BUREAUCRACY ON DRUGS

Last evening's service went very well. It was an opportunity for me to develop my tolerance levels. Twins come to this service and they are 'special'. They can be quite talkative and distracting. I had to ask them to be quiet several times and I managed to so without getting snappy. They aren't so special that they don't know they need to be quiet. They tend to be 'message grabbers', meaning they think ever word spoken is for them.

The forms I have to fill in are proving truly vexing. 'How many times do you go to the toilet in a day and how many minutes do you take to do so?'. Most of the questions are like this one. If I am not disabled now, I certainly will be by the time this damned form is completed.

I am going to visit another Lhasa Apso breeder today and I will take Whitney, James, Bridget and Carly with me.

I managed a swim today. Yesterday was okay pain wise. Quite why Saturday was so bad pain wise I don't know, but that is just the way it goes.



This is the tunnel that one drives thru to get into Buda. There is then a bridge (more than one) which goes over the Danube into Pest. In case you don't know, Budapest was two towns, Buda and Pest that have been amalgamated into one city.
Now his is a bit more butch don't you think?
This is a Lada, an old Russian car. Here in the UK it was called a Lada Riva as Lada used to sell here in the 80's because they were cheap and reliable, though ugly. My first brand new car was a Lada Samara. The car above might be a Trabant but it certainly looks like a Lada Riva to me.
This one tries hard but ends up looking like a man trying to look butch.(above)

LIVE FREE OR DIE

On the way to the pool this morning, I listened to The Partridge Family. Made me feel melancholy. I started to think about the time I first heard them. I was a child, living in Singapore. It was a fascinating place for me. I remember it with a mixture of excitement and awe and pain. Excitement and awe because it was so different to England and Germany, the only places I had lived up to that point. Pain because it was here that I was first sexually molested by a stranger, and the first time my father almost killed me in his rage. It is only by luck that he didn't.

I already knew I was not acceptable to my parents, that I was a bad loathsome child.Yet his hatred of me grew during this period in Singapore and it was also the time I knew I didn't love him. The day he nearly killed me, by throwing a case of books at me which hit one side of my head and smashed the other side into an ornate coffee table leg. I also knew my mother was not on my side either and I was just as despicable to her. She lay me down and sponged my head with cold water all the while telling how bad I was and if I behaved Dad wouldn't get angry. (In case you are thinking she was a poor little victim-she wasn't. She was as cruel as he when she felt like it and he was never violent to her.) That night I did not kiss him goodnight and never did again. He thought I was becoming 'a man'. Fool.

I had been walking in the jungle when an Asian man, Indian or Malay, grabbed me, stripped me and masturbated over me. I was horrified and afraid. His sperm revolted me and I stopped eating or drinking milk stuff after that for a while. I did as I was instructed and did not tell a soul. Until something similar happened to a neighbours child. I then spoke up only to have my mother slap me, show her disgust and blame me for the attack on the other child. Further proof I was just an evil boy.

I was so ignorant then. I spent my life seeking the forgiveness of my family for not being what they wanted. As a result of this I laid myself wide open for more abuse. I never once saw the wickedness in others. I blamed myself for everything. I made friends with people who abused me, who had no respect for me, who found me wanting. I had sex with men (and women) who I didn't want to have sex with because I was unable to say no. I did not know I had been sexually abused as a child. I saw it as me having been sexually precocious and thus to blame.

The cruelty of my elder brother toward me, the hatred of me by my younger one, just added to my conviction I was a bad worthless person.( I now know that their hatred of me protects from feeling the pain of knowing they were not loved by our parents.)

We truly do experience life according to what we believe. My belief that I was a bad person, at core, ruined my life. It caused all sorts of painful behaviour. An eating disorder, self harm(cutting), sexual promiscuity, recklessness with my health. I was unable to cope without acting out in some way. all the while professionals treated me as bad, as sick, as deranged. No one saw the pain I was in, no one saw that I was merely the result of my experience and no one saw how I was telling them of my abuse by acting it out on myself. The arrogance of the so called mental health experts, social workers, shrinks, astounds me to this day.

