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Cadwell NOT Caldwell

Strange

[ 4 minute read ] 

Opinion

I couldn't sleep last night. My face kept tickling. Of course, I know why I couldn't sleep and my face tickled; my neighbour has come back from charging the batteries he uses to power his malevolence. I kind of feel sorry for him because he doesn't know he is an ogre. Don't worry, I know I am being uncharitable, well at least in trying to understand him. I gave up trying to engage him in conversation long ago. He simply wouldn't stop and say a single unsolicited sentence. Hark! There is a chorus of elderly voices calling that he probably just wanted to be left alone; for six years?

No, he has a hatred towards the world because, I suspect, he doesn't understand it. His misanthropy I have witnessed and I have been shocked at the breadth and depth of it. My face tickled last night because his throbbing cynicism moved the spiritual air and my face felt it like single threads from spider webs being dragged across my skin. There were other parts of my body that tickled last night but I don't have an answer for that yet.

I eventually got up. Do something you are good at, I thought; make yourself happy and relax. I, of course turned on a laptop and explored. Being in my living room is a fairly safe place from my neighbour's influence even though I sometimes get the feeling there is a zombie overlooking my shoulder as I work on some of the files. He doesn't believe I am an undergraduate so I thought I should, like many other students waiting for their academic year to start, do some preliminary work. That should soothe the looming aspect of my neighbour's projection, if he stumbles across me in my home. It is incongruous for an idiot to be studying anything so his confusion continues uninterrupted. Job done; he will just move on and wake cats and dogs in the neighbourhood as he passes through kitchen and bedroom walls. A few people will toss and turn until he leaves but no real harm will occur.

Every now and then I download some stuff I think might be useful. I don't run any MicroSoft software, as far as I know, so everything is cool; if I believe that the software developers are not foreign spies or hackers. The British hackers are all kind and helpful and make software to help elderly people cross the road, don't you know? It is rare that I ignore the probability of Trojan Horses cantering through my operating system but sometimes you just have to recognise that you might have to spend six or seven hours reformatting your hard drive because you couldn't be bothered to save everything only to duplicated memory sticks, and just download stuff in that same recognition.

I might wave my laptop towards my neighbour the next time I see him, to see if it makes any difference. Files that I lost when I moved partitions on the hard drive might come back but they may also be quite ephemeral and covered in spiritual cobwebs and so be unusable. 

       'Hey, Camelly! Come closer. Wooo! Wooo! Thanks.'

All I need is a Spiritual File Reader or SFR. Amazon will probably have one, if not them then definitely Temu. I might not like the cost though; it would likely be a piece of my soul. Well, there's an epiphany; I think my neighbour has allowed monsters to nibble away his soul or his own introspective nature has been like a solvent on it. I think the monsters might like the by-product of his dissolved soul and that is why he is empty of empathy. So sad.

You think me cruel. I am. I have detached emotions and it is my wont to caricature real life. It is even my escape. If I am honest, which I usually am, if my soul and my neighbour's soul went into a spiritual clothes shop for a fitting we would both come out wearing the same clothes in the same size. However, I would look incredible and he would look like a muddy puddle with a broken umbrella in it. Do you know why? You have to embrace eccentricity and weirdness; claim it as your own and never hide it. You should never be embarrassed by your... (at this point I shall consult my Roget's Thesaurus for some tasty words) Cue the music 'Left Bank Two' by The Noveltones (Link to a YouTube video of the Vision On Gallery music) while I search.

Ah ha! You should never be embarrassed by your... wackiness or your oddity; by being zany, kinky or queer, or by having a funny obsession. People will love us for it. If we hide it, people will cross the road because we are weird. Wear a top hat; sing while you cycle (I doff imaginary hats to fair maidens and dowagers alike); tell people how loud an egg exploding in a bowl of water heated in a microwave is; laugh at your image on the back of a spoon; or pull faces at the moon; who cares?

