Southend on Sea, the over winter refuge and the refugee.

A massive Hiatus.

I beg your pardon.

Yooerd.

So, I had to decamp from Stogursey in Somerset two weeks ago tomorrow. I am staying with very good friends, in their newly extended house in Southend-on-Sea. I am rooming, in what should be their snug. So, from the town with the world’s shortest pier to the town with the world’s longest pier. There is a poetic asymmetry to that situation I have always loved. Remembering of course that before `we’ went travelling in 2013, we lived at my brother's place in the very same Southend-on-Sea, just a mile or two from this location (brother is still there).

It is not an ideal situation, though my friends wouldn’t have it any other way. What comes next is going to sound ungrateful at first glance but will be mitigated a line or two further on. As a famous author friend of mine told me earlier this year. Writing, any writing is like clay, you can add, subtract, and mould as you go. You edit as you write and reread and write again (in paragraph writing terms this is paragraph six).

Slightly grim bit (Grim is short for Graeme, not Graeme is grim, Grim’s Reality is the reality of Graeme known as The Grim … it is about time I cleared that up). Adjectives you could describe my current existence as, and also the previous few weeks since I was unceremoniously asked to leave my own home by someone, I invested all my trust in for thirteen years: wretched, sorry, woeful, humiliating, painful, shameful. There may be more, but I do not want to dig too deep lest I upset my fragile sanity. This piece didn’t start where it ends.

The simple fact of the matter is, that all those adjectives live between my ears.

The reality is my friends are proper cool, the house has loads of room, I have my own space in it (all be it I have to move my bed out the way each day if I am to use it to sit in the snug and give my hosts some space for family time without Uncle Grim, cluttering up the place). It is no sacrifice or stress at all to uplift a foam mattress topped with a Duvaly, it is just a matter of being organised.

In this space, I can recover my fragile sanity noted above. It is fair to say that if you are going to bare your soul and share this experience for public consumption, then you really need to be mindful of not putting a gloss on it, and pretend you are living your best life ever … as people try to do on social media.

This is not a great experience. But believe me, it could be so much worse. Fragile sanity and an example of how fucked up things can get with the smallest of upsets follows.

This morning I awoke to go swimming. I have found a pool. I do not like it much even though I have paid for a month’s membership and have been twice. There are two things that fall out from this at a minimum. One, you cannot force yourself to feel like you are in control by going swimming and pretending that you are back on the horse. Two, the slightest upset throws number one into stark relief. What happened? My car made a funny noise as I pulled away from the kerb. I drove three-quarters of the way to the pool. The car was making an odd noise and it seemed worse when steering. Of course, this meant that any moment the car was going to fail, and I would be stuck miles from home with no chance of rescue because I had to cancel my AA cover because I simply can’t afford it. It is a risk; I have been a member of the AA for years. But when money is short you have to take more risks whether you like it or not. The mind races to the most disastrous potential outcome and your confidence and composure collapse in a festering heap. I was emotionally ruined before 07.30am, I felt exhausted, tearful, fearful and somewhere deep down a voice said `just fucking end it all.’ Bear in mind it was a noise that manifested for a few moments pulling away from a kerb and then going round three roundabouts.

Maybe you are reading this and thinking `for fucks sake man, that’s a bit of an over-reaction.', You might be thinking `wanker, eleven hours later you are writing about it. You’re an attention-seeking twat. Fuck off.’

I would counter that writing about it eleven hours later says I have thought about it all day and tried to understand it. I have listened to its words, I’ve thought about the motivation, the desire to make the nightmare of underlying uncertainty just `FUCK OFF!’ with all haste. The simple fact is, that voice is the voice of desperation and fear. I am going to say now, that I am still reading -very slowly- Jordan Petersons 12 rules for life. I understand that voice thanks to reading the book. Anger he says is the reaction to fear. Fear in this instance is the fear of the unknown (uncertainty), the unknown in this instance is the future. As someone pointed out quite wisely (not Jordan Peterson), suicide is a long-term solution to a short-term problem. The `end it all’ voice is the voice of abject terror, not fear. It is a strange voice, it is probably in all of us, and maybe we all hear it once in a while. When we are in highly stressful situations, you may hear it a lot. Lately, I’ve heard it a lot. Fortunately, Jordan Peterson and just about everyone you or I know will tell you variously that `ending it all’ isn’t the answer. You will tear their lives apart you will leave all the people you left behind wondering what else they could have done to help you over the hump. Is that their selfishness, that they don’t want to feel all the emotions the suicidal person is feeling at the moment they did whatever they did to end their pain? Possibly, probably, but it is also your friends and family saying in a round-about way that `suicide is a long-term solution to a short-term problem.’

