Hard work, but with an oasis of sorts

I finally managed to get out to register at a local GP this morning - I actually felt quite reasonable when I woke up shortly before 8:00, but by the time I'd got ready a couple of hours or so later, I was already starting to feel more than a little substandard, despite doing nothing more strenuous than breakfasting, shaving and showering. I walked to my nearest surgery, which is less than a mile away, and I was thoroughly glad it wasn't any further. I filled in the necessary paperwork, so all I need to do now is wait for about a week(!) for the surgery to 'process' me and retrieve my records from my old doctor's in Cornwall, and I might be able to see someone. There's nothing like cutting through the red tape, and that's nothing like it!
Given that I was already out, I decided to kill two birds with one stone, and do some shopping as well. Where the oasis experience came in. Given that I've either been indoors or in hospital for almost the whole of this month, my encounters with boys have been virtually nil - I didn't even have my brief glimpse of Jake this week, with it being half term - but that changed for a few minutes in the supermarket, because there were a number of cuties about, albeit all substantially too young to think of anything beyond looking. Even the oldest was only about 11, albeit tall for his age, and very cute, but, given the 'boy desert' I've been inhabiting of late, even being able to admire him and his ilk made a welcome change.
I was out for around two and a half hours overall, and pretty exhausted by the time I got back, but at least I achieved a couple of things I needed to do. I guess it's back to house arrest for a few more days now!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Well, so much for that

No visit today - my daughter has just rung me, having only recently got up. As she was only intending to do a day trip, by the time she got here, it would be more or less time for her to turn around and go back, which wasn't the object of the exercise. I'm disappointed, needless to say, but, ultimately, it's my fault for having painted myself into a corner as far as being nowhere near her is concerned. As I said the other day, being on my own, more or less permanently, is just something I'm going to have to find a way of coping with.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Maybe tomorrow....

....there could be some human contact, because my daughter might pay me a visit. It's not confirmed yet, but she is on half-term holiday this week, so it is, at least, a possibility. Whether I'll be able to do much if she does arrive remains to be seen - I was supposed to be going out to sort my GP registration out today, but it's been raining all day, and getting drenched, in my present state of health, didn't seem to be a particularly good idea. I told my boss I'd ring him tomorrow to update him on the prospects of my returning to work next week, and that is still my intention, but the recovery process, while still ongoing, is frustratingly slow, and, obviously, I haven't got any gift of foresight to be able to assess how I'm going to feel in just over a week's time. All I can do, I guess, is to tell it like it is.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Make believe

There is no solution, there never was, and there never will be. However much I might try to convince myself that some hope resides somewhere, to think otherwise is delusion. The world simply doesn't allow what I want, what I feel I need. If there is a way forward, it involves embracing 'never'. But that still doesn't constitute a solution, merely a coping mechanism. And I'm a long way, even from that. To shamelessly steal Radclyffe Hall's title, this well of loneliness is all there is. For always.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Adrift

This isn't a new subject, so I apologise in advance if anyone who has read posts like this in my blog before finds this one tedious and repetitive. It is something I've been thinking about for most of my waking hours since yesterday evening, though, without really getting anywhere substantive. What I've been considering is the issue of purpose, or, more to the point, the lack of it, in my life. Even before the upheavals of last year, there was a certain feeling of my life lacking a clear direction, because so much of what I did was mired in the negative - hiding, playing a part, not able to tell the truth, not being myself - partly because I was afraid (justifiably, as it turned out) of the potential consequences, partly because I didn't want to hurt other people, most notably my ex and my daughter. Once it had all come to the surface, though, sweeping away pretty much everything that meant anything in my life in the process, the sense of being rudderless became almost overpowering, at times. And that's the feeling that's uppermost in my mind at the moment, a feeling that I can't seem to find a way of dealing with. If I was more of a 'people person', I might be able to find activities, interactions, to help, but that isn't me, and never has been. My recent health problems have, perhaps, accentuated the problem, because I've been even more isolated than usual, but it's only a matter of degree, not of kind. I really don't know what to do, or even what I want to do. I know it's a problem only I can solve, ultimately, assuming a solution exists at all, but if I can't find some kind of justification, some kind of incentive, to carry on, it could all become rather difficult.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Out and about, but washed out

