I got off shift early yesterday and took some time owing
I rang the vets before I left work and organised they leave me some medicated shampoo for Mary .
The weather has been extraordinary wet of late and I drove up through unfamiliar roads to the country practice and hit a flooded piece of road along a deserted stretch .
Bluebell aquaplaned on the slick road and veered across the road with her backside into oncoming traffic and we slid for what seeming like an age before sliding the other way and eventually stopping on the drivers’ side verge with a loud bump.
I checked for damage and could only find a few strands of grass sandwiched into the bumper
I was still shaking by the time I got home twenty five minutes later and I’d only just walked into the cottage when there was a knock at the door
It was my neighbour Mandy with cake wrapped in silver foil .
“Thought you could use some”
She said
And I said I really could
I ate the cake with a coffee , in a silent cottage
We are all a fraction away from that accident which could change our lives forever I thought
to myself as I ate the cake whilst still in my coat.
It’s bucket of coffee time before a 12 hour shift and I didn’t sleep well.
It’s a while since a film has given me nightmares ( United 93 was the last) so I should not have been so surprised to find out that Hotel Mumbai had done the same.
For those that don’t know Hotel Mumbai is a fictional depiction of the Islamic terrorist attack on the prestigious Raj Hotel in Mumbai in 2009. The hotel was effectively put into a siege by six heavily armed terrorists and for days those terrorists systematically killed as many guests and staff members as they could before being defeated by special forces flown in from the capital.
This film isn’t an exhilarating Romp Die Hard style.
It is a visceral, very real cat and mouse drama where the protagonists spend most of their time hiding under tables and in cupboards until their captors corner them.
In once scene an elderly house maid is shot sat on the lavatory in the bathroom where she is hiding whilst in another the hotel receptionists are forced to ring the guests in their rooms telling them to come out to be saved by police who are not there.
The film depicts the courage of many of the Hotel staff who stayed behind to protect their guests, but it’s a real and downbeat film which underlines the savagery of the indoctrinated.
The Ghost stories of followers have yet again proved more interesting than my original post. I’ve read most at lunchtime at work and shared some with my workmates who found them highly entertaining .
I finished work at 8 pm
When I’m on day shifts I don’t get home much before a quarter to nine. By the time I’ve collected the dogs from Trendy Carol, fed and walked them, fuelled Albert and lit the fire, I don’t get to sit down until 9.30pm or so.
It was a bit after that tonight because Dorothy didn’t want to leave the warmth of Trendy Carol’s trendy sofa.
That upset me
As I sat down my phone beeped cheerfully
It was a co worker from today
She is my age
The message simply read
“ I’ve found my first bunion, I’ve ran out of Bacardi and my bra is now a dirty grey...I’m too old for this shit!”
I didn’t tell you all but I think I saw a ghost the other week.
I wasn’t shocked or frightened, just rather intrigued.
I was at work.
It was around four am in the morning and I just told my colleagues that I was going to pop out to my car to collect some paperwork.
When I got up, so did they for when I returned we had a succession of turns and syringe driver checks to do, and as I exited the unit through the electric doors I felt and sort of saw Ruth , my fellow nurse, move very quickly behind me to enter a patient’s room immediately to my right.
I collected the paperwork from my car, and as I returned to the hospice , I felt strangely unsettled by the “ quickness “ of Ruth’s movement, so much so that I asked if she had indeed entered the patient’s room so rapidly.
She denied that she had. Nor indeed had our fellow fellow support worker, the only other able bodied person inside the unit .
But I knew what I felt.
I felt and half saw a figure move behind me into the patients room with some gusto.
Last week I worked nights again but this time with another nurse. This nurse is well known for her spiritual experiences and comically is referred to by her colleagues being a bit of a white witch.
She is also one of the most pragmatic and talented hospice nurses I have ever had the pleasure of working with.
I asked her about her experiences on nights without explaining any details of my own “ visitation’ and
she told me that knew only of two recent ‘visitors’ .
One she described as a man , who stands quietly on one corner of the hospice away from any other activity
“ And the other? “ I pressed her
“ oh the other is an odd bod” she said cheerfully “ it’s a figure that moves from this corridor into the first of the patient bedrooms” she pointed to where I had seen my “ ghost”
“ she really IS a odd bod too ,” my colleague added
“ why’s that? “ I asked gingerly
“She always moves very fast like a bullet ...always from right to left” she told me with a gentle smile
The exceptional Russell T Davies series It’s a sin, has brought back many old memories of the gay world from the 1980s.
I wasn’t officially gay then .
No, the hatred and misinformed ideas of gay plagues and gay lifestyles shamed me into the closet so deep that not even my emotional intelligence could reach it.
This was the story of many young gay men of my generation .
We would be destined to come out later when the 1980s gave way to a more enlightened 1990s.
There was no internet then, no phones no apps ......if you were confident and ‘serious’ in having a relationship you met another man in a gay bar or from adds in the newspapers. If you weren’t you trolled around the same gay bars or else ambled around the parks after dusk.
I met my first proper boyfriend through the Sheffield Star.
He was closeted and angry and was generous and exciting and the relationship was a real abuse disaster waiting to happen.
The abuse did happen and a couple of years I walked away with my head kind of held high and my mind firmly fixed about what I would and would not accept from a relationship with a man.
I would never again accept that it was alright to be denied, to be hidden away, to be lied about.
I deserved better than that.
Before I met my husband, I dated a guy from chesterfield . He was a lovely, big teddy bear of a man, a broad country speaking animal feed wholesaler who worked through the Pennines and for several months we were happy with me visiting him , mainly at weekends or visa versa. One week day he unexpectedly found himself working in Sheffield and we met up for coffee and before we sat down I saw the wedding ring on his finger.
It wasn’t one of those he’s married kind of scenarios at all
But it was a case of him wearing a wedding ring to pretend he was straight in the eyes of his colleagues and his customers.
I reluctantly walked away from the relationship and didn’t look back