I often say to people who are going through a morass of shit in their lives that `there is always light at the end of the tunnel.’ I caveat the former with: `sometimes the tunnel is long or has curves, so the light may not be immediately apparent.’

Back to the latest triggering event. Let us cut a long story short. The power steering fluid was low. Before I left Somerset, I checked all the fluids, the tyres, and cleaned the windscreen … I even found one of the internal headlamp bulb covers was off and refitted it. I didn’t check the steering fluid. I have owned a lot of cars. I have never once ever checked the power steering fluid; it is just one of those things that is checked at service time by others. My mind in its race to find the worst outcome had immediately found a reason to look for a bill of thousands of pounds, the car being off the road and me not being able to fix it due to a lack of funds. This of course means that I cannot now not drive back to Somerset next week to move my furniture and items out of the house and put them into long-term storage next weekend. I have found a storage unit, and my mother bless her cotton socks has paid for six months. I lose this week no matter what because I can’t exfil back to the west country to `do the do’ and get some bodies to help me at short notice. However, I have booked the space and one can only hope 50sqr feet is enough with clever stacking.

This little upset brought things to a head. I realised that I probably need to park swimming for a while. I don’t feel comfortable at the pool. It is a bit dirty, a bit disorganised and I am not in the clique. The lane etiquette is stated on the boards at the end of the pool, but the people that swim ignore them, and the disinterested staff don’t enforce the etiquette. Therefore, the best thing for me to do in the short term is not give myself more stress by doing something I really like to do, in an environment where I don’t like to do it (it also saves me £27 I can ill afford). After all, I am living on charity and Universal Credit. It doesn’t sit well on my conscience, spending the state's money on what is clearly a luxury, even though it is good for me.

I am in a form of up in the air limbo. Trying to normalise things by force of will is expensive and counterproductive. I realise, reluctantly that just butting heads with reality is just making my mind race in directions it doesn’t need to go. This is probably the case with trying to expedite my return to the west country. I want to be there, but to be there I need a job. That’s a hard sell to employers when you are two-hundred miles away and don’t have anywhere to live of your own; trying to blag around it would be a nightmare. So, you have to be honest with potential employers, and say you are looking to relocate back to the place that has been your home for seven years, that you were forced to leave six weeks ago, and then abandon the county completely two weeks ago. Employers aren’t looking for re-locators, they are looking for people who can turn up on Monday ready to go, and are not in deep shit, homeless and currently prone to absolute panic at the merest hint of upset. So, that is clearly not me right now. However, I am not a usual man, I would live in a B&B until I found a flat to rent. However, sell that idea to an employer.

Now re-read all the above, and then re-read it again, and again and again. That perpetual loop is where the demons live. Knowing the demons live there, stepping back and watching the loop, loop may save your life, for the future the loop doesn’t see. It won’t be easy, you need your friends, you may need the Samaritans, you may have to go to your GP tearful snotty and raggedly crying, but if you do, you will step out of the loop of despair, step off the road to nowhere, you will find just enough perspective to save your friends and family the horror of not knowing what they couldn’t do to save you from yourself and your cohort of self-destructive demons.

https://www.samaritans.org/

This has been an uncomfortable write. The recent focus on everyone’s mental health doesn’t make it any easier to write and especially when the notion of mental health has, in my opinion, been trivialised by people who are actually saying `It’s so unfair’ (unfair being the restrictions created by the pandemic). Life is unfair, the universe does not give two hoots about you or the fact that you exist. Your friends and family do. Your mental health is not trivial. Not being able to go to the pub for a bit, is trivial. It is not trivial if your livelihood and your family’s welfare depends on your pub opening. Know the difference, don’t trivialise mental health.