I've finally managed to get out of my accommodation independently for the first time, apart from travelling back from hospital on Wednesday, for more than a fortnight. I only went to the supermarket at the end of the road and back, but I did, at least, cope with it. But only barely. I've recently got back, and I feel like a wet rag, in all honesty. It's clear that I'll need a good chunk, if not all, of my two weeks recuperation time before I'm going to be anything like getting back to normal. Still, now that my grocery stocks are replenished, I can crash out for the rest of the weekend, if that is what's required. And I think it might be!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

The most beautiful machine ever made

I've just been watching a documentary about secret Cold War weaponry, amongst which was what I consider to be, as per the post title, not only a machine that achieved its purpose almost perfectly, but that did it while looking as beautiful as any manufactured object can. Just amazing.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

What do we learn from this?

'This' being my recent health travails, needless to say. First of all, I guess, the starkest lesson is to listen to what your body is telling you. I believed what I wanted to believe, namely that what I had was simply a bad chest cold, as I've had from time to time in the past, rather than what was staring me in the face, the fact that it was obviously rather more serious, given my increasing difficulty in coping, to the point where, ten days or so ago, I really couldn't function at all, by which time it was too late to do anything without help. To my very good fortune, my brother came through for me, at really major inconvenience to himself - he put about an extra 500 miles on his car travelling up and down to Surrey, quite apart from the expense and the time he gave up for me. I couldn't be more grateful to him, and I've told him so. Hopefully, I'll find some way of repaying him, and my sister-in-law, at some point in the not-too-distant future. Related to the general 'neglecting my health' issue, I've also spent quite a bit of time reassessing my relationship with my job. In the build-up to what eventually happened, being carted off to hospital, what seemed more important to me was to try and carry on going to work, so as not to feel like I was letting people down, which I really hate to do, and, to a lesser extent, that I wouldn't be seen as a malingerer, going sick at the drop of a hat, something one or two of my colleagues are rather prone to. Ultimately, though, I'm neither indispensable to my employer, nor is the job indispensable to me. It was, perhaps, psychologically important a year or so ago, as my life was imploding, that I had some underlying stability somewhere, which the job provided at the time, but once that phase came to an end, the concept of 'living to work' as opposed to 'working to live' isn't necessary anymore. In fact, I've spent quite a lot of the last week contemplating whether I want to carry on with my job at all, or whether I want to take early retirement while, hopefully, I've still got a bit of life left in me. I've had the daydream of trying to write a publishable novel for several years, and although I'd need to find a more mainstream subject than most of the things I've written about in Nephelokokkygia, I have at least proved to myself, in the shape of Alexandrine, that I can write a near-novel length story while keeping the plot and characters coherent and consistent. Not the finished article, not yet, but a good step along the way, at least. Whether I could overcome my natural risk aversion and undertake such a major change in the context of my lifestyle, though, is an open question at the moment.
On a slightly different, but again related issue, is that some of the things I saw in hospital have convinced me that Pete Townsend was right when he wrote My Generation - 'Hope I die before I get old'. I could, possibly, cope with the physical deterioration of aging to some extent, but the prospect of losing my mental faculties to dementia, as, sadly, was the case with some of my fellow inmates of recent days, is just too awful to contemplate. Given a choice between quantity and quality of life, I'd choose the latter, every single time. To carry on existing, just because pharmaceuticals are available to facilitate that, is just not something that appeals to me at all. I've fulfilled my biological raison d'être by passing my genes on to my daughter, and maybe, to a smaller extent, my sociological purpose by trying to nudge her in the direction of a few beneficial memes as well, so I could face death knowing that I've achieved at least that much that is worthwhile. Not, at least most of the time, that I have any sort of death wish, but there are limits, without wanting to sound unduly negative, to what I would want to have to contend with.
So, for the moment, I'll get on with my recuperation, carry on thinking about what I want to do in the medium and longer term, and, above all, try to avoid ever getting myself into the position that found me in that ambulance last Wednesday in the future.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Hello, world

