave me. lifelong suspicion of gang culture, right up to internet trends, because for all my many faults, one fault I didn’t have, was a lack of compassion for people and for that I was called a puff!

I loved action man when I was a kid and had about ten of them and was still loving reenacting my own film dramas with them in WW2 uniforms until I was about 14, (I guess I was a backward kid, certainly by todays standards), in the wonderful, magical garden of Fleetway, 66 Dickens Lane where I grew up.. I had a black action man called Tom Stone, who I thought was brilliant, but some of my friends. Really had it in for him and would have the Germans strip him and torture him, eventually pull his limbs off much to my disgust. I remember one lad throwing him across the garden saying something like..why have you got this? 
I use this as symbolic for the hate they seemed to have for this black character, a hate I just couldn’t understand, of course it was dressed up as humour and I may have had a laugh at the nig nog or Sambo name calling as much as Honkie from Love thy Neighbour, which although it was schoolboy immaturity, I feel remorse for now, but I quite honestly though could never understand the hate or fear that a lot of the other white lads displayed. Was it hate, was it fear dressed up as humour, casual racism that was so widespread across the tv I grew up with where, the only black actors were Rudolph Walker and Don Warrington on the receiving end of white bigots and I guess without apologising at least the writers didn’t let the white bigots get the upper hand, in fact they came across as idiots. I definitely detected fear and hate in my classmates above the schoolboy humour.
 I still had the Tom Stone action man upon until about 10 years ago with a few others, he was in bits but I had still kept him, despite giving the vast majority of the others away, maybe because he was so damaged nobody would want him. Then I heard that the figure was a sought after collectors item, that not many had survived intact, so I tried to restore him with the limbs of another broken white figure and torso, did quite a good job then put him on ebay, clearly stating and showing pics of the mish-mash of parts and someone in South America bought him in a bidding war for almost £40. Bless Tom Stone! 

As I said I didn’t grow up around any black or asian people in the 70s so I didn’t have their experience, apart from hearing about the civil rights movement in the US, I wasn’t really aware first hand of racism here and the first time I had real contact with anyone black was my first foray into acting with Manchester Youth Theatre when I was 19. We were divided into pairs to do an improv about high status/low status, and this really nice lad, I can’t remember his name suggested I play a policeman and he someone the cop was stopping & searching. I always remember he said to me, “Call me a black bastard, don’t worry, don’t hold back!” Which kind of shocked me, but I did as he suggested, felt bad, even though we were acting, apologised to him afterwards even though the abuse had been his suggestion, he was warm and friendly, not even a trace of bitterness. It was only afterwards it struck me that this was almost certainly all in his experience, he’d clearly experienced police harassment and abuse and without even wanting to highlight the issue just suggested it as a truth in our dramatisation.
Not long after I shared a flat in Levenshulme, Manchester with two girls and when I rang the advert to see if I could come round and view the room, the girl on the phone said matter of factly, without a hint of bitterness again, “Just to let you know I’m black!” Which again really surprised me that she thought it worth saying, that might be a problem, a deal breaker. But again, sadly it was obviously in her experience. Boy I seriously needed educating about the black experience, but then all white people back then did and  shockingly still do apparently.

Racism is institutional in this so called Great Britain, it always has been, the trappings of Britains colonial past attached to that racism are everywhere, not just in some statues and names of public buildings, but in parliament itself. From the days of slave owners and the profits of slavery financing building development in our big cities right up to the Windrush scandal and the dreadful hostile environment policy of just a few years ago. That colonialism goes right to the top of our system, emblematic in the monarchy and the very honours system itself. What is needed is radical reform. A written constitutional setting out everyones rights, the jettison of all colonial trappings including the commonwealth, parliament itself.

