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
The Fast Ghost
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 move behind me into the patients room with some gusto.
Last week I worked nights again but this time with another nurse. This nurse is well known for her spiritual experiences and comically is referred to by her colleagues being a bit of a white witch.
She is also one of the most pragmatic and talented hospice nurses I have ever had the pleasure of working with.
I asked her about her experiences on nights without explaining any details of my own “ visitation’ and
she told me that knew only of two recent ‘visitors’ .
One she described as a man , who stands quietly on one corner of the hospice away from any other activity
“ And the other? “ I pressed her
“ oh the other is an odd bod” she said cheerfully “ it’s a figure that moves from this corridor into the first of the patient bedrooms” she pointed to where I had seen my “ ghost”
“ she really IS a odd bod too ,” my colleague added
“ why’s that? “ I asked gingerly
“She always moves very fast like a bullet ...always from right to left” she told me with a gentle smile
This used to scare me shitless as a child
from Going Gently https://ift.tt/2MwwkMM
Shame
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 years I walked away with my head kind of held high and my mind firmly fixed about what I would and would not accept from a relationship with a man.
I would never again accept that it was alright to be denied, to be hidden away, to be lied about.
I deserved better than that.
Before I met my husband, I dated a guy from chesterfield . He was lovely, big teddy bear of a man, a broad country speaking animal feed wholesaler who worked through the Pennines and for several months were were happy with me visiting him , mainly at weekends or visa versa. One week day he unexpectedly found himself working in Sheffield and we met up for coffee and before we sat down I saw the wedding ring on his finger.
It wasn’t one of those he’s married kind of scenarios at all
But it was a case of him wearing a wedding ring to pretend he was straight in the eyes of his colleagues and his customers.
I reluctantly walked away from the relationship and didn’t look back
Shame has no place in being gay
Shame has no place in being anything
from Going Gently https://ift.tt/3ogZv3O
100,000
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 months our borders have been pretty porous with people coming and going as if there was no deadly pandemic. As I say - quite incredible and the latest initiative just seems like an attempt to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted.
A hundred thousand. So many people. Enough to fill the old Wembley Stadium in London. For them the match is over. No more flag waving. No more brass bands marching on the pitch. They have gone. Their families could not even bury them with the funeral goodbyes and the dignity their lives merited. So tragic.
As if in the aftermath of a war, let us pause to think of the hundred thousand... "At the going down of the sun and in the morning - we will remember them".
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/36eo2QE
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