You are still out there, after all! I finally escaped from hospital at around 4:30 this afternoon - it should have been 24 hours earlier, but for some totally unnecessary last minute second thoughts on the part of a junior doctor, even her effective boss, the consultant I saw this morning who finally confirmed the discharge decision, said there was no reason for the extra day. I've been signed off sick for another two weeks, so I've got a reasonable period of convalescence, at the end of which, hopefully, I'll be fit for purpose again and able to go back to work. Given what I actually had, it's perhaps not surprising that I went from feeling bad to even worse in the days leading up to being admitted to hospital - I've been suffering from pneumonia, so trying, as I was, to carry on, was like the medical equivalent of trying to run off a broken leg. Anyway, I do appear to be on the mend now, and I'll do my best over the next day or two to catch up with both my normal haunts in Blogland, and with replying to the comments that people have kindly left on my brief posts of recent days. It won't be tonight, though - hospital might be a good place to get 'fixed', but it's a lousy place to get any rest, and I'm feeling thoroughly washed out at the moment. I hear my bed calling, I think!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Still sequestered

Despite my hopes having been raised yesterday, I'm still stuck in hospital. Tomorrow has now been mooted, but I'm getting to the 'I'll believe it when I see it' stage. I'm trying to be as co-operative as I can, but it's pretty hard work at times, especially when it's so hard to get enough sleep, even by my low standards, as it's proven to be. I suppose it's all part of a lesson learned, namely not to be neglectful of your health.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

The great escape - but not yet

Thank you to everyone who commented on my last post - I will reply to them once I get access to my laptop, but, at the moment, I can only get online via my phone, and even that's a bit hit and miss because of the signal here. The prospect has been floated that I'll be discharged tomorrow, but that hasn't been confirmed yet. The sooner the better, as far as I'm concerned!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

In dock

Here I am, reporting live(ish) and direct from the general hospital that serves this part of Surrey. I finally made it to the local NHS walk-in place yesterday teatime, thanks to my brother's generosity, and they promptly sent me here in an ambulance. It wasn't quite as dramatic as it sounds - I've got a bad chest infection, but it had triggered a bout of my heart arrhythmia, the combination of the two leading to my unmanagable levels of shortness of breath. It looks like I'll be here for a day or two while they pump me full of antibiotics, which will make it my longest stay in hospital since I was a baby. It makes me feel pretty stupid, of course, that I didn't address it sooner, but better late than never, hopefully.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Well, one way or another....

....tomorrow will be 'doctor day'. My brother rang me earlier, and he, and my sister-in-law, have said that if I can't get to the local NHS walk-in centre under my own steam, my brother will come and take me. Just a mere 100 mile round trip out of his way. I feel so guilty, about putting him out like that, but he wouldn't take no for an answer, and I'm really grateful, because I know my health needs to be addressed, something I would have done over the past few days, had I been able to leave the building, but I simply haven't been. Hopefully, some pill or potion will be forthcoming that can help to get me heading back to something resembling normality. I should know by this time tomorrow.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

It's not just me, seemingly

I've spent a good bit of today reading a long story I found at one of my fairly regular online haunts. It was, ostensibly, erotic fiction, but, in reality, there wasn't very much sex at all in this particular tale, it was more of a sci-fi/thriller/love story, and I found it pretty enjoyable. The author's afternote caught my attention, too, as he talked about how the project had burgeoned well beyond what he'd originally envisaged, and how he'd fallen in love with his protagonists. I know of a recently completed story not a million miles away from this blog about which I could say the same, and probably have!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Enervation

