Strong opinions are expressed here. You have been warned!!

Marriage

 Ahhh marriage, that great old institution, the bedrock of a civilised society, the foundation upon which all stable families depend and……..Oh what was that !!!  I must have fallen asleep and been dreaming…..it’s ok…….I’m awake now!!

 Marriage, well it certainly is an institution!  Having indulged and been lucky enough to have escaped with all my faculties in tact….just about….I have to say that the institution analogy is very appropriate.  As a matter of fact, I think we should replace the wedding rings with something more symbolically appropriate, like a straight-jacket and a frontal lobotomy for her, and a remote control and a lifetime’s subscription to Sky sports for him. 

 Because that’s what seems to happen to couples after the rings have been put on.  She disappears into herself and forgets that she used to have life outside of housework and children.  Every day merges into the same miserable drudgery until you’re living in some nightmarish Groundhog day scenario, with each day as monotonous and soul destroying as the next. 

 And as for him???  Well what can I say, all of a sudden the antics of some football team and ownership of the remote control, becomes a life or death struggle in getting through the daily round of mutual contempt that your marriage has become. 

 You look at him/her and try to remember what it was about this person that you used to profess to love.  LOVE?? You say to yourself bitterly, what does that even mean?  How can something that was supposed to be so wonderful, turn so quickly into this seething hotbed of petty power struggles and sarcastic asides; where trying to agree what DVD to watch on a Saturday night can quickly descend into a trade-off of insults, where her mother’s overbearing intrusion is voiced for half the neighbourhood to hear, and where his father’s personal habits are dissected with a venom that sends small animals and children running for cover; where all those little annoyances, like hanging the toilet roll the wrong way, can escalate into an issue of such magnitude that the UN put a platoon of special forces on stand-by just in case!  You finally agree, but agree isn’t really the word is it?  What actually happens is that someone has to back down, adding another layer of contempt to an already expanding portfolio of her f**king whinges, and his all-round uselessness.

 In time you’ll look back and wonder if you were suffering from some sort of mental pathology, as you remember how you actively pursued this state.  You’ll recall how you wanted this, how you dreamed and planned for it, saved every penny to pay for it, maybe even borrowed thousands of pounds because you wanted to make your day special,.....and now all you can think is ‘What the hell was I thinking, why did nobody warn me?’

You could have travelled the world several times over, had great holidays to exotic countries, met more windswept and interesting people but no, you got married instead.   You look over at your other half and can barely contain the sneer quivering on your top lip.  Stuck now with children and a mortgage, you’re trapped and the worst thing is, YOU DID IT TO YOURSELF!!!!!   

 Yes marriage, don’t ya just LOVE IT????!!!!

 Which makes all the controversy over gay marriage seem a little unnecessary, don’t you think?   Personally I don’t have a problem with gay marriage, far from it,  I really think that gay people should be allowed to get married.  I mean why should the heterosexual community be the only ones to suffer!  After all, the only people who complain about not being married are those people who never were, and believe me, a few years of marriage will certainly cure them of that.

 So if you’re thinking about getting married and reading this is making you nervous, GOOD,  you have been warned!!!  But never fear, it’s not all doom and gloom, there is an escape clause, it’s what divorce was invented for.  And finally if the worst comes to the worst, remember, marriage may be grand but divorce can be SEVERAL!!!

I read this book the other day, The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson.  It's about madness or what is, or is not madness, and it raises as many questions as it answers. 

Going insane might be one of our worst fears along with serious illness, or something terrible happening to our children, but after reading this I am now feeling highly reassured.  I am never going to worry about going mad at all again because after reading this, I figure we're all a little bit crazy anyway, and some of us may even be a whole lot crazy, but if we're not really harming anyone and managing to function in our lives, well, where's the problem??   

Because what is normal anyway??  Does anybody even know?? 

 Well you could say that it’s normal to get up and go to work every day.  Ok then, think about this -  is it really normal to get up and go to work every day, the way we do? 

To slog your way through crowds and traffic, to sit in a building doing stuff for a company or corporation, to make money for them so they can pay you money to buy stuff, most of which you don’t really need, for a house, you didn’t really want, to begin with. 

Then you take on a mortgage, to pay for the said house which will ensure you have to keep your nose to the grindstone for the next thirty years when you can finally look forward to retirement, (which by this time you will be too worn out and too tired to do anything) to find that the company CEO has raided the pension fund and disappeared into the ether, and you are destined to spend your old age in fear and poverty after spending most of your life working your bollocks off for someone else!!! 

AND, along the way you missed out on most of your children’s growing up, your partner is now a complete stranger with a life of their own that doesn’t include you, and all because you had to be at work, in order to pay your taxes to a government that basically doesn’t give a crap about you anyway!!! Yes, THAT'S normal!!