Final note, hopefully, whomsoever may drift by this blog by any means, will find that they are not alone and do have a future. Remember, sometimes the tunnel is long and has curves. Sometimes you just need to check your steering fluid reservoir and find it’s dry … which may also be a metaphor.

Southend on Sea, my overwinter location.

Staying with good friends over winter, in Southend On Sea.

From the town with the shortest pier in the world, to the town with the longest pier in the world. There is a beautiful asymmetry to this situation.

Government Bureaucracy, how it trips itself up.

Today I had to go to a Job Centre in Southend on Sea, to have an initial meeting with a Work-Coach. I have had to move back this way for a few months to overwinter … domestic separation is frankly a nuisance (to put it mildly). 

Why is a visit to a Job Centre worthy of a blog? Easy to answer. As per a post from a few weeks ago, Airing your personal disaster laundry in public. I have discovered that I was set on (in my opinion) the wrong road when I was pushed in the direction of Employment Support Allowance. 

How did I deduce this? Again, Easy. My newly assigned Work-Coach in Southend on Sea asked me about the pre-existing health condition (back injury, current but mending, with an over-arching long-term limitation), and said that I needed to register with a local GP and provide Fmed3 certificates until such time as I feel fit for work if that is appropriate. 

She told me that if I need to take the “Health Journey” within the Universal Credit system I will have to go through the process of having … wait for it … A Work Capability Assessment, within the Universal Credit system.

So, I was right. I am right. I was injured I needed space to recover. There is an existing system in place to account for the process. Job Seekers Allowance using FMed3 forms (Fit Notes to you and I), and if you have run out of national Insurance credits for the purposes of Job Seekers Allowance you fall into the Universal Credit remit. If you are sick while on either Job Seekers Allowance or Universal Credit, all you need to do is provide Fmed3 forms (Fit Notes to you and I) until you are well enough to work again, and or it is decided that you can’t work anymore. In my humble opinion, I am now fit for work and looking for a part-time role to carry me through the winter until I can Exfil back to the West Country.

What shouldn’t have happened? Easy to answer again. I shouldn’t have been moved from a Job Seekers Allowance to Employment Support Allowance. I should have been told to provide FMed3 forms (Fit Notes to you and I) within the Job Seekers Allowance process and or Universal Credit process until such time as I was fit for work.  And not be put into a stream for people who may have “perpetual” Limited Capability for Work. A private letter costing £30 would have been useful in bridging the gap and certifying from a medical perspective, that I can’t do manual work long-term because I only have two working lumbar disks and they are as Isildur would say “Precious to me”.

Let’s briefly talk about the qualifying criteria for Employment Support Allowance. Well actually let’s just post a link to the form, then you can read it through and see exactly how stringent the criteria are to qualify as having limited Capability to Work. And bear in mind I know a guy who manages a massive garden centre from the confines of a motorised wheelchair (quadriplegic). His neck was broken at the age of twenty-one (passenger in a car that crashed). I tore some soft tissue in the lumbar slipping on ice, I may have ricked the cage at my lowest fusion site but I still haven’t seen an orthopaedic specialist or had any form of scan.

ESA Limited capability for work form

ESA50-capability-for-work-questionnaire.pdf

Then let’s look at the equivalent Universal Credit, Limited capability for work form

UC50-interactive.pdf 

Apart from the form's internal number and layout (Four page overall difference, down to line spacing as far as I can tell) … spot the material difference. I am not going to investigate further than this. I am going to ask what’s the point? What is the point of having two separate streams of assessment with the same stringent criteria to measure limited capability for work?

I have an official complaint in progress. I am told there will be a response to me by the 27th of October 21.

Things I already know.

Job Centres don’t record calls. They can’t necessarily see everything from every other silo and vice versa. 

Job Centre and call centre operatives working from home don’t record calls. No one takes notes verbatim; they write what they think they heard not what was said (if at all). It could be that the notes just say the time and date of the call and nothing more.

Call centre staff in call centres do record calls. No one takes notes verbatim; they write what they think they heard not what was said (if at all). It could be that the notes just say the time and date of the call and nothing more.