Finding the energy, the motivation at the moment is a major enterprise - it's just taken me ten minutes to flog myself into walking half a dozen paces across the room to get a glass of water. I don't want to see anyone, I don't want anyone to see me, I don't, seemingly, want to do anything. It is, no doubt, a side-effect of the coughing at all hours, the fractured sleep patterns, but there's also an undercurrent of sinking beneath the waves of my wasted life. I don't want it, life, enough as things stand. I am trying to convince myself otherwise, but it hasn't worked yet. I'm off work until at least Wednesday - the next two days are my days off in any case - but whether I make it for my next rostered shift is very much in the balance at the moment. Something else I don't want enough, well paid though my job is. If there are any vacancies for hermits going at the moment, that might be my ideal role.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Disintegration

A month ago, when my daughter was here for nearly a week during the school holidays, I said to her that if my life was going to be like it was indefinitely, I didn't want it to continue much longer. The only real incentive I had at that point was finishing my story, but now that's done, and it's sunk almost without trace, like most of its predecessors, even that motivation has gone, and, when the seemingly complete collapse of my health is factored into the equation, the feeling that it's time for it all to come to an end is stronger than ever. Maybe I'll find a way of getting over it. But maybe I won't.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

I tried, I really did

But I still didn't make it to work last night. I didn't get up early enough to do the 'leave very early on the last bus' move I'd done on Wednesday, so I was faced with the prospect of trying to walk to the station. I got ready to leave quite a bit earlier than I normally would, knowing that if I was going to walk, it would take a hell of a lot longer than usual, but, in the event, I didn't even make it past the front gate of the establishment where my accommodation is - 100 yards totally defeated me. I was so upset with myself, I hate letting people down, especially at the last minute, but I just couldn't help it. I'm going to try to get to see a doctor as soon as I can, but the only place I can go in 'domicile-ville' is as far from here as the station is, so when, exactly, I'll be able to stagger up there remains to be seen.
One upshot of all of this is that I'm seriously considering early retirement - I'm old enough, or more to the point, have been working for my company long enough, to be able to take my pension, albeit that I'd only get about 85% of the projected total at my current age, and the way I'm feeling at the moment, I don't think I'm going to live long enough to take advantage of that pension any other way. It's far from being a done deal yet, but to have some life that doesn't revolve around work, unlike the past 35 years, is a thoroughly appealing prospect.

Love & best wishes
Sammy B

What season is it?

I was under the impression that it was supposed to be Spring, but looking out of my window this afternoon, it seems almost autumnal - it's cool, grey and windy, with lots of loose leaves blowing about. Maybe those couple of warm, sunny days we enjoyed over the past weekend was the summer, after all!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Jake (Take 2), but otherwise....

....not much to celebrate. The boy was here again with his classmates for their swimming lesson, and I spent a happy few minutes admiring him from my window half an hour or so ago. He really is a cutie, albeit that he's probably a year younger than I thought on first sight last week, and thus even further into the 'eye candy only' category. To be honest, though, looking is probably about as much as I could manage at the moment, anyway - I'm going back to work tonight, but, in all honesty, I'm really not fit to do so, only my sense of duty and not wanting to let people down impelling me to go. I suppose the best that can be said is that I'm no worse than I was, say, a week ago, but I'd be lying if I said I was much better. I'm going to have to do a rather circuitous manoeuvre to even get to work, which will involve leaving substantially earlier than I normally would, so I can catch the last bus from outside the accommodation, given my continuing inability to walk to the station. It really would make my life so much easier at the moment if I had a car, but the practicalities of acquiring one, and the fact that the financial vultures would probably want to take it away again in pretty short order, seem to make it an insurmountable problem at the moment. I thought of asking the rhetorical question 'Why is my life so full of shit?', but in all honesty, virtually all of my problems are self-inflicted, so it is, as usual, just a case of sucking it up and getting on with it, I guess.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Thousand