If that's normal, then I embrace my insanity with glee!!  Hee, hee!!

Because inside all of us, there is a little streak of insanity.  It may not manifest itself as a medically recognised psychosis (although if the American Psychiatric Association has it's way, it may very well soon be) but it might just be a little obsession about collecting stuff, or how we dress, or cleaning; something along those lines, because let's be honest, we all have our little obsessions, don't we?

And what harm are we doing?  Ok if your shoe buying habit is the reason you haven't paid your rent in six months well, maybe there’s a little bit of a problem there, that you need to think about, but still you're not crazy, are you??  And what about the girl up the street who goes out to work every day dressed up like Mary Poppins, or the old lady who walks around like the queen on LSD, are they really harming anyone?  Because the truth is, isn't it our little insanities that mark us as individuals?  Aren't these the hallmarks of our uniqueness in the world?? 

Because what I now realize, is that, THERE IS NO NORMAL.  We’re all crazy in some way and some of the so-called most normal things are the craziest of them all!!!

What I see happening within the world of psychiatry is similar to what happened back in the 19^th century, when the Victorian's did a study on sexual habits and labeled everything that wasn’t the Missionary position as sexually deviant. 

Basically the same thing is happening now with all human behaviour.  Anything that deviates from the norm (because we all know what normal is??!!) is now being diagnosed and labeled as mental illness and comes with it's own line in pharmaceuticals. 

Roll up! Roll up!  Get you behaviour modifiers here, an emotionally-deadening pill for every little ill!!

‘WHAT YOU HAVE AN OVER-ACTIVE CHILD???’ (Fake shock and horror)

Here, don’t you know that a little Ritalin a day, will keep the pharmaceuticals in pay!!!’

If you think that’s a bit exaggerated, then I urge you to read this book, (if you haven’t already) because the really scary part of all this, is what is happening with children in America , and here too, so let’s not get complacent.  Children are being diagnosed with all sorts of mental health problems.  We’ve all heard of ADD and ADHD, ( I always had huge reservations about those two, even more so now!) but what about childhood bipolar disorder???  Now, there’s a happy little threesome, to label a child with?  Add to that the huge rise in autism diagnoses, and soon you will find that children everywhere are being medicated out of childhood. 

So, if you have an active child, don't take them to a doctor and definitely don't take them to a psychiatrist, take them to the park and let them run around.....stop feeding them crap and let them dig that hole in the back garden and get mucky!!  Who cares what the neighbours think!!  Let them swing from trees….even better, join in and swing from the trees with them, and basically, go have some fun!!!! 

 Because that’s what’s wrong here….we take ourselves far too seriously and we have forgotten what it is to HAVE SOME FUN!!!!…. So let rip…..and let a child be a child……and remember that you were once one too!!!  Life’s too short to let it drift by on prozac and Ritalin……ENJOY IT!!!!…….LIVE IT TO ITS FULLEST!!!!……because in the words of Noddy Holder -

 ‘MA MA, WE’RE ALL CRAZY NOW!’

 So stop worrying and embrace the insanity because we are all in this one together!!!!!

 YEAHHH!!!

God?

 I’m back on the God question again today, because these questions keep rattling around in my brain, and the truth is no one really knows if God exists or not.  Unless you’ve had a personal encounter with some awesome force beyond yourself, or you are taking on faith, the teachings of whatever religion you subscribe to, you probably don't know any more than me 

 I have read most of the Richard Dawkins book, The God Delusion, and while I can’t disagree with his conclusions about religion, I have to question why he thinks God, if he does exist, has anything to do with religion?  I mean isn’t religion man-made? 

 Seriously now… if you really think about it…or think about what God is supposed to be...do you really believe that all those dreary sermons and/or fanatical rantings, could have anything to do with what is supposed to be the most potent and awesome force in the entire universe and beyond?

 Now let's really think about that!!

 THIS ALL-POWERFUL, ALL-KNOWING, ALL-CREATING FORCE OF LIFE. 

Say it again, ALL POWERFUL, ALL-KNOWING, ALL-CREATING FORCE OF LIFE!!!

 How could we even DARE to claim to know anything about it.  We’re only a bunch of human beings, inhabiting (or trashing, depending on how you look at it), one small planet, in a fairly quiet corner of the universe.  Maybe that’s why we are so far away from all the action, we haven’t learned how to behave ourselves yet, or take care of the beautiful planet, we are privileged to live on.

 Also, how could we possibly know anything about God, if God is supposed to be what we believe him/her/it to be????  Imagine an encounter with something like that, it would completely blow your mind!!!!! 

So I’ll ask again, how could we have the AUDACITY, to claim to have knowledge of what God is, or to know how or what, he/she or it thinks?

