If you don’t want to read a bile filled self pitying rant, I suggest you stop now and do something else.
I’ve been back home just under a week. I had my last lesson at school just over a week ago. My two tutors, classwork and conversation, were both impressed by my achievements, as was I. And yet I feel as empty as I did on 19th January 2013 when I returned home for the first time to a house that would never have Laing in it again, well if you exclude his ashes. Sorry if that sounds tasteless.
Yes, I am flatter on my back than a bottom at an orgy. I am piling up around me more heaps of rubbish and filling up floor space and not clearing anything up. I honestly don’t give a toss. At work I am all happiness and smiles and yesterday I kept my emotions under control as, for some inexplicable reason, I thought of Laing and his love for the music of James Taylor and Carole King, thinking of albums like “Tapestry” and “sweet baby james”.
I want to cry again.
I want to lock myself away from that ghastly world out there that doesn’t know and doesn’t care.
I want to scream and shout at the Daily Mail for picking on a dead man to malign one of his sons.
I want to get hold of every Tory politician who has shied away from condemning the Daily Mail. Had anybody tried to smear my Laing, I would have stopped at nothing to make the callous bastards pay for it. It would make “Theatre of Blood” look like a Sunday School picnic.
Two weeks away from this God forsaken country, I was full of hope. I return to find it full of ghastly hate. Today I learn the former Naughtie Spoonerism (how apt it is), Jeremy Hunt, wants to stop health workers get a pay rise. Workers, such as those wonderful people who tested Laing while he was an in-patient, who diagnosed him, who gave him the necessary cocktail of chemicals so he could have more time and strength, for which I am eternally grateful. Yes, Mr. Hunt. I am talking about those people who selflessly assist the slow dying, even though they know the end in so many cases is not going to produce the most desired result. Our Health Service is not merely about what us oldies used to call, “pounds, shillings and pence”. It is about more.
Despite all these negative thoughts and emotions flowing through me, as ever, art gives me an answer to everything. In this case, it is the despairing bleak analysis of life in a pithy poem by the American all rounder, Dorothy Parker. Despite the seemingly overall negative content of this poem, reading it again before posting has, ironically, raised my spirits. Seven successive lines of negative comments, but only one is in the negative (but it is not a negative in another sense), and yet the last line contains an unuttered glimmer of hope.
Résumé
Razors pain you,
Rivers are damp,
Acids stain you,
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful,
Nooses give,
Gas smells awful.
You might as well live.”
Yes, Mrs. Parker. Thanks for your good advice. I guess I might as well.