Over the course of the past couple of months, I've had various grandiose plans for this post, from huge retrospectives, via a summary of 'highlights' of the past three and a bit years, to some attempt at writing something profound in a more general sense. In the event, though, a combination of the knowledge that, when Nephelokokkygia and my more or less private ranting 'scratchpad' of last year are taken into account, I passed the purported 'milestone' months ago, and the fact that I'm sitting writing this in the middle of yet another sleepless night, have conspired to make me realise that this really is 'just another' post, even though it marks 1000 posts since the inception of Semicentennial, and its subsequent metamorphosis into Quinquagenarian, in February 2010. My life has changed in just about every significant respect in that time, of course, mostly for the worse, but as that is pretty much what the whole blog is about, so there doesn't seem to be much to be gained by recapitulating that here. So, apart from thanking my readers, and especially my followers, for their patience in the face of my largely undiluted outpourings of doom and gloom, there doesn't really seem to be much more that can be usefully added.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Not sure how this is going to happen

I'm supposed to be back at work in 48 hours time, less a few minutes. At the moment, it's a struggle to even leave the room. I'm physically able to do my job, if I can get there. It's the getting there that might end up being an insurmountable problem. I need a car, really, and I could probably afford a cheap one, but when I've only left the building once in the past eight days, acquiring one isn't going to be easy. The frustrating thing is that I had a perfectly serviceable car, that would still, barring any unforeseen major catastrophes, have been on the road and more than adequate for my needs, but I sacrificed it so my ex could keep hers on the road before we split up. All part of the 'unreasonable behaviour' cited in the divorce papers, no doubt.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Gone

My daughter's on her way to London, and it's back to me, my ruined health and the four walls. I got over-emotional when K was getting ready to leave, I suddenly had an overwhelming feeling that I'm never going to see her again. She was patient with me, but it can't be easy for her to see the wreckage of what used to be her father, not even able to walk up to the station with her. That's the problem with a self-destructive lifestyle - sometimes it works, all too well.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

A visitor, and a moment of pleasure

Only a fleeting visit, but nonetheless welcome - my daughter is staying over tonight, en route to another of her YouTuber gatherings in London tomorrow. She's back to school on Tuesday, though, so she'll be heading straight back to Cornwall after the event. Still, sixteen hours or so in her company, even if some of that time is going to be occupied by sleep, isn't something I'd ever turn down.
Earlier this morning I found something absolutely delicious online - something purely fictional, imaginary, but something that would still mark me as beyond the pale, in most people's eyes. There are times, though, when I feel justified in mitigating the effect of the 'life sentence' I talked about yesterday, especially when, as in today's case, there is no question of any real person having been harmed in any way.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Life, without hope of release

More swimming lessons, not school ones, presumably, on a Saturday, are ongoing in the pool building outside my window. There's a cutie there, too, another in the strictly 'eyes only' category, 10, or thereabouts. If, by some infinitesimally unlikely chain of events, though, I found myself in a position where I might succumb to temptation with someone like him, a news story I heard on the radio a little earlier puts my situation into perspective. A retired teacher, from somewhere fairly close to here, has been found guilty of 'historic sex offences', as the current, post-Savile buzz phrase has it, against two boys of that age. Nearly forty years ago. That means that, if something happened today, I'd still be a wanted man in my nineties, not that I've got the slightest expectation of living that long. Just being a boylover is enough of a life sentence in this society, a 'cruel and unusual punishment', without spending your whole life looking over your shoulder. And yet some still think its a choice.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Ownership

I read a post yesterday about 'atheists' having 'viciously attacked' a Christian school over a so-called science test in which all of the 'correct' answers were taken from the bible - creationism, in other words. Amongst the 'sins' that these evil atheists were supposedly guilty of was denial of the assertion that children 'belong' to their parents. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who believes that children 'belong' to their parents, or, indeed, anyone else, should automatically be disbarred from parenthood, including their own offspring, if necessary. Slaves 'belong' to their owners, and, as far as virtually all rational people are concerned, slavery is unconscionable, so what possible justification is there for children to be viewed in the same light? The proper role for a parent, in my opinion, is that of a caretaker, maybe a guide, to look after the child until they are ready to be independent. Independent or not, though, they are autonomous, their own person, from birth, as far as I'm concerned, with the same right to individuality as any adult. Indoctrination, maybe parental indoctrination in particular, given the parents' privileged access to the child, is completely unacceptable, in my book.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

The trouble with democracy....