I've never liked statues, always seen them as ghostly representations of people, dark & cold in bronze like grave yard memorials, from my childhood they were always of military men and something stern and unsympathetic about them. Of course in the last 20 years we have had statues of contemporary, non militaristic figures and some beautiful representations like my favourite Molly Malone in Dublin, love her, she has a real power, and is a notable exception. Generally speaking though I'm not keen on them, it's such an out of date way of commemoration.
​As a tour guide which I was for many years up until this February in fact, they are useful tools of context and as such I'm wary about this discussion about removing them. I don't foist my views on anyone, including my mistrust of the royals, and most of the statues in somewhere like London just aren't worthy of note because without a statue they'd be forgotten.
History is important, but it's as important to re evaluate a statue as it is to honestly re evaluate a famous person in a biography. The establishment as in the dominant conservative figures in newspapers and tv got scared, angry when a group of people in a well organised demo pulled a statue down in Bristol of a hitherto forgotten 17th century merchant who’d prospered out of the slave trade, a statue put up in the late Victorian era where his sins had apparently been whitewashed to that of philanthropist. The statue should have been taken down a few years ago when protests in Bristol were first made. Concerns of airbrushing history are worth considering though and you can’t pick and choose your villain. Many historical figures that I grew up being taught to revere like Thomas More and MK Gandhi are I’m afraid tarnished from proper research. (and it is crucial to do proper research not just follow twitter trends). 
Cecil Rhodes though not revered in my lifetime was definitely a white supremacist and II suspect his stature looking down from Oriel College, Oxford will go, but then he as no worse a imperialist than Churchill.
​Churchill I'm afraid has become a hugely mythologised figure, it is right that he was undoubtedly the man of the hour in 1939, but he has been eulogised beyond belief into this heroic figure who we cannot dare to criticise. My own dear dad who joined up in the RAF in 1939 In remember surprised me in telling me he was no fan of Churchill, and I think it's myth that all servicemen revered him. 
His reputation has been elevated to hero who did no wrong and was loved by all in such movies as The Darkest Hour with Gary Oldman, which I thought was terrible. His deeds are just as checkered as that of Rhodes if you care to educate yourself properly about him. I don't believe his monstrous statue, (he resembles a misshapen monster like Davros out of Dr Who with a hunchback giants frame), should be removed, but it's important not to airbrush out his considerable transgressions which I'm afraid in the end do outweigh his laudable standing up to Hitler. The outrage of ‘Churchill was a racist’ being daubed on his statue palpable and Johnson is already at time of writing making political capital out of the statue being boarded up to protect it, an act itself designed I'm sure to outrage the racists and feed into their hate.
What happened in Bristol was understandable and the taking down of some in London, and I think Rhodes likeness will eventually go, but I worry that the whole statues issue is  distracting from real change happening, something I think that Cuntings government are already cynically exploiting as a way to divert attention from their complete fuck up of the country over their neglect to act sooner over covid.
No I'm afraid pulling the statues isn't going to change the behaviour of dyed in the wool racists across society today, rather only enflame them further, but I can hugely empathise with it.
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Racism is systemic in Britain and Brexit got to the core of it, the whole vote leave campaign got away with it’s dodgy dealings, lies, manipulation of the truth because too many people bought into almost hidden racist agenda, the same racist agenda that they buy into in America when they chant "Make America Great again!” 
Inequality is rampant in Britain and the most unequal are the black & ethnic communities who it’s no coincidence have been hit hardest in the covid pandemic. Life is still structured towards privilege in the UK. Look at how many public school boys and one or two girls have positions of power in governments, look at the institutions that govern us from Westminster to the law and those who administer sporting events. I took against the injustice when I was in my rebellious late teens 40 years ago and although much new positive agenda’s of fairness and equality have been dressed,  depressingly still so little has actually changed, so little empathy in those who have power, even Patel the home secretary, a Pakistani girl, racially abused as she has said, she knew and suffered racism but power has seemingly corrupted her not to understand peoples frustrations at it that make them want to destroy statues and lash out and anyway it was only a minority that did lash out against the police, the minority that you get on all marches that want to take advantage.
What Patel shows despite the horrible racism she endured, is a lack of empathy, which seems to go with the territory, following on from the two previous women, May and Rudd who held the positions and who were the instigators of hostile environment, and that is hugely depressing. Empathy is a fine word and is chronically lacking in our politicians, particularly though not exclusively the conservative ones, shamelessly so in fact.

​Black lives matter is not a thing to say as lightly and meaninglessly as Johnson does, it sits awkward, it's a dreadful statement to have to make anyway, a shameful admission. It's been a very long journey which this particular white man in his own little bubble can only barely imagine. How are we going to educate the mindless, poorly educated idiot who hates as much as the privileged, highly educated idiot. The playground hatred hasn't left those that left the playground too long ago, from subtle discrimination to overt frenzied hate, from the football crowd to the Bullingdon Club and that needs full attention to try to educate, shame and criminalise, no half measures. 
Hate & violence are inexcusable ways of standing to the hate of racism and that is not a way out of this, in fact it will only perpetuate the racism people are understandably lashing out against. I've never liked gang culture but I try to understand it as a reaction against poverty, injustice and just not mattering, the safety in numbers thing, but it's so important that humanity and compassion must override our anger, and that no one becomes so hate filled that they're hardened to inhumanity. I was living in East London in the summer of 2011 and the riots that spread from Tottenham in the aftermath of the killing of Mark Duggan, it was scary, people were losing it and taking out their anger on anyone including those like myself making their way home from work on the tube and buses. It was a complete fuck up of an arrest by the met police that left Mark Duggan dead, but the reaction went beyond rioting to a violent tension the like of which I had never experienced before.
I am of course all too aware I started off this blog entry not being able to resist hating Boris Johnson and wishing him dead, and seeing myself out rioting if I felt so desperately unheard and unimportant, so I am not in any way sitting in judgement of that kind of hate that makes you want to lash out. I'm just lashing out as therapy on a vanity website that is barely noticed. We are all human and get angry but self control is ultimately vital.