I sometimes have difficulty forgiving myself for having thought as I did for so many years. For believing them. When we came from Australia to England, I came without a fuss because my parents agreed to bring one of my dogs with us. The others were sold to the first person who wanted them.

We came to England and I immediately got a job at a quarantine kennel and my beloved Sally, a yellow Labrador, was booked into arrive from Oz on August 5th, 1975. On August the 4th the owners of the kennel allowed me to call the people, family friends, who had taken care of Sally, to be sure she had been put on the plane. I was informed that my parents had had her destroyed the day we left Oz.

Despite this, I still believed I was the one at fault. That the treatment I was subjected to was deserved. My feelings of worthlessness and wickedness was compounded by the Xtian religion, in it's various forms, being taught to me at school and elsewhere. There was no shortage of people telling me I was going to Hell, that I was evil and spawn of Satan. I didn't realise then what I now know - I was already in Hell and the people teaching me this rot were themselves disturbed, or wicked, or deluded or abuse victims.

Now I see that the enormity of the pain I would feel when and if I realised that I was not evil, that in fact I was unloved and unwanted because of a deficiency within my parents, was pain far to great to allow myself to feel until such times as I was strong enough to do so. Plus something had to happen to trigger the healing, and the realisation that I was not at fault.

This came about in an odd way. Odd in that it could not have been better planned and it does make me wonder about 'outside power' influencing my life. Thru the 'net I had met a person who clearly did not like me from the moment we met. I spent two days in their company. I had no choice as we were in a foreign country and anyway, I had disassociated more or less str8 away. I was treated with utter disdain and disrespect. Their attitude and manner and the look in their eyes was just as my father's had been. I was found severely wanting in their eyes.

I had disassociated so I was not consciously aware of this at the time. Upon my return home, I began to have night terrors again, I began to get sick, I began to feel terribly afraid. More afraid than I had ever felt in life. I thought I was dying. I was convinced I was. This terror built up over a period of months, with days of crying and me trying to stop it and not knowing at all why this happening. I did not connect it to my past nor did I connect it with the visit to that person.

However, I did begin to realise I was grieving. I felt so bad. Really bad, bad enough that I thought I'd die just from the pain. I had felt nothing yet. Worse was to come. The very root of me was about to be torn out and banished form me forever.

That day I will never forget as long as I live, and longer. I was in my bedroom, unable to leave it. I was terrified, really, really terrified. I was losing my mind. I called out to whatever Power may have been there and I said: If you f'ing well love me, then I need you to show me NOW. The telephone rang and it was the person who has known me the longest, a close female friend. She seemed to instantly know what was happening and she spoke to me as I were a little boy, soothing me with her voice, telling me how it was not my fault, how I didn't deserve what had been done to me. She was not perturbed by the animal like noises I was making, the retching, the screaming as this pain I had kept buried for most of my 49 years finally left me, ripping my guts out as it did. I finally KNEW it was not my fault. That I had not been abused because I was me but because they were them. I was free.

It took months to physically heal from this epiphany. As I healed, I began to change. I began to sleep well. I could sleep and go to the loo when we were away from home. I stopped feeling afraid all the time. I stopped having people in my life who hurt me or made me feel bad.

I developed a need to wear colour. Lots of it, and bright. No longer was I going to drown myself in black and grey and brown. I was going to express myself and LIVE.

This is what I am doing now. At 50 I am finally alive. I am free. Free from them and free from everyone else. I no longer care a damn what anyone thinks. I do as I please and dress how I please. I treat others well regardless of how they treat me because to do otherwise would diminish me.

This life is short. Too much of it was stolen from me. Almost 50 years of it. I intend to live the rest of it to the full, as far as my wrecked body will allow and I will not allow that, the wrecked body, to stop me either.

This is the Presidents Office.

BUDA AND STUFF

DUH! As I was swimming today, and I began to hurt, I thought to myself that this may be the time to stop swimming and not push myself thru it. I asked one of my fellow swimmers who is a nurse and she agreed that if I am starting to feel pain, and I have taken 100mg Tramadol and 1000mg of Paracetamol, then my body was telling me to stop! Perhaps this will mean I can go back to daily swimming. At least one good thing is that the pain in my arms and shoulders has abated this last few days and I am just experiencing the usual.

