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Shredded the Day went well

Mental health 

[ 7 minute read ]

Yesterday, I woke up to a mechanical whine. Through the slits of my slightly open eyes I saw someone feeding my entire day through a shredder. The colours of the walls stretched, blended, and joined with colours from the furniture and the curtains like plasticine strips that formed lines of adjacent paint as they compressed into the 40cm device. Where there was once colour there was now left only black. The red numbers on my radio alarm clock that once said 04:23 joined the bedtime book that was recently on the floor. And then there was only black, an angle-poise lamp which I switched on, and strips of colour that was my day, on the floor; a black floor that absorbed the light.

Somewhere, amongst the heap was 7 o’clock; 8:12; lunchtime; my laptop, and some pieces of being outside that I could not recognise. At least they had left me with electricity. I eyed a strip that had an image of my unstretched sewing kit in it. It was tiny, but I could use it. I started sewing and looked for images of unstretched glue and some backing paper; ANYTHING TO STICK THIS TOGETHER! I picked up a handful of strands and a few fell back to the floor. This is going to be fruitless, I thought, but I MUST DO IT!

On my knees, I wept uncontrollably as I tried to piece the strips of the day together to make some kind of order. This was a disaster. Too many mistakes would see me committed under the Mental Health Act. It might well have been the most precious thing that I had spent my whole life creating, suddenly and spitefully smashed to the ground like a family heirloom that had been in the family for tens of generations. Nothing else could render me more hopeless and empty. The expectation that the day would just go on being a day was entirely absent. Although time had not stopped; for me, there was no time; no sequence of seconds or minutes; no brightening of sunlight. I knew that if I did not make some semblance of my shredded day before me, my body would eventually be found curled on the floor, shrunken from starvation, my mind would still be fumbling with strips of a broken life, and my spirit would be not yet shriven of my sins.

I did my best, but there was no time to waste because I was always playing catch-up. There were mistakes, mismatches that led to complications throughout the day.

I went to the village shop but didn’t need to. One minute I was at home, the next walking through the shop door. Only the postmaster was there. He greeted me. Before I had taken another step, His wife and daughter were in his place, staring at me, and he was sitting at the other end of the shop eating something hot in a plastic container on his lap. He looked hungry and was slumped over it, rapidly spooning the mess into his mouth. I had stitched two time-frames together that were minutes or hours apart. I never buy crisps. I bought crisps - tortilla chips. I started explaining my purchase.

        ‘When I was at primary school, fifty years ago…...crisps cost two and a half pence and I got 50p a day pocket money. My dad earned seventy-six pounds fifty per week in those days. That means that at today's price of crisps I got seven pounds of pocket money a week. A lot of money to a nine-year-old’ I said. I am thirty six, and could not have been nine years old fifty years ago, and seven times 50p is not seven pounds; neither is twenty packets of crisps in today's money the equivalent to twenty packets of crisps whenever ago (50p) At a pound a packet, today, it would be twenty pounds a week. It is actually about ₤4 GBP. Never mind!

My counting was wrong and my maths. My voice just carried on speaking and I could hear the words were just wrong – born to fantastic parents. The family stared at me. I knew why but had no time to rip the stitches and resew the event and relive it. But, I did reassemble some of the consequences.

I went home with the tortilla chips. I never eat snacks and should have thrown them away. My phone rang and I missed the call. Restricted number. A text message arrived.

       ‘We are trying to contact you to arrange an appointment at the Radiology department. Please call this number to discuss arrangements.’

I tried four times over the next forty minutes. They didn’t answer the phone. I looked on the floor to see if I had missed a piece of the day. Then another text message: ‘We have booked an appointment for you for 1430 on 1 August at Saffron Walden Community Hospital for your x-ray. Please phone this number to rebook or cancel.’ I live one hundred and seventy miles from Saffron Walden.

Nobody answered the six calls I made, so I went to my local doctor’s surgery. ‘We can’t help you.’ I couldn’t help thinking that the receptionist couldn’t find a key on her computer keyboard or I was not registered or something. Normally, I am registered there. She looked placid enough but nothing changed to make my appointment go away. Somehow I had sewn good customer service next to the doctor’s surgery visit. Wishful thinking, I supposed.

Back home again, I made a blackberry and tomato tart because the tinned mackerel and picallili sandwiches, I had made earlier were starting to curl at the edges. Today, it seemed, that I thought I like piccalilli (mustard pickle) enough that it should be in my day. I never buy it. Somehow, my smattering of French had allowed me to try to make a Blackberry and Apple pie, using tomatoes because I thought that ‘pommes de terre’ was ‘tomato’ when it is really ‘potato’. I had an inkling that ‘pomme’ is apple and complements blackberries. When you think about it, it is only the first three letters that were scrambled in my head ‘tom’ and ‘pot’. A classic case of a little bit of knowledge is worse than none at all; except, that is, if you want to avoid the ‘men in white coats’. Also, I never buy butter or spreads, mayonnaise, or sauces, but there was butter in the fridge.

More phone calls to the Saffron Walden Community Hospital got no answers. I wrote a letter to cancel the appointment and went back to the Post Office in my village. A woman immediately ahead of me kept peering around me.

       ‘Go ahead,’ I offered, ‘Shop away. I won’t take your place.’

She looked confused and frightened. Why I thought that I had my thinking together enough to talk to random strangers I do not know. I silently swore at myself. At least that bit of my day works, I thought. Eventually, she understood that I meant that if she needed something else before she was served, I would ALLOW HER to re-take her place in the queue. She said she was looking for vegetables. The Post Office doesn’t sell vegetables, but I looked around, in case, today, they did. They weren’t any, thank God.

£1.70 bought me a first class stamp and it went onto my envelope addressed to the hospital in Saffron Walden. Fortunately, my brain runs latent solutions to problems and even though it is ‘snail mail’ a letter sent today is faster than the three days before the appointment date takes to pass, and it would get to the hospital and tell them to cancel the appointment I did not ask for, before it evolved.

With such a cobbled together day, I could only leave the rest of it to the nonsense on YouTube. Maybe I will watch only the weird adverts for Lucozade that tells me that it ‘sees me’ and I should ‘Rock Off, Rock Off’ which means something quite rude to me that should never be seen in public. I think that it is in my head as, ‘To get your rocks off.’ or reach a sexual climax. (https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/get+your+rocks+off) 'Let me see you...Rock Off, Rock Off' - Lucozade ad. The TUI holiday advert would tell me not to 'skip' on my holiday. I would never do that. Even walking or hopping on, over, or near my holidays was more than I could accomplish yesterday. I certainly tried not to 'skimp' on my day, though.