I've a strong and positive feeling that we're not going to forget the name of George Floyd, that he's not just going to be another name on a t shirt as someone said last night, and his last words "'I can't breathe" will live to haunt the racist ghouls, it's going to be tough in America with all their thousands of police forces and hateful racists and Trumps won't just vanish and this probably won't be the last brutal murder at the hands of police, and here in Britain the mindset of the police who when intervening in a altercation will still stop and search a black guy before a white one is going to be a knee jerk reaction that needs almost a physical revolution as much as a cultural one.
I watched scenes of a memorial for George Floyd when Sam Cooke's beautiful 'A Change is gonna come'  was played, and I started crying, I loved that song when I was younger without really realising what it meant, and the fact that it was released in the year of my birth 1964 and that change is still to come.


and now the depressed bit...
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DEPRESSED

A week last Saturday, I slept most of the day, I haven’t been sleeping much  since the beginning of this year anyway, but on Saturday I could only sleep. Without self dramatisation which I admit can find it’s way into my darkest feelings, Saturday and building up this last week, I have definitely had the darkest feelings I have ever felt. I was scared of those feelings and I needed to sleep them off. Sleep for me has become a reaction to the weight of impossibly bleak feelings, an absolute necessity, I’m sleeping more, though not necessarily well at the mo.
Now I’m a bit of a goth, gothic sensibility more than wearing eyeliner and steampunk punk clothing, though I love those kind of clothes, I think a lot about death, love Shelley & Emily Bronte, the Cure & Joy Division , and often an overcast sky to blazing sunshine, but the kind of dark feelings I’m sorry to say I refer to are nothing good, nothing creative or inspirational, in fact the polar opposite.
Like so many others I’m sure, I’ve felt on my own in the covid crises, like a survivor from a nuclear war, well a survivor that receives Iceland and amazon deliveries every week or two. I’m not a survivor really, all my life when I’ve endured hardship, as I have for the majority of my time on earth, I’ve always had my dear mum to bung me £20 or more when I’ve been at my lowest and to stop me becoming homeless. 
I don’t know, I imagined that although in denial of it that depression has haunted me for years and I’ve not wanted to admit to it for fear of being perceived as weak, but this year I have undoubtedly experienced something new, a a hollow despair that frightens me. I read this quote a few days ago on twitter…

“Depression isn’t just about feeling sad at the state of the world. It is a total inner collapse of your self. A free fall where your every thought is whether you have the stamina for another day of pain. It is primarily internal. It is not simply being sad about stuff.” 

(Matt Haig)

This really spoke to me as I instantly recognised myself, not just mere sadness, the blues, melancholy as I undoubtedly have been, but the real, palpable near giving up. It’s really shaken me up and my whole view of mental illness. 
I suspect thousands are suffering from depression, thousands like me are completely on their own. I haven’t had a face to face in person chat with anyone I know and love for over 2 and a half months and the longest I’ve even chatted to a stranger is a couple of minutes to thank them for a home delivery. I’ve talked on the phone every week to some of my dear nieces and occasionally to friends. I never ring anyone, because I don’t know what to say, or rather don’t want the inevitable platform to whinge how bad things are for me. I ve been on my own in my mums house in deepest, darkest Cheshire, beautiful if wildly overgrown garden, though I’ve pushed a manual, roller mower across the lawn every week or two and cut down the odd nettle or piece of indestructible ground elder, barely to make a difference, gardening is not something I gain any pleasure from, in any case gardening is always seems more killing things than nurturing them! I’m fighting a daily battle with depression so debilitating that it will not let me see the good or purpose in anything. I’ve been trying to write this all this last week but couldn’t. I couldn’t/still can’t really write with any confidence. I also tried loads of silly poems and things to get me through the last few weeks of the last month, but had to abandon them because they were shit or just couldn’t see any good in it.
I’m scared I can’t do the things I want, that I don’t know how to and haven’t got the belief that I can do them anyway. I feel as though I’m drowning in the mess that my life has become, that there is not one area of my life that isn’t messed up. I worry that i’m fucked. And that even when this is over, it isn’t going to be, for the far reaching effects of the degenerative self harm, equally physical & mental will be with me. I’m scared of my future.