....is that an ill-informed electorate can end up voting, sometimes in disturbingly large numbers, for parties whose policies are stupid, and potentially enormously damaging. As in the rush yesterday to vote for UKIP, who, as far as I'm concerned, are simply the National Front in a suit, a bunch of petty nationalist, racist xenophobes. I'm not expecting ever to be subjected to a UKIP government, but if they ever did get into power, it would undoubtedly be time to leave the country, because we'd be reduced to little more than a protectionist, ingrowing 'banana republic' in months - in this era of globalisation, UKIP's idea that Britain should 'stand alone' would more or less guarantee national bankruptcy and desititution. The only reason they've managed to appeal to a disaffected slice of the electorate, largely white, is by shamelessly playing immigration, anti-European and Islamophobic cards, the 'keep Johnny Foreigner in his place' attitude. To anyone who thinks a UKIP government would be a good thing, I would say this - be careful what you wish for. Once a bunch of hard-right lunatics assumes power, the last thing they would ever want to do would be to relinquish it.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Parenting

'The report begins with Jacob C., who was 11 years old when convicted of one count of sexual misconduct in Michigan for touching, not penetrating, his sister’s genitals. He was not allowed to live in a home with other children, was eventually put into foster care and was placed on a sex registry that was made public when he turned 18.  He struggled to graduate from high school, and was shunned because of his registration status. And when he enrolled in college, he said, campus police followed him everywhere. He dropped out.

Now 26, the report says, Jacob’s life continues to be defined and limited by a conviction at age 11.'

I came across this story last night, part of a report on juveniles in the US who are placed on sex offender registers. Leaving aside the justice, or otherwise, of children and young people being labelled, often for life, in this fashion, what occurred to me was how Jacob's case came to the attention of law enforcement in the first place. I don't know the circumstances, of course, but I strongly doubt that he was 'caught in the act' by a policeman, which suggests to me that it was his parents who initiated the process. If that is the case, what on earth were they thinking? Why would any caring parent throw their child, particularly one so young, into a situation with the potential to completely ruin their life for such a trivial 'offence'? If he'd raped, or otherwise seriously assaulted the girl, then it would have been a different issue altogether, but, surely, this kind of 'sibling curiosity' is a family, a parenting issue, not something that law enforcement should ever be involved in. Any parent that would hand their child over to the police in such circumstances should be placed on an 'arrant stupidity register' for life, in my opinion.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Jake....and Xander

Another day of disturbed sleep patterns - I was asleep for a good chunk of the morning, and again in the mid-evening, but now, in the middle of the night, I'm wide awake - and another day where I got no further from my room than the shower at the opposite end of the corridor. There was, though, an unexpected dose of eye candy, simply by virtue of looking out of my window at lunchtime - the establishment where my accommodation is has a small swimming pool, in a separate building, and it's used for swimming lessons sometimes. One such took place today, evidently involving the pupils at the top end of a local primary school, and one of their number, the biggest and oldest looking boy, although he wouldn't have been more than 11, certainly caught my eye - he was a real cutie. He'd contrived to forget his bag, and had to go back for it, one of his friends laughing that 'Jake's left his bag behind', hence my being able to include his name in the post title. Before I get deluged in yet more opprobrium, it was strictly a case of 'just looking', and would never have been anything else - as I've said before, I wouldn't engage a boy as young as Jake, even if he was willing, for both our sakes, his because I wouldn't want to harm him, mine because I don't want to go to jail.
As far as fictional cuties go, I'm afraid I've indulged myself by reading Alexandrine again over the past day and a half. Having 'lived with' Xander for all those weeks while I was writing the story, I'm still finding it quite hard to let him go. A sign, no doubt, of my increasing disconnection from reality, but when 'real life' is as crap as it is, escapism is almost an inevitable consequence.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B