Company (CJ and Badger)

Loneliness is the most dreadful of diseases
Occasionally you will meet someone who just likes to talk and talk and talk...it's as though they have saved up all of their weekly unused conversations and let them pour out of themselves like water out of a garden hose.
You want to get away, there is always 101 things to do....but for someone like me, who has never really felt the pain of loneliness, it's prudent to stop and think a little more before you make your excuses and hurry on to something easier or more necessary.

I see lonely people at work.Those that are isolated by grief, finance,depression,apathy and fate.....and to bloody well  cap it all they are ill too....being ill AND lonely.....thats a bum steer if ever I saw one.

Yesterday I watched one of my co workers. I don't know her that well, we say hello in a kind of businesslike way and I make her laugh on occasion but that's as far as our relationship goes...she gets on with work and I guess so do I.... anyway as I was writing my notes... I watched her interaction with an elderly lady who was obviously very frightened with her condition. The patient was also alone in the world, having no documented next of kin or even a "person to be contacted in an emergency"., and  during visiting, when all the other patients had their relatives around them, I noticed that the nurse almost instinctively became more attentive and physical with her patient, cupping her face with her hand after she arranged her CVP lines and holding her hand as she administered her antibiotics.
Before I finished my shift I told the nurse that I liked the way she interacted with her patient and she summed things up nicely by saying with a bit of a sad smile "It's crap being by yourself..especially  in this fucking place!"

I have always been lucky when It comes to loneliness....I have never suffered it's destructive, gnawing pain. Some of that , I think comes from being a twin.....as a child there is always some other person there for you..........the rest I think comes from the fact I have always been lucky enough to be able to cultivate friends as well as being able to enjoy my own company....and this in turn has got me to thinking about how animals, so often, need that special contact of another warm body to keep them company.

Yesterday I put two orphans together. CJ the gosling and the chick that survived the badger attack (who I have now nicknamed Badger) now share the back garden shed.
After a bit of an initial squabbling match, both birds have settled down and for once in their short lives now have a constant companion in each other. CJ being larger and more confident has a tendency to bully the hen chick just a little but Badger seems oblivious to the odd prod now that a real, warm and animated friend has appeared on the scene. Last night at dusk I checked on the two of them. Badger had started to roost on top of a wicker basket in the corner of the shed, and right up with him was CJ.

Like that old lady on ITU yesterday, these little scraps of life, just needed a warm body to touch base with...............