​My body has suffered through lack of exercise & my mind through lack of stimulus & hope. I have been thinking about my death and my biggest, lifelong fear to die alone, with no one who I have met in life to love me and not having done anything I wanted to do on earth, or done anything in any way to help anyone else.

 I have had an awful feeling for some time now that I won’t live til old age, that I won’t even reach 62, which was my dads age when he died. When you’re scared of the future you don’t want to, even though you can still have flickering dreams of a happier scenario. The way I’m neglecting my body and the wallowing in despair is almost testing this. My friend Therese several weeks ago said she thought that I might be pushing myself to see how far I could go, to see how far I could push myself. I haven’t given up completely and this weekend seems like a new dawn after last weekends bleak sunset, although I touch wood very heavily here, mindful of how easily the worst thoughts could seep back into me. 

I go for almost daily walks at dawn, to see sunrises, it comforts me to see sunrises. it is the best time of the day across the earthy plateau of maise seedlings at first light and then sit down and watch the first appearance of the sun, then I go back to bed. The difficulty is later on in the day from about 1pm. It’s like it’s all downhill from there. I went to look at a few sunsets too, but didn’t find them as comforting, it’s like the passage of the day is a metaphor for life, although sunsets can be far more beautiful than sunrises, I hope that means something. I have no faith, although I have always counted myself a spiritualist, someone who senses more to things than meets an eye, an agnostic as opposed to an atheist.
I don’t know how many times I say to myself “Dear God, help me, or I talk to my dad, apologising for being such weak son and wishing he was here, telling my recently departed friend Sharron, how much I miss her as well, and my mums dear little shih tzu Maisie who should be here still, but I have no conviction they can hear me.
I don’t think I believe in a life, a consciousness after death anymore, even though I desperately want to, particularly sensing more than ever my own mortality. It seems more a wishful thinking fantasy than ever, leaving aside the science of what neuro transmitters etc enable that very consciousness in the first place, energy I was once told doesn’t just not exist it goes on, but I am not intelligent enough to grasp science and the best I can hope is for “There are more things in heaven and Earth philosophy. Do you know I’m not even sure by and large we human beings would deserve one after the travesty we’ve made of this one. I see the beautiful wild bees buzzing on the bushy hedge and wonder whether they need to dream of a life beyond, and they for all their life enhancing qualities richly deserve it more than we do.
With all the death, anxiety and uncertainty and the quality of all our lives so considerably reduced these days, I do think we need something to believe in, and the philosophy that my dear friend Therese puts forward that if we believe in what we want it will be true and that none of this is real anyway. So if I believe in mermaids and witches is that my heaven?

I do love life, but I don’t love mine. I feel sorry for myself, but not always in a ooh poor me kind of way, but more I look at myself in the mirror, or more often in one of the photos I am always obsessively taking of myself, and I see a body that I am occupying, that’s not too bad looking, or didn’t used to be, tall, compassionate, kind and caring, with a fucking great taste in music and films and I say to myself sorry. Sorry for not being kinder to myself, sorry for the neglect of my body with no exercise for over 2 months. Sorry for all the times I’ve had a go at myself, treated myself disrespectfully, wasted my own time and been too stupid to not recognise opportunities that may have made me happier. 

When I go out walking in the dawn or the beautiful, wild garden or even on the surface look at my books and records, and old sentimental toys that I gave personality to, I think how awful not to have this, while there is still the glimmer of a promising dawn that represents the hope for my two most wanted quests in life, to find love & strength in a woman and to make myself and others proud of me as an actor, how can I lose that possibility. But I almost wish that I didn’t see any good in anything, that there was no flame to be extinguished, that life and nature held no flicker of joy for me. That the sun before the new dawn fades wasn’t so lovely. 

I recorded myself doing Ian Curtis’s lyrics to the song of that name on Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Ian’s suicide on 18th of May, inspired by seeing Maxine Peake similarly doing She’s Lost Control on a special evening of events broadcast online that I watched on the evening of the 18th. I was quite pleased with the result recorded with the backdrop of the most beautiful dawn I have seen of late, and put it on instagram, twitter and youtube (I’ve come off facebook at the mo, became unhappy with it) but if the purpose of doing was to get attention, which of course it was, it failed, although a few lovely people said some nice things.

