R's rue

 Hug me Wrap me In a warm embrace  As I crave  A snowy ground And piping fireplace  from R's rue https://ift.tt/2MqUs3w

I didn’t tell you all but I think I saw a ghost the other week. I wasn’t shocked or frightened, just rather intrigued.  I was at work.  It was around four am in the morning and I just told my colleagues that I was going to pop out to my car to collect some paperwork.  When I got up, so did they for when I returned we had a succession of turns and syringe driver checks to do, and as I exited the unit through the electric doors I felt and sort of saw Ruth , my fellow nurse,  move very quickly behind me to enter a patient’s room immediately to my right.  I collected the paperwork from my car, and as I returned to the hospice , I felt strangely unsettled by the “ quickness “ of Ruth’s movement, so much so that I asked if she had indeed entered the patient’s room so rapidly.  She denied that she had. Nor indeed had our fellow fellow support worker, the only other able bodied person inside the unit . But I knew what I felt. I felt and half saw a figure mo...

  The exceptional Russell T Davies series  It’s a sin, has brought back many old memories of the gay world from the 1980s.  I wasn’t officially gay then . No, the hatred and misinformed ideas of gay plagues and gay lifestyles shamed me into the closet so deep that not even my emotional intelligence could reach it. This was the story of many young gay men of my generation . We would be destined to come out later when the 1980s gave way to a more enlightened 1990s. There was no internet then, no phones no apps ......if you were confident and ‘serious’ in having a relationship you met another man in a gay bar or from adds in the newspapers. If you weren’t you trolled around the same gay bars or else ambled around the parks after dusk. I met my first proper boyfriend through the Sheffield Star. He was closeted and angry and was generous and exciting and the relationship was a real abuse disaster waiting to happen.  The abuse did happen and a couple of year...

Stuart Goodman in his daughter's arms - one of the 100,000 On and on this bloody pandemic goes. So many words spoken about it, so many words printed. Together they could make a pile that would reach the moon. A year ago, very little had been said about the virus. It was just easing itself into our consciousness - the ultimate elephant in the room. Yesterday, Britain's official death toll surpassed one hundred thousand. Our scruffy, bumbling prime minister appeared on TV saying that he was sorry about all the lives that have been lost. Arguably, he should have also said sorry for dragging his feet at various points in this living nightmare, having the guts to  admit to some of his many errors. Incredibly, it is only now - this very day - that airport border controls are going to be beefed up to get incoming travellers from South America, Portugal and South Africa into quarantine hotels. Who is going to police them?  Who is going to arrange food supplies?  In past mont...