Now, I can’t claim to have had an awesome encounter with a heavenly body (chance would be a fine thing!) beyond my understanding or not, but I have been on a bit of a spiritual journey for several years now.  I call it a spiritual journey because I have actively been seeking encounters or knowledge beyond what I see and hear in front of me.  Things have happened that I can’t explain, and I have questions to which, I don’t as yet, have any answer.   

For instance, I used to have a recurring dream, I won’t go into the full details of it here, but the important thing about it was this, in the dream I would wake up to find that I wasn’t really awake at all.  As any good psychologist/ psychiatrist/dream dictionary will tell you, that is a message from your sub-conscious mind, telling you to wake up to something that is going on in your life.  So when I became conscious of it's meaning I didn't have the dream again, or at least until there was something else in my life, I needed to wake up to!

Now, what I don’t understand about it is this, how does my sub-conscious mind know something my conscious mind doesn’t?  And another thing, how and why is the sub-conscious mind always right?  Where does it get its information from? 

Not only that, but why do I have two minds anyway, why do I not just have one with all the information I need? 

 And now, when I put that all together, I can only conclude that maybe, just maybe, (and I am only saying maybe because I don’t know either) the sub-conscious mind is God’s, or whoever, or whatever’s way of communicating with us. 

 That out there in the universe, and maybe it is the actual universe or some other force that exists beyond us, that it can only communicate with us, through our sub-conscious mind because it’s complete and true reality would be...TOO AWESOME....TOO OVERWHELMING...TOO MIND BLOWINGLY SPECTACULAR to encounter in it’s fullness and would completely destroy us, mentally and physically. 

Think about it.  And now that I do think about it, I probably shouldn't even mention he/she/or its name.  So read this very quietly, please, just in case.

I wrote this poem last night.  I was trying to get to sleep and I started to think about Gortin Glen where I like to go for a ramble around and to get away from all the stresses of life.

I was trying to relax the mind and unwind the body, and then the first line came to me and so I got up again to write this.  

Gortin Glen 

 Standing 

In the quiet of the forest

Breathing in

the silent scent of pine and fir;

Softening

the hard edges of a life on edge.

Breathing out.

Tension and tightness unwinding

with each tentative step

on the needled floor,

as moisture laden mosses

drip gently into rivulets, running

to a strengthening stream,

gathering all the cares and

worries of the world away.

Away,

to dissipate in distant seas,

as I step softly across

the sweetened grass.

Gently now, slowly now,

My soul is restored.

Ok, let’s get to it. There are guy things, and then there are girl/woman things or rather these are supposed to be the girl/woman things like Robbie Williams and shopping.

Ok for the record, I just don’t get the whole Robbie Williams thing, I am a woman, as red blooded as any other but ROBBIE WILLIAMS??? I mean come on, ROBBIE WILLIAMS??? He has as much sex appeal as a bull terrier, come to think of it he even looks a bit like one,  and yet the female population seems to go brain dead at the mention of his name and lose all sense of well….anything. 

I mean, as a person I don’t dislike him, I’ve seen him on chat shows, he seems like a nice enough bloke, but that’s about as far as it goes, he’s just a bloke, nothing special.  I mean put him next to Hugh Jackman or Viggo Mortenson, (now we’re talking!) or even Ralph Fiennes (phew!), and well Robbie just doesn’t compare does he?  He just looks like an enthusiastic schoolboy.  No big deal. 

And there’s another thing, his music is shit, I mean, ok Angels was alright, I’ll give you that, but seriously, Rock DJ??  Wasn’t that just about the crappiest song you ever wish you had never heard?  It was garbage,

‘I doo wanna rock DJ cos you’re BORING ME TO TEARS!! and  if I have to listen to that song one more time I’m gonna slit my freaking wrists!!!.’

It was just shit!

Anyway, here’s another thing, what is the shopping thing about?  Again I just don’t get it, trailing around shops looking at stuff, trying stuff on, into another shop, the same thing, the music is too loud, I thought this was a shop not a freaking disco!  Your back starts to hurt, your temples start to throb, you can feel your brain disintegrating, you’re starting to lose the will to live, your life is passing you by, you start to forget that you had a life outside of the shopping centre, the walls are starting to close in, you might never get out of here again, 'Weren’t we in this shop already?'

They’re all starting to look the same, the all have the same stuff,

'Just buy the freaking jeans so’s I can get out of here!!'

…your chest starts to tighten….you can’t breathe….you’re trapped in hell…you thought it was a quick look to see what’s there and it’s turning into an episode of Eerie Indiana….you’re going to be trapped in the shopping centre for the rest of your life and you just have to keep shopping forever and ever!!!!!!  Ahhhhhhhh!!!!!!! 