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​As I said, one of the most worrying things is that I haven’t even been able to talk to anyone about this because I worry sounding miserable when talking to others, worry being viewed as a liability if I go on too much about how awful everything is when everyone is going through the same thing and equally worry how weak I would look. Then of course I worry what psychological self harm I’m doing to myself in not allowing myself to talk as it would most assuredly do myself good. That’s an awful lot of worrying.

All my life I’ve lacked confidence/courage. (In the last week I have even lamented the fact that I haven’t the courage to end my life). ‘The nerve’ has alway been allusive to me.  I found an outlet in acting where I could have courage, courage in performance. A problem was at first doing this in front of others, when at first I played parts on my own. (I still do my best acting when on my own),it took me all my 20s to find this and then of course the life long problem has been getting the opportunities to do this.

I have been listening, reading, watching to the work to 4 famous talents, who’s lives were cut short in their 20’s, Ian Curtis, Stu Sutcliffe, Nick Drake & James Dean. As well as hugely rating them, Ive always been obsessed with these young men who were genius but then in the case of Ian & possibly Nick too, took their own lives thru depression basically. I think I desperately wanted success, fame, accolades and more importantly their incredible talent in my 20s and have always admired those who seemingly cram a whole lifetime into a short number of years, and the apparent  awareness of only a very short time to do stuff, seemingly unafraid that they might push it too far & that would be the end of them, either in an accident, haemorrhage or suicide.
it might suggest that are lives are predetermined in some way, though I have of course cited 4 extremely high profile individuals & for every Ian Curtis theres someone who we’ll never know the name of who died too young without ever doing anything like what they wanted, not to mention children who never made it beyond infancy. So it really is all too random for this to ever make sense. I’ve always had a gothic obsession with death, reading Shelley poems, fascinated by the Bronte’s, particularly Emily, I’ve always fantasised about gothic, witchy girls and used to like wandering around old grave yards reading tombstones.

For the first time in my life I have given up hope in acting & love & I always thought that then when i would, life wouldn’t be worth it.  Love particularly is and always has been the single most source of depression for me. As recently as last Autumn I was dating a woman I met on tinder, but it fell apart, she was a bit messed up, thought I was going to peg out on her, just because I was a little red faced and out of breath after climbing up The Edge at Alderley to meet her at the Wizard pub. 
I’ve always lacked strength, fantasised about a woman in my life who would give me strength. I don’t mean look after me, I mean just be there to make me strong for myself as much as her. I want to look after someone, to have someone who depends on me, someone to be kind and giving too. Being on my own for almost 3 months has magnified how depressed I get when I've only got myself to think about. I am not one of life's natural loners, despite appearances. I don't have Maisie anymore, very sadly, no cat, I only can take a little delight in buying bird seed to put out every morning and try to imagine, now matter how far fetched it is, the birds depending on me every morning for a little bit of breakfast!

All of this I have craved for too long. I imagine the all consuming love of a woman would give me purpose, but even this may be a fantasy. I have always had these gothic fantasies about intense mutual love, as I’ve said before I blame reading Wuthering Heights when I was 14 for shaping my fantasies!
The problem is it’s like I’ve never matured in my romantic life, that is I still have the passionate intensity of the teenager in love & I haven’t had the years of experience of living with a woman, it has always been a dream. 
I guess I might have been married and divorced by now with grown up kids but then I’d have been a very different person. I’d have been a very different person with a regular woman in my life... well i mean constant not normal, normal wouldn’t cut it, she’d have to be a bit crazy to go out with me. 
I want to meet a woman and get married, but this is surely now as much of a fantasy as acting glory. Anyway in the end we are all alone and those of us lucky to meet a partner to walk through life with, last through practicalities not through romantic whims, and an awful lot of people are alone.
please don’t let me die before that happens, that I’ll never be anyones love of their life is the saddest thing I’ll ever think or say. I always have been obsessed with leaving some kind of legacy behind, all the old films and music I love the talent behind them long since gone, but then very much alive in the emotions they stimulate in their recorded work.I’m sure I should be not so bothered about making such a big noise, but instead caring more about doing things that are kind and considerate and help people without them even knowing it, without having to be remembered because of something wonderful and life enhancing, but the equal if not more importance of a less showy legacy. I wish I could be content at that I really do, but I don’t think I will be. Beautiful sentiment all the same and true.

“When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.”

John Lennon

Anyway I’ll  end with a sunrise and that’s the most poetic, (I hope not prophetic), thing I’ve said in months.