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

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[ 6 minute read ]

Sleep without a parasite stealing energy

I haven't had a looming visit from my neighbour's spirit for a while now. He, the person, has been going out a lot more; his live-in carer, whom I think he regards as his girlfriend, has seemed to get him to experience more of the world beyond his own thoughts. He even took fishing tackle out of the boot of his car on May Day.

Whereas I could tell if he had stayed somewhere else overnight by the quality of sleep I had, I can no longer do this. Either he doesn't stare at me in bewilderment while I am asleep or he has grasped that he is not the only person in the world with any kind of meaningful existence and now understands why there is another person sleeping in a neighbouring home. That, of course does not qualify any suggestion that I have a meaningful life or that he does; it is merely to illustrate that I observe a possibility that he may have realised that people revolve around their own sphere of influence or chosen influencers; friends and family.

I once got becalmed with a broken engine on a small sailing boat and caught in a tide that drew me along the Essex coast towards the Thames and Medway estuaries. I had sailed the Essex coast from within the River Medway in Kent (Hoo St. Werburgh, I think). The engine had cut out just as I was leaving the Medway at Sheerness, and entering the Thames estuary to head for Southend seven miles north on the other side of the Thames estuary. The tide also changed just as I was leaving the Medway estuary and my little boat could not make way against both a headwind and the tide, no matter how hard I tried to tack or beat against them. In fact, even with a good wind the hull speed (maximum speed a boat can move at without being towed by a larger boat) was slower than the tide that day. I resigned myself to tying up against a concrete wall that probably served the power station at Gravesend (right where the Medway estuary met the Thames estuary). I had earlier chucked the anchor in alongside a muddy bank and took a viewing of aligned powerlines to later check to see if the boat was dragging its anchor (The anchor failing to hold the boat still). At 22:30hrs I checked one last time before I prepared myself to go to sleep. The powerlines were no longer aligned! The boat was dragging its anchor on a seriously high and rising tide. That is how I ended up tying up to a very large wooden beam next to the concrete dock for Gravesend Power Station. I am so lucky to have slept well during the weeks before I set sail at noon that day. If I was wiped out from lack of sleep I would have made many more mistakes. At that time though the mistakes I made were exclusively from foolishness and lack of experience.

All that night, a motor-boat went back and forth up and down the River Medway. Small boats don't require navigation lights and my old boat had none. I also had no other form of lighting onboard so the motor-boat crew had no idea I was there. They did not enquire why I was there and they did not throttle back when they passed, so their wash rocked my little sailing boat so much that the top of the mast kept hitting the concrete slab that was the dock wall. All night I had one hand on the mast and the other one being scraped and cut by the limpets and old shells stuck to the wall, to prevent damage to the mast; the only means I had to move in the morning. I had only just managed to secure to a huge wooden beam as I drifted past it otherwise I would have just carried on upstream until I hit something.

In the morning, about three or four hours later, dog-tired from no sleep whatsoever, I had to sail off the concrete wall with what is called a 'lee wind' which is an oncoming wind that blows you directly  onto the shore or against a dock or your moorings. This meant that I had to let go from the wooden beam holding me still while the tide was still coming in and was not too strong. I couldn't wait for the tide to change because my way was barred by a series of wooden beams rising from the river bed downstream and the ebbing tide in an hour or two would have sent me into the wooden beam I had tied to all night. Then, once I was again drifting, and only then, could I rig the sails to be able to sail upstream, across the wind, to get enough steerage (speed to make the rudder useful) to complete a 135 degree turn into the wind to immediately start tacking across the wind and slack tide. Fortunately, I managed to do it just before I hit another huge wooden beam sticking up out of the river. The tip of my mast was just about 20 centimetres from hitting hit it as I made the turn. Despite being shattered from lack of sleep I was scared enough to be alert.

I made Southend a couple of hours later; but not before drawing long stares from other sailing crews who were wondering why I was sailing so close to the World War Two sunken (1944) 'Liberty' ship, the SS Richard Montgomery, still with volatile explosives on it. It is so dangerous that salvage and make-safe divers have never been close to it except for a plan to remove the masts, still visible above the waves, in case the masts fall down and set off the 1,400 tonnes of explosives supposedly still on it. Plans have been to wait for the containers holding the explosives to leak and the explosives to wash away, but no-one knows if the explosives are still there or not. Now (very recently) there is concern that a number of 'metallic' objects have been detected around the sunken hull.