 And then, just when you are on the verge of cracking you spy the book shop, you almost cry with relief, you’ve been saved, just in time!  You walk in and make straight for the classics section, nothing like a few Dickens or Bronte’s titles to restore equilibrium. 

You remember, that’s right, I did have a life before this, I read books, yes books....... like Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, you glance around, you’re starting to feel better, your eyes fall on the TV/Film section….and there on the top shelf you see,

The Wonders of the Universe by Professor Brian Cox, ….YES!!!

You have been saved………you feel safe again, your breathing has steadied, you walk over and lift it off the shelf, you stroke it’s cover and console yourself with the thought that yes, there is intelligent life out there and one day in the future…….PEOPLE WILL THINK AGAIN!!!  And so just to nudge the world in that direction you take as many copies as you can and place them over Robbie Williams autobiography before you leave.

I went to the US last year and this poem was inspired by a visit to Manhattan.  It was interesting to go to the States and see the reality of what America is like compared to what we see on television.  I was quite surprised at how much visible poverty there was and the US looked like a country in decline.  Also, the scale of the place has to be experienced to be really understood.  I would like to go back and see more of it as I only covered the area from Washington DC up to Toronto in Canada, and even what I did get to see was only a very small part.  When I came back Donald Trump was all over the news because of the row that was going on about the golf course he wanted to build up in Scotland, and when I read it aloud I always end up sliding into a Scottish accent.

Donald Trump’s Hair

Donald Trump, your hair looks ridiculous

Yet, you are a very wealthy man,

Who made a fortune over in the land of the free, and

You built a big tower in Manhattan ,

But still your hair looks ridiculous.

Donald Trump of the ridiculous hair,

I saw your big tower when I was over there,

In Manhattan.  It’s up at the top of 5^th Avenue,

But this is the thing I don’t understand about you,

Why does your hair look so ridiculous?

So ridiculous, Donald Trump and your hair.

I didn’t meet you when I was over there,

In Manhattan. But I did meet a man in Central Park

Who lost his home, his job but not his heart, (at least not to me)

His hair looked ok and he at least had some excuse,

So why does your hair look so ridiculous?

Ridiculous Donald Trump and the hair.

I checked you on-line, and being completely facetious,

I also discovered you come in a fragrance.

Now Eau de Donald may freshen your air

But it won’t improve the state of the hair

Of the ridiculous Donald Trump

Ridiculous Donald Trump, in your tower high above us

How can you be self-made and yet, that vacuous?

Because it’s not just the hair that looks ridiculous.

Is all that rich living giving you gout? 

I cannot tell a lie and feel compelled to point out,

That even more ridiculous pout.

What’s that all about, Donald Trump?

This is another poem I wrote which I use it to remind myself to challenge my own thinking. I have often found that very few people ever challenge their own thinking and when you question them on it, it often turns out that their beliefs are not their own but what they have been told, or brought up to believe.  I'm often told I think too much but I think we don't really think enough about everything.

Belief

Ask yourself a question;

What do I believe?

Think about it for a while,

Then ask yourself,

Why?

Write it all down.

Turn it into a poem

Or even a play,

Set it to music  

Make it into a song

Sing it out, loud and long.

Then ask yourself another question;

What if it’s all wrong?

Then think about that.

I wrote this poem last year on my creative writing course but it was much shorter and didn't seem finished, so now I have finally finished it, I hope you enjoy it.  Comments are welcome

Austerity

The stated precedent of the Condem Government is:

To implement cuts to pay off the deficit.

When greedy bankers and free market Capitalism

Dramatically failed, they were saved by Socialism

And still they demand no tighter regulation

To control their gambling and reckless speculation

Even when it leads to third-world starvation,

Because profit is their only consideration.

And their biggest worry is double-dip recession,

Which if it lasts longer, will be a depression.

‘There is no alternative’ says Thatcher’s next generation.

‘Someone has to pay for this economic devastation’

As they roll out the old policy of privatization,

(Which also demonstrates their complete lack of imagination),

To sell off to the few, what belongs to the nation

And the cost will be yours and your children’s education.

Along with your health and your old age pension

While blaming the poor for the whole situation

Not to mention that other old chestnut- immigration

Because every government failure needs a scapegoat to aim for

And tomorrow the finger might be pointed at your door.

So, the next time there is a general election

Think carefully before you make your selection

And vote in the best interests of the entire population

Not for Oxbridge boys and their corporate connections

Who deceive us with rhetoric and tabloid machinations

In their lust for power and without any consideration

For the debt, they’ve dumped on future generations.

Because this legacy of poverty has been laid down for posterity

But not for the millionaires who’ve Condemned us to austerity