CASHMERE. I have knitted up two swatches. One in violet and the other in orange. Both are going to be for me. Round neck, set in sleeves, plain.

SOCKS. Well I frogged the pattern I designed yesterday after all! It will work well on a plain coloured yarn, but not on the multicoloured yarn I am using. I think when it comes to these yarns, I will stick to ribbing.

I mentioned how bored I was with knitting ribs for socks on the knitting lists. I was astonished at the amount of people who wrote in suggesting.....ribs!!!!!!!! Still, at least they were kind to write with a suggestion.

Today is sock wash day as I have one clean pair left. All I have to do now is put them all in pairs on the drying stand thing I use. Clothes horse? I think that is what it is called.





This is a toilet. It is sitting on top of a brick chute. From the ground, I had thought it was some sort of ancient lifting mechanism until John told me it was the toilet chute. The King or whoever, sat in there over the chute and let it go!

MORE BUDA AND STUFF

Much to my surprise I did my swim the way I am used to this morning. More or less pain free. yes I had taken meds but this last few months even with the meds, the pain stopped me 1. doing as much and 2. as often. So I am really pleased.

I have also been wondering if the reason I don't want to get up in the morning is because I have been making myself not have a nap in the afternoons. I had a nap yesterday afternoon and I had no trouble getting up this morning. Well, only the usual physically getting up, not waking up. I have been waking groggy and really feeling like I must sleep more.

I am almost done with the Cooper socks. Nothing fancy, just a 3x3 rib but in a lovely colourway called Poison Apple. I'll blog them later.

My service went really well on Sunday. Two new ladies, both in their 80's, in fact may have been in her 90's. By new I mean they had never seen a medium work before. Both of them received communication from their husbands and the evidence they gave was really good. Both were somewhat taken aback and not sure how to respond. I told them they didn't have to. I had done my job and they could now think about it and decide for themselves what it meant. I think they were pleased with that.

They had camp men back then obviously.

BUDA

These photographs are all Buda. Some are views from Pest of Buda and the others are views of Pest from Buda or they are in Buda up on the hill where the President's Office is. It is here that I held up the Presidential Motorcade whilst they waited for me to cross the road. I do not think I shall forget that.


View from Buda of Pest
View from Buda of Pest
View of Buda from Buda.
Up on the hill in Buda.
View of Buda from Pest
View of Buda from Pest. The river is the Danube.
View of Buda from Pest.


I am not feeling too bright today. I have not gone swimming. I slept longer planning to go swimming an hour or so later. However, I have acceded to my body's request that I don't. I am not happy. It seems the days of me being able to swim daily have gone. I find I really have to limit myself more so now than a few months ago. Swimming used to be the one thing I could do without pain. Not so now and hasn't been since about October. Although painkillers will help me swim, they do nothing for the fatigue and it is this that stops me swimming daily. Damn. I know this is a progressive disease but I really thought that by eating right, exercising right and losing the weight, I'd be able to stave it off for much longer than this. It has spread to include my arms and shoulder sockets. Yes, they have always been painful at times but briefly. Now they hurt most of the time like my back, hips and legs do and I can't use them to propel myself in a manual wheelchair any more.
I am usually successful at not thinking beyond today but I am worried that at this rate it might not be long before I can't show my dogs. Perhaps I am wrong and flares can last a long time before once again improving. I do know that the severe neck and arm pain that seems like a heart attack but is not, hasn't bothered me for quite some time.

EVEN MORE PEST

I bought a shirt and a hand made leather purse which hangs from my trousers, It has a wonderful brass buckle closing mechanism. i shall picture it later.

We thought this (above) was amusing....

MORE PEST

I had a delightful surprise this morning. One of my blog readers telephoned me from Australia to congratulate me on Whitney's win. Thank you Toni! I was thrilled to hear from you.

I have been for my swim today. I took drugs first. Even with them, it was painful. I am certain this is not a flair now as this has been going on too long-6mths- and also pain in my shoulder sockets and down my arms is new.I think it has spread. Still, most importantly I was able to swim.

below are more pictures of our trip. all of these are Pest.