Someone from Newport tried to swerve the complaint and say that it was invalid. They hadn’t actually read it, they just tried to dismiss it. I had to insist it was moved forward.

The paperwork for the work capability assessment did go missing. This I already thought I knew. However, it had been dismissed, by a Job Centre manager in Bridgwater … turns out she was wrong.

Where do our taxes go? Where is the value add in all this? Why are there these ridiculous silos? How is Universal Credit, universal, when it is nested in with all these other duplicate systems? Why is there Job Seekers Allowance, New Style Job Seekers Allowance, Employment Support Allowance, New Style Employment Support Allowance? And a plethora of others.

I’ll just say, right here that the answer to all of this idiocy is UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME. Just think about the savings.

Having worked all my life mostly in commercial areas. I struggle with government systems, I struggle with bureaucracy, I struggle with petty bureaucracy, I struggle with the mess, the convolutions, the silos, duplication, the misinformation caused by the complexity that serves no purpose, except it seems to bamboozle the public create a smokescreen for people to hide behind and as I said elsewhere, allow people to avoid all responsibility, through judicious buck-passing.

This isn’t the government of the day's fault, or the previous governments or indeed successive governments over decades. This shit is the fault of the civil service, it’s willfully and woefully inefficient because it provides security of tenure by dint of opacity.

Everyone is a Miracle

A huffpost article on the odds of being born. 

From the article (there is quite a bit of preamble but just look at the numbers below):

So now we must account for those 150,000 generations by raising 400 quadrillion to the 150,000 power:

[4x10] ≈ 10

That's a ten followed by 2,640,000 zeroes, which would fill 11 volumes the size of my book. Multiplying it all together for the sake of completeness (Step 1 x Step 2 x Step 3 x Step 4):

Are You a Miracle? On the Probability of being born.

On the Mend

Over the last four and a bit weeks the back has gotten significantly better. I would say too little too late retrospectively and in regard to the incidents of the last four weeks, however, that would be at best humbug and at worst wishing ill on yourself.

When I left my previous home of seven years on the 8^th of September 2021, I was still having serious problems day to day, week to week. Now things have settled to a newish normal that I shall attempt to describe.

My stride length has shortened, my pace has slowed, and my leg left is `unreliable’ on uneven ground, but the hot-lumbar pain, the burning sensation of permanent stinging nettles running from thigh to calf has faded to a constant `sensation’ (I can’t describe it as anything else, it no longer burns, but it is constantly present). I still have peripheral neuropathy along the entire length of my left leg and in various places around the midriff, front and rear. Peripheral neuropathy manifests as constant involuntary motion of muscles. My son Charlie says it looks like something is trying to claw its way out of my leg. It’s a good description.

I have wracked my brain wondering about the change, the positive progress in the last four weeks that has eluded me for the previous eight and a half months or more. And I think it’s a combination of factors. Chief of which is the fact that all the structure and routine of my life has been removed. Or put another way … I haven’t had anything to do apart from write letters and emails to try and resolve matters.

I looked back at what I have actually been doing day to day in the previous months and realise with 20/20 hindsight that I haven’t stopped pushing. I spent months feeling useless, lost, and hopeless. Worried sick that my lack of productivity and the loss of income would have a detrimental effect on my relationship … well at least I guessed that right. To counter this fear of the future, fear of the unknown and concern that I wasn’t pulling my weight, I did something that now looks idiotic in retrospect … I didn’t rest. I didn’t give myself recovery time. Every time I thought I was nearly mended I did something that fired up the problem again. I can see now that my routine of waking at 05.30, doing jobs and loosening up, swimming three times a week, and then spending the days up and down like a fiddler’s elbow trying to fill the hours with domestic make-work has just meant I haven’t allowed myself to do the final bit of healing.

There is a little more to it than the above. I need to point out that this is guesswork, and it might just be coincidental, and that after eight and a half months, things have just gotten better on their own.

However, I have been walking my daughter in laws dog. The first time almost a month ago, I could walk around a single field I reckon two-hundred metres on a side, up an incline on two sides. The day following, I was not in great shape, and regretting taking on the job. However, it seemed like the least I could do, given that Charlie and Lauren have provided home comforts and a place to park the camper, without having to up-sticks and move two-hundred miles to Essex to stay with family or friends. The consequence of which may result in me losing my foothold in the county and place I have adopted as home and love.

