A sad & sorry tale of two cities: Birmingham & London……
I was the tender age of 21 going on 12 when first I arrived in Birmingham with my then fiancé. We were making a trip across the water to do a dreadful deed. If it happens once, you know it happens twice.
The following year I travelled to London with my big sister to do another dreadful deed. My vanquished children: Chloe & Jane. Girls girls girls!
Nowadays I am a disenfranchised mother. Disenfranchised completely from my daughter. I need more babies!
But heck, what kind of toxins am I taking in to curb my ever increasing spells of mania? Not very child-friendly at all at all! If I keep carrying on the way I’ve been carrying on since I last left hospital about 6 weeks ago, there’s sure to be a bun in my oven before long!
Who’s your Daddy?
God only knows!
I can easily & effortlessly put my present promiscuity down to my diagnosis of bipolar disorder! Goes with the package. The real deal…Bipolar to fuck! Fucking Bipolar Order!
My self-diagnosis of Bipolar Order didn’t wash well when I put it out there during one of my many many mental health tribunals. Indeed they sentenced me to another 3 weeks of involuntary incarceration.
Incarceration? My shrink was fit to explode…We have saved your life so many times! How could you say you were incarcerated? …Because I was! And that’s the long & the short of it.
My shrink & his sidekick community cursed nurse are of the persuasion that I am going to indulge in 14 weeks of drug rehabilitation. Not!
The drug rehab centre doesn’t find me fit to engage in their ever-so-emotionally intensive program of recovery. Not that I need to recover. I am fully recovered from my latest psychiatric shenanigans, thank you very much & enjoying my hedonistic party lifestyle to the hilt!
As far as my psychiatric team are concerned, I’m on the dry. Just keep telling ’em what they wanna hear, I tell myself. My drug addiction counsellor knows otherwise. After rattling off the alcoholic beverages I consumed last Friday night, she summed up: well, it was a long night! Tequila, vodka, whiskey, beer & wine were very well enjoyed by yours truly! Hic!
My cursed community nurse is very keen to see me this week to give me a grilling. Fat nosey cunt! There’s nothing she dislikes more to hear from me than the word cunt. I told her that my sisters were a shower of cunts & she told my shrink that I was still showing signs of mania. It’s taking you much longer to come down than usual, she was insisting. She’s one stuck-up, know-it-all geebag if ever there was one!
Studies In Hysteria, Sigmund Freud’s earliest work, is my latest reading material… given to me by my erstwhile neighbour Richard, a very well-read man indeed. My community curse completely disapproves. She also disapproves of my daily consumption of magic mushrooms in the form of Ganoderma Lucidum & Cordyceps.
She showed me an article where a study of lab rats fed on a high fat diet & Ganoderma suffered disease of the liver. I told her I put their disease down to their high fat diet! Ganoderma is proven to support healthy liver function, as seen on PubMed.
The curse is not to be persuaded of the magical benefits of my mushrooms. Fat ignorant cow that she is. Now she’s messaging me about maybe seeing her this week. C. U. N.ext T.uesday, is my reply!
Gotta kick the fags before I cough up a lung. Spent the not so wee hours chainsmoking last night. Sheer boredom in boring company. Lung cancer got the better of my dear, long departed Granny. It wasn’t in the genes, I’m convinced. ‘Twas in her filthy Major cigarettes!
I remember visiting her in St. Luke’s hospital & watching her gasp on each drag of a fag she took. A long, slow painful death ensued. Granny had much grief on her lungs. She never got over the marriage of my parents. Her beloved son Frank, an amazing surgeon in the making, shacking up & setting up family with the woman of her nightmares, my Mom.
I told him he should never have married that woman! Granny & I were not so patiently waiting for the men to arrive in from the pub for one of her delicious daily dinners. I was suitably horrified to hear such hatred towards my mother but I felt sorry for Granny at the same time. Despite her hatred & resentment, she was a darling & she spoiled all of us grandkids something rotten!
My Grandad the Great, beloved husband of Granny, was a storyteller if ever there was one! He could spin yarns until the cows came home. Tales of days gone by & memories he would never forget.
He lived to reach the ripe old age of 99 & his cognitive function was on overdrive to the last. I visited him on his deathbed days before he passed. When it came time to say goodbye, he gave me his firmest possible handshake & a knowing wink of his left eye.
He was well aware that he was on his way out & he was good to go. His last days were spent in agony, with fluid on his lungs, drowning in his bed.
One of my sisters went to see him a few days after I did & reported back to me that he had shredded his pyjamas with his not so feeble fingers. He was suffering almightily!
God damn carers were extremely careful with his dosage of morphine to make sure they didn’t kill him & get themselves into all sorts of trouble. So, like Granny before him, Grandad the Great suffered needlessly before he died.
The eulogy at his funeral was absolutely incredible! What a life he had lived!
In his greatly lauded book, The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People, author Stephen Covey invites the reader to imagine their own funeral. So I did……
I lived to see the ripest old age of 150! My eldest daughter, 120 years old by then, presented my eulogy to the party of people present. A most colourful account of a long life lived she told.
My daughter always had a wonderful way with words, ever since she uttered her first syllable as a wee baby, way back at the beginning of the 21st Century: hap, she gurgled. Latin for happiness!
None of my siblings lived to see the occasion of my funeral. They had long since perished from chronic illnesses & gone straight to hell, one by one.
Neither had I been in attendance at their funerals.
The year was 2127.
Climate chaos was a thing of the past. Mother Nature’s activities had wreaked havoc on the human population of the world & we survivors lived long & strong, in harmony with our surroundings & respectful of our environment.
There were no billionaires & no millionaires. Their time was well & truly spent. People lived off the fat of the land & died for the most part of natural causes.
The Quickening had come & gone, leaving the world washed of the greed & grime of so many lost souls consuming too much. Consuming themselves to their comeuppance…expulsion from Earth & explosion into many fragments of themselves, ready to repopulate the animal kingdom, bugs & all.
The plant kingdom too.
Human destruction of our rainforests was no more. Trees grew aplenty & forest fires had become a thing of the past, wiped out by a gradual reversal in global warming & the disappearance of man’s weapons of mass destruction: le Big Mac et le Whopper.
The holy cow had come to be revered once more.
Back to my funeral proceedings: wrapped in a white shroud, my body was laid in a freshly dug hole in the earth. Many many marijuana seeds were sown by my progeny when the hole was filled. There were no tears of sorrow, for I had lived a life fuller than full & said my goodbyes in good time preceding my demise.
My funeral feast was a sumptuous spread of roasted vegetables, nuts & seeds, fine fruit salads, freshly baked bread & crackers, cheese & wine. Lots & lots of wine.
Even the great & the greater & the greatest grandkids of mine were indulging. Anarchy ruled & there was no legal age limit for imbibing. Every last funeral guest got drunk as a skunk! Music & merriment was the order of the day & night. The party rolled on into the following day, as I the corpse would have carried on during my lifetime.
And that’s about the height of it but not to end on a glad note, us psychiatric patients have a life expectancy of 15-20 years less than the average lifespan so the chances of me making it to 150 are slim to none. Never mind, I plan to reincarnate rapidly & return as a lioness, queen of the jungle, eagerly anticipating the self-inflicted extinction of mankind.
Faith In The Ripple Effect 