It was a few days later that I was becalmed (no wind to drive my sails) off the Essex coast on a speedy tide, still with a broken engine and heading for the concrete piles that is the World War Two sea defence, the Shoeburyness Boom, also known as the Thames Boom, off the Essex coast (Maplin Sands to be precise). It was built to prevent WWII German shipping and submarines and later 1960s Russian vessels, entering the River Thames and it, still sticking out over 2km and marking the edge of MOD testing ground both on land and the estuary, was about to wreck my tiny boat. The boom in the image above jinks right and if you look carefully you can see it, above half of the closest part, as a dark line on the horizon. You can see the scale of it from the image below. It is only part of the same defences that crossed the entire 7 miles of the Thames estuary.

Mayday, the international distress call for air and sea is actually French; 'm'aidez' or 'help me'. After calmly phoning the coastguard and alerting them that I was becalmed and drifting on a rising tide into the Thames estuary from north of the Shoeburyness Boom, and telling them I needed a tow, I phoned again after discovering that I had switched my phone off. I had watched other sailing boats moving two or three miles further out and none had come to help me. Now, tired from another night of dragging my anchor in the River Crouch estuary further north, I recognised that no matter how brave I was or how clever I might be, I was never going to avoid the disaster of hitting the Shoeburyness Boom at speed. Surviving the impact and piles rising from the sea-bed leant heavily towards improbable. I am not talking a gentle drifting here; I am talking swirling water around raised sandbars as I passed them only tens of feet away. I am talking about two metres a second. Time for some maths: 120 metres a minute or about 7 kph (just under 4 knots) or just over 4mph. When something made of plywood that weighs 900kg, with its heavy keel, hits an immovable body at these speeds (remember the boom was made to stop submarines and warships) there is going to be only one result; shipwreck. What makes it worse is that the Boom has a second one right next to it; covered in sharp shells.

     'Mayday. Mayday. Mayday.' It was inevitable really. The RNLI arrived with a mini-hovercraft and a high-powered Rigid Inflatable Boat (RIB) and the RIB towed me back to Southend. The awful thing is, I could have chucked the anchor in and delayed the inevitable, and waited for a slight breeze to sail around the Boom. I was tired and scared; I panicked.

Now that my neighbour has stopped scaring all the creatures, visible and invisible around and in our homes, and I am not woken by my protective avatar, I sleep so well that I can see hope in my life again. Whether he was parasitically feeding off my energy or just aimlessly looming in limbo, I don't really know. My brother used to steal my energy, as a narcissistic psychopath, so I am inclined to consider theft as the cause for my miserable few years (since he moved in in August 2020). My home is now clean and maintained and I sleep well again.

Image of the sunken SS Richard Montgomery at high tide:

The image has been cropped by the author, Martin Cadwell. The background horizon has been reduced with no foreground or middle-ground objects or persons missing.

Wreck of the SS Richard Montgomery, off Sheerness by Christine Matthews, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>;, via Wikimedia Commons

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wreck_of_the_SS_Richard_Montgomery,_off_Sheerness_-_geograph.org.uk_-_4195096.jpg

re-use conditions

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedia

link to the licence

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

Images of the Shoeburyness Boom: Amusing Planet

https://www.amusingplanet.com › 2021 › 01 › shoeburyness-boom-cold-war-era-defense.html

First image of the Shoeburyness Boom:

Julian Osley (photo) in an article by Kaushik Patowary,  Jan 28, 2021. Accessed 07 May 2026

Second image of the Shoeburyness Boom:

'East Beach in Shoeburyness', Essex. Photo: Romazur/Wikimedia Commons in an article by Kaushik Patowary ,  Jan 28, 2021. Accessed 07 May 2026

re-use conditions for Wikimedia Commons

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedia

link to the licence

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en