At the same time, I pushed my swimming up from four-hundred metres to a thousand metres. I had reduced what I was doing when I returned to swimming after lockdown because I was trying to recover. But after eight months I wondered, if pushing back up would aggravate things, or do nothing to the back? It was an easy test. Do a bigger swim or two, see how things fall out. Obviously, everything went fine, my breathing improved, my stamina improved, and the only very obvious side effect has been cramps (mostly in the calves, but also upper inner thigh). It needs to be said that cramp is a symptom of an overworked muscle. Peripheral Neuropathy is a from of muscular work, entirely involuntary but work all the same. I added breaks into the swims and started doing sets of lengths, rather than just doing a single long swim, coupled with stretches in between, to manage out the spasms that bring on cramp. I have only had to get out the water early once because things were getting silly, and I was risking a massive inner upper thigh spasm. This particular form of cramp is the worst. You can’t straighten your leg, and if you get the movement wrong you just cramp elsewhere, you also can’t bend your leg for the same reason. This particular variety of cramp will leave you limping for days it is that severe.

Back to the dog walking, I varied my route around the fields. They had been ploughed but the margins were intact for the most part. I found a longer route that went uphill but at a very gentle rate over fairly even ground from the bottom of the field. This allowed (I think) a proper warm-up. I did the same thing for a couple days, and overcame to embarrassment of stopping, stretching bending and generally looking odd doing weird Callanetics, leaning on posts, trees, and gates. I did feel a fool, after all I was walking a dog, lots of people walk dogs around these arable fields, none of them look like they are limbering up for track and field.

The things that have been removed from my life, include doing all the housework, odds and ends (really small odds and sods of gardening), house-plant care, doing the dishes, emptying the dishwasher, putting on the washing machine et etc etc. These things I started at 05.30 in the morning and carried on doing quite often until 7pm or 8pm in the evening. Things I felt I had to do, to make up for the lost income, and the amount of time I was spending at home coupled with the underlying stress of not getting better but feeling under constant pressure to do `something to make amends’, are probably the reason why for eight-and-a-half months; I’ve taken two steps forward and one step back. I feel such a fool. I’ve been so focused on trying to force myself back to fitness, that I haven’t taken the time to allow the body to knit together whatever it is that has needed knitting since January.

In mitigation, I would point out that I still haven’t actually found out what I did to myself with some diagnostic imaging. I have without guidance from the medical profession (other than take naproxen like Smarties) just blindly butted heads with the injury and tried to beat it into submission.

It seems one never learns. It also seems that the key to recovering the last mile was rest. Having a single walk and a lot of sit-down time, and not trying to do everything all the time because you are paranoid that your partner is slowly sickening of your miserable, malingering carcass … Oh hang on?

My life has literally been stripped back to get up get dressed, write, look for jobs, write letters and emails, and walk a dog for between forty minutes and an hour a day. And of course, on three days a week swim a thousand metres front and back crawl.

I can say this without fear of repute. I’m not a 100%. One day the dog was surprised by another dog as we came around a blind corner. She isn’t good with other dogs, and I wasn’t ready. She almost had me over, and in doing so wrenched my lumbar good and proper. We didn’t go out the next day, and I was back on the anti-inflammatories for two days. A few days after this, I found a hole under some straw around a field margin, after the farmer had tilled the ploughed field to a finer tilth. The self-righting nervous mechanism that lets you know where you are relative to the ground, doesn’t work well on the left side. I did an aeroplane impression briefly, while trying to regain my balance. I spent the next two days only walking on made roads rather than fields, two days of Naproxen, and a week of neck that won’t turn left. It has to be said I haven’t swum for a week, I picked up bug and did a lot of sneezing and coughing for a few days. Coughing and sneezing are the enemy. But and it is a big BUT, on balance things seem to be heading in the right direction … a little late for my relationship, but on a personal level, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

The plan going forward (such as it is) is to maintain the current momentum, find a job and start re-building the rest of my life. Getting back to meaningful work, finding a home, and finding a way back to some semblance of normality.